Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama 9781107306592, 9781107023154

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ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN JACOBEAN DRAMA In Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, Bruce Boehrer provides the first general history of the Shakespearean stage to focus primarily on ecological issues. Early modern English drama was conditioned by the environmental events of the cities and landscapes within which it developed. Boehrer introduces Jacobean London as the first modern European metropolis in an England beset by problems of overpopulation; depletion of resources and species; land, water, and air pollution; disease and other health-related issues; and associated changes in social behavior and cultural output. In six chapters he discusses the work of the most productive and influential playwrights of the day: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, Dekker, and Heywood, exploring the strategies by which they made sense of radical ecological change in their drama. In the process, Boehrer sketches out these playwrights’ differing responses to environmental issues and traces their legacy for later literary formulations of green consciousness. b r u c e b o e h r e r is Bertram H. Davis Professor in the Department of English at Florida State University. He is the author of five previous books, including most recently Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings and European Literature (2010). He is the editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007), and since 1999 he has served first as founding editor and now as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He lives in north Florida with his wife, the environmental artist Linda Hall.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN JACOBEAN DRAMA BRUCE BOEHRER Florida State University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107023154 # Bruce Boehrer 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Environmental degradation in Jacobean drama / Bruce Boehrer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-107-02315-4 1. English drama–17th century–History and criticism. 2. Environmental degradation in literature. 3. Human ecology in literature. I. Title. pr678.e58b64 2013 8220 .309355–dc23 2012031743 isbn 978-1-107-02315-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Introduction

1

1 Middleton and ecological change

28

2 Jonson and the universe of things

49

3 Shakespeare’s dirt

71

4 John Fletcher and the ecology of manhood

96

5 Dekker’s walks and orchards 6

120

Heywood and the spectacle of the hunt

142

Conclusion

166

Notes Bibliography Index

173 196 211

v

Acknowledgments

An early and somewhat different version of Chapter 1 of this study has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (2012). I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint, and I am indebted to the volume editors, Trish Thomas Henley and Gary Taylor, for their help in preparing the piece for its initial publication. Likewise, in 2008 I presented a still earlier version of the same chapter to the Department of English of Arizona State University. I greatly appreciate the ASU English Department’s gracious hospitality, comments, and suggestions on that occasion. I owe a particular debt to Robert N. Watson and a second, anonymous scholar who reviewed the full book manuscript for Cambridge University Press. Their comments were encouraging, incisive, and unusually consistent – all in all, the very best an author could hope for. I also wish to acknowledge a special personal debt to Anne Coldiron, who generously read and commented upon the original manuscript of Chapter 3. Finally, I would like to thank Cambridge University Press in general, and in particular editor Sarah Stanton, assistant editor Fleur Jones, production editor Joanna Breeze, and copy-editor Frances Nugent for their extraordinarily helpful, expeditious, and professional treatment of the manuscript from first to last. It has been a rare pleasure to work with them.

vi

Introduction

The title of this book may strike some as anachronistic. After all, the drama of Jacobean England (by which I mean primarily the drama of the public and private theaters, although I shall have brief occasion to refer to masques and similar entertainments as well) derives from a twenty-two-year period at the beginning of the seventeenth century. By contrast, the phrase “environmental degradation” has entered public discourse as a term for the ecological damage wrought by twentieth- and early twenty-first-century population growth and industrial development. This apparent inconsistency will seem only more pronounced when I add that I draw my definition of environmental degradation from the lexicon of the thirtynation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): “the deterioration in environmental quality from ambient concentrations of pollutants and other activities and processes such as improper land use and natural disasters.”1 Here, in short, is vocabulary designed for a specific set of recent historical circumstances; its application to a very different and earlier set of conditions may naturally arouse suspicion. This problem receives broader formulation in a popular master-narrative of urban historians, who distinguish between “two major changes of pace” in the growth of the world’s cities: The first, known as the agricultural revolution, occurred in the Middle East around the fifth millennium bc . . . The second, known as the industrial revolution, occurred first in Britain in the late eighteenth century, and led to the growth of the large modern metropolis. These revolutions . . . distinguish different technological environments each of which is associated with a specific settlement response.2

On this logic, the period between 4000 bce and 1750 ce witnesses no really major change in the structure of urban life, and insofar as modern environmental damage correlates to the growth of the world’s urban population over the past two centuries, both the modern metropolis and 1

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the ecological crisis in which it is implicated would appear to exist in a class by themselves, with no earlier counterpart. Here quantity creates a quality all its own – or so the story goes. In an important sense this is true. Size does matter, and although it is hard to say at just what point a large pre-industrial city translates into an industrial metropolis, when nineteenth-century London becomes the first European city with over a million residents it is hard not to feel that an important historical threshold has been crossed, and that the character of urban life has changed forever in the process. But by the same token, it is patently silly to maintain that the conditions of life in industrial London bear no relation to the city’s experience during earlier stages of development. Urban historians are quick to point out that population alone does not differentiate cities from the surrounding environment; instead, modern cities are defined at least as much by the development of specialized economic, administrative, and cultural structures, and these must already be in place before a municipal environment can accommodate the massive populations of the industrial period and beyond. From the structural standpoint, “a certain very long-term process of urban network creation is a necessary preparation for entry into the modern industrial world.”3 Likewise, it makes no sense to argue that because a city of 1,000,000 people produces and suffers a greater degree of environmental damage than does a city of 250,000, the latter damage is therefore unworthy of the name. Though the OECD’s definition of environmental damage is obviously devised with current ecological crises in mind, all its exemplary terms – “concentrations of pollutants,” “improper land use,” “natural disasters” – find a counterpart in the history of Jacobean England, especially Jacobean London. For concentrations of pollutants, there is atmospheric coal dust, the runoff from tanneries, and so forth; for improper land use, there is deforestation, enclosure (both urban and rural), and fen drainage; for natural disasters, bubonic plague and syphilis spring quickly to mind. Each of these features of Jacobean life has its roots in human manipulation of the natural environment, and each has cast a long shadow over subsequent British history. Moreover, ecological historians have connected human behavior to “deterioration in environmental quality” within societies older than that of early modern England. Thus “in Greece the first signs of largescale [environmental] destruction began to appear about 650 bce . . . The hills of Attica were stripped bare of trees within a couple of generations and by 590 . . . Solon . . . was arguing that cultivation on steep slopes should be banned because of the amount of soil being lost.”4 By Roman times “the surviving evidence gives the impression of declining populations of wildlife

Introduction

3

and the gradual extinction of certain species in one area after another.”5 Portuguese colonization of the Cape Verde Islands, the Azores, and Madeira in the 1400s “involved the massive change of tropical forests into sugar plantations.”6 And so forth. Even from the standpoint of raw demographic figures, early modern London requires comparison with the metropolis of more recent times. Estimates vary as to the city’s population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but most everyone agrees that its expansion during this period was breathtaking. As Lena Cowen Orlin remarks, “The first thing to be said about early modern London (and . . . the last thing, as well) is that it experienced an astonishing growth in population.”7 Most sources number the city’s inhabitants in 1500 at between 40,000 and 50,000; in 1550 at between 70,000 and 120,000; in 1600, at the dawn of the Jacobean period, at about 200,000; and in 1650, a quarter-century after the death of James I, at between 350,000 and 400,000.8 By the more conservative of these figures, in 1603 King James’s new capital had experienced 300 percent population growth over the preceding century and would grow by another 75 percent in the coming fifty years. As a percentage of base population, this growth rate has only been exceeded in the period between 1801 and 1900, when the number of Londoners grew from roughly 1,000,000 to 6,500,000 – an increase of 550 percent.9 In the twentieth century, by contrast, London reached its peak population of about 8,600,000 in 1939 and has posted a small net loss in the seventy-odd years since. One should be cautious not to give these figures undue emphasis. As Peter Blayney has observed in a very different context, “a small percentage of a large number can be much bigger than a large percentage of a small number,”10 and this is a case in point. The 300 percent increase in London’s population between 1500 and 1600 amounts to 150,000 people in all; a comparable increase to the city’s early nineteenth-century population base would encompass 3,000,000. The percentage comparison misleads if one takes it as a marker of scale. But it remains valuable as an index of systemic stress, and by this metric sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London may well deserve to be called the first modern western city. Without question its growth – and the strain that growth placed upon its existing resources – outstripped that of all other contemporary cities, rapidly placing London in a class by itself. To quote a recent assessment, “In 1500, ten European cities, excluding Constantinople, had more inhabitants than London and six others had roughly the same population; in 1600, only two European urban places – Naples and Paris – exceeded the English capital in size, and neither by a very large margin.”11 This sort of

4

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development could not occur without bringing unprecedented pressures to bear on the city’s infrastructure, on its surrounding natural environment, and on the mental and emotional condition of its inhabitants. Contemporary environmentalists tend to dwell on the destructive aspects of population growth, with deep ecologists in particular arguing that earth’s human population should be limited to “500 million (James Lovelock) or 100 million (Arne Naess).”12 So it is worth noting at the outset of this study that early modern London’s exorbitant population increase not only produced pollution, land mismanagement, and epidemic disease; it also led to some of the glories of western civilization. Under the Tudor and early Stuart monarchs, the city refurbished itself in ways of lasting importance for urban history, art history, architectural history, and social history. The improvements in question defy summary here, but consider some examples. The city gates at Ludgate, Aldgate, and Aldersgate were rebuilt in 1586, 1608, and 1617, respectively; Ludgate prison was rebuilt in 1585; and Bridewell workhouse was founded in 1553.13 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a whole series of cisterns and water conduits was introduced, including, in 1582, the city’s first indoor plumbing system.14 Gresham’s Royal Exchange, built in Cornhill between 1566 and 1568, heralded London’s coming of age as a modern commercial center. Inigo Jones’s royal banqueting house, constructed at Whitehall between 1619 and 1622, brought Palladianism to London. Within a decade of King James’s demise, the first of London’s great city squares appeared at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden. In this sense, the area’s demographic growth communicated itself to the fabric of the city as well so much so that subsequent developments in the humanities may in large part be understood as an extended meditation upon the achievements of Londoners during the 1500s and 1600s. Readers may consider for themselves what this fact portends about the compatibility of professional study in the humanities with the rigorous practice of environmentalism. In any case, the present study unfolds from the premise that the early modern English drama, like other contemporary aspects of English cultural achievement, was conditioned by the environmental events within which it developed. Like syphilis, bubonic plague, and Palladianism, the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was primarily an urban phenomenon, albeit one with consequences for the relation between city and country as well. My objective in these pages is to understand this phenomenon from the standpoint of ecological change, to consider how that change imprints itself upon the theater’s history and practices, and to offer some account of the theater’s response to ecological pressures. My thesis is that the Jacobean

