THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN
LONDON
by
MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO
(Under the Direction of Christy Desmet)
ABSTRACT
The “place” scholars have assigned to the stage in early modern London is as much a reflection of the politics of contemporary literary criticism as a reflection of the cultural function of popular drama in the early modern period. Modern critics are generally not engaged in reexamining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or heuristic that has hardened, over the past couple of decades, into a New Historicist version of “fact,” an attitude toward or conception of social energies that collapses boundaries and subtle distinctions in the interest of a unified critical narrative. That critical narrative has characterized the theater as a culturally marginal phenomenon relative to early modern London. Using complementary frameworks for classifying cultural space and the space of the stage, this dissertation reevaluates the place of the stage by approaching popular drama as an important, and central, site of cultural production. Situated on a boundary between what Raymond Williams has called “dominant” and “emergent” cultural space, the playhouse offered a construction of reality that was simultaneously “central” and “marginal,” in Stephen Mullaney’s terms. Combining Williams’s and Mullaney’s paradigms of cultural geography, this dissertation argues that popular drama was both mimetic and constitutive, conservative and revolutionary. The stories of the stage mingled dominant narratives with emergent ones. When those stories are given credence and currency as fundamentally “like” or reflective of reality, the drama’s cultural authority can be highlighted. That Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was afforded such a currency and credence is apparent in the popularity of the theatrum mundi metaphor and the popularity of the theater industry itself. This popularity combines with the drama’s power to shape reality as it re-presents reality to make Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a significant, constitutive force in the writing of popular culture of early modern London.
INDEX WORDS: Theater, Drama, Culture, Stage, Space, Early Modern, London, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Moll Frith, Raymond Williams, Stephen Mullaney, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Dominant, Emergent, Residual, Marginal, Central
THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN
LONDON
by
MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO
B.A., The University of Texas, 1994
A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2002
© 2002
Matthew Behen Kozusko
All Rights Reserved
THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN
LONDON
by
MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO
Approved:
Major Professor: Christy Desmet
Committee: Frances Teague Charles Doyle Sujata Iyengar Michelle Ballif
Electronic Version Approved:
Gordhan L. Patel Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2002
iv
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to Emily, who weathered its ups and downs and whose support made it possible. I were but little thankful, if I could say how much.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of my advisory committee, Frances Teague,
Charles Doyle, Sujata Iyengar, and Michelle Ballif, for graciously working with the obnoxious demands of my timetable. Chiefly, I wish to thank the Chief herself, Christy
Desmet, who read chapter drafts on a moment’s notice, in hotel rooms, on airplanes, and sometimes over the phone, and returned them with much needed speed and support.
Thanks must also go to Nelson Hilton, Hugh Ruppersburg, Kathy Houff, and the
Freshman Composition program for enabling me to teach from abroad; to Judith Shaw and the Oxford Program for letting me tag along; to Elizabeth Kraft for lunches at Ask; to
Ian Archer for taking me seriously; to Jane Barroso for not taking me too seriously; to
Douglas Anderson for encouragement; to Doc Ayres, who taught me how to play; to
Keith O’Neill for caring about literature and life; to Bretagne O’Neill for tolerating lodgers; to my roommates for understanding; and to Ray and Nancy Kozusko, who asked nothing and gave all.
Completion of this dissertation was made possible by a Franklin College
Distinguished Doctoral Assistantship.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v
CHAPTER
1 The Place(s) of the Stage(s)...... 1
I. Liberties of the Law...... 12
II. Other Complications...... 37
III. Places and Stages ...... 42
2 Places, Spaces, Stages ...... 51
I. Introduction: the Space of the Stage...... 57
II. Dominant, Residual, Emergent and the Space of London...... 82
III. A New Historicism: Embracing Our Historicity ...... 98
3 Fashionable Frith: Constructions of a Roaring Girl...... 105
I. Fashions and Fashionability...... 113
II. Fashioning Moll Frith...... 130
III. Middleton and Dekker’s Moll: Just the Fashion...... 166
4 The Allowed Freak: Stage, Space, and Recreation in Volpone ...... 170
I. Punctum Indifferens, Locus, and Platea: The Allowed Fool...... 181
II. From Fool to Freak: Blood, Bonds, and Boundaries...... 203
III. Recreation Abroad ...... 225 vii
5 Histrio Agit Totum Mundum: Bartholomew Fair and the Theatrum Mundi
Metaphor ...... 236
I. Mimesis and the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor...... 248
II. The Shapes of Reality...... 260
III. Bartholomew Fair: Puritans, Puppets, and Plays...... 270
6 Conclusion ...... 292
APPENDIX A...... 298
WORKS CITED...... 304
1
Chapter 1
The Place(s) of the Stage(s)
In her recent study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Theatre, Court and City,
1595-1610, Janette Dillon remarks on a kind of complacency in the view “modern critics” continue to espouse of London’s best-known public amphitheaters: “the
Bankside theatres are frequently described by modern critics as being outside the city boundary because they were across the river in Southwark, but this is incorrect. It was because they were located within the liberties of Paris Garden and the Clink in Southwark that they were outside city jurisdiction” (151 n. 1). The difference between “across the river” and “in the liberties of Paris Garden and the Clink” is a simple matter on the surface level, but it is symptomatic of a much broader and more significant set of conceptual indiscretions on the part of contemporary literary critical approaches to early modern drama. Despite a wealth of new and emerging work on the place and function of popular English drama in the second half of the sixteenth century that calls into question established conceptions of the “place” of the stage, the standard vision of popular theater as a socially, culturally, and geographically marginal phenomenon perpetually in conflict with the city authorities continues to serve as the background for studies of the plays themselves. The legend of James Burbage and his Theatre, extracted from the work of early twentieth-century historians such as C. W. Wallace and E. K. Chambers, continues to stand as representative of the whole of stage playing before the 1590s, while other stages, such as the Red Lion, the playhouse at Newington Butts, and the several inn-yard 2 theaters, both inside and outside of the city’s twenty-six wards, are often compressed into a footnote, or neglected entirely, and the relationship between the theaters and local authorities is almost always reduced to a matter of morally-driven antagonism. Similarly, the various venues used for performances at Court go almost unremarked despite, as
Glynne Wickham reminded us a full thirty years ago, their centrality to the industry.1
This narrow conception of the theater in early modern London results from a general lack of historical record—the tattered and incomplete legal paper trail from which we have had to construct what we know about the playhouse at Newington Butts raises as many questions as it does answers—but it is also in part a matter of literary critics happily inheriting a streamlined and simplified picture of the emergence of the popular theater in early modern London. Seminal studies such as Stephen Mullaney’s The Place of the
Stage have offered dramatic but ultimately disputable visions of the role and orientation of London’s theaters vis-à-vis the city authorities and the city itself, and these visions have been canonized by studies that follow them. As William Ingram has put it, “if a suitably constructed story line gives sufficient satisfaction to its clientele, the certainties on which it is based may cease to be questioned or examined, their truths taken for granted rather than demonstrated” (Playing 18).
The usefulness of Mullaney’s study, to which this project is greatly indebted, is difficult to overstate, but its approach to the particulars of the relationship between the city and the theaters is often too tidy in its treatment of the complex questions of jurisdiction, particularly with regard to the Liberty of the Clink and Paris Garden. For
Mullaney, the relationship between the City of London and its theaters has a storybook
1 See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, especially 2.2:148-150. Hereafter noted as EES, followed by volume and page number. 3 simplicity. Despite a sophisticated contextual approach built on an examination of ritual progressions, topography, and Foucauldian notions of power, Mullaney’s description of the place of the stage distinguishes too absolutely between central and marginal in the culture and geography of greater London: “During the latter half of the sixteenth century, it was in the Liberties that the alien warp of Elizabethan culture became most pronounced, and it was in such areas, of course, that Elizabethan drama established its most radical roots—in the public playhouses located outside the city walls” (22).
Mullaney pushes a vision of the stage as “effectively banished” from the city proper by aggressive legislation, matched by a vision of “the Liberties” as a homogenous class of spaces made uniform by their freedom from city jurisdiction (22). As theaters moved into these areas, they acquired a particular cultural valence and a particular cultural liberty traditionally associated with “London’s margins” (25). Having left the city for the green world outside the walls, the theater reinvented itself as a marginal spectacle with the “culturally and ideologically removed vantage point” necessary to help London make sense of itself.2
As we will see, these pronouncements about the place of the stage need to be
overhauled. “Modern critics,” to use Dillon’s phrase, are generally not engaged in
reexamining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or
heuristic that has hardened, over the years, into the New Historicist version of “fact,” an
attitude toward or conception of social energies that collapses boundaries and subtle
distinctions in the interest of a unified critical narrative. The power of a narrative such as
2 Mullaney’s romanticizing of the place of the stage effectively begins the moment he likens the stage’s “banishment” to Rosalind’s banishment from court in As You Like It: “like Rosalind’s withdrawal from court in As You Like It, the withdrawal of drama from the city was a flight ‘to liberty, and not to banishment’” (Mullaney 23; As You Like It 1.1.138). 4
Mullaney’s, I would argue, resides precisely in its unity, which offers a compelling and complete approach to the matter at hand. But a unified narrative easily becomes a totalizing narrative, ironically untroubled by its own process of simplification, compression, and substitution. We may, as a discipline, happily question the stability of established authorities in Tudor and Stuart London; but where we might be equally interested in questioning whether “the city” or “the Corporation” or “the city Fathers” should be considered as a uniform body whose homogenous attitude toward playing in and around London was uniformly antagonistic, we continue instead to work with generalizations. We are prepared to note that the Privy Council often clashed with the city authorities over how to deal with the growing theater industry, but we would do well to look more closely at divisive tensions within either camp, just as we might look more closely at the possible motivations driving activity or litigation on either side.
Dillon and other critics, such as Alan Somerset and William Ingram, have begun to call for a reevaluation of available evidence. Ingram has suggested, for instance, that the 1574 act of the Court of Common Council, targeting plays in London inn yards, was motivated as much by economics as by opposition to playing, and he has noted that it was directed rather more at the inn-yard owners than at companies of players. Though in the wording of the Act, the Court of Common Council goes to great length to establish the several hazards and problems posed by public gatherings at plays, the familiar litany of dangers and complaints that the Council rehearses is arguably more a matter of rhetorical positioning than a measure of the city’s aggressive antipathy toward plays: the act’s net effect provided for the city to profit financially from public plays, and this realization must temper our understanding of the legislation as an act of aggression intended to curb 5 the growth of popular, professional theater.3 In Mullaney in particular, we have an
invaluable precedent for looking at the relationship between the city and the theaters, the
place of the stage, issues of jurisdiction and attitudes toward playing, but we would do
well to step back and reconsider our approach to reading the relationship between the city
and the theaters, or more generally between popular drama and the popular culture that
fed it in early modern London. With current critical narratives such as Mullaney’s, we
are in danger specifically of romanticizing the place of the stage by turning the theater
industry into a kind of Robin Hood, recreating in the suburbs of license and sin where the
morally unified front of the lord mayor, aldermen, and Common Council could not
contain the stage’s transgressions.4 So romantic a vision of the stage is attractive as well as genuinely useful, but only to a certain degree. There are plenty of reasons to believe that the theater industry was not always dashing and rebellious, that the city authorities, insofar as they can be taken as a homogenous entity, were neither powerless over the suburbs nor uniformly antagonistic toward playing, and that the suburbs themselves were not the unbounded and lawless enclaves of sin or repositories of criminals and outcasts they are sometimes taken to have been.5 Reading the “place” of the stage as one of
subversion, transgression, and marginality is not necessarily wrong. It has brought us
studies like Mullaney’s, and it has driven many of the developments in New Historicism
and Cultural Materialism that have given a critical edge to scholarship in the field.6 But
3 See William Ingram, The Business of Playing, especially 128-149. 4 See Mullaney, 21. 5 Mullaney suggests the Liberties were “the suburbs of the urban world, forming an underworld officially recognized as lawless.” He continues: “whatever could not be contained within the strict bounds of the community found its place here, making the Liberties the preserve of the anomalous, the unclean, the polluted, and the sacred” (22). 6 Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating work on subversion and containment and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s complementary readings of similar “social energies” are just a few highlights of recent criticism 6 alternative readings can help prevent the settling of a critical approach—”stage as marginal”—into an established historical reality. From a different angle, the place of the stage can be read as contributive, rather than alternative, to popular culture; the popular drama can be read as culturally constituent, rather than culturally external; the theater can be understood as having a cultural currency, a function of its “popularity,” that makes it an important site for the production of a dominant culture to which it is too often placed in antagonistic opposition.7
In a recent article, Kristen Poole argues for the importance of a continual
reevaluation of the categories we use to understand and discuss early modern culture.
The recent controversy over editorial decisions to replace the name “Falstaff” in the
Henry IV and Henry V plays with Shakespeare’s original choice, “Oldcastle,” have obscured the issue of the character of Falstaff itself, and its relationship to the historical
John Oldcastle.8 Poole emphasizes the legend of Oldcastle as a proto-Puritan martyr and
early champion of John Wyclif, canonized in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and other
important religious works. Working from a reconstruction of the early representations of
Puritans on the popular stage during the Martin Marprelate controversy, Poole reminds us
that our vision of Puritans as the “legendary origin of all that is repressed and repressive
in American society and history” was not the only image available in early modern
England. According to anti-Martinist accounts of plays that mocked Martin Marprelate,
that build on the notion of the stage as marginal or subversive. See Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, especially chapter 2, “Invisible Bullets”; and Dollimore and Sinfield, “History and Ideology.” 7 I discuss the particulars of “dominant culture” and “popular culture” in chapter 2. 8 Gary Taylor has led the defense of the decision of the Oxford editorial team to change “Falstaff” back to “Oldcastle” on the grounds that Shakespeare’s original text featured “Oldcastle.” As David Scott Kastan and others have pointed out, the revision undoes the work of sixteenth-century censors, effectively removing the text, along with the author’s intentions, from the social and political conditions of its production—something ideologically antithetical to the Oxford project as a whole. See Gary Taylor, “The 7 he was fiercely lampooned on the stage as a hypocrite who enthusiastically partook of earthly pleasures. Poole smartly reminds us that Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy offers quite a different perspective on Puritans than does Shakespeare’s Malvolio, and she encourages us to allow for a reading of Falstaff as a “grotesque puritan,” alongside the standard or conventional readings that understand him as a cowardly glutton, a braggart solider, the warped prodigy of the morality play’s vice figure, and so forth (64).
She also reminds us that “puritanical” anti-theatrical writers like Stephen Gosson need not necessarily have been Puritans to have attacked stage plays. She follows Jonas
Barish and Christopher Hill in noting that Gosson was in fact opposed to Puritanism9 but remarks that Barish chooses nonetheless to refer to Gosson as a Puritan:
The conceptual incongruity of an author who is simultaneously writing
against the stage and against puritans is awkward and uncomfortable; the
knowledge of Gosson’s antipuritan writings deconstructs these very
categories. . . . We think of Gosson as allied with the puritans, and that is
where he remains—whether he belongs there or not. (64)
Gently admonishing Barish for glossing over the indiscretion, Poole notes that the received categories for classifying early modern phenomena are sometimes simply inadequate. Our understanding of Puritans and anti-theatrical sentiment makes it difficult for us to see Gosson as a detractor of both religious zealots and the theater. Similarly, our preconceptions about Puritans and the fat and jolly Jack Falstaff make it difficult for us to see him as both.
Fortunes of Oldcastle”; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, chapter 5; and Douglas A. Brooks. For a detailed list of related scholarship, see Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory 232 n. 9. 9 See Poole, 63 n. 57; and Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 82. 8
Poole’s argument may not fully persuade—she acknowledges that because none of the Marprelate plays is actually extant, their alternative depictions of Puritans cannot be verified—but its central point is well-argued and quite valuable: our understanding of early modern drama is constrained by the categories we have available for receiving, analyzing, and understanding the material itself. Christopher Hill and others have discussed at length the problems with the definition of the term “Puritan” and with the association of all anti-theatrical sentiment with religious zeal.10 The incorporation of
these caveats and exceptions into the categories we use to map early modern drama can
change the way we approach plays, theaters, and their place in culture.
Mistaking the Thames for the southern boundary of London proper is forgivable.
But the other missteps attendant on this idea—that the Bankside theaters were, in fact,
outside of city jurisdiction; that the Bankside was a “suburb” of license and sin; that the
Rose, the Swan and the Globe are justified via synecdoche to represent “the stage” as a
whole—are more difficult to set straight. To begin with, the matter of who had
jurisdiction over the theaters is more complicated than most studies suggest. The Liberty
of the Clink and the Paris Garden were indeed outside of London’s twenty-six wards, but
were the Bankside theaters therefore free or “at liberty,” to use Mullaney’s phrase, from
city authorities? This particular line of reasoning is deeply ingrained in our
understanding of the place of the stage, but it is erroneous. Jurisdiction in Southwark is
an especially complicated matter, as David Johnson’s study Southwark and the City
amply demonstrates, and it is at the very least misleading to imply that the Bankside
theaters, or their peers in to the north, were untouchable by the lord mayor, the Court of
Aldermen, or other manifestations of city authority.
10 See Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism, especially chapter 1. 9
To begin with, many of the surviving documents related to the city’s authority in the suburbs and liberties of London imply at least a provisional jurisdiction over playing outside the city proper, and specifically in the Liberty of the Clink and Paris Garden to the south, and in Shoreditch to the north. Leaving individual clashes between the city and particular playhouses aside, we may look to a series of records in which the city claims an authority over playing in its suburbs. A city precept from May of 1569 commands that “no mannour of parson or parsons whatsoeuer, dwelling or inhabiting within this citie of London liberties and suburbes of the same, being Inkepers,
Tablekepers, Tauernours, hall-kepers, or bruers, Do or shall . . . take vppon him or them to set fourth, eyther openly or privately, anny [sic] stage play or interludes . . . within this
Cittye of London, the liberties or suburbes of the same.”11 So sweeping a command with
regard to stage playing may itself be suspect, but the language here quite clearly includes
the “suburbes” in the proscription of plays. Whether the city was successful in enforcing
this precept is a different matter, but the act of claiming a privilege is evidence that the
city’s jurisdiction over playing in “the suburbs” cannot be denied with complete
certainty. And while we cannot be sure that these pronouncements were obeyed by
players either in the suburbs or in the city and its liberties, we need only consider that
orders hostile to playing or to playhouses were disregarded with some frequency in the
period. Complaints of playing on Sundays and during Lent, in open violation of laws and
of the Privy Council itself, survive in abundance.12 We cannot lean too heavily on such
11 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:267. Hereafter noted as ES, followed by volume and page number. 12 The Privy Council order of 1597, calling for the destruction of all playhouses, is perhaps the most obvious example. Glynne Wickham has offered a plausible explanation in Early English Stages, 2.2:9-29. His speculative account of why the order was not carried out is both compelling and generally informative regarding the politics that complicate apparently straightforward legislation. 10 instances without a better understanding of why those commands were to all appearances not obeyed, but the point stands: the fact that orders forbidding playing were sometimes ignored is no indication that the orders themselves carried no authority.
The theaters on the Bankside and in the northern suburbs were very clearly under the control of the city in other situations. Privy Council orders directing the lord mayor and aldermen to restrain playing in Paris Garden, the Clink, and other areas not in the city’s official jurisdiction in times of plague or during Lent indicate a real and immediate authority in matters of public health. On February 3, 1594, the Privy Council wrote to Sir
Cuthbert Buckle, Lord Mayor, instructing him to “strait order that thear bee no more publique playes or enterludes exercised by any Companie whatsoever within the compas of five miles distance from London” (ES 4:314). On March 11, 1601, the Privy Council records a letter to the lord mayor “requiring him not to faile to take order the playes within the cyttie and the liberties, especyally at Powles and in the Blackfriers, may be suppressed during this time of Lent” (ES 4:332-333). Of course, the “authority” in such instances was provisional and derived from a mandate from the Privy Council, not from a right inherently belonging to the city. For the most part, the city’s attempts to regulate playing in Surrey, Middlesex, and the ecclesiastical liberties within its walls did, in fact, rely on the endorsement of the Privy Council, but the means do not negate the end: theaters erected in the “suburbs” may have been more difficult for the city to regulate, but they were not entirely out of reach of the lord mayor and the aldermen. Literary critics of early modern drama typically say otherwise, perhaps because it is useful to generalize and simplify issues of space and jurisdiction in the interest of a manageable overview of 11 where theater entrepreneurs chose to build theaters and why they chose to build them there.
Again, there is little use in arguing that city jurisdiction did not play a primary part in James Burbage’s or Francis Langley’s decisions to build where they did, outside of the city’s twenty-six wards. Justices of the peace in Middlesex to the north and Surrey to the south were notoriously less severe about enforcing regulations, and if the city wished to take matters into its hands, it generally had to petition the Privy Council on a case-by-case basis.13 We should not, however, allow these particulars to obscure other
equally important components in the picture: the city did impose its will on the suburbs,
and in various forms. Perhaps as aldermen, the city fathers had difficulty exercising
jurisdiction over the suburbs, but as prominent members of livery companies (or as
Justices of the Peace in Surrey, for, from 1606, the city began to employ its old right to
nominate appointments to the commission of the peace for the county of Surrey) many of
the same officials had “jurisdiction” stretching as far as several miles beyond the city’s
walls and wards.14 Nor should we forget that legislation restricting stage plays is not
necessarily the same thing as opposition to playing itself. The city’s attempts to legislate
public performances were motivated by economic or public health interests perhaps as
often as they were motivated by concerns of morality.15 Moreover, issues of jurisdiction
when it came to theaters were only part of a much larger and more complicated picture
13 See E. K. Chambers, ES 4:305; and David Johnson, Southwark and the City, 224-225. 14 See Johnson, 73, 229. 15 For a discussion of the economic motivation for legislating public performances, see William Ingram, The Business of Playing, 128-149. The city’s concern for public health was fueled by fears that plague was spread at public gatherings, and by accidents at theaters, which some understood as acts of God visited upon theatergoers as punishment. 12 involving far more than straightforward anti-theatrical sentiment.16 The city had been
competing for jurisdiction or “liberty” in Southwark, in particular, for hundreds of years
before the neighboring liberties came to harbor public amphitheaters, and again,
economics were as much a motivating factor as public safety or questions of morality, if
not more of one.17 Working with these observations in more detail, I would like to
complicate the understanding of the “place” of playing and playhouses: first by
challenging the notion that the theaters built outside of the city’s primary jurisdiction
were in fact beyond its reach; second by considering more generally the notion of
authority in and around London; and finally, by referring to recent efforts by several
scholars, I would like to emphasize tensions, distinctions, and differences within entities
such as “the city” or “the suburbs,” which are typically represented as homogenous or
coherent collective entities.
I. Liberties of the Law
The root of the current misunderstanding involves the term “liberties” itself, and
the question of jurisdiction in and around London can begin with a survey of its early
modern usage. Mullaney has popularized the notion that “the Liberties” were areas
outside of London proper—or within it, but “outside the purview of the sheriffs”—that
did not fall under the city’s explicit jurisdiction:
The Liberties were free or “at liberty” from manorial rule or obligation to
the Crown, and only nominally under the jurisdiction of the lord mayor.
16 On anti-theatrical sentiment, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, which covers the topic from Plato to the twentieth century. 17 On the city’s economic interests in claiming jurisdiction in Southwark, see David Johnson, especially chapter 12, “The Justice of the Bridge Yard.” 13
While belonging to the city, they fell outside the purview of the sheriffs of
London and so comprised virtually ungoverned areas over which the city
had authority but, paradoxically, no control. Liberties existed within the
city walls as well, but they too stood outside of London’s effective
domain; like the Liberties outside the walls, they were a part of the city yet
juridicially set apart from it. (21)
What this definition neglects—indeed, works precisely against—is the very strong link between “liberty” and “authority” in early modern London. The freedom or “liberty” operative in the term traditionally refers to a privilege of a governing body to exercise jurisdiction over a particular area—a liberty of the law. Instead, Mullaney emphasizes the sense of liberty from law—”‘at liberty’ from manorial rule.” In fact, far from being free from manorial rule, The Liberty of Paris Garden, for example, in which stood animal-baiting arenas and Francis Langley’s Swan theater, was itself a manor, with a lord and courts leet and baron (Ingram, “London Life” 73-74). Predominant in documents of the period are instances of “liberties” that refer, in their primary sense, specifically to an area of jurisdiction, rather than to an area that was “virtually ungoverned.” When the
Court of Common Council passed an act in 1574 aimed at regulating plays in the city’s inn yards, it insisted that “henceforthe no playe, Commodye, Tragidye, enterlude, nor publycke shewe shalbe openlye played or shewed within the liberties of the Cittie” without first meeting criteria outlined by the Act (ES 4:274). Nowhere does the document distinguish between the city proper and any “liberties” that surround it, and as
William Ingram has pointed out, the Act specifically targets playing in inn-yards within the city. This use of “liberties,” then, denotes not the anomalous spaces Mullaney 14 describes, but rather the area of primary municipal jurisdiction. The Act’s issue is not
“within the city” as opposed to “within the liberties of the city,” which would distinguish between the parishes inside the walls and wards and the parishes outside the walls and wards, but simply “within the liberties of the city.”18 Similarly, a Minute of the Court of
Aldermen from 1549 outlines a procedure for the screening of “all suche enterludes as
hereafter shalbe pleyed by eny comen pleyr of the same within the Citie or the liberties
therof,” reserving to the lord mayor the privilege “to suffer them to go forwarde, or to
stey” (ES 4:261). Given the date of 1549, we can be quite certain that the specific spaces
in question here are none of the public amphitheaters we have come to associate with the
suburbs, and it is hardly likely that “liberties” here refers even to the spaces in which the
Theater, the Rose, the Globe and their brethren came eventually to stand. “Liberties
therof” here contrasts starkly with “liberties without” elsewhere;19 again, it refers not to a
liberty from the law, but rather to a liberty of the law—a liberty of specific authorities to
exercise their power. Nor does the letter offer a sense of these liberties as “virtually
ungoverned.” If they were, as Mullaney says, “outside the purview of the sheriffs of
London,” they were not here beyond the reach of the lord mayor.
Though the Oxford English Dictionary offers “liberty: (in England before 1850) a
district within the limits of a county, but exempt from the jurisdiction of the sheriff, and
having a separate commission of the peace,” it is noted as occasional in usage and does
not seem common in the majority of surviving documents that refer specifically to
18 The city’s primary administrative divisions were its twenty-six Wards. Each Ward had an alderman, common councilors, constables, scavengers, and a wardmote inquest. The division of the city into parishes (138, including out parishes, in 1638) constituted a separate and usually much smaller administrative schema based on local churches. See Finlay, Population and Metropolis; and Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society. 19 A 1577 Minute of the Privy Council, for instance, refers to Shoreditch, north of the city’s walls and wards, as “without the Liberties of the Citee” (ES 4:276). 15 jurisdiction and the theaters (“liberty” 7c.).20 The Oxford English Dictionary also offers
“the district, extending beyond the bounds of the city, which is subject to the control of
the municipal authority,” or, more generally, “the district over which a person’s or
corporation’s privilege extends” as current from the mid-fifteenth century (OED “liberty”
7c., “liberties of a city”); further instances of this usage abound, particularly as the issue
of jurisdiction over entertainment occasioned more and more exchanges between the city
and the Privy Council. A 1577 Minute of the Privy Council suppressing playing for
health reasons specifies the Queen’s pleasure that “as the Lord Mayour hath taken order
within the Citee, so they immediatlie upon the receipt of their Lordships’ letters shall take
order with such as are and do use to play without the Liberties of the Citee within that
countie, as the theater and such like, shall forbeare any more to play until Mighelmas be
past, at the least, as they will aunswer to the contrarye” (ES 4:276). Here, what appears
to be a reference to the Theatre in Shoreditch and to “such like”—probably the Curtain
and perhaps the theater at Newington Butts—places them “without the Liberties of the
Citee.” “Without” in standard usage denotes “outside,” and so the term “Liberties” here
must again refer to the area immediately under the Lord Mayor’s jurisdiction—or, in any
case, different liberties from those Mullaney describes. Similarly, a letter to Lord
Burghley from the Lord Mayor “Sir Nicholas Woodrofe” in 1580, outlining plans for
“preseruing the Citty from infection,” points to the especial danger of the “frequenting of
howses verie infamous for incontinent rule out of our liberties and iurisdiction.” Yet
again the word “liberties” refers not to the plot in Shoreditch on which the Theatre stood,
but rather to the liberty, or jurisdiction, of the city, outside of which the Lord Mayor
“lack[s] power to redresse” (ES 4:281).
20 All references to the Oxford English Dictionary are to the second edition. 16
For obvious reasons, this primary sense of “liberties” as areas under the city’s jurisdiction is far more abundant in sixteenth-century correspondence between the city and the Privy Council than are instances of “liberties” that denote areas specifically in other jurisdictions, such as the Liberty of the Clink, or the Liberty of Hollywell, where the Theatre and the Curtain stood. When the lord mayor writes of “liberties,” he refers to the scope of his own authority. Having “published orders” to stop gatherings at public amphitheaters within the city to help curb the spread of plague, the lord mayor wrote to
Sir Francis Walsingham on May 3, 1583, saying “it auaileth not to restraine them in
London, vnlesse the like orderes be in those places adioyning to the liberties,” or areas in which the lord mayor could not restrain plays without help from the Privy Council (ES
4:294). Shortly after, in July, the lord mayor wrote the Privy Council again for
“allowance of our proceding in such reformacion [of playing on Sundays] within our liberties,” asking the Council “to send your Lps. lettres of request and comandement to the Iustices of the cownties and gouernours of precinctes adioyning to this citie to execute like orders,” suggesting continuity and comparability between the terms “liberties” and
“precinctes” (ES 4:295).
The Privy Council, too, uses “liberties” to denote the lord mayor’s jurisdiction. A letter of November 1583 to the lord mayor asks him to “geue order” that “hir maiesties playeres may be suffered to playe within the liberties as heretofore they haue done,” presumably indicating inn-yards within the city and clearly suggesting that the liberty to permit playing lay with the lord mayor (ES 4:295). A 1623 letter of the Privy Council to the mayor and justices of Norwich makes rare use of the term in contrasting senses.
Responding to the city’s complaints of being “pestered and disquieted” by “players, 17 tumblers, dancers upon the ropes and the like,” the Privy Council “condemn[ed] the lawless liberty taken up and practiced in all parts of the kingdom by that sort of vagrant and licentious rabble” and authorized the lord mayor “not to suffer any Companies of players, tumblers or the like sort of persons to act any plays or to shew or exercise any other feats and devices within that city or the liberty of the same” (EES 2.1:143-144).
Having shown this letter of authority to one Francis Wambus, who insisted on his license from the king to perform in the city, the city records Wambus’s response: “the said wambus was accordinge to the Counsells order commanded to forbeare to play w(i)thin the liberties of this City And he neu(er)theles answered that he would make tryall what he might doe by the kings authority for he said he would play” (qtd. in EES 2.1:144).21
When the city bought the King’s interests in Southwark in 1550, it paid £647. 2s
1d. for land and 500 marks for liberties (Johnson 114). The charter of Edward VI, which documents the purchase, lists in fine detail the boundaries and attendant rights of these lands and liberties, including in the latter category that the “mayor and commons and citizens and their successors, may have in the borough, town, parishes, and precincts aforesaid forever, all and all manner of liberties, privileges, franchises, immunities, customs, and rights, which we [Edward VI] or our heirs should or might there have, if the same borough or town were to be and remain in the hands of us or our heirs” (Johnson
401). “Liberties” here are not lands themselves, but attendant rights. The city’s interest in purchasing the king’s land in Southwark was in large part a matter specifically of rights, over which the city, the justices of the county of Surrey, and other authorities in the area, such as the king and other land owners, had long clashed in conflicting claims.
The city, rather than continue to fight for a clearer definition of its rights in the
21 See Johnson, Appendix Ie. 18 borough—confined, for the most part, to the Guildable Manor, prior to 1550—sought to settle the matter decisively by purchasing outright the king’s lands and liberties.
It may be useful, then, to think of this primary sense of “liberties” as referring simultaneously to a collection of “privileges, franchises, immunities, customs, and rights” held over a particular, delimited area, as well as to individual plots or larger areas of land themselves. William Page dates “the earliest reference to the Liberty of London, meaning the district over which the city courts had jurisdiction” to the thirteenth century, when the bars that marked the boundaries of the suburbs abutting the city first appeared
(179). The “liberties” we are thus most likely to encounter in documents of the period— particularly those that pertain to playhouses, playing, and jurisdiction—are districts “over which a person’s or corporation’s privilege extends,” in this case, the Corporation of
London.
There is nonetheless a second common sense of “liberties” in the period, which might more easily be thought of as individual plots of land with a “separate commission of the peace,” and from which, presumably, Mullaney draws his definition. Norman G.
Brett-James cites a list commissioned in 1595 of gentlemen “residing within ye Citie of
London, the Liberties and Suburbs thereof,” indicating by “liberties” not a general jurisdiction, but a distinct portion of the metropolitan area under a jurisdiction different from the city’s (The Growth of Stuart London 37). In other words, “liberties” here is grouped with “suburbs” to designate areas outside of London’s liberties, set off against the city as a unit in and of itself. Technically, the term in this second usage still refers to a particular jurisdiction, and so the difference in usage is difficult to characterize. To refer to “the liberties” and mean the plots of independently owned land that punctuated 19 the city and the areas just outside it is certainly valid, but examples of such usage are comparatively rare, and examples of such usage in the context of the major public theaters of early modern London are positively elusive. Bills of Mortality in the early seventeenth century break the city up into areas, typically “London within the Walls,”
“London without the Walls and within the Liberties,” and “out Parishes”22 adjoining the
city. From 1570 on, the city prescribed these categories to parish clerks, who recorded
deaths in their parishes, and though the number of parishes in each category grew as more
of the suburbs were included in city mortality counts, the basic divisions themselves
remain fixed. A 1612 charter refers to the clerks as “The Parish Clerks of the Parishes
and Parish Churches of the City of London, the Liberties thereof and seven of the nine
out-parishes adjoining,” distinguishing clearly between the city and the liberties outside
the walls, and then again between those liberties and the suburbs or “out-parishes
adjoining” (qtd. in Brett-James 251). These three component pieces of the greater
London area—city, liberties, and suburbs—are familiar to us from Stow and other
contemporary sources, and they suggest how Londoners themselves might have
understood their city: the city proper was enclosed by the semicircular wall to the north,
east, and west, and by the river on the south. Though many of the city’s twenty-six wards
straddled the wall, extending to cover land outside, the wall must nonetheless have
carried a heavy significance as a barrier to the outside world. The gates were shut at
night, and the city was locked down in a tangible sense.23 Outside the walls and mingled among the extramural wards were the “liberties,” composed primarily of what were originally church lands that, under Henry VIII, were sold variously into private or lay
22 From a 1603 Bill of Mortality. Reprinted in Norman G. Brett-James, facing page 256. 20 ownership and so retained their status as independent of city authority. As far as bills of mortality were concerned, these church lands and extramural wards were known together as “the liberties,” and they contained both liberties under manorial or other city- independent rule and areas in the purview of the city, and, importantly, under the jurisdiction of Guildhall. There were liberties within the walls as well—the Blackfriars, the Royal Free Chapel, The Grey Friars and others—and, as with the extramural liberties, they were grouped with parishes within the walls for census and bills of mortality purposes.24 Beyond the liberties and extramural wards were the suburbs, roughly coterminous with the “out parishes.” These were areas further removed from the city and from its authority, outside the bars that marked the boundaries of the city wards.
From the perspective of parishes, then, the city could be conceptualized as
parishes within the city wall, parishes outside of the wall but in the “liberties,” and the
out parishes beyond, which categories roughly match the division of the city and its
environs into city, liberties, and suburbs. Corresponding to these divisions are three
different valences of city authority: the lord mayor and aldermen had full jurisdiction
within the walls and a compromised or provisional jurisdiction in the liberties, while the
justices of the peace in Middlesex and Surrey had jurisdiction in the suburbs. But this
model, common today in accounts of public theaters and city authorities, is only useful in
a broad sense, and it is misleading on any more particular level. For instance, there is an
immediate problem with the use of the city walls to limit the area in which the city had
23 Paul Griffiths, “Nightwalking in Early Stuart London,” 5 (forthcoming). For an account of the clock and the urban day, see 4-7, and for further reading, see n. 23. 24 Valerie Pearl lists the liberties within the walls: “Blackfriars, the Royal Free Chapel and Sanctuary of St. Martin’s le Grand, the Priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, the Grey Friars, the Priory of the Austin Friars, the Crutched Friars and the Priory of Elsing Spital,” and St. Paul’s and the Inns of Court, which were non- monastic liberties or precincts (London and the Outbreak 23-24). 21 full jurisdiction, since it did not have jurisdiction in the liberties within its walls, and since Portsoken Ward, Bishopsgate Ward Without, Cripplegate Ward Without,
Aldersgate Ward Without, and Farringdon Ward Without all stood partly or entirely outside the walls. These extramural spaces, again roughly coterminous with parishes that the Bills of Mortality list as “within the Liberties,” were in fact part of the same administrative structure that governed the city within the walls. That is, the Bills of
Mortality, organized along parish boundaries, rather than ward boundaries, classified portions of the city of London as in “the liberties” outside of its jurisdiction, whereas each ward had an alderman, common councilors, constables, scavengers, and a wardmote inquest, which distinguishes them from “liberties” outside the city’s jurisdiction on several counts.25 The core of the confusion resides in the use of “liberties” to refer to
areas immediately outside the walls but not necessarily also outside the extramural wards.
This is a rather important point elided by many historians and literary critics who classify
the liberties with the suburbs in terms of jurisdiction. In a recent essay, Joseph Ward
refers to the “suburbs and liberties” as “areas in the metropolis that were outside of the
City’s legal jurisdiction” (“Metropolis” 24). As we have seen, however, the city
authorities themselves often used “the liberties” to refer to the extramural wards and the
extent of the city’s jurisdiction. As far as the literary critic or historian of early modern
drama is concerned, this should be understood as the primary or principal one of “the
liberties” in relevant documents. They are certainly not the liberties that Mullaney
describes, falling as they do in the immediate, primary jurisdiction of the city, nor were
25 The twenty-sixth ward, Bridge Ward Without, on the south bank of the Thames, did not have any representation in the Court of the Common Council, and its alderman was not nominated by the ward. Bridge Ward Without was an administrative anomaly in many respects. See David Johnson, Southwark and the City, especially chapter 10, for a full discussion. 22 they home to the Theatre, the Curtain, the Red Bull, or the Fortune, all of which fell in what the Bills of Mortality classified at out parishes or suburbs. When Mullaney says
“the Liberties,” we should in fact understand “the suburbs.”
In summary: to be fair, it is difficult to fix a single definition for the term
“liberties,” and it must be noted that in early modern London, multiple senses of the word obtained without any apparent or notable confusion.26 It remains, however, that in the
context of the public theaters, the term “liberties” refers to places under city jurisdiction,
and the term “suburbs” is used to locate theaters. Moreover, generally speaking, to
delimit a space by calling it a “liberty” was to associate with one jurisdictional body or
another, and though often inactive or dormant, an association with authority almost
always inheres in the term. Use of “liberty” in any of its forms to indicate a freedom
from authority is comparatively rare in surviving documents of the period, and any sense
of license from authority that recent criticism has associated with “London’s Liberties” is
ill-advised.
John Stow, in his Survey, introduces “the Suburbs without the Walls of the said
City”: “having spoken of this city, the original, and increase, by degrees ; the walls,
gates, ditch, castles, towers, bridges, the schools and houses of learning . . . . I am next to
speak briefly of the suburbs, as well without the gates and walls as without the liberties,
and of the monuments in them.”27 As he proceeds to describe such areas as the “suburb”
of Shoreditch and the “liberty and duchy of Lancaster,” it appears that the “liberties” for
26 In an especially telling example, the Privy Council interpreted a patent issued to the amalgamated Queen’s Revels and Lady Elizabeth’s players giving them permission to build a theater “in the Suburbs of London” as excluding any land—including the Blackfriar’s liberty—within the city proper. See EES 2:2:139-140; G. E. Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 78-79. 27 John Stow, A Survey of London, 382. All quotations from Stow’s Survey are from Henry Morley, ed., A Survey of London : Written in the Year, 1598. Morley follows the 1598 text. 23
Stow, too, stopped short of the out parishes. It is difficult to say where “the liberties” began and where they ended, just as it is sometimes difficult to decide whether Stow in particular uses “liberties” to indicate the area of city jurisdiction or the areas between the city walls and the suburbs. Whatever the case, Stow does distinguish between liberties and suburbs, and it is a distinction that we would do well to observe, for all of the major public amphitheaters built north of the city in what we have been lead to think of as “the liberties” were, again, built in the suburbs, or out parishes. The Theatre and the Curtain both stood in Hollywell—a liberty, to be sure, but located in the parish of St. Leonard
Shoreditch, an out parish “without the liberties.” Similarly, the Red Bull and the Fortune both stood in the out parish of St. James Clerkenwell. The Red Lion was well east of the easternmost boundaries both of the liberty of the city and of the city’s liberties, and the playhouse at Newington Butts lay a good half of a mile beyond the southernmost boundary of the Liberty of the Clink and Paris Garden. In no instance that I have found are these areas ever referred to as “London’s Liberties.” Rather, in John Stockwood’s now-famous phrasing, the theaters were “houses of purpose built, and that without the liberties” (qtd. in Chambers ES 4:200; italics mine). Whether he means by “liberties” the area of the city’s primary jurisdiction or Stow’s liberties outside the city walls, he does not mean Shoreditch (location of The Theatre and the Curtain) or Clerkenwell (location of the Red Bull and the Fortune) or Newington (location of the Newington-Butts theater).
We may also recall the 1577 Minute of the Privy Council suppressing playing for health reasons: “such as are and do use to play without the Liberties of the Citee within that countie, as the theater and such like, shall forbeare any more to play untill Mighelmas be past” (ES 4:276). The city was indeed ringed with various liberties and out parishes, but 24 in neither of its primary senses does the contemporary usage of the term “liberties” refer to the out parishes in which the theaters were located. To return for a moment to Janette
Dillon’s phrasing, we may say that “modern critics” often describe the major purpose- built theaters in early modern London as being outside of the city’s jurisdiction because they were located in the city liberties, which is not entirely correct: it is because they were outside the city’s liberties, in the liberty of Hollywell, in the suburbs north of
Cripplegate Ward Without, in the out parishes east of the tower, that they were outside of the city’s jurisdiction.
Still, the extent of the city’s authority in the spaces outside of its official liberty should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as even in a liberal estimation, the areas outside of the twenty-six wards and the jurisdiction of Guildhall—that is, the spaces falling either outside the ward boundaries or within them but technically exempt from city authority—cannot be said uniformly to have fallen outside the city’s jurisdiction.
We may look more closely at a few instances that involve city authority and the theaters.
In 1583, the Lord Mayor wrote to a justice of Middlesex, “Mr. Young,” to explain his refusal to license certain fencers to “play a prise at the Theatre on Tuesday next”: “we haue not only not geuen them licence, but also declared to them the dangers, willing them at their perill to forbeare their passing both thorough the citie, and their whole plaieng of such prise.” The letter requests that Young, who as Justice of Middlesex presumably had immediate jurisdiction of the Theatre, “both looke vnto it your self, and so deale with the rest of the iustices, that no such prise be suffred, or assemblie had” (ES 4:293). It is not clear whether the fencers, who seem to have advertised their plans in posted bills, actively sought the city’s permission to present their entertainment, and the fact that the 25
Lord Mayor petitioned the help of the justices of Middlesex strongly suggests his power was not primary or absolute. But it is nonetheless worth noting that he did suppose that he had a say in the matter. Since the letter notes the fencers’ “desire to passe with pomp through the citie,” it may be that the “licence” the Lord Mayor declined to give pertained specifically and only to the component of the affair that was to involve London proper, though asking them “at their peril” to forebear “their whole plaieing of such prise” (italics mine) appears to extend the city’s say out into Shoreditch. In any case, the Lord Mayor saw fit to include a sort of disclaimer at the end of the letter specifying that “if we be blamed for suffering, we must say that we admonished yowe of it in time” (ES 4:293-
294). The cumulative effect of all the ambiguity in this document suggests at least that the issue of jurisdiction was apparently not a simple matter. The city had no established jurisdiction over the Theatre, so it is no surprise that the Lord Mayor wrote to the local justices to request aid. But if the city had no claim whatsoever to jurisdiction, why would the Lord Mayor presume to withhold his blessing from the event, and why would he feel compelled to exempt the city from any blame that might come of a mishap?
An incident at the Paris Garden earlier the same year may shed some light on this latter question, for, issues of official jurisdiction aside, the city appears to have borne the brunt of the blame for failing to police recreation in its suburbs, outside its liberty. On the fourteenth of January, 1583, the Lord Mayor Thomas Blank Major wrote to Lord
Burghley to request “redresse” for “a greate mysshappe at Parise gardeine” that had, the day before (a Sunday), resulted in injuries and casualties at a bear baiting arena. The
“Iustices of peace of that Countie [Surrey],” the Lord Mayor reports, had apparently been unable to address the matter because, as they claimed, they lacked a “Comyssion.” Lord 26
Burghley’s response is intriguing. He expresses his sorrow for the “mischance” and indicates that the Privy Council will shortly look into the matter, “wishing neuerthelesse that your Lp [the Lord Mayor] in the meane time, hauing rule of the whole Citie, might thinke it conuenient to make a generall prohibition within euerie warde of that Citie and liberties, that no person vnder your commaundment shold on the Saboth daie resort to any such prophane assemblies or pastimes, which I leaue to your Lps. discretion to be considered by the aduise of the Aldermen your bretheren” (ES 4:292). The troublesome ambiguity of what is meant here by “liberties”—”euerie warde . . . and liberties” seems to indicate some area supplementary to the twenty-six wards—again complicates an easy sense of jurisdiction. Perhaps Lord Burghley wished the city to prohibit playing and bear-baiting on Sundays only where it had strict authority to do so (“vnder your commaundment”); the thought here would be that the “mischance” was a manifestation of divine displeasure at the violation of the Sabbath, and that the Lord Mayor might do what he could immediately, the Privy Council’s action forthcoming, by restating the prohibition of Sunday entertainments where he had authority to do so. The Privy Council would address issues in Paris Garden and other places outside the city’s jurisdiction; the
Lord Mayor might proceed “neuerthelesse” to address similar issues inside the city.
Conversely, Burghley’s “neuerthelesse” may suggest that the Lord Mayor did have some immediate authority in the case: the Privy Council will take up the matter, but nevertheless, the Lord Mayor might exercise his own right, under consultation with his brethren, to forbid playing and animal baiting on Sundays, not only in the city, but in adjoining suburbs as well. If nothing else, the city may have presumed a basic authority over its citizens, even when they left the bounds of the city proper. 27
Perhaps the city was requesting provisional or circumstantial authority to do something not strictly within its official power; perhaps Lord Burghley’s response constitutes just such a provisional authority; perhaps the city had no authority in the matter, and the Privy Council here prescribed that the Lord Mayor and aldermen mind their own business—but even if this last is the case, the tenor of the exchange suggests a perceived connection between the city authorities and the suburbs into which their
“liberty” did not extend, and that connection is crucially important. Official jurisdiction aside, the Lord Mayor’s intent here is clearly to have the city’s will imposed on the suburbs, and the city’s response does little to separate the wards and liberties of London from the areas immediately outside of them. The Lord Mayor felt blamed, anyway, if not here by Lord Burghley, then certainly by “sermons at Poules crosse” and various unnamed publications that followed the incident, and it is perhaps with this in mind that he excused himself from responsibility in the matter of the fencing “prise” in April (ES
4:295).
So who had official jurisdiction? Alan Somerset, in a recent article, points to the
1550 Charter, noting that “according to Burghley (and the wording of the 1550 charter),” it was the Lord Mayor (47). Somerset presumably refers here to the charter’s granting to the city the areas “in and through all the parish of St. Savior’s, St. Olave’s and St.
George’s in Southwark,” St. Saviour’s including the Paris Garden (Johnson 118; translation of charter 399). Johnson himself explains that
the greater part [of St. Saviour’s parish] lies to the west, comprising the
Clink Liberty and the Manor of Paris Garden. Neither of these was ever
within the jurisdiction of the City so we must conclude that the parishes 28
were mentioned only as a way of defining the manors and not as areas of
jurisdiction in their own right. (118)
The Charter’s language is tantalizingly imprecise here, and Somerset’s reading is inviting. But the fact that surviving records bear no trace of the city ever having cited this right argues against Somerset’s reading, and Johnson’s tidying of the charter’s meaning is probably safe. What the city purchased in 1550 was the lands and liberties of the king, and those did not extend westward of the Guildable Manor into the Clink or
Paris Garden.28 Indeed, most of the documents from the period support the notion that
the city had no fixed jurisdiction over activities at any of the theaters surrounding the
city. Time and again, letters to the Privy Council request that action be taken where the
city has no authority to do so. This is the case in May and July of 1583, shortly after the
Paris Garden disaster and the January letter to Lord Burghley, when Lord Mayor Thomas
Blank Major separately petitioned Francis Walsingham and the Privy Council for help in
a coordinated effort to curb activities at theaters and baiting arenas in Middlesex and
Surrey. To Walsingham he writes of “care for staye of infection of the plage”:
According to oure dutie, I and my bretheren haue had care for staye of
infection of the plage and published orders in that behalfe, which we
intend god willing to execute with dilligence. Among other we finde one
very great and dangerous inconuenience, the assemblie of people to
playes, beare bayting, fencers, and prophane spectacles at the Theatre and
Curtaine and other like places, to which doe resorte great multitudes of the
basist sort of people ; and many enfected with sores running on them,
28 The city’s purchase, and thus the boundaries of Bridge Ward Without, were effectively coterminous with the combined areas of the Guildable Manor, the King’s Manor and Great Liberty Manor. 29
being out of our iurisdiction. . . . it auaileth not to restraine them in
London, vnless the like orderes be in those places adioyning to the
liberties, for amendment whereof I beseche your honor. . . . (ES 4:294)
The Lord Mayor perceived a disparity between the scope of his charge and the scope of his authority. The city had come under fire for failing to police activity in its suburbs after the Paris Garden disaster, and the Lord Mayor, perhaps more keenly aware than his critics of his inability to take the matter entirely into his own hands, appealed once again to the Crown for help. The particulars of this letter contrast “in London” against “in those places adioyning to the liberties,” which were out of city jurisdiction. The letter implies the city will do its part within its liberties but here asks that the Privy Council match the city efforts with an “amendment” of illicit activities outside the city liberties.
Both angles, the letter suggests, must be addressed if the problem is to be solved—”one side will mock another,” we might say, recalling Regan in King Lear.29 Given that this
sense of jurisdiction accompanies complaints about activities “at the Theatre and
Curtaine and other like places,” it is reasonable to conclude that the Theatre, the Curtain,
and “other like places”—surely, in 1583, the animal baiting arena which was by July of
the same year back in operation, and on Sundays, too—were precisely the areas the city
had in mind with the phrase “out of our iurisdiction.” So, regardless of what the Privy
Council may have suggested during the exchange, the city clearly did not feel it could act
entirely on its own to suppress activities in Paris Garden. This complaint about
insufficient authority is by now commonplace in contemporary studies of the period, and
it is not surprising that repeated readings and repeated discussions have concluded, along 30 with the lord mayor, that the city had no explicit jurisdiction over the Theatre, the
Curtain, and their Bankside counterparts through the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign.
But to leave the matter of jurisdiction here is to miss the larger point: as the Lord
Mayor Thomas Blank Major and his brethren well knew, people who lived in and around
London, people who published books and delivered sermons at Paul’s Cross, perhaps even Lord Burghley and the Privy Council itself, thought differently. A related letter from the Lord Mayor responds to the Privy Council’s own “honourable letters, for execution of the lawes for maintenance of archerie and restraineng of vnlawfull games.”
The Lord Mayor’s response points out that
not only the said vse of archerie and maintenance of good artes ar [sic]
decaied by the assemblers to vnlawfull spectacles, as barebaiting, vnchast
enterludes and other like, but also infection thereby increased, affraies,
actes and bargaines of incontinencie and thefte, stolen contractes and
spoiling of honest mens children, the withdrawing of people from seruice
of God, and the drawing of godes wrath and plages vpon vs, whereof god
hath in his iudgement shewed a late terrible example at Paris garden. (ES
4:294-295)
The disuse of archery and other “good artes,” that is, are not the only problems that ensue from “vnlawfull games” (the Lord Mayor, perhaps advisedly, takes the opportunity to include plays and animal baiting); such pastimes also result in various petty crimes, such as fights, theft, and pandering. The primary issue, of course (and foremost in the letter’s rhetoric, if not in the city’s mind), is the manifold dangers of inappropriate recreation on
29 The Tragedy of King Lear 3.7.68. All quotations of Shakespeare come from The Norton Shakespeare, 1997. King Lear quotations are from the The Tragedy of King Lear text, which follows the 1623 Folio 31
Sundays, a day of prescribed rest. The city, despite its better efforts, was not able to prevent the gathering of crowds on Sundays, presumably because it did not have adequate authority to do so outside of its own established “liberties.”30 Again, since it would not
suffice to suppress illegal playing and other recreation on Sundays only within the city
proper, the assistance of the Privy Council in suppressing these activities elsewhere
would be necessary. The city apparently felt the need to resolve the matter itself,
probably in part because it was already taking the blame for negative consequences.
Primary state jurisdiction belonged, in this case, to the Justices of Surrey, but the
associations that the local population made at the time—and that we may cautiously but
profitably allow ourselves to make again today—between the city authorities and the
policing of activities in the city suburbs is clear.
In summary, the matter of who had effective jurisdiction remains, in the end,
unclear. The city did not have sufficient authority to accomplish what it wanted to
accomplish, and yet there was, according to the Lord Mayor’s letter, an active and vocal
constituent of local citizens and visitors who thought it the city’s duty to address the
problem. There is the evidence, too, that the justices of the peace in Surrey themselves
thought that the authority to act lay outside their power. The people of London looked to
the lord mayor and aldermen, and the lord mayor and aldermen looked to the justices of
the peace in Surrey. These justices, lacking a commission, looked back to the lord
mayor, who requested assistance from the Privy Council, only to have the Privy Council
return a vague endorsement of the lord mayor. This compound deferment of
version of the play. 30 It is well worth noting that the city was not entirely successful suppressing plays on Sundays even where it did have clear and explicit jurisdiction. Laws proscribing performances on Sundays were widely flouted, if complaints about violations are any indication of what might actually be expected on Sundays. 32 responsibility blurs the lines of jurisdiction by illustrating that contemporary perspectives were anything but decided on the matter. Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that perceived responsibility and official authority were comparable, especially since it is hard to imagine that the city would not make use of the full extent of its prescribed power. It is also misleading, however, to suggest that the city had no power over what happened in its suburbs. Fallout after the Paris Garden disaster makes it difficult to say not only who had official jurisdiction in which “liberties,” but also who might exercise a provisional jurisdiction in the areas outside the city’s official jurisdiction.
Records indicate that the Privy Council itself either did not always know, or did not always care to observe, technical lines of jurisdiction. On March 11, 1601, the
Council wrote to the lord mayor “requiring him not to faile to take order the playes within the cyttie and the liberties, especyally at Powles and in the Blackfriers, may be suppressed during this time of Lent” (ES 4:332), while nine years earlier, fearing a riot on
Midsummer evening, the Council had issued orders specifically to Lord Cobham and Sir
Thomas Sherley [sic] to suppress playing at Blackfriars and Whitefriars, respectively
(Dasent 550-551).31 As David Johnson notes, the Privy Council was at times flippant
with its orders, aiming for immediate and effective results without regard for
jurisdictions, but it seems they had trouble establishing who was in charge of the
Blackfriars generally (Johnson 266). Virginia Gildersleeve has suggested that Lord
Cobham had been contacted about the Blackfriars district in 1592, not because he was in
charge there, but rather because nobody was officially in charge there; Lord Cobham, like
Lord Hunsdon, was a resident of Blackfriars, and being a respected and powerful
31 See John Roche Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council vol. 22. 33 citizen—he was later to hold the office of Lord Chamberlain—the Privy Council looked to him when they could not look to anyone else.32
Furthermore, though the Lord Mayor’s letters after the incident at Paris Garden did not clearly empower the city authorities, such was not always the case. The Minutes of the Privy Council for May 11, 1586, record letters sent both to the Lord Mayor and to the Justices of Surrey issuing orders for the restraining of “plaies and interludes in publique places.” The “heat of the yeere” was approaching with the summer months, and
32 Perhaps the same nonchalance or uncertainty on the part of the Privy Council accounts for its opaque response to the Lord Mayor after the Paris Garden incident. But again, the question of jurisdiction in the municipal area south of the city on the lower bank of the Thames was particularly troubling. The Rose, the Hope, the Swan and the Globe were all built (and, in the cases of the Rose and the Globe, rebuilt) within the boundaries of St. Saviour’s Parish, Southwark. St. Saviour’s itself was composed of three different jurisdictional areas: the Guildable Manor, the Liberty of the Clink, and Paris Garden. The city had purchased full rights, including liberty or jurisdiction, in the portion of the parish that lay in the Guildable Manor, but the Liberty of the Clink was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester and the Surrey justices of the peace, and it held its own court leet, while the Paris Garden Liberty, also under the jurisdiction of the Surrey justices, was privately owned, passing in 1589 to Francis Langley. As usual, these jurisdictional divisions were not so fixed as to prevent problems. The city’s purchase of the king’s land surrounding the Guildable Manor on the east and south (the Clink and Paris Garden, to the west, were obviously not part of the sale) was motivated to begin with by the need to neutralize competing claims to various liberties or rights in the area. Disputes over jurisdiction between the city on the one hand and the steward and marshal of the king’s household on the other had long been a source of conflict. An early charter of Edward III excused people living in the liberty of the city—which ostensibly included the Guildable Manor—from the jurisdiction of the marshal, but residents in the area were being called before the marshal on charges of trespass and debt (Johnson 71). Arguments over tolls and who had rights to hold markets and fairs in the Guildable Manor had occasioned similar disputes, which intensified and came to a head under Henry VIII, when the seizure of church lands brought the independent liberties surrounding the city’s land under the crown’s control. In order to establish its own boundaries of jurisdiction around the Guildable Manor, the city authorities essentially had to buy out the competition (Johnson 107-113). Doing so may have helped solidify the city’s claim to jurisdiction, but disputes, as we have seen, did not by any means subside. Part of the problem was that though the city incorporated the borough south of the Thames as Bridge Ward Without, the twenty-sixth ward, it was nonetheless anomalous in important respects. Its citizens never elected their own alderman, and they had no representation on the Court of Common Council. Johnson notes that the aldermanry of the ward eventually became something of a sinecure. By failing to treat the ward and its citizens as it treated citizens north of the river, the city left itself open to jurisdictional challenges for years to come. Future attempts by the city to secure its privileges in the area ultimately failed because it could not demonstrate established precedent (Johnson 244-246). All three jurisdictions fell entirely within St. Saviour’s Parish, which the city classified in Bills of Mortality as a parish “in the liberties” (of the city) from the late sixteenth century. For purposes of keeping tabs on the plague, then, the entire parish could be considered part of the city. As we have seen, theaters and animal- baiting arenas were also sometimes classified as matters of public health, and it may be that the Privy Council approached the situation as a public health concern whose gravity superceded questions official jurisdiction. 34 fears that crowds drawn to plays would spread infection were mounting. The Privy
Council replied to a request form the Lord Mayor:
A letter to the Lord Maiour ; his Lordship is desired, according to his
request made to their Lordships [the Privy Council itself] by his letters of
the vijth of this present, to geve order for the restraining of playes and
interludes within and about the Cittie of London . . . and that their
Lordships have taken the like order for the prohibiting of the use of playes
at the theater and th’other places about Newington out of his charge. (ES
4:302)
A description of the letter sent to the Justices of Surrey indicates that it did proscribe plays and interludes in Newington. The “theater” in question is presumably the theater at
Newington Butts, over which, along with the surrounding areas, the Surrey justices had jurisdiction. Given the city’s history of imploring the Privy Council to suppress playing in areas near London over which the city could not exercise control, we might reasonably assume that the “request” to which these letters are a response was the usual petition for the Privy Council’s cooperation in a unified front against playing in time of the plague: it is the Surrey authorities who are directed to suppress playing, but the “order” itself originates with the Lord Mayor.
