Drama, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation in Early Modern

RUDE MECHANICALS: STAGING LABOR IN THE EARLY MODERN ENGLISH THEATER by Matthew Kendrick BA, English, University of New Hampshire, 2005 MA, English, University of Rochester, 2006 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2011 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Matthew Kendrick It was defended on September 29, 2011 and approved by John Twyning, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Jennifer Waldron, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Nicholas Coles, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Rachel Trubowitz, Professor, Department of English, University of New Hampshire Dissertation Co-Chair: Jennifer Waldron, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh Dissertation Co-Chair: John Twyning, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh ii Copyright © by Matthew Kendrick 2011 iii Rude Mechanicals: Staging Labor in the Early Modern English Theater Matthew Kendrick, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2011 This dissertation explores the relationship between the early modern theater and changing conceptions of labor. Current interpretations of the theater’s economic dimensions stress the correlation between acting and vagrant labor. I build on these approaches to argue that the theater’s connection to questions of labor was far more dynamic than is often thought. In particular, I argue that a full understanding of the relationship between the theater and labor requires that we take into account the theater’s guild origins. If theatricality was often associated with features of vagrant labor, especially cony-catching and rogue duplicity, the theater also drew significantly from medieval guild practices that valued labor as a social good and a creative force. I contend that the theater’s residual guild structure invests representations of labor with an ennobling and humanizing support. In a variety of plays, from Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour to Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, theatrical techniques like disguise and deception gesture towards vagrancy while also enabling laborers of various stripes to affirm their skillful creativity. Plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest depict theatricality as an act of labor, a craftsmanlike endeavor rather than a commodity or mere function of commercial forces. In doing so, the plays carve out a space of artistic autonomy for the theater while affirming the creative power of labor. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE………………………………………………………………...................................... v 1.0: “PROFESSIONS AND OCCUPATIONS OF PLAYS”: LABOR AND THE STAGE........................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1: EARLY MODERN LABOR IN CONTEXT…………………………………….. 2 1.2: LABOR AND THE STAGE……………………………………………………... 13 2.0: THE LABOR OF DRAMA IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ……………..…. 34 2.1: “THOU ART TRANSLATED”: EXCHANGE IN THE GREEN WORLD..... 36 2.2: “HERE IS A PLAY FITTED”: THE LABOR OF DRAMA………………….. 50 3.0: “YOU MAR OUR LABOUR”: ACKNOWLEDGING WORK IN THE TEMPEST……………………………………………………………………………………… 66 3.1: LABOR AND REALPOLITIK, OR THE LIMITS OF POWER…………….. 68 3.2: ACKNOWLEDGING WORK…………………………………………………....79 4.0: THE LABORING BODY AND ARTISANAL CONSCIOUSNESS: THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY AND A SHOEMAKER, A GENTLEMAN….…………...…..... 99 4.1: ARTISANAL CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THINKING WITH THE BODY….. 100 4.2: THE LABOR OF COMMUNITY IN DEKKER’S THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY…………………………………………………………………………. 114 5.0: “THE HUMOUR OF NECESSITY”: DISPOSSESSED LABOR AND SUBJECTIVITY IN JONSON’S EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR……………………… 150 5.1: THE HUMOURS AND NECESSITY…………………………………………. 151 v 5.2: “GIDDY HUMOUR AND DISEASED RIOT”: ORDER AND ECONOMIES OF LABOR…………………………………………………………………………………… 157 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………. 173 vi “A poem, as I have told you, is the work of the Poet; the end, the fruit of his labour, and study. Poesy is his skill, or Craft of making: the very Fiction itself, the reason, or form of the work.” - Ben Jonson PREFACE On Shrove Tuesday, March 4, 1617, a group of Clerkenwell apprentices rioted in response to the movement of their favorite acting company, Queen Anne’s Men, from the public Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell to a new, private playhouse, the Cockpit, located in the exclusive neighborhood of Drury Lane. The apprentices wreaked havoc on the Cockpit; one account written by John Chamberlain describes how these apprentices “fell to great disorders, in pulling down of houses, and beating of guards that were set to keep rule, specially at a new playhouse, some time a cockpit, in Drury Lane, where the queen’s players used to play.”1 A letter to the Privy Council highlights the anger and violence displayed by the apprentices, describing how “there were diverse persons slayne, and others hurte and wounded, the multitude there assembled being to the number of many thousands as wee are credibly informed.”2 The riot was eventually quelled, though not before the apprentices inflicted significant damage on the theater and those people who unwisely attempted to stop them. Even still, the apprentices had anger to spare, and organized another riot the following year, again on Shrove Tuesday. 