Introduction

5

theater registers awareness of such pressures through a series of conventions which in turn offer audiences a way to come to mental and emotional terms with their changing natural environment. In pursuing this argument, the core chapters of my study deal with six Jacobean playwrights of particular historical consequence. While Shakespeare’s, Jonson’s, Fletcher’s, and Middleton’s enduring prestige remains more or less selfevident, Dekker and Heywood deserve equal consideration here, given their extensive dramatic output and its confirmed popularity with a prominent segment of the Jacobean play-going public. Together, these playwrights offer a good picture of how their theater responded to England’s changing relations with the natural world. As for the character of those relations (and the change they underwent during the early 1600s), this naturally requires introductory consideration. For convenience’s sake, one may approach the topic under the following headings: demographic and other causes; depletion of resources and species; land, water, and air pollution; disease and other health-related issues; and related changes in social behavior and cultural output. Since the core chapters of this study focus mostly upon the last of these five categories, the preceding four will occupy the remainder of this introduction. 1 As noted, early modern London’s population growth put it in a category by itself in the post-classical western world, and while this growth was not the only cause of Jacobean England’s environmental problems, it was the most obvious. Basic figures for the city’s population rate have already been given, but these need to be fleshed out with further data, particularly as regards the relation between London and the surrounding countryside. First, and almost as famous as the city’s overall growth, is the fact that “the crude death rate in London was substantially higher than the crude birth rate over the period as a whole.”15 Thanks to the insalubrious nature of life in the city, the miracle of London’s early modern population increase was only made possible by a steady stream of immigration: a flow of people from country to city that has become paradigmatic for British writers from Middleton to Dickens and beyond. To judge by the figures given above, sixteenth-century London grew by an average of 1,500 inhabitants per year, while between 1600 and 1650 that rate doubled to 3,000. The actual net rate of immigration during the years in question can be determined by combining this figure with the city’s average annual

6

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

shortfall of births, which demographers estimate conservatively at “10 per 1000.”16 Thus we may hazard that around the time of James I’s coronation, a net average of 5,000 newcomers were entering the city per year for the purpose of long-term residence, and if we assume a population of 275,000 at James’s death, that rate rises to 5,750 in 1625. What can be said, in general, about these newcomers to the city? To begin with, they would have been relatively young. In early Stuart England “the expectation of life at birth . . . was only thirty-two years,” and given that “in any population it is normally the young and single who migrate most readily,”17 one may assume that the influx of new Londoners consisted largely of men and women in their twenties or late teens, many of them seeking urban work opportunities as apprentices, servants, or laborers. The majority would have come from the southern counties and the closer parts of the Midlands, with a significant minority traveling from farther afield in the British Isles. London’s status as a center of trade and influence also assured a small but growing community of international immigrants, especially French and Dutch Protestants fleeing religious unrest at home. And these long-term immigrants would have been accompanied by a larger population of short-term visitors, from generally the same places of origin, whose business in the capital would further enhance the bonds of commerce that tied the city to the surrounding countryside. As for where the newcomers settled, the pattern of urban growth in Jacobean London generally consigned them to the suburbs, which thus became the fastest-growing part of the city.18 If London’s suburbs thus became the focal point of the city’s demographic expansion, the suburban liberties – and foremost the Bankside – also served as the main theater district for the metropolis. One popular explanation of this coincidence involves the equivocal legal and cultural character of the liberties, especially the extramural liberties, which functioned as “ambiguous territory . . . at once internal and external to the city, neither contained by civic authority nor fully removed from it,” and therefore ideal for the performance of “marginal spectacle.”19 On this logic, an indeterminate, alienated space fosters a theater of indeterminacy and alienation in which liminal figures restage the rituals of civic and royal authority, in the process both affirming them and subjecting them to searching inquiry. But from the standpoint of ecological concerns, the ambiguity of the suburbs takes on a hard, material quality downplayed in such formulations. From this latter perspective, the suburbs might be better understood as an acquisitive processing zone, a belt of territory for the transformation of rural space into urban space, where the natural

Introduction

7

resources of the surrounding countryside – land, water, air, people, etc. – are slowly, unevenly, but inexorably assimilated to the conditions of London life. Only through this acquisitive function can one give proper weight to the most distinctive feature of London’s early modern suburbs: their relentless growth, both in population and in sheer geographical extent. Liminal they may have been, but the limen in question changed steadily throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, always at the expense of the city’s rural environs. Such change might naturally be of concern to a theatrical tradition sited largely if not wholly in its midst, at the point where the city’s consumption of the country was most clearly on display. In any case, as the city’s population grew, so did its footprint. The spread was most notable in the East and West Ends, which developed into areas for shipping and government, respectively. To the west of Temple Bar, the medieval hamlet of Charing succumbed to expansion from both London in the east and Westminster in the west. To the east of the Tower of London, new suburbs sprang up in Blackwell, Wapping, Ratcliffe, and Deptford to handle the city’s rapidly increasing naval traffic. With the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, much space around the old city walls was freed for development, much of which took the form of haphazardly subdivided tenements. In 1604, at the start of James’s reign as King of England, “Westminster incorporated the manors of Ebury, Hyde, and Neyte . . . increasing its official size almost three times.”20 Growth also occurred to the north, toward Clerkenwell and Islington, and across the river in Southwark as well. This development might be called the first great suburbanization of London, and it changed not only London’s relation to the settlements at its margins but also the broad relationship between the city and rural England more generally. As Joan Thirsk has summarized with respect to the home counties: All the main roads and rivers converged upon the capital. Many of the villages had in their midst a good proportion of London citizens as residents and landowners who were constantly traveling to and fro. Local farmers either dealt direct with merchants and drovers frequenting the central London markets, or disposed of their produce in local towns, knowing that these were only transit camps and that the bulk of the food sold there was likewise ultimately destined for London. Romford, Brentwood, Enfield, Cheshunt, Watford, all were halfway houses, halting places and little more, for the great procession of animals, merchants, and packhorse men wending their way to the metropolis.21

Just as early modern London’s population exploded relative to that of other European capitals and metropolitan centers, so it hugely outstripped

8

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

that of England’s other major settlements as well. By one reckoning, “in 1500 . . . the population of Norwich – England’s second largest city – stood at 10,000; in 1700, it was about 29,000 – less than a threefold increase . . . None of the other major towns of the realm grew by as much.”22 The result was a gradual reorientation of English cultural and economic life away from the regional population centers and toward London instead. In sum, London’s population explosion of 1500 to 1650 did not simply entail an increase in the overall number of the city’s inhabitants. It also involved heightened levels of immigration; increased suburban settlement; the annexation of surrounding properties of a formerly more or less rural character; and a realignment of economic and cultural ties whereby southern England and the Midlands, in particular, came increasingly to function as suppliers of raw materials to the metropolis. These developments are of obvious consequence for any literary history of environmental degradation in the period. Yet even so, London’s increasing size and cultural importance should not distract one from the additional fact that population was growing in the provinces as well, and this growth, although not nearly as robust as that of the capital, generated its own kinds of environmental stress. The Agrarian History of England and Wales alludes to this issue repeatedly: “a rising population in both town and countryside increased the demand for food and the demand for land”; in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire “the effects of a rising population were evident in changes in the use of both houses and land”; in the southwest “an expanding market for food and a rising population instigated a fresh movement of land colonization and land improvement”; “large populations of small farmers and an increasing number of immigrants . . . were characteristic features of most of the forests in the east Midlands”; even on the edge of the Pennines and the Welsh border “the population was rising; commons were being steadily encroached upon and improved; cottages grew like mushrooms on the waste.”23 To this extent, the alarming growth of London’s suburbs, far from being unique to the capital, served as a synecdoche for broader changes occurring in more leisurely fashion throughout the realm as a whole. While those changes manifested themselves most dramatically on the demographic level, shifts in the size and distribution of England’s population were of course also keyed to economic changes. Most prominent among these was the enclosure movement, which gained momentum during the early Tudor period and had achieved broad legal acceptance, or at least toleration, by 1607, when King James’s government conducted the early modern period’s last major review of the practice.24 In fact,

Introduction

9

neither enclosure (the fencing or hedging in of commons) nor engrossing (the consolidation of two or more farms into one) was a new thing in the 1500s; both grew out of medieval precedent. But increased population pressures in the sixteenth century placed new demands on common farmland and pasturage, prompting freeholders to restrict access to formerly open property. No contemporary account of this process describes its social consequences more vividly than does Raphael Hythloday’s antienclosure diatribe in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): [S]heep, which are ordinarily so meek and require little to maintain them, now begin (so they say) to be so voracious and fierce that they devour even the people themselves; they destroy and despoil fields, houses, towns . . . [W]herever in the realm finer and therefore more expensive wool is produced, noblemen, gentlemen, and even some abbots . . . not thinking it sufficient to live idly and comfortably, contributing nothing to the common good, unless they also undermine it . . . leave nothing for cultivation; they enclose everything as pasture; they destroy homes, level towns, leaving only the church as a stable for the sheep . . . And so that one glutton, a dire and insatiable plague to his native country, may join the fields together and enclose thousands of acres within one hedge, the farmers are thrown out . . . One way or another the poor wretches depart . . . from hearth and home, all that was known and familiar to them, and they cannot find any place to go. All their household furnishings, which could not be sold for much even if they could wait for a buyer, are sold for a song now that they must be removed. They soon spend that pittance in their wanderings, and then finally what else is left but to steal and be hanged – justly, to be sure – or else to bum around and beg?25