Indeed, evidence of such requests survives in abundance, as do Privy Council orders giving the city provisional authority, sometimes directly, to suppress playing in areas not ordinarily within its jurisdiction. In February of 1594, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor with concerns about the spread of plague at playhouses in and around
London, asking him “foorthwith to take strait order that thear bee no more publique 35 playes or enterludes exercised by any Companie whatsoever within the compas of five miles distance from London” until the threat of infection subsided (ES 4: 314). “Five miles distance from London” of course covers all theaters in and near the city for which records survive, including, we may presume, the Bankside houses as well as theaters in the liberties and suburbs. The letter to the Lord Mayor from March of 1601, cited above, gave him a commission through the season of Lent for suppressing plays in the city and the liberties but “especyally at Powles and in the Blackfriers,” both of which are routinely said to have been outside of the city’s administrative reach.
Probably, for the most part, the Liberty of the Clink, Paris Garden, and Shoreditch were safe from immediate and effective aggressive legislation or action from the city authorities, and the comparative freedom performers and owners might thus enjoy was part of the reason so many purpose-built theaters went up just outside of London’s walls.33 But beyond this, the particulars of place and authority are far too complex to support the kinds of categorical statements current in literary critical approaches to the place of the stage. The city and the suburbs that surrounded it were indeed separate spaces, often governed by different bodies. But the distinctions were neither fixed nor absolute, and by leaning too heavily on the notion that the liberties and suburbs were liminal boundary lands between the city and the alien countryside that loomed north in
Middlesex or South in Surrey, we are only seeing part of the picture. Mullaney has conceived of the areas outside the city wall as foreign to the city itself, as “suburbs of the urban world, forming an underworld officially recognized as lawless,” where “the anxieties and insecurities of life in a rigidly organized hierarchical society could be given 36 relatively free reign” (21-22). Mullaney is not always so radical in separating the city from its suburbs, but the force of statements like these is likely to lead astray. As Ian
Archer has noted, local government in London was the cumulative effect of parish, ward, guild, and corporation control, and almost all of the spaces Mullaney characterizes as
“lawless” fell under at least three of these authorities (“Government in Early Modern
London” 2).
Perhaps the best reason for us to associate the city with the suburbs in the same administrative arena remains that the local citizens and higher authorities themselves did so. The January 1583 exchange between the Lord Burghley and the Lord Mayor discussed above addresses, in the portions not reprinted by Chambers in The Elizabethan
Stage, a second issue of authority and city safety. On the fourteenth of January, the Lord
Mayor wrote to Lord Burghley with notice that certain “vitailers [victuallers’] howses infected [with the plague] within the liberties of this Citie” had been “reformed” according to Lord Burghley’s requests, and that the Lord Mayor had determined where relevant notices concerning public health might best be posted. Lord Burghley responded by asking the Lord Mayor to have similar notices posted in the city’s “suburbs” as well:
“I pray your Lp to cause the officers in the Citie of Westmr, and other officers in the suburbs to be acquainted wth the maner and forme thereof, to the intent that the like forme of the Certificat may be kept in all other places about your Citie” (Collections of the Malone Society 1:61). On the one hand, these instructions clearly indicate that it was not the Lord Mayor’s business to post flyers in the city’s suburbs—the same areas that harbored the major amphitheaters—but on the other hand, they indicate equally clearly
33 By “purpose-built,” I mean to distinguish buildings intended specifically for the exhibition of entertainment on a stage surrounded by paying spectators from the inn-yards and halls of city inns, which 37 that the Lord Mayor’s office was the vehicle through which action, at least on this occasion, was taken in those suburbs. The Lord Mayor did not have jurisdiction, but he was saddled with the responsibility of seeing these things accomplished. The city and the suburbs, though “heterogeneous” in the sense that they were in different jurisdictions, had the same sorts of problems, and it was more efficient to administrate homogenously as necessary.
The inclusion in city Bills of Mortality of many of the out parishes containing the suburbs tells a similar story. After the 1562 and 1563 plague outbreaks, Bills returned to the lord mayor include a growing number of out parishes, or parishes in the suburbs, outside the bars and outside the city’s jurisdiction. The mortality figures were based on parish boundaries, rather than ward boundaries in part because ward boundaries were useless outside of the city and its extramural or transpontine wards. Thus, the way the city was organized was not always adequate for the task of administrating the city, which for many purposes exceeded its technical boundaries. The particulars of jurisdiction separate the City of London officially from its suburbs, but the reality of day-to-day administration lumps those suburbs in as part of the city’s immediate business.
II. Other Complications
Stepping back from these particulars of jurisdiction, authority, and administration, we can consider several other points that complicate standard accounts of the place of the stage in early modern London. To begin with, even in cases in which jurisdiction itself was not an issue, effecting compliance with proscriptions presented its own kind of problem. The complaint perhaps most common in records involves theaters
are not “purpose-built” for public entertainment but which often hosted public entertainment. 38 staging plays on Sundays, which was expressly forbidden by the Privy Council on several occasions. Licenses issued to playing companies typically hedged the permission they granted, prescribing that performances “be not in tyme of devyne service,” but contemporary accounts suggest such restrictions were often violated (ES 4:268). On the enforcement side of the matter, the justices of the peace in Middlesex and in Surrey appear for whatever reason not to have monitored activities at theaters as carefully as the city authorities did, and the Privy Council more than once wrote to reprimand them. In
October of 1587 the justices of Surrey were criticized for their “negligence”:
Thinhabitauntes [sic] of Southwark had complained unto their Lordships
[the Privy Council] declaring that th’order by their Lordships sett downe
for the restrayning of plaies and enterludes within that countie on the
Saboath Daies is not observed, and especiallie within the Libertie of the
Clincke and in the parish of St. Savours in Southwarke, which disorder is
to be ascribed to the negligence of some of the Justices of Peace in that
countie ; they are required to take suche stricte order for the staying of the
said disorder as is allreadie taken by the Lord Maiour within the Liberties
of the Cittie, so as the same be not hereafter suffred at the times forbidden
in any place of that countie. (ES 4:304-305)
We may presume that Philip Henslowe’s Rose theater was an offender here, located in the Liberty of the Clink, within the portion of St. Saviour’s that fell west of the Guildable
Manor, in the county of Surrey. The Middlesex justices were likewise reminded to restrain playing on Sundays, but not accused of negligence. On other occasions, 39 however, all three authorities were addressed as a group. A Privy Council Minute from
1591 relates
A letter to the Lord Maiour of the Cyttie of London and the Justices of
Midlesex and Surrey. Whereas heretofore there hathe ben order taken to
restraine the playinge of enterludes and playes on the Sabothe Daie,
notwithstandinge the which (as wee are enformed) the same ys neglected
to the prophanacion of this daie. . . . (307)
Plays and other arena recreations on Sundays drew spectators from church services, just as plays competed with animal baiting for audiences on Thursdays.34 While the Privy
Council recognized the financial need to restrict playing on days when bear and bull
baiting were popular, it also apparently recognized the need to observe the Sabbath. The
Paris Garden disaster of 1583 happened on a Sunday, prompting Lord Burghley to
remark publicly that “such like worldly pastimes” as plays and animal baiting were best
confined to “some other daie within the weke” (ES 4:292). And yet, complaints to the
Privy Council—”as wee are enformed”—were common enough. Despite the express command of the Privy Council, which, as David Johnson remarks, was “law,” to be neglected by other authorities “at their peril,” playing continued on Sundays, and not only in the suburbs (Johnson 225).
On the other hand, even manifest freedom from city authorities did not mean unchecked liberty. The Privy Council, whose authority superseded any local power, was itself sometimes the force behind the suppression of plays, and not always at the behest of
34 That is, plays were criticized for violating the Sabbath, but Phillip Stubbes, for example, also suggests that plays were guilty specifically of the “alluring and inuegling of the People from the blessed word of God preached” (ES 4:222). Stubbes avers that some people spent the entire day away from church, and not simply the period during which the play was performed. 40 the lord mayor and aldermen: the threat of the plague or of riots often resulted in the
Privy Council restraining plays, and it routinely wrote to the city and justices of the peace in Middlesex and Surrey with reminders to suppress playing on holy days. Nor was the city the only civic body to request the Privy Council’s help in curbing activities in theaters. One of the more interesting petitions on which the Council acted came from the residents in the wealthy Blackfriars district as the Burbages made preparations to open the new Blackfriars theater, which the elder James Burbage, anticipating problems with the Theatre in Shoreditch, had purchased for £600 in an attempt to secure a new performance space. The residents, fearing “the great resort and gathering togeather of all manner of vagrant and lewde persons,” the danger of the plague, and “the noyse of the drummes and trumpetts,” asked that “no playhouse may be used or kept” in the hall (ES
4:320). The petition was signed by the Lord Hunsdon who, succeeding his father, had just become the patron of Burbage’s company, The Chamberlain’s Men, and was soon to become the Lord Chamberlain himself.35 The irony of a company’s patron lobbying to
stop its moving into a new theater has been often remarked on, but what is also
interesting is that an entity other than the city was petitioning the Privy Council for
assistance in stopping plays. In the more sensational cases of The Isle of Dogs and A
Game at Chess, the Privy Council or the crown moved directly to suppress playing.
Glynne Wickham links The Isle of Dogs incident to the Privy Council order of 1597, on
its surface the single most aggressive order issued against the theaters until 1642.36 Our
35 Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, had been Lord Chamberlain and thus patron of the Burbages’ company. When he died in 1596, his son George Carey succeeded him as patron of the company (though Lord Cobham succeeded as Lord Chamberlain), which was known for a brief period as the Lord Hunsdon’s men. Carey shortly afterward became Lord Chamberlain, too, taking the post at the death of Lord Cobham and shifting his company’s name back to the Chamberlain’s Men. 36 See EES 2.2: 9-29. 41 sense of legal or administrative action taken against theaters or performances does not ordinarily admit of plaintiffs other than the city—the order of 1597 is more often seen as a response to the city’s letter of the same day, requesting the “fynall suppressinge of the saide Stage playes”—but clearly there were others (ES 4:321).
Finally, most discussions of city authority and the theaters rest on the implicit assumption that the city wanted control over its suburbs to begin with. Evidence makes this assumption difficult to substantiate, and increasingly so as the suburbs grew in size.
As Ian Archer and others have pointed out, the city was remarkably reluctant under the
Stuarts to take responsibility for areas outside its liberty or to enlarge its jurisdiction.
City authorities appear to have considered but ultimately declined several proposals to expand their jurisdiction into the suburbs under James I and Charles I. Besides St.
Martin-le-Grand, the Minories, Heneage House and Ely Place, the city requested no
additions to its primary jurisdiction in 1644, and its desire that year for increased leverage
in commissions of the peace in Middlesex and Surrey were essentially no more than the
latest in a string of attempts to clarify the city’s standing in such matters. Archer
suggests that the “magnitude of the task” or the fear of “social dilution of the institutions
of civic government” may have discouraged the city authorities from seeking to enlarge
their area of jurisdiction around London (“Government in Early Modern London” 5).
City complaints that the suburbs had grown “far bigger than the Cittie” support either
notion (qtd. in Brett-James 226). The city had opposed the independent incorporation of
the suburbs for years before 1636, since such a move would threaten the city guilds’
control over trade work there, but it was unwilling on the other hand to have the suburbs
fully incorporated into the city. We must revise our vision of the city authorities slightly 42 if we are to account for their lack of interest in acquiring over the suburbs that held the northern theaters the kind of control they enjoyed within the walls.37 After 1642, when
theaters were closed, the force of such a point decreases, but most of the city’s
opportunities to expand came while the public amphitheaters were still in operation. If
nothing else, the city’s reluctance to take on the matter of government in the suburbs
suggests that whatever problem the theaters presented was of little consequence in the
larger picture.
III. Places and Stages
Challenging thus the popular model of a metropolis divided clearly and absolutely
into areas under city jurisdiction and areas under county or other jurisdiction allows us to
link the city and its suburbs economically and socially, as well as administratively.
Joseph Ward has recently cited the work of several early modern poets and social critics
conceiving of the city, liberties, and suburbs as a homogenous unit uniformly responsible
for incurring the wrath of God. When divine punishment is visited on the city, it will not
itself distinguish between Fleet Street and the brothels in Southwark; in the eyes of God,
all of greater London, wards, liberties and outparishes, is guilty in sin. Slightly more
tangible is his work with craft guild data, which links the city and its suburbs through the
interest of livery companies in their right to pursue and regulate work in and outside of
the city’s twenty-six wards. Joseph Ward offers records of the Carpenters’ Company and
the Tylers and Bricklayers’ Company as examples, citing their activities on behalf of
company members’ rights in both the liberties and the suburbs. The Carpenters’
37 For a full discussion, see Norman G. Brett-James, esp. chapter ix, and Ian Archer, “Government in Early Modern London.” 43
Company exercised its right to inspect work in Whitechapel, the Minories, Blackfriars, and on the Bankside “near the Globe play house” (qtd. in “Imagining” 32). All of these spaces fell inside the “liberties” of the city, if not within the liberty of the city, and, as it happens, all but one of them harbored at least one playhouse.38 Thus, in pursuing evidence of a substantive connection between the city and the spaces in which theaters stood, we might note that the Carpenters’ Company had a demonstrable interest in the area. The model of the city as city-within-the-walls versus liberties or suburbs outside the walls neglects not only economic, administrative, and religious connections, but also trade- and guild-based similarities that link the allegedly disparate realms. Similarly, the
Tylers and Bricklayers’ Company records show regulatory activity in “Petticoat Lane,
Golden Lane, and Chancery Lane,” and further out in “the Strand, Westminster, and
Islington” (“Imagining” 33). Ward sees in these records of inspections evidence that
“tile- and bricklaying was a metropolitan-wide trade,” and regardless of whether there is a difference between honest, metropolitan-wide business and the Company’s simply trying to levy fines or confiscate goods where it could, there is manifest interest on the part of a craft guild in an area outside of the city proper (“Imagining” 33). Of course, the
New Corporation of the Suburbs, formed by Charles I in 1636, was to meet with great opposition among guilds in the Corporation of London, whose objections were quite genuinely based on the prospect of lost business and economic setbacks in general.39
Freemen of the city did live in the suburbs, and though the proportion of their numbers to those who lived in the city proper is not known, their grievances constitute a
38 This is so if we may presume that the location “near the Globe play house” was west of the boundary of the Guildable Manor and not otherwise part of Bridge Ward Without. 39 For a detailed discussion, see Joseph Ward, “Imagining the Metropolis,” and Norman Brett-James, chapter ix. 44 demonstrable connection between the city and its suburbs at the level of the citizen.
(Ward “Imagining” 36; Archer “Government” 2).
Ward concludes by noting that “members of London’s guilds were quick to assert their right to work in the suburbs” and that “the City and its suburbs and liberties were linked by the movement of goods and people” (“Imagining” 34; 37). But the larger problem was one of government in general: as the suburbs surpassed the city in size, the loose affiliations of justices of the peace and local governing officers became insufficient as a means of maintaining an adequate level of administrative organization. The perceived need to govern the suburbs as London proper was governed suggests a notion that the suburbs were substantially and substantively like the city they surrounded. The point itself is rather obvious, but it is worth making: despite the vilification of the suburbs in (largely Puritanical) literature of the time that would seem to mark them off as areas somehow different from the city, the divisions that kept the two predominantly separate in jurisdiction did not constitute the same kind of boundary between the progress of the daily lives of citizens on either side of the divide, whose social, religious, and economic concerns were by and large the same. In the words of Henry Chettle, “Is it not as faire a way to Myle-end by White-chappell, as by Shorditch to Hackney? the Sunne shineth as clearly in the one place, as in the other” (qtd. in Harbage 17). In the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the balance of the population shifted, the growth concentrated not in the city within the walls but in the liberties and suburbs outside so that, concurrent with the period of the greatest activity in early modern drama, the “margins” of London were in fact inhabited by a substantial portion, if not the majority, of the total metropolitan population. 45
David Scott Kastan’s recent study, Shakespeare After Theory, offers a brief encapsulation of the reigning conceptualization of the early modern stage:
Under Elizabeth, in an atmosphere of growing cultural conflict, the
theater’s subversive potential came under ever greater governmental
scrutiny and control, as the authorities sought ways of limiting and
containing the actors’ unnerving freedoms: the Master of the Revels began
to license—and censor—plays; players were permitted to act only as
members of licensed acting companies under noble patronage; and the
theaters themselves were banished by the city fathers—to the Liberties.
(126)
This conception understands the trajectory of theater in early modern London as a downward arc, the result of increasing censorship and constraint by authorities. In this account, what implicitly was a period of relative freedom for theaters comes to a close as the crown and its agents of censorship increase their control toward the end of the century, and the antipathy of the city authorities mounts and comes to a head in banishment. Put in a broader historical context, however, the “subversive potential” of the theater and the “governmental scrutiny and control” are less remarkable. Government censorship and scrutiny were certainly in part concerned with the theater’s potential— similar to that of the printing press—to broadcast unsanctioned material to large audiences, especially when religion was the subject matter, but state censorship of
English drama had begun long before Elizabethan theater became an established popular success. Henry VIII had put constraints on religious subject matter in stage plays in
1543, and the “subversive potential” of public plays had manifested itself as early as 46
1540, when an uprising at York was linked to a “religious interlude” (EES 2:1:65-66; qtd. in EES 2:1:62.).40 Nor is a connection to the actors’ “unnerving freedoms” absolute or
obvious. What freedoms the actors may have had can be linked to the censorship of play
texts only tenuously, and though it is true that players increasingly were permitted to act
only under license, it does not necessarily follow that they were a dangerous breed that
needed careful monitoring by the state. If anything, scholarly consensus is that the 1572
Act outlining the punishment of “Vacabondes” helps to establish and defend professional
playing in London by erecting a framework for the prosecution of non-professional
players and vagabonds posing as players.41 Finally, the notion that the theaters were
“banished” to the “liberties” is, as we have seen, both an exaggeration and an inaccuracy.
The trend of theater building outside the city’s immediate jurisdiction began long before
the London authorities wrought a ban on performances in the city, and playing inside the
city walls continued undiminished for nearly five years after the first wave of extramural
and transpontine public stages were built.42 Similarly, though theater builders did begin
choosing sites outside the jurisdiction of Guildhall, they did not necessarily presume
thereby to escape opposition from authorities. The Privy Council and even residents
themselves could and did oppose theaters as adamantly as did the city authorities. A
sense of forced evacuation is not sufficiently tenable.
In the end, the spaces in which the major public theaters stood in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries were neither homogenous nor ungovernable; they were
no more reducible to representation in a single example—the Bankside, Shoreditch,
40 In a letter to a Justice of the Peace in York dated c. 1635-1640, Henry VIII links the “late evil and seditious rising in our ancient city of York” to “the seditious conduct of certain papists who took part in preparing for” an interlude (qtd. in EES, 2:1-62). 41 See EES, especially 2:1, chapter 3. 47
Newington; the Theatre, the Rose, the Blackfriars—than were the city’s wards, parishes or craft guilds, and the layers of jurisdiction and administrative procedures in the several spaces that harbored theaters were neither simple enough to be summarized in a phrase, nor were they firmly established for the duration of the period. If we can understand by the Act of the Common Council of 1574 that inn-yard playing was a profitable enterprise by that year, we can say with some certainty that for a full two decades, the phenomenon labeled now most frequently as “liminal” or “marginal,” or otherwise removed from our sense of the city proper, had in fact flourished in the very heart of the city. Early in his introduction to the space of the city, Mullaney insists we “keep well in mind the fact that, in the sixteenth century, what has come to be known as popular drama situated itself neither at the heart of the community nor even within it” (8), but the continued use of playing locations along Gracechurch street and just west of St. Paul’s well into the 1590’s should compel us to keep in mind just the opposite.43 By the same token, we can say that
“the playhouse” as we imagine it today cannot comprehensively be represented by any
single one of the particular early modern buildings that we place in the category of
“playhouse.” We can categorize as far as it is necessary and useful to do so, but we
should avoid categorizing permanently or definitively in any situation. It is useful to
point out that the marginal or liminal status of the stage, socially, is in some senses
reflected in its marginal or liminal placement in areas of the city that the city authorities
could not reduce entirely to their jurisdiction—that observation remains a major premise
of each of the chapters that follow, despite the tempering proposed here—but we must
42 See O. L. Brownstein, “A Record of London Inn-Playhouses,” SQ 22 (1971): 17-24, especially 23. 43 E. K. Chambers himself recognized that “originally stageland was in the heart of the City itself. With the building of the first theatres, it was transferred to the Fields of the northern suburbs. During the last decade of the sixteenth century the Fields in their turn gave way to the Bankside” (ES 2:370). 48 remember that such a simplification can mislead. The areas that hosted theaters—the inns of court, the inn-yards off Gracechurch street,44 the lay liberties that punctuated the
city, the suburbs that surrounded it—were as varied in location and history as the theaters
themselves, which ranged from converted halls to inn-yards to purpose-built
amphitheaters to game-houses with removable stages.
Joseph Ward and others have recently emphasized the connections that linked the
city with the suburbs economically and socially. It is the object of this study to endorse
that suggestion and encourage an approach to the literary critical study of early modern
drama that sees connections between the city and the suburbs alongside those
conventions and situations that separated them. The positive link between the theaters
and the city has suffered some neglect at the hands of studies emphasizing the distinction
and separation between the city and its suburbs. Keeping in mind that characterizations
of the suburbs in the negative extreme were perhaps rhetorically motivated and that for
many purposes the city and its suburbs were regarded by citizens and administrators alike
as one unit, we may look at playhouses and the stage plays they hosted not as marginal
spectacles enacted in social and administrative limbos, but as culturally central spectacles
enacted in and around the metropolis, wherever companies could find affordable land and
spaces to hold both performances and the sizeable crowds that attended them. It is
difficult to argue that city and religious authorities did not see the theaters as offering
questionable, morally dubious entertainment, but we must remember that the surviving
anti-theatrical sentiment from which we induce the popularity of this attitude is neither
conclusively representative of general attitudes at the time, nor neutral. Those records
44 Glynne Wickham has argued plausibly that the performance space at inns and taverns may not necessarily have been the yard itself. See EES 2.1:186-190. 49 are after all the surviving voices of a small cross section of London’s population, and they speak no more loudly than the voices of the theater’s supporters, who were numerous enough to keep the theaters profitable as long as the government did tolerate them. Andrew Gurr cautiously offers that perhaps fifteen to twenty percent of people in the greater London area were regular playgoers and that “well over fifty million visits” to playhouses were made between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theaters in 1642 (The Shakespearean Stage 213).45 If we are to believe
contemporary accounts, theatergoers were most often wayward apprentices and other
profligate social renegades who either went to plays with assorted nefarious designs or
emerged having learned them. But as Gurr has demonstrated, it is more likely that
members of all classes and backgrounds, citizens of all motivations, went to theaters.46
Insofar as the people of a metropolis are representative of its culture, its practices, and its beliefs, the popularity of stage plays in theaters of all sorts suggests that the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage play was not at all the “oddly liminal” phenomenon depicted in current literary critical approaches to the stage, “geographically, socially, and politically” separated from the city that spawned it (Kastan 126). We need a model for
understanding the “place” of the stage that does not presuppose the stage’s essential
marginality. For some religious zealots and other assorted social critics, the theater was a
glaring offense to God; for some government officials, it was dangerous, sinful, and
corrupting; for some neighborhood alliances, it was a threat to order and manners; for
many theatergoers, it was apparently entertaining and stimulating; for the queen and her
45 All references to Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage are to the third edition. See also Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience, New York, 1964. 50 royal successors, it was a desirable diversion, a mode for the expression of culture and learning, and a means of displaying the material wealth of the kingdom. For different people, it apparently was different things, and though there is sufficient evidence to suggest the theater was generally thought of as outside the center of the cultural vision the state had for its people, to say that popular drama “abstracted itself from the city and moved into the Liberties,” thereby transforming itself into a uniformly marginal phenomenon, will no longer do.
46 For different views on the audiences at early modern theaters, see Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience; Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London and “Audiences”; and Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 51
Chapter 2
Places, Spaces, Stages
I establish in chapter 1 a historical or “factual” argument for rethinking the status or place of the stage. A more careful reading of the term “liberties,” for example, forces us to begin thinking about the early modern association of liberties with areas or instances of jurisdiction, rather than as spaces in and around the city that were “at liberty” from law. The revised understanding of so important a term as “liberties” reveals the need for a new understanding of the larger relationship between the government and city of London and the popular theater. The present chapter provides a theoretical or conceptual argument to function alongside the historical argument. Both chapters seek to establish the centrality of the stage to popular culture1 in early modern London by
complicating current theories of the theater as a marginal institution and the stage as a
marginal space, but while chapter 1 treats the stage from a perspective jurisdiction and
administration in an urban geography, chapter 2 treats the stage as a cultural space; it
approaches not the place of the stage in a material sense, but the space of the stage in a
figurative sense.
1Michael D. Bristol has discussed social structures in early English society and their relation to drama. He works with a notion of “popular” or “majority” culture in contrast to an “elite” culture associated with gentry, peerage and the crown (“Theater and Popular Culture” 232). I do not use “popular culture” in opposition to “elite” culture, because such a distinction fragments what this dissertation approaches as a larger united whole. Separating the elite from the popular encourages similar distinctions between the popular drama of the amphitheaters and the elite drama of the schools, universities, and high-end hall theaters, and those distinctions frustrate the notion of a popular drama pursued here that includes amphitheater drama, hall drama, and even university drama. The term “popular culture” in this dissertation attempts to describe a popular or majority sentiment that draws the broad support of—that is produced, overseen, and consumed by—a cross-section of society comprising everyone from laborers and servants to yeomen freeholders to citizens and burgesses to gentlemen and the peerage. See Keith Wrightson, Early 52
The difference between “place” and “space” is between location or status on the one hand and function or role on the other. Ordinarily, “the stage” in contemporary criticism is meant as a synecdoche for “the theater,” and when we consider its “place,” we are thinking in general terms of the overall status of the theater in early modern
London. But little has been said of the stage itself, the physical space inside the theater upon which scripted, dramatic narratives were performed. This is to consider the space of the stage specifically, as opposed to the larger space of the theater. Hanna Scolnicov distinguishes between theatre space and theatrical space: “The physical space in which a performance takes place is its theatre space. Within a given theatre space, the production will create its own theatrical space, which, in a theatre, might be confined to the stage alone or appropriate the aisles and balconies or even extend to encompass the audience sitting in the auditorium” (11). Studies such as Nial W. Slater’s
“Transformations of Space in New Comedy,” which approaches the space of the stage in relation to the auditorium space, treat the larger “theatre space.” Twentieth-century theater has at times radically reworked the distinctions between audience and performance space,2 but in Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, the distinction is
functional and real: as Jonathan Haynes has pointed out, “extra-dramatic” moments in
which Elizabethan actors do break the wall separating stage from audience are “a relic of
the medieval theater,” and not charged with the same intent as their twentieth-century
counterparts. Haynes argues that Elizabethan actors do not become “conscious of
themselves as creatures with a metaphysical or ontological problem,” and they are not
English Society, chapter 1 “Degrees of People”; Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability. For a comparable perspective on “popular,” see Alexander Leggatt, Jacobean Public Theatre 28. 2 See for example Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater, and “Six Axioms for Environmental Theatre,” in Public Domain, 157-180. 53 compromising dramatic illusion “in order to produce a philosophical frisson” (“The
Elizabethan Audience on the Stage” 59).
Recent archeological excavations have turned up new and useful information about the location and size of the Bankside theaters,3 and the field of performance studies continues to grow and to speculate about early modern performance conventions: both endeavors, in some sense, explore the space of the stage. But the stage is also a cultural space, independent of its physical width, depth, and height, and independent of its significance in the history of dramatic conventions. Robert Weimann, in his discussion of
“Platea and Locus,”4 and Catherine Belsey, in her account of The Castle of Perseverance, offer “readings” of speculative stagings of morality and mystery plays that examine the significance of different spaces on the stage.5 They begin to address the relationship between the stage, the play, the players, and the audience, and between all of them and the larger grouping of narratives that comprise their “culture.” Weimann refers simply to a “contemporary perspective on everyday experience,” suggesting that an actor’s particular position on the space of the late medieval stage enabled connections with his audience that went beyond connections previously available in purely representational
3 We now know, for example, that the Rose theater went through major structural expansion in 1592 and that the Globe, variously located on different maps of the south bank of the Thames, was indeed the southern and easternmost of the Bankside theaters, both built and rebuilt just opposite and east of the Rose, off Maiden Lane. See John Orrell and Andrew Gurr, “What the Rose can tell us”; and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642. 4 Weimann’s extensive contribution to the study of locus and platea remains invaluable, and I follow his sense of the schematic as discussed in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition. The terms themselves, as Alan H. Nelson has noted, are “well-established” and generally accepted. Though there is some debate over the particulars of locus and platea as spaces on the stage, the general sense of a “localized area, called a domus, locus, or sedes in Latin, and a ‘mansion,’ ‘room,’ ‘hall,’ ‘house,’ or ‘place’ in English”—the locus—and an “unlocalized area” between or around the locus or loca, which is to say “any other space lying within the total acting area”—the platea—is standard (Nelson, “Some Configurations of Staging in Medieval English Drama” 117). As a recent example of the use of these two terms, see Jerome Bush, “The Resources of Locus and Platea Staging: The Digby Mary Magdalene.” 5 See Robert Weimann, “Platea and Locus,” in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy. 54 drama, which had maintained a distance from the here-and-now of the audience’s present
(82). The gap between contemporary perspective and mimesis grows smaller and smaller as the “anachronistic” self-expression of characters in the platea is further combined with the representational realism of characters imitating life in the locus; popular drama shifts, in Weimann’s terms, from allegory to realism and begins to “approach the standards and experience” of its audience (82). When the space of the stage becomes simultaneously the location of imitation of life and of contemporary commentary on life, the theater becomes a powerful site of cultural production. Toward the close of the period, beginning with late Caroline plays such as James Shirley’s Hyde Park and coming fully to predominance in Restoration comedies, realism gradually overtook metaphor and
English theater lost as a result some of what Glynne Wickham has called its
“emblematic” character. But for the heyday of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, the space of the stage was host to something between the symbolic abstracted reality of morality plays and the comic scene and stage realism of the Restoration. Between The
Castle of Perseverance and Marriage á la Mode, the balance of emblem and image in
English drama made the theater simultaneously a reflection of, and on, the people it entertained.6
Hitherto, the term “stage” has been used as a synecdoche for the popular theater,
and it has subsequently absorbed all of the negative, culturally marginal associations we
have linked with a popular tradition that was opposed by religious and civic authorities in
London. I would like to dislodge these negative and marginal associations and challenge
that trope on the grounds that the popular theater in early modern London was more
complex in its relationship with culture than could be signified by a single synecdoche.
6 See EES 2.1, especially chapters 6 and 7. 55
Staging a play, I will argue, was a process that positioned subject matter as culturally situated and culturally relevant. To the extent that culture provided the set of narratives from which drama took its subject matter, culture imposed itself on theater and the space of the stage. But as far the theater was free to select—and then to shape, supplement and even supplant—the narratives it worked with, the events on the stage exerted a reciprocal influence on culture. Theater, by enacting narratives on the privileged space of the stage, not only confirmed what was culturally intelligible; it actually constituted some portion of what was culturally intelligible. Considering the way in which Littlewit’s puppet show in Bartholomew Faire selects and represents particular narratives from the action of the play can draw our attention to the fact that the play itself selects and represents particular narratives from a London fair. The representation of the fair on the stage at the Hope in
1614 is both a commentary on and a re-creation of a cultural practice—a fair around which layers of social recreation had accreted—in early modern London. It is one way of bringing the fair at St. Bartholomew hospital into existence as a cultural phenomenon: the theater’s process of dramatizing and performing material positioned that material in the milieu of cultural narratives, gave it a cultural valence. In short, the drama could confer upon a narrative the status of being culturally articulated, culturally placed, culturally significant—could confer culturality.7
This dissertation is not an inquiry into the production of dramatic space or into the
semiotics of the stage, but rather an attempt to approach the social, cultural and physical
place of the stage from the perspective of its centrality to culture, instead of its
7This term attempts to pinpoint the “noun-ness” of the adjective “cultural.” When we wish to talk of a historical valence, a continuous “noun state” of the adjective “historical,” we talk of “historicity,” and we mean to indicate how something is fundamentally situated in a perspective of history. By “culturality,” I mean to indicate how something is fundamentally situated from a perspective of culture. 56 marginality relative to culture. As a part of the playhouse, the stage, in a categorical sense, inherits the marginal status of the theater—a theater of the margins in terms of activity, association, and location, where, according to popular critical thought, transgressive, subversive, or otherwise unruly cultural energies collected and were brought into focus. As Louis Montrose phrases it, “the popular theatre was a uniquely threatening phenomenon because it was the physical and ideological site of convergence for a panoply of perceived innovations and perversions” (The Purpose of Playing 35).
But as a privileged and central space in that theater, the space of the stage is arguably the opposite of marginal; it is where all of the theater’s sanctioned, scripted, and regulated activity takes place, and it is the focal point of popular public attention.8 The events on the boards may have been the product of a culturally marginal institution, but they were themselves quite culturally central. In the bid to enrich our knowledge of early modern theater, we might consider the cultural significance the drama could give to narratives by bringing them to the stage, and the way that such an approach provides a model of the theaters and the theater industry cast in terms of connections to popular culture, rather than separation from popular culture.
There are three components to this approach, by way of a response to reigning paradigms for understanding the relationship between theater and culture in early modern
London. I will follow Stephen Mullaney in conceiving of the city and its environs as a tripartite structure: a center, or London proper, within the city walls; a margin, or the
“liberties” outside the city proper, but within the conceptual and associative vicinity of
8 Hanna Scolnicov’s phrase, theatrical space, is perhaps a more concise way to make the distinction, but I prefer “the space of the stage” because it suggests parallels and contrasts with “the place of the stage.” For more on the relationship between the theatrical event and space, and for a critique of Scolnicov, see Gay McAuley. 57
London; and a surrounding countryside stretching beyond the “liberties” into rural
England. But as we have seen, Mullaney’s scheme is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate movements and variations in the phenomena it attempts to “place,” and it treats the place of the stage as a literal, rather than a culturally constructed, space.
Mullaney’s scheme therefore needs to be amended. To render Mullaney’s model more flexible and more friendly to the space and place of the stage as a cultural phenomenon, I will offer another tripartite conceptualization of London adapted from Raymond
Williams’s writings on dominant, emergent, and residual culture. In Williams’s scheme, as I will suggest, London proper corresponds to the “dominant culture”; the “liberties” correspond to “emergent culture”; and the countryside corresponds to “residual culture,” though Williams’s classifications are both figurative and flexible. I will attempt to situate the space and place of the stage in terms of these two tripartite models of early modern
London and its culture.
I. Introduction: the Space of the Stage
The stages of the thirteen public London theaters and the performance spaces at the various inns, halls, and palaces that hosted stage plays were culturally invested spaces, and the narratives enacted there had a special cultural significance. Their cultural significance is an effect of the relationship between theater and the dominant culture that held sway inside the walls of London. But the particular source of the power of the theater to imbue a narrative with cultural significance lies in the special status accorded the narratives that are articulated specifically on the space of the stage. This power operates regardless of whether the narratives presented on the stage are approved of by 58 guardians of the dominant culture. That is, the power the theater has to confer a cultural status, or a state of culturality, on the narratives it stages obtains even—and perhaps especially—when the city authorities do not approve. It is a power that resides in the attitude with which a culture witnesses narratives presented in a particular space. Some spaces are charged with an intensified, extra, or multi-layered kind of semiotic significance, so that the narratives presented there signify in rich ways.9 The surface of a
bulletin board or a billboard; the walls of a museum or gallery; the space inside of a
picture frame: all of these spaces provide a context for narratives that helps to determine
their significance.10 The stages that hosted performances of plays provided their own
specific context that helped to determine the way in which those performances signified.
The context of the theater—the space of the stage in particular—framed dramatic
narratives such that they could be read as cultural commentary. From the status of
cultural commentary, the drama derives its power to shape understandings of culture
which, put another way, is the power to shape culture.
By way of analogy, let us look at how narratives articulated in other spaces, such
as execution scaffolds and courtrooms, were also invested with a special significance by
virtue of the space in which they were “performed.” Consider, for example, the case of
the condemned man at public execution. His positioning in a certain “space”—on the
verge of death, soon to come before his creator to make account—was a powerful surety
9 The “frame” of the stage, for example, obviously endows the signification it frames with an “overriding signifying power” that they do not ordinarily have (Keir Elam 7). 10 Gay McAuley has noted that empty space is “the precondition that alone makes possible the simultaneous presence of performer and watcher” to create theater (3). Peter Brooks has said that we can “take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (9). A space can be imbued with extra semiotic significance simply by its being bounded or framed in any functional way and viewed as a stage. Stanley Fish makes a similar point about language: any instance of language can have 59 for the veracity of whatever he was moved to utter there. He was exhorted, ostensibly for the safety of his eternal soul, to confess his guilt and make his peace with God. There could, after all, be little use in prolonging a false claim of innocence at this point, since for a person whose life was shortly to come to an end, the prospect even of permanent infamy in the records of the world was presumably preferable to eternal damnation on the burning marl. This moment was a final opportunity for the criminal to absolve himself of sin against God by admitting a sin against mankind.11 But it was also an opportunity for
authorities to gather information about contingent or related crimes, an opportunity for
the prosecution to enlarge its web of information about accomplices and about the
structures of transgression and association inside which the condemned had operated. In
the case of Anthony Bate, a London goldsmith accused by an officer at Bridewell of
extensive involvement with a certain prostitute, the testimony of an acquaintance named
Richard Rolles became an important piece of evidence. Rolles, mounting the scaffold
where he was to be hanged for stealing a horse, apparently exonerated Bate in his final
speech, apologizing for having slandered him. Rolles’s crime had nothing in particular to
do with Bate’s, but his impending death afforded authorities the opportunity to extract
powerful confessions from him. The space of the scaffold imbued this testimony, which
cleared Bate, with a special significance, and his confessions set back the case against
Bate considerably.12
specifically poetic significance if it is approached with “poetry-seeing eyes” (326). On the notion of space, frames, and semiotic significance, see Jacques Derrida, “Parergon.” 11 On the tradition of scaffold confessions, see J. A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches,” especially 150-156. 12 For a detailed discussion of Bate’s case, see Paul Griffiths, “Contesting London Bridewell” (forthcoming). The case was initially discussed by Ian Archer in The Pursuit of Stability, 232-233. Karen Cunningham has argued that public executions in early modern London were “formal cautionary rituals staged for various audiences” (Imaginary Betrayals 3). I do not specifically treat the dramatic or ceremonial components of scaffolds or public executions, but they have drawn significant scholarly attention. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish addresses at length the connections between the 60
We have records of various instances in which particular stagings of particular plays bore an immediate influence on London’s justice system. The 1601 staging at the
Globe of a play involving “the deposing and kyllyng of Kyng Rychard the second” became condemning evidence against conspirators in a treason case.13 A performance at
the Swan of Thomas Nashe’s The Isle of Dogs is known to have landed several players in
jail. A hugely successful run at the Globe of Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess in
1624 resulted in Privy Council injunction directed at the King’s Men.14 Each of these
stagings had a direct effect on a theater company’s favor with the crown, but perhaps
only the 1601 play at the Globe can be said to have contributed to a legal matter that was
otherwise unrelated to the theater industry. Further instances of such a relationship are
rare. Paul Mulholland has suggested that The Roaring Girl may have aimed at
influencing public opinion of Moll Frith as she came before London’s Consistory Court
to be arraigned for public cross dressing, and other expressly topical plays, such as the
Dekker-Ford-Rowley collaboration, The Witch of Edmonton, presented current events on
the stage from a particular viewpoint and were no doubt rhetorically persuasive in some
fashion as arguments. But these instances offer examples of the way a play could affect
public perception of established topics already familiar to the public. The more
spectacle on the scaffold and state power. For treatments specific to early modern drama, see J. A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches” (Past and Present 107, 1985), Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death” (PMLA 105 no. 2, 1990); and Gillian Murray Kendall, “Overkill in Shakespeare” (SQ 43 no. 1, 1992). 13 Leeds Barroll has sharply and smartly challenged the widespread use of this account to assert the subversive potential of the Elizabethan drama. Though Shakespeare’s company, reportedly at the bequest of Essex’s steward Sir Gelly Meyricke, agreed to perform the play in public, the performing of the play itself was to all appearances not considered subversive. See “A New History for Shakespeare and His Time,” SQ 39 (1988): 441-464. See also Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, chapter 5. 14 On The Isle of Dogs, see EES 2.2: 3-30; on A Game at Chess, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (18-21, 151, 191; and appendix 2, item 141); and T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton’s “VulgarPasquin”: Essays on A Game at Chess. Newark, U of Delaware P, 1995, especially chapter 3 “Auspices and Reactions,” 77-110. For a discussion of recent “potentially startling” evidence on the 61 interesting function of popular drama, much more difficult to document, is how it might have helped shape larger or more general trends, perceptions, and patterns of thought— how it might have played a deeper role by helping to determine, through presenting narratives on stage, not only what the public thought about particular people and particular issues, but more important, what the public thought about to begin with. That
Middleton and Dekker’s play affected the popular opinion of the historical Moll Frith is probably true; that Middleton and Dekker’s play brought Moll Frith into the public consciousness—that it brought about a “Moll Frith” narrative in popular culture—to begin with is contestable, but much more intriguing. To assert that the theater had power to influence perceptions and understandings of cultural narratives is merely to observe that theatrical narratives, as narratives, are rhetorical. That the theater had the power to confer a status of culturality on narratives to begin with is the argument of this project.
Many studies, especially in the New Historicist tradition, have addressed the relationship between theater and culture during the peak of English Renaissance drama under Elizabeth and James. This study works at the same intersection, but rather than stressing the subversive or marginal elements of the theater, as Jonathon Dollimore’s
Radical Tragedy or Stephen Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage do, it stresses the popular, central, and contributive elements of the theater. Both “popular theater” and “culture” need to be defined.
The terms “popular theater” or “popular drama” and their distinctions and variations—Renaissance drama, early modern drama, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,15
frequency of performances of A Game at Chess, see Jeanne Shami, “‘Twice a Day on the Banke Side’?: A Contemporary Report on Middleton’s A Game at Chesse.” 15 John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan have recently argued for the term “early English drama” to refer to the period as a whole. They point out the awkwardness of the “regnal” designations, “Elizabethan,” 62 or, more locally, “the stage,” “the theater,” “the drama,” “playing” have all been widely and synonymously used. They seem to refer to play writing and play acting, but the phenomena falling under the umbrella term often include a broader range of activities by playwrights, players, theater owners and managers, theater patrons and patronage, and ordinary playgoers of every social standing. Thus, not only plays, but courtly masques, civic pageants, lawsuits, contracts, letters, and the extended everyday lives of people involved with the theater on any side of the stage itself come into play. While it is neither possible nor necessarily useful to bracket off these concentric circles of related activity surrounding plays, playwrights, and players, the scope of the period itself can be narrowed here. “Popular theater” and its analogue, “popular drama,” refer to the body of plays written primarily for public performance in public theaters during the last half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth.16 Recent studies have emphasized a market demand for public drama as early as 1567, with the building of the
Red Lion playhouse, which helps us establish the presence of a truly “popular” drama,
“popular” in this case being an indication of established currency and popular public
“Jacobean,” and “Stuart,” which force a sense that drama “conveniently changed with the passing of the monarch”; they dislike the problems inherent in “Renaissance,” which always suggests a “medieval” predecessor and “reenact[s] the humanist bias against the prehistory of the Renaissance itself”; finally, they argue against “early modern drama” because it invokes the issue of progress toward “a modernity of which of course [the period] could know nothing” (“Introduction” to A New History of Early English Drama 3). I use “early modern drama” because its currency in scholarship remains viable, and because Cox and Kastan’s objections are casual. Moreover, their alternative (“early English drama”) does not entirely escape the logic it critiques. As we have perhaps learned from the course of New Historicism, reading the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the perspective of our own “modernity” may be a necessary evil that we are better off acknowledging than trying to talk around. I also occasionally use “Elizabethan” or “Jacobean” to describe the drama of the period as sources or context requires. 16 David Bevington has emphasized the “popular” and “national” roots of Elizabethan drama in From Mankind to Marlowe, pointing out that a modern focus on the “classical rediscovery” that in part drove the development of early modern drama can be misleading (1). The distinct presence of an “elite drama” that developed alongside its purely “popular” counterpart can pose a problem for grouping school, university, and Inns of Court drama with drama at public theaters, but Bevington notes that “this distinction should not be urged too far” (26). Popular precedent often intruded into the elite drama, and the blurred boundary between the two: “England’s glory came ultimately from the fact that its courtly drama could borrow life 63 support in a given culture.17 How popular and how profitable the Red Lion was, we do
not know, but John Brayne’s apparent willingness to undertake a similar but much more
costly enterprise nine years later—the Theatre—suggests that his first endeavor was not a
failure. The fact that at least two, and most likely three, spaces for performances of plays
by adults were built within ten years of the Red Lion is a strong indication that
commercial theater had blossomed by 1576 into a promising venture.18 The potential for
profit from a take at the door seems the most likely impetus for these business gambles.
Alternatively, the prospect of a dedicated building itself might have been alluring for
companies that wished to settle into a space. Either reason presumes a strong audience,
of course, and that is the essential element for recognizing a popular public theater. By
1574, criticism had begun to appear attacking plays for profaning the Sabbath and
drawing playgoers away from their work, and by 1577, the now-familiar complaints
about the “multitudes” that “flocked” to the “sumptuous” theaters were being lodged.19
At some point in the mid-1560’s, O. L. Brownstein has argued, the Bel-Savage had begun
to host stage plays along with fencing prizes, and significant dramatic activity certainly
predates the Red Lion, but we may look conveniently to 1567 as the year in which the
drama had become popular enough to warrant a semi-dedicated building to house it. The
year 1642 is the obvious date for the end of the period, but this study does not extend
beyond the Jacobean drama. The emergence of the comedy of manners in the first
and vitality from its humble brother, while the popular drama, never excluded from the indulgent and even affectionate attention of the court, grew into maturity instead of withering into impotence” (26). 17 See especially William Ingram, The Business of Playing, chapter 4. 18 On the probable dates and locations of the Theatre, the Curtain, and the playhouse at Newington Butts, see William Ingram, The Business of Playing, especially part III. 19 In 1574, Geoffrey Fenton wrote of players who “ought not to be suffred to prophane the Sabboth day in such sportes, and much lesse to lose time on the dayes of trauayle” (ES 4:195); in 1577, Thomas White in a sermon at Paul’s Cross decried the “sumptuous Theatre houses, a continuall monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly” and remarked the “multitude that flocketh to” common plays (ES 4:197). 64
Caroline period, evident in plays such as James Shirley’s Hyde Park and William
Davenant’s The Wits, and the shift of popular theater toward wealthier and more exclusive audiences, presage the Restoration drama and a departure from the popular theater that marks the zenith of Renaissance drama. The year 1625, then, with the death of James I and the accession of Charles I, marks the end of the period considered in this study.
The term “culture” is yet more vague and complex. In most conceptualizations,
“culture” would entirely subsume “theater,” since theater (or “drama” or “play acting”), like all social practices, institutions, and ideas, is a constituent of culture. So while it is arguably difficult concretely to envision and define cultural phenomena like “theater,” doing the like for “culture” itself is even more difficult.20 According to Raymond
Williams,
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development,
in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be
used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and
in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. (Keywords 87)
What Williams traces in his account of the word “culture” is more complicated than a simple etymology; his account traces a full-scale evolution, with several distinct branches of development and convergence. But rather than attempting an exhaustive definition, we can try to refine what is inherently an impossibly loose and broad concept by approaching culture as an amalgamation of sets of related narratives that we understand
20 See James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture for a short overview of the problems of defining “culture,” especially 38-41 and 230-236. 65 to say something about a certain people, in a certain time and place. That is, one way to delimit a “culture,” from inside or outside of it, is to begin identifying the narratives that contribute to it, the narratives of which it is composed. “Culture” can be thought of as an amalgamation of different narratives in various states or stages of articulation.
In Clifford Geertz’s words, “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Interpretation of Cultures 452). To see everything as a text is, or has become, a defining project of literary critical approaches to literary or historical periods. Arguably, the “world-as-text” approach to literary studies has sprung most immediately from poststructuralism.21 Jacques Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas de hors-
texte,” a key tenet in poststructuralist thought, is of some use here: nothing is had outside
of the text; there is no outside-of-the-text; there is no outside-text (Of Grammatology
158).22 Approaching the world of phenomena as a text inside of which all perception,
imagination, and analysis happens is in part what enabled New Historicism to overhaul
the literary critical use of history. Derrida continues:
in what one calls the real life of these existences “of flesh and bone,”
beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau’s
text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been
21 James Clifford has discussed the notion of culture as “assemblages of texts” in interpretive anthropology. See The Predicament of Culture, especially chapter 2, “On Ethnographic Authority.” 22 Gayatri Spivak’s translation offers “there is no outside-text” in brackets (158). The French phrasing is intentionally awkward, and that awkwardness is best rendered in “no outside-text.” Derrida insists that the notion that “Jean-Jacques’ life, or the existence of Mamma or Therese themselves” are only available to us in the text (of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions) does not quite cover the import of il n’y a pas de hors- texte. The import of il n’y a pas de hors-texte is “more radical.” To grasp (from inside of language) the notion that “there is nothing outside language” is unavoidably also to miss the point, and Derrida’s awkward phrasing suggests this (158). As Antony Easthope notes in a review and critique of Richard J. Evans’s In Defence of History, there is a difference between “‘rien n’existe hors du language’ and the much 66
anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only
come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and
being added only while taking on meaning from a race and from an
invocation of the supplement, etc. (Of Grammatology 159)
For Derrida, the realization that there is no outside-of-the-text is always a matter of critical self-awareness, and it serves to remind us that both the way that we think and the way we assess the way that we think are essentially textual: both processes happen exclusively and entirely in texts. Of course, such a postulation requires a broad notion of
“texts.” Earlier in Of Grammatology, Derrida notes that “from the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs” (50). A “text” in this sense is any kind of narrative constructed out of signs, whether they are specifically textual, more generally linguistic, or entirely extra-linguistic. Signs make up the texts of the worlds we live in, and there is nothing thinkable or knowable outside of these texts.
When we think of, talk about, or gesture to a postulated “something” that is external to the realm of signs, we inadvertently but necessarily construe it precisely in the realm of signs: in order to conceive of an extra-semiotic entity, we have to contaminate it with sign-based conception. More generally, Derrida’s observation that “il n’y a pas de-hors texte” is also the cornerstone of thought from which New Historicism built its revisionist approach to historical criticism, and it is the key component in casting everything as a
“text” in a broad sense. It is what gives us Louis Montrose’s famous “chiastic” formulation, “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history,” and suggests an
more troubling assertion Derrida actually made” (563). For another interesting evaluation of Derrida’s phrase, see Martin McQuillan’s discussion in his “Introduction” to Deconstruction: a Reader, 35-39. 67 approach to culture as an amalgamation of narratives—texts—in different stages of articulation.23
As not all narratives consist of words, written texts, or even images, however, we
have to distinguish among different stages of articulation, with written or spoken
narratives at one end of the spectrum and those narratives that are not—or that cannot
be—written or spoken at the other end. Some narratives are expressly articulated, as with
written histories, while others are either not articulated in one space at one moment from
beginning to end (as with a political rumor, for example, that circulates in different
versions at different times), and still others are not articulated at all as linguistic signs (or
have components that cannot be classified as strictly linguistic, as with courtship,
perhaps, which may have a verbal and even a textual component but which is clearly
more than the simple sum of love poetry and flattery). Yet all these “narratives,” factual,
imperative, imaginative, litigious, and so on, could be grouped together as facets,
components, or instances of a particular culture. William Drummond’s library might be
useful for detailing a good amount of English culture, but the books in that library
comprise only a fraction of the cultural narratives at work in the same room: architecture,
furniture style and arrangement, window-dressings—all could be understood as
occupying a significant, culturally charged space. They all say something about the
culture in which they articulate and are articulated.
Yet it remains that the more powerful narratives in a culture are indeed those with
verbal or textual components, and if something of a hierarchy appears to obtain here
between textualized and non-textualized narratives, so much the better. It should not be
said that without exception, spoken or written narratives are more important to a culture
23 See Louis Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” 20. 68 than those that are not written or spoken, but evidently, those narratives a culture considers most important, those of which a culture is most self-aware and that appear to dominate a culture from within, tend to be construed in language. They are spoken and, ultimately, written, whenever possible: religious texts, political texts, legal texts, historical texts, and so forth. The most important narratives in a culture tend to be put expressly into language; they tend to become “textualized.”
Elizabethan and Jacobean popular drama served exactly this function: it textualized narratives by writing them down and then speaking them out. It scripted them, and in the course of doing so, it worked them from thoughts, images, objects, events—”social energies,” to borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s term—into texts.24 Whether it
was performed, witnessed, or simply read, the drama collected, focused, and transcribed
different narratives in different stages of articulation into particular words. It told stories
of the people of England and the world in which they lived in such a way as to keep the
invested attention of its audiences, giving the age and body of the time its form and
pressure. Drama was an embodiment, a hypostasization, of people and events and the
world they inhabited. Just as Littlewit’s puppet show in Bartholomew Fair is a selective
recreation of the events it describes, giving them a concrete existence in particular words,
so the popular drama was a selective recreation of the events it described, and of the
people it recreated and re-created. The Mad Moll of The Roaring Girl is a narrative
hypostasization of a historical figure; it captures her and re-creates her in a particular text
to be articulated. Similarly, the non-historical figures and events in the play are narrative
hypostasizations of city life; they are a dramatic recreation, driven by a central,
24 See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, chapter 1, “The Circulation of Social Energy,” especially page 6. 69 structuring text, of an experience of London and its people. Drama served as a textualizing agent for narratives, iterating them and thereby placing them in the milieu of culture.25
The narratives textualized and put on the stage were varied. Some were already
established; some were fledgling or liminal, residual or emergent; some were new and
some were old, some native, some foreign—anything “popular” enough to catch the
public’s eye or the poet’s fancy was worked and reworked, created and recreated on the
popular stage. But many of them were variations of traditional narratives in English
culture. Classical comedies drew from Terence and Plautus; pastoral comedies drew
from mystery and miracle cycles and from folklore; city comedies sprung most directly
from London life in the city. Tragedies like Ben Jonson’s Cataline were built on
classical models, while domestic tragedies like Arden of Feversham eschewed classical
dramatic unity in favor of an adapted native English form. From Mucedorus to The
Shoemaker’s Holiday to history chronicles from Edward II to Henry VIII to current-event
plays like The Roaring Girl, popular drama under Elizabeth and James drew on stories
and characters that came from history, folklore, Christianity—from narratives already
established in prominence and dominance inside the walls of London, often espousing the
values, politics and histories of standing paradigms of class, ethics, politics, and so forth.
Yet the very figureheads and guardians of those class systems, those politics,
those ethics, were often the people up in arms about what was happening in the theater
25 This process of textualization may be helpfully compared to James Clifford’s discussion of ethnographic allegory as the “salvaging” of other cultures. Clifford’s critique of ethnographic allegory notes at one point that “the fieldworker presides over, and controls in some degree, the making of a text out of life” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 116). Though Clifford later complicates this notion, it stands as a useful analogue for the relationship between drama and culture and suggests how the text of the drama writes the life it supposedly imitates. 70 and what was being said on the stage. Though they should not necessarily be taken as a homogenous group, political and religious leaders in London legislated consistently against playhouses and players from the late 1560’s (well before James Burbage’s
Theatre)26 until the theaters were ultimately closed in 1642. Clearly, although the
dramatists drew from London’s more established cultural narratives, they were not
simply transcribing old stories into dramatic verse, or, if they were, the very process of
staging a narrative was seen to bring it shame, rather than glory, or to transform the
heimlich into the unheimlich.
What was the basis of this objection to the performance of narratives that were not
themselves indictable? Thomas Nashe’s now-famous defense of plays argues that they
are a “rare exercise of vertue,” since
the subiect of them (for the most part) [is] borrowed out of our English
Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant acts (that haue line long buried
in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselues
raised from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged
Honours in open presence : than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to
these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours ? How would it haue ioyed
braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two
hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage,
and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand
26 Chambers records city documents aimed specifically at curbing the performance of plays as early as 1569. A city precept of May 12 of that year offers the familiar objection to plays on the basis that they attract crowds, which in turn invite the spreading of disease. The precept also objects to violations of the Sabbath (ES 4:267). 71
spectators at least (at seuerall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents
his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding? (ES 4:238-239)
Talbot’s heroic victory at Rouen, like many other narratives from the “English
Chronicles,” is an important English cultural narrative. Nashe argues that the value of the story itself is key, but that its presentation on stage can only increase its value and power as a cultural narrative. As Thomas Heywood would later argue, “so bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action, that it hath power to new-mold the harts of the spectators, and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt” (ES 4:251). “A description,” Heywood notes, “is only a shadow, received by the eare, but not perceived by the eye,” just as an image “is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture to moove the spirits of the beholder” (ES
4:251).27 Stage plays offer the best of both worlds, combining the revered ethos of
English Chronicle narratives with the power of lively personation.28
The counter argument attacked the “subject” of plays first on the grounds that
they were, for the most part, idle fantasies. The actor “frames himself with nouelties and
strange trifles to content the vaine humors of his rude auditors, faining countries neuer
heard of ; monsters and prodigious creatures that are not ; as of the Arimaspie, of the
Grips, the Pigmies, the Cranes, & other such notorious lies,” writes Anthony Munday (ES
4:211). What appears more unsettling for Munday, though, is what happens when
playwrights choose their subject matter from reality, rather than fantasy: “and if they
27 Bert States has addressed the difference between description and action from a theoretical perspective as a difference between reading a play and seeing it performed: “reading presents almost no phenomenal distraction,” but as performed in the theater a text has an “ontological presence, in which there is extraordinary phenomenal satisfaction” (“The Dog on Stage” 377). 28 For an outstanding discussion of the relationship between history chronicles and their dramatic adaptation, see Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History. Rackin argues from the perspective that the Tudor 72 write of histories that are knowen, as the life of Pompeie ; the martial affaires of Caesar, and other worthies, they giue them a newe face, and turne them out like counterfeites to showe themselues on the stage” (ES 4:211). Stage play, in Munday’s view, counterfeits reality; it does not personate reality. Counterfeiting is somehow iniquitous, and it is the deception inherent in playing, so often remarked by detractors of the stage, that offends most deeply. Where Heywood sees positive inspiration, Munday sees deceit and perjury, a “newe face” given to what had implicitly been a fixed and indelible form. Something about the very iterability of character is unsettling in Munday’s perspective, as if the guardianship of the narrative is compromised when popular playwrights can appropriate
“English Chronicles,” and the characters that people them, for their own uses.
