“PUBLIC, SCURRILOUS AND PROFANE”: TRANSFORMATIONS IN MORAL DRAMA AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1465-1599 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ineke Murakami, B.A., M.A. ______________________________ Graham L. Hammill, Director Graduate Program in English Notre Dame, Indiana November 2005 “PUBLIC, SCURRILOUS, AND PROFANE”: TRANSFORMATIONS IN MORAL DRAMA AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1465-1599 Abstract by Ineke Murakami This project demonstrates the intense symbolic and material engagement of popular English moral drama with the social and economic forces of the emerging capitalist state. Challenging long held critical assumptions about the “morality play’s” “tedious” rehashing of conservative religious doctrine, I argue that moral drama is an intensely political from its inception, and that playwrights from the late fifteenth century to the height of Elizabethan playing use literary and performance conventions to both veil and articulate inflammatory perspectives on social justice, labor, and commercialism. As the nascent state lends increasing support to those on the leading edge of the shift toward market dependency—from the yeomen of rural East Anglia to London’s merchant-class citizens—moral drama’s criticism of this target audience grows more overt. This critique solicits and defines a “middling” Protestant ethos. By closely reading literary and performance conventions, I reveal that the difference Ineke Murakami between early and late moral drama is best grasped not as the break typically depicted in periodizing accounts but as a proliferation of the spirit of innovation intrinsic to moral drama. Chapter one argues that Mankind (1465) implicates yeoman allegiance as the decisive factor in a psychomachic battle between “good,” a nostalgic feudalism, and “evil,” increasingly monetized market relations. Chapter two examines plays by William Wager (1558-69) that solicit and materialize an urban merchant class, prescribing casuistic discernment against the lures of capitalist gain. Chapter three demonstrates how two chronicle plays, Cambises (1561) and Horestes (1567) test contrasting theories of state to imagine an economically salubrious solution to social discord that renders Christian morality a cultural practice. In chapter four, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta interrogate the relation of the citizen to his own labor, and the subsumption of that labor to the emerging, market-dependent state economy. By chapter five’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), casuistry has become social judgement and virtue is signified by good taste, as Jonson stages a ubiquitous market mentality that infects all social relations. CONTENTS PREFACE . iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . xxxviii Chapter 1. “PE SUPERFLUOUSE GYSE”: ECONOMICS, SOCIAL CHANGE AND THEATRICALITY IN MANKIND . 1 2. WILLIAM WAGER: MONSTERS AMBITIOUS, AND DREAMS OF COMMONWEALTH. 86 3. BY VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE: ETHICS, NATURE, AND STATE IN THE CHRONICLE PLAYS . 158 4. “BINDE THY SOULE”: CONTRACT, PROFESSION AND RESISTANCE IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS AND JEW OF MALTA . .226 5. JONSON’S EVERY MAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR: “MUSIC” FOR “THE BEAST” . .296 Appendix 1. SYNOPSIS OF MANKIND . 359 2. SYNOPSIS OF THE TRIAL OF TREASURE, THE LONGER THOU LIVEST, THE MORE FOOL THOU ART, AND ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 362 3. SYNOPSIS FOR CAMBISES AND HORESTES . .368 WORKS CITED . .373 ii PREFACE For well over a century, moral drama was the formal backbone of a thriving, popular early English theater. In its itinerant and professional form, moral drama emerged in the late fifteenth century from the same tumultuous socioeconomic transformations that gave rise to capitalism and the nation state.1 Subsequently, moral drama struggled to come to grips with these coterminous forces, interrogating, figuring and even prefiguring what, in turn, shaped it. This intense material and symbolic interaction with market and state produced moral drama as a fiercely political form: a stance veiled by its homogenizing use of convention. Scholars of early modern drama tend to view moral plays as prohibitively “tedious” for precisely this conventionalism (i.e., its didactic rehashing of orthodox doctrine, its basic plot-line, etc.). This perspective mischaracterizes what is, in fact, a vibrant and sophisticated form. In recovering a sense of moral drama’s aggressive and often risky engagement with its audiences, we discover performances designed to provoke, texts that explore volatile issues of market and state with a subtlety that has not been adequately recognized. It is the moral play’s conventional appearance that enables it to draw on exogenous, semantically-charged forms and discourses to convey its topical messages. The stability of the drama’s generic characteristics (personifications, the abstract battle between virtue and vice, etc.) serve as the framework within which popular modes and 1There is also an elite form of moral drama whose distinguishing features will be discussed in the first chapter. While cross-pollination between popular and elite forms frequently occurred, there were distinctive differences. iii genres—from the courtly love lyric to the civic procession—express the play’s otherwise “silent” critique or warning. Devices themselves carry ideological meaning that astute playwrights emphasize or modify in response to topical issues and events. In this way, moral drama retains its vigor and relevance up through its final transformation on the London stage. The moral play’s presence in London plays is not atavistic but the continuation of a potent mainline tradition. Against periodizing accounts of drama history, I argue that the difference between early and later popular English drama is best understood not in terms of the break so often depicted but as a proliferation of the spirit of innovation intrinsic to moral drama. 1. The Problem In 1639, approximately seventy years after watching a performance of the now- lost moral play, The Cradle of Security, R. Willis set down the following recollection: In the city of Gloucester the manner is (as I think it is in other like corporations) that when players of interludes come to town they first attend the Mayor to inform him what nobleman’s servants they are, and so to get license for their public playing; and if the Mayor like the actors or would show respect to their lord and master he appoints them to play their first play before himself and the aldermen and common council of the city; and that is called the Mayor’s play, where every one that will comes in without money, the Mayor giving the players a reward as he thinks fit to show respect unto them. At such a play, my father took me with him and made me stand between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches where we saw and heard very well. The play was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him; and they keeping him in delights and pleasures drew him from his graver counselors, hearing of sermons, and listening to good counsel and admonitions, that in the end they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies joining in a sweet song rocked him asleep that he snorted again, and in the meantime closely conveyed under the cloths wherewithal he was covered a vizard like a swine’s snout upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally iv by those three ladies, who fall to singing again, and then discovered his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing; whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another door at the farthest end of the stage two old men, the one in blue with a Sergeant at Arms, his mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a drawn sword in his hand, and leaning with the other hand upon the other’s shoulder, and so they two went along in a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle when all the court was in greatest jollity, and then the foremost old man with his mace struck a fearful blow upon the cradle; whereat all the courtiers with the three ladies and the vizard all vanished; and the desolate prince, starting up bare-faced and finding himself thus sent for to judgement, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked spirits. This prince did personate in the moral, the Wicked of the world; the three Ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury, the two old men, the End of the World, and the Last Judgement. This sight took such impression in me that when I came toward’s man’s estate, it was as fresh in my memory, as if I had seen it newly acted.2 One of the few, extended eye-witness accounts of this type of play, Willis is frequently cited in defense of moral drama’s former impact.3 Yet, few agree about what Willis found so moving. Some cite the “spectacular [stage] business” that ostensibly enriched such plays; others propose its dramatization of homiletic lessons or the glamour of the play’s “figurative [courtly] setting.”4 Almost always, excerpts from Willis are couched in the barely repressed tone of sympathy tinged with 2R. Willis, Mount Tabor; or, Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner (London: printed for Richard Badger for P. Stephens and C. Meredith, 1639), 110-112. 3Early and moral drama studies which use some section of the Willis account include Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 65-6; Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 35; Robert Potter, The English Morality Play (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 68; Edgar T.