Of course, More’s description did not fit all cases of enclosure, which could be carried out by commoners rather than lords and gentry, did not always entail the conversion of arable land to pasturage, and did not always lead to the dispossession of tenants. Indeed, early modern advocates of enclosure tended to reverse More’s argument by depicting common rather than enclosed lands as the nurse-plot of vagrancy.26 Moreover, it is easy to overestimate the actual extent of English countryside demonstrably enclosed in the early modern period. One fairly recent estimate, for instance, asserts that “between 1500 and 1600, a maximum of 2 percent of England was enclosed” – hardly a preponderance of the realm.27 But the same study goes on to note that “the 160 years from 1600 to 1760 were the most crucial in the whole of England’s enclosure history,” with “a good 28 percent of England” enclosed between those dates.28 And in any case, More’s account of enclosure has not only survived as paradigmatic; it held much influence in early modern times as well, being echoed by other writers who clearly regarded the enclosure movement as worrisomely

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

widespread. Thus in 1586, seventy years after the publication of Utopia, William Camden could quote Hythloday’s comment about man-eating sheep while noting that Northamptonshire, “as other counties in England, [is] covered and as it were beset” with the animals.29 And in 1607, Edward Topsell could cite both Camden and More approvingly in his Historie of Foure-footed Beasts (1607), adding, “indeed so sweet is the gaine that commeth by sheep, that in many partes of the land there is a decay of tillage and people . . . so that for Christians now you haue sheepe, and for a multitude of good house-holders, you shall haue one poore Sheapheard swaine and his Dogge lyuing vppon forty shillinges a yeare.”30 Considered in itself, the conversion of arable land to pasturage should be of little environmental concern. Indeed, insofar as raising crops depletes the soil of nutrients which must then be artificially replaced, conversion to pasturage may represent a more sustainable ecological arrangement. But the enclosure movement’s social dimension created environmental problems in at least two separate yet interlinked ways. First, of course, to the extent that enclosure displaced tenants from their established homes, it created an itinerant population of which a significant part could be expected to relocate to urban settings, particularly London, in search of new livelihoods. Second, inasmuch as enclosure increased the efficiency of agriculture, replacing “a multitude of good house-holders” with “one poore Sheapheard swaine,” it could force much of the remaining rural population to seek non-agricultural employment of a sort that generated new kinds of environmental damage. Thus the early modern period witnessed an “expansion of industry in towns and countryside”; in the highlands, “there was hardly a county without a considerable mining or quarrying industry”; in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, “lead-mining was a by-employment of long standing,” while “in the course of the sixteenth century stocking-knitting developed into an export industry of some importance”; in the home counties, “the cloth-making areas . . . were said to be ‘so populous that the soil is not able . . . to maintain and find the one half of the inhabitants except clothing be maintained’”; and the inhabitants of Herefordshire “blamed the poverty of their cottagers on the large-scale felling of timber to meet the demands of the iron-smelting industry.”31 As the population of London increased and the surrounding counties were progressively stripped to satisfy the city’s growing demand for both raw materials and manufactured goods, provincial industries such as mining and logging expanded in the process, with worrying consequences for the ecological balance of the realm.

Introduction

11

Nor was London’s interest in raw materials limited by national boundaries. As international commerce and exploration increased in the early modern period, the English nursed ambitions for an overseas empire as well – although during King James’s reign these designs remained in their infancy. Despite the ongoing English colonial venture in Ireland, the establishment of American settlements at Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth Bay (1621), and comparable Asian successes in the Battle of Swally (1612) and Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to the Mogul Jahangir (1615–18), the environmental consequences of English colonialism in the Jacobean years remained primarily intellectual and potential, manifesting themselves mainly through new philosophical and proto-scientific practices. Of these, Baconian science is the most notorious, so much so that most recent environmental histories of early modern England see it as inaugurating a new regime of environmental exploitation. Offering “a functional view of epistemology” that focuses “upon the transactions one finds reliable . . . with the externalities of [the] world,” the Baconian method sought “to bring savage nature to her true order,” and to this end it “advocated power over nature through manual manipulation, technology, and experiment.”32 On this logic one could argue that Baconianism is to contemporary environmental history what Cartesianism is to contemporary animal studies: the decisive philosophical intervention that divests nature of spiritual and ethical stature, objectifying it so as to render it more pliable for human purposes. In fact, the Baconian regime simply provided the theory for new modes of scientific practice that had been developing haphazardly since the mid 1400s. The study of zoology provides a case in point. On one hand, the spread of printing produced new editions, translations, and epitomes of classical works on natural history such as those by Aristotle and Pliny. On the other hand, explorers began to introduce an influx of foreign zoological marvels into the cities of Europe, and the scholars preparing new editions of Aristotle and Pliny were obliged to integrate these new specimens into the teachings of their classical authors. The collision of old texts and new discoveries generated a classic Kuhnian paradigm crisis out of which emerged a new way of doing zoological science. “New literary genres and epistemic practices” developed to accommodate the new material, and in the process there gradually emerged “a method of meticulous examination of nature that shows common points with the zoology of the following centuries.”33 As a result, by the early 1520s, Pietro Pomponazzi was using dissection to disprove Albertus Magnus’s claims about galline anatomy:

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

Albertus seems to say that the chicken has both an eyelid and, behind it, another white protective membrane. But I have dissected a hen and not found this. I have wasted my hen without finding anything.34

By the late 1600s, of course, dissection would take its place as one of the signature procedures of the new experimental science deriving from Bacon and Descartes. But over a century before King James’s death, it is already available to natural philosophers like Pomponazzi as a method of zoological observation and manipulation. Thus by 1603 England could bear witness to a series of historical trends which, when taken in aggregate, threatened to inflict unprecedented damage upon the realm’s natural environment. Population growth and urbanization; enclosure, coupled with a gradual economic shift away from manorial agriculture and toward industrial and commercial activity; international exploration and colonialism; and a philosophical revolution that presented nature as an object of observation, experimentation, and exploitation: taken together, these developments marked the beginning of the western world’s modern ecological crisis, and among European cities, the elements of that crisis first appeared together in early modern London. In an important sense, thus, one could say that the Londoners of King James’s generation were the first people to experience modern urban life in the west. The peculiar environmental pressures of that experience can be traced within the era’s cultural achievement, not least within its drama. 2 In their convergence, the historical conditions surveyed above could scarcely avoid producing troublesome environmental consequences. Indeed, in many cases these consequences built on problems visible even before the population explosion of 1500 to 1650. Resource issues offer a useful case in point. By 1500, human activity had already changed the quality and range of natural materials available for consumption in England, and in the coming 150 years, this change would only accelerate. Among the living elements of England’s ecology, certain animal species had been driven into extinction by human efforts long before King James first entered London. Most famous among these was the wolf; while some specimens “seem . . . to have survived on the North Yorkshire Moors and other high parts of England until the fifteenth century,” nonetheless “at the beginning of the early modern period England was distinctive among European countries because she had no wolves.”35 Far from causing

Introduction

13

environmental concern, this fact was a point of national pride. As William Harrison observed in 1577, echoing John Caius’s 1570 treatise Of Englishe Dogges, The happy and fortunate want of these beasts in England is universally ascribed to the politic government of King Edgar, who, to the intent the whole country might once be cleansed and clearly rid of them, charged the conquered Welshmen . . . to pay him a yearly tribute of wolves’ skins.36

Later monarchs, notably Edward I,37 continued Edgar’s policy of persecution, thus allowing Harrison to conclude brightly that in more recent times “we read not that any wolf hath been seen here that hath been bred within the bounds and limits of our country; howbeit, there have been divers brought over from beyond the seas for greediness of gain and to make money only by the gazing and gaping of people upon them.”38 By historical coincidence, the United States presidential election of 2008 was disturbed by fierce controversy over the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s enthusiasm for the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska. In early modern England, by contrast, support for the lethal pursuit of wolves marked a point of cultural consensus. Indeed, the only recognized negative result of the species’ national annihilation was the inconvenience of sportsmen who aspired to hunt the animals and were now obliged, like the third Duke of Grafton in the late eighteenth century, to travel abroad for that purpose.39 From the twenty-first century perspective, this may seem like a trivial concern, but in fact the regulation of hunting emerges as a major consequence of environmental degradation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Europe one may trace the practice of maintaining hunting-parks for the wealthy and privileged back to classical times; however, in England the pressures of species persecution lent new life to efforts at game management in the late medieval and early modern periods. From the Norman Conquest forward, much of the realm was legally designated as royal forest, which was in turn defined as a safe haven for wild beasts and fowls.40 But even this effort at wildlife preservation could have ironic results; thus in 1598, John Manwood’s Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest included wolves among the species protected by forest law, despite the fact that they had already ceased to exist in the territory in question.41 Another large mammal – the brown bear – had also disappeared in the wild in England before the accession of James I. In this case, extinction seems to have occurred in late Roman times, during the fourth or fifth century ce.42 Bears, of course, were an integral part of Tudor and Stuart