Dramatic treatment of scripture is equally upsetting for Munday, since plays bring
“the Gospel into slander”: “The reuerend word of God & histories of the Bible, set forth on the stage by these blasphemous plaiers, are so corrupted with their gestures of scurrilitie, and so interlaced with vncleane, and whorish speeches, that it is not possible to drawe anie profite out of the doctrine of their spiritual moralities” (ES 4:211). Munday’s objection to “newe faces” and “counterfeits” for known histories and corrupting gestures for “histories of the Bible” is not precisely echoed by his contemporaries, but it suggests an interesting approach to the power of staged narratives. What to Munday is presumably safe in the guardianship of the magistrate and the church is dangerous in the hands of the playwright. He is troubled by what happens to the essential meanings of history and scripture when they become the subject of stage plays. In the proper circumstances, meaning is tractable and maintainable. The fixed sense of important
dynasty “sponsored official histories that constructed a myth of ancient descent and providential purpose” to legitimate their “claim to the throne” (4). 73
English historical and religious narratives for Munday is analogous to the stability of meaning seen to inhabit speech, as opposed to writing. That fixed sense is destabilized when those narratives appear on the popular stage; Caesar gets a “newe face,” the Gospel is slandered, kings become companions with clowns, and the assuredness of a narrative’s meaning, historical or religious, is challenged. Once separated from its source, its original and proper mouthpiece—the church and the magistrate—the proper meaning of these narratives is no longer certain to obtain. In the hands of the playwright, they could be warped, appropriated, reinvented. Following Jacques Derrida’s scheme for “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” the popular stage is analogous here to writing: character, scripture, and history are essentially iterable, which makes them eminently appropriable.29 The
iterability of character, of history, of scripture, is abused by the writers of stage plays,
whose recreations are also re-creations. They have dangerously appropriated narrative,
and what they write and perform before packed houses is either a fantastic lie or a
corruption of the truth.
What we can recognize in Munday’s objections to theatrical narratives is a fear of
their cultural authority, their power to affect the popular cultural understanding of
England and its components: its people, its culture, its history, its religion, its self-
perception. Comparisons of plays to sermons by both the stage’s proponents and its
adversaries suggests a very real fear of the theater’s power to construct a world for its
audience. Like a sermon, a play could gather a very large group of people together and
present them with a narrative that described the world from an invested viewpoint and
that addressed an audience’s need to see its own concerns, fears, principles, and joys
reflected. Plays and sermons handled many of the same narrative conflicts, after all—
29 See Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy.” 74 life, death, love, piety, sacrilege, and so forth—and both stages and pulpits offered their texts, implicitly or explicitly, as descriptions of real life.30 Perhaps most important,
though, the theater had demonstrated a capacity to appropriate narratives deeply rooted in
the soil of English culture, and regardless of whether the narratives were changed,
updated, perverted, or warped, it was the power itself that was unsettling.
We may also briefly consider narratives besides those performed on the stage.
The texts of anti-theatrical sentiment and legislation suggest that for those opposed to the
theater, there was “no difference between bear-baiting, fencing matches, playing and
prostitution” (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 32). In 1579, an anonymous writer
criticized “the Theaters, Curtines, Heauing houses, Rifling boothes, Bowling alleyes, and
such places, where the time is so shamefully mispent, namely the Sabaoth daies, vnto the
great dishonor of God, and the corruption and vtter distruction of youth” (ES 4:202). The
corruption of youth and the violation of the Sabbath remain the most visible and abundant
complaints against popular drama in surviving records, but the same complaints were
leveled at fencing prizes, animal baiting, gambling, and prostitution, often in the same
breath. If the theater as an industry was a narrative of entertainment and profit, its
constituent and neighboring narratives played subtle variations of the theme. That
prostitution and petty thievery were a part of audiences at playhouses is certain, as is the
fact that the Bankside theaters all stood within strolling distance of any number of
disreputable houses, from brothels to bear baiting arenas. “Play acting” was associated
with, and sometimes undistinguished from, less savory forms of public recreation, which
perhaps says something about its opponents, but it also says plenty about the theaters and
30 For more on the relationship between stage plays and sermons, see Marianne G. Briscoe, “Preaching and Medieval English Drama.” 75 their patrons. As a form of entertainment appealing to all strata of society, the theaters did indeed involve all sorts of narratives, and in several senses. What happened on the stage was a reflection of—or a reflection on—what happened in London and in the anglo- centric world, but also in the city’s margins, its brothels, fairs, and stewes, and so there was no shortage of speaking parts for criminals, prostitutes and other malefactors, just as they were present to some degree in the audience itself.31
Mullaney’s study suggests that what was dramatized on the stage exceeded the
boundaries of what was considered right, proper or normal in official or established
cultural narratives. It is important to acknowledge this point because that process of
exceeding boundaries drew from and relied precisely on the excess of narratives in and
around the audience and the wide social base from which audiences came. The popular
theater incorporated all of these different narratives into the narratives it presented on the
stage, and the very process of staging narratives—of textualizing them—gave them a
cultural currency that at least some of them would not otherwise have had. In this
fashion, the theater serves as a kind of cultural frontier, buttressing what was already
established as English culture by re-representing conventional narratives, but also
revising, transforming, and updating English culture, to the consternation of Anthony
Munday, by altering and supplementing—even supplanting—those conventional
narratives with new ones, with different ones, with emerging ones. The Elizabethan
theater appears to straddle a boundary between what Raymond Williams would call the
“dominant” culture and the “emergent” culture, functioning on the one hand as the
31 For a discussion of crowds at early modern plays, Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare’s Audience remains a useful resource. Harbage collects and presents much of the contemporary writing on audiences. For more recent discussions that reevaluate Harbage’s argument, see Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers and “Audiences”; and Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 76 mining agent of emergent culture, turning up new and emerging material, and on the other hand as the incorporating agent of the dominant culture, making what is new intelligible from inside what is old.32 This back-and-forth exchange of narratives
between theater and culture—this “negotiation” of narratives, to borrow again from
Stephen Greenblatt—constitutes the positive relationship between drama and culture.33
Now, lest this updating of narratives become wrongly understood as merely a
matter of injecting roguery and transgression into the conventional texts of culture, let it
be noted that among the nontraditional voices speaking in the theaters, especially on the
stage, were plenty of heroes, heroines, and other worthy figures. The Roaring Girl’s
Moll Frith will be the case study here, but the list might include characters such as Firke from The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Bartholomew Fair’s Ursula, or even Shakespeare’s
Othello or John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. After a point, it is not the particulars of a character’s moral or ethical alignment relative to the predominant cultural values inside the city proper that are at issue. There is a larger process of cultural mining at work whereby the theater turns up and textualizes narratives for general placement in the milieu of culture. It does not necessarily endorse or disparage them so much as it simply situates them culturally, giving them a cultural significance and intelligibility. Moll Frith is enthusiastically celebrated in her play, but even when a play condemns its marginal or transgressive voices, it seems at the same time to offer a new look at them; it seems to let them speak as they would speak, not in the text of a confession or a sentencing, but in the open marketplace, as one narrative among many, with equal claim to its place in the collection of narratives that make up a culture. In Shylock, in Edmund, the
32 See Raymond Williams, Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 460-461. 77 disenfranchised speak most eloquently, most persuasively, and yet both characters are villains. It is not that the drama gives voices an objective embodiment, but it does give them an alternative embodiment. Through the stage, their stories compete, as it were, with those of an established culture, whereas ordinarily, under the control of the law or the church, their stories are something more like products of that culture, interpellated rather than articulated. Before, in the histories, law books, and sermons of the dominant culture, they were hailed; on the stage, equipped with or freed by the power of mixed dominant and emergent traditions, they hail. As we will see in chapter 3, a comparison between the voice of “Mariam ffrithe” in the Consistory of London Correction Book’s record of her trial and the Mad Moll of The Roaring Girl demonstrates as much. Though not a criminal on the scale of major tragic villains like Shylock or Edmund, she did have a record for nightwalking and had been in and out of Bridewell before she was brought to trial for appearing in men’s attire on the stage at the Fortune theater.34 In the Consistory
account, Moll speaks in language scripted by her interlocutors; in Middleton and
Dekker’s play, she speaks the language of a dramatic heroine.
This view of the popular stage as an alternative mouthpiece for otherwise
disenfranchised or interpellated narratives should not suggest that the theater offered
marginal or emerging voices a revolutionary opportunity to circumnavigate the otherwise
insuperable systems and structures of cultural production. Because the theater itself is a
product of culture, it technically makes little difference whether the playhouses are
subsequently relegated to the margins of culture. There is no transformation whereby the
33 See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, especially chapter 1, “The Circulation of Social Energy.” 78 theater achieves some sort of total ideological independence from the culture that spawned it, thus becoming free to manipulate and produce narratives outside of the control of the established culture it feeds them to. Theatrical narratives are as structured as the system that begets them. Yet there is something about residing in the margins, on the Bankside, south of the Thames, in the suburbs north of the city, and in the license of the private liberties, all free from the fuller range of city authority, that gives the stage a certain unusual status in terms of who it dramatizes and what it says. Shakespeare’s fools, particularly Feste and Lear’s fool, are illustrative of this point. Something about their distance from the dramatic conflict enables them to comment on it more profoundly than anybody else in the play—and to do so under the “license” of the allowed fool.
The way in which the popular drama figures itself in the allowed fool suggests a range of comparisons between the place of the stage and the place of the clown or the fool. As I will argue in chapter 4, Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno, in Ben Jonson’s
Volpone, provide a particularly rich model through which to characterize the place and function of the theater vis-à-vis culture. Jonson’s three social outcasts are figures of recreation and play, and with their fate at the close of the action turning on Mosca’s command for them to “recreate” themselves abroad, the play’s language and logic offer a link between creation and recreation, between play and the process of real-ization.
Though “marginal” characters to the play and its plot, they have an emblematically central function in the comedy, acted out in 1.2, when the three take the focus of the stage and perform a miniature entertainment for Volpone. Though they are returned to the play’s margins whenever the major characters take the stage, Nano, Castrone, and
34 See Paul Mulholland, ed., The Roaring Girl and “The Date of The Roaring Girl”; Margaret Dowling, “A Note on Moll Cutpurse—’the Roaring Girl,’” Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 67-71; Mark Eccles, 79
Androgyno are never effectively confined in the play’s action. That they are not is remarkable, given that the general scheme of the play is to contain social aberrance.
When they are set loose by Mosca in act 5 to “recreate” themselves, they contrast sharply with Volpone, Mosca, Corbaccio, Corvino, and Voltore, whose transgressions are severely punished. As figures of recreation and re-creation, emblematic of the theater itself, Volpone’s servants exist well outside the boundaries of what the play’s conclusion indicates is acceptable behavior, but they are not punished.
The results of the theater’s power, the cultural authority it assumes when it appropriates English cultural narratives, is another matter. Interestingly enough, we again have both sides of a debate in agreement about a process of the popular stage, but in disagreement about its effects: neither side of the theater debate in early modern
London doubts what Louis Montrose has called the “affective power” of a stage performance on its audience; it is the result of its application that is debated.35 Defenders
of the theater insist that the staging of vice dissuades audience members from enacting
vice: “no Play they haue, enourageth any man to tumult of rebellion, but layes before
such the halter and the gallowes ; or praiseth or approoueth pride, lust, whoredome,
prodigalitie, or drunkenness, but beates them downe vtterly” (Heywood ES 4:239). The
opposition agrees but re-imagines the end result: “wheras you say there are good
Examples to be learned in them, Trulie so there are : if you will learne falshood ; if you
will learn cosenage ; if you will learn to deceiue ; if you will learn to play the Hipocrit, to
cogge, lye, and falsifie ; if you will learne to iest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nodd and
mow”—the list continues to exhaustion—”you need to goe to no other schoole, for all
“Mary Frith, The Roaring Girl.” 35 See Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 49. 80 these good Examples may you see painted before your eyes in enterludes and playes”
(Stubbes ES 4:224). As Montrose notes, the starting point for both arguments takes for granted the fact that the theater was capable of compelling its audience to behavior of some sort. The pro-theater argument saw valuable narratives, familiar stories, enacted powerfully on the stage, capable of inspiring good behavior. The anti-theater argument saw sacred narratives appropriated by unskilled and unschooled writers and actors whose habits and careers were suspect, familiar stories made unfamiliar, counterfeited, supplemented by the worst kind of dramatic plots and enacted in the most unseemly of places, the whole of which resulted in nothing but bad behavior, either by providing fertile soil for plots and sin in general, angering God and drawing the plague, or by inspiring the kinds of ill deeds the dramatists spectacularized.
It is difficult to “prove” that theater compelled people to act in specific ways. But proving, or even observing, that drama compelled people to engage in any one specific activity or type of activities is not the object here: to say that drama inspired action that can in retrospect be seen to derive from the representation of narratives on a stage is to posit a relationship between drama and culture, but only one component of such a relationship, and an especially contentious one at that. The relationship that the present project seeks to characterize is more general, and the “proof” is based less on factual connections or demonstrations of cause and effect than it is on considering how drama, as a narrative hypostasization of the world and its people, can be seen to help construct experience of the world and its people. In other words, anecdotal evidence may be useful for establishing a link between drama and the “real” world perceived to exist outside of drama, but only as a reflection of a larger scheme, in which both drama and the world it 81 recreates and re-creates are understood as intermingled narratives, written, spoken, performed, or otherwise inhabited. The stage play, by dramatizing events in a storyline that is understood as a reflection of an audience’s world, worldview, and world experience, helps construct self-understanding, and in doing so, it shapes self-perception.
Whatever concrete actions a stage play might have inspired would be not an effect of theater, but a sub-construction in a meta-narrative to which the popular theater is a contributing source. What we have, then, is not an argument for drama as an inspiration to action, but drama as a means to reflection and then self-construction.36
Drama is of a class of narratives that represents the way people understand
themselves—the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” to use Hamlet’s phrase.
“Theater,” Bert States suggests, is “the quintessential repetition of our self-repetitions, the
aesthetic extension of everyday life, a mirror, you might say, that nature holds up to
nature”; it is “the art that is most like life as it is lived in the real world” (“Theater as
Metaphor” 5). Drama imitates life by staging life. In doing so it goes through a process
of selection, exclusion and reification, distilling from what is otherwise an
undifferentiated mass of experience, shapeless and formless, a set of objectified events
and giving them an embodiment in particular words. It turns into utterable texts—
textualized narratives—what is otherwise too vast, variable, and complicated to
comprehend at once. It trims down and pronounces for us as “everyday life” a section of
the innumerable sensations and stimuli that surround our senses and faculties. I will
address this process of trimming and textualizing at length in chapter 5. This notion of
the theater’s “affective power” as an alternative cultural authority is reflected by the
36 Kenneth Burke’s discussion of persuasion “to attitude” (as opposed to persuasion to action) suggests how this notion of drama as an agent of culture could be approached in rhetorical terms. See Burke, A Rhetoric 82 vigorous opposition from conservative authorities, traditional guardians of key cultural narratives, to theaters and the plays they hosted in early modern London, but we should not mistake conservative opposition for large-scale marginalization. By approaching culture as an amalgamation of narratives and by acknowledging the process of textualization on the space of the stage, we can understand the popular theater in early modern London as a central and particularly persuasive cultural narrative.
II. Dominant, Residual, Emergent and the Space of London
The most useful critical terms for this argument come from Raymond Williams’s essay, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in which Williams approaches culture as a system of “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” strains.37
Williams uses the term “dominant culture” in a straightforwardly Marxist understanding of the dominant ideology that is functionally compatible with, if not identical to, the New
Historicist approach to power and culture in early modern London: the dominant or ruling class has established a vision of reality via the “selective tradition,” which it maintains in domination through a complex process of enculturation built on education, family life, work organization, and so forth (459). “Residual culture” consists of fragments of previously dominant culture still active in elusive articulations:
By “residual” I mean that some experiences, meaning and values, which
cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture,
are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue—cultural
as well as social—of some previous social formation. (459-460)
of Motives, 49-55. 83
This term contrasts with what Williams later calls the “archaic.”38 An “archaic” cultural
practice is one “wholly recognized as an element of the past,” one completed, closed, and
dormant except when it is “consciously ‘revived,’ in a deliberately specializing way”
(Marxism and Literature 122). Residual culture has not yet passed entirely into a state of closure, but it is submerged in the dominant consciousness that has largely displaced or replaced it. It is still active in some areas of dominant culture, which will have had to make use of it “especially if the residue is from some major area of the past” in order for the dominant culture to “make sense in these areas” (Marxism and Literature 123)
On the other end of the spectrum is “emergent culture,” comprising new activities
and energies happening either in opposition to, or as an alternative to, dominant culture:
By “emergent” I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices,
new relationships and kinds of relationships, are continually being created.
But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are
really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture . . . and those
which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the
strict sense, rather than the merely novel. (Marxism and Literature 123)
The “merely novel” are effects or “phases” of the dominant culture, from which the truly emergent must be distinguished. In this realm of the emergent we find, presumably, various departures from established culture, some productive enough to function as alternatives to the dominant culture, perhaps gathering enough force to become oppositional, at which point they are directly in competition with the dominant. The
37 Originally published in The New Left Review in 1973. Williams explores the notion of dominant, emergent, and residual culture at more length in Marxism and Literature (1977). 38 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, especially chapter 8, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” pages 121-127, which reproduces much of the material from “Base and Superstructure.” 84 dominant culture, according to Williams, is especially alert to any phenomena that might be seen as emergent; depending on whether the emergent form is oppositional or merely alternative—the distinction is increasingly difficult to make, as the dominant culture now reaches increasingly further into all aspects of society, narrowing the gap possible between alternative and oppositional—it will be more or less readily and forcefully confronted.
Certain English cultural institutions from the sixteenth century spring immediately to mind as a fit for this model: the largely superseded feudal system of social organization, the preeminence of rural communities over urban,39 the structure of
pre-industrial labor, and perhaps even the Roman Catholic church, offer themselves as
instances of the residual culture, not quite closed off and finished but still operative only
in the spaces and stretches left unrevised or weakly fortified by, or simply foreign to, the
late Tudor regime. On the emergent side, an increasingly fluid individual identity, a
social and geographical mobility, and a proliferation of the possibilities of interpretation
stand out. Yet the fit is slightly awkward, and in order to make use of Williams’s
paradigm, it must be understood generally as a model for cultural development, rather
than specifically as a description of exactly how the revolution in state, social status, and
religion in England had replaced a rural and feudal society built on ceremony and
pageantry with an urban and fluid society built on the new individual and a church
stripped of its ornaments and icons. Such a view of sixteenth-century England is of
39 By 1600, the estimated total urban population of England accounted for roughly 8% of the total population. By 1700, that figure had nearly doubled, to 15.3%. Thus, although population trends shifted the balance of the population increasingly toward urban centers, the great majority of the English people lived in towns whose population was smaller than 5,000 (see Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis, table 1.1, page 7). These figures offer a different perspective on the notion that the dominating forces in English culture were increasingly a matter of urban life. 85 course a gross and misleading simplification of a series of changes to begin with.40 The main force of Williams’s paradigm, for the current argument, is in its tripartite and temporal conception of working culture, which imagines a margin of activity on either side of the middle ground: one for the material temporally anterior to the dominant (the residual), and one for the material temporally posterior to the dominant (the emergent). If this model will not perfectly accommodate the flow of culture in the sixteenth century, it will provide a theoretical framework for “placing” the stage in early modern culture.
Most genealogies of popular theater link it strongly with a medieval tradition that was largely defunct by the 1590’s, if not earlier. Whether by disuse, displacement, or royal prohibition, the remaining manifestations of a dramatic tradition that flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had effectively ceased to be a popular phenomenon in London by the time popular drama was at its height, yet the central components of that theater are visible still largely intact in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The heavy moralizing of the morality play and even the Vice character itself are commonplace, and sometimes structurally requisite, in tragedy from John Kyd to Phillip Massinger, while the emergent humor of the mystery cycles and interludes is a mainstay in Shakespearean and other pastoral comedy throughout the period. Still, the popular drama itself appears most obviously to have flourished as a function not of a residual culture but of an emergent culture, devised, performed, and attended by London’s marginal and socially suspect. It is tempting to take Williams’s model of culture and locate the phenomenon of early modern drama entirely within the emergent sector. Williams warns explicitly against such a move for literature in general, however: “it would be easy to say . . . that
40 The reality of the number of people living in rural as opposed to urban settings illustrates this point. 86 literature operates in the emergent cultural sector, that it represents the new feelings, the new meanings, the new values,” but
when we read much literature, over the whole range, without the sleight-
of-hand of calling literature only that which we have already selected as
embodying certain meanings and values at a certain scale of intensity, we
are bound to recognize that the act of writing, the practices of discourse in
writing and speech, the making of novels and poems and plays and
theories, all this activity takes place in all areas of the culture. (463)
This point can be made also for the drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean London, and it is accordingly important that we not locate drama entirely within an emergent cultural phenomenon. Such a move would be analogous to the tendency of reigning critical theories to consign the theater industry to the margins of London in “the liberties,” and that is precisely the sort of wholesale dismissal of centrality that this project hopes to challenge. Many of the theaters were indeed located in the geographical and social margins of London, and many of the them attracted the kind of attention from city authorities that looks emblematically like the kind of attention Williams sees the dominant culture bestowing intensely on oppositional emergent culture. To return to an earlier point, however, and to adopt Williams’s caution along with his larger paradigm, to place the theater entirely in the margins of society is to ignore its fuller range of appeal, and to deny its cultural centrality, its force as a contributor to the “dominant culture.”
If the theater appealed only to an emergent culture—to the emerging bourgeois sensibility, for example—we would have a difficult time explaining its popularity at court and with members of the gentry, whose most immediate associations are with dominant 87 culture. Moreover, Andrew Gurr’s recent study of the makeup of Elizabethan and
Jacobean theater audiences suggests that theaters as a whole were patronized by people from all sorts of social classes, and that both audiences and theaters changed from the beginning of the period to the end.41 To reorganize our understanding of early modern
drama by dividing it into distinct phenomena according to the social background of
theatergoers and its correlation to the plays they saw and where they saw them would
require evidence about playgoing we simply do not have. What evidence we do have
supports the understanding that the popular drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
drew spectators from the full range of social and economic classes, from gentry to
laborers. Similarly, the wide range of social and political backgrounds represented in the
ranks of successful popular dramatists and players themselves precludes their categorical
classification as socially radical.42 In either case, however, to construe “emergent
culture” as the particular actions of particular people—players, playwrights, or
spectators—is both to simplify the paradigm and generally to miss the point: strains of
culture happen across personal boundaries (they are both intra- and inter-personal), and
they exceed practices even as broad as “the theater” itself. In trying to pin down a
location for “emergent culture,” we are forced to mix theoretical abstractions with
historical-social realities. Different facets of the early modern drama appear best in the
different lights of residual, dominant, and emergent culture, but if drama is a broadly
cultural phenomenon, it must “[take] place in all areas of the culture.”
Stephen Mullaney’s tripartite model describes the social and geographical
structure of London consisting of the city, the liberties, and the country, emanating from
41 See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 88 the center of town in roughly concentric circles. The city proper is, for Mullaney, a sort of homogenous space of rule and order comparable in scope and boundary—in other words, homologous with—Williams’s notion of the “dominant culture.” Then, “between the city and the country,” Mullaney offers, there were spaces “where the powers of city, stage, and church came together but did not coincide”:
From the walls of London out to the bars located up to a mile beyond
them—outposts where pilgrims and other travelers could be examined for
signs of leprosy or plague, turned away or diverted to nearby lazar-houses
and hospitals—stretched the marginal and ambivalent domain of London’s
Liberties. (21)
These famously anomalous spaces “over which the city had authority but, paradoxically, no control” function in Mullaney as a kind of spill gutter for the excesses of social energy and the variety of deviances the city proper either could not house or could not comprehend within its walls (21). These spaces were “ambiguous” places of license, danger, and exile where alternative or oppositional movements—Williams’s “emergent culture”—flourished. Finally, beyond these unstructured and ungoverned margins lay the third component, the country itself, rolling expanses of a supposedly idyllic rural existence that bore the mark of a nearby past, partially submerged in the urban consciousness that had begun to forget its bucolic predecessor. Here one imagines
Williams’s “residual culture,” or at least its hypostasis.
The fit of Williams’s tripartite structure with Mullaney’s tripartite model of social and geographical London is not perfect, and neither, as we have seen in chapter 1, are
42 See M. C. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player; S. P. Cerasano, “The Chamberlain’s-King’s Men”; and W. R. Streitberger, “Personnel and Professionalization.” 89
Mullaney’s divisions. The notion of the city as a homogenous space sits no better with historical records than does the imagined uniformity of the “Liberties.” Though the demographic arrangement of the city divided according to trade had largely fallen away by the end of the seventeenth century, neighborhoods in the city can be sharply distinguished from each other on the basis of wealth alone: the wealthier districts in the center of London contrast with the poorer and developing areas toward the edges.43
Similarly, the areas comprising what Mullaney calls “London’s Liberties” were remarkably diverse, some located within the city, some outside of the walls but within extramural city wards, some beyond the wards, and many even further out, in the out parishes. Their geographic diversity is matched by their social diversity: the fact that a particular parish fell within a liberty not strictly under the control of the city of London by no means determined the character of its residents, who may have been privy councilors or wage laborers, alderman or artisans. The case of the wealthy residents of the Blackfriars district petitioning the Privy Council not to permit the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men to perform in their neighborhood foils both notions at once: first, it forces us to consider the differences between a wealthy and influential neighborhood like the one in which members of the Privy Council themselves lived and the poorer parishes also inside the city wall: the city proper was not a uniform social, political, or economic entity. Second, it frustrates the idea that “the Liberties” that harbored the theaters after
43 Compare, for example, the parishes of St John the Evangelist, St Mary Magdalen Milk Street, and St Matthew Friday Street, in which the number of households deemed “substantial” represented 74%, 69%, and 61%, respectively, of the total number of households, to those of Allhallows London Wall, St Alphage Cripplegate, and St Michael Bread Street, in which substantial households represented 3%, 4%, and 6%, respectively. All of the parishes were well within the city proper. See Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis, chapter 4. Percentage figures quoted from table A3.1 in appendix 3. 90 they were “banished” by the city authorities were necessarily extramural or places of license, sin, and misrule: the Blackfriars district was neither.44
Nonetheless, a sense of three kinds of space roughly matched with three modes of culture is a useful heuristic. On the one hand, following Mullaney, the early modern
London that hosted popular drama can be conceptualized as a graded social space changing from country to city: as one approaches the metropolis, one passes from the ebbing rural setting through a transitional space and into the structured space of the city proper. In Williams’s complementary scheme, the dominant culture established in the city proper holds sway within the walls, while dominant clashes with emergent in the suburbs that surround those walls, and both give way to a countryside in which the dominant movements of culture in London had yet to take hold and establish themselves.
The ethos of Mullaney’s spaces follows that of Williams’s. In particular, the center and the margins of London are coterminous with dominant and emergent culture: “central” in
Mullaney and “dominant” in Williams are linked by an almost obvious association of power with the hub or core or other forms of centrality. The dominant defines itself as central, and it defines everything that is not dominant as marginal relative to its own centrality. The “marginal” in Mullaney pairs with the “emergent” in Williams as the alternative, as the spill gutter or purge valve; what cannot be contained within the dominant45 center is forced into the emergent margins where it remains until it disperses
or gathers enough force for the dominant to have to confront it.
44 See Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 34 n. 25, for a similar critique of Mullaney. 45 The distinction Williams makes between that which is truly emergent and that which is “merely novel,” a “new phase of the dominant culture” is important (123). The “merely novel” is a change originating inside dominant culture, whereas the emergent culture works either as an alternative to, or in direct opposition to, the dominant culture. Both may come to bear on dominant culture, but the “truly emergent” is more radical, developing in the margins and posing a palpable threat to the dominant. 91
These spaces in Raymond Williams’s paradigm are essentially figurative. Part of the reason Mullaney’s scheme needs to be revised or supplemented is that it is too literal, too bound up in geographical space; its attempt to describe the city and environs of
London is constrained by the fact that it cannot accommodate movement or change, not only of boundaries in the city, but of people and their habits and even of theaters themselves.46 By fusing Mullaney and Williams together, we get a flexible and
essentially figurative concept of urban place and space that has physical components but
that does not view those physical components as static and that does not tie people and
their cultural practices permanently to centers, margins, or outlands. The boundaries of
geographical space can shift, just as the cultural phenomenon Mullaney tries to contain
within those boundaries (or exclude from them) can move back and forth between them
or exist simultaneously in multiple spaces.
Mapping Williams’s three cultural spaces onto Mullaney’s model of London
gives us a single tripartite model of culture and space in London that is elastic and that
allows us to situate the theater on an active boundary, as an agent of both dominant and
emergent, of both center and margins. This model applies both to the physical place of
the stage and to its figurative space: it can be both material and metaphorical as needed,
describing the changing location of the theaters and the simultaneously dominant and
46 The Burbages’ Theatre was in a sense “moved” from Shoreditch to Bankside in 1599, where it became the Globe, and several public performance spaces were rebuilt or moved on different occasions. But other movements—of the King’s Men’s theater, for example, from the Globe to the Blackfriars, or from the Globe to court—best supports the point that theaters were not static entities. A produced play was essentially mobile, especially for a company with as many playing opportunities as the King’s Men. They had a well-developed, popular repertoire in demand both by the public and by the court, which required performance in different venues, and they also needed to be able to take their repertoire on tour when the plague forced closures of local theaters or across the river to Blackfriar’s during the winter season. Thus, their productions were necessarily mobile. The company and its props and plays actually “moved” with the playing seasons or on individual occasions. Glynne Wickham has made a similar point in arguing for the structural similarity of hall, public, and court theaters. See EES 2.1, chapter 5, “Playhouses.” 92 emergent status of the signifying space on their stages. The residual in Williams, matched with the rural countryside in Mullaney, is vague and relatively inactive in both schemes, though it is useful in this combination of the two models. It is the largely dormant past, a predecessor of what is dominant in the immediate present for Williams and a space for Mullaney out of which London and its center grew and into which it subsides once after the ambiguous margins of the city are passed through.
The place of the London stage in this heuristic involves all three spaces: dominant-central, emergent-marginal, and residual-rural or residual-country. The theater’s roots lay in the liturgical and festival dramas of a kind of residual culture increasingly suppressed by late Tudor monarchs but still practiced, especially in the north,47 into the Jacobean period.48 While it drew its narratives from both dominant and emergent culture, popular drama retained many of the conventions of its late medieval predecessors. According to Glynne Wickham, the Reformation was responsible both for suppressing the most native and traditional of English dramatic enterprises, the mystery cycles, and for ensuring their integration into popular drama under Elizabeth and James.
On the one hand, Wickham notes, the suppression of the Feast of Corpus Christi and legislation against the treatment of doctrinal issues in stage plays served to smother mystery and miracle cycles. On the other hand, the Reformation’s distrust of anything associated with Rome, Italy, or Latin posed problems for the growth of a popular drama derived exclusively from classical sources. The result was a popular tradition that drew
47 The Corpus Christi tradition continued in performance in Kendal into the seventeenth century. See Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays 202-203; and Cox and Kastan 3. 48 See Glynne Wickham, EES 2.1, especially “State Control of British Drama,” 93. 93 from the momentum of the classical revival but relied extensively on its native, religious dramatic predecessor:
Italian neo-classical example made heavy inroads upon the English drama,
both in point of subject matter and of its treatment, but . . . the
Reformation served to temper the pace of its progress and thus to preserve
a marked degree of continuity in English dramatic structure. The result is
that Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, however noticeable the influence of
Seneca, Plautus, Terence and Horace, mirror their origins in medieaeval
religious plays with equal clarity. (2.1.30)
Those medieval religious traditions were quickly fading. In Williams’s model, “some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation.” This is the case, he notes, with “certain notions derived from a rural past, which have a very significant popularity” (496). The “significant popularity” of native (and, arguably, rural) traditions like mystery cycles meant that they were ideally suited for use in eking out a new dramatic tradition.
Though the residual-emergent component is crucial as the submerged predecessor of dominant culture and the origin of the popular drama, the drama was most active at the point of connection between the dominant and the emergent movements in culture, straddling the boundary.49 The point of tension or friction, in both Mullaney and
49 The merely nominal role of the residual in the discussion of the plays that follows in chapters 3, 4, and 5 calls into question the necessity of the third component of the tripartite scheme. Mullaney proposes a tripartite scheme in place of a binary scheme largely to allow the “liberties” to function as a “transitional zone between the city and the country, various powers and their limits, this life and the next” (ix). The 94
Williams, is at the boundary of the dominant-central and emergent-marginal, and that boundary is the focus of this discussion. Drama took the bulk of its narratives, in some form or another, from the dominant popular culture50 established within the city proper,
city’s power vanishes once its domain gives way to the country, but there is no clear boundary on either side of which the city exercises control or does not exercise control. The binary to which Mullaney reacts, then, is city/country, which he revises to city/liberties/country. But Mullaney himself spends little time exploring the country, which ends up taking a back seat to the city/liberties scheme. In the end, Mullaney’s scheme works like the binary model he proposes to amend: city and liberties are functionally opposed to each another. Williams’s more linear model, on the other hand, begins as a tripartite scheme and stays that way: the movement of culture is from emergent to dominant to residual, and though the residual rarely enters into discussions of the dominant and emergent, it is an integral part of the scheme. In light of the structural differences thus implicit between Mullaney’s scheme and Williams’s, the mapping of Mullaney’s “country” onto Williams’s “residual” is awkward. If we consider, however, that the linearity of Williams’s three spaces necessarily emphasizes only one boundary at a time—dominant/emergent or dominant/residual—we can excuse a discussion of a phenomenon on the boundary of dominant and emergent that largely ignores the residual. And although the same logic cannot apply to Mullaney’s scheme, which when visualized is not a line but rather a series of concentric circles, movement across boundaries within Mullaney’s scheme is, in fact, linear: from city to liberties to country, or from country to liberties to city. This explanation may seem somewhat sophistic, but I believe it accounts for the reduced role of both the country and the emergent: both boundaries cannot be active at the same time in the same phenomenon. Finally, though Mullaney amends a binary to develop his tripartite model whereas Williams begins with a tripartite model, Mullaney’s country and Williams’s residual are, in fact, linked by their temporal associations with the past. The residual is a measure of older instances of the dominant, while the country contains cultural practices that the city has left behind in its development and innovation. The residual, I have suggested, manifests itself in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the form of holdovers from late medieval “popular” English drama. The traditions of New Comedy that also made their way into Elizabethan and Jacobean drama might be candidates for a residual element, since they are temporally antecedent, and since their associations with Roman culture have led scholars such as Glynne Wickham to link them to the Roman Catholicism, which was in some ways residual. But the point of entry of New Comedy into early modern drama is the school and university tradition, which is too intimately involved with dominant culture and thus should be associated with the dominant, rather than the emergent. Moreover, as Robert Miola has pointed out, “the ancients were models for various kinds of writing” and were used to teach dominant ideals of morality and behavior (“Reading the Classics” 176). Furthermore, when the moral certitude of figures like Terence was questioned, it was in terms similar to those used to vilify the theaters, suggesting a link specifically to the emergent, not the residual. The late medieval English drama remains a better candidate for the residual, especially in light of its association with the mystery cycles that were performed in rural areas long after they had been suppressed in urban areas (see chapter 2, note 50). 50 Michael D. Bristol has warned against associating popular culture too closely with dominant culture: “although it could not accurately be characterized as a dominant culture, the customary practices and forms of expression of the base, common, and popular element of early modern society nevertheless constituted a majority culture” (“Theater and Popular Culture” 232). I do associate them closely, though, based on the notion that “dominant culture” in Williams’s specific sense is broadly popular. Distinctions at this level of generalization are difficult to make, and delineating exactly where “popular culture” or “dominant culture” starts and stops is, besides being antithetical to the notion of flexibility pursued in my use of Williams, a difficult if not misguided undertaking. “Popular culture” suggests the terminology of people and of class, while “dominant culture” suggests the terminology of “power.” These differences in terminology prevent the simple equation of “popular culture” = “dominant culture,” but the sense of dominance inherent in “popular” and the sense of popular currency inherent in “dominant” links them both. 95 but it mixed them with emergent strains: in The Roaring Girl, Moll Frith’s emergent narrative of rebellion and self-re-creation is mingled with a classic, new-comedy plot featuring a miles gloriosus figure, a senex, clowns, prodigal lovers, clever servants, and so forth. The theater had one foot, as it were, on either side of the figurative divide.
This straddling is held true in a physical or geographical sense, too. There were public stages both inside and outside of the city wall, and both inside and outside immediate city jurisdiction—stages located, that is, in both dominant and emergent sectors of London. Though it soon established itself comfortably in the margins just outside the walls, where its purpose-built sites flourished from 1576 on, popular drama first began to thrive in the city proper. The Bell, the Cross Keyes, and the Bull inns, all clustered around Gracechurch Street, stood within the city jurisdiction, as did the Bel-
Savage, near Ludgate. These inns hosted plays51 regularly until the mid-1590’s, and they
were not expressly forbidden to do so until 1600.52 Even in Mullaney’s paradigm, then, although there were stages in the “liberties” as early as 1567, their counterparts inside the city walls—and inside its jurisdiction— were active perhaps even earlier,53 and they
continued to recreate the public well into the heyday of popular theater.
Both terms imply establishment. In the syntax of my tripartite schema, “popular culture” and “dominant culture” are in apposition to each other relative to “marginal” or emergent culture. 51 The Bel-Savage certainly had a yard used for performances, but performances at inns may have taken place in their halls instead. See EES 2.1:186-190; and O. L. Brownstein, “A Record of London Inn- Playhouses,” SQ 22 (1971): 17-24. 52 Chambers notes that there is “no precise date” provided by Richard Rawlidge’s description of the city’s triumph over playing at inns within their jurisdiction, but 1596 is the year generally noted. The first surviving Privy Council legislation addressing the issue after 1596 does not occur, however, until June 22, 1600: “especiallie yt is forbidden that anie stage plaies shalbe plaied (as sometimes the haue bin) in any Common Inn for publique assemblie in or neare about the Cittie” (ES 4:329-331). Glynne Wickham has suggested that The Cross Keyes may have hosted the Lord Chamberlain’s men after 1596, while they struggled to secure a house for the winter season (EES 2.2: 101n.) 53 See O. L. Brownstein, “A Record of London Inn-Playhouses,” SQ 22, 1971, 17-24. Brownstein argues that the Bel-Savage (“Bell Savage”) was apparently active as a public stage in the mid-1560’s. Brownstein notes that fencing prizes were being played in the Bel-Savage in the 1560’s, and that since fencing prizes were played so infrequently that they could not warrant a playhouse structure of their own, the Bel-Savage 96
Using Mullaney’s paradigm in conjunction with Williams’s model of culture, we can associate the popular theater with all three spaces: the drama’s technical roots and its popular foundations are bound up in a residual cultural tradition active only outside of
London, far from the city proper and the censorship of the Tudor monarchy, while the bulk of its material was nourished by narratives traditionally belonging to the dominant culture within the city proper. These narratives were supplemented by a lively emergent counterculture that provided not only dramatic material, but much of the economic support that made the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater a popular phenomenon. Just as the walls and parish boundaries did not confine Londoners within one sector of the larger city, and as dominant, emergent, and residual trends in culture describe not people or even events, but modes of cultural production, the theater industry itself was a product not of one particular socio-economic set or specific grouping of urban areas, but of the entire city, wards, liberties, suburbs, out parishes and all.
In my opening paragraph, I introduced a distinction between the place of the stage and the space of the stage. The former term is a cornerstone of Stephen Mullaney’s The
Place of the Stage, which takes account of the social status and the physical location of the popular playhouses in early modern London. Mullaney uses the word “stage” chiefly as a synecdoche for the theater. The practice is neither uncommon nor unreasonable—it is in fact quite useful. If the “theater” can be thought of as a body, its component pieces—drama, dramatic poetry, playhouses, the stage within playhouses, plays
must have been fitted as a public theater as early as the earliest recorded fencing prize played there. This is a sturdy argument, but not an entirely sound one, since we cannot say with certainty that the structure that hosted fencing prizes in the 1560’s was necessarily identical to that which hosted the plays known to have played there from 1575 on—no evidence precludes the possibility of significant structural changes at a later date. Moreover, even if we can assume the Bel-Savage was fitted to host plays in the 1560’s, it does not necessarily follow that plays were indeed hosted there. The evidence does support speculation, however, and the argument is intriguing. 97 themselves, and so forth—can be used as so many synecdoches and stand individually to suggest the larger tradition with which they are associated. As far as they denote the same set of signifieds, they are interchangeable. But by distinguishing the “place” of the stage from the “space” of the stage, we can shift the focus of the study of the relationship between theater and culture from an approach that sees the theater as a marginal phenomenon to one that sees the theater also as a central phenomenon.
If the space of the stage can imbue a narrative with cultural significance, we must approach the place of the stage by revising slightly the way we understand the boundaries that divided London physically, economically, socially, and culturally. The first step in such a revision is to recognize that generalizations about physical areas and their cultural valences, while useful, can be misleading. A tripartite paradigm for classifying space in greater London is necessary, since it nicely coordinates three senses of urban location, central, marginal, and outer or rural. But the paradigm must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate anomalies and irregularities, such as wealthy parishes near the edge of the city’s twenty-six wards or church-turned-lay “liberties” that were not entirely under the control of the city but that were nonetheless policed vigilantly by its powerful and wealthy conservative citizens. Even a loosely defined set of boundaries dividing the urban landscape into working sections is too sweeping a generalization if it means the theater is to take on the marginal color recent critics have forced onto “the liberties.”
Thus, a model of culture as flexible as Williams’s—dominant, emergent, residual—helps us account for the drama and its relationship to past, present and future movements in culture, without forcing us to confine cultural phenomena to any one sector. Williams’s scheme is a means to model the greater movements in cultural change, not a description 98 of historical moments. The categories of dominant, emergent, and residual are not for classifying historical figures or even the organized behavior they engage in. They are a structure inside of which we can account for social energies, the inter- and intra-personal negotiations that happen, and when we combine them with Mullaney’s, we get a more dynamic model for understanding the place of the stage in early modern London.
III. A New Historicism: Embracing Our Historicity
To situate this project further in terms of a theoretical background requires a look at a diverse collection of work known variously as New Historicism, Cultural Poetics, or
Cultural Materialism, depending on the particular focus one takes, or from what particular background one derives. The difference between the two primary classifications of this theoretical approach—New Historicism on the one hand and
Cultural Materialism on the other—may be summarized as a difference in the way each approaches the subversive potential of popular drama. Both schools see in popular drama a subversive threat to dominant culture or “power,” but where New Historicism typically sees the drama’s subversive potential ultimately contained by the establishment it seeks to subvert, Cultural Materialism understands subversive potential to remain always active. Because this dissertation stresses the power of popular drama to affect popular perceptions of reality, it may seem appropriate to adopt the term “Cultural Materialism” to describe its theoretical orientation: insofar as dominant culture dictates to a people how “reality” is to be experienced and understood, a reading of the theater that argues for its effectiveness in influencing the experience “reality” would seem to endorse its
“subversive” potential vis-à-vis dominant culture. “Reality” cannot be comfortably be 99 made commensurate with dominant culture, however, nor should “subversion” be equated with cultural authority. Since I argue that drama mingled cultural narratives from dominant, residual, and emergent culture, and since I follow Raymond Williams in understanding drama as a cultural phenomenon that draws simultaneously from dominant, emergent, and residual cultural practices, drama should not be associated with subversion alone.54 The focus of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism on the
notion of subversion deflects attention from the more important cultural function I
propose for the drama, and therefore I do not adopt one approach specifically over the
other. I use the term “New Historicism” to categorize my theoretical orientation because
it remains the more familiar tag for an attitude toward drama and culture that is
poststructural and text-based. It is immediately apparent in the presence of alternative
terms like Cultural Materialism that New Historicism would be better cast in the plural
from “New Historicisms,” but the presence of alternative forms partly fills the need to
recognize a plurality of approaches gathered under the heading “New Historicism.”
Divergent branches of New Historicism are in fact brought together by their
common concern with texts and contexts—with textuality in general. Louis Montrose’s
now famous “chiastic concern” formulation unites the schools of New Historicism under
a single focus on “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (20). More often
than not, the historicity of the critic’s own text falls by the wayside, but pledges to
recognize one’s own social and historical embedment rarely amount to anything more
than a kind of lip service. The real concern is first with the ways in which all histories,
54 Nor, for that matter, should “power” be associated with dominant culture or any one particular entity to the exclusion of other entities. As Edward Pechter has noted, New Historicism’s notion of “power” is essentially taken from Michel Foucault, who himself insists on a conception of “power” as provisional and 100 like all literatures, are texts, and can be read accordingly, and second, with the ways in which all texts, including histories and literatures, are productions of a particular set of historical (which is to say economic, political, social, and cultural) circumstances. So far, so good. While it is certainly unfair to condense New Historicism to a simple process of reducing everything to a text, in fact such a simplification is in some senses useful. New
Historicism indeed does reduce everything to a text, though it perhaps sounds better to say New Historicism elevates everything to a text. Either way, by casting everything as a text, one is able to read across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, using texts and contexts on the same level, as equal partners in the production of meaning, of culture.
Standard New Historical procedure for reading drama in the early modern period involves opening with an (historical) anecdote that is later used, in conjunction with various non-literary texts, to light up a particular construction in a play of roughly the same period, and vice-versa. There is an exchange back and forth; neither the play text(s) nor the history text(s) is openly acknowledged as the dominant text in the reading, since the negotiation, the flow of social energy, is inscrutably impartial. The trick is to observe each text’s reflection of the other without actually nominating one text as source of the reading. Of course, the New Historicist never really achieves this nonpartisan reading of two texts. Being for the most part literary critics, New Historicists lean toward literature, and just as they tend to read all texts as pieces of literature (one contemplates a third axis for the chiasmus: the literacity of textuality55), their endemic fondness for tropes tends to
itinerant. See Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” 296-297. 55 Perhaps the “literariness of textuality” would be better, semantically, but “literacity” preserves the rhythm and consonance that characterizes Montrose’s original expression. Since literary approaches to texts tend so strongly to foreground their figurative energies, a sense of “literariness” inheres already in the term “textuality,” but the sometimes sterile, structural connotations of “textuality” do not sufficiently communicate the playfulness that animates most literary readings of narratives. 101 overrun their passes at textual impartiality. In the end, the standard New Historical tale of two stories uses one as a text (literature) and one as a context (history).
Joel Fineman, in his essay “The History of the Anecdote,” demonstrates that
Stephen Greenblatt’s vision of a negotiation between Galenic biology texts and
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night actually turns on a metaphor taken from the play and is thus partial to the expressly literary narrative.56 Discussing the contemporary biology of gender differences in the early seventeenth century, Greenblatt cites Galen, who notes that the male and female reproductive organs are essentially identical when either is turned inside-out. Greenblatt then suggests a glove as the appropriate metaphor—but
Fineman notes that this metaphor, which is the starting point of the “negotiation” between the texts, comes from a passage in Shakespeare, and not from Galen. The Shakespearean metaphor is the ur-text, the point of departure, the governing trope that Greenblatt uses to read the biology texts.57 I invoke Fineman not to criticize New Historicism for failing to
police itself adequately (it is plainly inevitable that some one text must, after all, serve as
a critical point of departure), but to make a point of the difference between textualization
and contextualization. The gem of New Historicism to date is its savvy for useful,
complex or “thick” contextualizations—a technique so useful that to ignore the
56 The Greenblatt essay in question is “Fiction and Friction,” from Shakespearean Negotiations. 57 See Fineman, 49-76. Edward Pechter offers a similar criticism of Greenblatt’s methodology in theory versus practice—Greenblatt’s anecdotal essays always seem to prefer the cultural text as a “prior phenomenon” to the literary text—in “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama” (293). Pechter stresses that New Historicism ultimately always chooses the cultural text as the basis for understanding the literary, which seems to contradict Fineman’s reading. The two critiques need not work against each other, however: a reading may favor the literary text even as it nominates the cultural text as a prior text and the source of “meaning.” In any case, Fineman and Pechter both demonstrate the same thing: that Greenblatt fails to treat literature and culture as mutually constitutive texts. Greenblatt, a pioneering practitioner and perhaps reluctant spokesperson for New Historicism, has become the general target for critiques of and objections to the critical method he christened. Of course, Greenblatt himself has rejected the name “New Historicism,” and the critical practices currently grouped together as having derived from Greenblatt and other early practitioners are too diverse to be represented by the work of a single scholar. 102 historicity of texts and the textuality of histories in any attempt to theorize early modern drama is critically unthinkable today. What has not yet stood out in the new historical project, however, is the idea of textualization itself. The implications of il n’y a pas de hors-texte and of culture-as-a-text need to be considered from two successive viewpoints, beyond their usefulness in facilitating close readings of culture. First, if culture is a text, then how things get written into it must be important. By broadening the definition so that culture is a set of narratives instead of specifically a text, we get both a more inclusive model for culture and a means to distinguish between different states of narratives in that model. The theater, I argue, is the stylus of the unwritten narrative, and its stage is a space for textualizing cultural voices. The theater contributes to the collective narrative of culture in a particularly powerful way: those texts a culture considers most important tend to become textualized whenever possible, and the theater, which we typically represent as a socially marginal institution, was a major agent of the textualization of narratives. Acknowledging and exploring such a power should lead us to question the generalization of the theater as “marginal.” Second, if the space of the stage is indeed so integral a part of producing culture, then New Historicism has inadvertently trivialized or sentimentalized that space in its readings of the negotiations between drama and culture. The space of the stage—the theatrical space as opposed to the theater space; the public performance as opposed to the printed play script—is the true site of cultural production in the form of textualization, and we should pay as much attention to the stage, as the culturally central space in theaters and the emblem of the theater’s cultural authority, as we do to the larger, culturally marginal building that we call “the theater.” 103
This project is New Historical also in that it reconsiders recent readings of source texts. The empirical evidence informing our view of early modern drama needs to be continuously reread, re-interpreted, and reevaluated, as do the texts in which we study that empirical evidence. A truly New Historicist approach calls for nothing less: in order to ensure that the historicity of our own critical texts remains a useful barricade in our critical perspective to prevent us from mistaking what is a reading of available texts for an objective observation of fact, we continually have to read and reread the past, the present, and ourselves. In 1986, Jean Howard offered a description of, and some recommendations for, the emerging new historical literary practice, in which she made several observations similar to those I make here. “A new historical literary criticism,” she notes, “assumes two things: (1) the notion that man is a construct, not an essence; (2) that the historical investigator is likewise a product of his history and never able to recognize otherness in its pure form, but always in part through the framework of the present” (“The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies” 23). She observes several times that New Historical scholarship fails “to reflect on itself”: “the new historicism needs at every point to be more overtly self-conscious of its methods and its theoretical assumptions, since what one discovers about the historical place and function of literary texts is in large measure a function of the angle from which one looks and the assumptions that enable the investigation” (31, 42-43). A forthrightly New Historical approach to studying drama should recognize, for instance, the apparently profound investment that contemporary critics have in discovering marginality in the popular tradition they study even when it may not be there. The “historicity” not only of the texts we study—printed copies of plays that have survived from the period—but also of “the 104 texts in which we study them”—critical treatises on early modern drama—betrays itself readily in both. We are anxious to recognize the historicity of the former, but despite our better intentions, we have arrived at a critical juncture where it is now necessary to remind ourselves of the historicity of the latter—of our own “cultural specificity” and
“historical embedment” (Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture” 20). Whether it is a latent or atavistic Romanticism in us or a sense of our own disenfranchisement from today’s “popular culture” that drives us to celebrate the subversive marginality of an early modern phenomenon, we have adopted the theater’s marginality as a given. We need to maintain the initiative of William Ingram, Alan Somerset, Louis Montrose and others, who have begun to question the current understandings of the place of the stage.
The critical readings of The Roaring Girl, Volpone, and Bartholomew Fair that follow in chapters 3, 4, and 5 are thus based on a general reevaluation, in chapters 1 and 2, of evidence and arguments about the place of the stage. 105
Chapter 3
Fashionable Frith: Constructions of a Roaring Girl
To date, scholarship on Moll Frith and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s
The Roaring Girl has concerned itself in large part with arguing whether Moll’s character in the play is a subversive force, and if so, whether her subversive energy is contained by the action of the play or remains at large as the drama comes to a close. Jean Howard,
Marjorie Garber, Stephen Orgel, and Jo Miller have all variously explored the staged
Moll and her historical counterpart as successfully subversive. Garber’s reading looks to
Jacques Lacan and the notion of anxiety of lack and circulation of the phallus to construct a subversive reading of Moll as the phallus (“The Logic of the Transvestite” 227).1 Jean
Howard takes what Garber calls a “feminist historicist” approach (Garber 229) to the play
by focusing on sexuality and gender and on how Moll can be read as a “critique of the
specific material institutions and circumstances which oppressed women in early modern
England” (Howard “Sex and Social Conflict” 180). Moll upsets conventional schemes of
desire with her ambiguous gender and ambiguous sexuality in the context of the public
theater, which itself also complicates desire and sexuality in its use of cross-dressing and
of boys to play the parts of females. The threat of female sexuality is not entirely
contained by the play, especially since Moll, though she refuses all sexual advances,
“never denies her sexuality” (185). Nor does the denouement smooth over problems
1 The conclusion of Garber’s essay leaves some ambiguity about whether the transvestite Moll “still refers back to the male as norm and hence is still itself a hegemonic move,” or whether Moll’s “existence on the ‘outside’ or fold of the text of The Roaring Girl is . . . a strong argument against the domestication or taming of transvestism as metaphor” (232). 106 raised by Moll’s behavior: Mary Fitzallard may be inscribed with the institution of marriage at the play’s conclusion, but Moll remains outside, and no easy identification with the status quo is available. Stephen Orgel focuses specifically on Moll’s cross- dressing, in which he locates the germ of her transgressive potential. In The Roaring
Girl, gender boundaries are compromised, reflective of the outside world in which
“masculinity is always in question” (“The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl” 25). Jo Miller argues that although Moll’s support of the institution of marriage, manifest in her helping facilitate the marriage of Mary and Sebastian, suggests she is “far from denigrating her society’s patriarchal conventions” (“Women and the Market in The Roaring Girl” 12), the play encourages its audience to reevaluate its “ability to enjoy [Moll’s] antics” (17).
Miller sees Moll as a powerful critique of the “total financial subjugation [of women] under the laws of patriarchy” (13). Moll is “not only the most delightful character in the play, but obviously the most subversive and treacherous figure confronting the men in her world” (14).
Against these readings of Moll as successfully subversive or transgressive, Jane
Baston has argued that “Moll’s defiance is reinvented in The Roaring Girl in order to be contained, enervated, and eventually incorporated into the prevailing social apparatus”
(“Rehabilitating Moll’s Subversion in The Roaring Girl” 319). While most critics see
Moll as excluded from the New Comedy ending, Baston insists that “Moll has become rehabilitated into a society which is neither new nor tolerant” (319). Because Moll’s subversive potential ultimately results in “no radical shift in terms of gender or class” in the play, Baston argues, “Moll’s actions, words, and appearance are no longer threatening” (331-332). Baston reads Moll’s complicity as a “recuperation” of her 107 subversive potential—a notion Jean Howard has discussed elsewhere of “Renaissance texts in which ideological orthodoxies maintain themselves, not simply by producing and exorcising their subversive opposites, but by recuperating them—that is, by domesticating and incorporating alien elements which thereby lose their subversive power” (“The New Historicism” 40). Other critics configure the notion of subversion or transgression more complexly, finding in Moll elements both of sustained—that is, unrecuperated—reaction against the status quo and of cooperation with the status quo.
Mary Beth Rose’s important early essay on The Roaring Girl and the Hic Mulier and
Haec-Vir [sic] pamphlets argues that while Moll’s non-conventional behavior and
“nonconformity” may be used to further conventional institutions like marriage, she is also excluded in some senses from the “tolerant new society which forms in the final scene” (“Women in Men’s Clothing” 385). She retains her subversive potential because she is not contained, nor is she willing to be contained, by the frames that contain Mary and the play’s other women. Lloyd Edward Kermode makes a similar point but qualifies the idea of the “tolerant new society” by insisting that the “new order” that Moll
“supports and begins to erect” will never, in fact, reach completion; it will never arrive.
She cannot be said to be in the service of the status quo, because the status quo she would support “is certainly not the world in which Moll is currently moving” (“Destination
Doomsday” 441).
Kermode’s essay is in part a response to a provocative essay by Deborah Jacobs that argues against reading Moll in a way that “remakes in the reader’s own image
Renaissance and other pre-novel-era figures” (“Critical Imperialism and Renaissance
Drama” 75). Jacobs quotes from Howard and Rose and cautions that their readings of 108
Moll “rely on a phraseology usually associated with liberal humanist ideals” that are not appropriate for discussing the “pre-bourgeois subject” (76). Instead of reading Moll as subversive because she disrupts “male-originated plots,” Jacobs offers that we should recognize how “at every point in the play where there is a potential debasing of the social order, the figure of Moll Cutpurse, as an instrument of the state (in a state-sanctioned production), deflates these challenges” (78). Exactly how Jacobs’s own argument avoids imposing the phraseology of its twentieth-century ideals on the play’s pre-bourgeois subjects is not made clear, but her central point stands: Moll’s actions in the play frustrate Sir Alexander, Laxton, and Trapdoor, the characters whose viciousness and lasciviousness threaten the status quo. Like Baston, Jacobs focuses on Moll’s complicity with the institutions of which other critics see her as subversive.
Vivian Comensoli has argued yet another variation. She follows the majority trend in noting that while Moll “does assist in ushering in the typical comic ending,” she
“unequivocally renounces the conventional values embodied by Mary and Sebastian,” and the audience is encouraged to “condone” the renunciation (“Play-making, Domestic
Conduct, and the Multiple Plot in The Roaring Girl” 251). She differs, however, in claiming that Moll “and her roarer-companions . . . are never excluded from the reformed society sketched in the denouement” (251). According to Comensoli, Moll’s version of domestic life effectively wins the day. Read in conjunction with the “cynical treatment”
(251) of the citizen subplot marriages, which has complicated the possibilities of a happy marriage, “Moll’s misogamy provides a powerful alternative to the veneration of marriage and procreation that informs the epithalamic ending” (260). As the play closes, both the epithalamic option and Moll’s “powerful alternative” are available. 109
This notion of “both/and” rather than “either/or” keys a final set of readings that emphasizes ideal unity or transcendence, figured in Moll’s double-gendered status as both male and female.2 Susan Krantz argues that critical readings that reinscribe “the binarism of gender—male and female” merely perpetuate the problem by robbing cross-
dressing of its transcendent or unifying gesture. She also broadens the range of approach
by introducing more categories into the subversion/convention binary:
Earlier readings of The Roaring Girl as transvestite text not only
reinscribed (and therefore reaffirmed, even if negatively) the binarism of
gender—male and female, they also minimized the significance of
transgression by accepting the cross-dressed woman as normal and
arguing the desirability of cultural reform that incorporates and empowers
the outsider: the transvestite female is, after all, simply a female who
wants the independence and/or power of the male. But even the more
recent readings, while recognizing the power of the female transvestite on
stage as transvestite, present the power as subversive rather than
oppositional or alternative and locate it within the relatively safe limits of
the culture—a culture that allows boys to cross-dress on stage and to
“double-cross” when playing female cross-dressers—and, further, they
minimize the theatrical normalizing of the stage transvestite. (“The
Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse” 7)
2 For more on the figure of the hermaphrodite or androgyne as a figure of transcendence, see Grace Tiffany’s book-length study, Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters. Tiffany does not address Moll Frith or The Roaring Girl specifically, but her model of the hermaphrodite as a figure of transcendence, rather than of aberrance, fits the scheme proposed by Krantz and Cheney. Tiffany contrasts two models of androgyny in early modern drama: satiric androgyny, which she discusses in Ben Jonson’s satires, and mythic androgyny, which she discusses in Shakespeare’s cross-dressers and fluid individual identities. See also Stephen Orgel, Impersonations, particularly chapters 5, 6, and 7. 110
Reading the transvestite as transvestite, rather than as a demand for the power of the male, is a move to deconstruct the restrictive male/female binary. Krantz’s terms
“oppositional” and “alternative” seem to come from Raymond Williams, but they have a more pointedly poststructural edge here than in Williams. She questions whether the playwrights “locate Moll within or without the cultural binary of gender,” suggesting that
Moll as a dramatic hero succeeds “only because she removes herself from questions of sexual identity” (8). Krantz thus pushes a reading of Moll as “the hermaphroditic ideal” who cannot “transgress against a society” that she is in fact above (13).