1 Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68), 1:161. 2 Ibid. vii The precise cause of this riot remains unclear. Contemporaries who chronicled the event offer no concrete explanation, relying instead on stereotypical assumptions about apprentices’ “lewde and loose” nature.3 The idea that the riot was the product of the apprentices’ hotheaded disposition is echoed in more recent accounts of the event. Andrew Gurr, for instance, claims that the apprentices’ decision “to attack the Cockpit ahead of the northern ampitheatres and the Blackfriars…. suggests that they were taking revenge for the loss of their plays.”4 Although revenge may have played a role in the riot, it is important not to overlook the larger socioeconomic dimensions of the event. To suggest that the apprentices were acting out of revenge risks representing the apprentice community in its entirety as irrational, driven by unthinking passion. Underneath the event’s violence is a more coherent narrative of the emerging class tensions that were beginning to shape London society. In a recent intervention into this discussion, Mark Bayer reminds us of the distinct class aspects of the conflict: not only could the apprentices not afford the more lavish environs of Drury Lane; their working-class understanding of the theater as carnivalesque entertainment rather than cultural capital would have clashed with the elitism of the Drury Lane crowd. In short, the move of Queen Anne’s Men from Clerkenwell to Drury Lane staged, quite literally, a tension between two distinct ways of seeing the theater. As Bayer contends, “the moral economy of the Clerkenwell apprentices conflicted with the market-driven model followed by the troupe who were motivated by profitability, the accumulation of cultural capital, and increased social respectability.”5 In addition to a violation of a working-class moral economy, the Cockpit riot also points up an aspect of the early modern theater that is often neglected. The riot indicates the 3 Ibid. 4 Andrew Gurr, Jacobean Public Theatre (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 171. 5 Mark Bayer, “Moving UpMarket: Queen Anne’s Men at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, 1617,” Early Theatre 4 (2001): 142. viii inextricable connection between the theater and laboring identity. This connection permeates early modern theatrical debates, which were often framed around the changing conditions of labor. The theater’s critics and state powers often treated members of the theatrical community as little more than vagrant laborers, dispossessed members of the new economy. Phillip Stubbes, for instance, referring to the statutes against vagrancy, asks his readers: “And is it not true? liue [actors] not vpon begging of euery one that comes? Are they not taken by the lawes of the Realm for roagues and vacabounds?.”6 Members of the theatrical community, however, saw themselves and their profession in a far more dignified light. Nathan Field suggests a double standard at work in anti-theatrical logic, explaining that acting should be seen on an equal footing with all other trades: Why, neither Christ nor they by their letters patents incorporated either the mercer, draper, goldsmith, or a hundred trades and mysteries that at this day are lawful, and would be very sorry to hear the sentence of damnation pronounced against them, and simply because they are of such a trade; and yet there are faults in all professions, for all have sin, may be freely spoken against.7 As suggested by Field’s defense of acting, one important source of the actor’s dignity was the theater’s lingering guild tradition, which offered an alternative conception of both acting and labor that stressed the guilds’ deeply entrenched aura of respectability. As this dissertation will demonstrate in greater detail, members of the theatrical community are represented, in pamphlets and on the stage, not as vagrants or dispossessed laborers but as craftsmen in control of their theatrical and professional identities. 6 Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (London: 1583), 91. 7 Nathan Field,

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