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popular entertainment, associated with the theater in any number of ways. Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn famously maintained an interest in both the public theaters and the bear-pits; live bears appear to have participated in plays and courtly entertainments on select occasions; and a theater like the Hope could be purposely designed – to Ben Jonson’s well-known annoyance – for the staging of both plays and bear-baitings.43 Given the popularity of bear-related entertainment in early modern England, the absence of local wild specimens was naturally made up for by the maintenance of captive herds. Erasmus noted the existence of these with disapproval in the early sixteenth century: “In Britain many persons keep groups of dancing bears, a dangerous animal that has a voracious appetite.”44 The specimens in question were originally imported, and Shakespeare acknowledges the main source of the supply when he has the Duke of Orleance in Henry V (1599) disparage English mastiffs as “foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples.”45 Aside from their employment for fighting, dancing, and occasional theatrical appearances, these bears also seem to have proven valuable as objects of display for their own sake; like the imported wolves that Harrison describes as making money “only by the gazing and gaping of people upon them,” they appear to have been placed on display in their kennels for interested viewers. That, at least, would explain the circumstance whereby, in June of 1609, a Bankside bear “killed a child that was negligently left in the beare-house.”46 The offending bear “was baited to death upon a stage, by the King’s order,” thus affirming one last time the species’ association with theatrical entertainment.47 But Jacobean England’s natural-resource problems ran well beyond the extinction of large mammals. Perhaps the direst such difficulty involved the nation’s food supply. As the demand for foodstuffs – especially cereals – increased with population growth, English agricultural production failed to keep pace, with the result that the price of basic sustenance grew dramatically and the gap between rich and poor widened in the process. The principal factors driving this crisis – population growth and urbanization – were essentially man-made. In particular, London developed a voracious appetite for grain imports, which it drew from farther and farther afield. The 1590s and early 1600s proved crucial to this development. Whereas during most of Elizabeth’s reign London’s “coastwise and foreign imports [of grain] were comparatively slight,” the middle years of King James’s reign saw average imports “well above” Elizabethan famine levels.48 Thus “under the early Stuarts, the theory that the city was too large

Introduction

15

became generally accepted, partly because of this difficulty in obtaining food, and it became usual to fight unduly high prices by limiting the city population.”49 Among other kinds of human activity, the conversion of pasture to arable land, where it occurred, could also aggravate the shortage of food. As Andrew B. Appleby observes, “land converted from pasture is poor and quickly becomes exhausted,” at which point “it must be returned to pasture, even though it may take some years to regain its grass”; thus “food production actually begins to decline,” and “if population growth continues into the period of declining food production, the supply demand balance is broken.”50 On the other hand, the conversion of arable land to pasturage through enclosure could also contribute to difficulties with the food supply, but perhaps not by directly limiting farm output. Indeed, loss of arable land through enclosure may have made little difference to overall agricultural productivity and could have been completely offset by improved farming methods. But in any case, enclosure led to considerable tension and political unrest in peasant communities afraid of starvation, with the result that most of “the anti-enclosure legislation of the sixteenth century . . . coincided with periods of dearth.”51 In addition to human activity, the principal force driving early modern England’s food-supply problems was the weather, which spoiled harvests and drove the price of grain out of reach of the poor. This pattern repeated itself across the sixteenth century, starting at its very outset: “because of poor harvests the price of flour doubled within two years and prices in general rose by 20 percent during 1500–3.”52 Likewise “very poor harvests . . . drove the composite price index up by nearly thirty percent at the beginning and end of the 1520s”; in the mid 1550s “England suffered successive dearths,” with prices in London reaching “their highest point thus far during the Tudor period”; and the century ended with a brutal series of poor harvests in the 1590s, with the result that “the price of flour in London nearly tripled in four years.”53 Nor did King James’s accession bring an end to these convulsions. Grain shortages led to the enclosure riots of 1607; when rain crippled the harvest of 1608, “prices rose by nearly 20 percent in a single year”; and the end of James’s reign was marred by a series of bad harvests in 1621–3.54 Largely as a consequence of these upheavals, agricultural prices underwent a sixfold increase in the 150 years from 1490 to 1640, “bringing the wage earner’s standard of living by the early decades of the seventeenth century to its lowest level in three hundred years.”55 As if this difficulty were not enough, similar problems developed around the nation’s timber supply. Again, population growth and urbanization lay

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at the heart of the matter. As London grew in size, so did its demand both for domestic fuel and for lumber for building purposes. Likewise, the native iron-smelting industry used more and more firewood, while maintaining an appropriate reserve of timber for ship-building became an issue with implications both for England’s growing maritime economy and for national security. In the event, the price revolution for timber lagged behind that for foodstuffs; by the early 1600s the cost of firewood in London, although “up by 118 percent since the 1490s,” had still grown by “less than one half” the price increase for most comestibles.56 But this relative stability ended with the accession of King James, so that “by the early decades of the seventeenth century . . . wood prices were rising more rapidly than agricultural prices.”57 By 1660, in turn, one might feel justified in concluding that “the timber resources of the nation had been extravagantly and, indeed, wastefully used.”58 Insofar as these resources were stripped for firewood, they bear witness that, for the first time in the nation’s history, early modern England found itself in the grips of an energy crisis. Traditional sources of fuel no longer sufficed to meet demand, and so the search began for alternatives. On the Yorkshire Wolds and in the unwooded areas of Leicestershire, “people burned straw and cow-dung”; in the eastern counties, “men were burning dried dung and furze”; in Wiltshire “groups of cottagers were forced to cook their daily meals by the meagre heat of a single common fire.”59 Elsewhere – especially in London – sea-coal emerged as the favored alternative to firewood. By Carolyn Merchant’s measure: As a consequence of English timber exploitation, coal mining rose exponentially. Between 1540 and 1640, outputs from coal mines increased from a few hundred tons a year . . . to 10,000–15,000 tons . . . Coal shipped out of Newcastle-uponTyne to other parts of England rose sixteenfold during this same period. As London needed more and more coal to replace its dwindling supplies of wood, imports increased twenty- to twenty-five fold.60

These figures have been subject to debate, but in any case “it is clear that a substantial increase occurred and also that shipments of coal to London, chiefly from Newcastle, rose by as much as 400 percent during Elizabeth’s reign.”61 Given that coal “was generally regarded as a noxious and unpleasant fuel,”62 this shift in consumption represents not just an accommodation to the scarcity of firewood but an acknowledged debasement in the quality of life – one to which we shall return when considering the effects of pollution in early modern London.

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17

In any case, contemporaries remarked upon the realm’s deforestation with both wistfulness and concern. The former reaction is evident in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1613), when the poet laments “Times injurious theft / Of . . . / . . . the goodliest Forrest ground, / This Iland ever had.”63 As for the latter, it is famously on display in John Evelyn’s Silva (1662), which sought to reverse the loss of woodland by encouraging reforestation and protective legislation. Thus on one hand Evelyn warns of dire consequences “if we . . . continue to destroy our Woods, without . . . providential Planting in their stead,” while on the other hand he seeks to curtail “the Exorbitance and Increase of devouring Iron-mills” in England by removing them to the American colonies.64 Other writers could of course celebrate deforestation as improvement of the land, which once cleared could be rendered serviceable for agriculture. But even so, it is apparent that early modern Englishmen and women could and did see the disappearance of England’s forests as a threat to their society’s well-being and as the loss of a way of life.

3 When it comes to the subject of pollution in early modern England, our attention must turn primarily to London. If, as I have asserted, Jacobean London should be understood as the first modern European metropolis, then we must expect urban blight and contamination to manifest themselves there with particular speed and intensity. In the event, abundant evidence suggests that this is just what happened. As they themselves understood, the Londoners of King James’s generation were fouling their own nest on an unprecedented scale. Consider, for instance, the case of the town ditch. First dug around the city walls for defensive purposes in the early thirteenth century and filled with water, this channel fell victim to suburban expansion, so that despite repeated efforts to cleanse it in the 1500s, John Stow could describe it in 1603 as now of late neglected and forced either to a verie narrow, and the same a filthie channell, or altogither stopped vp for Gardens planted, and houses builded thereon, euen to the verie wall, and in many places vpon both ditch & wall houses to be builded.65

These encroachments offended Stow not just because they undermined the city’s defenses and blighted the suburbs, but because they also diminished the local food supply:

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Before [1569,] the saide ditch lay open, without wall or pale, hauing therein great store of verie good fish, of diuerse sorts, as many men yet liuing, who haue taken and tasted them can well witness: but now no such matter, the charge of clensing is spared, and greate profite made by letting out the banks, with the spoyle of the whole ditch.66

In effect, thus, when King James officially entered his new capital city for the first time in March 1604, it was encircled by a discontinuous belt of fetid water so foul that even the local river life had abandoned it. As for the city’s streets and suburban environs, these seem to have fared little better. On the contrary, London’s urban expansion was accompanied by a torrent of rubbish and sewage and unregulated building. Stow notes it again and again. The bottom of Holborn Hill, for instance, is bounded by “Gold lane, sometime a filthy passage into the fields, now both sides builded with small tenements.”67 The northwest side of Tower Hill “is greatly diminished by building of tenements.”68 The Bankside liberty “is now a continuall building of tenements, about half a mile in length to [London] bridge.”69 Portsoken ward has become “a continuall streete, or filthy straight passage, with Alleyes of small tenements or cottages builded, inhabited by saylors victualers.”70 The extramural passage from Aldgate east is pestered with Cottages and Allies, euen vp to White chappel church: and almost a half a mile beyond it, into the common field: all which ought to lye open & free for all men. But this common field, I say, being sometime the beauty of this City on that part, is so encroached vpon by building of filthy Cottages, and with other purprestures, inclosures and Laystalles . . . that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient high way for the meeting of Carriages and droues of Cattell, much lesse is there any faire, pleasant, or wholesome way for people to walke on foot: which is no small blemish to so famous a city, to haue so unsauery and vnseemly an entry or passage thereunto.71

Extending beyond the city proper, such development entailed widening violation of the surrounding countryside, which had been under assault since well before Tudor and Stuart times. Thus as early as 1209, in the reign of Henry III, “the Forest of Middlesex and the Warren of Stanes were disaforested: since the which time, the suburbs about London hath bin also mightily increased with buildings.”72 Likewise, “In the yeare 1498, all the Gardens which had continued from time out of mind, without Moregate . . . were destroyed.”73 By the reign of Henry VIII, “the inhabitantes of the Townes aboute London . . . had so enclosed the common fieldes with hedges, and ditches, that neyther the yong men of the City might shoote, nor the auncient persons walke for theyr pleasures in those fieldes.”74 And by Stow’s own day – despite efforts to rein in suburban