Patrick Cheney looks at Moll as a figure of unity or “both/and,”3 rather than
aberrance or transgression. Cheney notes the “most serious central theme” of The
Roaring Girl: “love as the power that unites contraries” (121). He looks to
Aristophanes’ tale of the hermaphrodite in Plato’s Symposium and to Britomart and
Venus in Spencer’s Faerie Queene for antecedents to Moll.4 He suggests that The
Roaring Girl is “an adaptation of Spenser’s great theme of the hermaphroditic nature of
human love to Jacobean citizen comedy” (125-126). Cheney also explores other
instances of union in the play, including the notion that the collaboration between
Middleton and Dekker constitutes a bridging of Dekker’s “Spenserian vision of romantic
love” and Middleton’s “satiric habit of mind”: “amidst the confusion is born a hybrid
form of comedy mixing romantic and satirical elements. . . . The hermaphrodite,
3 The “both/and” syntactical construction dominates Cheney’s article from start to finish. Moll is “both male and female,” “both realistic and idealistic,” “a creature of both the land and the sea, a subject and an object of desire” (121); she is “both benign and irascible”; she “inspires both laughter and awe, jocularity and seriousness” (126); she is “a figure of both love and war” (127), and so forth. 4 See Patrick Cheney 121-128. All references in this chapter to Cheney refer to Patrick Cheney’s “Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl.” 111 conventionally a symbol of sexual identity, expands to become a symbol of artistic identity as well” (132).
Krantz and Cheney thus offer variations on the same reading, placing Moll outside or above the binary of male/female or convention/subversion. Marjorie Garber also suggests that Moll is a “both/and” figure, though her most provocative work on cross-dressing addresses the phenomenon in a much wider context than that of The
Roaring Girl or early modern drama. In Vested Interests, Garber argues that “one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the way in which it offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of ‘female’ and ‘male,’ whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural” (10). Garber postulates a third sex as a social and cultural space in which gender and sexuality are not simple binary choices. Transvestism, she emphasizes, “is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself” (17, Garber’s italics).
Like Krantz, Garber suggests that binarism itself is destabilized by the transvestite as a transvestite. There is an appreciable difference between the critical perspective that sees
Moll as transcending boundaries (Krantz, Garber) versus the critical perspective that sees
Moll as simply crossing boundaries to unite disparate elements (Cheney). Indeed, the orientation of “transcendence,” with its deconstructive implications for binary categories, is fundamentally different from that of “union,” which depends more on a sense of fusing different spaces than on erasing difference. I use the terms alongside each other in my discussion of criticism on The Roaring Girl, however, because they can be grouped together as working outside the terms of “either/or” that dominate most scholarship. 112
The Garber-Krantz-Cheney approach is valuable in that it allows us to read Moll as a dramatic heroine. As Krantz puts it, Moll “displays the familiar attributes of the dramatic hero—physical prowess, a noble spirit, and a moral certitude—that succeed only because she removes herself from questions of sexual identity”—she “combin[es] the idea of female and male into one being,” making the hermaphrodite not a “social threat” but “an ideal of transcendence” (8). The only way a critical evaluation of the play can account for Moll’s dramatic heritage and her full function in the drama is to approach her as an exercise in union—union of male and female, union of state subversion and state complicity, union of criminal and heroine. I want to develop the idea of Moll as
“both/and” here, but in slightly different terms and in a slightly different direction: I want to read her not only as both transgression and convention, both subversion and status quo, both male and female, but also in Williams’s terms of emergent and dominant and Mullaney’s terms of central and marginal, as discussed in chapter 2. As I will suggest, Moll straddles, on various levels, the cultural boundaries of dominant and emergent.5 In a play that, according Patrick Cheney, is a combination of different
dramatists and different forms (satiric and romantic or mythic) and that straddles multiple
boundaries, Moll is a complex locus of union or transcendence6 of boundaries. She is the play’s heroine, its protagonist, and if we understand her as simply transgressive or as
5 The Roaring Girl’s dramatic heritage—its roots in New Comedy and in the English popular tradition described by Robert Weimann—involve the third cultural space from Williams: the residual. That is, while I focus primarily on the boundary between dominant and emergent in the context of “both/and,” I will also periodically situate The Roaring Girl with regard to residual culture, which in Mullaney’s scheme is simply “the country” (Mullaney viii). 6 There is an appreciable difference between the critical perspective that sees Moll as transcending boundaries (Krantz,) versus the critical perspective that sees Moll as simply crossing boundaries to unite disparate elements (Cheney). Indeed, the orientation of “transcendence” is fundamentally different from that of “union.” But in the case of Moll and The Roaring Girl, union is a key step in the notion of transcendence: Moll transcends the male/female or subversion/convention binaries because she simultaneously embodies both. I use the terms interchangeably in my discussion of criticism on The 113 simply in the service of the status quo, we miss the fuller range of her character: Moll may have subversive potential, but it will not do to say that “Moll’s staged body”
(Jacobs’s term), is either subversive or contained.7 As Lloyd Kermode has noted, Moll
“cannot be read simply, or appropriated to champion ideologies” (440). Using Krantz and Cheney’s approach to the play, I will attempt to establish several points of connection or analogy involving the historical Moll Frith, Middleton and Dekker’s The
Roaring Girl, the popular stage, and the culture in which all are figured and which all play a part in figuring. Having set forth here the basic terms of a critical approach, I will turn now to the notion of fashion and self-fashioning in the play and in the London in which it is set.
I. Fashions and Fashionability
Middleton’s epistle to the 1611 edition of The Roaring Girl places the drama in the context of fashion: “The fashion of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel: for in the time of the great crop-doublet, your
Roaring Girl because they can be grouped together as working outside the terms of “either/or” that dominate most scholarship. 7 Working simultaneously with the notion of “either/or” and terms such as “subversive” versus “complicit” or “transgression” versus “convention” or even “emergent” versus “dominant” requires a comment on Stephen Greenblatt. These various deployments of the binary are basically instances of the poles of subversion and containment, a scheme that derives from Greenblatt’s early work, notably the essay “Invisible Bullets,” the first version of which appeared in Glyph in 1981. The “subversion/containment” paradigm, by which Greenblatt sees the subversive potential of the drama as ultimately only an effect of authority (see “Invisible Bullets”), has come under heavy criticism, and rightly so. David Scott Kastan, for example, has recently criticized Greenblatt’s argument in “Invisible Bullets” for being “unnecessarily totalized.” (Shakespeare After Theory 125). Yet since “Invisible Bullets” and Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt seems, according to Jean Howard, “to be moving away from the position that in Elizabethan culture subversion is inevitably contained, to a position which acknowledges that through certain cultural practices, such as the production of plays on the public stage, a space for more than compliance with dominant ideologies may be opened” (“The New Historicism” 41). The disagreement over whether subversive potential can, in fact, be contained has been a key issue in the development of a new historical approach to literary studies and is a principal distinction between New Historicism and cultural materialism. 114 huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean purposes, was only then in fashion” (“Epistle” 68).8 It is only fitting that the introductory epistle should compare the fickle and changing tastes in early modern London’s theater scene to “the alteration in apparel,” given that the play’s central character, Moll Frith, was so sensational a figure when it came to apparel, perhaps best known among contemporaries for wearing a doublet and breeches. Middleton’s link between play writing and changing “fashion” provides us with a compelling paradigm for understanding not only the creation and production of plays in early modern London, but also, drawing on multiple senses of the word “fashion,” the creation and production of identity and the culture inside of which identity is produced. Playwrights are the agents as well as the subjects of fashion, just as the material out of which they made plays was itself a matter simultaneously of fashion and fashionability.
The Roaring Girl was published in 1611, within months of its opening at the
Fortune theater.9 Paul Mulholland has argued that the play and its publication capitalize
particularly on the budding popularity of Moll Frith, and that both the authors and their
subject stood to benefit from a theatrical venture that served the financial needs of the
authors and the positive publicity needs of the subject.10 The play and its subject matter
are sensational, which makes for box-office success, but they also cast Moll Frith in a
distinctly positive light, which could presumably influence public opinion and the court
officials who heard Moll’s case in the Court of the Star Chamber. Mulholland cites
8 Citations from The Roaring Girl come from Paul Mulholland’s 1987 edition. 9 The date of the play’s first performance has not been established beyond a doubt, but the evidence for an early 1611 opening is sufficiently strong, and an entry in the Stationers’ Register for February 1612, listing a fine in connection with the unlicensed publishing of what seems to be the play, strongly suggests publication in 1611. See Paul Mulholland, “The Date of The Roaring Girl,” 18-31. 10 See Paul Mulholland, “The Date of The Roaring Girl,” 19. 115 evidence that Middleton and Dekker were under pressure from creditors in 1611-1612 and suggests that “it may follow that The Roaring Girl represents an attempt to alleviate their own troubles as well as those of Moll Cutpurse” (“The Date of The Roaring Girl”
19). Since these “troubles” of Moll Frith are in large part a result of the play in early performance, it is presumably the play’s publication, rather that its composition, that
Mulholland has in mind when he speculates about possible publicity stunts.11
Establishing a philanthropic motive for the printing may in fact be quite difficult, as it is
more a matter of wistful conjecture than sturdy inference, but positing a sound financial
prospect as an impetus for publication is relatively easy. In any case, one important fact
emerges from the surviving contemporary evidence: Moll’s story was a viable
commercial venture for two playwrights who had played active roles in the theater
business for nearly a decade. The play was produced, was presumably successful, and
quickly ran into publication.12 Insofar as this “hurried sequence” was driven by popular
demand for the subject matter in dramatic form, we can assume that Moll was a
recognizable figure in the London cultural landscape by 1611.
Frith first began to appear in popular fiction as early as August seventh of 1610,
for which day the Stationers’ Register lists “A Booke called the Madde Prancks of Merry
Mall of the Bankside, with her Walks in Mans Apparel and to what Purpose. Written by
John Day” (Andor Gomme xv). Although no copy of this book is known to have
survived and although it may never have been printed, its entry in the Stationers’ Register
gives us a substantive indication that Moll Frith was a sufficiently well-known figure in
11 Moll appeared before the Consistory Court on the 27 of January, 1612, to answer for the charges related to an incident at St. Paul’s Cathedral the preceding Christmas day. 116
London city culture that someone had thought to capitalize on her celebrity with a book.
Elizabeth Cook makes a similar point in her introduction to the 1997 New Mermaids edition of the play, but it is important to note in particular the perceived market appeal of
Moll’s story. Certainly, printed accounts of celebrity lives were an established commercial enterprise by the time Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp became the subjects of jest books and collections of anecdotes at the end of the sixteenth century, and though we may only cautiously put Moll Frith in the company of someone as widely known as
Tarlton or Kemp, the John Day book is sufficient indication that the sensationalism of
Moll Frith’s reputation—whatever its specifics—was compelling enough to inspire a commercial account of her “Madde Prancks.”
Following the John Day book, the play, and a related appearance on the Fortune’s stage, Moll is mentioned in The Consistory of London Correction Book’s record for
January 27, 1612, and shortly after in John Chamberlain’s February 12, 1612 letter to
Dudley Carleton, outlining her penance at Paul’s Cross near the church. She appears again in records pertaining to a 1621 Star Chamber and in a spate of fiction, poetry and popular biography from John Taylor the Water Poet’s “A Prodigal Country Gallant,” to
Thomas Freeman’s “Epigram 90” from Rubbe and a great Cast, to the anonymous, purportedly autobiographical Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith and the anonymous The
Woman’s Champion. She also surfaces briefly in Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies and
Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar. There are other documents and narratives that involve Moll in some capacity, but these selections have a pronounced concern specifically with Moll, and they appear during her lifetime or shortly after her death.
12 Publication may not necessarily be an immediate and direct result of perceived demand for a commercial printing of a play text. Any number of factors could force a play into publication, including its having been 117
They provide evidence supporting the particular popularity of Moll Frith’s story—its
“fashionability”—on the London scene at the outset of the second decade of the seventeenth century.
Miriam-Webster lists both “fashionableness” and “fashionability” as variants of
“fashionable.” I use “fashionability” to describe Moll Frith’s story because it suggests the role of both agent and object associated with verb: fashionableness and the capacity to be fashioned. That is, in addition to Moll’s fashionability as a topic of popular drama and entertainment, her story acquired a remarkable fashionability as a continually written and rewritten—or writeable and rewriteable—narrative. Her story was both sensationally popular and eminently appropriable, or re-fashionable, as a topic of popular lore.
Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that “in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 2). It indeed appears that in Tudor and
Stuart England, identity, individuals13 and “fashion” came together in a complex and
compelling mix. The term “fashion” itself plays a role considerably more intricate than
that of a simple noun denoting established customs in dress or comportment, or that of
verb denoting the action of giving shape and form to a substance. Observing sartorial
trends in the ranks of gentlemen seated on the stage at a hall playhouse does not
sufficiently describe the place of “fashion” in early modern London, just as Edmund
Spenser’s famous phrase “to fashion a gentleman,” though it turns on a vital sense of
leaked to a rival company or printer. 13 The term “individual” to describe historical people in the early modern period has been heavily criticized in current critical theories. As Jonathan Dollimore points out, “individual” invokes “Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of individuality,” which cannot apply to the early modern period, a “period deeply receptive to the implications of the decentred subject” (Radical Tragedy 175, 158). I use it here because it preserves the sense of agency, significant if limited, developed by Greenblatt (see following paragraphs). 118 identity as a shapeable construct, does not quite cover the scope of the relationship between identity and language, or between the real world of lived experience and the complex sign-system inside of which we construct and discuss that experience.
The body of scholarship on fashion and the early modern period is considerable. I have worked extensively with Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, but I draw on definitions of “fashion” from various sources to construct a notion of fashion first as the pursuit of what is popular or current and second as the activity of making, of shaping, deriving from the Latin source, facio, -ere, “to make.”14 I refer to on Ann Rosalind Jones
and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, especially for
the notion that clothing has the power to affect the “nature” of the people it adorns.15
For the notion of “fashion” in the sense of making or shaping, I follow the larger trend, lead in some senses by Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in New Historical and cultural materialist scholarship of the past two decades.16
I have in mind, then, two principal meanings of “fashion,” each with a subset of
applications. First is “fashion” in its noun sense of “style.” A fashion is a manner of
dress, mode, demeanor, or behavior that is characteristic of a particular place or period of
time. Thus far, fashions are analogous to trends, and while some fashions have more
longevity and are more stable than others, all are ultimately volatile. A fashion is
The word “subject,” theoretically a better term, carries the sense of passive subjection too forcefully in this context. 14 Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. “facio” 15 See Jones and Stallybrass, 2-4 and chapter 1, “The currency of clothing.” 16 Greenblatt may be generally recognized as a pioneer of the study of self-fashioning, but self-fashioning is based on a more general acknowledgement in scholarship: the emerging status, in the early modern period, of the self and of identity as a construction, and therefore as something that can be shaped and re-shaped, fashioned and re-fashioned. Major recent studies besides Greenblatt’s that address this self-as-construct model include Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy, and Katherine Eisaman Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. 119 something marked simultaneously by its currency and by its vulnerability to changing tastes, or its likelihood to pass from currency into desuetude. As Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out, “fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of style” (Adorned in Dreams 3). Clothing is an obvious instance of fashion, and great many contemporary—that is, fifteenth and sixteenth century—uses of the word refer specifically to dress. But any instance of behavior that can be said to belong to a certain time or place might be thought of in terms of its “fashionability.” Behavior that has currency and is invested with a significance in a particular social setting is fashionable by virtue of its popularity, or popular practice, in the modern sense. This is to make a distinction between the use of “popular” to refer to the common people—the predominant sense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries17—and “popular” to refer a currency-in-
practice, or fashionability, in any given group.18 Moll Frith was something of an early
modern celebrity, a “popular” social figure, and her story was apparently a topic of some
currency in the early seventeenth century.
But the social figure Moll Frith was also eminently subject to fashion in the sense
of shaping and reshaping, telling and retelling. The second principal sense of “fashion”
begins with the observation that identity, like narrative, was fashionable. The distinction
between identity and narrative, in fact, begins to break down in the context of self-
fashioning. In the early modern period, the property of iterability that marks all
narratives—their fundamental repeatability—was realized in new ways by the advent of
17 The Oxford English Dictionary lists “of, pertaining to, or consisting of the common people, or the people…”; Of lowly birth, belonging to the commonalty or populace; plebian”; and “having characteristics attributed to the common people; low, vulgar, plebeian,” as current from the sixteenth century. See Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter noted as OED), 2d edition, “popular,” 2a, 2b, 2c All citations are from this edition. See also Michael D. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” especially 231-233. 18 See OED, “popular,” 6 and 7. 120 the printing press. Matched with their inherent capacity for further shaping or re- fashioning, narratives were doubly fashionable, first in this modern sense of “popular,” and second in the sense of “fashionable” as shapeable or manipulable, leading to the phenomenon Stephen Greenblatt examines in Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
Greenblatt opens Renaissance Self-Fashioning with the notion that in the sixteenth century, “fashion seems to come into wide currency as a way of designating the forming of a self” (2). At times, the literature of the sixteenth century corroborates this notion “quite literally,” Greenblatt notes, “as the imposition upon a person of physical form.” But the more interesting register of self-fashioning is “the achievement of a less tangible shape: a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving” (2). Thus, Greenblatt obliquely introduces the notion of identity, of a selfhood as a collection of traits or behaviors perceived to be both manipulable or shapeable, and furthermore, capable of holding a shape indefinitely.
Problems and critiques of problems with Greenblatt’s scheme of self-fashioning began before Renaissance Self-Fashioning was even finished. Greenblatt himself acknowledges a problem with the idea of self-fashioning built on “the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 256). As work on the book progressed, Greenblatt notes, he “perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state—were inseparably intertwined.
In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society” (256). Jean
Howard has noted that Greenblatt in fact largely succeeds in guiding his readings by 121 using “Lacan’s neo-Freudian psychology with its assumption, not of a unified and autonomous self, but of a provisional and contradictory self which is the product of discourse” (“The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies” 37). Yet she sees in the book
“a lingering nostalgia for studying individual lives, for mystifying the idea of personal autonomy, even after Greenblatt has directly discarded notions of autonomy and the organically unified self” (37). The net result of Greenblatt’s puzzling anecdote in the epilogue to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in which Greenblatt is confronted by a man about to visit his dying son, is, according the Sharon O’Dair, “the slim notion that the autonomous self is a necessary fiction” (O’Dair 89) and that self-fashioning, despite ultimately being contained, is indeed experienced as “pure unfettered subjectivity”
(Greenblatt 256).19
Complications with the autonomous human subject in self-fashioning are largely
sidestepped in this discussion, since I am concerned generally with the fashionability of
identity, as opposed to strictly the role of the self in self-fashioning. As I will suggest,
the historical Moll Frith may have been admirably adept at fashioning herself, but the
preponderance of stories about her, the poems, plays, pamphlets, court records, and
biographies, offers instances in which Moll was fashioned by people, agents, and
discourses besides herself: self-fashioning is only one component of fashionability. Moll
Frith was a hotly and complexly contested site of what was fashionable: she was a
fashionable or “popular” topic, hence the proliferation of topical references to her,
especially in the context of her sense of fashion. This topical popularity causes Moll to
19 For a similar critique of the role of the autonomous human subject in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, especially chapter 10. 122 be fashioned repeatedly and in multiple ways; she becomes a story or anecdote told over and over again, fashioned anew each time.
The term “fashionable” appears to have been first used in first decade of the seventeenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest listing for the word
“fashionable” is in 1606, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, 3.3: “A fashionable
Hoste..slightly shakes his parting Guest by th’hand.”20 The sense associated with this
entry is “of persons: Observant of or following the fashion; dressing or behaving in
conformity with the standard of elegance current in the upper-class society.” The next
entry, for 1609, comes from “The man in the moone telling strange fortunes,” signed by
W. M.: “a finicall fellow he is, and very fashionable.” There follows from 1608 a
sample from William Sclater’s Malachy (written 1608, published posthumously 1650):
“It ..was grown so fashionable, that it seemed to be no sin,” under the usage “of things,
esp. dress: Conformable to fashion; in accordance with prevailing usage; of the kind of
vogue among persons of the upper class. Of immaterial things: Approved by custom,
generally accepted, current.”
Of course, the root “fashion” is considerably older, in use as “a prevailing custom,
a current usage; esp. one characteristic of a particular place or period of time” as early as
the fifteenth century and quite common in literature of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.21 There are some 700 instances of “fashion” and its variants in
published Tudor poetry, and at least another 1000 in Stuart and Caroline poetry.22
20 OED, s.v. “fashionable.” The date of composition for Troilus and Cressida is probably 1602. A Stationers’ Register entry for February 7, 1602 lists “The booke of Troilus and Cressida as yt is acted by my lo: Chamberlens Men.” See W. L. Godshalk, “The Texts of Troilus and Cressida.” 21 See OED s.v. “fashion,” sb., subheading 8. 22 The Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database Copyright lists 778 instances of the root word “fashion” from 1500-1603 and another 1085 from 1603 to 1660, in poetry alone. The database is not comprehensive, and some entries are listed multiple times, but it offers a general sense of the frequency of 123
Connotation and denotation vary widely, but of particular interest is the dynamic between established currency and transience or caprice: what was fashionable was stylish, but style is always subject to frequent change. There is thus a sense of mutability or volatility that characterizes fashion, as is evident in Thomas Campion’s “Every Dame”:
“Now such new found toyes are sold, these women to disguise, / That, before the yeare growes old, the newest fashion dyes” (5-6). John Taylor the Water Poet invokes Moll
Frith herself as an unlikely model of consistency in a city overcome with gulls and gallants chasing the latest fashion: “And Mary Frith doth teach them modesty, / For she doth keep one fashion constantly, / And therefore she deserves a matron’s praise, / In these inconstant moon-like changing days” (“A prodigall Country Gallant” 61-64). The joke—which incidentally is almost invisible without the contextual knowledge, apparently presumed by the poet, of Moll’s own peculiar sartorial habits—turns again on the idea that fashion is eminently changeable.
As fashion was changeable, so was the “fashion-monger,” or “one who studies and follows the fashion or fashions.”23 The English physician Andrew Boorde (1490?-
1549) offers an early account of the “English man” and his love of “fashyons” in The
fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge:
I am an English man, and naked I stand here,
Musyng in my mynde what rayment I shal were;
For now I wyll were thys, and now I wyl were that;
Now I wyl were I cannot tel what.
the term. Results reproduced from the English Poetry Full-Text Database Copyright (c) [1992-1995] Chadwyck-Healey Ltd. Cross checked against Early English Books Online database, with full citations. 124
All new fashyons be plesaunt to me;
I wyl haue them, whether I thryue or thee. (117)
The narrative voice is clearly contemptible for its flippancy and inconstancy. From “now
I wyll were thys,” to “now I wyl were that” to now “I cannot tel what,” the speaker is presented as impetuous and rash. He has no regard for thrift or “thryving” and appears to think that the proper garment of the moment is the only object worthy of pursuit.
As we might expect, the predominance of this use of “fashion” increases as
London becomes more and more a social marketplace of vogues and styles. The changing fashions and the people who pursue them remain a favorite target of criticism in the poets who contrast vanity with substance. Canto III of Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche takes “fashion-mongers” to task:
Let gaudy fashion-mongers day by day
Misshape themselves, and vex their giddy Brain
About some upstart Cut or Garb, which they
Were never yet disfigur’d with: in vain
Striving to catch the fashion, which is still
Like Phoebe’s face, but one day at the full.24
The concern with disfigurement remains, although its emphasis is more secular. The
criticisms here are familiar. The “upstart Cut or Garb” suggests a kind of impudence or
presumptuousness on the part of purveyors of fashion, and the notion of disfigurement
links vain pursuit of fashion with an injustice done to substance. Yet again, there is
something blemishing or even defacing about fashions. Finally, the phrase “fashion-
23 OED, s.v. “fashion-monger.” 24 Canto III, 33, stanza 102. See Works Cited for full citation from Early English Books Online. 125 mongers” invokes the growing industry surrounding the fashion scene. The OED links
“fashion-mongers” with those who follow changing fashions, but the agents of manufacture and sale are present as well. We may think of Mistress Tiltyard from The
Roaring Girl. Jack Dapper enters 2.1 and approaches her shop in search of a feather:
What feather is’t you’ld have, sir?
These are most worn and most in fashion
Amongst the beaver gallants, the stone riders,
The private stage’s audience, the twelvepenny-stool gentlemen:
I can inform you ‘tis the general feather. (2.1.148-52)
What Mistress Tiltyard is selling is “the general feather,” fashionable among gentlemen who pay extra for the privilege of sitting on a stool on the stage at the hall playhouses.25
That Jack Dapper rejects this “mode” and asks instead for a “spangled feather” points to the absurdity of the race for fashion. Dapper wants nothing to do with the “general” fashion: “tell me of general! / Now a continual Simon and Jude’s rain / Beat all your feathers as flat down as pancakes” (2.1.153-155). “But one day at the full,” the fashion has reached the point of saturation once it is “general,” and the gallant—or would-be gallant, as is more often the case in Renaissance and Restoration literature—who wants to remain fashionable seems always to have to stay ahead of the game.
Joseph Beaumont’s allusion to the fashion-monger “misshap[ing]” himself, quoted above, hints at another issue that weighs heavily in similar criticisms throughout the period. To this point, fashion has been discussed primarily as a property of clothing
25 Paul Mulholland cites A. Armstrong’s “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres,” which argues that the standard price for a stool on the stage at a hall playhouse was six pence and that the “twelvepenny- stool gentlemen” may refer to top-price seats at amphitheaters, instead. Either way, the association with high fashion in elite social circles at theaters stands (qtd. in Mulholland, The Roaring Girl, 106, n. 151). 126 and as a matter of adorning an implicitly immutable self with whatever look was currently fashionable. But as Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass note, “‘fashion
[in the Renaissance] did not have changing style of clothing as its naturalized referent; rather, it commonly referred to the act of making, or to the make or shape of a thing, or to form as opposed to matter, or to the enduring manners and customs of a society” (1). As fashions change and the pursuit of fashion gathers momentum, the process of fashioning or shaping applied to the person as well as the appearance becomes unsettling.
Fashionability, a property of outward appearance associated with the fashion-monger, emerges also as a property of internal substance. Fashionability, that is, pertains to internal as well as external, to the person as well as to the clothing. Jones and Stallybrass elaborate:
This opposing of clothes and person was always in tension with the social
practices through which the body politic was composed: the varied acts of
investiture. For it was investiture, the putting on of clothes, that quite
literally constituted a person as a monarch or a freeman of a guild or a
household servant. Investiture was, in other words, the means by which a
person was given a from, a shape, a social function, a “depth.” (2)
Clothing was intimately involved in identity. Fashion, then, could be a dangerous pursuit in more profound ways than in preoccupying the vain and giddy: if fashion entails the capacity not only to shape and configure, but also to misshape or disfigure, the potential to shape oneself immediately becomes the potential to misshape oneself. To traffic in fashion was, ultimately, to meddle with oneself in manner properly reserved only for
God. 127
The minte of deformities, signed “C.G.” and published in 1600, berates those who
“deforme” themselves in the pursuit of fashion: “oh spightfull forgerie. / when God fayre fashion’d partes, vnfashioning, / they both deforme those gratious parts, & him” (88-90).
Once the donning of an article of clothing is understood in its capacity to form or deform that which it adorns, the full power of fashion is apparent. Greenblatt notes that the early modern period revives a “powerful alternative” to Augustine’s injunctions against “self- fashioning,” which had held sway from the fourth century (Renaissance Self-Fashioning
2). Men had been fashioned in their creator’s own image, and attendant on the capacity to re-fashion themselves is the danger of disfigurement: fashion is no longer—if it ever was—a matter only of adorning the body.
To cast this issue of fluid identity in the terms of rhetoric, we may look at selves and fashions in early modern London as a deployment of what Richard Lanham has called homo rhetoricus. Opposed to homo seriosus, the notion that “every man possesses a central self” and that “these selves combine into a single, homogeneously real society which constitutes a referent reality for the men living in it” for which man has “invented language to communicate with his fellow man,” is homo rhetoricus: “rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful” (1, 4). Homo rhetoricus works exactly against the notion that there is a
“central self” or a “‘real’ reality” (8).26 The more fashionability is recognized as a
property of the “central self” as well as outward appearance, the less stable the idea of
“‘real’ reality” becomes. If this sophistic approach to language and the self can be seen
periodically and cyclically to come into and out of vogue in the West, Lanham notes, the 128
Renaissance was a time of “mixture,” during which man as homo rhetoricus begins to obtrude into the idea of man as homo seriosus (Motives of Eloquence 218).
The fear driving sixteenth-century criticisms of fashion as an agent that “deforms” original shape or substance thus derives from a lurking suspicion that the notion of an ultimate substance, a God-given essence, an originary form, an identity, is, in fact, a chimera. As Jonathan Dollimore notes, “an aspect of the growing complexity in characterization” in Jacobean tragedy “was of course the realization that identity itself is a fiction or construct” (Radical Tragedy 176). In any case, the original essence was easily corrupted, lost, unrecoverable. Just as Ben Jonson feared that “wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves: like Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers so long, till at last they become such; and make the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten,” so one’s “nature” could be so corrupted by fashion—the “habit” one chose to wear—that the true self was forever lost
(Discoveries 8:597). The distinction between outward appearance and inward essence, so fragile in these depictions of the fashion-monger, begins to break down when it comes to the property of changeability. It is as if by seeking new fashions, the character itself loses its original shape.27
Still, self-fashioning seems not to become a disturbing problem as long as the
model on which one fashioned oneself was a manifestation of the divine will. But once
fashion becomes a pursuit in its own right, self-fashioning becomes dangerous.
26 I group “the central self” with “identity” and “substance” and other hypostasizations of the notion of a fixed and objective reality. They are all instances of an ultimate center, a transcendental signified, that is destabilized in the early modern period and that is driving acknowledgement of most recent scholarship. 27 In a sense, this notion of identity as shapeable looks back to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which Christy Desmet locates the advent of the “discussion of the self’s ambiguous status in the drama” (Reading Shakespeare’s Characters 4). If character is the result of action, and more specifically the accumulated result of 129
Greenblatt argues convincingly that once Christ is no longer the “ultimate model,” self- fashioning created “considerable anxiety”:
Thus separated from the imitation of Christ—a separation that can, as we
shall see, give rise to considerable anxiety—self-fashioning acquires a
new range of meanings: it describes the practice of parents and teachers;
it is linked to manners or demeanor, particularly that of the elite; it may
suggest hypocrisy or deception, an adherence to mere outward ceremony;
it suggests representation of one’s nature or intention in speech or actions.
And with representation we return to literature, or rather we may grasp
that self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it
functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and
social life. It invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of
literary characters, the shaping of one’s own identity, the experience of
being molded by forces outside one’s control, the attempt to fashion other
selves. (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 3)
Greenblatt’s case study is Thomas More, a figure whose success at court was founded on an identity he carefully tailored in his self-representation. The records we have of Moll
Frith’s attempts at representing herself in words are suspect at best, when it comes to their authorship, but as Greenblatt asserts, the fashioning of an identity is never bounded by the subject’s own initiatives.28 In the case of Moll Frith, popular identity is as much a
purposeful, habitual action on the continuum between good and bad, then character can be shaped by a change of “habit.” 28 The voice of Moll Frith is represented with some frequency between 1610 and 1662, but it is doubtful that the words actually attributed to her were ever spoken by her voluntarily, if at all. A glance at the syntax of the Life and Times diary account (see Randall S. Nakayama, ed.) does not support the notion that the account was dictated, and there is no particular reason to suppose that Moll Frith was literate (I am indebted to Ian Archer for this suggestion). 130 matter of what was said and written about her as it was the result of what she may have said, or done, herself.
The historical Moll Frith became the subject of a great deal of writing, talking, and storytelling in the early seventeenth century. As a result, the story of Moll Frith began to grow and multiply in the hands of playwrights, poets, pamphleteers, private citizens, the legal system, and the popular culture of the city. What survives from this period of activity is a handful of published instances—plays, poems, letters, short narratives, and court records—of that growth and multiplication. By looking closely at some of these instances, we can make a case for the importance of the popular stage as both an originary and a dominating force in determining the public social and historical experience of Moll Frith. In particular, it can be argued that Middleton and Dekker’s The
Roaring Girl likely played a critical early role in bringing a breaking story, an emergent cultural phenomenon, to the cultural mainstream and making Mary Frith the object of popular attention. The play was able via the agency of the popular stage to accommodate the emergent social energies surrounding Moll’s growing reputation in a way that dominant cultural institutions like the court system were not. In doing so, its particular take on her character, its “fashioning” of her story, achieved a kind of dominance over other narrative constructions and became a narrative reference point.
II. Fashioning Moll Frith
The first Moll Frith narrative to be considered here is the Consistory Court’s transcript of Moll’s appearance in the court on January 27, 1612, to answer to various charges of indecency. Paul Mulholland gives the following text: 131
Officium Domini contra Mariam ffrithe
This day & place the sayd Mary appeared personally & then & there voluntarily confessed that she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places in this Cittie as namely she hath vsually in the habite of a man resorted to alehowses Tavernes Tobacco shops & also to play howses there to see plaies & pryses & namely being at a playe about 3 quarters of a yeare since at the ffortune in mans apparell & in her bootes & with a sword by her syde, she told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should finde that she is a woman & some other immodest & lascivious speaches she also vsed at that time And also sat there vppon the stage in the publique viewe of all the people there presente in mans apparrell & playd vppon her lute & sange a songe. And she further confessed that she hath for this longe time past vsually blasphemed & dishonored the name of God by swearing & cursing & by tearing God out of his kingdome yf it were possible, & hath also vsually associated her selfe with Ruffinly swaggering & lewd company as namely with cut purses blasphemous drunkardes & others of bad note & of most dissolute behavior with whom she hath to the great shame of her sexe often tymes (as she said) drunke hard & distempered her heade with drinke And further confesseth that since she was punished for the misdemeanors afore mentioned in Bridewell she was since vpon
Christmas day at night taken in Powles Church with her peticoate tucked 132
vp about her in the fashion of a man with a mans cloake on her to the great
scandall of diuers persons who vnderstood the same & to the disgrace of
all womanhood And she sayeth & protesteth that she is heartely sory for
her foresayd licentious & dissolute lyfe & giveth her earnest promise to
carry & behave her selfe ever from hence forwarde honestly soberly &
woman
her misdemeanors afor
assigned her by the Lo: Bishop of London her Ordinary. And then she
being pressed to declare whether she had not byn dishonest of her body &
hath not also drawne other women to lewdnes by her perswasions & by
carrying her self lyke a bawde, she absolutely denied that she was
chargeable with eyther of these imputacions And therevppon his Lordship
thought fit to remand her to Bridewell from whence she nowe came vntill
he might further examine the truth of the misdemeanors inforced against
her without laying as yet any further censure vppon her. (Mulholland, ed.,
The Roaring Girl, Appendix E, 262-263)
The Consistory of London Correction Book, along with the other legal records, seeks to represent Moll in an institution already assigned to arraign her activities. That is, the court might profit by creative distortion or exaggeration of “facts” in this case, but not in the same sense as a commercial publication that stands to profit by embellishing and glamorizing Moll’s transgressive behavior. Yet, the Consistory account, as I will show, is a meticulously articulated piece, particularly mindful of the structure of its record and very interested in the voice it presents. The record does appear to seek a specific kind of 133 narrative from Moll as a product of the court proceedings. The statements from Moll are cast as voluntary “confessions,” which should invite skepticism: “This day & place the sayd Mary voluntarily confessed that she had long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places in this Cittie as namely she hath vsually in the habite of a man resorted to alehowses Tavernes Tobacco shops & also to play howses there to see plaies & pryses.” The phrase “voluntarily confessed” clearly suggests not only that the information to follow was offered without compulsion, but also that the confessor herself has recognized, through “confession,” that the activities recounted are of a generally unlawful character. A deed that is “confessed” in a court of law is always already condemned. Moreover, a voluntary confession presumably entails the subject’s own words. The text of this interrogation, however, sounds as if it is trying to establish the domain of Mary’s transgression in terms of punishable offenses. “Resorting” to alehouses and “frequenting . . . disorderly and licentious” places is the language of litigation, not of confession. It is the language of wrongdoing, culpability, blame, recognized offense—and, implicitly, a recognized need to reform.
The voluntary confession also transfers agency and willingness to the subject, rather than leaving it with her interlocutors. Mary becomes the vehicle of her own arraignment, which the court then appears merely to record. It is as if the court wants to erase its own role in the construction of the relevant facts in order to make its assessment of those facts more sound. That the narrative is immediately, almost anxiously advertised as a voluntary confession invites us to suppose just the opposite, in fact. Later in the record, Mary, “being pressed to declare whether she had not byn dishonest of her body & hath not also drawne other women to lewdness by her perswasions” denies it 134
“absolutely.” One notes the progression of offenses established by the record to this point—from drunkenness to cross dressing to prostitution—and wonders how voluntary the preceding declarations have in fact been. The outline of a set piece of the prosecution begins to emerge: Mary confesses “namely” one thing, but she “further” confesses others that follow in kind, after which she confesses still further and further, until she is
“pressed to declare” whether the pattern of transgression “hath not also” included prostitution and sexual corruption. The court appears to have a kind of categorical violation in mind, and it urges Moll to accept all of the associate components. As drinking goes with fencing and with swearing and with quarelling, so cross-dressing goes with frequenting ale houses, consorting with delinquent company, and eventually, by this declension, with prostitution and bawdry.29 The “narrative” here is constructed by the
court, rather than by Moll. It is not likely “voluntary” at all so much as it is a
construction to which Moll submitted in the court. This is Moll Frith according to the
Consistory Court of London.
The second half of the opening sentence moves to the “main” offense to be
arraigned. Mary Frith had appeared on the stage at the Fortune theater sometime in early
1611, for which she had been sent to Bridewell:
Namely being at a playe about 3 quarters of a yeare since at the ffortune in
mans apparell & in her bootes & with a sword by her syde, she told the
company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that
she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should
29 I take the notion of “declension” from Polonius, in 2.2 of Hamlet: Hamlet “fell into a sadness, then into a fast, / Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, / Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension, / Into the madness wherein now he raves” (2.2.147-150). The idea is of progress along a certain line from one 135
finde that she is a woman & some other immodest & lascivious speaches
she also vsed at that time And also sat there vppon the stage in the
publique viewe of all the people there presente in mans apparrell & playd
vppon her lute & sange a songe.
This particular portion of the account has occasioned a good deal of scholarship and speculation, and it is well to consider it carefully. The account draws attention first of all to Moll’s dress. It is perhaps more difficult for moderns to grasp the absurdity of Moll’s dressing habits, especially because cross-dressing is a much more familiar idea, and perhaps experience, today. But given the context, Moll’s behavior was considerably more radical than that of her twentieth-century counterparts, and not only because she was violating gender prescriptions. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sumptuary laws regulated dressing within gender boundaries, as well, and dressing outside of one’s station involved a broader range of subversive associations. Mary Frith was not necessarily violating class boundaries or laws specifically proscribing cross-dressing,30
but she was challenging a more extensively structured set of sartorial conventions than
today’s cross-dressers. It is not surprising, then, that most accounts of Moll tend to
foreground this aspect of her behavior. The Consistory record clearly has an interest in
this cross dressing, because it needs to be itemized and corrected. The piece opens with a
particular state to another, related particular state in a series. For Hamlet, it is from sadness to madness, while for Moll, it is from boyish (that is, non-feminine) behavior to bawdry and prostitution. 30 According to Randall S. Nakayama, “sumptuary legislation had no provisions concerning cross- dressing,” though it was apparently a well-debated topic (Nakayama 43, n. 3). Paul Mulholland notes, in his edition of The Roaring Girl, that sumptuary laws were repealed in 1603 (134, n. 14), and Stephen Orgel observes that “sumptuary legislation concerned itself with violations of class, not violations of gender” (“The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl” 14). Orgel also notes that the repeal of sumptuary laws as matters of civil law “did not mean that there were no longer any sumptuary regulations” but rather “only transferred the jurisdiction over questions of appropriate dress” to ecclesiastical courts (Impersonations 98). For an argument that sumptuary laws did, in fact, prohibit cross-dressing, see Marjorie Garber, “Logic of the 136 mention of Moll “in the habite of a man,” and toward the middle of the passage, Moll is again charged with improper dressing: “since she was punished for the misdemeanors afore mentioned in Bridewell she was since vpon Christmas day at night taken in Powles
Church wth her peticoate tucked vp about her in the fashion of a man wth a mans cloake on her to the great scandal of diuers persons who vnderstood the same & to the disgrace of all womanhood.” This charge stands by itself, implicitly indictable apart from any other behavior. Moll going “in the habite of a man” was strikingly preposterous, and it seems to have been unusually disturbing.31 It is the focus of Thomas Freeman’s
“Epigram 90,” it is noted in Chamberlain’s letter, it plays a prominent role in The
Roaring Girl, the Life, and “The Woman’s Champion,” and it is the entire basis of the
topical allusion to Moll in John Taylor the Water Poet’s “A Prodigal Country Gallant.” It
is a component, if not a cornerstone, of every significant allusion to Moll between the
John Day book, where Moll’s “man’s attire” is mentioned in the subtitle, to 1719’s Lives
of the Most Famous Highwaymen, which closely follows the account of Moll’s dress set
forth in The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith.
But in the Consistory book, it is the special target of legal investigation. Paul
Mulholland suggests that Chamberlain’s use in February 1612 of the past tense when he
describes Moll’s dressing habits—”Mal Cut-purse…that used to go in mans apparel”—is
evidence that she might have given up her cross-dressing under pressure from the
Consistory court. Regardless of whether this is true, it can be surmised that the court
equated cross-dressing with indecent behavior “to the disgrace of all womanhood,” and
Transvestite” 222 and Vested Interests 21-40. Regardless of the letter of the law, it is plainly evident that Moll’s own cross-dressing is a direct cause of her punishment at Paul’s Cross. 31 Presumably, Moll was not alone in her habit. Phillip Stubbes lists cross-dressing among the abuses of apparel in his Anatomie of Abuses, and the anonymous pamphlet Hic Mulier defends the practice. 137 that the penance Moll later performed at St. Paul’s cross—in a white sheet, if the account claiming to be her diary is to be believed—was meant in part to atone for dressing as a man.
Mulholland also suggests that Moll’s appearance at the Fortune “in mans apparel
& in her bootes & with a sword by her side” might in fact have happened as part of a performance of The Roaring Girl, since Moll’s character is so dressed throughout most of the play. The suggestion is interesting, though extremely unlikely to be true. One wants to expect that the Consistory court would have adopted a more specific policy about so unusual an event. Moll may have had company as a London cross-dresser, but an
English woman on a public English stage playing a role in an English play is all but unheard of in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, as far as we know, and so daring a move would presumably have occasioned more than an oblique description in the court records.32 More likely is the conjecture that Moll participated in some sort of non-
dramatic entertainment outside of the play proper, wearing her customary male garb.
Indeed, the account moves immediately on to Moll’s “imodest and lascivious” speech:
“she told the company there present yt she thought many of them were of opinion yt she
was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should finde that she is a
woman & some other imodest & lascivious speeches she also used at yt time.” Lewdness
in speech follows disgrace in dressing. Their proximity in the account, or perhaps the
simple fact that they are two details apparently fit to set down, encourages association
between them. The general theme is that Moll’s behavior is unbecoming of women, and
32 Stephen Orgel advises caution on this assumption (see Impersonations, chapter 2), but popular, public drama during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods seems not to have featured professional actresses. If Moll had played herself in The Roaring Girl, the event surely would have been alongside her other indiscretions. 138 its component pieces acquire a similar valence accordingly. This is the beginning of the progression that will proceed to drinking, keeping questionable company, and eventually to suspicions of bawdry and prostitution.
The indecency of appearing on the stage in men’s clothing seems to be tied to its public character. Moll sat “vppon the stage in the publique viewe of all the people there presente in mans apparrell & played vppon her lute & sange a songe.” The court’s concern covers the cross-dressing and the appearance on the stage individually, but it returns time and again to the indecency of Moll’s public comport, which is “to the great shame of her sexe.” Something about the public spectacle of it all makes it pronouncedly more disgraceful. If a woman had no place in men’s clothes, or unaccompanied at a theater, she certainly didn’t have any business in a jerkin and breeches on the public stage at the Fortune. Moll’s behavior is the more scandalous because it is showcased in front of an audience. Her public appearance at the theater is fitly echoed in what is probably the Consistory Court’s assigned penance: Moll appeared shortly after at a public Sunday sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in a white sheet, which was meant to shame her. The voice in the Diary claims that “they might as soon have shamed a black dog as me with any kind of such punishment” (Nakayama 43). The public shaming in a white sheet matches the public indecency of men’s apparel.
The next section of the Consistory account addresses Moll’s behavior generally, apart from the specific incident at the Fortune theater in early 1611:
She further confessed that she hath for this longe time past vsually
blasphemed & dishonored the name of God by swearing & cursing & by
tearing God out of his kingdome yf it were possible, & hath also vsually 139
associated her selfe with Ruffinly swaggering & lewd company as namely
with cut purses blasphemous drunkardes & others of bad note & of most
dissolute behavior with whom she hath to the great shame of her sexe
often tymes (as she said) drunke hard & distempered her heade with
drinke.
The general picture here is familiar. Moll has made a habit of swearing, swaggering, keeping company with drunkards and thieves, and drinking heavily herself. This establishment of a licentious background helps cast the transgression under immediate consideration in a particular light: Moll Frith’s antics at the theater are shown to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. At the outset, the record suggests a pattern—Moll has “long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places” in the city—and then proceeds with what Moll is “namely” charged with. Here and in the next section of the record we hear her confessing to further misdeeds, building to a kind of crescendo after which Moll
sayeth & protesteth that she is heartely sory for her foresayd licentious &
dissolute lyfe & giveth her earnest promise to carry & behave her selfe
ever from hence forwarde honestly soberly & woman
ready to vndergo any censure or punishement for her misdemeanors
afor
Bishop of London her Ordinary.
Again, whether Moll voluntarily voiced any of these sentiments cannot be known, but if the court is pressing for a particular kind of narrative, this last protestation would serve as an appropriate conclusion. Moll, penitent, has realized the error of her ways; she is 140 heartily sorry for her behavior and resolved to reform herself. Specifically, she pledges herself to lead a sober and womanly lifestyle, the perfect structural complement to her offenses.
The remainder of the record, discussed above, details Moll’s denial of prostitution and bawdry. Both charges seem to have been leveled at her in some fashion in popular opinion, and the matter of prostitution is addressed directly by Middleton and Dekker.
Moll’s being “pressed to declare” whether she was guilty of prostitution or bawdry is somewhat peculiar: it comes after what looks like a resolution to the case, and it is the one “charge” for which the court session apparently had no previously established evidence. But its effectiveness as a containing move in a strategic battle to preserve the justice system’s authority over Moll’s subversive potential becomes clear when we read the Consistory Court’s record of Moll’s confession as a legal construction of a criminal personality. It is a prime example of the voice of a counter-cultural or “emergent” phenomenon as spoken by the “dominant” state apparatus. It establishes guilt, a recognition of fault, a willing submission to appropriate punishment, and a vow to reformation—a structurally perfect story for the justice system, erasing the agency of the court via a voluntary confession and complete with a happy ending. It is the London government’s way of colonizing an oppositional cultural movement through interpellation. The subversive power of Moll’s voice is neutralized as the court system picks the voice’s register, vocabulary, and context and constructs not a mysterious, unclassifiable movement in the margins of society, but a fully charted and comprehended minor criminal whose transgressions are thereby contained. The court’s biggest struggle, therefore, is not to catch and reform Moll Frith, but to comprehend her subversive 141 potential in the established criminal models at its disposal. Moll’s unclassified social energy is far more dangerous before it has been named and filed—classified by the penal system. Her greatest potential threat as an emergent cultural phenomenon is neutralized only when the state can find a model over which to stretch her behavior so that it assumes a recognizable shape. By casting her case as a matter of immodest behavior and drunkenness, the court confines her threat to already-established avenues that it can patrol efficiently.33 Its last accusation, of prostitution and bawdry, is best read not as the court fearing the worst, but rather as the court’s checkmate move to ensure that Moll’s transgression is entirely contained, not only in the here and now, but also in the future.
For the moment, it has established that her subversion is classifiable as immodest and licentious, but its future potential can only be contained when the court establishes its only possible destination: prostitution and bawdry. In the eyes of the state, Moll can now become nothing more than a sex offender.
A letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton dated February 12, 1612,
offers an account of what is probably Moll’s penance at St. Paul’s Cross, as assessed by
the Consistory Court. N. E. McClure gives the text in The Letters of John Chamberlain:
The Lady of Shrewsberie is still in the Towre rather upon wilfulnes, then
upon any great matter she is charged withal : only the King is resolute that
she shall aunswer to certain interrogatories, and she is as obstinate to make
none, nor to be examined. The other weeke a younge mignon of Sir Pexall
Brockas did penance at Paules Crosse, whom he had entertained and
33 Susan Krantz makes a similar point, though she reads the court’s behavior as a kind of shoulder- shrugging more than as an aggressive move of containment: “the court really had no term for what she was, so it reinscribed her behavior in terms that corresponded to the established cultural binary of gender” (6). 142
abused since she was twelve yeares old and this last Sonday Mall Cut-
purse a notorious bagage (that used to go in mans apparell and challenged
the feild of divers gallants) was brought to the same place, where she wept
bitterly and seemed very penitent, but yt is since doubted she was
maudelin druncke, beeing discovered to have tipled of three quarts of
sacke before she came to her penaunce : she had the daintiest preacher or
ghostly father that ever I saw in pulpit, one Ratcliffe of Brazen Nose in
Oxford, a likelier man to have led the revells in some ynne of court then to
be where he was, but the best is he did extreem badly, and so wearied the
audience that the best part went away, and the rest taried rather to heare
Mall Cutpurse then him. Sir Thomas Bodley hath gotten a graunt of the
Stationers to have one copie of every booke that shalbe printed for his
librarie, and hath prevayled with Sir John Bennet to undertake the building
of the schooles at Oxford, by collections from frends, and with the help of
commutations and legacies to pious uses belonging to his office. I know
not whether you have heard that Dr. Maxie is Deane of Windsor : or that
Charles Paget is dead, and left a goode state to certain nephewes by his
sister. (334-335)
I have included material immediately on either side of the account of Moll’s penance in order to suggest the tone and context of the letter. Moll’s is not the only penance
Chamberlain observed, and it is here coupled with another presumably scandalous affair atoned for at Paul’s Cross. The relation of Bodley’s grant that follows the section about
Moll—interesting now for reasons entirely independent of Moll—and the news of Dr. 143
Maxie and Charles Paget are good indications of the current-event status of Moll’s story.
If the Moll material stands out, it is only because of its length; otherwise, all of these items are treated with the same attitude. McClure notes of the letters in general that
Chamberlain “wrote of matters that he thought would be interesting to Carleton as a man, not as a diplomatist, and since Carleton was his trusted friend, he wrote frankly all that he saw and heard, all that was most talked about in London” (2).34 Chamberlain, Carleton’s
elder by some twenty years, apparently served Carleton in the office of friend, confidant,
and advisor. By 1612, Carleton was stationed as English ambassador at Venice, and
Chamberlain was regularly sending him local and national news. This context makes
clear the informal, almost private tenor of the account, in opposition to the more public
literary and legal sources. It is the observation of a person connected to Moll neither in a
commercial capacity, as those who have something to gain in telling her story, or in a
litigious sense, as those who record the events of legal processes. Thus, Chamberlain’s
account probably reflects popular conception of current events better than any of the
other sources, and what his account corroborates is valuable, insofar as it suggests a
reality on which other accounts embellish or from which they diverge.
At the close of the court session, according to its record, Moll was returned to
Bridewell, while the court deliberated. The twenty-seventh of January 1612 was a
Monday, and the twelfth of February—the date of Chamberlain’s letter—was a
Wednesday. Chamberlain places Moll’s penance “this last Sonday,” which must then
either have been the ninth of February, and otherwise the second of February, depending
on what is meant by “last” Sunday and on what day the passage in question was written.
34 For a summary account of Chamberlain’s life and relationship with Dudley Carleton, see the introduction to N. E. McClure’s The Letters of John Chamberlain. 144
The penance is corroborated by the Diary, which mentions a sentence “to stand and do
Penance in a White Sheet at Pauls Cross during morning Sermon on a Sunday”
(Nakayama 43). More interesting is Chamberlain’s appraisal of Moll. He refers to her as
“a notorious bagage (that used to go in mans apparel and challenged the field of divers gallants).” Even so small a phrase as “notorious baggage” is wonderfully illuminating.
The OED lists “well or widely known” as current for “notorious” in the seventeenth century, often with the expected negative overtones. This usage suggests that Moll was well-known, and that her renown was linked to her questionable behavior. “Baggage” is likewise interesting. The OED offers “a worthless good-for nothing woman; a woman of disreputable or immoral life, a strumpet,” which fits the court’s depiction of Moll as
“imodest” well enough, serving also the vague association with prostitution or loose sexuality. The phrase together is clear in its indication. Moll was a well-known public figure in February 1612, though perhaps not so well known to be mentioned in passing without elaboration. At least, for someone like Dudley Carleton, who spent time in
London only occasionally, Moll was a figure whose story was newsworthy but that did not stand on its own as common knowledge.
The foregrounded information is familiar: Moll dresses in men’s apparel.
Mulholland’s suggestion that the past tense “used to go” reflects her having given up cross-dressing is questionable, since the phrase, if meant to signify a change, implies that the forsaken habit had been out of use for some time. According to the Consistory Court, though, Moll was “taken in Powles Church wth her peticoate tucked vp about her in the fashion of a man wth a mans cloake on her” as recently as the Christmas day just past.
The question of whether she had or had not abandoned her cross-dressing aside, the 145
Chamberlain letter is further evidence that it was an important component of her popular legend.
What is new in this account is the vague allusion to Moll “challeng[ing] the feild of divers gallants.” Some of the biographical accounts mention Moll’s swordsmanship, and The Roaring Girl transforms her valor into a full-blown dramatic spectacle, but the particulars of this facet of her masculine behavior remain quite vague. Alexander Smith has her wounding General Fairfax and killing two of his horses during a robbery, but this anecdote is almost surely apocryphal, and Chamberlain’s non-specific phrase, challenging “the feild of divers gallants,” provides the only third-person reference we have to Moll’s gallantry. As with “go[ing] in mans apparel,” “challeng[ing] the field of divers gallants” is something Moll “used” to do, and both statements are given in a parenthesis, effectively making them background information. The strong suggestion here is that both pieces of information are useful knowledge for a person would not likely know the curious details of Moll’s reputation.
Also notable in the letter is the jibe at “one Ratcliffe of Brazen Nose in Oxford, a likelier man to have led the revells in some ynne of court then to be where he was.”
According to Chamberlain, he was not especially suited to the task of overseeing Moll’s penance, and in any case, “he did extreem badly, and so wearied the audience that the best part went away, and the rest taried rather to heare Mall Cutpurse then him.” Among
Ratcliffe’s shortcomings as a master of ceremonies was an inability to captivate the crowd, the greater part of whom left before the penance was complete. Those who did stay, Chamberlain supposes, did so to see Moll. Chamberlain gives us the clear sense of an “audience” of people who witnessed Moll’s penance and who, in Chamberlain’s 146 characterization, appear to have been spectacle-seeking. Two inferences may be drawn here. First, the spectacle-seeking crowd, like Chamberlain himself, was a fixture at St.
Paul’s, and second, Moll was sufficiently compelling as a penitent to keep the attention of at least a portion of that crowd. The cathedral was the social and news hub of the city, and Paul’s Cross, in the northeast corner of the churchyard, was a common site for the treatment of public issues, including shamings, like Moll’s and like that of the “younge mignon of Sir Pexall Brockas.” The crowd expected a performance, which Ratcliffe failed to deliver. Moll, however, constituted a draw of her own. She was likely already a familiar figure to some spectacle-seekers at St. Paul’s—Sebastian Wengrave notes at line
1.2.100-101 of The Roaring Girl that “a whole city takes / Note of her name and person”—as her penance was performed but a month and a half after her most recent public transgression, committed on Christmas of 1611, also at St. Paul’s. The comment about Ratcliffe’s inability to keep an audience derives much of its force from the implication that Moll had succeeded where he had failed.
Moll’s “performance” at Paul’s Cross resonates nicely with the Consistory report of her contrite posture in the court. She “seemed very penitent” at Paul’s, just as she had been “heartely sory for her foresayd licentious & dissolute lyfe” in court. If the rumor of
Moll’s having tippled of a quantity of sack beforehand is true, both moments of contrition look indeed like performances, and one wonders whether Moll was not an accomplished actress off the stage. Though I have argued that the Consistory Court’s representation of
Moll as a penitent minor criminal was as much a construction as an objective description, it is tempting to see in Moll’s public behavior a pattern of offense and contrived penance. 147
She was in and out of litigation most of her life, and atonement would typically have required her to appear sorry for her misdeeds.
The Chamberlain letter is most useful to us as an index of public opinion. It corroborates some of the characterizations supplied in other accounts, and serves nicely as a companion piece to the Consistory Court’s proceedings of January, 1612. It does not present any unique material, nor does it raise any major questions about the historical
Mary Frith. It is essentially a passive construction of Moll Frith in that its representation is motivated presumably by its author’s perception of the newsworthiness of the incident in which Moll played a part. The sociological sketch that Chamberlain provides derives—again, presumably—from whatever he perceived as relevant or sensational facts. In other words, if we understand the Chamberlain letter as a spectator’s account of a newsworthy event related to an Englishman living abroad but interested in current events back home, we can take its assessment at face value and understand its representation of Moll as a reflection of popular opinion.
Before moving on to The Roaring Girl, we can look briefly at Thomas Freeman’s
“Epigram 90,” from Rubbe and a Great Cast, The Second Bowle:
They say Moll’s honest, and it may be so,
But yet it is a shrewd presumption, no;
To touch but pitch, ‘tis known it will defile,
Moll wears the breech, what may she be the while;
Sure she that doth the shadow so much grace,
What will she when the substance comes in place. 148
The terminus ad quem for this composition is 1614, when it was published, but it may have been written at an earlier date. Andor Gomme has suggested it could be a response to Middleton and Dekker’s play, since it seems to address an opinion of Moll similar to that peddled in The Roaring Girl—”they say Moll’s honest.” The first line of the poem offers honesty on the one hand and, on the other, its implicit, unnamed opposite, then argues that Moll’s wearing “the breech,” or breeches, is an indication to the “shrewd” observer that her substance is thereby defiled. Just as touching pitch will “defile,” so a woman’s wearing breeches must do analogous damage to her honesty. The epigram aligns itself, in terms of judgment, with the Consistory Court’s account of Moll, and with the Chamberlain letter. Whatever may be said in her defense, the “shrewd presumption” about Moll is that she is, in fact, not “honest.” Given the period’s concern with female sexuality, it is not surprising that behavior as aberrant as Moll’s should consistently occasion the same fears and suspicions.