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expansion and enclosure – “we see the thing in worse case than euer.”75 Stow’s complaints are sometimes dismissed as a minority opinion, out of step with the many contemporary writers who celebrate London’s growth as, in the main, a glorious thing. But given that proponents of urban expansion arguably outnumber the advocates of environmental preservation even in the twenty-first century, this imbalance seems to reflect less upon Stow’s idiosyncracy than upon human nature itself. As much as one might wish to ignore Stow’s account of early modern London’s squalor, there is no reason to disbelieve its particulars. If the land surrounding London suffered because of the city’s growth, so too did the local rivers and springs. Indeed, it is in the late fifteenth century that the noun “conservation” first enters English as a term for the “official charge and care of rivers, sewers, forests, etc.,” specifically in connection with “the conseruation of the water and river of Thames” as this was entrusted to “the Maior of the Citie of London.”76 This new usage can hardly have been coincidental, for during the late medieval and early modern periods the Thames estuary was in need of conservation as never before. It was between 1400 and 1750 that the “lost rivers of London,” as Nicholas Barton calls them, all disappeared from view. The first to go was the Walbrook, which flowed southwest from Moorfields through the city ditch and thence, by a wandering course, into the Thames. Already polluted in the Middle Ages, it was partly vaulted over in 1440, and the job was mostly finished in 1462.77 Although glimpses of the stream still remained visible as late as 1803, Stow could describe it two hundred years earlier as “now hidden vnder ground, and therby hardly knowne.”78 The little Tyburn, which flowed into the Thames at Merflete, west of Westminster Abbey, was greatly reduced in 1236, when a conduit diverted most of its flow to the city for drinking water. The trickle that remained was bricked over between Hyde Park and Saint James’s Park in 1612.79 The largest local tributary to the Thames, the notorious Fleet, ran south from Hampstead Heath through Camden Town and King’s Cross to Holborn and beyond. In King James’s day it was still much in evidence indeed, one could say it had taken on a life of its own. Already abused for centuries as a refuse dump and general sink, it had achieved an evil apotheosis in the process, coming to embody everything that was wrong with London’s breakneck growth. Ben Jonson, who lived beside it in Blackfriars for a while, used it as the setting for the last of his Epigrams (1612–13). There, as Jonson’s two mock-epic protagonists row an open boat up the river to Holborn to visit a house of ill repute, they encounter a hell-on-earth of stench and decay:

20

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama In the first jawes appeared that ugly monster, Ycleped Mud, which, when their oares did once stirre, Belch’d forth an ayre, as hot, as at the muster Of all your night-tubs, when the carts doe cluster, Who shall discharge first his merd-urinous load.80

And in 1712 Jonathan Swift could still describe the Fleet as clogged with “Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, / Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, / Dead Cats and TurnipTops.”81 Small wonder that it was finally vaulted over in 1733.82 As the city’s land and water went, so too went its air. John Evelyn, whose Silva provided the classic assessment of early modern England’s energy crisis from the standpoint of supply, also produced a comparable study of the issue from the perspective of consumption: his Fumifugium of 1661. Here, in the definitive eyewitness account of seventeenth-century London’s atmospheric pollution, Evelyn attributes it to the “Hellish and dismall cloud of sea-coale” that had in recent memory invested the city:83 It is this which scatters and strews about those black and smutty Atomes upon all things where it comes, insinuating itself into our very secret Cabinets, and most precious Repositories . . . it is this which . . . is Avernus to Fowl, and kills our Bees and Flowers abroad, suffering nothing in our Gardens to bud, display themselves, or ripen: so as our Anemonies and many other choycest Flowers, will by no Industry be made to blow in London, or the Precincts of it, unlesse they be raised on a Hot-bed, and governed with extraordinary Artifice to accellerate their springing, imparting a bitter and ungrateful Tast to those few wretched Fruits, which never arriving to their desired maturity, seem, like the Apples of Sodome, to fall even to dust, when they are but touched.84

Evelyn’s work first appeared some thirty-six years after the death of King James I, but the conditions to which it responds had been developing steadily since the last quarter of the sixteenth century, as a consequence of London’s growing dependence on coal as a substitute fuel for firewood. Thus by 1603 the city had assembled the basic elements of a degraded environment in the modern sense of the phrase: ambient concentrations of pollutants, improper land and water management, and resource problems related to uncontrolled population growth and urbanization. Moreover, these factors had begun to reshape the daily experience of Londoners, making a perceptible difference in the commodities they could buy at market, in the dwellings that lodged them, and even in the air they breathed. The purpose of the present study is of course to register the influence of these changes upon the popular drama developing in London concurrently with this wave of environmental change. But to that end one

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must also note once more that London’s ecological problems did not develop in a vacuum. While more pronounced and aggressive than similar changes elsewhere in the realm, the corrosion of London’s natural environment presaged and indeed helped instigate a pattern of environmental blight throughout England generally, as all corners of the realm were ransacked for materials that might prove useful to the culture and needs of the metropolis. We have already seen that the inhabitants of Herefordshire felt themselves impoverished by the growth of the local iron-smelting industry, with its concomitant deforestation of the countryside. But Herefordshire was not alone in its despoliation. “Active iron industries developed . . . in the regions of Sussex and Kent” and also “around Sheffield in South Yorkshire and in parts of the West Midlands,” along with other areas.85 Furthermore, the scale of these operations steadily increased, so that the growth of the mining industries during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I demanded the construction of mining shafts and pumps driven by horse power, as ores were increasingly raised from depths of 20 to 50 fathoms, in contrast to the earlier extractions of only a few fathoms. By the time of the Civil War, thousands of men and women were employed as workers in the new mining and metallurgical industries.86

Nor were mining and metallurgy the only provincial industries to grow at such a rate, for “beginning around 1540, large-scale mills and foundries producing paper, gunpowder, cannons, copper, brass, sugar, and saltpeter began to supplement production by domestic workshops.”87 In their diversity and scope, these new enterprises bore witness to the emergence of England’s modern market economy. In the process, they also inaugurated a new regime of environmental degradation, a regime centered upon London’s needs and preoccupations, but with ecological consequences extending well beyond the capital itself.

4 Finally, it remains to offer some discussion of the various medical issues besetting early modern England, as these pertain to or derive from human manipulation of the environment. The list of health hazards threatening King James’s subjects was of course extensive, ranging from simple malnutrition on one hand to the more spectacular epidemics on the other. Insofar as poor nutrition may be linked to problems with the national food supply – and insofar as these problems were a function of population

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growth, urbanization, and related developments – there was a clear ecological dimension to starvation in Jacobean England. But the same may also be said, for different reasons, of the realm’s two signature epidemic maladies, bubonic plague and syphilis. According to traditional accounts, both diseases appeared in Europe through the kind of international contact and conquest facilitated by western exploration; both have been associated with epoch-making innovations (in military science and maritime travel, respectively); and both thrived in the demographic environment of early modern urban life. As for the plague, the foundational narrative of its appearance in Europe, composed in the early 1350s by Gabriele de’ Mussis, places it on the caravan routes leading from East Asia to the Black Sea. At the western end of this long, tenuous line of communication, the Genoese inhabitants of Caffa found themselves encircled in 1346 by a besieging army under the command of the Kipchak khan Janibeg. De’ Mussis recounts the sequel as follows: But behold, the whole army was infected by a disease which overran the Tartars and killed thousands upon thousands every day . . . All medical advice and attention was useless; the Tartars died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies: swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever. The dying Tartars . . . realising that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside . . . And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.88

On the basis of this tale, “Janibeg has been proclaimed the father of biological warfare by several generations of historians.”89 However, one need not accept this lurid characterization in order to recognize human interference with the natural environment as implicated in the spread of the disease. Indeed, one need not even accept all the particulars of De’ Mussis’s narrative. While one line of recent scholarship has dismissed De’ Mussis’s story of corpse-lobbing as a pious fabrication,90 it nonetheless remains that the plague was carried to Europe as a result of transcontinental commerce, and this alone is sufficient to establish it as in large part the product of anthropogenic environmental dislocations. Moving thousands of miles from its place of origin in the Far East to its ultimate site of dispersal in the west, the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis) has never been indigenous to Europe. Moreover, Yersinia pestis required human

Introduction

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assistance to travel from its initial range to new and far distant locations. Indeed, “Plague is among the slowest moving of wandering sicknesses. New strains of influenza can leap around the world in a year or two, but Y. pestis, like the AIDS virus, is tied to a complicated chain of infection that can take decades to unfold.”91 This infection chain is largely rooted in insect and rodent ecology and ancillary factors such as climate, and in fact human beings are not even a preferred host for the plague bacillus. For Y. pestis to settle in a human population, its primary and secondary host populations must already be overtaxed, and the prospective human hosts must be readily accessible to these non-human populations. As it happens, this last condition was met entirely by human activity, beginning with “the reticulum of commerce and communications established by the Romans in the late 1st century b.c.,” which apparently set the stage for the plague’s first European appearance in the sixth century ce and whose maintenance remained essential for the disease’s return in the fourteenth century.92 In short, the plague’s circulation was abetted by a whole series of human innovations: the development of long overland trade routes; the establishment of settlements along those trade routes to facilitate commerce; the construction of vehicles for overland and overseas travel; the domestication of draft animals; etc. In the absence of a fairly sophisticated system of transcontinental trade, travel, and conquest, it is perfectly possible that the plague bacillus might have remained contained within its original zone of dispersion. Moreover, human effort proved essential not only to the global distribution of Yersinia pestis, but also to its incubation and reproduction. Here the role of urban development can hardly be overstated. From the epidemiological standpoint, the cities of medieval and early modern Europe provided an environment ideal for transmission of the disease. Urban overcrowding placed human bodies in dangerously close conjunction; poor city sanitation ensured robust populations of bacteria and disease-laden commensal animals; and frequent travel between urban centers exposed city-dwellers to exotic infections on a regular basis. Even the sketchy medical science of the Middle Ages recognized an intimate connection between the Black Death and city life. Already in the fourteenth century, the ladies and gentlemen of Boccaccio’s Decameron could flee the plagueridden city of Florence for the refuge of the country, thereby coincidentally setting an example for Lovewit in Jonson’s Alchemist.93 Likewise, 150 years later, the authorities of Elizabethan and Jacobean London regularly closed the city’s playhouses in plague-time lest close-packed crowds of theatergoers might aggravate the contagion.94 Indeed, plague and famine achieved

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a kind of diabolical complementarity in early modern England, with the former mainly afflicting urban settlements while the latter spent its force mostly in rural areas. Thus, to take the northwest as an example, “plague, when it struck Carlisle or Penrith, was deadly enough, but in the countryside, where the vast majority of the people lived, it had little effect. Starvation, on the other hand, was a great killer.”95 By contrast, London “had resources to ameliorate food shortages that were unknown in the northwest,” with the result that for the capital “the enormous losses from the plagues of 1592–93 and 1603 completely dwarf the [famineinduced] mortality of 1597.”96 Indeed, the notorious differential between early modern London’s birth and burial rates seems to have derived primarily from the terrible spikes of mortality that accompanied visitations of the plague.97 For its part, syphilis presents a picture very similar in some respects to that of the plague, while differing from the plague in some crucial particulars as well. As to the similarities: like plague, syphilis has been traditionally understood as an exotic infection, although where plague followed an east west vector in its introduction to Europe, syphilis is said to have moved from west to east. In 1526, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo provided an early account of the malady’s origins that has remained influential to the present day: [T]his horrible disease came from the [West] Indies . . . Syphilis first appeared in Spain after Admiral Christopher Columbus discovered the Indies and returned home. Some Christians who accompanied Columbus on the voyage of discovery and some who were on the second voyage brought this plague to Spain. From them other people were contaminated. Later, in 1495, when the Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández de Cordoba, went to Italy with an army to support young King Ferdinand of Naples against King Charles VIII of France . . . the disease was carried to Italy for the first time by a few Spanish soldiers . . . From there it spread all over Christendom and was carried into Africa by men and women who had the disease.98

Since its initial circulation, the Columbian narrative of syphilis’s beginnings has undergone vigorous debate.99 However, recent partial genomic analysis of the syphilis spirochete (Triponema pallidum) would appear to favor Oviedo’s story.100 If confirmed, the Columbian narrative would place syphilis amidst a number of epidemiological catastrophes set in motion by changes to the natural environment that accompanied the European conquest of the New World. In any case – again like plague – syphilis is a selective kind of bacterium that requires fairly specific circumstances to propagate.

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And once more like plague, it found those circumstances in the urban areas of early modern Europe. After all, syphilis was self-evidently transmitted by human contact of a sort for which cities like London proved all too amenable. Relatively high population densities, coupled with public sexual amenities like London’s notorious Bankside stews, heightened the possibility of multiple anonymous sexual encounters. As a result, the pox rapidly came to be identified with the ostensible moral decay of early modern urban life. Yet despite a range of broad similarities to the plague, the pox differed from its sister ailment with respect to the precise nature of its social impact. Plague, on one hand, brought with it rapid mortality on a breathtakingly large scale. The Black Death of 1348–9 offers the most extreme instance here, with parish registers from Lichfield, York, and Lincoln yielding “death-rates of around 40 percent” for the period in question, and other surviving English records producing “maximum death-rates of around 45 percent.”101 Later epidemics proved less lethal, but even so they could be expected to entail mortality rates between two and eight times the average for plague-free periods.102 In 1603, the year of King James’s English accession, plague is estimated to have carried off “more than one-fifth of [London’s] population.”103 Syphilis, on the other hand, killed far fewer people, and killed them more slowly; whereas plague dispatches half its victims within a week of the onset of symptoms, syphilis consigns them to years of suffering and humiliation. As the disease progresses through the three stages of its development the patient is beset with symptoms that prove ever more distressing and difficult to conceal: the swollen chancres of the primary infection, the widespread rash of the ailment in its secondary phase, and finally the horrid disfiguring granulomas of tertiary syphilis, often coupled with locomotor ataxia and insanity. As a result, while plague vastly outstripped syphilis in terms of its raw effect upon population levels, syphilis arguably exerted an equal, and perhaps even greater, influence upon the cultural structures of early modern life. As Oviedo observed, “This disease is so serious and painful that no man can help seeing the many people, rotten and crippled like Saint Lazarus, who are afflicted with it.”104 With the spectacle of syphilitic suffering and degradation constantly before their eyes, the writers, actors, and playgoers of Jacobean London had good reason to obsess about the disease and its place in their world. To summarize, then: two of Jacobean England’s most prominent medical crises, like its growing resource problems and difficulties with pollution, may be ascribed in large part to human disruption of the balance of nature. Any effort to assess the impact of environmental

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degradation on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries must therefore take these epidemics into account, while also considering the other issues enumerated above. In the chapters to follow, I shall repeatedly return to the various topics surveyed in this introduction as I seek to gauge their influence upon the dramatic output of six specific playwrights. As for the overall structure and interrelationship of the ensuing chapters themselves, this should require little introduction. Taken together, Middleton and Jonson, Shakespeare and Fletcher, and Dekker and Heywood represent a large and exceptionally prestigious segment of the dramatic literature that survives from early seventeenthcentury England. Moreover, these six dramatists sort themselves into three pairs that together help delineate a range of possible responses to the environmental problems already described. On one hand, the works of Middleton and Jonson display a morbid fascination with the dysfunctional aspects of early modern England’s relationship to the natural world. Operating mainly in the register of satire and exposé, these playwrights immerse their audiences in the filth and rapacity of Jacobean London as they inventory a range of social abuses that leave their mark upon the land, water, and air of the city itself. By contrast, Shakespeare and Fletcher revive the conventions of pastoral and festive drama for purposes that are largely escapist in character. Fashioning alternative worlds of natural harmony, they offer a consolatory fantasy whereby the ills of a sophisticated urban social order find their remedy in “the movement back to nature.”105 For their part, Dekker and Heywood follow Middleton and Jonson in their self-conscious focus upon urban life and manners. But rather than adopting Middleton’s and Jonson’s satirical, condemnatory approach to these subjects, Dekker and Heywood work in part to develop a drama that is triumphalist and nationalistic in tone. Celebrating a notion of Englishness grounded in robust, proletarian urban experience, their plays offer a panegyric to the working people of London and the ethic of improvement, both personal and civic, that drew them to the city in ever-increasing numbers. Taken together, these three pairs of playwrights define the conceptual space within which the Jacobean theater gave meaning to anthropogenic environmental change. To this extent, one might think of them collectively as defining the end-points of the abscissa, ordinate, and applicate within a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. Needless to say, the playwrights thus paired will nonetheless offer a study in contrasts, despite the fact that they deal with common subject-matter and approach it from a common perspective. Middleton, for instance, depicts the abuses

Introduction

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of London society with a penitential religious vocabulary derived from the Elizabethan cony-catching pamphlets; Jonson, by contrast, engages the same material with language and gestures drawn largely from classical satire. Other such contrasts characterize the relative status of all the playwrights examined in this study, as I shall demonstrate at length in the following chapters. More broadly – and while acknowledging that the Jacobean drama provides a worthy subject of analysis in its own right – I would argue that the literary modes of urban satire, pastoral escapism, and proletarian nationalism remain to this day the most powerful imaginative tools we have to confront the ongoing degradation of our natural environment.

chapter 1

Middleton and ecological change

Any ecocritical study of Thomas Middleton must identify him first and last as a city writer, a London writer. Born within the city walls in 1580, he was christened in the church of Saint Lawrence Jewry, hard by the London Guildhall. By the age of twenty-one he could figure in legal documents as “heare in London daylie accompaninge the players,”1 and play-titles like A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Widow of Watling Street recall the urban topography within which he lived and worked. Throughout his professional life he composed civic pageants, and from 1620 to his death seven years later, he held the position of Chronologer to the City of London. To quote Swapan Chakravorty, Middleton’s “roots lay almost entirely in London.”2 Likewise, his life, his career, his literary and dramatic sensibilities were all profoundly conditioned by the urban surroundings that nurtured him. Among Middleton’s professional connections to the city, his various civic entertainments repeatedly engage environmental themes. However, given their celebratory nature, the productions in question tend to handle this subject-matter in an affirmative, encomiastic fashion which contrasts sharply with Middleton’s treatment of the same material in his plays for the public and private stage. For example, one might instance The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, performed in October 1619 to accompany the installation of Sir William Cokayne as Lord Mayor. Cokayne was a freeman of the Company of Skinners,3 and in tribute to this relationship Middleton welcomes the newly installed Lord Mayor into the city with a speech delivered by “Orpheus, great master both in poesy and harmony, who by his excellent music drew after him wild beasts, woods, and mountains.”4 The poet takes pains to enumerate the animals surrounding Orpheus, which were those “now in use with the bountiful Society of Skinners” (446–7). Yet beyond this stylized compliment, the “wild beasts, woods, and mountains” of Middleton’s device assume a broader allegorical meaning: 28

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Such are the vices in a city sprung, As are yon thickets that grow close and strong; Such is oppression, coz’nage, bribes, false hires, As are yon catching and entangling briers . . . ... Just such a wilderness is a commonwealth That is undressed, unpruned, wild in her health; And the rude multitude the beasts o’th’wood, That know no laws, but only will and blood; And yet by rare example, musical grace, Harmonious government of the man in place, Of fair integrity and wisdom framed, They stand as mine do, ravished, charmed, and tamed: Every wise magistrate that governs thus, May well be called a powerful Orpheus. (149–52, 155–64)

The core metaphor here, more familiar from the Gardener’s scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II, likens civic governance to agriculture, in the process attributing negative ethical qualities to a natural world in need of virtuous management. This much is conventional, figurative, and consistent with the early modern discourse of civic improvement. Elsewhere, however, Middleton’s entertainments engage environmental issues more literally. London’s water supply provides a case in point. As scholars of the subject have observed, “the attempt to provide adequate quantities of potable water” proved “a burdensome task” for large cities throughout early modern Europe.5 More particularly, “by the mid sixteenth century, London had outgrown its supply of water,”6 with the result that by the early 1600s “London’s city officers [found themselves] faced with desperate water shortages.”7 Thus when Middleton composed a series of Honourable Entertainments to celebrate the wedding in 1620 of Lord Mayor Cokayne’s daughter and Charles Howard, Baron of Effingham, he arranged for the third speech of the sequence to be uttered by “a water-nymph, seeming to rise out of the ground by the conduit head near the Banqueting House” in honor of “the renewing of the worthy and laudable custom of visiting the springs and conduit heads for the sweetness and health of the city” (3.4, 1–3). This practice, whereby the Lord Mayor and Aldermen performed an annual inspection of the city’s water sources before dining near the Tyburn conduit at Oxford Street,8 had been discontinued “these seven years” (Honourable Entertainments, 3.13) prior to its revival by Cokayne. For her part, Middleton’s nymph praises the renewal of this custom as an act of “virtue” (3.7, 17), essential “for yon fair city’s health” (3.16) and again consistent with notions of civic improvement whereby unruly nature submits to human governance.