The closing couplet sets up an interesting contrast between “shadow” and
“substance” to suggest that Moll’s outside, her habits, must be a reflection of a stable inner being. For the epigram, Moll “is” a certain way, and though the arrival of her
“substance” is deferred, it remains a possibility. From a literary theoretical standpoint, the arrival of Moll’s substance is eternally deferred, not only because a fuller historical understanding of the historical figure “Mary Frith” is unrecoverable, but also because a stable self, what Freeman calls the “substance” of a person, is in fact a fiction, however useful; it is an epistemological tool that we use to breath life into identity narratives, into characters, both in everyday experience and on the stage. Of course this realization that
“identity is itself a fiction or construct” was, as we have seen, available in the early 149 modern period as well. Accordingly, the epigram does return us to the notion that there is a crucial connection between fashion and substance—between the mutability of dress and the mutability of the self. Wearing breeches here serves metonymically for the perception that Moll has generally debased herself and the female gender, but the poem’s central trope is more specific, implicitly comparing the defiling potential of pitch to that of clothing. Both affect the substance underneath. “Epigram 90” thus recalls similar moments in Joseph Beaumont and the mysterious “C. G.,” in which fashion-mongering disfigures and mis-shapes. The pursuit of fashion—of which Moll is guilty, albeit in a peculiar way—can actually come to bear on the substance it adorns. The fashion-monger disfigures or misshapes his or her being by meddling excessively with outward appearance. Fashion, the manipulation of appearance, invokes fashionability, the fundamental malleability of the self.
The Roaring Girl is arguably the most striking fashioning of Moll Frith’s character. Of the major narratives considered here, it is easily the most widely known, now as it most likely was in the seventeenth century. The play takes the form of a city comedy, but its title character is the principal focus. The city comedy form is, in fact, little more than a vehicle for Middleton and Dekker’s exploration and celebration of Moll
Frith as a dramatic heroine. From Prologue to Epilogue the play’s concern is with the dramatic possibilities of so interesting a topical figure, and the plot, which undoes itself in the second scene, is something of a pretense.35 T. S. Eliot assessed the play: “In The
35 The plot that initiates the dramatic action is Sebastian’s device to force his father to condone Sebastian’s marriage to Mary Fitzallard. Sebastian will pretend to pursue Moll Frith instead of Mary until Sir Alexander concedes to bless the better of two disadvantageous matches. Early in the first act, Sebastian confronts Sir Alexander, who claims to have “wooed” his “fond” son to marry Mary Fitzallard. Sebastian calls his bluff and demands, “Give me Fitzallard’s daughter!”, but Sir Alexander declines: “I’ll give thee ratsbane rather!” (1.2.169). Both men show their hands early in act one, and yet the play continues. 150
Roaring Girle we read with toil through a mass of cheap conventional intrigue, and suddenly realize that we are, and have been for some time without knowing it, observing a real and unique human being” (“Thomas Middleton” 85). The “conventional intrigue” is a set of standard plot devices and stock characters adapted from Roman comedy.
There is a senex figure (Sir Alexander Wengrave), a braggart soldier (Trapdoor), a pair of young lovers (Sebastian and Mary), and a vain and foppish gull (Jack Dapper). The sub- plot features a selection of city-types, including various gallants, citizens, and citizen’s wives. As Sebastian schemes in the foreground of the play to find a way to circumvent his father’s objection to his love choice, citizens, gallants, and fops mingle in the background, where the lecherous Laxton attempts multiple seductions.
Moll herself36 is the “real and unique human being.” Eliot’s language sits
awkwardly in the contemporary academic climate, though his response to the character of
Moll is indicative of her dramatic power. She is a successful collision of different New-
and City-comedy figures. For Northrop Frye, who, in his well-known essay “The
Argument of Comedy,” outlines the basic borrowings of early modern drama from
classical New Comedy, she would qualify as the “efficient cause,” since she helps the
primary plot to its resolution (Frye 59). Her Roman New Comedy ancestor is the “tricky
slave,” which Frye notes was a modified vice figure in the early modern drama (59). But
Moll is also clearly a “chaste maid” figure bizarrely mingled with strains of the city-
comedy prostitute. Alexander Leggatt contrasts the city comedy character types of chaste
maid and vicious whore:
36 From this point forward in my discussion, “Moll,” unless otherwise noted, refers to the title character of The Roaring Girl, and not to the historical Moll Frith. 151
The stereotype [of chaste maid or vicious whore], in other words, seems
difficult to break. But it does break, with a satisfying crash, in Middleton
and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl . . . where female chastity is embodied,
not in a virtuous shopgirl, but in Moll Cutpurse, whose racy speech and
intimate knowledge of the underworld might seem more appropriate to a
conventional whore. The theatrical surface of one figure is superimposed
on the moral values of the other, and the result establishes that virtue is not
merely a matter of conventional images. (109)
The cumulative effect of character-combinations does not necessarily make Moll Frith unparalleled in city comedy, nor does The Roaring Girl transform its genre or revolutionize the use of character types in early modern drama. But it does, as I will argue, illustrate the simultaneously central and marginal cultural status of the popular theater; through Moll as a “both/and” figure, it demonstrates how dominant and emergent cultural energies converge on the space of the stage.
If not unparalleled in popular drama, the character of Moll Frith in the play is a unique blend of city comedy stock characters. “A roaring girl, whose notes till now never were, / Shall fill with laughter our vast theatre,” the play’s Prologue tells us.
Laughter is as much as the dramatists will guarantee: “that’s all which I dare promise; tragic passion, / And such grave stuff, is this day out of fashion” (“Prologue” 9-12). In delivering a comedy, the play admits it is bowing to fashion, echoing a sentiment offered to readers in the Epistle. The dramatists’ tractability with regard to public taste quickly gives way to the tractability of the drama, however, as the Prologue previews the titular character. Of the “roaring girl” character type, the play tells us, “there are many”: 152
. . . One is she
That roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls,
That beats the watch, and constables controls;
Another roars i’th’ day-time, swears, stabs, gives braves,
Yet sells her soul to the lust of fools and slaves:
Both these are suburb-roarers. Then there’s besides
A civil, city-roaring girl, whose pride,
Feasting, and riding, shakes her husband’s state,
And leaves him roaring through an iron gate.
(“Prologue” 16-24)
This brief catalogue of roaring girl types is slightly awkward. The implication is that
“roaring girls” are not at all an unfamiliar breed in London, and yet the passage notes at the outset that each audience member arrives “and brings a play in’s head with him,” with details of “what he would of a roaring girl have writ,” suggesting that the “roaring girl” has hitherto been only a hypothetical character type (3-5). The first fifteen lines of the
Prologue are an apology, a standard dramatic device excusing the play and the dramatists in the event that the play does not please. On the stage, in any case, this is the debut of the roaring girl character type:
None of these roaring girls is ours: she flies
With wings more lofty. Thus her character lies—
Yet what need characters, when to give a guess
Is better than the person to express?
But would you know who ‘tis? Would you hear her name?— 153
She is called Mad Moll; her life our acts proclaim!
(“Prologue” 25-30)
Moll is different from these various roaring-girl character types; she is “more lofty.” The word “character” suggests to twentieth-century readers a dramatic character, and so the passage seems to cut itself off just before it begins to discuss the dramatic incarnation of
Moll Frith. But as Mulholland points out, “the ‘fictional personality’ sense was not yet current” in the early seventeenth century, and “character” here refers to a set of personality traits, such as those listed for suburb-roarers and city-roarers above (77 n. 26).
The prologue has “expressed” other roaring girls by describing them; for Moll, it will proceed instead to “give a guess,” or present her on the stage as a dramatic “character.”
After this tantalizing introduction, the play keeps Moll off stage until the second act. The build-up is dramatically effective. Sebastian and Sir Alexander each previews
Moll as he sees her, providing the audience with two principal possibilities for understanding her character. For Sir Alexander, she is “a creature . . . nature hath brought forth / to mock the sex of woman” (1.2.127-128). Fixated on her ambiguous gender and sexuality, Sir Alexander’s viewpoint represents the polar extreme of public disapproval. For him, Moll is “woman more than man, / Man more than woman”
(1.2.129-130), and yet also a “cutpurse drab” (1.2.172); her gender is complexly undecidable, and yet she is a thieving whore, as well. Sebastian’s introduction is less invested. In the course of detailing his plan to defeat his father, he describes Moll to
Mary:
. . . There’s a wench
Called Moll, Mad Moll, or Merry Moll, a creature 154
So strange in quality, a whole city takes
Note of her name and person . . .
(1.2.98-102)
Sebastian’s preview is short and almost neutral in tone, and not nearly as enthusiastic as
Sir Alexander’s is severe. Yet, compared to Sir Alexander’s description, it is clearly positive. Here, “wench” and “creature” appear affectionate, rather than derisive, and, in the context of the introductory matter from the Epistle and Prologue, Sebastian’s viewpoint represents the celebratory approach to Moll, stressing how “mad” and “merry” she is. Given the play’s title and Prologue, there can be only so much mystery in whether the play will celebrate or disparage Moll, but the tension established in act one is substantive. When Moll first enters, in the second act, the play’s three gallants are the first to respond to her in person:
Enter MOLL in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard.
Goshawk. Life, yonder’s Moll.
Laxton. Moll? Which Moll?
Goshawk. Honest Moll.
Laxton. Prithee let’s call her. – Moll!
All Gallants. Moll, Moll, pist, Moll!
(1.2.175-179)
The stage direction is crucial in establishing Moll’s appearance. She is wearing attire associated exclusively with men—the jerkin, a kind of coat—and attire associated exclusively with women—the safeguard, which women wore to protect their clothes while riding. She is instantly spectacular, even before she is addressed by the gallants. 155
Goshawk and Laxton’s exchange is difficult to read precisely, but the fact that Goshawk answers “honest Moll” to Laxton’s question “which Moll?” seems to call for earnestness.
If Sir Alexander’s assessment of the name “Moll” is accurate, then Goshawk’s exclamation, “life, yonder’s Moll,” might load Laxton’s response as specifically salacious. “For seek all London from one end to t’other / More whores of that name than of any ten other,” notes Sir Alexander, and Sebastian’s defense—”is that name the worse
/ Where honesty sits possessed in’t?”—only enforces the notion that “Moll” was a common name for prostitutes (2.2.154-155; 164-165).
Goshawk’s “honest Moll,” then, probably serves to distinguish Moll Frith from whatever dishonest Molls Laxton might expect to have encountered. That Laxton then delivers a lengthy aside in which he fantasizes about Moll’s promiscuity and sexual voraciousness could complicate the audience’s picture of Moll, but Laxton, as we will see, is the first victim in a series of challenges to Moll from which she emerges virtuous and victorious. The play continuously indulges sexual innuendos and keeps Moll dramatically submerged in sexualized contexts while systematically demonstrating her honesty and chastity. As Susan Krantz has noted, “at every opportunity, the playwrights displace the negative social reading of Moll and replace them with a positive ideal” (15).
In fact, they manufacture such opportunities to illustrate that “Honest Moll” is an accurate clarification. The fact that Trapdoor is also referred to as “honest Ralph” seems to debase the term “honest,” but Moll, for all of the ambiguity and innuendo, turns out to be the genuine article.
The image of Moll developed in 2.1 accords with Chamberlain’s letter. She wears men’s apparel and challenges the field of diverse gallants, to use Chamberlain’s 156 terms. At line 254 she strikes the “fellow” who happens by, and at line 366, she trips
Trapdoor, who has just finished bragging about his stoutness. More examples are to follow, but what is established here is her basic valor. As Laxton (who is forever missing the point when it comes to Moll) assures her of his willingness to defend her physically, she confronts his proffered help with her own self-sufficiency: “do you think I cannot ride a stone-horse unless one lead him by th’snaffle?” (2.1.269-270). Laxton does not miss the double-entendre and immediately asks Moll for a meeting later in the afternoon, laying the groundwork for Moll to eke out her gallantry by establishing her chastity.
In Sir Alexander and in Laxton the play has begun to address negative elements of
Moll’s popular reputation. Sir Alexander expressly fears her sexuality, and in 2.2, he confronts Sebastian with those fears. Sebastian points out in return that Sir Alexander
“take[s] part with the world to wrong her” (2.2.135). “The world” here is a stand-in for all of the negative components of the historical Moll Frith’s popular mythology, against which the play must battle if it is to establish Moll as a heroic figure. Sebastian emerges as Moll’s first advocate. To his father’s objections to Moll’s reputation and name, he responds with reason, offering his own firsthand experience:
He hates unworthily that by rote contemns,
For the name neither saves nor yet condemns;
And for her honesty, I have made such proof on’t
In several forms, so nearly watched her ways,
I will maintain that strict against an army,
Excepting you, my father. Here’s her worst:
Sh’has a bold spirit that mingles with mankind, 157
But nothing else comes near it, and oftentimes
Through her apparel somewhat shames her birth;
But she is loose in nothing but in mirth:
Would all Molls were no worse!
(2.2.170-180)
Those who condemn Moll “by rote”—that is, by repetition, without consideration, by the memory that others have condemned her—do so unworthily. What Sebastian criticizes here is the very notion of reputation. He questions the worthiness of judging someone based on popular report or opinion. But that is, essentially, the project of the play’s characterization of Moll: it asks the audience to suspend not only what they “would of a roaring girl have writ” (“Prologue” 5), but also what they might believe of the historical
Moll Frith, as they experience her character on the stage. Sebastian, speaking on behalf of the play’s heroine, attests to her honesty, which he has proved, presumably via personal observation, “in several forms,” and which he is willing vigorously to affirm.
His two principal concessions about Moll—her boldness of spirit and her dress—are offered as quirks, rather than perversions, and the concession is coupled with a mitigating nod to her “mirth.” He places her transgressive energy in the ameliorative context of merriness, invoking a common dramatic justification of a character’s questionable behavior.37 Thus Sebastian describes the Moll we have seen in the play, the dramatic
heroine of a city comedy, defending her against the popular report articulated by Sir
Alexander and held by “the world” with which he takes part in wronging her.
37 See Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare, chapter 6, “Chaste Maids and Whores.” 158
In act three, she takes center stage and defends herself. As Laxton prepares for his afternoon assignation with Moll, his own opinion of her chastity becomes even more clear. If Sir Alexander fears Moll’s sexuality, Laxton eagerly anticipates it. He hires a coach for himself and Moll at Marylebone Park, noted by most editors for its association with prostitution and usually linked to Laxton’s earlier sexual pun on “marrow bone.”38
Laxton leaves no doubts about his intentions, bantering with the coachman about the fitness of the horses and the best place to pick up Moll. Moll, of course, has different plans. She enters “like a man,”39 according to the stage directions, which may signify that she has shed her safeguard and donned the breeches she ordered in act two. The transformation—whatever its degree—has symbolic overtones, since Laxton, expecting to meet a loose woman, meets instead a stout “man” who defeats him and his hopes. “I’ll
38 See Andor Gomme, 54, n. 4; Paul Mulholland, The Roaring Girl, 133, note 4; Elizabeth Cook, 50, n. 4. 39 I do not address the much-discussed issue of male actors playing female roles. The notion that boy or young male actors playing lead female roles must have complicated in crucial and perhaps incalculable ways the sexual energies on the stage and between the stage and the audience seems to me to diminish in importance when we consider that the concern is largely our own as twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. The actual experience of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline audiences is unrecoverable, and to suppose that they were deeply affected by the ironies of men playing women dressed as men is to superimpose on those audiences our own (largely projected) experiences as audience members. It remains a topic worthy of consideration because it apparently was of some interest to sixteenth and early seventeenth-century audiences, and it is a favorite object of ironic jokes in early modern plays themselves (Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra provide classic examples). We might avoid making too much fuss over cross-casting, however, by remembering that for early modern audiences in England, the practice was absolutely standard, and that willing suspension of disbelief was invoked by playwrights with the same frequency that boy actors were made contextually ironical. If our aim is to approximate what early modern audiences might have felt about conventions of stage performances, we would be well to look for analogues in how we feel about conventions of modern stage performance: it is entirely “natural” for us for girls or women to play female roles; it is the norm. On the other hand, to cross-cast a male actor in a female role is to make a social, cultural, or meta-dramatic statement. The appearance of a female player on the popular stage in early modern London might, by analogy, have seemed rather unnatural. I do not want, however, to dismiss altogether the complexities inherent in cross-casting. Jean Howard concedes that “while in performance the fact of the boy beneath the woman’s clothes could usually have been ignored by playgoers,” but points out “it could also at any time have been brought to consciousness by a self-reflexive gesture or comment” (“Sex and Social Conflict” 175). Moreover, the broader cultural implications of boys playing women are quite significant; especially in the context of patriarchy and the construction of gender, the politics of boys playing women and of cross-dressing in general are rich and complicated. That is, setting aside sexual tensions and nuances specifically in theaters during performances, the issue is worth exploring. Stephen Orgel has investigated 159 swear I knew thee not,” says Laxton of Moll, to which Moll replies, “I’ll swear you did not: but you shall know me now!” (3.1.57-58). Perhaps “knowing” a person has carnal connotations here, but more important, Moll now invokes the notion of substance, of her
“real” identity. Laxton has mistaken Moll’s identity because her dress has obscured her person as Laxton knows it—he means, literally, that he did not recognize her. Moll’s response elevates “know” to a higher level—she means “know” in a fuller sense of “be acquainted with the personality and intent of” someone. She agrees: Laxton did not know her before, because she let him continue to believe she was willing to sell herself, corruptible by money, the “aquafortis that eats into many a maidenhead,” but now she will acquaint him with herself as she really is (2.1.195). The question of substance, of the true or real identity of the self, is a central issue in this dissertation, which makes it all the more interesting that Moll’s self-assertion here is linked with a change in costume, with her peculiar and complicated “fashion,” and with mistaken identity based on appearance.
There is a genuine, stable identity of character proposed here by Moll—it appears to us as the play’s construction of Moll Frith as comedic heroine—but that identity is confused and obscured to this point in the play by the dramatic circumstances of costume, rumor, and intention, which keep the reality of Moll’s character in doubt. Working to resolve this confusion and doubt, the play lets it build to a head (Sebastian has argued, but Moll has yet to demonstrate, that she is “honest”) and, once all of the negative assertions about
Moll’s chastity are lined up in a row, it knocks them down. Literally, Moll wishes that in
Laxton were embodied all her detractors, so that her victory over him could be a final victory over all those who slander her with base report: “would the spirits / Of all my
the cultural and material implications of cross-casting and cross-dressing in detail in Impersonations. For further considerations of the topic, see also Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction.” 160 slanderers were clasped in thine, / That I might vex an army at one time!” (3.1.114-115).
Figuratively, for us, her detractors in fact are all embodied in Laxton, and her triumph over him is a triumph over them. One dramatic episode in which the rumor of Moll’s sexual looseness is debunked stands comprehensively to represent the debunking of all such rumor, and, vanquishing Laxton, Moll demonstrates that she is as chaste as she is honest.
As Moll draws her sword and challenges Laxton, he is baffled, asking “what dost mean, Moll?” She responds:
To teach thy base thoughts manners! Thou’rt one of those
That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore:
If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee,
Turn back her head, she’s thine; or, amongst company,
By chance drink first to thee, then she’s quite gone,
There’s no means to help her; nay, for a need,
Wilt swear unto the credulous fellow lechers
That thou’rt more in favour with a lady
At first sight than her monkey all her lifetime.
How many of our sex by such as thou
Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name
That never deserved loosely or did trip
In path of whoredom beyond cup and lip?
(3.1.71-84) 161
The image Moll conjures here is remarkable. It simultaneously suggests the fragility of female reputation in the hands of a careless gallant and the casualness with which such gallants might go about slandering women. It is a graceful, if severe, criticism that contrasts the folly of men with the vulnerability of innocence, making women—and by proxy, Moll—the victims of uncaring lechers. Moll is laying the foundation of a rhetorical edifice (and edification) to complement the physical lesson she will teach
Laxton. She establishes a superiority of reason to support her indignation, giving her position a righteousness that transforms Laxton’s defeat into a symbolic defeat of all lecherous gallants:
In thee I defy all men, their worst hates
And their best flatteries, all their golden witchcrafts
With which they entangle the poor spirits of fools.
(3.1.88-94)
Just as she wishes to have all her slanderers represented in Laxton in order to defeat them all at once, so she uses him here as a metonymic representation of male deceit, witchcraft, and seduction. As a defense of women, the passage strongly suggests Moll as the complementary metonymic representation of female chastity and innocence.40 Moll
stands, curiously, as champion for the gender that, according to popular opinion and local
legend, she has debased. In Chamberlain’s letter, in the Consistory Court’s record, and in
Freeman’s epigram, Moll is a “notorious bagage” who, to the disgrace of all women, has
defiled herself by wearing men’s clothing. In the play, she is “honest Moll,” a roaring
40 Patrick Cheney has suggested that Moll’s rebuking of Laxton triggers the shopwives’ rejection of Laxton and Goshawk. In this sense, the figurative defeat of all lecherous gallants has hypostasized instances in the play itself in the shopwives subplot. See Cheney, 129. 162 wench who, to the glory of all women, symbolically defeats deceitful men and their slanderous tongues by defeating the would-be lecher Laxton.41
In its vaguely purposeful progression, the play reproduces the “declension” style
of character anatomizing pursued by the Consistory Court in its examination of Moll.
Having begun by demonstrating Moll’s bravado and chastity, the play moves in the
fourth act to establish that she is not a thief. The fact that she is not a thief is the final
component of Moll’s compound “honesty”; valor, chastity, and probity are all associated
traits, and the play links them just as the Consistory Court links disorderly conduct with
drunkenness, drunkenness with lewd company, lewd company with petty thievery, and so
forth. This is not to suggest that the play is a response to the court record, which is
clearly a later event. But the structural similarity does emphasize a similarity in
rhetorical design: where the Consistory Court moves to demonstrate Moll’s associated
vices, the play works studiously to illustrate her catalogue of virtues. Middleton and
Dekker’s stated bias, we remember from the Epistle, is to leave things better than they
found them. Arguably, they exceed the expectations they set up, as the play goes out of
its way to disprove rumors and explain away curious associations. Why? The Consistory
Court needed a villain; Middleton and Dekker need a heroine.
The Roaring Girl’s city setting, topical discourses, satiric tones, and cast of New
Comedy characters are typical of plays most often grouped in the city comedy genre. In
fact, its titular character aside, the play is remarkably formulaic in its treatment of the city
41 Frances Teague has suggested to me that part of what makes the staged Moll more attractive than the actual Moll is the fact that the staged Moll is played by a boy. The staged Moll is a conventional performance (a boy cross-dressed as a woman), and therefore acceptable, whereas the actual Moll’s behavior (a woman cross-dressed as a man) is unconventional and variously problematic. 163 comedy structure.42 Mary Beth Rose has argued that “the play has a traditional New
Comedy plot in which a young man, Sebastian Wengrave . . . has threatened to disinherit
Sebastian if he marries the woman he loves” (380). But Moll does not fit neatly into any
of the structural roles required by the city comedy. She helps Sebastian foil the senex, to
be sure, which aligns her with the clever servant of Roman New Comedy, but she is
clearly much more heavily weighted in the play than a clever servant. She is a maiden
whose virtue is tested and proved, which makes her a chaste maid figure, but she
explicitly refuses to participate in marriage, which means she cannot assume a productive
role in the reintegration typical of comic resolution. She has aspects of the respectable
courtesan, but her chastity complicates that role, too. In short, she is a character in
popular drama “whose notes till now never were” (Prologue 9). To borrow from
Alexander Leggatt’s analysis, she is “the theatrical surface of one figure”—the
prostitute—”superimposed on the moral values of the other,” the chaste maid (109).43
As Mary Beth Rose observes, Moll is “the fulcrum of The Roaring Girl, and the other characters’ reactions to her tend to define them as social and moral beings” (367).
Rose’s point cannot be overemphasized. Rose echoes Northrop Frye’s statement that “as the hero gets closer to the heroine and opposition is overcome, all the right-thinking people come over to his side” (60). Sebastian is in some sense the hero of The Roaring
Girl, and Mary the heroine, but Moll is the titular hero. As Susan Krantz has suggested, this is only possible because Moll “removes herself from questions of sexual identity”
(Krantz 8): just as Moll transcends the male/female binary, so she transcends the
42 An absolutely satisfactory definition of the genre has yet to be worked out. I use as primary sources Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare, and Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged, Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613. 164 prostitute/chaste maid binary. According to Leggatt, “the assertion of morality and the subversion of morality are the poles between which citizen comedy moves” (150); Moll is simultaneously both subversive and conventional.
As outlined at the outset of this discussion, Deborah Jacobs smartly argues that
Middleton and Dekker’s Moll is every bit an “instrument of the state (in a state- sanctioned production)” (78). She is neither the “grotesque body”44 nor the body on
which its repressive power is inscribed. The “virago” character tradition in which
Middleton and Dekker’s Moll may be placed had threatening overtones, but, according to
Stephen Orgel’s article on The Roaring Girl, the virago is “also a comic figure,” and “if
she is considered threatening, the threat is also regularly distanced and disarmed” (13).
Orgel cites Long Meg of Westminster, the historical London virago who preceded Moll
as a kind of roaring girl. In literature, Long Meg is always “represented as an effective
supporter of the social order, an essentially conservative figure” (13-14).
Jacobs’s re-reading of Moll as an instrument of the state does not sufficiently
address the components of her staged body that defy easy association with the dominant.
Jacobs quotes the introduction—”[Moll] flies with wings more lofty”—in order to
suggest that Moll’s staged body is not the grotesque body of the other, but the “noble or
closed body.” But she forgets that Moll is a roaring girl “whose notes till now never
were”; Moll’s staged body is not entirely confinable to dominant, to mix Jacobs’s and
Williams’s terms. The Roaring Girl cannot stand simply or even roughly as the
representative of the dominant, or as the unqualified “instrument of the state.” Moll
crosses borders; she straddles boundaries. Her staged body is the emblem of commingled
43 Leggatt’s point is worth quoting, though I have preferred the notion of combination where Leggatt uses the notion of superimposition. 165 cultural discourses, dominant and emergent, just as both feminine and masculine are mingled in her character, and just as she is both hero-heroine and social deviant, both the figure who drives the city comedy and the figure whose non-traditional status— unmarried, undomesticated—frustrates the standard city comedy conclusion. As Jean
Howard has noted, “the fact of her cross-dressing destabilizes the very essentialist binarisms that the ‘corrective’ cross-dresser overtly wishes to uphold” (179).45 If Moll
defies categorization as subversive or marginal, she also defies categorization as
dominant or central. Moll’s account of her own body may valorize “not a grotesque,
excessive or debased body, but a classic, enclosed and chaste one,” but this description
cannot account for her cross-dressing, her high spirit, or her knowledge of the underworld
manifest in her ability to cant with thieves (Jacobs 79). Just as Moll’s reasons for
knowing the language of thieves fall short of full persuasion (they satisfy Lord Noland
and company, but stretch the audience’s sense of probability), the notion that she is agent
of the state is too simple. It is a reality of the play that for women, “who most brags is
most whore” (4.2.326), and Moll’s bragging, despite the fact that she proves herself over
and over again, seems always to color her with a shade of the reputation she works
against in the play. The only way to accommodate all of the social energies active in The
Roaring Girl’s Moll Frith is to honor the contradiction figured in the play’s title and read
her as always “both/and.”
44 Jacobs’s critical paradigm is Bakhtinian, derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. 45 For a similar point, see Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict” 181. 166
III. Middleton and Dekker’s Moll: Just the Fashion
The Consistory Court’s account of Moll is a legal construction of a criminal personality. John Chamberlain’s letter offers a passive construction of Moll as a current event, a newsworthy story on the London scene. Thomas Freeman’s poem constructs
Moll as the subject of a cautionary aphorism. What The Roaring Girl gives us is a construction of Moll Frith as a comedic heroine in the popular theater. The particulars of the dramatists’ motivation are of course unavailable, but we may assume that the growing popularity of Moll Frith as a public figure meant box office potential for Middleton,
Dekker, and their business partners. In order to cash in on Moll’s popularity, the dramatists had to find a suitable genre—the city comedy—and then outfit Moll accordingly. The play’s meticulous demonstrations of her honesty thus are necessary to counter established opinion and allow the play to present Moll as a marquee heroine.
Middleton and Dekker work neither exclusively in the dominant nor exclusively in the emergent. Rather, they create a dramatic heroine out of a social deviant in order to bridge the two spheres. Like Moll, and like the popular drama of which they are representative,
Middleton and Dekker occupy both spaces at the same time. They work in a sense above or outside of the binary, mingling emergent narratives with dominant discourse to yield a storyline that benefits from emergent energies and dominant legitimacy.
The popular theater is able, on the space of the stage, to articulate Moll Frith in a way the Consistory Court, John Chamberlain, and Thomas Freeman could not. In chapter
2, I discussed popular culture and theater in London in terms of the dominant, the emergent, and the residual and suggested that the theater was especially active at the boundary separating dominant from emergent. Because of its mixed social status— 167 blasted by some conservative religious writers as the work of the devil, yet patronized by nearly twenty percent of the greater London population representing a rich cross-section of the social classes; tolerated by the city fathers within certain boundaries, but actively supported by the crown and at court—the theater was able to synthesize cultural movements from both sides of the dominant/emergent divide. It could draw on the emergent energy of events, people, and ideas in the margins of city life without forsaking legitimate status rooted in the world of the dominant culture. Originally native to the heart of the city in inn yards and banquet halls, the popular stage later established itself across the river and outside the city walls where land was available and affordable and where the theater could tap its roots in the recreational traditions of a residual culture that was giving way to a quickly expanding city center. Physically and figuratively, socially and culturally, the theater had a foot on both sides of a division between central and marginal, dominant and emergent.
This double status as central, yet marginal allows the theater to synthesize cultural energies circulating in disparate cultural spheres. The historical Moll Frith is an emergent cultural figure, a marginal phenomenon for which the dominant, central cultural scheme had no suitable classification. Her cultural energy is an alternative to the dominant culture, which cannot adequately articulate her. Its response to her, then, is to rewrite her, not as an emergent cultural figure, but as a figure already established inside dominant culture: the “notorius bagage” who, if she continues in her “licentious & dissolute lyfe” is in danger of becoming “dishonest of her body.” The court speaks through her, ascribing its criminal narrative to Moll in the form of a voluntary confession.
It interpellates her, recasting the emergent as something the dominant can both 168 understand and control. The theater, on the other hand, is able to process Moll simultaneously in both dominant and emergent modes. It assumes both her emergent and her dominant potentials and synthesizes them, incorporating marginal material and emergent traits that the Consistory Court simply represses in its representation. Moll’s emergent energy is what makes her a newsworthy, topical figure and imbues her story with box office potential. She is sensational because she is emergent, something new and different, hailing from the frontier of culture. The popular drama is able to redirect that emergent cultural energy into dominant cultural energy by modifying the narrative hero figure, a conventional dominant trope, so that it can accommodate emergent material.
The textualization of Moll Frith narratives, in court records, poems, plays, pamphlets, private correspondence, and popular report, marks the emergence, not of a historical person, but of the cultural understanding of a historical person. Texts help to place Moll’s story culturally; they help to culturalize a character type. The Roaring Girl is a particularly important text because it fuses disparate cultural viewpoints, presenting a
Moll Frith who carries the momentum of an emergent figure and the legitimacy and validity of an established character type. But The Roaring Girl also came to bear directly on the reputation of a historical person. It came to influence how Londoners thought about the real Moll Frith in the early seventeenth century. The opening line of Freeman’s
“Epigram 90,” presumably a response to the Moll Frith of The Roaring Girl, is the most impressive testament to the cultural authority of the theater. “They say Moll’s honest, and it may be so”: without specifying who “they” is, the poem leaves the impression that the saying is common report. In fact, the less specific “they” is here, the more widely- held the opinion appears. In stark contrast to the Moll Frith of the Consistory record and 169 the Chamberlain letter, the Moll Frith of The Roaring Girl is indeed honest, and if this vision of Moll is the one that stuck in the second decade of the seventeenth century, the play almost certainly was a driving force behind the opinion. 170
Chapter 4
The Allowed Freak: Stage, Space, and Recreation in Volpone
In her pioneering study, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, Enid
Welsford notes that the “mental deficiencies or physical deformities which deprive [the court-fool] both of rights and responsibilities,” place him “in the paradoxical position of virtual outlawry combined with utter dependence on the support of the social group to which he belongs” (Welsford 55).1 Court-fools may “belong to” a social group, but their
peculiar deficiencies distance them from that social group. They reside on a boundary,
associated with, but not entirely integrated into, a community. William Willeford
elaborates:
The use of physical freaks as jesters is surely in part the expression of an
ambivalence that also results in the relegation of such people to the
margins of human society: grotesques have both positive and negative
powers; they are hideously attractive; they should be approached and
avoided, abused and placated. The grotesque jester, like other kinds of
fools, is a mascot who maintains a relationship between the ordered world
and the chaos excluded by it. (The Fool and his Scepter 15)
1 Welsford’s study has held up remarkably well since its initial publication in 1935 (reprinted Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1961; Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1966; London: Faber & Faber, 1968), and it is still widely regarded as a current source. William Willeford makes extensive use of Welsford in The Fool and his Scepter (1969, reprinted 1977), citing her study as “an excellent general history of fools and fool actors and their counterparts in imaginative literature” (237 n. 7). Sandra Billington cites Welsford as support throughout two recent studies, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (1991) and A Social History of the Fool (1984). John Southworth, in Fool and Jesters at the English Court (1998) calls Welsford’s book “by far the most scholarly, comprehensive and readable account of fools in a variety of times and cultures to have appeared so far” (“Further Reading” 209). 171
In “maintain[ing] a relationship between the ordered world and the chaos excluded by it,” the fool is perched on a boundary between central and marginal. Welsford and Willeford work with the notion that the fool, by marking a boundary between the community and what is foreign to it, helps to define the community. He establishes the limits of what is familiar. Like a local, social version of the “wonders” of nature discussed by Lorraine
Daston and Katherine Park, which “marked the outermost limits of the natural” and registered “the line between the known and the unknown” from the medieval period to the Enlightenment, the fool articulates the edge of the familiar (13-14).2 As Stephen
Greenblatt has remarked, “the Renaissance tended to sharpen its sense of the normative
by meditating upon the prodigious”: that which exceeds the familiar helps through its
excess to define the familiar (“Fiction and Friction” 77).3
But the social distance imposed between the fool and the society that both owns
and disowns him should not be cast only in terms of the community from which he is
distanced. The same deficiencies that separate him from the “ordered world” and place
him in “virtual outlawry” also give him both a unique perspective and a powerful license
to exercise that perspective: unbounded by the laws that constrain the ordinary citizen,
the fool is afforded a scope of behavior not available to the ordinary citizen. By reason of
his infirmities, he is also free from the “carking cares,” to use a phrase from Erasmus’s In
Praise of Folly, that concern the ordinary world (51). This mixture of license and unique
perspective makes the fool a powerful social and cultural figure. On the Elizabethan and
2 Daston and Parks’s study is concerned broadly with the history of wonder and wonders and with “setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known . . . from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment” (13-14). Its scope thus exceeds that of the present chapter considerably, though its treatment of natural wonders like monstrous births has some significance here. 3 John Gillies has discussed at length the notion of boundaries as a means of defining identity in his 1994 study, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. He argues for “the influence of poetic geographic ideas in the construction of otherness and voyaging in Shakespeare” and the Renaissance (38). 172
Jacobean stage, this license and perspective characterize the “allowed fool” in whom, as
Olivia reminds us in Twelfth Night, there is no slander, even “though he do nothing but rail” (1.5.81).
In this chapter, I will work with the notion that the fool’s position on the boundary gives him a critical perspective on the society to which he belongs and from which he is distanced. Tracing the dramatic heritage of the fool and his place on the space of the stage, I will develop an extended analogy likening the role and function of the fool vis-à- vis society to the place of the stage relative to early modern London. Where in chapter 3, the staged Moll Frith of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl became the emblem of a theater that was active in both dominant and emergent culture, able to articulate movements simultaneously in both realms, chapter 4 argues that the theater, like the fool, was both part of and not part of a community and was thus invested both with a unique perspective on the community and a license to exercise that perspective in “recreating”— a richly significant term for “entertaining” introduced near the end of Volpone—the community.
Ben Jonson’s Volpone may seem an unlikely candidate for such a project. A proposal to work with the “allowed fool” suggests more obvious plays, such as Twelfth
Night, King Lear, or As You Like It, each of which features celebrated instances of the all- licensed fool. Indeed, though Volpone does have fools—Nano, Castrone, and
Androgyno—their “allowed-fool” status must be teased out of a set of other characters with similar dramatic heritages. Furthermore, they have hardly been a focal point of scholarship, and when they are mentioned, Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are usually dismissed as the trivial effects of Volpone, serving only to “emphasize the luxury and 173 selfishness of the Fox” or to satisfy the base desires of the groundlings, as Welsford puts it (246). But their relative anonymity in the play, which leads to their neglect in scholarship, also makes them the ideal example of the license of the allowed fool: they are overlooked in the play’s conclusion, which isolates, identifies, and punishes instances of social deviance—the deviance of which they are the walking, material embodiment, as we will see.
Volpone’s novelty servants play a small part in the action, and the bulk of scholarship to date has understandably focused on figures and issues more prominent in the play. Jonson’s “Epistle” to Volpone, effectively the first literary critical remark on the play, establishes early on a critical framework for the play that stresses its moral lessons. The play works “to inform men in the best reason of living,” as Jonson tells us, and thus he strives “to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out ‘We never punish vice in our interludes’” (“Epistle” 107-108, 114-116). 4 As James Loxley recently remarked,
Jonson’s claims to moral didacticism in the “Epistle,” and in the “prefatory material” to
4 I cite R. B. Parker’s 1983 Revels Plays edition of Volpone. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson’s edition has the significant claim of tradition behind it, and it is the standard scholarly edition. But prominent scholars have begun to question the routine, almost mechanical choice of Herford and Simpson as a base text. Chedgzoy et al. note that “its many volumes, its elaborate and separately collated notes, its old spelling, and its now occasionally anachronistic decisions” make it increasingly less attractive and less practical (3). David Bevington offers similar criticism: “Herford and Simpson’s edition is, to a spectacular degree, wholly unfitted for theatrical use, with its old spellings, its multiple volumes, its indifference to stage action, its commentary and stage history widely separated from the text, and so on” (“Why Re-edit Herford and Simpson” 22). Bevington also notes the impracticality of the absence of running titles and points out that the old spelling in Herford and Simpson is simply not necessary, besides the fact that old spelling is one of many editorial choices that tends to reinforce the relative enervation of Jonson scholarship as compared to the Shakespeare industry. Moreover, the commentary, Bevington points out, “suffers from the usual deficiencies of editions in their era” and needs to be updated. Cambridge University Press is planning a new complete edition. Individual scholarly editions address and resolve all of these issues and more, at the very reasonable sacrifice of a break with scholarly tradition that has little else going for it at this point besides tradition. Among the editors of recent stand-alone editions are plenty of well-regarded scholars who themselves are not neglectful of Herford and Simpson and whose work is not only careful but generally assimilative as well. See David Bevington, “Why Re-edit Herford and Simpson?”; Martin Butler, “Introduction: from Workes to Texts”; Chedgzoy et al., “Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson”; and Ian Donaldson, “A New Edition of Ben Jonson?”. I do use Evelyn, Simpson, and Simpson’s text of Discoveries in chapter 5. 174
Every Man Out of his Humour and The Alchemist, have “shaped the idiom of the criticism such plays provoked”: “the satirist’s claims to be in pursuit of moral reformation have helped to ensure that Jonson’s work for the stage were read as single- mindedly ethical, and could be comprehended entirely within the horizons of this reformatory impulse” (161). Thus, Edward Partridge’s 1958 study, The Broken
Compass, though it is troubled by the generic ambiguities of this play (“is it satire, burlesque, farce, comedy of humours, melodrama?” 70), focuses on the play’s project of moral edification. Partridge argues that the play’s images are “indecorous,” with “great vehicles” linked to “mean tenors,” which is a result of the play’s perversion of traditional values (112). Similarly, L. C. Knights’s 1937 study, Drama and Society in the Age of
Jonson, explores Volpone as an argument against acquisitiveness and greed in an emerging capitalist society.
Responses to these early books may complicate the notion that Jonson himself could have been unaffected by the changes in society he criticized, but they still read the comedies in terms of their central preoccupation with morality, greed, corruption, and so forth. For instance, Don E. Wayne’s 1982 article “Drama and Society in the Age of
Jonson: An Alternative View,” reconsiders Knights’s book based on the notion that it is
“the product of an earlier moment in the history of thought dealing with the relationship between culture and society,” and that “recent developments in social theory, in the study of ideology, and in the sociology of knowledge” call for a reevaluation (103). Yet
Wayne’s article still pursues the play’s relationship to an “anti-acquisitive” attitude, and its reading is still grounded partly in Jonson’s “Epistle” to the universities and Jonson’s drive “to expose folly and corruption in his own society” (110). Wayne remarks on the 175
“inconsistency between Jonson’s theory and his practice as a comic dramatist after
Volpone” (113), but insists that Volpone has a “moral certitude that informs [its] theme and structure” (110). Volpone offers closure: “we are able to join complacently in the final act of moral censure” (113).
Alan C. Dessen’s 1971 study, Jonson’s Moral Comedy, describes Volpone as “a dramatic vehicle capable of conveying the time’s deformity through comedy” (75).
Dessen argues that although Volpone is not, in fact, a morality play—it does not contain
“allegorical personae who would appear out of place in a Jacobean comedy set in
Venice”—its structural and thematic similarities to the morality tradition are defining:
“in many important respects Jonson’s literal comedy does use means analogous to those of the late morality to achieve similar ends” (79). Dessen explores the Vice-like qualities of Volpone and Mosca, who effortlessly control the other characters in the play. Though he admits that the play’s denouement does not present justice as inevitable—”can the villains and fools be counted upon continually to destroy each other?” he asks (97)—
Dessen nominates Volpone as the “birth of Jonson’s moral comedy” (104).
Other critics have explored alternatives to, or variations on, the Jonson-as- moralist reading. James D. Redwine, Jr. has read the play through Volpone and Mosca as
“a study of man’s wolfish compulsion to make others suffer.” He argues that while
Volpone as “a powerful moral study of human greed, foxish cunning, and goatish lust” has been extensively discussed, the particular impulse toward malice has not been sufficiently recognized (301). Ann Barton, on her way to arguing that Volpone is “not a morality drama,” begins a discussion of Jonson’s “Epistle” and visits along the way the major structural points constituting the rise and fall of Mosca and his patron. Her focus is 176 on the fox and the fly and their vanity and confidence, which ultimately undo them. She suggests that Jonson found in Aristophanes a model that “might provide for him what
Greek New Comedy had given most of his dramatic contemporaries . . . a basic comedic structure capable of subtle variation and extension” (113). Jonson used this flexibility to push the “realization, against seemingly impossible odds, of a fantastic proposal,” such as
Volpone’s proposal to “live off society’s greed . . . by pretending to be terminally ill and uncertain as to the choice of an heir” (114). The conclusion, Barton notes, is awkward:
Jonson, “instead of confirming the achievement of the Fox and the Fly”—as
Aristophanes would have—”goes on to explode it. But he makes it clear that this second ending is accidental, something which might have been almost indefinitely postponed”
(115). Thus, the failing of Volpone and Mosca is not that they are scoundrels, but that they do not know when to stop. Finally, the audience’s “indulgence,” given to Volpone via applause after the epilogue, inevitably undercuts the play’s proposed morality by celebrating its comedy.
Robert N. Watson follows Barton in reading the play’s conclusion as too ambiguous to match with Jonson’s stated intentions in the “Epistle.” He suggests that
“the surprisingly blunt exposure and punishment in Volpone pits the indulgent conventions of satiric comedy, in which wit is the sole criterion for success, against the forces of conventional moralism that were exerting renewed pressure against the popular theater” (83).5 For Watson, the conclusion does punish vice, but in doing so, it works against the grain of Jonsonian satiric comedy: Jonson decided “to stop indulging the amoral exercise of wit that triumphs in so many of his other comedies” (84). Volpone,
Watson argues, expects all of his schemes to succeed because he “apparently believes 177 exactly what many critics now believe: that his story is essentially a retelling of old beast-fables about the clever fox who outwits the birds of prey” (85). Similarly, Mosca
“envisions himself as the all-conquering wily servant of New Comedy and of the satiric city-comedies based on that classical model” (88). Of Bonario, Watson notes smartly that “‘Heroic’ behavior may do you no good at all, as Bonario and Surly and Overdo discover, if the context is hostile or dismissive toward your particular genre of heroism”
(11-12). Of Celia, he observes that she “behaves . . . just as a conventional heroine should behave,” but not being in a conventional play, her behavior impresses no one (92).
All of these characters, each expecting a different ending that never arrives, are in
Watson’s view powerful satiric vehicles. Most important, though, are Volpone and
Mosca, whose “surprise” at finding themselves in a morality play gives Watson’s discussion its title, “Surprised by Morality.”
John Sweeney, in “Volpone and the Theater of Self-Interest,” also argues that the play’s ending is disjunctive:
the verdict of the avocatori certainly punishes vice, and in doing so it may
well have applied the snaffle to certain officious spectators, but in relation
to the rest of the play, it exists in a strangely diminished light. More is
involved than Jonson’s taking on an ending that does not quite fit: the rest
of the play actively rejects the conclusion as the human body rejects
foreign tissue. (221)
Sweeney notes that Jonson was himself aware of the disjunction, and that he registered that awareness in the “Epistle.” Sweeney finds the conclusion less ambiguous than
Watson and Barton, if only because it all too plainly contradicts “the principles of
5 Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers from Watson refer to Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy. 178 morality and justice to which [Jonson] was publicly committed” (222): “Whereas consensus seems to be that Volpone is a moral play by virtue of its effective application of ‘poetic justice,’ what I find striking about this play is the length to which it goes to mitigate the force of such justice. The climax . . . demonstrates nothing about the inevitability of comic justice” (238). Like Barton, Sweeney wonders at the “false ending”6 after which Mosca and Volpone insist on pushing their plotting too far, but
where Barton sees in this ending blind confidence in the characters, and where Wayne
sees delusion, Sweeney, like Redwine, sees a desire to punish the gulls further: “what
brings Volpone back to life after Act IV is the thought of vexing his victims. Unsatisfied
with their material possession, he wants their souls; he wants them to know they have
been gulled and suffer for it” (236).
Through these various readings of the play’s moral project, few studies treat
Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno in any detail. Watson discusses every named character
except Volpone’s three freaks. Ann Barton briefly treats Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno
as “reduced by their names to physical abnormalities,” but she does not explore their
significance in the scheme of the play (107). Alexander Leggatt mentions Volpone’s
freaks occasionally as “a freakish progeny of ‘imperfect creatures’” and links them to a
larger trend of “false creation” in Jonson’s comedies, but again, his attention is
concentrated elsewhere (Ben Jonson: His Vision and his Art 26, 2). Of the major studies
considered so far, only Partridge’s The Broken Compass addresses the freaks at any
length.
6 See Stephen Greenblatt, “The False Ending in Volpone.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75 (1976): 90-104. 179
Partridge’s concern with the freaks fits into his reading of Volpone as a play filled with indecorous images. The journey of the soul of Pythagorus from Apollo to
Androgyno, charted in the fools’ song in scene 1.2, is, according to Partridge, “symbolic of the way the classical world has spiraled down to the modern world” (78). Partridge notes further that the “deliberate choice” of the soul of Pythagorus to inhabit Androgyno
“indicates how completely values have been reversed” (79). He reads the freaks as emblematic in every way of the general decrepitude of the world of Volpone:
a eunuch, a dwarf, and an hermaphrodite—all are unnatural beings in
whom the equipoise of body and soul has been disturbed. They are the
living emblems of the perverted culture of this mean world. The
debasing of the real values of life has gone so far in Volpone that he
surrounds himself with these abnormal beings, none of whom is capable of
a normal relation with the world outside. As symbols, they stand for what
goes on in Volpone’s soul as much as what Volpone’s world is like. . . .
We see them, then, as symbols of what the Volpone world produces: the
misshapen, the degenerate, and the castrated. (80)
As this passage suggests, Partridge does not celebrate the unnaturalness of the three freaks. He establishes quite powerfully how the freaks both fit and represent the debased world of Volpone, the moral of which, he argues “is large enough to contain both a medieval tradition and a modern criticism of capitalism” (111). Thus, the freaks are broadly emblematic of the social problems that Ben Jonson and Volpone set out to critique. 180
I want to build on this reading of the freaks and their aberrances as both materially and metaphorically representative of the violations of social ideals of which
Volpone, Mosca, and the three birds are guilty. They indeed encourage an understanding of the play as having the kind of critical value Jonson proposes in the “Epistle”: “to inform men in the best reason of living” (“Epistle” 106-107). Following the trend established by later critics, however, I want suggest that the play undercuts its moralizing.
But where Barton, Watson, and Sweeney have pointed to the curious ambiguity of the conclusion and the play’s high comedy to question its “moral valence,” I want instead to look at the role the freaks play in frustrating a clear sense of closure. They are the profoundest, if the most subtle, components of the play that undercut its alleged moral didacticism. As I will show, Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are structurally crucial, if ostensibly minor, characters in the play, and the various transgressions, aberrances, and perversions represented materially and figuratively in their deformities work against a sense of closure at the play’s conclusion. Volpone, Mosca, and the three birds are arraigned and given specific punishments by the court, but Volpone’s freaks, the “living emblems of the perverted culture of this mean world,” are turned loose by Mosca and never brought to account.
I will begin, as I have indicated, by tracing the dramatic heritage of the “allowed fool” through the early Vice figures in the emerging professional theater. Looking first at the fool as a “point of indifference” in the drama, I will consider the schematic of locus and platea as developed by Robert Weimann and the fool’s place on the boundary between central and marginal on the space of the stage. I will then turn to Volpone and to its version of the allowed fool in Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno. Finally, I will suggest 181 a range of parallels to characterize the theater as an “allowed fool” to the City and its dominant culture.
I. Punctum Indifferens, Locus, and Platea: The Allowed Fool
In the midst of a lamentation over the state of contemporary art in the late nineteenth century, Coventry Patmore introduces the phrase punctum indifferens into his musings about the structural arrangements of the classic works of greatness from times past. “Look through the National Gallery,“ he proclaims, “and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive.“ At an “Academy Exhibition,“ on the other hand, one would find “scarcely . . . a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skillful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of unrest, if they were in daily and hourly sight“ (13). At the National Gallery, an emblem of the accumulated accomplishments of western artists and a repository of cultural and moral achievement, one will find good art that observes principles of harmony, embodying a kind of Elizabethan-Victorian world picture even in depictions of conflict. Conversely, contemporary artists at academies, the dubious counterparts to the great tradition represented in the National Gallery, rarely achieve, for all their skillfulness, the balanced perspective characteristic of a masterpiece.
The critical difference between the canon at the National Gallery and the
“misguided” efforts at the academies is that contemporary art neglects the punctum indifferens, or “point of rest,“ as Patmore calls it in English. Quoting Coleridge, Patmore observes that harmony in art is a relationship among its elements and a central, 182 structuring point of rest: “all harmony is founded on a relation to rest—on relative rest“
(qtd. in Patmore 12). In a good painting, “there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose“ (14). The point of rest orchestrates a picture—or poem, or play—by serving as a moment of stasis in an otherwise frenetic situation. It is a halfway point between two extremes in a work of art that allows the viewer, reader, or witnesser to maintain a perspective of the piece’s larger harmony. The point of rest rarely asserts itself or stands out: “the most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is in itself not the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the punctum indifferens to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred,“ and though it is ostensibly a minor moment, without the point of rest, a picture’s harmony is compromised:
No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea
of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in
which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them.
Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye,
the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered. (14)
The punctum indifferens cannot bring about harmony “where—as in most modern works—its elements are absent,“ but it is otherwise indispensable in art, in proportion to the complexity or variety of “points of interest“ in a given piece (17, 14). Though
Patmore offers some examples of points of rest in particular paintings—a sawn-off branch in an unspecified landscape of John Constable, the infant’s heel in Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna—he finds the device “in its fullest value“ in Shakespeare: 183
In King Lear it is by the character of Kent, in Romeo and Juliet by Friar
Laurence, in Hamlet by Horatio, in Othello by Cassio, and in the
Merchant of Venice by Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied ; and this point being also in each case a point of vital comparison by which we measure and feel the relationships of all the other characters, it becomes an element of far higher value than when it is simply an, as it were, accidental point of repose, like the lopped branch in Constable’s landscape. Each of these five characters stands out of the stream of the main interest, and is additionally unimpressive in itself by reason of its absolute conformity to reason and moral order, from which every other character in the play departs more or less. Thus Horatio is the exact punctum indifferens between the opposite excesses of the characters of
Hamlet and Laertes—over-reasoning inaction and unreasoning action— between which extremes the whole interest of the play vibrates. . . . So with the central and comparatively unimpressive characters in many other plays—characters unimpressive on account of their facing the exciting and trying circumstances of the drama with the regard of pure reason, justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate : a vital center, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference. (16) 184
Given the intensity of the social and cultural significance of these Shakespearean characters relative to that of a lopped tree limb or an infant’s foot in a painting, it is not necessarily easy to reconcile Patmore’s various examples into the same artistic phenomenon. Yet, Patmore is careful to note the difference between the “accidental point of repose“ in the paintings and the calculated neutrality of the Shakespearean characters who provide a “peaceful focus.“ Horatio, Cassio, Kent, Bassanio, and the friar are carefully wrought points of rest intended to serve quietly as a vital center in their plays’ action, which is complexly energized by the various different and extreme points of reference and which needs a punctum indifferens to orchestrate stability. Patmore’s analogy to the workings “of a great wheel“ places these character firmly at the center of the dramatic conflict that drives each play, but there is an implicit distinction between a central point of stasis on the one hand and a central character on the other. These are not central characters, just as the lopped limb and the infant’s heel are not central images in a painting; they are simply points of neutral perspective that are located centrally with regard to a given work’s more radical extremes. Patmore values them for their sanity, their “pure reason, justice, and virtue,“ without which we would lose access to a proper perspective from which to “measure and feel“ the dynamics among the other perspectives. It is only in crucial reference to the “unobtrusive“ character Kent that “the departure, in various directions, of every character more or less from moderation, rectitude, or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt“ (15-16).
Given Patmore’s careful and specific articulation about the characteristics and function of the point of rest, it is odd that Enid Welsford, in The Fool: His Social and
Literary History, should nominate a very different kind of character as the punctum 185 indifferens of the Shakespearean canon. In Welsford’s view, it is not Kent but the Fool who is the punctum indifferens of King Lear:
Shakespeare makes the fullest possible use of the accepted convention that
it is the Fool who speaks the truth, which he knows not by ratiocination
but by inspired intuition. The mere appearance of the familiar figure in
cap and bells would at once indicate to the audience where the ‘punctum
indifferens’, the impartial critic, the mouthpiece of real sanity, was to be
found. (269)
Welsford approaches the “point of rest“ more as a point of neutrality or indifference, a point of detached critical observation available only to a character not invested in the same way as the central characters are in the major dramatic conflicts of the play. The
Fool, like Kent, might not be an entirely “central“ character, but he is otherwise quite distinct from Kent, who is Patmore’s nomination for punctum indifferens. He is not a calm center or peaceful focus, and he is not a figure of “pure reason, justice, and virtue“ from which the other characters depart in various directions. The Fool, instead of being a balanced perspective amidst the characters in which all of their various excesses are proportionately commingled, is rather a unique perspective entirely separate from the rest of the play’s characters; he works in contrast not to each individual character, but to the cast of characters as a whole. He is not the quiet center of a great wheel, but a point of observation outside the wheel entirely.
The Latin word itself, indifferens, tends to support Welsford’s sense of the phrase over Patmore’s. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary offers “in which there is no difference, indifferent“ as its primary meaning, and most dictionaries give variations on 186
“indifferent“ or “neither good nor bad“ or “neither good nor evil.“7 Patmore’s usage
stresses a position between two or more extremes of character. It is hard to divide the
complex qualities of different perspectives and extremes in a drama along lines so simple
as “good“ on the one hand and “evil“ on the other. The categories seem hardly adequate
for classifying Hamlet and Laertes, for instance, just as Horatio seems hardly to be a
neutral mean between two such extremes.
Welsford does, in fact, acknowledge Patmore’s English translation of the Latin
phrase. Writing of As You Like It, she comments on the fool Touchstone:
As an onlooker by profession he can supply us with that punctum
indifferens, or point of rest, which, as Coventry Patmore has well
remarked, is particularly necessary for the enjoyment of a complicated
work of art. (250)
Welsford here follows Patmore in recognizing the necessity of a “point of rest“ to eke out
the structural scheme in a complicated work of art, and we can hear echoes of Patmore’s
notion that without such a perspective integrated into the whole, a “moderately sensitive
and cultivated eye“ will find “the whole life of the picture . . . to have been lowered“
(14). In every other instance in which she paraphrases Patmore’s term, however,
Welsford seizes on the notion of indifference or detachedness, rather than on “rest.“
Shakespeare treats the Fool in Lear as “the disinterested truth-teller, the ‘punctum
indifferens’ of the play,“ she remarks, again linking the notion of disinterestedness and
truth to the perspective of indifference (258). The fool is an “impartial critic,“ a
7 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary (1969), s.v. “indifferens.” Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (1977) also offers “indifferent” and “neither good nor bad” (s.v. “indifferens”). The Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968) lists “neither good nor bad, indifferent,” then “making no difference, unimportant,” and “(of persons) not fussy or particular, indifferent.” 187
“privileged truth-teller,“ an “all-licensed“ commentator who “sees and speaks the real truth about the people around him“ (269, 251, 256). None of these descriptions, which
Welsford directs specifically at Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool, applies to characters like Horatio, Cassio, Bassanio, Kent, or Friar Laurence. Such non-fools8 are in Patmore’s
evaluation balanced characters in whom the excesses of their dramatic counterparts are
distributed in equilibrium, but they are not indifferent to the dramatic circumstances that
drive those other characters’ decisions and development, as the fool is. Typically,
Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool do not react directly to the central conflicts in the
play; they react to the reactions of others to the central conflicts in the play. The fools’
reaction is critical, evaluative, and detached, always showing a different regard for, and
unique perspective on, the situation in which another character is involved. The fool is a
neutral character, but it is because he observes the dramatic action from a point of
indifference, and not because he represents a peaceful balance of volatile extremes. As a
description of the allowed fool, Welsford’s appropriation of Patmore’s phrase gives it a
more felicitous employment, and it is Welsford’s sense in which I use the term here.9
John Fuller described the most storied Elizabethan fool figure, Richard Tarlton:
“in a word, he told the Queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her
melancholy better than all her physicians“ (qtd. in Welsford 286). In telling the Queen
her faults, Tarlton made use of the fool’s license; he exercised his right as the “allowed
fool“ to speak his mind, with relative impunity, in critical evaluation of his betters.
8 The phrase “non-fool” comes from William Willeford’s The Fool and his Scepter. Willeford uses it to designate characters who are not fools in various dramatic situations that feature fools and that depend on the fools for their dramatic import. 9 I have been unable to trace further developments in the usage of the phrase punctum indifferens. The most recent instance I have found in scholarship is in William Willeford’s The Fool and His Scepter (1969, reprinted 1977). 188
Gareth Lloyd Evans has pointed out that the critical license we associate with
Shakespeare’s fools in particular was perhaps more of a tradition in artistic representation than a “palpable reality“; it may well be “a wry ghost of something that itself has no substance“ (148). Though they may not have operated with absolute impunity or with an actual written license, popular contemporary lore, like John Fuller’s account of Tarlton, suggests clearly enough that fools were in fact retained by nobility and did in fact offer their opinions on matters properly beyond their scope of consideration. Will Sommers and Archibald Armstrong were much celebrated in their time for their wit, and both are known to have been outspoken at court.10 The “all-licensed fool,“ to use Goneril’s term, may have been more popular as a literary character than as a historical reality, but he seems not to have been entirely a fiction (King Lear 1.4.166).