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While describing her “good service” (3.28) in providing water to the citizens of London, Middleton’s nymph also credits her “kind and loving sisters” named “Chadwell and Amwell,” with performing a similar “pipe-pilgrimage” (3.32). The reference here is to London’s most recent and ambitious waterworks project, the New River aqueduct, which had been opened in 1613 to convey drinking water to the city from the aforementioned springs in Hertfordshire, some forty miles away. As it happened, Middleton was more than coincidentally aware of this enterprise; seven years earlier he had been commissioned to write the civic pageant celebrating its completion. The piece in question, entitled The Manner of his Lordship’s Entertainment . . . At that most famous and admired work of the running stream from Amwell Head, credited one “Master Hugh Myddelton of London” with “the sole invention, cost, and industry” of the undertaking, while exhorting the New River’s “precious spring” to “flow forth” in “crystal murmurs” toward the thirsty metropolis (10, 9, 80, 80, 83). In fact, this language overstates Sir Hugh Myddelton’s role in the New River project – a role which, as important as it finally proved to be, was both belated and far from all-encompassing. The New River had originally been proposed in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign by a former soldier named Edmund Colthurst; however, getting the necessary permissions and financial backing proved a lengthy affair, and in early 1609 “Myddelton somehow took Colthurst’s place” as the face of the undertaking.9 Myddelton was what we would now call an industrial entrepreneur: a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, he hailed from Wales and would later pursue a variety of projects that included the mining of Welsh silver and lead and the reclamation of land on the Isle of Wight.10 In 1609, however, he threw himself into the New River enterprise, which at that time was already some six years old and had been completed through only some three miles of its planned extent. Further problems followed almost immediately, the most significant being the organized legal opposition of a group of landowners through whose property the conduit was planned to run, and the entire venture came to a standstill between early 1610 and late 1611. Ultimately, King James himself had to be enlisted as a financial partner before the New River’s crystal murmurs could at last be heard in the capital.11 While praising Myddelton’s role in all this, His Lordship’s Entertainment likewise acknowledges the severity of the difficulties the New River project faced. As the pageant declares with satisfaction,

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[W]here before many unjust complaints, Enviously seated, hath oft caused restraints, Stops, and great crosses, to our master’s charge And the work’s hindrance; favour now at large Spreads itself open to him. (43–47)

Structurally and ethically, the “complaints,” “restraints,” “stops,” and “crosses” here occupy a position comparable to that held by “oppression,” “coz’nage,” “bribes,” and “false hires” in The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity: they comprise what Stephen Orgel has called the “world of disorder and vice, everything that the ideal world of the . . . main masque . . . was to overcome and supersede.”12 But where The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity metaphorically envisions these qualities as the attributes of an unruly natural world – as “thickets,” “briers,” and “beasts o’th’wood ” – His Lordship’s Entertainment draws no such comparison. Instead, the vices besetting the New River project – “malice, envy, false suggestion,” etc. (41) – remain steadfastly abstract, and this seems appropriate given that the most serious threats arising to the venture derived not from the countryside through which its work-crews dug their way, but instead from the English legal and political process itself. Barely a month after celebrating the completion of the New River, Middleton participated in another civic entertainment: the first of his Lord Mayor’s pageants, entitled The Triumphs of Truth. In this case the man of the hour was Sir Hugh Myddelton’s elder brother, Sir Thomas, and the spectacle celebrating his inauguration as Lord Mayor, which included an honorific tableau staged “close by the Little Conduit” in Cheapside (492), has for this reason been adduced as more evidence of the poet’s concern with London’s water supply.13 For present purposes, however, the pageant’s interest lies elsewhere, in the blocking figures that once more, as in His Lordship’s Entertainment and The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, are conjured up as a threat to virtuous and stable government. In this case the principal such figure, an allegorical personification of Error, shadows the main pageant as it conducts the new mayor into and through the city of London, from Saint Paul’s via Cheapside to Leadenhall. Along this way, Error travels “in a chariot . . . his garment of ash-colour silk, his head rolled in a cloud . . . mists hanging at his eyes” (244–9), awaiting an opportune moment to assault the new Lord Mayor. As the procession begins, a female figure attired as the City of London welcomes Lord Mayor Myddelton with a civic key and some words of warning:

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama Seest thou this key of gold? It shows thy charge. This place is the king’s chamber; all pollution, Sin, and uncleanness must be locked out here, And be kept sweet with sanctity, faith, and fear.

(187–90)

And the pageant ends with this charge symbolically fulfilled when an actor playing the allegorical role of Zeal projects a flame that, “fastening upon that chariot of Error, sets it on fire, and all the beasts that are joined to it” (780–1). The noun “pollution” in London’s speech is heavily charged with meanings to which we shall return in our discussion of Middleton’s stage-plays. For now, suffice it to say that the word refers simultaneously to spiritual and material conditions, to “sin” as well as to “uncleanness” in its physical or environmental dimension. To this extent, the pageant’s final incineration of Error performs a ritual of cleansing on both these levels a purification of soul and body alike. And for all his character as an abstraction, Error’s appearance is designed to foreground this duality. Ashen-gray, surrounded by clouds and mists, he pursues the main pageant while attended by a complement of unclean beasts – a bat, a mole, a rhinoceros, a snake (244–54) – that anticipate the association of vice with the natural world to be encountered later in The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity. However, the atmosphere accompanying Error seems to have been his most distinctive and noxious attribute. As Alan Dessen observes, “both figuratively and visually Error is repeatedly linked to mist and fog,”14 a linkage rendered most notable when the procession pauses by the Little Conduit and Error, seizing the moment, envelops everything in “a thick, sulphurous darkness, it being a fog or mist raised from Error, enviously to blemish that place” (495–6). Almost unique in the surviving literature of Jacobean drama and pageantry, this moment is as complex as it is arresting, and it demands study from the standpoints of both audience and performer. As to the former: in light of recent scholarship on humoralism in the Renaissance, we might ask how the pageant’s original viewers would have experienced such “fog or mist,” considering its dense connections both to theatrical tradition and to early modern theories of the relation between bodies and their surroundings. Given its status as one of Galenic medicine’s non-naturals, the atmosphere was regularly implicated in the spread of disease. As scholars note, “[t]he idea that the environmental air itself could become infected, or putrefy, served as a useful explanation of epidemic illness.”15 At heart, the assumption here was that “putridity engendered putridity, with smell constituting the primary agent of contagion,”16 and this logic led to various civic improvement projects comparable, in their way,

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to the New River undertaking. For instance, “early modern cities in the grip of the plague sought to purify the air by shooting off cannon or building fires,” while “[l]arge-scale projects to drain swamps . . . sought . . . to eradicate dangerous disease-laden miasmas.”17 In England, such ventures were sufficiently prominent for one scholar to declare that “[t]hroughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the olfactory drove social policy with regard to the regulation of London’s public space.”18 When Middleton’s personification of Truth responds to the “pois’nous vapours” of Error by exclaiming, “Vanish, infectious fog, that I may see / This city’s grace” (510, 522–3), some such understanding of fog and mist is clearly at play. Underlying this language, in turn, is the implication that infectious fogs may be a distinctively London – or at least a distinctively urban – phenomenon; as Truth again observes, “Thick are the mists that o’er fair cities rise” (513). In this sense, The Triumphs of Truth imagines its central threat to good governance as an urban environmental catastrophe, a toxic, disease-bearing haze that rises to envelop the city of London. And from the standpoint of performance practice, this association is, if anything, enhanced. No records have survived to specify how Error’s “fog or mist” would have been staged, but Jacobean actors clearly had equipment available for such a purpose.19 Jonathan Gil Harris notes that in the public theaters “[r]osin powder was thrown at flames to produce flares,” while “squibs . . . were employed to produce flashes or loud bangs”; of course, both produced smoke as well.20 More to the point in the present case, Alan Dessen observes that “specific stage directions that call for a mist are rare” and often “linked to special effects in masques or comparable no-expense-spared events,” of which Middleton’s pageant obviously provides an instance.21 But even in this select company, The Triumphs of Truth proves unusual. Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei (1606) calls for “a Mist made of delicate perfumes” (681). Likewise, Jonson’s Sad Shepherd (1637) requires a “mist” to arise and darken the scene (3.Argument.39), while similar darkening mists are stipulated in stage directions for four other surviving plays of the period.22 But only in Middleton’s pageant does the fog/mist comprise such a prominent, recurring feature of the entertainment, and only in Middleton’s pageant is it identified as poisonous and foul-smelling. These descriptors seem more than coincidental: in effect, they provide an added physical dimension to a fog that might otherwise seem primarily moral or intellectual in its effects. And while no one knows with certainty just how Error’s mist was originally generated, Middleton’s adjectives provide us with the best surviving clues as to this aspect of his pageant’s performance. When Error

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himself calls upon “rotten darkness” to shroud the pageant-scene in a “sulphurous cloud ” (633–4), his words, taken literally, suggest a fetid pall of smog produced by throwing sulfur – or perhaps some sulfur-rich compound such as gunpowder – onto a brazier of glowing charcoal.23 If some such technique was in fact used to produce Error’s fog in The Triumphs of Truth, it would speak to the changing atmospheric conditions of a Jacobean London increasingly dependent upon coal for its energy. In any event, Middleton’s pageants present us with a mixed and sometimes contradictory range of environmental gestures. On one hand, the poet was closely associated with prominent civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and (at least in the case of the New River) major projects for urban development. He was repeatedly employed to praise, celebrate, and advertise these figures and projects, and he undertook this employment with a conventional vocabulary that depicted the natural world as a site of vicious disorder in need of human restraint and rational management. In these respects – most obviously in his willingness to overlook the deserts of others while extolling the accomplishments of his patrons – Middleton’s sensibility seems as mercenary and amoral as that of any twenty-first-century public relations consultant. Yet beneath the language of civic boosterism, Middleton’s pageants offer us glimpses of a municipal government marred by lawsuits and political corruption, dependent for its welfare upon distant, rural sources of water and other raw materials, and shrouded in a stinking, poisonous haze. As for the sea-coal that produced this haze, it may or may not have been instrumental in generating fog for The Triumphs of Truth. But when the self-conscious cuckold Allwit in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) rejoices in the material comforts supplied by his wife’s lover, he includes among them a copious supply of this very same substance: I walk out in a morning; come to breakfast, Find excellent good cheer; a good fire in winter; Look in my coal-house about midsummer eve, That’s full, five or six chaldron new laid up. (1.2.23–6)

A London writer from start to finish, Middleton takes the city’s environmental conditions and practices as a matter of course.