The allowed fool combines two related principles of folly culled from the fool’s
roots in various different traditions from French fool societies to country clowns to Lords
of Misrule to actual court fools. The first is his wit or wisdom, which derives from a
unique personal perspective outside the conflicts that affect ordinary people in ordinary
society—the perspective of the punctum indifferens—and the second is the license to
make open use of that perspective to criticize ordinary people and ordinary society. For
Erasmus, foolishness “is present whenever an amiable dotage of the mind at once frees
the spirit from carking cares and anoints it with a complex delight“ (51-52). Freeing the
spirit from cares is precisely what gives the fool figure in early modern drama his
indifferent critical perspective on the principle conflicts in the play. Babulo, the fool in
Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton’s Patient Grissill, exclaims “a fig for care!“ and stands immune to the misfortune that trouble’s the play’s central characters
10 See Enid Welsford, The Fool, especially chapter seven, “The Court-Fool in England.“ 189
(qtd. in Welsford 247). Feste’s clever proof of Olivia’s folly in mourning for her brother’s soul because he is in heaven, demonstrates a perspective on a point of dramatic circumstance—the death of Olivia’s brother—unavailable to a character deeply affected by the circumstance. Because he is not invested in their outcome in the same way as the play’s “central“ characters, the fool is able to evaluate from an outsider’s perspective both the central characters and the conflict inside of which they struggle.
Second, the “amiable dotage of the mind“ that frees the fool from cares also covers the fool’s behavior with a degree of impunity. The natural fool or simpleton had a presumed unique proximity to God that made him untouchable on earth. Such a fool might be kept at court because he “causes amusement not merely by absurd gluttony, merry gossip, or knavish tricks, but by mental deficiencies or physical deformities which deprive him both of rights and responsibilities” (Welsford 55). More broadly, various dotages of the mind, along with deformations of the body, were viewed at various points as indications of an exemption from the laws of gods and men. The fool, the clown, and the freak, used as everything from entertainment to spectacle to good luck charms, were treated as special because their abnormalities suggested the “presence of the supernatural“ or exempted them through pity from the malice of the merely worldly
(58).11
The evolution of this laxity into the “all-licensed“ or “allowed“ court fool and especially the Robert Armin fools of Shakespeare’s later plays reflects the synthesis of wit or wisdom on the one hand and a license to use it on the other. The punctum
indifferens, in Welsford’s sense of a critically detached observer whose detachment gives
11 For a full discussion of the social and religious history of “fools” with mental or physical deficiencies, see Enid Welsford, The Fool, chapter 3, “The Fool as Mascot and Scapegoat.“ 190 him both perspective and scope of expression, provides the dramatic action with a critical reference point, a touchstone or viewpoint check that brings the play’s conflict into a particular focus to show the characters and the audience what they otherwise might not see.
The structural role of the allowed fool or punctum indifferens on the stage has important dramatic precedents as well. The Vice character, often associated with Tudor moralities but ultimately descended from diverse earlier figures and traditions such as court fools, folk or festival plays and games, and popular ritual, establishes the dramatic space for the fool in popular drama. Francis Hugh Mares undoes much of the confusion surrounding the origins and development of the Vice and offers a persuasive account of how two different dramatic figures were eventually associated under the common name
“Vice.” Mares “reject[s] the usual suggestion that the Vice was a morality figure before we find him named in [John] Heywood’s farces” and argues that “those characters claimed as Vices or ancestors of the Vice . . . fall easily into two distinct classes: those wearing the fool’s costume, and acting accordingly; and those who are comic representations of the person addicted to the grosser forms of worldly pleasure” (26).
“The latter,” he continues “is the obvious choice for the tempter in the morality,” while
“the figure in the fool’s dress is conceived more purely in terms of allegory” and developed into both the natural “half-wit” fool and the artificial fool (26). It is in the play
Respublica (1553), Mares argues, that the two different roles are first combined into one under the name “Vice” (27), and it is “because of this combination of the fool and the riotous man under the title of the Vice” that “the two types are often lumped together in 191 discussions of the antecedents of the Vice without the distinction between them being clearly seen” (28).
Welsford’s own account of the Vice offers a similar argument: “in a few
Interludes, such as Godly Queen Hester and Skelton’s Magnificence, the Vice is unmistakably a court-jester; while in Clymon and Clamydes and in The Plaie of Patient
Grissell, though not a court fool, he is a buffoon or merry-companion” (285). She also notes, as does Mares, that “there is evidence that the Vices were sometimes dressed as fools,” and concludes that “it seems clear that the Vice of the Interlude developed into the
Elizabethan stage clown” (285, 286). Mares’s argument is also consistent with that of E.
K. Chambers, who notes in The Mediaeval Stage that the fool character of
“Shakespeare’s and other Elizabethan plays” figures in “some of the earliest Tudor interludes,” where he has “the not altogether intelligible name of the ‘vice.’” (203).
Chambers concludes that “the character of the vice is derived from that of the domestic fool or jester” (204). 12
I depend heavily on the link Mares and others establish between the non-morality
Vice and the fool of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but the Vice in the morality
tradition—which Mares refers to as “the tempter in the morality” who “seduces mankind
from a proper concern with eternal values to passing gratifications” (26)—is also an
important dramatic antecedent to the fool. For instance, the morality Vice, in his role as
seducer, stands largely untroubled by the struggle in which the other characters are
caught up, usually interacting with those characters in such a way as to manipulate them
relative to the central dramatic conflict, while he remains unaffected by their dramatic 192 challenges. The link between the fool and the morality Vice will be especially important here in establishing the role of punctum indifferens-type characters and other dramatically unique characters besides the allowed fool in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In both
Mosca and Volpone, for instance, the influence of the morality Vice is evident. As
Rainer Pineas and Alan Dessen have noted, Volpone’s pursuit of evil for its own sake associates him with the Vice, just as Mosca’s skillful manipulation of other characters links him to the Vice.13 There is a punctum indifferens quality to the morality Vice in
that he has a different relationship to the central dramatic conflict from the relationship
the other characters have. Because the particulars that distinguish the two basic Vice
traditions from each other are not entirely clear, and because I rely on the influence of
both types of Vice on the “allowed fool” in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, I will
differentiate between them here only when necessary.
The Vice’s relationship to the other characters in the drama prefigures, and is
greatly similar to, that of the allowed fool in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean tradition.
The Vice was distinct from the other characters in the play in the sense that the actor who
played him was most likely the principal member of his troupe and was probably not
doubled with another role. The broad comic talent necessary for successful
improvisation on the part of leading Elizabethan and Jacobean fools like Richard Tarlton,
Will Kemp, and Robert Armin, is prefigured in the Vice, whose lines left ample room for
improvisation and whose talents were meant to be showcased in the lead role, at least
until the central human protagonist began to grow in importance and size, eventually
12 Robert Weimann has generally supported Mares as well, and Peter Happé draws similar conclusions. See Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 283 n. 72; and Happé, “‘The Vice’ and the Popular Theatre, 1547-80,” 21. 193 requiring a second leading actor. According to Mares, “the Vice was a favorite with the audience, and the man who played the Vice seems to have been the major actor of the company. His is almost invariably the longest single part. He has less time for doubling than the others, and it is his job to keep the audience amused in the lulls of the action while other characters are off stage changing for another part.” (13). David Bevington offers a similar note: “the Vice may be expected to double with minor parts in a difficult situation, when the rest of the troupe is already employed. Otherwise, he is left to perform his specialized and demanding role without added burden other than prologue and epilogue” (81). 14 Moreover, the “dominance” of the Vice is evident in the “position
of his name on the printed casting lists. . . . the Vice is named first or last among the list
of characters, and the grouping on the page is often such that the Vice’s name receives
typographical prominence” (81).15
Finally, the Vice, like the fool after him, is strongly associated with the platea, or unlocalized theatrical space that stands in contrast to the locus, a localized, representational space on the stage that represents a specific, often fixed dramatic location.16 Robert Weimann discusses these two terms at length:
The platea provided an entirely nonrepresentational and unlocalized
setting; it was the broad and general acting area in which the communal
festivities were conducted. Here the audience could—as in the
13 See Rainer Pineas, “The Morality Vice in Volpone,” Discourse V (1962), 451-159; and Alan Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy, 75 and following. 14 For a fuller discussion, see Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe, 81-83. 15 See also Happé 21-22. 16 As Mares notes, the Vice “is on intimate terms with his audience and cracks jokes with individual members of it” (14). 194
performance of The Castle of Perseverance—share the setting with both
the actors and the “stytelerys” who acted as stewards or supervisors. (79)
The contrast between locus and platea is one of “fictive locality” versus “public place,” to continue with Weimann’s terms (80). The distance between the audience and the locus is essentially the same distance that constitutes the “fourth wall” between audience and actors today. The primary means of breaking that wall in late medieval and Tudor dramatic traditions was the platea, a space that belonged to the drama but that established an “anachronistic” link with the audience by bridging a certain distance between spectacle and spectator. In liturgical drama, for instance, the obvious distance in time and place between audience and the subject of the drama could be closed by the behavior of an actor who addressed the audience or commented on the action from the perspective of the audience, rather than the characters in the locus. Weimann offers as an example the performance of Joseph in the twelfth play of the Ludus Coventriae, called Joseph’s
Return. Joseph’s “self-expression” in his commentary on the events of the play “is anachronistic in the sense that a contemporary perspective on everyday experience is being enacted” (82). Similarly, the fool in the late French miracle play Saint Didier
“dissociates himself from the world and time of the locus”:
This fool quite clearly occupies the platea; he speaks to the soldiers,
servants, and beggars, and to the audience, while the serious or high-born
persons in the play seem unaware of his existence despite his lengthy
comments on their actions and deportment. Contemporaneous with the
audience, the fool here dissociates himself from the world and time of the 195
locus as he glosses the symbolic action for the audience: “This must have
happened long, long ago,” he tells them directly. (78)
The space of the stage provided opportunities for actors to step out of the action of the play and into a metadramatic perspective partly commensurate with the audience’s.17
The platea is a part of the acting stage, but its space is essentially blank; it is involved in the play’s action but specified in terms of time or location.
As the popular, professional drama grew into a large-scale industry in Elizabethan
London, the space of the stage evolved, and there is some question as to how the later platform stages made use of localized versus unlocalized space. Weimann describes the progress of the locus and platea:
It may be reasonable to assume that while the main acting area in
Shakespeare’s theater did not perhaps develop directly out of the platea it
did take on and expand some of the platea’s basic functions. The scaffold,
once its platform had become the main acting area, was likely to be
increasingly dissociated from the earlier representational assumptions of
the loca; the “place,” however, retained the unlocalized quality that
remained so important on the later platform stage. In the medieval drama
it is the symbolic function of the various loca that tended to distance them
17 I would argue that the concept of anachronism with which Weimann works necessarily involves aspects of a metadramatic perspective because it recognizes distance between audience or platea on the one hand and locus on the other. Any time an audience member or a dramatic character recognizes the events on the stage as events in a play, a metadramatic perspective is invoked. Thus, the clown of Saint Didier is in a metadramatic space as he notes that the action on the locus “must have happened long, long ago”: he is seeing the events as part of a dramatic scenario that he is entirely outside of. By the same logic, the audience may be said always to occupy a metadramatic space, though such a perspective need not always include an emotional or intellectual distance from the dramatic events. The improvisational duties of performers like Will Kemp and his predecessors in the Vice are anachronistic and fundamentally metadramatic, because they occupy a perspective that is outside of the play, that recognizes the play as a play. On the character Volpone and metadramatic links with the audience, see Sweeney, 236-238. 196
from the audience. . . . it is only when the actor [playing Herod], by
threatening or raging [in the “street”], upset a sense of distance from
within the platea or platea-like position that the representational quality of
the role disappeared, to be replaced by an anachronistic form of semiritual
burlesque and self-expression. (Weimann 80)
Several points may be gleaned from this passage. First, the various loca on the medieval stage are often invested with a symbolic or representational significance; they were meant to represent a particular time, place, and mood on an otherwise blank stage. Second,
Weimann is careful to note that either the platea or a “platea-like” position could facilitate the anachronistic connections with the audience that characterize the
“nonrepresentational” component of the stage. Although in the strictest sense, the loca are locations on the stage that represent actual places, such as the throne, the particular space of a particular stage is not necessarily inflexibly divided between locus and platea, especially in Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters. There are “fixed, symbolic locations near and on the larger unlocalized acting area [that] tend to define a more particular kind of action,” and it is dramatically expedient for a character to make a platea-like connection while not at a fixed, symbolic location, but the space of the stage was always adaptable (74). Finally, while the later platform stages did feature localized, representational points—such as the throne, again, or the bed, the hell’s mouth, the tomb, and so forth—in or near a larger, unlocalized platform, the relatively exclusive locus qualities of the representational spaces became less and less firmly established, and the whole stage took on more of a platea-like function: “the Elizabethan platform stage did not divide or dovetail the two modes with anything like the consistency that can be found, 197 say, in the medieval theater of the Ludus Conventriae or an early morality like The Castle of Perseverance” (238).
Anachronism forges a connection between the here-and-now of the audience and the then-and-there of the play by inserting an object of contemporary perspective in a moment otherwise dramatically removed from the here-and-now. But in plays in which the temporal disparity between the subject of the drama and the present time of the audience is either absent not especially applicable, the locus, platea, and the
“anachronism” that characterizes the latter are provided by any number of other methods of breaking the fourth wall. Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s other Armin comedies offer entire casts of characters whose perspective on the dramatic conflict is essentially contemporary with the audience; they are not biblical figures living out biblical experiences but early modern identities living in early modern scenarios, and so the temporal and situational distance that separated the here-and-now from the then-and-there in earlier drama is gone. Gone, too, is the distance separating the Vice or fool from the
“serious” or “high-born” characters, who simply did not hear the fool’s commentary and criticism. The characters whom the fool critiques in Shakespeare’s comedies are perfectly aware of his presence and his opinion. Yet the social distance between the fool and his betters remains, and that social distance absorbs the energies displaced by the closing of the anachronistic gaps on either side of the fool. That is, once the audience’s temporal perspective on the events of the play is made commensurate with the perspective of the play’s main characters, an emphasis falls on the principal remaining disjunction between drama and metadrama, between locus and platea: the social space between the fool and his betters. The fool’s social distance from the other characters in 198 the play serves as an “anachronism” where the action of the play is not temporally removed from the world of the audience. His perspective, one of detached or objective critique, the punctum indifferens of the play, is closer to that of the audience than it is to that of the other characters in the play. In other words, in the popular drama of
Elizabethan and Jacobean London, it is the general difference in perspective, and not simply a particular difference in temporal position, that characterizes the distance between a platea character and the locus of a play on the one hand and the proximity between a platea character and the world of the audience on the other. The fool, like the
Vice before him, sees the action of the play both as a participant and as an observer. He is both a “point of indifference” outside the play’s central scheme—either because, like the morality Vice, he stands apart from the rest of the characters in a manipulative role, or like the early clown Vice, he is afforded the perspective and the license of an allowed fool—and a point of reference within it. He teaches the audience how to read the play
(Weimann talks of the fool in the French miracle plays as “glossing” the action) just as he offers the play’s other characters alternative ways in which to see themselves and their predicaments.
Situated thus between audience and drama, able to move back and forth with relative ease and without derailing the narrative on the stage or its reception in the audience, the allowed fool inhabits a boundary area between the center and the margins— between the locus and the platea, or whatever related, derived, or locus-and-platea-like scheme can be said to have obtained on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. He moves between the margins and the center of the play, just as he is able to take up a position either inside or outside of the drama itself. This movement, a crossing back and forth 199 over boundaries, is constitutive of the allowed fool, because it is both engendered by and demonstrative of his license, his freedom, and his perspective of indifference. This supposition plays on a similarity or analogous relationship of some sort between margins and centers on the one hand and drama and audience or locus and platea on the other.
The social distinctions that separate the locus tradition from the platea tradition, especially when the original temporal distinction is absent, have been cast by Weimann in terms of high-born and low-born, serious and comic. They can also be cast as defining and supporting, principal and secondary, or central and marginal, which in turn allows a rich range of comparisons between the fool or punctum indifferens and the popular dramatic tradition of which he is a part, and the function of that tradition with regard to popular or dominant culture and the space of the city. The structural role of the fool and the space of the stage he inhabits while playing can be emblematic of the structural role of the theater, the spaces in the city it inhabits, and its relationship to the city it recreates.
The theater plays the “allowed fool” to the culture that permits its operation; it is the punctum indifferens that constructs the age and body of the time in the office of detached criticism. Its license is dramatic, its indifferent perspective permits social representation and social criticism, and its subject is increasingly the people and cultural texts of
London. Like the allowed fool, the royally-licensed theater made a sport of critiquing the society from which it was separated by distances of space and class. It was a “marginal” institution with ties to a center that both kept it at a distance and embraced its unique perspective.
The spatial schematic of locus and platea is reflected in the layout of a city with a center and margins. Without blindly adopting a simple binary scheme for all of London, 200 we can posit a locus-like center studded with the symbolic architecture of buildings like
St. Paul’s, the Royal Exchange, the Tower, and the City Companies’ halls and demarcated by the city wall. Outside the wall in the platea-like margins, the trend of building moves toward a vernacular architecture that eschews the symbolic grandeur of the city’s monuments in favor of functionality.18 John Stow, whose dismay at the trends
of landlords and builders in the “suburbs without the walls” is often cited, remarks on the
meanness of the “small and base tenements, for the most part lately erected” in the
northern suburb of Shoreditch (386). Norman G. Brett-James explores in detail the
growth of the suburbs under Elizabethan and James. He notes Stowe’s aversion to
various “filthy cottages” and “alleys of small tenements or cottages” that sprung up east
of the Tower to serve expanding population (qtd. in Brett-James 58). In the margins of
London, construction of buildings observed the functional perspective of here-and-now.
Of course, squalor persisted inside the city walls, just as the Globe theater itself, situated
across the river from the city center, was remarked for its splendor and grandeur. But the
basic scheme of a locus-center privileging established, dominant cultural customs and
platea-margins, favoring irreverent, emergent cultural energy, works well: within the
walls, the careful administration of the lord mayor, aldermen, and city government
maintained an ordered and often symbolic status quo. Outside the city wall, status quo
gives way to innovation and recreation. Building codes are less strictly enforced,
symbolism is replaced by functionality, and business is replaced by sport and recreation,
18 Valerie Pearl notes that “the erection of cheap, shoddy dwellings, the conversion of great houses into tenements, and the extortion of rack-rents, inevitably accompanied the increase in population” in London (18). The bulk of the expansion developed outside the city walls where land was more readily available and enforcement of building proscriptions was more lax. For a detailed study of the city’s expansions, see Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, especially chapters 2, 3, and 4. 201 provided by the fields, parks, and fairs that occupy the open space surrounding the twenty six wards.19
Like the allowed fool, the popular theater could move comfortably between city
center and extramural margins. This boundary-crossing, which becomes more powerful
as the fool mingles more intimately with his social superiors on the Elizabethan and
Jacobean stage, is a defining capacity of the allowed fool: he can move between
perspectives, from platea to locus, from high-born to low-born, back and forth on either
side of the anachronistic divide. Such movement is reflected by the popular stage’s
development both inside and outside of the city proper. Though the trend of theater
construction toward and after the turn of the century reflects the increasing pressure from
city authorities to move performances off city-administrated land, popular stages
remained inside the city walls, in private, “allowed” spaces for the duration of the period.
The King’s Men are an obvious example, with an outdoor season at the Globe on the
Bankside and an indoor season at the Blackfriars theater, in the City’s Blackfriars liberty.
The theater’s association with other recreational pastimes concentrated in the city’s
margins, however, makes it both easy and tempting to stress the link between the stage
and the platea-like space outside the city center, and the association may cautiously be
indulged. The stage’s recreational energies are best suited to a municipal platea, where the theater’s function of allowed fool can flourish. It was licensed by the crown, tolerated by the city authorities, and patronized by a cross-section of society that composed perhaps twenty percent of the city’s population. It offered with a remarkable
19 In chapter 1 I sharply challenge the easy division of the city into the scheme of central and marginal corresponding to inside the walls versus outside the walls and across the river. As I have acknowledged, however, Mullaney’s model remains critically useful, as long as it is understood to be flexible. It is particularly useful here, as a means of describing architecture in urban expansion. 202 impunity20 its unique perspective on the city center, derived from its separation, its punctum indifferens, relative to that center.
Access to the platea is increasingly open to characters other than, or in addition to, the fool in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and where there is no court fool to assume an essentially contemporary perspective on the platea, there are other figures and even entire plot lines to fill his space. As Weimann’s example of Joseph from the Ludus
Coventriae illustrates, the platea even early on was not exclusively the place of the fool or his predecessor, the Vice, and once the temporal distance between locus and platea is removed,21 the platea-like position is available to any character who takes up the perspective of the audience or shares his or her thoughts with the audience, thereby bringing the audience to his or her perspective. As the popular professional drama established itself in London and the plays themselves began to address contemporary issues or to address classical or biblical topics from a contemporary perspective,22 the events on the stage began “to approach the standards and experience” of the audience in such a way that it was no longer necessary for a character to be dissociated from the
20 Of course, the theater industry and the community of actors, writers, and entrepreneurs who made it run were often the object of various serious aggressive legal actions, but its license is abundantly apparent in its success and in the durability of its popular tradition. A good example of its license is the fact that neither punishment nor suspicion was directed at the Lord Chamberlain’s men in the crown’s actions after the performance of a play, presumably Shakespeare’s Richard II, directly linked to the Essex rebellion. Neither the play nor its performance, Leeds Barroll has argued, appears to have been considered subversive, or if either was, the license of the Lord Chamberlain’s players seems to have exempted it from punishment. See Leeds Barroll, “A New History for Shakespeare and His Time.” 21 There is some debate about the relationship between the spatial arrangements of the popular professional stage in London and its Tudor predecessors. Whether the distance between locus and platea collapses or whether the platform stage did indeed “develop directly out of the platea” is difficult to determine. It is clear that loca-type locations on the stage did not disappear, for there are still thrones, homes, and residences (the domus or sedes, as Weimann calls them (74)), but they do not retain the localized, removed- by-time-and-distance separation characteristic of their predecessors. See Weimann, 73-85; 237-246. 22 Consider as an example the difference between Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both use the same central plot to make comparable suggestions about the wisdom of dividing a kingdom, and both explore avarice and assorted other human vices. But the differences of perspective is substantial. Lear offers the story of a pre-Christian king from an active, late sixteenth-century vantage point; its didacticism is less overtly symbolic and its drama is more involved. 203 events or characters he or she commented on (Weimann 82). Stage conventions like the aside or, arguably, the soliloquy, depend on the actor’s ability to speak to the audience as from the platea.23 When Mosca tells us in 5.5 of Volpone that he’ll “make [Volpone]
languish in his borrowed case, / Except he come to composition with me,” he is playing
the Vice, he is addressing the audience, and he has assumed the platea (5.5.7-8). He is
not the play’s fool, but he has taken on some of the dramatic functions associated with
the fool and the fool’s predecessors.
II. From Fool to Freak: Blood, Bonds, and Boundaries
Welsford notes that “the fools in Jonson’s Volpone, Nano, Androgyno and
Castrone, are peculiarly odious grotesques whose only function in the play is to
emphasize the luxury and selfishness of the Fox, and to perform an occasional jig,
presumably to gratify the groundlings” (246). Approached from the perspective of a
history of fools in literature, Volpone’s freaks may indeed seem to be the trivial effects of
the play’s titular character, especially when they are compared to Shakespeare’s court
fools or earlier Vice figures, whose size as roles alone makes them prominent. But if we
read them as closely and carefully as their major-character counterparts, their
contribution to the play’s conflict and resolution becomes much more important.
Similarly, if we look within the history of fools in literature at the specific dramatic place
and function of the fool as punctum indifferens in the space of the platea, we find in
Volpone’s freaks a remarkable phenomenon. According to Robert Weimann, we in fact
23 See J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, 72-74, and, for a discussion of soliloquies, asides, and observations on stage, see Bernard Beckerman, 183-197. 204 have an obligation to take the fool, the punctum indifferens, and the platea quite seriously.
The fool and the platea, as specific examples of larger, general structural component of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, are actually indispensable to understanding popular dramatic form on the popular stage. In what Weimann calls broadly the “popular tradition,” the platea and the characters and traditions associated with it in Tudor popular drama (clowns, comic subplots, ritual, self-embodiment24) are not simply safety or purge valves for the serious dramatic tension around which they orbit; they are absorbed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage into the very structure of drama as “constituent parts of the play’s form”:
Perhaps we should be wary of reading the plays . . . in too abstract a way,
as if the popular infusion into Renaissance structure must have served
either as a foil or a parody of the serious matter. In light of the traditional
methods of correlation between platea and locus, the foil relationship by
which the “comic people” set off the “tragic king” and the parody analogy
do not seem necessary alternatives. . . . The popular conventions could
hardly have been designed to “set off” the main action when “mingling” of
“Kinges and Clownes” went so far that the resulting gallimaufry affected
not only the relationship between prince and peasant but the language and
the attitudes of the prince as well. . . . the “second dimension” does not
merely comment upon the main action but enters into a highly complex
relationship with it that is indispensable to the larger meaning. (241-245)
24 See Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, especially 73-77 and 237- 246. 205
Weimann uses “popular infusion” as an umbrella term parallel to the “Clownes” portion of Philip Sidney’s “mingling Kinges and Clownes” complaint. If we read comic subplots, fools, moments on the platea, and other non-locus material in plays as somehow secondary or complementary to the principal dramatic action, we run the risk of introducing a false relationship between component parts of the drama. The platea is not ancillary to the locus; they are structural equals, mutually constituent. Renaissance dramatic theory such as Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy or the perceived allegiance of the age’s educated dramatists to classical precepts suggests that the low-born characters in a play are moments of respite (in the platea) to be experienced independently from the play’s serious plot. Weimann’s deconstruction of the binary emphasizes how the popular, native tradition in English drama, represented here via synecdoche by
“Clownes” and the dramatic space they inhabit, is not, as it might appear, ancillary, secondary, or marginal to the serious, locus-driven plot, but instead critically central, simultaneously with the locus. Especially in Shakespeare, the “structural integration” of the two was “most fruitfully developed.” In Hamlet, for instance,
one of the basic themes (“The time is out of joint”) is given a
complementary gloss (“the age is grown so picked”) by which the play’s
meaning itself is affected. By matching “Horne Pipes and Funeralls” the
clowns continue to do precisely what Sidney feared they would: “they
stirre laughter in sinfull things.” (240)
The gravedigger-clowns are not merely a “comic interlude” or “subplot” because structurally, they are in fact “like the uncomic interlude” (242). They affect the play’s meaning because they affect Hamlet himself, the things he talks about, and the language 206 he uses. They come to bear directly on characters of a much higher rank whose dramatic ancestors would presumably not have heard the clowns’ commentary and would not have come downstage to the platea to engage them in conversation.
The mingling of kings and clowns, or princes and gravediggers, a symptom of the collapse of once-necessary distinctions between locus and platea, poses a challenge to reductive readings of ostensibly minor characters, and Weimann’s approach to the tradition of the platea on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage can be used to argue against
Welsford’s dismissal of Jonson’s Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno in Volpone. From
Welsford’s perspective, the trio are simply minor effects. When we approach them as emblems of the “popular tradition,” however, the fool, the Vice, the comic subplot, the punctum indifferens, or the platea—different manifestations of the same dramatic space—they become constituent elements instead. Again, to transfer into this argument terms from earlier chapters, we can say that Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are not marginal, but rather central to the dramatic action and the space of the stage. They are small roles, but in the structural consideration, size is not an issue; it is the function that determines their importance.
Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno, though they provide entertainment, are not court fools in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Armin roles. Their fooling in the play is more a matter of entertainment than a substantive critique of the human shortcomings that drive the plot—that function falls to Mosca and Volpone himself, whose own connections to the Vice specifically of the morality tradition make them both the tempters and the anatomizers of the greedy birds, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. But Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno do represent themselves as fools, and their entertainments suppose the 207 presence of the allowed fool in the play. At their first appearance, in 1.2, they present a burlesque on the transmigrations of the soul of Pythagoras, which ends with an incarnation of Pythagoras in Androgyno:
Nano Now quit thee, for heaven, of that profane nation,
And gently report thy next transmigration.
Androgyno To the same that I am.
Nano A creature of delight,
And, what is more than a fool, an hermaphrodite?
Now, pray thee, sweet soul, in all thy variation,
Which body wouldst though choose to take up
thy station?
Androgyno Troth, this I am in, even here would I tarry.
Nano ‘Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?
Androgyno Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.
No, ‘tis your fool wherewith I am so taken,
The only one creature that I can call blessed,
For all other forms I have proved most distressed.
Nano Spoke true, as thou wert Pythagoras still.
This learned opinion we celebrate will,
Fellow eunuch, as behooves us, with all our wit and art,
To dignify that whereof ourselves are so
Great and special a part.
(1.2.47-62) 208
Nano first characterizes Androgyno as a “creature of delight, / And what is more than a fool, an hermaphrodite,” noting that Androgyno’s complex gender and sexuality are not incompatible with being a fool but are a departure or an addition.25 There is an implicit
link here between “delight” as present in the rich sexual composition of the
hermaphrodite and the category of “fool”—the syntax of the lines, in fact, puts them in
apposition. A fool is a creature of delight, and in this case, there is another dimension,
the added or extra attraction of the hermaphrodite. Androgyno assents, and Nano
continues with his emphasis on the link between the “delight” of the fool and
Androgyno’s plural sexuality with “‘cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary,”
but Androgyno dismisses the notion of sensual pleasures in favor of the “blessed” state of
fools as compared to the “distressed” state of “all other forms.” It is the role of fool, and
not the added or extra dimensions, that Androgyno prizes above all else. Brian Parker
and David Bevington find in Androgyno’s response an insistence that he “cherishes the
paradoxical wisdom and license of the allowed fool more than sexual variety” and note
that “Androgyno has come to the conclusion that most shapes of existence are distressful;
only the fool enjoys the perfect freedom of his license” (Parker and Bevington 1.2.56 n.;
1.2.58 n.). These editorial glosses presume a link between “your fool” in Androgyno’s
line and the tradition of the allowed fool. The connection is not explicit, though, and to
see “allowed fool” where Nano and Androgyno talk simply of “fool,” we need the
support of the song that follows the transmigration of Pythagoras:
25 Stephen Greenblatt has considered the figure of the hermaphrodite and its relationship to boy actors playing female roles on the early modern stage in “Fiction and Friction.” Examining early modern notions of the homology of the sexes and presentation on stage versus representation, he contrasts the “fictive existence of two distinct genders” on the stage with the fact that “on stage there is in fact but a single gender” (93) and concludes that “Shakespearean women are . . . the representation of Shakespearean men” (92). Greenblatt treats the hermaphrodite specifically as a challenge to the notion of an “underlying natural 209
Fools, they are the only nation
Worth men’s envy or admiration;
Free from care or sorrow-taking,
Selves and others merry making.
All they speak or do is sterling.
Your fool, he is your great man’s dearling,
And your lady’s sport and pleasure;
Tongue and bauble are his treasure.
E’en his face begetteth laughter,
And he speaks truth free from slaughter;
He’s the grace of every feast,
And, sometimes, the chiefest guest;
Hath his trencher and his stool
When wit waits upon the fool.
Oh, who would not be
He, he, he?
(1.2.66-81)
The first two lines reprise the sentiment established in the first entertainment, but the remainder of the song builds a case specifically for the allowed fool. With “free from care or sorrow-taking,” the song recalls Folly’s observation from The Praise of Folly:
“[the madness of folly] is present whenever an amiable dotage of the mind at once frees
fact of sexual difference,” which notion he ascribes to the Renaissance. The hermaphrodite illustrates that “sexual difference, the foundation of all individuation, turns out to be unstable at its origin” (76). 210 the spirit from carking cares and anoints it with a complex delight” (51-52).26 Freedom
from care or sorrow, from which the position punctum indifferens derives, is the first of
two major components of the allowed fool. He must be detached from the conflicts in
which other characters are caught up in order to pursue a different course of action from
those other characters with regard to the progress of the conflict. The second component,
the license or scope of expression, comes into play with “all they speak or do is sterling”:
the words and actions of the fool are like precious metal; they are a rare commodity, and
consistently so. They are also linked, via the punctum indifferens, to the idea of “truth.”
The fool’s freedom from care gives him access not just to delight, but to a truth that
others do not have in plenitude, like “sterling.” Consequently, the fool “speaks truth free
from slaughter,” or punishment. There is no slander in the allowed fool even when he
does nothing but rail.
There is an unspoken third component to the allowed fool: he must proceed to
rail, to fool, to show up his betters. That is, he must be active in his office. Volpone’s
fools do little if anything in the way of railing, and though they are freely allowed to
entertain themselves and their master, they are immediately banished from the stage
when, to use Hamlet’s phrase, a “necessary question of the play” is at hand—namely, one
of Volpone’s suitors.27 In this sense, Volpone’s fools are neither “allowed” nor “fools.”
Nano and Androgyno conduct a miniature encomium on fools, their license, and the
virtues of their role, but the only use they make of their license or their privileged access
to “truth” is to play a “very, very pretty” jig of Mosca’s invention; otherwise, they sport
amongst themselves with their curiously silent (except in song) companion, Castrone.
26 For more on the relationship of the “fools” song and Erasmus, see Sweeney, 227-228. 27 See Hamlet, 3.2.38. 211
They are not “allowed” except in the sense that Volpone permits them to entertain him in private. Nano plays a slightly larger (though separate) role as a henchman in the schemes of Volpone and Mosca, but to the extent that they are fools, Nano and Androgyno are not allowed to exercise their folly in public, and to the extent that they are in fact “allowed” to do anything, they offer not a transcendent truth of the play, but a brief interlude and a song.
The play lacks public, licensed fooling largely because Volpone has no room for an actual allowed fool. As noted above, the critical evaluation of other characters in the play is an office filled mostly by Mosca and Volpone himself, who anatomize the folly of the rest of the cast in private discussions and asides. Throughout scene 1.2, in which we are first introduced to the legacy-hunters, Mosca and Volpone punctuate the visits of the birds with commentary on their greed and gullibility: “What a rare punishment / Is avarice to itself!” Volpone observes (142-143). Thus, to have Nano and Androgyno speak truth free from slaughter would make them tautological, and their truth redundant.
With their structural role partly absorbed by other characters, the would-be fools are further isolated in the play. They are emblematic of foolery, but their purpose, manifest in their appearance, is more aberrant.
Considered with the addition of Castrone as a trio—as noted, Nano has a separate part in Volpone’s machinations, but for the play’s structural purposes, these three are packaged together—they are in fact not fools but freaks, each bearing a physical deformity, either congenital or inflicted, that literally determines his character. That they argue that the value of the allowed fool is crucial for establishing the presence of allowed fooling in the drama, but the role they actually play is something more akin to the 212 allowed freak—”freak” because the physical deformity that characterizes each literally determines his dramatic character,28 and “allowed” because they are employed by
Volpone and the play specifically for their freak-fool status. They are incarnations of the
fool whose distance from the ordinary both endears them to the society that marginalizes
them and exempts them from its limitations and expectations.
Nano is a dwarf—he is naturally part of the Other, the unheimlich, a freak of
nature. He is excessively diminutive, which places him outside the mainstream of
society. He is “dwarf” before he is a person, just as his name, “Nano,” reflects not his
behavior in a figurative sense (as with the fox, the fly, the vulture and so forth), but his
very physical presence in the play. Castrone is a eunuch, and his marginality is
presumably either chosen or inflicted, but exotic, in either case. His otherness is
suggestive of the eccentricities or the court or of foreign cultures and practices. He is a
rarity, employed by persons of status for entertainment. As with Nano, his name says
little about his behavior. Castrone is in fact almost non-existent in the play as a character,
and his behavior is accordingly unremarkable. He sings, but he appears otherwise only to
stand for strangeness and marginality as part of the trio. Lastly, Androgyno is a
hermaphrodite. The details of his/her (“its”—the awkwardness of the character as a
member of gendered society is immediately apparent in the problem of pronouns)
sexuality are not given, but we know that Androgyno “the delight of each sex [can] vary”
(1.2.54). Like that of Castrone, Androgyno’s sexuality (though perhaps more his/her
gender) is strange, but like that of Nano, his/her marginality is natural, rather than chosen
28 Enid Welsford refers to the trio as “grotesques” (246) and as “clowns” (252). Brian Parker uses “freaks” in his Revels edition of the play. I use “freak” for several reasons. Despite its potential dismissive harshness, the alliterative affinity it has with “fool” and that fact that it is also a short, monosyllabic term helps link the phrase “allowed freak” with “allowed fool,” which association I stress in this argument. 213 or inflicted. Androgyno is thus perched on several boundaries, not residing exclusively in any one category. Part male and part female, Androgyno is all freak, all marginality.29
Again it is interesting to note that while almost all of the play’s characters have
“symbolic” names loaded with some sort of extra significance, the specific relationship between names and characters divides neatly into two groupings. On the one hand are the animal names, which bear a roughly allegorical charge relative to the characters to which they are attached. Volpone is guileful and clever; Mosca is parasitic; Voltore is vulture-like, looking to feed on a corpse; Corvino seeks to beautify himself with others’ feathers; and Corbaccio disinherits his son,30 and so forth.31 On the other hand are the freaks, with Greek- or Latin-derived names that roughly describe physical abnormalities but have little, if anything, to do with the behavior of the characters to which they are attached. Nano is not especially terse or laconic, Androgyno’s behavior cannot really be classified as a mixture of feminine and masculine stereotypes, and it is hard to imagine the state of castration translating into a kind of nonverbal behavior. Whether they are called by their Greek or Latin names or, as is more often the case, by the English
29 These observations about the freaks’ bodies do not necessarily apply to actors’ bodies. There is no reason to suppose the roles were played by an actual dwarf, eunuch, or hermaphrodite. 30 Brian Parker notes that “ravens were thought to neglect their young” (Parker, Volpone 87 n. 4). Parker briefly considers the associations of each bird of prey, citing Beryl Rowland’s Birds with Human Souls. Rowland’s study offers full accounts of all three birds, each with further references. See Parker’s notes on each name in “The Persons of the Play,” 86-89; and see Rowland on “crow” (35-38); “raven” (143-149); and “vulture” (177-180). Jonas Barish’s discussion of Jonson “humors” characters offers another background for Volpone, Mosca, and the three birds. Though the doctrine of humors—”body fluids” that “engendered certain vapors, or fumes, which passed through the blood and acted directly on the brain” (Barish, Language of Prose Comedy 217))—is much more important to Jonson’s earlier comedies, it is useful here as a means of understanding each character’s particular traits. Robert Watson, in his edition of Every Man in his Humour, notes that “Jonson’s use of the term [“humour”] is unorthodox. . . . Jonson’s characters are driven less by chemistry than by fantasy” (“Introduction” xiii). For his part, Barish recognizes a similar point, that humors “referred primarily to a physiological unbalance,” but that “secondarily, and more significantly for Jonsonian drama,” they “connoted affectation; its commonest symptom was mimicry, a ridiculous straining to become what one was not” (Language 217). 31 “Celia,” “Bonario,” and “Peregrine” also have Latin-derived names that actively describe their characters or approximate them in some way—Celia is heavenly; Bonario is good; Peregrine is a hawk and a traveler. 214 translations, the three are referred to exclusively by their abnormalities; they are “dwarf,”
“eunuch,” and “hermaphrodite” before they are persons. Their defining essences are their deformities, the things that set them apart from the cultural mainstream of the play.
Taken individually, the strangeness of each freak is specific, but as a unit they are marginality in general. They are almost always referred to as a group, and they carry with them not isolated instances of marginality, but marginality in the play as a whole.
They are “allowed” freaks in the sense that their freak-defining characteristics, their substance as characters, is allowed to govern their behavior, which they engage in with impunity. Their fooling is celebrated when appropriate and tolerated—that is, not coercively corrected—when not appropriate. They are “allowed” within Volpone’s household to prosper as freak-fools, and otherwise they are merely dismissed from the stage. What is more interesting is that the play as a whole allows them to sport, to recreate themselves abroad, to roam unattached save for their ambiguous relationship to
Volpone himself. Volpone silences them and sweeps them off stage when the birds arrive with gifts, but Mosca turns them loose in 5.5 with instructions to “recreate” themselves abroad. As the play rounds up and punishes aberrant characters in 5.12,
Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno remain at large, frustrating, I will argue, the play’s grand scheme of enforcing patrilineage through punishing unnatural behavior. Volpone’s fool- freaks, emblems of playfulness, self-creation, and recreation, are (ostensibly, unwittingly) celebrated by the play for the very characteristics that it corrects in others. They are
“allowed” to recreate themselves and us, without being punished, because the distance between them and the other characters, socially, exempts them from the rules the prescribe and proscribe actions of others. 215
With its play on “sterling” and “treasure,” the fool’s song at 1.2.66 establishes a subtle contrast to the worldly greed that drives the dramatic conflict of Volpone. The play opens with an ode to worldly riches, and a curtain is drawn to reveal a presumably garish pile of prop treasure, to which the fool’s treasure of a care-free existence, coupled with exclusive access to delight and truth, is directly opposed. The “treasure” that
Volpone is hoarding and that the three suitor-birds and the parasite seek is literal sterling
(and gold, plate, jewels, and so forth), and it turns out to be all-corrupting.32 The treasure
possessed by the fool is figurative sterling; it is a richness of merry making, and its
preciousness is uncorrupted and uncorrupting. The world of the fool and the world of the
legacy hunting are sharply distinguished and contrasted in the play, the moral force of
which contrast comes in exposing the viciousness that characterizes worldly greed.
While the fools enjoy the use of their figurative treasure, the play’s other characters
scheme in vain to acquire a treasure that, while eluding them, turns them against each
other and destroys the fragile structure of cooperation they erect to further their causes.
What is interesting is the scope and richness of the juxtaposition: the treasure of the fools
is juxtaposed to Volpone’s literal wealth; the relationship among Volpone and his freaks
is juxtaposed to the relationship among Volpone, Mosca, and the birds; and the scenes
themselves are juxtaposed, emphasizing not only the difference between the social
relationships, but also the absolute incompatibility of the two. The healthy, hearth-like
relationships that characterize the celebration of delight, merry making, and cooperation
32 Don E. Wayne, following L. C. Knights, notes that the “unremitting critique of acquisitiveness,” evident here in the greed of Volpone, Mosca, and the three birds, is central to Jonson’s plays generally: “the deformities of personality that drive Jonson’s characters to seek power and self-aggrandizement in one for or another are ultimately linked to the lust for gold.” He qualifies Knights’s argument, however, by insisting that in Jacobean playwrights and in Jonson in particular, “the ‘attitude’ . . . is far more complex than the phrase ‘anti-acquisitive’ would suggest,” since the dramatists themselves are not unaffected by the increased circulation of material wealth characteristic of emerging capitalism (Watson 105). 216 when the fools are on stage is an embarrassment and a threat to the spurious love, affected brotherhood, and duplicity that drives the relationships among Volpone and his suitors. When the latter arrives at Volpone’s door, the former must be banished to the margins: “who’s that? Away! Look, Mosca. Fool, begone!” Volpone erupts (1.2.81).
The two cannot obtain at once. As though somehow aware that the boundary separating platea and locus has largely dissolved, and that the stage cannot accommodate the full force of both at once, the play keeps them out of view of each other.
The conclusion of Volpone shows the triumph of lawful, morally upright citizens over deception, fraud, and foolishness. Though the instruments of Justice—the avocatori—turn out to be far from incorruptible themselves, they mete out punishment just the same, bringing to justice the play’s various offenders with sentences that address their crimes individually. Specifically, the conclusion of the play identifies and punishes acts of transgression by inflicting metonymic mockeries of the crimes as corrective penances on the transgressors. Mosca, “a fellow of no birth or blood,” has impersonated a gentleman (5.12.112). His attempt to force himself above his station results in his being whipped and imprisoned in the galleys, beneath his station. The principle of his crime— violating class boundaries—is applied to him in reverse, moving him from low-born citizen to slave. Volpone, a true—and healthy—gentleman by birth, has impersonated an invalid, so he is to “lie in prison cramped with irons” until he is “sick and lame indeed”
(5.12.123-124). His punishment is similar to Mosca’s in that it turns his devices against him and uses the principle of his crime to punish him.33 Voltore has abused the legal
33 To the modern reader or audience, these punishments may not seem substantially different—they are both prison sentences of a sort—but to the Venetian court, they apparently were. The avocatori note that Volpone, “by blood and rank a gentleman,” cannot come “under like censure,” suggesting a fundamental difference. 217 system whose workings have been entrusted to him: he has violated the laws he is supposed to uphold, and so the legal system excludes him and turns back upon him—he is deprived of his practice and his citizenship. Corbaccio has disinherited his natural son, dispossessing a “birth and blood” heir of his rightful legacy, and so Corbaccio is himself stripped of his estate. In each case, the punishment is tailored to fit the crime; unnatural behavior is condemned and corrected as authority asserts itself, using nature as a kind of bludgeon to teach legitimacy. If a character pretends to be more than he is, he is reduced to something beneath what he was. If a character impersonates an invalid, he is made into one; if he falsely represents himself as a cuckold, he is mocked with ass’s ears and paraded through Venice.
The play’s preoccupation with “birth and blood,” “natural” behavior, and the state law that regulates them unites all of these transgressions and punishments. Let us begin by unpacking the terms “blood” and “natural.” The use of the word “blood” in the play typically carries one of two principal senses. The first is sensual passion, such as that excited by Celia in Mosca’s account of her beauty in 1.5: “a soft lip, / Would tempt you to eternity of kissing! / And flesh that melteth in a touch to blood!” (111-113). Corvino later invokes the idea of a “young Frenchman, or hot Tuscan blood” as examples of sexually active men who know “every quirk within lust’s labyrinth” and to whom he would never entrust Celia’s body, contrasted with Volpone, whose blood is so cold that, as Mosca notes, nothing can warm it except a fever (3.7.59-61). The second, more prevalent sense is of “blood” as a biologically transmitted substance that determines character, status, and right. It is linked with “birth” in Mosca’s punishment: he is a fellow “of no birth or blood,” meaning he has no birthright to the title, dress, or privileges 218 of a gentleman, just as Volpone is “by blood and rank a gentleman” and therefore not punishable in the same manner as Mosca (5.12.112, 117). When Mosca describes
Corbaccio’s disinheriting of Bonario, he says Bonario will be “thrust . . . forth, / As a mere stranger to his blood” (3.2.44-45). Earlier, Sir Politic speaks of the “brave bloods” of England and having been consulted in weighty matters by “great men’s sons, / Persons of blood and honour” (2.2.115, 121-122). Thus, “blood” is important in the play as the substance that links father with son on the one hand and person with title or entitlement on the other. To be “of blood” is to be of some importance and social standing, as well as to be in the line of birthright wherein both goods and status are transferred from parents to children. Bloodlines and birthrights are, in fact, the key component violated by
Volpone, Mosca, and the three legacy hunters. With the exceptions of Voltore, who has no blood or birth interest in the play, apart from as a surrogate heir to Volpone, and
Madame Would-Be, whose attention is split between the legacy plot and the Sir Politic sub-plot,34 the transgressions of the legacy plot turn on the abuse of either bloodlines or
birthrights, or both. Mosca attempts to seize a birthright not available to him by lineal
descent; Volpone is variously guilty of obstructing the proper transfer of goods from
father to son; Corvino abuses his own blood by offering the services of his wife, to whom
he refers as “my blood and my affections,” to Volpone (2.6.71); and Corbaccio threatens
to turn his biological son into “the common issue of the earth,” according to Mosca, by
writing Bonario out of his will (3.2.64).
The play’s investment in preventing or redressing these violations of birthrights
and bloodlines, given its fullest form at the conclusion, calls for “natural” behavior on the
34 I do not treat the sub-plot in my discussion. Jonas Barish’s “The Double Plot in Volpone,” though nearly fifty years old, is still cited. For a recent reconsideration of Barish’s article, see Alexander Leggatt, 219 part of parents, children, wives, and husbands. Typically, the words “nature” and
“natural” are linked, in the Renaissance, with the notion of birth, blood and family—filial obligation, patrilineal succession and inheritance, and, especially, appropriate behavior toward and among parents and children. “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not,” says the ghost of old Hamlet, meaning that if Hamlet is a “natural” child, he will avenge his father’s murder in accordance with his filial duty (Hamlet 1.5.81). The Oxford English
Dictionary offers “of children: Actually begotten by one (in contrast to adopted, etc.), and especially in lawful wedlock” as definition 13a, and as 16a, “feeling or exhibiting natural kindliness, affection, or gratitude; having natural feeling,” which usage is now “rare.” At
10a, the OED lists “standing in a specified relationship to another person or thing by reason of the nature of things or force of circumstances.” The “natural” child is one who shows all duty and reverence especially to the parents from whom the child has issued.
The link of blood is the link of nature, and bloodlines carry with them not only right and title, but also duty.35
“Nature” in a broader context is considerably more complex in the period,
denoting a variety of concepts and serving a number of political and cultural uses. Bonds
of blood as natural ties between family members in Volpone, as in Hamlet, depend on an understanding of “nature” as something opposed to custom and of natural law as the
(usually divinely ordered) set of behaviors, attitudes, and feelings that nature precipitates.
In On Rhetoric, Aristotle introduces “specific law” and “common law,” using the former to describe the laws “defined by each people in reference to themselves,” and the latter to refer to law “based on nature”: “there is in nature a common principle of the just and
“Volpone: the Double Plot Revisited.” 220 unjust that all people in some way divine, even if they have no association or commerce with each other” (1373b). In Aristotle, “natural law” thus has underpinnings of universality and transhistorical permanency, based in an immutable “nature” that applies to all people, and not just to “each people in reference to themselves.”
As George C. Herndl and others have shown, such classical models of nature and natural law, shaken by Calvinist images of man as degraded and questioned by humanists like Michel de Montaigne, “gave way in the early seventeenth century” (Herndl 109).
Citing various characters and writers from Sir Thomas More’s Raphael Hytholdaeus to
Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind to John Donne and Michel de Montaigne, Michael Morgan
Holmes notes that “despite the widespread conservative injunction to follow nature, many early modern people actively contested essentializing fictions, asserting instead that what is commony called natural is, in reality, merely custom” (Early Modern Metaphysical
Literature 13). “Definitions of what is natural and perverse,” he observes further, “are contingent on the subjective interests of individuals and societies” (16).
Still, as Herndl acknowledges and as R. S. White has demonstrated at length, much sixteenth- and some seventeenth-century literature demonstrates a particular “faith in natural law” (Herndl 86).36 It is in fact this faith, Herndl argues, that distinguishes
Shakespearean tragedy qualitatively from later Jacobean tragedy, which departs from the
classical model of natural law established by Aristotle and developed by Thomas
Aquinas. In Volpone, “nature” and natural law are left ambiguous, as demonstrated by
the absence of blood ties in Volpone’s household and the self-created status of Mosca and
35 As Keith Wrightson has demonstrated, one of the few expectations placed on children in the early modern period was obedience to parents (see Wrightson, 114-118). 221 the three freaks. Alexander Leggatt notes that in the miniature “secondary world[s]” of
Jonson’s plays (“an island in Sejanus, a house in The Alchemist and Epicoene, and a bedroom in Volpone”), “true nature is perverted” (Ben Jonson: His Vision and His Art 2).
In contrast to these realms of “false creation,” as Leggatt calls them, nature, natural law, and the notion of birth and blood that is supposed to bond family members is cited by the avocatori and used in the courtroom arguments against Celia and Bonario. Thus, while the play offers visions of the unnatural, its moral scheme depends on a sense of “natural” duty.37
Accordingly, “unnatural” is the converse of “natural,” and the word is repeatedly
used in Volpone as a description of Corbaccio’s legacy double-dealing. “I know not how
to lend it any thought, / My father should be so unnatural,” says Bonario, responding to
Mosca’s news of Corbaccio’s intent (3.2.53-54). Mosca uses the same term when lying
to Corbaccio: “Your son . . . Enter’d our house with violence, his sword drawn / Sought
for you, call’d you wretch, unnatural, / Vow’d he would kill you” (3.9.5-7). Each
responds to what he believes is the unnatural behavior of the other. Corbaccio, deceived
(perhaps willingly) by Mosca, finally disowns Bonario, citing “the mere portent of
nature” and insisting that Bonario is “an utter stranger to my loins” (4.5.108-109). Father
and son are mutually bound by nature to each other, and those bonds are upset in the
course of the play. But the expectation of “natural” behavior that the court tries to
enforce or repair at the conclusion of the trial also extends to husband-wife relationships.
36 See George C. Herndl, The High Design; English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law; and R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature. Herndl’s study is particularly useful, thorough, and convincing. 37 For further considerations of nature, law, and family, see also Stephen Greenblatt’s “Fiction and Friction”; and Louis Montrose’s “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form.” In Greenblatt’s essay, “nature” becomes the contested site at which identity is fashioned according 222
The avocatori, discussing the accusations amongst themselves, variously condemn not only Bonario and Corbaccio, but also Corvino and, by implication, Celia, as apparently having played “unnatural” parts:
4 Avocatore. The gentlewoman has been ever held
Of unreproved name.
3 Avocatore. So the young man.
4 Avocatore. The more unnatural part that of the father.
2 Avocatore. More of the husband.
1 Avocatore. I know not how to give
His act a name, it is so monstrous!
(4.5.3-7)
The “natural” bond between husband and wife is in fact urged by Celia but violated by
Corvino, whose attempts to prostitute Celia to Volpone are punctuated with a dismissal of the idea of “honor” in the realm of “nature”: “Honour! tut, a breath. / There’s no such thing in nature,” he insists, invoking a different sense of nature than that the court,
Bonario, and Celia know (3.7.38-39). For Corvino, “nature” is a Hobbesian state in which constructs like “honor” have meaning only as tools for effecting personal advancement. His own paranoia about his wife’s capacity to cuckold him is established by his silent exit at 1.5.82 and his protracted deliberation before consenting to Mosca’s insinuations, which suggests he is concerned about his own “honor”; he is, in any case,
to desire. Montrose’s article offers an interesting account of natural bonds among family members in the context of primogeniture. 223 willing to dismiss its sanctity for himself by prostituting his wife, and for his wife by arguing that it is merely a construction used to “awe fools” (3.7.40).38
The bonds that govern natural behavior inhere in bloodlines, but—as the marriage
contract illustrates—they can be achieved by legal contract, too. As the fourth avocatore
notes in 5.10, the court has “done ill” to send for Mosca “by a public officer” if Mosca
has indeed been named as Volpone’s heir (36-37). If Mosca has been named legal heir to
Volpone, he inherits not only Volpone’s wealth, but his status as a gentleman, which
means the court owes him a dignified summons, just as the third avocatore indicates that
Mosca deserves a stool to sit on when he enters the court. Volpone, disguised as a public
officer, is to be whipped for failing to bear himself properly “towards a person of
[Mosca’s] rank” (5.12.79-80). Mosca, who is soon to return to the status of “parasite” he
held before he was presumed Volpone’s legitimate heir, is for the moment revered as a
“proper man”—and a “fit match” for an avocatore’s daughter (5.12.50). The fourth
avocatore’s plans to marry his daughter to Mosca further emphasize the importance of the
legal contract, which both makes Mosca a gentleman and which can also translate
Mosca’s newfound status and wealth into eligibility for another, similar contract of
marriage to a ranking statesman’s daughter. For the avocatore, birth and blood determine
natural bonds, but no more so than the legal contract, which, like the legal judgment,
“may not be revoked” (5.12.146). The court thus illustrates how the legal bonds of wills
and marriages can reproduce the natural bonds of bloodlines and birthrights.
38 James Hirsh has considered Corvino’s logic here in the context of arguing that in the world of Volpone, one is either a naïve fool or a knavish fool. One who tries to cure foolishness is a naïve fool, while one who knows foolishness is incurable but who claims to be able to cure it anyway is a knavish fool, “a con artist, a mountebank selling a phony elixir” (106). 224
What the play ostensibly attempts to keep in place with the court’s various punishments is a system of “birth and blood” in which goods and class status are transferred along bloodlines and all social behavior accords either with natural bonds inherent in parent-child relationships or with legal and sexual union in husband-wife relationships. Mosca is punished for, among other things, attempting to become a gentleman with neither a birthright nor a proper legal claim. He has “with [his] impudence abused the court, / And habit of a gentleman of Venice, / Being a fellow of no birth or blood” (5.12.110-112). Specifically and primarily, his offense is an attempt to violate a “natural” class boundary. Corvino is punished for violating his marriage contract by defaming Celia and attempting to prostitute her to Volpone. Corbaccio is punished for disinheriting a legal blood relative and declaring in his place a very unnatural heir. Volpone has generally interfered in the system of birth and blood, obstructing the transfer of property and title in several, layered instances. Voltore has aided Volpone, abusing in the course of his advocacy the law of which he is supposed to be a well-deserving pillar. Volpone himself opens up the initial breach in this scheme of birth and blood early in the play by failing to have a legitimate heir to his wealth. “I have no wife, no parent, child, ally, / to give my substance to; but whom I make / Must be my heir,” he says, shortly after announcing that his heap of gold is “the best of things; and far transcending / All style of joy in children, parents, friends, / Or any other waking dream on earth” (1.1.73-75; 17-19).
The specific context here links Volpone’s perverted adoration for wealth with his absence of regard for birth, blood, and the social and class customs built around them.
Rather than seek an appropriate person as the beneficiary of his wealth, he specifically 225 exploits the disturbance in patrilineal succession created by his lack of a legal heir. Much of the play’s dramatic conflict derives from the greed inspired in Voltore, Corbaccio, and
Corvino, who are themselves variously drawn into violating family bonds in their quest for Volpone’s wealth. Their unnatural inclinations put in motion their several offenses, and the two trial scenes bring the offenders to justice and reestablish the natural behavior called for by the bonds of birth and blood. Bonario is awarded his father’s estate, Celia is dismissed from her marriage contract, broken by Corvino, and returned to her father
“with her dowry trebled,”39 and with Mosca, Volpone, and the birds ushered off to their punishments, the play concludes.
III. Recreation Abroad
But the tidy closure proposed by reestablishment of birthrights, bloodlines, and natural behavior is frustrated by Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno, violators of the scheme of birth and blood, perversions of “true nature,” in Leggatt’s phrasing, whom the conclusion conspicuously does not address. Volpone’s freaks, whose very existence is at
39 This is a peculiarly vague resolution to Celia’s storyline. Though I emphasize the role of Volpone’s freaks in complicating the play’s resolution, the fate of Celia and Bonario also frustrates the sense of closure suggested by the court’s punishments. As match-worthy young people whose union is blocked by a senex-type character (Corvino and/or Corbaccio), their structural function calls for a marriage that never arrives. Both characters succeed to a sum of money in the court’s judgment, which is not untypical of senex plot resolutions, but neither character has worked during the play to achieve money. The choice not to marry two eminently marriageable characters is apparently intentional, on Jonson’s part (as Ann Barton has noted, Jonson was “uneasy” with the “linear, boy-gets-girl plot inherited from Greek New Comedy” that served other dramatists so well. See Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 114 and 118), and it emphasizes the notion that the healthy social relationships urged by the court cannot obtain in the world of the play’s central plot (on Jonson’s “choice” not to marry Celia and Bonario, see also Robert N. Watson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy 91, 96). Money has corrupted the ideals of family and society, a notion Volpone introduces in the play’s opening speech where gold, the “world’s soul,” has transcended “all style of joy in children, parents, friends, / Or any other waking dream on earth” (1.1.3; 1.1.17-18). Ironically, the court preaches children, parents, and friends, but it in fact sees only money. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that money replaces the joy of children, parents, and friends at the outset, and that the substitution is reiterated at the conclusion. Rather than marry Celia and Bonario and suggest the success of a family unit in the future, the play leaves its only healthy social or “family” relationships in the three freaks and our early vision of the twisted, but happy, Volpone household. 226 odds with the play’s prescribed schemes of birth and blood, remain at large at the close of the play. Their lineage—the one component of identity most important in the play’s
Venetian law—is confused from the outset. Mosca tells us that it is “the common fable
[belief] / The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch are all [Volpone’s],” begotten on “beggars, /
Gipsies and Jews and black-moors, when he was drunk” (1.5.43-46). Thus, the only heirs
Volpone may have are entirely illegitimate—they are conceived in drunkenness, and quite outside of wedlock. The catalogue of reputed mothers is equally compelling, especially as it continues in the spirit of the play’s drive to lump social outcasts together in an undifferentiated mass of Other. Beggars, Gipsies, Jews, and black-moors, entirely distinct from each other individually, are essentially equated here, strictly on the basis of their marginality. Their status as social outcasts or enemies supersedes their individuality, just as is the case with Volpone’s freaks, who are named for their aberrances.40
Furthermore, there is little to nothing, even in Renaissance fantasy about the
Anthropophagi and men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders,41 that would suggest that the abnormalities of the dwarf, the castrato and the hermaphrodite would proceed from sexual union between Volpone and beggars, Gipsies, Jews, or black-moors, just as the idea of a congenital castrato, implied in Mosca’s rumor mongering, presents obvious problems. There is no logical—or, more specifically, no biological—link between the one kind of marginality and the other: it is enough, in the world of the play’s reasoning, that marginality begets marginality. The status of freakishness is passed on not biologically, as a specific trait from parent to child, but figuratively, as an associated
40 On the differentiation of “extraordinary individuals” from “marvelous species,” see Daston and Park, 48- 59. 227 marginality attendant on any one of a number of biologically or socially distinct aberrances.
The three’s illegitimacy is general, extending beyond their potential as heirs to
Volpone’s estate. Their very existence itself is illegitimate, outside the scheme of birth and blood that places subjects in lines of inheritance and duty. That Volpone is the biological father of his freaks is only suggested; the actual details of their creation are unavailable. Volpone himself says that he has “no wife, parent, child, ally” to give his
“substance” to, “but whom [he] makes / Must be [his] heir” (1.1.73-75). In any case, the play makes nothing more of the rumor that he is their father. The origin of Nano,
Castrone and Androgyno remains in doubt so that when Mosca, in 5.5, tells them to go
“recreate” themselves, the command rings with a special significance. They are, essentially, their own creations. In a wonderful mockery of the “birth and blood” ideal, they have no biological origin and no blood ties to anyone.
It is further remarkable that Nano, Castrone and Androgyno, illegitimate as people and heirs, unreformed as aberrations in the scheme of birth and blood, are the only successful family unit in the whole play. As Susan Dyer Amussen has noted, the family unit in early modern England included “not only the married couple at its head and their children, but also any servants or apprentices who worked with the family” (“The Family and the Household” 85).42 There is, then, a tangible sense in which Volpone’s household,
including Mosca and the three freaks, could be construed as an actual family. More
important, though, is the bond of mutual appreciation that connects Volpone, Mosca, and
41 From Othello, 1.3.143-144. Othello relates to the Venitian senate how Desdemona solicited tales of the wonderful and the monstrous he encountered in his travels, such as “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” See John Gillies, especially chapters 1 and 4. 228 the three freaks. Remarkably, they are the only group of characters in the play connected by such a bond. Though the camaraderie between Mosca and Volpone eventually dissolves into greed and envy, they are, at the outset, part of the only group of characters whose association with each other is manifestly healthy. Scene 1.2 offers entertainment, but it also offers the spectacle of successful social interaction and a vision of contentedness. When nobody else is looking, the Volpone household-family assembles on the stage for a private entertainment. It is warm and congratulatory; Volpone is pleased with Mosca’s “invention,” and a cheerful brotherhood among the freaks is strongly suggested. It is essentially a positive experience, and the sentiments offered by the skit and the song are earnest, if humorous, which contrasts sharply with the experience of the rest of the play. Volpone thus presents us with a superstructural moral and moralizing edifice in the court’s punishments that is undermined by an inversion of centers and margins at the base level, where Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno paradoxically function as examples of healthy social behavior. The play’s best example of “natural” behavior and the kindness, caring, and happiness that attend on it inheres in its least natural characters. In the play’s most socially functional relationships are collected its most radically marginal energies, among whom birthright and bloodlines have no significance or currency whatsoever, except in the fact of their absence.
Most interesting about the freaks’ subplot, however, is its open-endedness. In a play that pushes so hard to reign in and realign aberrant, transgressive, or subversive social activity, the fact that Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are turned loose and told to
“recreate” themselves abroad is remarkable. The movement of the play is to close up
42 The importance of the family unit in early modern England has been established by Lawrence Stone (The Family: Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800) and Keith Wrightson (English Society, 1580-1680). 229 avenues of unnatural behavior, but Volpone’s freaks are instructed to continue opening new spaces. Renaissance usage puts “sport” or “recreation” before any sense of re- creation in the word “recreate,” but “to create anew” is active as early as 1587.43
“Recreate” resonates with all the play’s concern over the creation of persons and the
various ways that such creation can be legitimate or illegitimate. Whom Volpone
“makes” must be his heir, and that is the flaw in the scheme of birth and blood that sets
the play in motion to begin with. Once the human agency in the “making” of character is
recognized, the schemes of birth and blood are imperiled, always challengeable or
trumpable. To create or recreate oneself is immediately to deny bloodlines and kinship
ties, and if identity or original creation is a right of birth, “recreation” in some sense
denies natural or legitimate creation altogether. Self-created people have no parents and
can be legitimate heirs to nobody. Self-created people operate outside the scheme of
“blood and birth” so important to Volpone’s closure. To recreate yourself is in an instant
to ignore the key prescriptions the play makes for its characters.
In terms of the intersection of the play’s thematic and spatial schemes, Nano,
Castrone, and Androgyno are liminal, playing a small part to the side of the central
action. And yet, as Weimann argues, the structural role of the platea subplot is crucial,
and when the freaks are featured in a scene, they are its dramatic focus. Mosca’s
dramatic entertainment in 1.2 takes the dwarf, the eunuch and the fool from the margins
of the play and places them prominently in the very center of the stage. The space in the
middle of the stage is accorded a significance by virtue of its being central, a primary
focus of attention. Scenes are often gathered around the stage’s center, where we might
43 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “recreate.” 230 imagine a throne or a hell’s mouth or some other focal point.44 The center of the stage is the implicit or default point of dramatic importance. To be sure, the drama often subordinates the action on the center of the stage by placing contrasting or parasitic action elsewhere on the stage—an eavesdropping, a private commentary on the main action—but center-stage remains the understood or default location of primary importance. Structurally then, in terms of the space on the stage, as well as the sequence of the play, calling the dwarf, the eunuch and the fool into the center stage could not be more conspicuous.45 It puts in the locus that which apparently belongs in the platea.
Aberrance, marginality, illegitimacy—the play should conceal or deny these elements, but here it displays them instead. Hardly are Mosca and Volpone themselves introduced before the play’s focus shifts to a trio of freaks who take the midday spotlight as Volpone indulges what we are soon to sense is a guilty pleasure: “Who’s that? Away! Look
Mosca. Fool, begone!” snaps Volpone as he hears a knock from the outside world
(1.2.81). Though they are quickly banished back to the margins, their presence in the center of the stage lingers. The stage becomes a three-dimensional palimpsest, and Nano,
44 If scholarship and speculation about staging on early modern thrust stages has established anything, it is that the entire area of the ample stages was used. The so-called “De Witt” drawing of the Swan stage shows the action concentrated at the center of the stage, toward the front, an arrangement that was presumably as popular in practice as it was functional. Bernard Beckerman has suggested that “the only area from which [actors] could be seen by virtually all members of the audience was at the center of the platform in front of the pillars, at the very place where De Witt’s Swan drawing shows a scene in progress” (Shakespeare at the Globe 169). Beckerman’s vision defers to the pillars, which obviously frustrated certain sightlines from certain seats, as they continue to do today at London’s rebuilt Globe theater, but as J. L. Styan notes in Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, the contract for the Hope theater suggests that supporting posts were not structurally necessary and may have been rejected in order to keep the stage open (18). It remains probable that, upstage or downstage depending on the presence of posts supporting the heavens, the isle along the center of the stage was the default focal point for staging when the number of actors on stage permitted it. In accordance with the platea tradition, upstage seems the obvious default location for soliloquies or other forms of direct address to the audience, just as downstage center seems the obvious location of locus-like objects such as the throne or the bed. 45 If there is ultimately no way to prove that certain scenes were staged at the center of the platform, it is similarly difficult to imagine how such a scene as 1.2 of Volpone could make something besides the freaks the stage’s focal point. That is, if Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are not, in fact, center-stage for their entertainment, the focal point moves wherever it is they happen to be. 231
Castrone and Androgyno are the trace that will not be erased by subsequent scenes. They have been privileged, and the gesture refuses to disappear; the vision of the freaks on center stage will not be dislodged. In fact, they are recalled periodically—most notably in 2.2, during which a second “stage” is constructed and yet another marginal figure, the mountebank, is presented in a structurally significant space46—and ultimately turned loose into the play at large. In a plot that works so hard to discredit aberrance, they move counter to the current, insisting by their very existence on their marginality and offering an alternative vision not only of social status but also of nature and legitimacy.
The conclusion of the play may repudiate transgression, but it does little to resolve the tension introduced and propagated by Volpone’s freaks. The last time we see them, Volpone expresses surprise at their unaccompanied or ungoverned presence on stage: “How now! Who let you loose? Whither go you now? / What? To buy gingerbread? Or to drown kitlings?” (5.11.8-9). The sense that these marginal figures have been turned loose in the play to do whatever mischief they please could hardly be more clear. Volpone’s questions suggest that even those closest to them in the play can only guess at the specifics of what Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno will do when released and unsupervised. Mosca has told them to recreate themselves abroad; whatever it involves, they will go on “recreating”—playing and sporting and re-creating themselves,
46 Most editors suppose that a small scaffold or platform is constructed by Mosca and Nano, who enter about twenty-seven lines before Volpone “mounts” the second stage or rostrum. Michael Jamieson (Three Comedies, Penguin Classics 1966), Gordon Campbell (The Alchemist and Other Plays, World’s Classics, 1995), Alvin Kernan (Yale Ben Jonson edition, 1962), and Philip Brockbank, (New Mermaids edition, 1968), all have Mosca and Nano enter carrying materials to erect the mountebank’s platform. Brian Parker (The Revels Plays edition, 1983) and Parker and David Bevington (Revels Student edition, 1999) have a stage direction at 2.2.1 indicating that Mosca and Nano “set up a rostrum.” The second stage, whether it be a sizeable scaffold or a simple bench, necessarily assumes a focal significance, both for the stage audience and the theater audience. 232 existing and operating entirely outside the laws that the play attempts to establish for its citizens.
Obviously, the transgressions committed by these three are not of the same order as those punished by the court. Both the freaks and the legacy-fraud characters are in violation of birthright and bloodlines, but the former enact no willful harm toward the state, the court, and the laws they purport to enforce. Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno are, after all, allowed fools or freaks, and in the sense that they are permitted to operate outside the scheme of birth and blood, they fulfill the function of a “purge valve” so often associated with comic relief in drama and with carnival in society. They are not malicious in transgression; they are exceptions to the rule, and their aberrant behavior is silently excused. The freaks’ dramatic lineage, much more clear than their parentage, associates them with the platea and gives them the license to flout the rules by which the other characters are bound. They operate exempt from standard requirements, under the protection of the license and play of the allowed fool, and they are emblematic of the license and play of the theater itself. From this vantage point, free from carking cares, they stand for “recreation,” a property unique to the theater among public pastimes in that it combines the idea of recreation as sport with the idea of recreation as re-creation.
There are several types of recreational sports associated with the margins of the city in the extramural suburbs at the point where city meets country—archery, hunting, May- games—but only the theater activates the second sense of recreation as the re-making of self attendant on the re-presentation of life on the stage. The word “recreate” foregrounds a whole catalogue of intriguing associations. The idea of fun, of playmaking, is linked to the self in Mosca’s command, “go, recreate yourselves abroad.” 233
The reflexive syntax of the verb phrase invokes, along with the making of fun, the re- making of identity, which, as we have seen, is fluid and redefinable in the early modern period. Recreation and re-creation go together; they are both properties of the theater, for which Nano, Castrone and Androgyno, like the allowed fool, are a kind of metaphor.
They are patronized by those seeking entertainment, because linked to their ability to re- create themselves is their ability to recreate others. Similarly, as the theater created and re-created narratives on the stage, it recreated, in the sense of “to refresh” or “to entertain,” theatergoers. The trio is also marginalized. They stand at a distance from the status quo, from the ordinary, from the culturally central. Likewise, the theater, rooted in recreation, stands—sometimes literally—in the margins of society, offering all of London the opportunity to recreate itself abroad.
The space of the stage and the space of the city can be seen as loosely analogous when we consider the functional similarities of the theater and the allowed fool. Socially, both theater and fool are marginalized by the established, dominant, or mainstream culture according to whose schemes they are originally understood as supplemental, emergent, or secondary. Both flourish in space that is unlocalized, blank, ready to receive whatever impression is presented, whether it be the direct address to the audience that achieves the anachronistic link not available on the locus, or the “vernacular” architecture that characterizes immediate, local building needs in the quickly-expanding extramural wards and suburbs of London at the turn of the century. Verse and prose contrast on the stage as high style and prosaic functionality contrast in the city and its suburbs. Recognizing the formality of poetry as analogous to the formality of architecture and the informality of prose as analogous to the informality of improvisation 234 will offer us parallel conceptions of stage and city that emphasize Raymond Williams’s structural scheme of dominant versus emergent culture. Then, recognizing the similarity of the theater and the fool reminds us to temper Williams’s structural scheme in order not to accept it blindly and unilaterally. Theater and fool forge circuits that connect disparate banks of social energies.
The allowed fool inhabits both realms. He is both formal and informal; he keeps the company of kings and of clowns, he both participates in and transcends dramatic conflict; he is both spawned and spurned by dominant culture, which in turn both reveres and reviles his existence. He is alternately the secondary component in the center/margin binary and the meta-entity who articulates the whole structure; he binds the divergent realms of center and margin by straddling the boundary that separates them. He is also both a synecdoche and a metonymy for the theater, which serves a similar function itself in bridging the distance between dominant and emergent, between city center and city suburbs, between the locus of St. Paul’s and the platea of the Bankside. As a standout part of the theater world, the fool represents the theater as a part for the whole; as the emblem of entertainment and marginality, he represents the theater as its associative embodiment in a single figure. His unique double status as both central and marginal is thus both representative and emblematic of popular theater in London.
Like the mischievous world of Volpone’s freaks, the world of the fool is always the world of the other. It is a space in which imagination and play combine in the double sense of recreation as both entertainment and the making or creating of its subjects and subject matter. The structural role of this world in the scheme of the drama—and of the theater in the scheme of popular culture—is, as Robert Weimann argues, much more than 235 simply a purge valve. Its constructions of the centers, the loca, it critiques are not only complementary, but constituent. The role of the freaks in Volpone may be relatively small, but their function is not proportionately diminished, since they affect its themes, its staging, and its structure. They transform the play’s moralizing because they inhabit its prescriptions even as they violate its proscriptions: they are the healthy family unit that exists in spite of the scheme of birth and blood that is understood to be the only begetter of natural bonds. Playing the role of allowed fool, their indifference to care and their camaraderie serve as a critical assessment of the characters in the “central” plot, who are overwhelmed by the dramatic conflict in which they are contained. The fools do operate in a different world from the one the rest of the play’s characters inhabit, a world in which the pursuit of wealth has not corrupted the “substance” of man by exalting riches over “joy in children, parents, friends,” which are in the end only a “waking dream” in the world of Volpone (1.1.74; 1.1.17-18). In the world of Volpone’s freaks, wealth is immaterial, recreation is cynosure, and the fool is the ideal citizen. 236
Chapter 5
Histrio Agit Totum Mundum: Bartholomew Fair and the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor
He that denies then Theaters should be,
He may as well deny a world to me.
-Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors
In “The Theater of Forgiveness,” Robert N. Watson considers Jonson’s parodic
strategy in Bartholomew Fair as a departure from the parodic strategy developed in
Volpone and The Alchemist. After the “triumph” of those two plays, Watson notes,
Jonson “may have found himself uncomfortably close to supporting . . . Puritan attacks
[on the theaters], because his parodic strategy depended on portraying, in a grotesquely literal form, the same tendency that was the basis of a standard complaint against the popular theater: the tendency of spectators to imitate the less than ideal behavior they witness on stage” (140). Sensing that he had inadvertently aligned himself with the
Puritans against the theater, Jonson “shifts the emphasis in Bartholomew Fair away from the specific absurdities perpetrated by his fellow playwrights” and focuses his satire in
Bartholomew Fair on the authority figures who “fail to participate in the forgiving spirit” that governs the play—the same “censorious forces” that were “threatening to close down all the theaters.”1 Like the characters in Volpone and The Alchemist¸ the characters of
1 Jonas Barish makes a similar point in his discussion of Bartholomew Fair. See Prose Comedy 238-239. Both Barish and Watson compare the “hucksters and sharpsters of the Fair,” who fight amongst themselves but close ranks to defend as a group against authority, to Jonson closing ranks with his fellow dramatists to 237
Bartholomew Fair “battle over which sort of a plot will be allowed to rule the stage”
(142). Bartholomew Fair also “continues the practice of Jonson’s earlier comedies, deploying the parodic strategy against the indulgences of romantic melodrama” (170).
But where Volpone and The Alchemist pursue the victims of their parody relentlessly, the parodic impulse in Bartholomew Fair, like the pretensions of its characters, dissolves in a wash of forgiveness “that distinguishes this instance of satiric city-comedy from its predecessors” (170). In the end, Bartholomew Fair “enables Jonson to subvert his own authoritarian attitudes toward literature and to relax his hierarchical constriction of the dramatic canon.” The play’s ending, Watson notes, “is an endorsement, rather than a repression, of plays and playfulness” (139).
Thus, Bartholomew Fair offers a different look at the place of the stage in early modern London from that offered in Volpone. It concludes by celebrating the spirit of forgiveness. Rather than overtly punishing the misdeeds and misdoers in the closing scene, it essentially directs all the characters, as it did the three freaks in Volpone, to “go sport”: Justice Overdo invites everyone to his house, to supper, and Bartholomew Cokes arranges to bring the puppet play along. In a play that mocks authority for its pretensions and its unforgiving repressiveness, and amidst such a high concentration of cheats, fools, and hypocrites, there is clearly no need for Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno, whose aberrant energies have been universalized in the spirit of the fair. In Bartholomew Fair, it is the lower classes and base pleasures of the body that overtly prevail in the end.
Recreation is not the marginal pursuit of marginal characters, but instead the driving force of the play’s prescriptions for society.
defend against the movement to close the theaters. See also Katherine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, 154-155. 238
Appropriately, the play’s various loca are populated by cheats, cozeners, and clowns, rather than the high-born characters Weimann discusses in earlier drama.
Ursula’s pig booth, the various trinket stands, and the puppet stage are the fixed domain of characters ordinarily associated with the platea. As Neil Rhodes has argued, “Ursula’s pig-booth and the puppet-theatre, ‘the tents of the wicked’ in the eyes of Zeal-of-the-land
Busy, are the focal points of the action; they also correspond to the mansions or sedes of the mystery plays, described by Glynne Wickham as ‘symbols for the identification of place’” (142).2 To complete the inversion, each of the play’s authority figures ends up in
the stocks at one point or another, inhabiting the space ordinarily designated for the fool.
As Jonas Barish notes, Jonson mixes prose and verse in his “comical satires” in
order to contrast the “mordant image of a ‘real’ world—in prose” with “a supra-real
world of divine truth and justice by which the ordinary world is to be judged—this in
verse” (147). Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster, and Volpone, Barish observes, maintain both prose and verse in order to distinguish linguistically between the real world and the supra-real world. In Jonson’s first all-prose comedy, Epicoene, however, “the need for a special language to mark the apes from the sages has disappeared” (147). Likewise,
Bartholomew Fair does not distinguish between characters via prose and verse. Barish demonstrates how each character’s language is uniquely his or her own, but “prose . . . becomes once more the dominant rhythm” (188).
In the language of Quarlous, 3 the play’s witty gallant, we see “the increasingly
close identification of the satiric commentator [Quarlous] with the world on which he
2 Rhodes’s quotation from Wickham can be found in EES 1:159. 3 Barish discusses the “heatedness and syntactic density” of Quarlous’s prose relative to Clerimont’s prose in Epicoene (194). Specifically, he contrasts Clerimont’s description of Sir Amorous La Fool with 239 comments,” and “the increasing abandonment of his special position” (194): the dramatic distance separating the high-born from the low-born, or Jonson’s “author” figure in the play4 from the rest of the gulls and fools, dwindles to a pretentious but
ineffectual attitude at the fair, where everyone is reduced to the same level of “flesh and
blood” and the pursuit of basic, bodily pleasures. Quarlous and Winwife, Barish notes,
retain something of the function of expositor, since it is chiefly through
their agency that the procession of fools who visit the Fair is effectively
ridiculed. . . . They go to the Fair in order to witness ‘excellent creeping
sport,’ and they think of the misadventures of Cokes as a play in five acts
with a prologue, to be acted for their amusement. Once at the Fair,
however, they become more the victims than the manipulators of
circumstances. Their role as bystanders melts rapidly, until, by the time
the sun is high, they are dueling for the hand of Mistress Grace, enlisting
the madman in their projects, using the professional services of the
cutpurse Edgeworth, ending in short as two more human atoms tossed
about in the flux of Smithfield. The final reckoning, at the comic tribunal
of the puppet play, finds them with almost as much to answer for as the
rascals of the Fair itself. (195)
Though Quarlous and Winwife are not particularly humiliated, they are somewhat
humbled, each learning that the plans and pretensions he harbored about himself at the
Quarlous’s description of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy to establish the clarity and syntactical-rhetorical regularity of Clerimont’s language versus the confusion and opacity of Quarlous’s speech. 4 Watson notes that Quarlous is “the nearest thing in Bartholomew Fair to Jonson’s surrogates in the earlier comedies, the playwright-figures who satirically subsume the plots of lesser wits” (168). See Watson 168 and 255, n. 58. 240 play’s outset would need to be adapted.5 As Quarlous himself notes, simply being at the
fair makes one “fit to be demanded, as well as others” (2.5.15-16),6 but as Neil Rhodes
has observed, Quarlous, Winwife, Overdo, and Busy “ostentatiously deny in themselves
the instinctive desires which the Fair stimulates” (149). The play chastens both those
who stand opposed to instinctive desires and those who think they stand above instinctive
desires. Busy is confounded and assents to “become a beholder” with the rest (5.5.105-
106); Wasp finally resigns himself to silence, offering “I will never speak while I live,
again, for ought I know” (5.6.100); and Adam Overdo, reminded by Quarlous that he is
“but Adam, flesh and blood,” resolves to “be patient” (5.6.93-94, 101). Like
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Rhodes argues, Bartholomew Fair “persuade[s] the
audience to withdraw their sympathies from those whose fanaticism attempts to repress
or exclude such drives” (151).
Bartholomew Fair never quite manages to endorse its versions of the sober,
sensible characters like Grace Welborn, who “has merely disengaged herself” and who
“continues disengaged to the end, poised, judicious, and slightly inhuman” (Barish, Prose
Comedy 223). Grace “possesses good sense, judgment, and sobriety,” Barish notes, but
“the trouble is that these are no longer the qualities that the play itself is primarily
recommending, and they clash rather disastrously with the dominant spirit of warmth and
animal appetite” (222). The fair, a great leveler of class and pretension, celebrates bawdy
and body, the basic human urges that must be acknowledged. As Watson might argue,
5 Watson suggests that “the contrast between the actual behavior of Winwife, Quarlous, and Grace on the one hand, and the noble roles with which they identify themselves on the other, may partly serve to degrade these characters” (146). Anne Barton reads Quarlous and Winwife’s humbling less casually: “by Act Four, they have arrived at the point of drawing swords on each other, to be pacified only by Grace’s insistence that she will make choice of one of them by lottery,” she points out, going on to note that Quarlous plans unscrupulously to bleed Winwife for the privilege of marrying Grace (207). 6 Citations from the play are from G. R. Hibbard’s edition of Bartholomew Fair (1977; rpt. 1994). 241 the play lampoons characters who think they are in a play in which enormity is to be castigated—characters who think they are “sages,” in Barish’s analysis. The fair is a kind of “carnival,” and Carnival, as Michael Bristol has put it, is “a constant reminder that the rule of king and bishop was fabricated and unnatural, while the demands of the body are natural law” (“Acting Out Utopia” 23).
Thus, Bartholomew Fair ridicules some of its characters for being fools (such as
Cokes); some of its characters for aspiring to wit (such as Littlewit); some of its characters for being rogues (the inhabitants of the fair); and the rest of its characters for supposing they are superior (the play’s authority figures and its gentlemen).
Bartholomew Fair makes no distinction among “apes” and “sages,” because everybody is an ape at some level. But it ultimately embraces apishness as the condition of humanity.
As Watson notes, the play is still critical of fools and would-be wits, but it is much harsher on those characters who are skeptical or critical of the fair. It primarily ridicules the notion that the laws of the body can be resisted, and, in the end, it celebrates everyone who embraces those laws.
The critical consensus traced thus far has been roundly challenged by Mathew R.
Martin. Synthesizing the work of a number of recent critics, Martin suggests that the
“release from parody” noted by critics such as Barish “is not as complete as such festivity
[as Overdo’s invitation] might seem to require” (137). Martin points to Jonson’s history of offering plays that “inform men in the best reason of living”:7 “the satirical and moral
intentions that Jonson expresses throughout the prefatory material of his plays are
fundamentally inimical to the spirit of carnival. Carnival laughter, as Bakhtin remarks,
“is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event” (137). Martin follows 242
Michael Bristol in noting that “a fair may contain many surface features of carnival— feasting, eroticism, noisy crowds—but its substance is strictly commodity exchange.”8
Thus, Bartholomew Fair, in Martin’s view, cannot be read as a festive comedy.
Martin’s approach to the play’s fair may be faulted for reading the fair itself too literally. Jonson’s Smithfield fair is the play’s setting, not its substance. As Richard H.
Perkinson notes, “Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair, writes a topical comedy that is not personal, but topographical, that does not treat historical personalities or events, but historical scene” (“Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century” 276). It contains
“semitopical personalities,” but not the sort of specific lampoons on particular people that drove, for example, the portraits of Dekker as Demetrius and Marston as Crispinus in The
Poetaster (276-277). Bartholomew Fair is a study of various character types brought together in a particular place. As Barish’s chapter on the play in Ben Jonson and the
Language of Prose Comedy amply demonstrates, it is the characters themselves, through the fantastic complexities of their individual verbal tags, that provide the dramatic material for the play:
Bartholomew Fair collects onto the stage a loose aggregate of social types,
ranging from two gentlemen through the various strata of the citizenry
represented by a proctor and his wife, a Puritan elder, and a city
magistrate, to the polyglot swarm of swindlers who inhabit the Fair and
prey on its visitors. The largeness of the milieu, the expansiveness of the
plot, its freedom of gesture, are all reflected in the prevailing irregularity
of the language. . . . (189).
7 The phrase, which I discuss in chapter 4, comes from the “Epistle” to Volpone at lines 107-108 8 The quotation is from Michael Bristol, “Acting Out Utopia: The Politics of Carnival,” 25. 243
Not only are language and the “various strata of the citizenry” the subject of the play, but the fair itself hardly functions as a fair: the cries of “what do you lack? What is’t you buy?”9 do punctuate the action, suggesting the marketplace setting described by Bristol, but the play can hardly be said to focus on material commerce. Cokes comes near to buying the entire fair, but that activity is depicted secondarily, in the course of Jonson’s satirizing of Cokes. As Barish points out, the play dramatizes not business, but swindling. Just as Watson cautions critics who read the play as “Jonson’s symbolic embodiment of the entire material world” to “be wary of reading Busy’s play rather than
Jonson’s,” so we may caution against reading Bartholomew Fair as a play about a fair,
rather than a play about people and the flesh and blood urges that drive them to fairs
(151).
More significant than Martin’s misreading by far, critics who read the fair as
marginal are also approaching the play too literally. As we have seen, geographical space
in London should not be understood monolithically as either central or marginal.
Smithfield itself was located within the liberty of London—that is, within the jurisdiction
of Guildhall—though outside the city wall, just to the northwest of the city. As Henry
Morley noted in his Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, Smithfield was “the daily gathering
place of Londoners in search of active recreation” (38). It was associated with sport and
play, and it thus carries some of the sense Mullaney ascribes to London’s margins.
Referring to the fair’s “peculiar legal position,” Frances Teague notes that “the fair,
which cut across society, was beyond the normal rules of that society. The kings were
there as spectators rather than figures of authority” (21-22). In addition, the fair had its
9 For example, see 2.2.29. 244 own court—Pie Powders—for dealing with legal complications that arose in the fair itself.10 The fair was thus somewhat distinct in jurisdiction from the city.
Smithfield and particularly Bartholomew Fair itself may have been something of
a marginal phenomenon, but I will argue in this chapter that Jonson’s re-creation of the
fair presents a more complex vision of cultural and geographical space. The play offers a
powerful image of a convergence of different cultural energies and traditions spanning
not only the “marginal” and “central” of Stephen Mullaney’s scheme, but also, through
associations with rural tradition, its “country” space. The play brings together all three
spaces, just as it mingles dominant, emergent, and residual energies in Raymond
Williams’s paradigm. It is a metaphorical, rather than literal, account of a historical
event—it “does not treat historical personalities or events, but historical scene”
(Perkinson 276). Jonson’s fair is thus able transcend the boundaries inside of which
critics would contain it. Bartholomew Fair completes the dramatic project of The
Roaring Girl by complicating the geographical and cultural boundaries of London in its
depiction of the Smithfield fair.
Building on the notion that Jonson eschews in Bartholomew Fair the moralizing
projects some critics see him pursuing in earlier comedies, I will show that the play
combines elements of the complementary but different dramatic projects I have already
examined in Volpone and The Roaring Girl: like Volpone, Bartholomew Fair uses its
license simultaneously to recreate and re-create the theatergoing public who came within
its thrall and to champion the aberrant energies that ordinarily come under censure. Also,
like The Roaring Girl, Bartholomew Fair uses its dual status as both dominant and
emergent, central and marginal, to synthesize various cultural energies into a powerful
10 See Teague, 20-21. 245 narrative, and to offer a staged version of life that exerts an influence over life off of the stage.
In Volpone, Jonson very subtly celebrates the aberrant energy of Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno by allowing them to escape the play’s overtly moralizing project.
Bartholomew Fair reenacts that celebration openly and directly, by championing the characters and behaviors that Jonson’s earlier comedies had maligned through parody and brought to account for their foolishness or viciousness in the end. Volpone’s freaks were the exception to the rule; in Bartholomew Fair, their analogues—the inhabitants of the fair and those who come to enjoy themselves—are made the norm. Bartholomew Fair’s characters are not accountable for their foolishness or enormity; instead, the figures of authority are forced to own up to their fallibility. While Volpone localizes the spirit of transgression in marginal figures like Nano, Castrone, and Androgyno, Bartholomew
Fair makes their aberrance universal. Everyone is susceptible to the urges of the body, and everybody is guilty of sins of the flesh. Nobody, however, is punished.
To approach the play in Weimann’s terms, locus and platea have exchanged functions. If we may draw some tentative associations between the dramatis personae
Weimann discusses in his chapter on “Platea and Locus” and the dramatis personae of
Bartholomew Fair, the “low-born” figures whose dramatic heritage associates them with the platea have taken center stage, while such “high-born” characters as the play has are marginalized by the spirit of the fair. By submitting to their basic flesh-and-blood humanity, those characters who harbor pretensions about their place in society can join the community in the conclusion. To quote Barish once more, “the Fair draws its visitors 246 and inhabitants together into the fold of a shared humanity and involves them inextricably with one another” (231).
Bartholomew Fair inhabits a cultural space that can be characterized in Raymond
Williams’s terms as both emergent and residual: on the one hand, the fair in Smithfield has roots in a residual cultural practice established in the twelfth century in association with the Catholic church.11 Its connections to rural celebrations link it to the rural
component of Mullaney’s scheme. On the other hand, the fair is populated by an
assortment of rogues and tricksters, citizens of the seedy underground that sprung up in
London’s margins as rapid urban growth drew to the city more and more people who are
emergent in Williams’s scheme, and marginal in Mullaney’s scheme. The fair also has
generally dominant associations as a popular, contemporary cultural event. It thus
mingles energies from all three cultural spaces.
The puppet show, as we will see, establishes the residual and emergent
relationships further. By staging narratives—the stories of Damon and Pythias, and Hero
and Leander—from the past, it builds itself out of residual cultural material. As
Leatherhead and Littlewit fear, however, the residual roots of these stories make them
largely irrelevant and unfamiliar to the fair- and play-going public, and they must
therefore be updated. Thus, Littlewit has made the material “modern for the times”
(5.4.106-107): he rewrites the residual from a contemporary, if vulgarized, perspective.12
11 See Teague, 16-21 12 The snatches of the Hero and Leander story quoted by Leatherhead actually come from Christopher Marlowe’s poem, which was scarcely two decades old when Bartholomew Fair was first performed, making the immediate source hardly “residual.” In fact, Leatherhead and Littlewit fear Marlowe’s poem is “too learned and poetical for [their] audience” (5.4.97-98)—their objections are based on their projections of the audience’s uneducated tastes, which makes the updating a matter more of class than of cultural movement. Jonson’s reference to Marlowe here may be bracketed off in my discussion as a topical reference, since it reflects Jonson’s habit of alluding to the work of other dramatists, which is a separate matter. The important point about Littlewit’s amendments to the stories he dramatizes is that he has made 247
Residual (Damon and Pythias; Hero and Leander) is mingled with dominant (London place-names and occupations) and emergent (the fair’s subculture) to yield a truly popular narrative that manages to represent the world of the fairgoers with both farce and a striking, mimetic realism. Jonson himself is clearly lampooning his audience for its inability to appreciate the revival of classical literature. The criticism of popular taste implicit in Littlewit and Leatherhead’s updating of the Hero and Leander story has been understood as Jonson’s response to the failure on the stage of Cataline and Sejanus. In the mouths of Littlewit and Leatherhead, however, the stories dramatized by the puppet show need to be modernized for the show’s audience.
As I will argue, the puppet show re-creates the tone, spirit, and substance of the fair with remarkable sharpness. I read this process of re-creation as analogous to the theater’s own process of re-creation: the puppet show’s depiction of the world of the play in the story of Hero, Leander, Damon, and Pythias is a model for how the play,
Bartholomew Fair, styles the world of London in the story of the fair itself. I will examine this process of re-recreation at length and suggest that the play’s dramatic representation of reality, especially in the figure of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, both reflects and shapes the world it represents. Just as The Roaring Girl helped fashion the cultural construction of the historical Moll Frith, so Bartholomew Fair’s stage Puritan, Busy, helps fashion the cultural construction of the hypocritical Puritan that came to prominence in the seventeenth century.
I will begin with a brief history of the theatrum mundi trope, which figures the theater’s cultural authority in terms of the rich, recursive relationship between theater and
them “modern for the times” (5.4.106). Moreover, the puppet play treats not just Hero and Leander, but also the story of Damon and Pythias, which, as Anne Barton notes, “lay further back in the Elizabethan 248
“the world.” From there, I will consider some approaches to drama as a specifically mimetic art form and the role of language in influencing the realities it represents. I will then discuss the puppet play in Bartholomew Fair and the character Busy.
I. Mimesis and the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor
Lynda Christian traces the origin of the theatrum mundi topos to late fifth century
B. C. Greece, observing that once the drama had established itself as popular entertainment, “the relationship between life and a play” became a commonplace in the work of Greek writers (Theatrum Mundi 1). Indeed, by the time the metaphor fell out of widespread use in the Middle Ages, it had been adopted in some form or another by
Plato, Aristotle, Petronius, Palladas, Menander, Plautus, Terence, and others, and its presence in surviving fragments of plays from the fourth century leads Christian to conclude that “Middle Comedy . . . was undoubtedly replete with references to the world as a stage” (10).13 The mimetic properties of drama compel the topos on one level—
drama is “like” the world it represents, but the structure and execution of stage plays
suggest the specific points of structural comparison between drama and life—the womb
as tiring house, perhaps; the world as a stage; seniority and death as denouement and
close, and so forth—that yield a cognitive metaphor. Different explanations have been
offered for the paucity of the metaphor between the fifth and fifteenth centuries.
Christian notes that “the idea expressed a thought congenial to the medieval mind,
namely, that life was filled with illusion, hypocrisy, and deceit” and that “we must
past” (214). 13 Several studies have addressed the history of the theatrum mundi topos. Of particular interest are Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (64-86) and Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and 249 assume that the learned men of the Middle Ages had seen the comparison frequently in
Cicero, Seneca, Chrysostom, and Augustine, to name only a few,” but that since these men had never seen a play in a theater, the metaphor lacked force for them (70).
Medieval writers favored a different cognitive metaphor, she argues: “the related idea of life as a dream . . . which can be fairly said to dominate the Middle Ages,” and which she sees having influenced the theatrum mundi topos when it reappears (71). Anne Righter locates the reason for the metaphor’s desuetude within the drama itself: “the play metaphor had, for obvious reasons, no place in the ritual theatre of the Middle Ages. . . .
A drama which deliberately blurred the distinction between audience and actors and associated Reality with the events of the stage, illusion with the secular world, could scarcely find the comparison useful. It was only with the sixteenth-century secularization of the theatre, the gradual development of the play as illusion, that the image of the world as a stage entered English drama” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play 67).14 Righter
also moderates its reappearance in English drama by noting that “playing a part” did not
necessarily have theatrical connotations: “even the common expression ‘to play a part’,
unless qualified, generally implies nothing more than the accomplishment of a specific
task” (70). She traces the notion of illusion and deceit inherent in the metaphor’s tenor,
“play,” alongside the growth of the Vice character, a figure of both make-believe and
trickery, and though she recognizes that some instances of the metaphor “as might be
expected, stemmed directly from Roman comedy,” she suggests that English dramatists
the Latin Middle Ages (138-144); Christian’s study, Theatrum Mundi: the History of an Idea, offers the most detailed account, though she treats Renaissance dramatic texts only in passing. 14 Christian’s argument accounts for the general absence of the metaphor from the fifth century until the fifteenth, while Righter’s argument refers specifically to the absence of the metaphor in Medieval drama. Both studies acknowledge John of Salisbury’s extensive use theatrum mundi in his Policraticus (1159). 250 in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “were using the play metaphor in ways for which there were no precedents in classical comedy” (67, 68).
Whatever the particulars of its heritage and development, the metaphor’s widespread popularity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is not disputed. It appears in Thomas Howell’s “The vncertaintie of this worlde,” from The Arbor of
Amitie;15 Michael Drayton makes extensive use of it in his eclogues and in his “Piers
Gaueston” poem.16 Samuel Daniel employed a variation to describe the English civil war
between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians.17 It appears throughout Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly as a celebration of the fool in “the comedy of life” (38). Thomas Churchyard was particularly fond of it.18 Both Elizabeth and James likened the monarchy to a role
played on a stage before the world. Thomas Bancroft talks of “this earthly stage” in his
“The brevity of Mans life” and of life on “this trifling stage of vanity” in “Of
Hypocrisie”;19 The memorable characterization of “this stage-play world” comes from
Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614). In “On the Life of Man,” Raleigh makes
extended use of the trope:
What is our life? a play of passion,
Our mirth the musicke of division,
Our mothers wombes the tyring houses be,
15 See Thomas Howell, The Arbor of Amitie, Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database, Cambridge, 1992. 16 See Michael Drayton, “The Fifth Eglog. This lustie swayne his lowly quill,” 68; and “Peirs Gaueston Earle of Cornwall. His life, death, and fortune,” 159, Works, 1931 (Chadwyck-Healey, 1992). 17 See Samuel Daniel, The First Fowre Bookes of the ciuile ways between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke, “The Eightth Booke,” lines 65-71 (Chadwyck-Healey, 1992). 18 See for example Thomas Churchyard, “Sir Simon Bvrleis Tragedie,” Churchyards Challenge, line 548; “Churchyardes Charitie,” A Musical Consort, line 497; and “Churchyards cherrishing,” A Pleasant Discourse of Court and Wars, line 125 (Chadwyick-Healey, 1992). 19 Thomas Bancroft, “The brevity of Mans life,” line 62; “Of Hypocrisie,” line 43, Two bookes of epigrammes, and epitaphs (Chadwyck-Healey, 1992). 251
When we are drest for this short Comedy,
Heaven the Judicious sharpe spector is,
That sits and markes still who doth act amisse,
Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun,
Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done,
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Onely we dye in earnest, that’s no Jest.20
Raleigh draws out the comparison by invoking the tiring house, the curtain, scene divisions, audience, the notion of “jest” in the comedy, and even the implied further comparison of the afterlife to an arena of experience one enters after the play is finished.
The fuller potential of the metaphor is apparent here, as are the possibilities of variation—between “the world is a stage” and “life is a play,” for instance. As on the stage, we “play” at everything, except death (which in Raleigh’s case was a real, looming permanence: he was shortly to be executed).
It is from plays and from writings about the theater industry, of course, that the metaphor is best known. In Shakespeare alone it figures prominently in As You Like It
(“All the world’s a stage . . .” at 2.7.139-165); The Merchant of Venice, ( “I hold the world but as the world, Graziano-- / A stage where every man must play his part” at
1.1.77-78); Hamlet (see discussion below), and Macbeth (“life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” at 5.5.23-24); and other comparisons between the world and the theater turn up in King Lear, Richard II, Antony
20 I have reproduced Richard S. Sylvester’s spelling here. Sylvester’s text derives from Agnes M. C. Latham’s The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh. For the most recent scholarship on this on this poem and its different versions, see Michael Rudick’s The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: a Historical Edition. 252 and Cleopatra, and elsewhere.21 But the metaphor also flourishes outside of
Shakespeare. Variations on theatrum mundi figure in Thomas Nashe’s Summers Last
Will and Testament (1600); the anonymous Liberalitie and Prodigalitie (1602); John
Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1602); the anonymous The Returne from Pernassus
(1606); George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613); Robert Armin’s The
Valiant Welshman (1615); John Fletcher’s and Phillip Massinger’s Thierry and
Theodoret (1621); Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1625); Thomas Heywood’s
Londini Speculum (1637); Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio (1637); Thomas
Rawlins’s The Rebellion (1640); and Nathaniel Richards’s Messallina (1640), to name only a few.22
The theatrum mundi metaphor was readily available to Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists, and they used it widely. But while the metaphor is notable for its popularity, it
is the peculiar qualities of its tenor-vehicle relationship that make it especially rich and
that help account for its particular prominence in the period. As Kent T. van den Berg
has discussed, the metaphor has a special complexity:
Any metaphor is a metaphor of mind, whatever its particular content,
because it makes us aware that reality is transformed when it becomes an
object in and for consciousness. The theatrical metaphor dramatizes this
subjectivity. Unlike other basic metaphors (e.g. nautical, military,
alimentary, corporal), its substance is provided by a human mimetic
21 The Tragedy of King Lear: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (4.5.172-173); in Richard II, York compares Richard and Bolingbroke to two actors who elicit different responses from an audience (5.2.23-26); and in Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra imagines her story staged in Rome as a play (5.2.210-217). 22 I must acknowledge the usefulness of the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry: 600-1900 Full-Text Database in my research for this chapter. All of the texts mentioned here are searchable via Chadwyck- Healey. 253
activity that already represents reality, even before being appropriated as
the vehicle of a metaphor. The theatrical metaphor reverses the mimetic
relationship and gives it a reflexive structure: the stage represents a world
that resembles a stage; the actor impersonates a character who plays an
actor. (Playhouse and Cosmos 52)
The theater is “like” the world it represents even before its structure is seen to resemble the models we understand to structure the world. Most definitions of metaphor involve the notion of one particular thing being described in terms of some other thing. Implicit in the “other” is a fundamental difference that makes the tenor and vehicle not obviously already linked.23 In “beauty is a rose,” the properties of a rose (the “vehicle”) are used to
figure the properties of beauty (the “tenor”), but there is nothing about the vehicle that is
already necessarily linked to the tenor. The metaphor that drives the theatrum mundi
trope, however, employs a vehicle that does already have a similar, if separate,
relationship with the tenor. A play “already represents reality, even before being
appropriated as the vehicle of a metaphor” for reality. The acute distinctions between
“reality” and a stage play must of course remain, but the “human mimetic activity” that
drives the drama constitutes a fundamental link between stage play and life to
complement the metaphoric vehicle-and-tenor relationship. Two levels of similarity, one
a matter of mimesis and the other a function of a rhetorical trope, connect the world and
the theater in which that world is represented or re-created.
Bert States has explored the notion of performance itself as metaphor. In
“Performance as Metaphor,” he suggests that theater is “in a sense,
23 The terms “tenor” and “vehicle” are I.A. Richards’s. See Philosophy of Rhetoric, Lecture V, “Metaphor,” especially 96-112. 254
the quintessential repetition of our self-repetitions, the aesthetic extension
of everyday life, a mirror, you might say, that nature holds up to nature.
One wouldn’t be likely to use the novel or painting as the key metaphor of
such a project because their imitations of human experience are conducted
in a non-human medium. Theatre, on the other hand, is the art that is most
like life as it is lived in the real world. (5)
States’s observations turn on how ideally suited theater is as a mimetic art form in which to represent human experience. The medium itself resembles the object it represents, partly because actors are indistinguishable from actual people except in context, and though their conflicts, conversations, emotions and so forth are scripted, it is not necessarily easy to differentiate between script and reality without the contextual information that designates stage-play as drama, rather than life. In States’s approach as in Berg’s, the substance of the vehicle enhances the metaphor in which it serves.
Thus, a complex, recursive significance develops around the metaphor as public, professional drama gathers force and becomes a popular trend. The rise of the theater industry in Elizabethan London and the heightened awareness of the mimetic relationship between drama and reality, figured in the drama’s master trope, emphasize the re-creative function of drama alongside its recreative function. That is, the metaphor’s popularity, indicative of its force, can be considered in conjunction with its peculiar double significance to argue again for the cultural importance—not the cultural marginality—of staged narratives.
The double significance, a relationship between the tenor and vehicle also embedded within the vehicle itself, provides the basis for a more particular argument 255 about the role of the drama in the production of popular culture. The metaphor’s mimetic art-reality relationship is fundamentally constitutive of the institution of drama, and it is difficult to tease out and discuss except obliquely, by looking at instances of metaphors and metadramatic constructions in plays themselves. I will examine several such instances in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair to argue that drama, an art that imitated reality even as reality resembled the art, played as active a role in writing popular culture as popular culture did in writing drama. Drama not only showed the very age and body of the time his form and pressure; it actually gave the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.24
Crucial to this thesis is the notion that a mimetic activity not only reflects or
imitates, but can also be constitutive of, a coherent reality. If the reality-mimesis
relationship is construed simply, reality is understood as a fixed and objective
precondition that must be perceived and re-constructed in the course of the mimetic
activity: the dramatist, for example, is understood to be exposed to a preexisting conflict
external to drama that he then dramatizes in a more or less faithful (as far as the form will
allow) reconstruction. Critical approaches such as that of A. C. Bradley in
Shakespearean Tragedy, which considers the processes, effects, and other particulars of
drama but which treats the characters of a drama as if they were fully-realized people,
presume a smooth transition between “life” and “art.”25 The dramatizing is mimetic
because it reproduces the circumstances and driving conflicts that are the essence of the
24 This construction comes, of course, from Hamlet: the “purpose of playing” is “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.18-22). Stephen Greenblatt has considered Hamlet’s pronouncement from a similar perspective. See Shakespearean Negotiations 7-8. 25 See also L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” This famous response to Bradley and others character critics remains an informative piece. 256 objective external reality. Mimesis is thus seen passively to register or reflect reality without contributing anything to it. Similar to simple models of language as a transparent medium in which the world is accurately transcribed, reality is the privileged term in the relationship here; mimetic art (or language) is merely a tool for its reflection. Such an understanding of the reality-mimesis relationship quickly becomes inadequate, of course, and it must be construed more complexly.
As Robert Weimann notes in his discussion of mimesis, “the imitating subject, or ego, imposes his own standards onto the object and the resultant representation is, as
Aristotle was to note later, not merely a passive reproduction of something given, that is, not a simple imitation” (2). Weimann cites Hermann Koller, who has explored the Greek origins of mimesis in mimeisthai and who argues a “close link between mimesis and dance” or expression, as opposed to imitation.26 Thus, Weimann notes, mimesis has
always “paradoxically included both the element of expression linked with the actor (that
is, the subject) in the process of representation, and the element of imitation, which is
primarily linked with the object” (3). Mimesis is both imitation and expression; it both
reflects and refracts reality.
Jonas Barish addresses a similar issue, of art as simple “transcription,” in Ben
Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy. Wary of the “deceitful” term “realism,” he
offers that
26 Weimann’s translation of Koller’s phrase, eine enge Verbindung der Mimesis mit der Tanzkunst (Die Mimesis in der Antike 12). Koller cites “countless examples” (unzählige Beispiele) of the connection (12). Mihai Spariosu also cites Koller’s work, noting the connection established between mimesis and Darstellung or Ausdrucksform, which Spariosu translates as “performance” and “form of expression” (Spariosu iii). See Weimann, 2-3; Spariosu, iii-iv; and Koller, 12. Koller’s Die Mimesis in der Antike: Nachamung, Darstellung, Ausdruck has not been translated but its title (in English, roughly: Mimesis in Antiquity: Imitation, Performance, Expression) suggests its content. 257
Pure realism, if by it is meant absolute fidelity to nature or impartial
transcriptions of the phenomenal world, is of course a will-o’-the-wisp.
The mere act of finding details, choosing among them, ordering them into
a new totality, forces the artist into a position of mastery over nature. The
idiosyncrasies of human perception, the multiple zones and levels that
constitute the “real,” as well as the alchemy of the creative process, forbid,
strictly speaking, any objective account of the world in art. (144)
Barish’s notion of finding and choosing among details in the creative process complements the understanding of mimesis as expression, rather than simple reflection.
To recognize the artist’s role as “a position of mastery over nature” is to emphasize the shaping influence that mimetic art has over the reality it represents.
Introducing the essay collection Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, Mihai
Spariosu notes that “mimesis is . . . involved with production as much as reproduction, creation as much as imitation, expression as much as reflection, truth as much as fiction, reality as much as the imaginary, etc.” (xi-xii). In all of these more complex accounts of mimesis, the agency of the mimetic art is stressed alongside the properties of the object.
It is this notion of mimesis as constitutive that I adopt in this chapter.
The notion that drama plays a constitutive part in the creation or maintenance of culture specifically has been explored by Victor Turner from the standpoint of anthropology and performance studies. Turner, in From Ritual to Theatre, introduces the notion of “social dramas.” Studying the Ndembu tribe in Africa, Turner describes how
something like “drama” was constantly emerging, even erupting, from the
otherwise fairly even surfaces of social life. . . . a public breach has 258
occurred in the normal working of society, ranging from some grave
transgression of the code of manners to an act of violence, a beating, even
a homicide. . . . once antagonisms are out in the open, members of a group
inevitably take sides. Or else they seek to bring about a reconciliation
among the contestants. Thus breach slides into crisis, and the critics of
crisis seek to restore peace. . . . [the critics] attempt to apply redressive
machinery—to “patch up” quarrels, “mend” broken social ties, “seal up
punctures” in the “social fabric,” by the juridical means of courts and the
judicial process or the ritual means provided by religious institutions. . . .
the social drama concludes—if ever it may be said to have a “last act”—
either in the reconciliation of the contending parties or their agreement to
differ. . . . (10)
Such social dramas, he argues, are reproduced in stories or cultural narratives that organize the structure of social dramas into illustrative tales. Moreover, social drama
“closely corresponds to Aristotle’s description of tragedy in the Poetics, in that it is ‘the imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude . . . having a beginning, a middle, and an end’” (72). This is because “there is
an interdependent, perhaps dialectic, relationship between social dramas
and genres of cultural performance in perhaps all societies. Life, after all,
is as much an imitation of art as the reverse. Those who, as children in
Ndembu society, have listened to innumerable stories about Yala Mwaku
and Luweji Ankonde, know all about “inaugural motifs”—”when the king
was drunk and helpless, his sons beat and reviled him”—”transitional 259
motifs”—”his daughter found him near death and comforted and tended
him”—and “terminal” motifs—”the king gave his daughter the lukanu and
excluded his sons form the royal succession.” When these same Ndembu,
now full-grown, wish to provoke a breach or to claim that some party has
crucially disturbed the placid social order, they have a frame available to
“inaugurate” a social drama, with a repertoire of “transitional” and
“ending” motifs to continue the framing process and channel the
subsequent agonistic developments. Just as the story itself still makes
important points about family relationships and about the stresses between
sex- and age-roles, and appears to be an emic generalization, clothed in
metaphor and involving the projection of innumerable specific social
dramas generated by these structural tensions, so does it feed back into the
social process, providing it with a rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a
meaning. (72)
In this argument, the energy of imitation moves back and forth between life and art, or between life and what Turner calls “genres of cultural performance” in which category
“stage drama” falls. Turner understands stories as powerful tools of enculturation—they teach the children who hear them how to understand conflict and resolution (breach, crisis, and “reconciliation”). They provide a structural model—a “frame”—for understanding and recreating drama in life. Stories may be said to imitate reality, but they in turn play a part in reproducing the structures they appear merely to reflect, supplying the blueprints for the whole process. The potential of “genres of cultural 260 performance” to influence cultural reality is more easily appreciated when the stakes are higher:
Some genres, particularly epic, serve as paradigms which inform the
action of important political leaders—star-groupers of encompassing
groups such as Church or State—giving them style, directions, and
sometimes compelling them subliminally to follow in major public crisis a
certain course of action, thus emplotting their lives. (72-73)
Art serves as a kind of complex, culture-wide role model, then, both showing people what is good, bad, heroic, and so forth, and allowing them to invoke dominant cultural standards as precedents or explanations for their own life experiences. It is a small step from here, of course, to recognizing that subtle and perhaps inevitable changes in the structures or particulars of stories could effect substantive changes in the structures through which social drama outside the theater is created and processed.
II. The Shapes of Reality
In 3.2 of Hamlet, Polonius enters to Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern to summon Hamlet to the queen. Hamlet puts off Polonius’s summons and torments him with the antics of madness assumed in act one:
Hamlet Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius By th’mass, and ‘tis like: a camel, indeed.
Hamlet Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet Or like a whale. 261
Polonius Very like a whale.
Hamlet Then I will come to my mother by and by. . . .
(3.2.345-352)
Harold C. Goddard has read this passage as demonstrating Hamlet’s ability to get the
“yes-man” Polonius “to admit, in quick succession, that the same cloud resembles now a camel, now a weasel, and now a whale” (357). Goddard observes that “since the cloud doubtless resembled none of the three in any marked degree, what Hamlet pretended to see in it was the result of free association on his part” and then suggests a psychological significance for each shape to fit Hamlet’s conflicts in the play (357). Roger J. Trienens criticizes Goddard’s reading as being too complex but observes that “it would be a mistake not to seek any significance in the imagery of the cloud” and suggests “an interpretation which is simpler and more plausible that Goddard’s; namely, that the three creatures . . . all connote lust” (211). David R. Cheney rejects both Goddard’s and
Trienens’s readings, offering in their place yet a third “symbolic” reading of the choice of camel, weasel, and whale as “covert warnings” to Polonius “to stay out of Hamlet’s affairs” (447).
Robert B. Bennett, in a refreshing move, abandons entirely the search for significance in the forms themselves, noting that “had Hamlet chosen three other items at random, the central dramatic effect would have been the same” and reminding us that
“Hamlet is indoors and it is midnight . . . there is no cloud” (90). Bennett suggests that the scene involves dynamics of authority. Hamlet forces Polonius into a “yes-man” role indeed, but he also follows the cloud antics by noting that he will come to his mother “by and by”—that is, Hamlet will decide what he will do, “not the queen, king, or their agent” 262
(90). We may in turn find fault with Bennett for being too dramatic about the location of the scene—”Hamlet,” in all probability, is outdoors, on the amphitheater stage, in broad daylight of the afternoon—but his point about the dramatic effect of the scene is well- taken: any three items would achieve the same effect. A cloud is a cloud, formless by definition, until it is given existence as a camel, a weasel, a whale. Polonius humors
Hamlet by agreeing to whatever antic interpretation he puts on a cloud, but this humoring does not take away from the force of Hamlet’s observations: the shapelessness of referents in the world outside of language—a cloud will forever be almost in the shape of something; almost recognizable as the abstracted symbol of another referent—once conceived within the world of language, of symbols, is given meaning and significance.
The formlessness of the real world—”real” in the Derridian sense of presence in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that refers only to itself—is literally unremarkable; it is outside the realm of language.27 It can be remarked on, given meaning, considered and
understood, only when it is narrated, or brought into being in the world of the symbols.
The cloud is shapeless, without form or meaning, but our ability to conceptualize its
shape in a likeness to another abstracted shape or symbol—a sign—can recreate it in a
world of meaning inside of which the world of experience comes to have significance.
We give meaning to “reality” by experiencing it, which is achieved only when the
presence of that reality is replaced with symbolic abstraction—when an object, an event,
a stimulus, is conceived in its absence and replaced by a symbolic stand-in.
This process of replacing presence with a symbolic stand-in is what Derrida refers
to as “différance as temporization”:
27 See Jacques Derrida, “Différance.” I have tried to suggest an uneasiness with the idea of a “real” world from this point forward by keeping the word “real” in quotation marks. 263
the sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the
present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the
being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go
through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The
sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. . . . According to this classical
semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both
secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence
from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and
missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of
mediation. (“Différance” 9)
Although Derrida goes on to attack the notion of deferred presence, since it still presumes the possibility of presence, the fact that an unrecoverable “reality” has been replaced by a sign remains. The paradox of positing a reality, then, is that the very process of positing requires such circumstances as will require replacing reality with signs. The condition of symbolic abstraction is the condition of infinitely deferred presence. On the stage, the cloud of experience-in-the-world is recreated in the realm of symbols, the performed text of a play.
The portion of this process that is particularly important here is the inevitable mutation of sensory experience, of the material world, as it is made to fit into the categories available in the world of symbols. There may not be a perfect fit in Hamlet’s lexicon with which to describe the cloud. In fact, Hamlet’s antics suggest that no one form is quite adequate; the cloud has characteristics of a camel, a weasel, and a whale.
To accommodate the cloud more thoroughly with a name in the realm of signs would 264 require mixing and matching of available symbols, and the implication is that the accommodation can never be entirely adequate: to abstract an external reality in the realm of language, some amount of reshaping is necessary. The process of signification, of capturing reality in language, is partly procrustean because “reality” will always be forced to fit into terms not able to represent it without changing it. The potential for the introduction of new categories into the realm of language is not limited, but the representation of reality in language—and of popular culture in drama—is always also a re-creation in (new) terms. The force of symbolic abstraction and representation forever alters the referent it represents. Thus when a drama shows the very age and body of the time its form and substance, the form and substance shown are inevitably different from the form and substance they are supposed faithfully to represent. It is more felicitous to say that the drama gives the age and body of the time its form and substance. To refer again to Victor Turner, “life, after all, is as much an imitation of art as the reverse” (72).
Literary theory has treated this relationship between art and reality in different but essentially commensurate terms. The argument that mimesis is constitutive as well as reflective of reality, discussed above in the work of Weimann, Barish, and Spariosu, is effectively the same as the argument that reality is a construction of language—or that it is only available as a construction of language. Both arguments allege that the media in which the world is figured are not transparent, passive, or self-effacing, but rather opaque, actively constitutive, and assertive. Media do not translate their referents; they write them.
To oppose “reality” to “language” is to invoke a fundamental philosophical issue especially prominent in structuralism and poststructuralism, and particularly in Jacques 265
Lacan and Jacques Derrida, whose work serves as a theoretical framework here for the notion that drama constructs reality. From Derrida we have already borrowed the idea that il n’y a pas de hors texte, or “there is no outside-text,” meaning that anything external to language can neither be known nor conceived from within the realm of language and still remain “external to language.” We can access the outside only from within the text, necessarily bringing to it the structures and logics of a text. This second point can be emphasized using Lacan’s often-cited approach to the unconscious as structured like a language: the conceptualization of external reality, necessary for recognizing and considering it, imparts to that reality the structures that allow conceptualization—the structures of language, the free play of unanchored or uncentered signifiers that have meaning without positive terms, only relative to each other.28 There is an analogous process in the “textualization” of reality performed by drama. Reality must be textualized, or construed as a text, whenever it is considered, apprehended, conceptualized, or discussed. It must be given an embodiment in the world of signifiers before it can have any meaning, before it can be present in consciousness, and that symbolic embodiment will as a matter of course bear the marks of structure common to and inherent in all modes of signification. Reality figured in the symbolic can never be reality outside the symbolic.
Drama is among the most intense modes of textualization, resulting in an actual script. It is also selective. Drama pares down the energies, conflicts, and events it dramatizes and gives them a confining dimensionality not native to their existence outside of the text of a play. This is the process Jonas Barish has described as the “act of finding details, choosing among them, ordering them into a new totality,” which “forces
28 See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” 266 the artist into a position of mastery over nature” (Prose Comedy 144). Just as the free formlessness of Hamlet’s clouds is constricted within the dimensions that Hamlet ascribes to them in order to give them significance as “camel,” “weasel,” and “whale,” so the free formlessness of reality is constrained within the dimensions available in the dramatic text. The process of constraint is a process of selection and exclusion.
Coherent, manageable narratives necessarily shut out noise and other stimuli that have the potential to be significant but that are too abundant to be exhaustively chronicled in the three hours’ traffic of a stage play. Hamlet’s cloud may be backed liked a weasel, but the potential to become a weasel must be contained if the cloud is to become a camel instead. Much like the “rare beast” drawing of a rabbit-duck used by Norman Rabkin to describe the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the meaningfulness of the cloud as one shape depends on the silencing of its other potential shapes.29 The drama selects
elements from a vast catalogue, keeping some and discarding or blocking others that
could be allowed to signify but that are not.
Such a process might, from the perspective of ideological criticism, be understood
as violent or suppressive, because it might be seen to silence potential voices—to shut out
not only excess stimuli, but also aberrant, subversive, or alternative potential voices:
Hamlet’s figuring of a camel, a weasel, and a whale silences other potential figurations.
This observation is valuable because it reminds us that different agents figure reality
differently to suit their specific ends—for instance, as examined in chapter 3, the court
system figures the reality of Moll Frith differently from how the drama figures that
29 See Norman Rabkin, “Either/Or: Responding to Henry V,” in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning. Of course, the point of Rabkin’s essay is that the rare beast is both/and: both a rabbit and a duck. I suggest that in order to finalize one reading over another, the process of selection is also a process of exclusion or repression. 267 reality. One seeks to neutralize her marginality, and the other, to capitalize on it. The
“cloud” of Moll Frith was, to the court system, very like a thief, a fence, a bawd, and by that declension, a prostitute; to The Roaring Girl, the cloud of Moll Frith was perhaps backed like a thief, but for the play’s purposes (of city comedy), she was better formulated as an unconventional protagonist. Rumor, report, and underground legend are mingled with dramatic expediency and popular dramatic structure to yield a heroine, not a criminal. The Roaring Girl silences—or in this case, rephrases—Moll Frith’s potential significance as a criminal, finding instead in that “shape” the likeness of a cunning citizen who consorts with thieves only to be better prepared to thwart them.
Thus, drama both selects and shapes the reality it presents on the stage. The process invites specifically ideological readings of selection and shaping as repressive, exclusionary, or cooptive/appropriative. To recognize the selectiveness of representation is to activate an issue at the heart of recent movements in criticism of early modern drama. Deciding whether the theater and its selective representations of reality were ultimately subversive or in the service of the state, productively countercultural or effectively contained—the only two understandings of selective representation that are widely available—constitutes one of the fundamental differences between New
Historicism and Cultural Materialism. These two related but often divergent strains of poststructural Marxist-derived criticism comprise the principal force in current ideological readings of early modern drama but clash over particular issues. Where New
Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt would see a process of subversion and containment whereby the theater’s forays into emergent cultural space are ultimately made to serve the state’s vision and version of culture, Cultural Materialists like Jonathan Dollimore would 268 note that “although subversion may indeed be appropriated by authority for its own purposes, once installed it can be used against authority as well as used by it”
(“Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism” 12), or, as Dollimore and
Alan Sinfield note elsewhere, “to silence dissent one must first give it a voice, to misrepresent it one must first present it” (“History and Ideology” 215). This dissertation does not choose between “subversion” or “containment” because such a choice deflects attention from the constitutive force of popular drama. That is, whether the drama is opposed to, or set in the service of, dominant culture, the state, authority, or other hypostases of dominant ideological power, its capacity to shape reality, which is the object of attention in this study, remains. The anthropological approach represented here by Victor Turner is in this sense most useful, since it emphasizes the potential influence of drama as a “genre of cultural performance” on life.
Bartholomew Fair helps illustrate both the theater’s process of selecting and shaping-through-textualizing and how that process translates into cultural authority in the capacity to influence perceptions of reality by influencing the categories available for experiencing reality. Discussion of these two points comprises the remainder of this chapter. First, metadramatic moments in plays such as dumb-shows and plays-within- plays, especially those that take as their subject matter the same dramas in which they appear, offer analogues of the selecting and shaping process in the drama itself. The dumb shows in Gorboduc that introduce each act figure the action of the play itself in a way that is suggestive of how a play figures the world of reality it represents. Likewise, the playlet within The Spanish Tragedy offers moments of metadramatic commentary on the events of The Spanish Tragedy; “The Murder of Gonzago” in Hamlet is 269 commissioned by Hamlet precisely for the way it re-creates the dramatic conflicts of the play Hamlet. John Littlewit’s puppet show in Bartholomew Fair offers a particularly compelling play-within-a-play because Littlewit’s puppet show re-creates the London world of the fictional playgoers in a way similar to how the play itself re-creates the
London of the actual playgoers. That is, by dramatizing Bartholomew Fair, the play,
Bartholomew Fair, does something similar to what Littlewit’s puppet show does as it
“dramatizes” the fictional world of London that we see presented obliquely in Jonson’s play. The process of Jonson’s dramatization is reproduced in miniature within the play, in the form of the play’s play, Littlewit’s puppet show. This analogue is also particularly illustrative of the way dramatic narratives on the popular stage combined dominant, residual, and emergent narratives in their creation of a contemporary reality.
Second, the translation of this shaping process into the power to affect or effect reality is evident in the character Busy who, as Patrick Collinson has argued, may be seen as a creation of the popular drama that came to bear directly on the category of reality— hypocritical Puritan, in this case—it figured on stage. For the Ndembu tribe in Turner’s anthropological study, the epic narrative provided a model for important political figures to understand and act upon their reality. For early modern Londoners, the stage-Puritan filled a similar function. By making certain categories of cultural understanding more widely available, the theater could directly affect perception and experience of the outside world. Margot Heinemann has compared the popular theater to mass media, noting that its audience was “never to be so wide again till the coming of film and television” (10). With such a wide public appeal, the popular drama’s construal of the phenomena of the outside world was proportionately widely exposed. While the drama 270 cannot be said to have invented the Puritan, it is largely responsible for the particulars of the stage-Puritan, a model for identifying, understanding, and experiencing radical religious zealots in the outside world that achieved remarkable currency.
III. Bartholomew Fair: Puritans, Puppets, and Plays
“I have an affair i’ the Fair, Win,” says proctor John Littlewit to his wife near the end of the first act: “a puppet-play of mine own making—say nothing—that I writ for the motion-man” (1.5.132). Littlewit’s reasons for wanting to attend the fair are many, but chief among them is his puppet play, the performance (and reception) of which he wants to witness with Win. But his amateur punning—an “affair i’ the Fair”—calls immediately to the foreground the reflexive and recursive properties of the puppet show relative to the play. Littlewit’s “affair in the Fair” puns on the embeddedness of a word within a different word, but it highlights the embeddedness of a play within a play, and how that play echoes the structures, arrangements, and processes of the play within which it is contained. “Affair i’ the Fair” also resembles the rhetorical trope aphaeresis, in which syllables are omitted from the beginning of a word. The logic of the trope thus reflects the process of selection and exclusion—the trimming down—we see as the puppet play represents reality.30
As the promoters of the puppet show prepare for its performance, the business of admission and seating at a public playhouse (the Hope, for example, on the afternoon
Jonson’s play opened) are reproduced in part on the stage of that public playhouse where the fair’s puppet playhouse is represented. “Door-keepers” charge twopence for entrance
30 Perhaps it is worth the smile to remark also the beginnings of a coincidental homonym—”affair i’ the Fair” and aphaeresis.” 271 of the play’s characters, though Leatherhead’s direction that they “take twopence a piece” if any “gentlefolks” come (5.2.20) suggests that a single penny was adequate for entrance, depending on social standing; and Sharkwell’s declared intent to take threepence, if he can, of gentlefolk, indicates a kind of sliding scale in effect for the puppet show admission (5.2.21). The tiered seating arrangements of a public amphitheater could not, presumably, have been reproduced faithfully on the stage itself, but this admission scheme at the puppet show otherwise reflects the graded scale in place at actual theaters: a penny for admission to the yard, another for admission to the covered seating galleries, and so forth.31 The wealthier patrons could be expected to pay
more and to have better seats. Wasp’s exchange with Filcher at the entrance even recalls
the contract recited by the scrivener in Jonson’s induction: “Twopence a piece, sir, for
the best motion, in the Fair,” says Filcher, and Wasp replies: “I believe you lie; if you do,
I’ll have my money again, and beat you” (5.4.70-71). The notion of value versus
payment rendered here echoes the induction’s concern with value, payment, and the
proportion of criticism allowed each audience member.
Cokes’s discussion with Littlewit and Lantern before the puppet show, in which
he insists on construing the entire affair in terms exclusive to the popular theater,
establishes the similarities in a different, ironically literal direction. “What manner of
matter is this, Master Littlewit? What kind of actors ha’you? Are they good actors?” he
asks (5.3.43-45). Littlewit and Leatherhead indulge Cokes’s fantasy and play along,
Leatherhead introducing the puppets as “actors, sir, and as good as any” (5.3.67). But
Cokes steps up the misconstrual by continuing the conceit: “which is your Burbage
31 The admission procedure at hall playhouses, while the seating arrangements were different, were based on the same principles. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Stage, 154-164. 272 now?” he asks, and then clarifies: “your best actor. Your Field?” (5.3.72-73, 75). Cokes essentially mistakes the proper bounds of his comparison between puppets and actors.32
While the same terms might suit both stage-play and puppet show, the two are eventually
no longer commensurate: if one “actor” plays all the puppets, no single puppet can be
said to have a native talent for performance that would make him the “best actor.”
Nonetheless, Cokes’s foolish fascination with the workings of popular theater presses the
similarities between the puppet show and the stage-play of which it is a part.
The puppet show itself offers the most substantive parallels between the dramatic
entertainment at the fair33 and the play in which it takes place. The action of the puppets
is limited, until the debate with Busy, almost exclusively to drinking, swearing, and
fighting, which reflects, comically, the general atmosphere of the fair. Where the play
features developed, full-blown dramatic scenes based on insults, prostitution, and
quarrelling, the puppet show has doggerel lines in which a similar atmosphere is
established. Many of the puppets’ individual lines might in fact easily issue from Wasp
or Knockem, just as the sections of their dialogue might have occurred in the fair’s game
of vapors. “You rogue, I am no pander,” the puppet Cole says to the suggestion that he
carry the puppet Leander to the puppet Hero (5.4.138). “Are you no pander, Goodman
Cole? Here’s no man says you are, / You’ll grow a hot Cole, it seems,” comes the reply
(5.4.141-142), and the exchange does not differ qualitatively from similar exchanges of
sentiment amongst the characters in the fair. Still, the average line in the puppet show is
32 As Nathan Field was part of the Bartholomew Fair’s original cast, Cokes’s question also constitutes a metadramatic joke here. 33 The fair of the play, as opposed to the actual Bartholomew Fair. Unless otherwise specified, all references to “the fair” are to the play’s fair. 273 in fact cruder than its corresponding sentiment in the fair. The insults, for instance, function on a lower, more scatological level:
Pup. Lean. Cole, Cole, old Cole.
Lea. That is the sculler’s name without control.
Pup. Lean. Cole, Cole, I say Cole.
Lea. We do hear you.
Pup Lean. Old Cole.
Lea. Old coal? Is the dyer turned collier? How do you sell?
Pup. Lean. A pox o’ your manners, kiss my hole here, and smell.
Lea. Kiss your hole, and smell? There’s manners indeed.
(5.4.117-121)
The first insult comes quickly and is entirely base: “kiss my hole here, and smell.”
Nothing of its tenor or scatological humor occurs in the play proper in such direct terms.
And where the characters’ lines in the fair occasionally indulge puns and basic rhetorical devices, the rhyming doggerel of the puppets is a reduction of a rich and varied prose selection to a much more constraining “dramatic” style. Vapors become strings of base insults; roaring descends immediately into actual fighting, without the complexities of braggadocio and cleverness. Compare the first “roaring” encounter from 2.5 between
Quarlous and Winwife on the one hand and Knockem and Ursula on the other with the fight between puppets Pythias and Damion at 5.4.201-226. The action of the first develops slowly from gruff greetings to declined invitations to insults to Ursula’s departure to fetch her scalding pan, and it involves several participants, onlookers, and perspectives, along with a creative, rhetorical facility in insults. The two puppets, 274 conversely, fall directly to accusations of “whore-mastering” amongst themselves and with the puppeteer and come to blows in the space of twenty-two half lines, most of which simply echo each other. A similar puppet-fight occurs at line 310 and lasts through line 275-291, with Knockem applauding the “fine vapors” (291).34
The competition over the affections of Grace Wellborn and the attempted
corruptions of Dame Purecraft and Mistress Overdo are reduced in the puppet play to the
brawling that fetches its head from the puppet Hero. As the only “female” puppet, the
comparisons with the play’s female characters may be disingenuous or slightly forced at
best, but there are useful similarities. Puppets Damon and Pythias resemble Quarlous and
Winwife in that they bicker amongst themselves over Leander but cooperate when they
are challenged together by another party.35 Though Quarlous and Winwife do not come
to blows with Grace and Cokes, just as Grace and Cokes do not have a similar experience
with each other to that of puppet Leander and puppet Hero, the general relationships
amongst the puppets are parallel to those amongst the fair characters: male characters
fight over female characters against the backdrop of drunkenness and pandering.
Ultimately, then, the puppet show bastardizes the “reality” of the fair
significantly, reflecting the fair but condensing a large experience into a very small one
and streamlining various different thematic expressions of aggression, revelry, and
sexuality into insults, a tavern, and a Cupid-pander figure. It is in such reductions,
however, that the process of selection and exclusion in dramatic re-creation is most
34 As James E. Savage has noted, many accounts of the puppet show “tend to pass it over in embarrassed silence, pausing merely to castigate its bad taste” (46 n. 6). It may be that more recent attitudes have generally come to appreciate the vulgarity of the puppet show for various reasons, and it is certainly the opinion of this study that the puppet show is in fact hilarious and has dramatic entertainment value above and beyond its usefulness as an image of play-making. 35 R. B. Parker makes a similar point in “Themes and Staging of Bartholomew Fair.” See page 303. 275 obviously reflected. The puppet show, constrained by time, scope, and form, cannot represent the fair as it is in all its complexity: it must select and exclude, occasionally directly echoing the “reality” of the fair but usually condensing that reality in time, scope, and speech to fit it within the confines of the puppet stage. The variations in character, speech, and plot in the events of the fair are reduced significantly in the cast of the puppet show, just as Hamlet reduces and streamlines the shapes of clouds in order to figure them as animals.36 And yet that the image of the fair is clearly recognizable in its encapsulated form on the puppet stage is hard to deny: the atmosphere of revelry, sexuality and sensuality, and fighting are captured efficiently, and just as Cokes understands the puppets to be “actors,” he understands the actions of the puppets to have relevance and meaning in his own world. The events dramatized by the puppets are meaningful to its audience because their dramatization is a reflection, if a simplification, of the fair-world in which they live.37
It is precisely this meaningfulness that Littlewit and Leatherhead hope to achieve by making their version of the Hero and Leander story “a little easy, and modern for the
36 The “reduction” performed by the puppet play is only ideological insofar as all cultural or social activity can be understood as political, as historical, as ideological. In any case, its fundamental status of being ideological—its “ideologicality,” perhaps—is not at issue. 37 The irreverent but underestimated cartoon comedy South Park offers a late twentieth-century example of a similar set of relationships between reality and representation figured in a play-within-a-play. South Park is itself a caustic satire both on cartoons and television entertainment—particularly sit-coms—in a way that is not necessarily parallel to Bartholomew Fair’s relationship to other popular entertainments at the time. But within South Park as within Bartholomew Fair is a play-within-a-play that says much about the particular relationship between Bartholomew Fair and its puppet show. The “Terrence and Phillip Show,” a mockery of the scatology and crude humor that drives the show South Park itself, fits into the television show the same way the puppet show fits into Bartholomew Fair. Terrence and Phillip distill the irreverent, sadistic drama of South Park into characters who are even more two dimensional than their counterparts in the show. The attitude of authority figures in the television show toward the embedded “Terrence and Phillip” show reflects the real world attitude toward South Park itself, much as Busy’s attack on the puppet show reflects arguments against the dramatic form in which the puppet show is embedded. South Park mocks the objections it stages to “Terrence and Phillip” just as Bartholomew Fair mocks Busy’s objections to the puppet show, and in doing so, both South Park and Bartholomew Fair mock real-world arguments against themselves as popular entertainment. 276 times” (5.4.106-107). The Touchstone of True Love is not played “according to the book” because Marlowe’s poem “is too learned and poetical for our audience” (93, 97-
98). “What do they know what Hellespont is? ‘Guilty of true love’s blood?’ Or what
Abydos is? Or ‘the other Sestos hight?’” asks Leatherhead (98-100). Assuming that classical allusions will be lost on his audience, he has “entreated Master Littlewit, to take a little pains to reduce it to a more familiar strain for our people” (102-103). On one level, Leatherhead speaks for Jonson, who is forever belittling the uneducated among the theatergoing public, but Littlewit and Leatherhead’s concern over the reception of the puppet show demonstrates a fundamental assumption about the relevance of dramatic entertainment to the everyday lives of audiences.38 “What do they know what Hellespont
is?” comes the question, and its import is crucial: the substance of the puppet play must
reflect the life experience of its audience—what they “know” as citizens in the culture
represented by the entertainment. To this end, Littlewit has
made it a little easy, and modern for the times, sir, that’s all; as, for the
Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s
son, about Puddle-wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bank-side, who going
over one morning, to old Fish-street, Leander spies her land at Trig-stairs,
and falls in love with her: now do I introduce Cupid, having
metamorphos’d himself into a drawer, and he strikes Hero in love with a
pint of sherry; and other pretty passages there are, o’ the friendship, that
will delight you, sir, and please you of judgement. (5.4106-115)
38 R. B. Parker has suggested that Leatherhead’s slight opinion of the average playgoer may in part have been Jonson’s response to the failure of his Cataline. See Parker, 302. 277
The puppet show pleases Cokes, Wasp, Knockem and, presumably, the others, because it shows them their own world in a significant fashion. The vision is condensed and warped into a scatological comedy, but it must be fundamentally recognizable;39 it must be essentially mimetic in order to succeed, and Littlewit achieves this by establishing in the puppet show dramatic conflicts, locations, and characters that are familiar for the
“modern times.”
The process of “making a little easy” the Hero and Leander narrative is also illustrative of the way popular drama mingled narratives from dominant, emergent, and residual areas of culture to create a truly popular phenomenon. As discussed in chapter 2, the narratives textualized and performed on the stage were richly varied, many already established in the canon of cultural narratives and others largely forgotten or newly revived. Littlewit has taken his plot from classical antiquity,40 the distant origin of
“English” culture obscured by time and learning in the particulars of its language but
generally available as an established or canonized narrative in dominant culture. And
like Jonson, Littlewit seizes on contemporary analogues to the names, places, and
functions of the classical story to enrich the relevance and immediacy of the story for its
contemporary audience. “What do they know what Hellespont is?”—Leatherhead may in
fact give his audience too little credit, and Jonson’s jibe depends on the fact that at least
some of the play’s audience knows precisely what Hellespont is, but the impulse that
39 Anne Barton (217) and Watson (Parodic Strategy 144) also discuss the similarities between the fair and the puppet show. 40 On Jonson’s classicism, see Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind. 278 drives the simplification in the puppet play is mirrored wherever popular drama caters to its audience’s early modern tastes.41
The popular stage featured stories that mixed all sorts of sources to yield visions
of life that were recognizable and meaningful for Londoners. The drama selects a
narrative inside of which to construe a vision of experience, and it then adjusts the
narrative slightly so that it bears a better mimetic relationship to the “everyday life” that
is the experience of its immediate audience.
The puppet show’s process of selecting and trimming down the available
narratives at the fair—of “finding details, choosing among them, ordering them into a
new totality,” in Barish’s phrasing (Prose Comedy 144)—and then combining them with
already established narratives thus offers a model of what early modern drama did for its
audiences, distilling and making sense of everyday life in such a way as to highlight
certain conflicts and values. To hold the mirror up to the fair, Littlewit’s puppet show
projects drinking, swearing, prostitution and fighting onto a residual narrative, the story
of Hero and Leander, itself a cultural touchstone updated to reflect the world of the
Bartholomew Fair, and maps the hybrid narrative onto early modern London locations to
yield a familiar story with contemporary significance. Emergent or marginal narratives
(selected from the fair) are mingled with established or dominant narratives so that the
theater can manage a production of “everyday life” that, despite its farcical crudity, re-
creates the world of its audience in a meaningful way.
Bartholomew Fair encourages an understanding of reality as a matter of
representation, rather than as a reflection of a stable world of observable phenomenon.
41 The revival of classical forms with contemporary twists, such as the revenge tragedy vogue started by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, reflects this catering. The same may be said of the “city comedy” in 279
As we have seen, Cokes compulsively confuses fiction with reality. He experiences the puppets as genuine actors, and his assurance to Leatherhead that “I am toward a wife” as he handles Leatherhead’s puppets suggests that he thinks the play’s other characters also experience the puppets as actors (5.4.6). They do not, of course, with one possible exception: Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, who undertakes to dispute with the puppet Dionysus the “profination” of stage-plays. By arguing with a puppet several standard points of objection often leveled by actual people at the theater industry, Busy forges another link between the world of the fair and the dramatic world of the puppet show. His endeavor to debate a puppet in the same terms used in actual anti-theatrical polemics establishes the puppet narrative and the narrative of the outside world in the same space, which makes them, for a time, commensurate. The preposterousness of Busy’s task is highlighted when he finds himself leveling charges of cross-dressing at the puppets, but the fact that the boundary between pretend entertainment and the world outside the play is compromised—first by Cokes, and here by Busy—remains. Distinctions between the theater and the outside world continually want to collapse in the course of the last scenes, as the play comes to a close and actors on the stage play at being actors and spectators.
The referent of the drama—the world of London and Bartholomew Fair—is implicated in this process; as the distinctions between life and play on the stage are compromised, so are the distinctions between life outside the theater and life on its boards. Totus mundus agit histrionem becomes also available in the reverse, histrio agit totum mundum, and the layered, reflexive significance of the theatrum mundi topos is fully activated.
The fair’s playfulness emphasizes the power of signifiers, which become important apart from their referents precisely because they can be separated from their
adoption and modification of New Comedy character types to reflect Elizabethan and Jacobean London. 280 referents. Justice Overdo continually mistakes attitude and professed disposition in the fair’s regulars and customers for reality: he is deluded into thinking Edgeworth a “civil young man”; Knockem, a “cutpurse of the sword”; and Quarlous, the madman Trouble- all. Actually, these characters are not at all as they represent themselves, or are represented, in the case of Knockem.42 They appropriate a symbol of virtue, of madness,
in order to trick others with false signification. In terms of interpretation, it is not the
“reality” half of the binary that matters, but the “signifier” half, the language half, which
in these instances has no direct link to reality but that functions effectively nonetheless.
Similarly, the Puritan hypocrite Busy continually misrepresents himself and his
behavior as zealously religious. He invokes the symbols, phrasings, attitudes and other
signs of holy devotion and abhorrence of the flesh even as he partakes of ale, of pig, of
turkey pie. The desire to go to the fair can be not only described but perhaps also
experienced as a Godly exercise in withstanding temptation. Busy can enjoy the fair
under the pretext of being “religious in the midst of the profane.” As Mary Bledsoe has
pointed out, Busy is called in act one to determine whether eating pig can be justified,
“the suggestion being that language will provide a warrant for them to go” (154). Busy,
of course, sees to it via some admirable casuistry that the party can excuse going to the
fair: it is only a matter of phrasing the expedition properly, and the fair can be attended
without violating godly precepts.
Other similar situations in which signification is divorced from referents abound:
Overdo’s own disguise, Trouble-all’s mistaking of a warrant for legitimate reason to do
something—or his acceptance of a forged warrant for a “genuine” one—Quarlous’s
42 It is Ursula who refers, in Overdo’s hearing, to Knockem as “cutting halfpenny purses, or stealing little penny dogs out o’ the Fair” (2.3.8-9). Knockem is innocent of these specific charges. 281 appropriation of Trouble-all’s clothing and verbal tags (“Save ye, quit ye, and multiply ye”), and so forth. But of particular interest is the game of “vapours” played by
Knockem, Nordern, Puppy, Wasp, Cutting, and Whit in 4.4. This absurd game, described in the stage directions as “nonsense: every man to oppose the last man that spoke, whether it concern’d him, or no,” celebrates signification absolutely separated from the world of referents (4.4.26). The players of the game engage in a loosely governed match of opposition and insult, in which the object is simply to disagree with and contest whatever has just been said. As Barish has described it, vapors “codifies contradictoriness into a formal rule” (217). The game divorces meaning from language: words spoken have no referent in the opinions of those who speak them, the sole object being to express disagreement, regardless of whether disagreement is actually harbored by the speaker. “Vapors” is verbal quarrelling for quarrelling’s sake alone. It is an ebullient, if bizarre, celebration of the capacity for signifiers to play freely when they are emptied of significance, entirely released from their obligations to the referents they are supposed to represent.
The play’s highlighting of the potential disjunctions between representation and reality thus emphasizes the constructive power of language. Such an emphasis should not imply that “reality” does not matter, for indeed the misrepresentation depends on the feasibility of the actual reality linked to the signs these characters use to (mis)represent themselves. After all, the game of vapors depends on the reality of actual disagreements for its force as a game in which disagreement is played upon. If there were no potential for actual disagreement to be signified in language, the “meaning” from which the game departs and that it needs in order to entertain its participants would cease to be, and so 282 would the game. Similarly, Edgeworth could not delude Justice Overdo if the idea of a virtuous young man were not a feasible reality somewhere, and Busy could not camouflage his desires with the pretexts of Puritanism if Puritanism were not an abstract of something perceived to be real indeed.
A connection between representation and reality is evident to some degree when the game of vapors descends into genuine disagreement and physical quarrel in the middle of 4.4. Knockem, Whit, and Wasp “fall by the ears” as Knockem calls for Whit to strike Wasp. Bartholomew Fair plays with representation and reality, but it ultimately neglects to prefer either one over the other. “Reality” is always fluid and redefinable, like the identities, attitudes, and even the goals of the play’s characters, which are continually amended, updated, or changed altogether. By the end of the play, Quarlous has reconciled himself to the idea of marrying a widow, which he had disparaged in act one; Busy gives in to the community of the fair and finally forswears the pretexts under which he has labored as a hypocrite for the duration of the first four acts; and Justice
Overdo, under the urging of Quarlous, recognizes his own human frailty and relinquishes his pretensions to stamp out enormity from what he has believed to be his superior moral perspective.
In the end, the goodwill of the fair community triumphs over all disagreements, whether acted or genuine, as a resolution that forms the basis of a happy ending for the play. That is, there is a perceived stability in the world that serves as a backdrop against which the characters of the fair play with reality. Jonson observes in Discoveries that
our whole life is like a Play : wherein every man forgetfull of himselfe, is
in travaile with expression of another. Nay, wee so insist in imitating 283
others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves : like
Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers so long, till at last they
become such ; and make the habit to another nature, as it is never
forgotten. (Discoveries 8:597)
But the characters of Bartholomew Fair do not, at last, make habit to another nature.
Their “expressions” of themselves and their world are made at the expense of what is
“real” as they play at various misrepresentations of themselves, but in the end everyone returns to himself, embracing an identity that, if not stable, at least affords a place in the
“fold of a shared humanity” (Barish, Prose Comedy 231).
Much has been made of Jonson’s mock contract at the outset of play, in which he instructs the audience not to identify the fair with life.43 What he specifically warns
against, however, is not confusing the play with life so much as searching out “who was
meant by the Ginger-bread woman, who by the Hobby-horse man, who by the
Costermonger, nay, who by their wares,” and so forth (“Induction” 134-136). As a
portrait of Bartholomew Fair, the play seems obviously to be understood as a model of
life. What Jonson advises against is rather the reading of characters as lampoons of
historical people in the outside world—the kind of activity that is encouraged if not
demanded in The Poetaster and other plays, where the project is precisely to parody the
pretensions of actual people. Bartholomew Fair eschews this sort of dramatic ridicule,
perhaps because Jonson’s focus is on character types and themes of the fair, rather than
on actual people. Bartholomew Fair is a study of the fair, its cozeners, and its customers
in “the present,” according to the scrivener, and its author is “loth to make Nature afraid
in his plays” (“Induction” 113, 124). The play is thus realistic but non-specific in its 284 choice of characters, and it is judicious in its choice of scenarios, containing no “better ware than a Fair will afford” (111). In The Poetaster, as in Cynthia’s Revels, Richard H.
Perkinson observes, “Jonson makes classical or literary characters act in ways that would suggest Marston or Dekker.” In Bartholomew Fair, however, “by an inversion,” Jonson
“frankly accepts the topical basis of the fair and makes imaginary characters act in comic and improbable ways. . . . In Bartholomew Fair the topical, or real life part of the comedy
is largely its locale; the ludicrous, fanciful characters are the comic falsifications of life”
(277).
In this last point, Perkinson is perhaps too dismissive of the potential role of such
“comic falsifications” in the “real life part of the comedy.” As Patrick Collinson has
argued, the “stage-Puritan” of late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama may have come
directly to bear on the popular understanding and experience of radical religious zealots
in the world outside the theater. “Which preceded which, and what fashioned what?”
Collinson asks, “the real or the fictitious Puritan?” (157). He notes that the
“commonsense” answer is that the “real Puritan” must have come first, since the
burlesque of Puritan morality and hypocrisy that came into a kind of vogue on the late
Elizabethan and early Jacobean stage would have needed a reality up to which to hold the
(burlesquing) mirror of drama. That this commonsense answer is not, in fact, entirely
defeated, Collinson seems ultimately to admit: the popular drama, he concedes, may not
have invented the Puritan “thing as well as name” (168). But popular drama did
contribute to the cultural understanding and experience of Puritans. Collinson cites the
case of one “Mrs Joan Drake,” from Surrey, who, while being treated for melancholy by
the spiritual physician John Dod, observed a similarity between Dod and the character
43 See Teague, 47; Barton, 210; and Watson, 142-143. 285
Ananias she had seen in a play at Blackfriars—presumably Jonson’s Ananias from The
Alchemist. The historical anecdote suggests a perceptual connection between stage characters and actual people on the part of early modern theatergoers, but this in itself is not remarkable. Collinson develops the connection into an argument about the role of the popular theater in constructing the reality it is usually assumed merely to reflect.
In this logic, the mirror metaphor, best known from Hamlet’s advice to the traveling players at Elsinore, ultimately gives way to its more popular cousin, the theatrum mundi trope. Life is like a play not only because the stage reflects the world; as discussed above, the stage also offers a conceptual model that comes to bear on our understanding of life, of the world, as a structured experience with parts, conflicts, and usually resolutions. But mimesis itself is understood as something more than reflection.
Collinson uses the word “refract,” in association with the notion of the drama as a
“prism,” to suggest what happens to reality when it encounters the process of drama
(158). Even within Hamlet, the relationship between drama and the “nature” it represents is understood to be more complex—and more powerful, if we consider Hamlet’s plans for the “Mouse Trap”—than a simple matter of reflection. “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet observes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (2.2.244-
245). The twentieth-century relativist resonance of Hamlet’s comment sounds oddly out of place next to a conception of drama as a passive reflection of the outside world. But
Hamlet’s understanding of the potential of narratives to affect reality fills out and complements his mirror metaphor: “after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live,” he says of the players to Polonius, recognizing the potential influence of the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” The implication is 286 that the players can make or mar a reputation, perhaps much in the same fashion the
Middleton and Dekker “made” Moll Frith in The Roaring Girl.
Hamlet’s elaboration on the metaphor itself exceeds the boundaries of reflection.
The purpose of playing is “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20-23). With “feature,” “image,” and “form,” the notion of reflection is sufficient, but with “pressure,” Hamlet’s hypostasization of nature becomes something whose dimensions cannot be conveyed by “reflection” alone. “Pressure” cannot be
“shown” in the same sense as feature, image, or form. Earlier, in 1.5, Hamlet speaks of wiping from the table of his memory “all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, / That use and observation copied there,” in order to remember only his present task of revenge (1.5.99-101). The OED lists both of these instances of the word “pressure”—the only two in Shakespeare—under the same heading: “the mark, form, or character impressed; impression, image, stamp. Obs.”44 In fact, Hamlet’s first
use of the word “pressure” to suggest a specifically written record in the tables of
memory colors his second use of “pressure” as a property of the age and body of the time
to link the object of dramatic representation with something that is already written. Thus, even if we understand “pressure” in Hamlet’s mirror metaphor basically, as the physical imposition of one object on the surface or into the space of another, the sense of the tenor
(the “pressure” of nature) exceeds the capacity of the vehicle (the reflecting mirror). The only sense of the word that occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare links “pressure” with the writing on a tablet to suggest that Hamlet’s own understanding of the tenor in his mirror metaphor involves writing, narrative, or text. The complex reflexivity of the theatrum 287 mundi metaphor is echoed here, where Hamlet’s notion of nature, reflected in the mimetic storyline of a drama, is something already written.
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and his stage-Puritan brethren are surely mimetic to some degree—that is, reflective of genuine, observable phenomena in the world outside the
London theaters. As Barish suggests, the rich assortment of hyperbolic tropes in Busy’s language reflects “cliché[s] associated with the Puritan lunatic fringe”—particularly
Busy’s favorite “an X, a something X, a something and something X” construction, which Barish notes is common in “writers like Phillip Stubbes” (198). Barish offers a number of examples, such as “an idol, a very idol, a fierce and rank idol” (3.6.53), which he matches with “a lustful loue, a venerous looue, a concupiscencious, baudie, & beastiall looue” (Stubbes, qtd. in Barish 198). Thus, insofar as Bartholomew Fair imitates actual
Puritans, it reflects reality, taking instances of Puritanical speech and reproducing them on stage.
But Busy and his brethren are creative inventions, as well, shaping and forming the world outside the theaters via the dramatic characters “pressured” or printed onto the surface of the popular stage. What makes the stage-Puritan a particularly powerful example of the theater’s capacity to shape reality is the fundamental ambiguity of the term “Puritan” in early modern usage, which leaves the particulars of “a Puritan” open to definition. As Christopher Hill has shown at length, the term “Puritan” was used in widely different senses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England.45
Originally, “like most political nicknames,” it seems to have been derogatory, applied to
people whose zeal for their cause exceeded what the user thought reasonable (Society and
44 OED s.v. “pressure” [sb] 4. 45 See Hill, Society and Puritanism, especially chapter 1. 288
Puritanism 14). It was also used broadly as a rhetorical device to dismiss people whose arguments against a particular practice involved conservative or religious motivations.
But it was not necessarily specifically religious, having political and social applications as well: often a Puritan was anyone opposed to James I and the policies of the crown or the court, or a fractious, contentious, or otherwise dissenting malcontent who was covetous of what he did not have and scornful of those above and below him. Though
Hill argues that the “killjoys of the type caricatured by Zeal-of-the-Land Busy” were to be found only “among the separatists,” he does concede that “contemporary references to puritan hypocrisy” were abundant, allowing that among the actual Puritans of the period before 1642 were many “Malvolios.”46
The general ambiguity Hill establishes surrounding definitions of actual Puritans supports Collinson’s argument that the stage exerted its influence on an emerging—and thus, undefined—social phenomenon. Characters like Busy provided a dramatic blueprint or model that influenced the way certain religious zealots were understood by their societies. If, as Collinson suggests, “‘Puritans’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean
England existed by virtue of being perceived to exist, most of all by their enemies, but eventually to themselves and to each other,” then the drama certainly played a part in
46 Hill argues this point about “killjoys” elsewhere, too. In Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, he insists that “black-clothed bigots” who “went about whining psalms through their noses, desecrating churches and killing joy . . . were not the mainline Puritans of whom we should think when we are considering Puritanism as the ideology of the English Revolution” (53). Oddly, the term “killjoy” seems more appropriate for a character like Malvolio, whose hypocrisy is debatable, while the notion of hypocrisy seems more appropriate for Busy, whose behavior, even before we meet him, runs counter to his mouth. Sir Toby’s barb in Twelfth Night, “dost think, because though art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale,” points up the difference (2.3.103-104). Malvolio may be said to be hypocritical in that he will emulate unfamiliar behavior in the pursuit of Olivia or in that he fantasizes about being of equal rank with Sir Toby, but he is much better described as simply uptight. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, on the other hand, is hardly a killjoy: he may register objections to recreation and other light pastimes, but he gives in to their allure in the end, first by going to the fair, and finally by becoming a beholder at the puppet show with the rest of the play’s characters. Hill’s reading of Busy appears to take him at face value. 289 their construction (158). The instantiation on the stage of the Puritan in the form of
Ananias or Busy or Malvolio would have contributed to the process of perception.
Busy is Collinson’s case study, but the argument depends on earlier instances of
Puritans in popular art: “although Jonson perpetuated the stage-Puritan in his most memorable form, . . . he was not, of course, the inventor of the stereotype” (164). The label “Puritan” is in use as early as 1572 in both positive and derogatory senses, and by the time Jonson created Busy, the stereotype was well established.47 Collinson looks to
the Marprelate Tracts, the anti-Martinist responses, and the various associated jigs and
satires that accompanied them, for the probable origin of the stage-Puritan. At the very
least, these fictions “helped those exposed to them to label, laugh at, hate, and even
become the Puritan who had all the while been in their midst, even within themselves”
(168). Like Hamlet’s clouds, which cannot be apprehended as weasels, camels, or
whales until they are named and re-conceptualized, allowed or made to inhabit forms
given to them in the world of symbols, the religious zealot became a Puritan only with
the conceptual help of the popular drama. “Paradigms such as Puritanism,” Collinson
writes, “which were deployed to construct and manipulate a semblance of reality, soon
became a part of the reality on which they imposed themselves” (169).
The experience of the fair is sorted, condensed, honed, and unified by the puppet
show. This process is a useful metaphor for how the theater treats “reality,” or
“experience in the world”: the theater sorts, condenses, hones, and unifies experience
into a narrative with characters, a plot, a central dramatic conflict, images, and ideas. It
binds sensory experience to a symbolic structure in which experience can be contained,
47 The OED lists J. Jones’s Bathes of Bath as the earliest dated instance of “Puritane” in 1572. See “puritan” 1a. 290 enumerated, and anatomized, contemplated, discussed, and so forth. It gives form and substance to that which is too vast and variable to have a homogenous sensibility and meaning in the primary instance of experience in the world. That this capacity constitutes a powerful cultural authority—the power to create or modify available categories, like “Puritan,” for understanding and experiencing the world outside the theaters—has, I hope, been demonstrated. The epigraph for this chapter, “He that denies then Theaters should be, / He may as well deny a world to me,” speaks directly to that cultural authority. The theater is a world in and of itself, a microcosmic model of reality in which the trials of life and death are acted out as a means of understanding their analogues in the world outside of the theater. The context of Heywood’s sentimental rhyme is a response to the anti-theatrical hostilities that would, if they could, have put an end to playing in and around London once and for all, and the closing of the theaters did indeed mean the loss of a kind of world when it finally happened some thirty years later in 1642: the world of the theater, its writers, actors, and patrons ceased, for a time, to be.
But the link between drama and life is bigger than the structural similarities that compel the metaphor, and the more literal relationship I try to establish in this chapter between drama and reality is just barely covered by the surface of the theatrum mundi conceit.
There is a double significance to Heywood’s rhyme, which is not simply a statement about the world of the theater industry, but also a statement about the way the theater writes the world. “He that denies then Theaters should be / He may as well deny a world to me”: it comes as a couplet at the end the verse in Heywood’s pamphlet. The typeset marginal gloss reads “No theater, no world.” Such logic requires an amendment to 291
Jacques’s famous use of the theatrum mundi narrative: not “all the world’s a stage,”48 but rather, “the stage is all the world.”
48 As You Like It, 2.7.138. 292
Conclusion
At various points throughout this study I have been careful to observe directly the cultural centrality of public, professional drama in early modern London. Along the way,
I have also attempted to clarify such terms as “culture,” “popular,” “early modern,”
“central” and “marginal,” “dominant,” “emergent,” and “residual,” and so forth. Tracing the critical history of these terms has been agonizing, if interesting. The project not only of clarifying terminology but also of anticipating objections across the variety of different critical approaches I have drawn on—Marxist, New Historical, and poststructural; historical, literary critical, psychological—constitutes a formidable challenge.
I have tried to be mindful of the dangers posed by combining different critical frameworks, because doing so invariably requires that the source frameworks be compromised. I am aware, for instance, that Stephen Mullaney’s paradigm cannot be used in precisely the same way as he uses it when it is complemented with Raymond
Williams’s paradigm, just as Williams’s paradigm cannot remain unaffected when employed in conjunction with Mullaney’s. Likewise, in using Robert Weimann’s study of locus and platea to read cultural space as well as stage space, I recognize that a certain license has been taken on my part. Nonetheless, I hope that the native value of the different schemes I have drawn on has remained intact, and that the result has been cumulatively valuable, rather than individually harmful to each paradigm. The attempt to combine not only cultural spheres but also critical models has been made in an effort to open up a new space in which to read popular drama. I hope I have shown that we need 293 to construe the place and space of the stage more complexly than current individual models will allow.
The challenge of defining the terms of different critical narratives also drives home a central point of this dissertation: that language quite powerfully affects “reality.”
The words we use in critical studies are not tools for communicating ideas; they are materials for building ideas. Consequently, the words we use shape not only the contexts of our studies, but the subject matter itself, and the conclusions that we draw, as well.
Adapting this observation, we might say that critical approaches are defined most precisely by the terms they use. Similarly, changes in literary theory have in large part been a matter of changing terminology. In choosing the term “early modern drama” over
“Renaissance drama,” for instance, scholars have registered uneasiness with the implications of word “Renaissance”: the “reality” it describes “reenact[s] the humanist bias against the prehistory of the Renaissance itself” (Cox and Kastan 3). Likewise, in preferring “early English drama” over “early modern drama,” scholars have quibbled with the implications of progress toward modernity. The choice of new terms effectively redefines both critic and text.
Eschewing the notion of progress toward modernity, however, presents a problem: to do so suggests an attitude about “progress” that is fundamentally at odds with a critical discourse which itself is always seeking newer, better, and more accurate modes of discussing the past and the present. That is, by replacing terms such as
“Renaissance” with terms that avoid the pitfalls of earlier critics’ “historicity,” every new generation of scholarship inevitably suggests a kind of step forward. If the profession of literary criticism in particular is occupied with choosing new terminologies that are 294 emptied of their predecessors’ (mis)conceptions, a notion of progress is necessarily involved. We may problematize the teleologies of our predecessors, but where we perhaps think we are being un-teleological, we are in fact being most teleological. By inventing terms for the here-and-now, we inevitably privilege the here-and-now; we make it into the end of critical study. That there is no way to avoid the rhetoric of progress in each new critical formulation of terms should not be understood as a problem to be solved. Rather, it is a condition to be embraced. Not to embrace it—or, worse yet, to try to work around the problem—is merely to commit the error of objectivity in greater magnitude.
The critical climate of poststructuralism has been most poignantly characterized by Jacques Derrida as a recognition: that “the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 280). Such a recognition made it “necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that is was not a fixed locus but a function. . . . this was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse. . . .”
(110). The critic’s recognition of his or her own status as “structured” is another formulation of the same problem we face as we revise the critical terminology of our predecessors. In doing so, we posit that our predecessors, trapped in their own structures, were unable to see the past in the way it ought to be seen. Of course, we are obligated to posit that, trapped in our own structures, we are equally unable to see the past as it ought to be seen. This notion of the past “as it ought to be seen” is thus analogous to the structural “center” in Derrida’s theories. As poststructuralists, we have come to 295 recognize that the past “as it ought to be seen” is the particular “transcendental signified” of historical scholarship. As poststructuralists we have also recognized, of course, that chasing the transcendental approach to the past is precisely the attitude that current scholarship must abandon.
My claim that we are all poststructuralists is likely to raise objections. That the critical context of poststructuralism is inescapable, however, is not difficult to illustrate.
Any critical formulation that recognizes the susceptibility of its own texts to the theories it uses to read other texts is making Derrida’s recognition of the structurality of structure.
New Historicism, as I have presented it in this dissertation, provides a perfectly appropriate example. Louis Montrose’s proposal for a “reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” implicates “of all modes of writing—not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them” in the structures of historicity and textuality (“The Poetics and Politics of Culture” 20).
Montrose’s insistence that “we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question” speaks directly to the objection I have registered to chasing the past as it ought to be seen.
I have insisted on the New Historicism as a general critical base for this study precisely because its formulation, by some of its most able and celebrated practitioners, specifically embraces its own historicity.
Montrose’s chiastic model of “the historicity of texts” and “the textuality of history” serves the arguments of this dissertation in two particular ways. First, with “the historicity of texts,” it embraces the defining observation of poststructuralism: that we cannot escape structure. As Jacques Derrida has said, “one always inhabits [a structure], 296 and all the more when one does not suspect it” (Of Grammatology 24). In expressing a concern with the notion of progress implicit in the formulation of new terms for what we presently call “early modern drama”—a phrase even now amended by respected practitioners to “early English drama”—I register an awareness that new terms are always provisional; that they will inevitably be replaced; and that in replacing them, we cannot presume to have improved our perspective on “a full and authentic past.” As J. Hillis
Miller has observed, “advances in literary study are not made by the free invention of new conceptual or historical schemes (which always turn out to be old ones anew in any case), but by that grappling with the texts which always has to be done over once more by each new reader” (“The Search for Grounds in Literary Study” 28). Thus, the answer is neither to stop updating terminology nor to attempt to work around the problem of our own historicity; it is rather to proceed “slowly and circumspectly, testing the ground carefully and taking nothing for granted, returning once more to those founding texts of our modern tradition of literary study and reading them anew with patience and care”
(Miller 33). In attempting to (re)read both early modern texts and contemporary texts with an eye to their historicity, I hope to have observed Miller’s recommendations.
Second, Montrose’s “textuality of history” accounts for Derrida’s insistence that il n’y a pas de hors-texte—”there is no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158). This observation is quite similar to the recognition of structurality: language is both the condition and the medium of knowledge; as it provides the logic of structure, language is as inescapable as structure. As Miller has argued, “any conceivable encounter with things or with subjectivities in literature or in discourse about literature must already have represented things and subjects in words, numbers, or other signs” (118-119). Reality 297 must be textualized, or construed in language, signs, or texts, whenever it is considered, apprehended, conceptualized, or discussed. It must be given a represented embodiment in the world of symbols before it can have any meaning, before it can be present in consciousness. Miller’s recognition is another indication of the degree to which literary critical thought is unavoidably poststructural. Accordingly, that we can access the outside only from within the text, bringing to it the structures and logics of a text, is not to be understood as a problem. As with the imperative to embrace our own historicity, we must recognize “textuality”—both our own and that of the subjects we study—as a condition of scholarly inquiry. To return to the point with which this conclusion began, we must acknowledge that language does not describe reality; rather, language determines reality, both for the critic-as-subject and for the critic’s subject.
The textuality of early modern culture has been particularly important in this dissertation, which reads early modern drama as a stylus for writing cultural texts on the space of the stage. Perhaps the most useful application of textuality, then, is to the study of popular drama as both a written text and a complexly mimetic, performed text. In other words, the New Historicist paradigm for understanding the relationship between texts and history, or between textuality and historicity, is available as a paradigm for positing a specific relationship between drama and reality: drama is the text of an experience that we can only access, in so many biased, subjective fragments, through that text. As such, its role in producing culture can no longer be seen simply as marginal. 298
APPENDIX A: The Woman’s Champion.
Shortly after Moll Frith’s death in 1659, two prose pieces appeared in print purporting to chronicle her life. One, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, published in 1662, has been reprinted several times with ample commentary. The second, a pamphlet titled The Woman’s Champion, also published in 1662, has generally been written off as derivative and has never been reprinted. It is, in fact, distinct, and though much of its material is similar or identical to material from The Life and Death, this shorter piece does contain material that is unique, making it a valuable resource. Both of these later prose pieces are beyond the scope of this dissertation, but The Woman’s
Champion, which exists in a unique copy at the Bodleian library and is otherwise unavailable, is short enough to reprint here. I have reproduced, as closely as possible, the text as it appears in the original.
T H E Womans Champion ; O R The Strange Wonder B E I N G A true Relation of the mad Pranks , merry conceits , Politick Figaries , and moft unheard of Stra- tegems of Mrs. Mary Frith, commonly called Mall Cutpurfe, living near Fleet-Conduit ; even from her Cradle to her Winding-Sheet. Containing feveral remarkable paffages touching the Conftable , Counters ; and Prifoners , and her laft Will and Teftament to Squire DUN , as a Legacy for his latter days. With her divining Prophefie , concerning wicked Plots , and Hell- bred Confpiracies.
299
------Extracted frow the Original; Publifhed according to Order. ------
LONDON , Printed for G. Horton , living in Fig-Tree Court in Barbican , 1662. ---page break--- [on the back side of this first page is a woodcut-style stamp of a figure--presumably Moll--on a horse. The figure appears to be drinking, or perhaps blowing a horn, with its left hand. It wears boots with spurs, a hat, and a long flowing overgarment. It holds something in the right hand along with the reins.] --page break--
(I)
To the Reader.
Ingenious Reader,
HAving Collected fome Papers, contayning the merry frolicks and uparallel’d defignes, and ftratagems of the Female Hu- mourift , or rather the Prodigie of thofe times fhe liv’d in being the living Defcription and Portraiture of a Schifm and Separation ; her Doublet and Petticoat , underftanding one another no better than an Amfterdam Jew , or a Coleman-ftreet Separate ; I fhall in this following Tract , prefent thee with fun- dry merry Pranks, pleafant to many, hurtful to none, but very de- lightful to the Loyal and Ingennous ; as will evidently appear by the following fubject.
------
THE WOMENS Champion, &c.
This great Ambodexter , Mall Cut-purfs , (for fo fhe was called in her life time) was born in the year, 1589 in the Parifh of Sr. Giles’s Cripplegate, near Barbican, her Father a Shooe-maker , from whom defcended a notable crafty Caffandra , a very Tomrig or Rumpfcuttle fhe was in her infancy, and delighted and fported only in Boys play A 2 and
---page break---[at this point, the text is full-page simple print, without variation in font size or weight, until the line “Her Epitaph”] 300
(2) and paftime , not minding or companying with Girls ; fhe was very rudely inclined, and could not indure the fedentary l[i]fe of fewing or ftiching ; a Sampler was as grievous as a winding- fheet ; her Needle, bodkin , and Thimble , fhe could not think on quietly , wishing them changed into Sword and Dagger for a bout at Cudgels ; for any fuch exercife, who but fhe! Nay more, for the Boys Play , who but Ranting Mall ; a Tomrig in grain ; to fight with them was her hearts delight ; and for running or jumping , leaping or hoping ; who but fhe ? her usual phrafe, being, Hey for them (kicking up her right leg) that can play any part , a merry World , I warrant you Boyes a true heart is worth Gold ; Bloomfbury and Turnmil-ftreet, are places of pleafure ; hang forrow and care, the longeft liver take all. A fad foul Godwot, and her Rudiments as bad , that in young years fhe fhould be fo far injured , as to imbrace fuch Caffandria practifes , that being too great a Libertine , fhe lived too much in common , to be inclofed in the limbs of a private domeftique life. Civility fhe counted a Bond-flave ; and a Quarter-ftaff was fitter to her hand then a Diftaff ; for when fhe was about 14 years of age, the Bear-Garden fhe frequented , going in a ftrange attire , her Hat buttened up, with a Swans Feather in it, died of feveral Colours , and a lufty ftout Dog at her heels , which she called Trouncer ; or, Have at all ; This Dog gaind her many a prave prize ; and who but little Moll amongft the Bear heards ; for ftave and toyl, inftead of fpinning and realing was her delight tell her of Houfewiveing , Pish , let us live by our Wits replyed fhe , I was never born under a Bufhel ; the world was made for money ; and fhall not I have my fhare come, a fig for the Bake- houfe, my Mothers bread will prove Dough, Chriftmas will come, and then have at the mincing Dames. Thus, after fome progrefs in her licentious waies, fhe initia- ted her felf into a private crew of fome loofe women, who pro- mifed great things to manage the dexterity of her wit, to fome notable advantage; their Trade being to receive goods which were lifted, that is to fay, ftollen by theeves, and fo in a fair ( or foul ) way, fell them again; in which enterprize Moll was to play faft and loofe; pretending fhe knew the theeves, and would help them ---page break--- (3) them to their goods; but thefe youngfters were to fubtle; for upon difcovery, moft of them ran away, only five were hanged at Tyburn, a place meriting their defert; fo that it was high time for Mary to decline that dangerous Road: Yet being thus fea- foned, fhe was fit for any employment, yet efcaped from being 301 fpirited for New-England, notwithftanding her being carried a- board the Ship to drink Strong-waters, and afterwards put un- der deck; which fhe perceiving, cryed out, A Plot, a Plot, Gun- powder, Gun-Powder; fo that the Boatfwain, or Purfer, and ma- ny others, immediately ran down, faying, Where is it, where is it ? Here, here, cry’d Moll; but during their diligent fearch, fhe made her efcape by the help of fome friends, and padded it along upon the Trentifh Coaft to London; where fhee proved old ex- cellent amongft the Land-Pyrates; and who but Moll amongft the Whipfters ? yet fore-feeing the danger, was loath to relinquifh the profit, every fnip and fhare fhe got, being as acceffary to the theft, as the very Bulkers themfelves, being like green fruit, fowre and fweet, never digefting of it, but with a conceited foar throat; till at laft fhe refolved to run no longer the defperate ha- zard of thofe courfes, which many of her Comrades monthly ex- piated with their lives : So that ( all things being considered ) fhe fet up a kinde of Brokery, or a diftinct factory for Jewels, Rings, and Watches ( in her houfe neer Fleet-Conduit ) which had been pinched or ftollen any manner of way; and this was cal- led, fofoorth, the Infurance Office, for fuch Merchandize, the lofers being fure, upon compaffion, to recover their goods again, the Pirates good ranfome, and Molls good Brokage, without any more danger. the Hue-and-Cry being alwaies directed to her; for indeed, ‘tis well known, fhe would have her humour; in one of which , coming home through Ludgate, with a Lan- thorn carried before her, a Shoo-maker, being then Conftable, tranflated her to a Rat, and fent her to the Counter; giving command, that fhe fhould be put into the hole; (a fit place indeed, for fuch Vermine ) in which Round-houfe, or Epitome of the world, the firft falute in the morning was, Garnifh, that amounted to half a Crown, which Moll ftebbornly refufed to pay; but the Conftable of the Hole, feconding his demand with A3 a ---page break--- (6) an imperious look, which is the fad prognoftick of a ftripping, laid hold of her cloaths, but ftarted at the new guife of a doublet and petticoat; and asking who fhe was, I am, quoth Moll, bouncing Mris. Frith, that never turned my back to any man; with that he fmiled; Ay doft thou foreftow mee, faid fhe, the prayers of the Collegians, attend your motion, which proved fuccefsful; for the next morning being fet at liberty, fhe put a trick upon the Conftable; having learnt his name,and the Coun- try from whence he came , and imployed a meffenger, in all hafte, to certifie him, that his Uncle was dead in fuch a place, and that hee had inventoried all the goods, and lockt up all his 302
Evidences and Bonds, and the Mony and Plate in one of the great Chefts, and had brought the Key along with him, as a ten- der of his fervice; which being accepted of, not many hours af- ter, he betook his journeys for poffeffion, Molls Imp waiting upon him; and coming within ten miles of the place, where they lodged that night, early the next morning, this youngfter gets up, faddles his horfe, with the Portmanteau and Mony, and away gallops another Road, leaving his new Mafter to finde out the Eutopia of his great wind-fall; who arifing, and miffing his Guide, fufpected it to be a cheat; and true it is, it proved no otherwife; for at his return, (the ftory being known) never was a Crafts-man fo flouted and jeered; but time and fhame wear out all things. And true it is, the longeft day muft have an end, and fo had Moll; though the chief remainder of her life was not to be pa- rallel’d; for from the firft entrance into a competency of age, fhe had her frollicks, wearing Doublets and Petticoats, and to her dying day, fhe would not leave it off, till the infirmity and weaknefs of nature, had brought her a bed to her laft travel, changed her Doublet for a Waft-coat, and her Petty-coats for a Winding-fheet; which being no amiable, or obliging Vefts, I fhall no further anatomize her, than in thefe words, which may very pertinently characterize her; to wit, I that have rid prancing through the City of London, like a Chevalier in Cap-a-pee, with a Trumpeter before mee which in thofe daies ( being as rare as a Swallow in Summer) was at laft abhorred, and by fome, ac- counted ---page break--- counted to be a Prodigie ; for what was generative in my belly by the excefs of Wine, came deftructive in my belly, for that the Tympanied skin thereof,founded like a Conduit door. So that it cannot be expected I fhould have made a Will ; becaufe I had perfevered fo long before in it, to no better purpofe; and that if I had had my defert, I fhould have had an Executioner, inftead of an Executor ; ‘tis very well I part fo fairly , but remember me to Squire Dun, and tell him he will not need my Legacy. For my Dianing [divining?] fpirit tells me, there’s a Glut cumming , which will make him happy, and rich, if he knows how to ufe it; and as in my life- time I have been prepofterous ; fo at my death I expect no Fu- neral Commendation, but two or threeduft-laid words by way of Epitaph. HER EPITAPH. HEre lies under this fame Marble, Duft, for times laft Sive to Garble; Duft to preplex a Sadducae, [may be “Sadducee”] Whither it rife a He or She, 303
Or two in one, a fingle pair, Natures fport and now her care ; For how fhe’l cloath it at laft day, (Unleffe fhe Sigh it all away) Or where fhe’l place it, none can tell, Some middle place ‘twixt Heaven and Hell; And well ‘tis Purgatory’s found, Ele fhe muft Hide her under ground. Thefe reliques do deferve the Doom, That Cheat of Mahomets fine Tomb: For no Communion fhe had, Nor forced with the good or bed; [bad??] That when the world fhall be calcin’d And the mixt Maffe of humane kind Shall feparate by that melting Fire, She’l ftand alone and none come nigh her. Reader, here fhe lies till then, When ( to fay all ) you’l fee her agen. --page break-- (6)
An Acrostick.
M erry I liv’d and many pranks I plaid, A an without forrow now in Grave am laid R eft, and the Sleep of Death doth now Sure eafe Y ouths active Sins, and their Old ag’d increafe.
F amous I was for all the Thieving Art, R enown’d for what Old Women ride in Cart ; I n Pocket and in Placket I had part ; T his Life I Lived in a Mans Difguife, H e beft laments me that with Laughter Cries.
------
FINIS.
------304
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