1 In Middleton’s stage-plays, these conditions and practices characteristically generate a predatory relation between city and country.24 Middleton depicts the natural world as a resource that Londoners, both citizens and

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courtiers alike, exploit with cynical rapacity, consuming it to fashion an urban order that precisely inverts its values. In this respect Middleton distinguishes himself notably from Shakespeare, for whom the natural environment offers solace or at least escape from the evils of urban life. In festive comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, and in romances like The Winter’s Tale, Shakespearean nature relieves the city and its discontents; even the grime of Measure For Measure is alleviated by Mariana’s moated grange. In Middleton, by contrast, the city preys upon the natural world and gleefully eviscerates it. In rare cases, Middleton can give this dynamic a lighthearted air, as if it were the early modern equivalent of a fraternity prank. Thus, in A Mad World, My Masters (1605), the scapegrace Follywit disguises himself as one Lord Owemuch, a peer with “great acquaintance i’th’ City” (2.1.15), in order to enjoy “the courtesy o’th’ country” (2.6.38) as this is offered by Follywit’s grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress. Once Sir Bounteous admits his disguised grandson’s entourage to his estate, inviting them to enjoy “my cocks, my fishponds, my park, my champaign grounds” (2.2.17–18), they fall upon the household, bind Sir Bounteous and his servants fast, and rob them blind. A serious enough offense, under normal circumstances: still, the play’s final reconciliation presents it in this instance as a flight of youthful fancy, more than paid back by Follywit’s inadvertent marriage to a courtesan. Elsewhere, similar activities take on a graver aspect. The main plot of Michaelmas Term (1604) enacts a commodity scam that was popular in Jacobean London: the clueless country gentleman Easy, newly arrived in town, is persuaded by the draper Quomodo to accept a quantity of cloth in lieu of a cash loan, and then to sell this cloth for a fraction of its quoted value. As Quomodo and his minions develop their ruse, their language elides Easy with the country property from which he derives his income, and both land and landlord emerge as exploitable resources. In one extended metaphor, Quomodo declares of Easy, “Gentry is the chief fish we tradesmen catch” (1.2.135); the servant Shortyard frets, “I perceive the trout will be a little troublesome ere he be catched” (2.3.155–6); and Quomodo gloats in an aside, “Now, my sweet Shortyard, now the hungry fish begins to nibble; one end of the worm is in his mouth, i’faith” (2.3.223–5). Obsessed with the acquisition of “Land, fair neat land” (1.2.106), Quomodo is explicit about the uses to which he will put Easy’s property: “Now I begin to set one foot upon the land. Methinks I am felling of trees already; we shall have some Essex logs yet to keep Christmas with, and that’s a comfort”

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(2.3.374–7). Or again: “Now come my golden days in. – Whither is his worshipful Master Quomodo . . . rid forth? – To his land in Essex! – Whence comes those goodly load of logs? – From his land in Essex!” (3.4.12–16). And yet again: “A little thing, three hundred pound a year, / Suffices nature, keeps life and soul together. / I’ll have ’em lopped immediately; I long / To warm myself by th’ wood” (4.1.73–6). An inhabitant of deforested, coal-burning Jacobean London, Quomodo understandably fixates upon his imagined real estate as a site for the extraction of firewood. As for London itself, it figures in this play as a “man-devouring city” (2.2.21), inhabited by predatory rogues with charactonyms like Blastfield and Salewood that announce their relation to the natural world all too clearly. The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) translates this vision of London to the dreamscape of a nameless Italian duchy, an exotic setting that – like Shakespeare’s Athens or Bohemia – owes a great deal to domestic manners and conditions. Here we witness a wholesale assault upon the world of nature, which is consumed and depleted to supply the raw material for courtly “luxur[y]” (1.1.9) in all senses of the word. In effect, the play stages a prolonged exercise in ecological cannibalism – an anti-pastoral dystopia whose degenerate elite devours the countryside, inhabitants and all. Disguised as a pander to try his sister’s virtue, the hero Vindice ironically exults, It was the greatest blessing happenèd to women When farmers’ sons agreed and met again To wash their hands and come up gentlemen. The commonwealth has flourished ever since. Lands that were mete by the rod, that labour’s spared; Tailors ride down and measure ’em by the yard. (2.1.206–11)

Forests, fields, and meadows succumb to the appetites of the court and are strangely translated into objects of urban commerce, particularly sexual commerce: “Fair trees, those comely foretops of the field, / Are cut to maintain headtires – much untold. / All thrives but Chastity – she lies a-cold” (2.1.218–20). In the resulting dynamic, the world of nature vanishes altogether, absorbed into the compass of a lady’s gown and the sexual arousal it engenders: Who’d sit at home in a neglected room, Dealing her short-lived beauty to the pictures That are as useless as old men, when those Poorer in face and fashion than herself Walk with a hundred acres on their backs, Fair meadows cut into green foreparts? (2.1.206–10)

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At its worst, this frenzy of consumption virtually annihilates the realm of nature, reducing it to the contents of an escritoire: I have been witness To the surrenders of a thousand virgins, And not so little. I have seen patrimonies washed a-pieces, Fruit-fields turned into bastards, And in a world of acres Not so much dust due to the heir ’twas left to As would well gravel a petition. (1.3.48–55)

Indeed the city’s exploitation of the country, as performed by and upon the human representatives of these two respective domains, arguably comprises the signature plot-motif of Middleton’s early career. In its most basic form, it consists of a series of urban scams inflicted upon rustic simpletons: in addition to Mad World’s Sir Bounteous and Michaelmas Term’s Easy, one might instance Witgood in A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), who opens the play lamenting that his “meadows[,] . . . goodly uplands and downlands” have all been “sunk into that little pit, lechery” (1.1.3–4); or the Country Wench in Michaelmas Term, whose journey to the metropolis anticipates Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress by over a century. This basic configuration then gives rise to a second-order sequence of stratagems in which sophisticated, opportunistic urbanites feign the identity of rustic simpletons in order to exploit the bad faith of still other urban opportunists. Thus the main plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One consists of Witgood’s ruse to regain his estate by convincing his uncle, Lucre, who holds the mortgage on it, that he, Witgood, stands to wed “a country gentlewoman and a widow” (2.1.33) and needs the guarantee of his own lands in order to pursue her successfully; Lucre, expecting a quid pro quo, signs over the mortgage only to discover that the gentlewoman in question is actually Witgood’s mistress – the “little pit” of “lechery” into which Witgood had sunk his estate to begin with. Likewise, the principal act of vengeance in The Revenger’s Tragedy occurs when Vindice, disguised as the pander Piato, ostensibly arranges an assignation between the play’s nameless Duke and an equally anonymous “country lady” (3.5.133); when the Duke kisses the lady’s face, he discovers it to be the disguised and poisoned skull of Vindice’s beloved, whom the Duke himself had earlier poisoned for refusing his advances. In such cases, the pretense of rural simplicity enables a refinement of predatory intrigue, re-staging the motif of the getter gotten in the context of an archetypal conflict between city and country.

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It may be objected that this conflict oversimplifies the social relations of Middleton’s plays by eliding the friction between city and court, and in a sense this is true. In fact, Middleton’s aristocrats occupy a fascinating and insecure position within the ecological dynamics of his work. They largely conform to two types: the gullible landed squire or country lady on one hand (e.g. Sir Bounteous, Easy), and the devilish, urbane Machiavel on the other (e.g. the entire ducal family of The Revenger’s Tragedy). While these types remain antithetical in their pure form, it is possible for one character to inhabit both successively; Witgood, for instance, metamorphoses from a landed dupe to an urban con-artist. And by the same token, it is possible for courtly Machiavels to credit themselves with greater sophistication than they actually possess (witness the aptly named Supervacuo in The Revenger’s Tragedy). But a broad and deep gulf still separates Middleton’s landed gentry from his courtly intriguers, and it may be understood in the first instance as a difference in relation to the natural world: a contrast between aristocrats at home in the country and those conversant with the ways of an urban courtly culture like that of Jacobean Whitehall. This contrast, in turn, echoes the discomfort of King James’s own policies toward the urban lords and gentry, policies which simultaneously promoted the court as a site of political and economic advancement while also fitfully seeking to discourage the migration of landed squires from country to town.25 Indeed, Middleton tends to imagine the court as a quintessentially antinatural environment, a diabolical mundus inversus where torches make “noon at midnight” (Revenger’s Tragedy, 2.3.44) and patricide is “sociable” (Revenger’s Tragedy, 3.5.217). This tendency, already present in his early work, grows only more pronounced in the later plays. In Women, Beware Women (1621), for instance, the figure of the rustic gull dwindles to comic relief, embodied in Guardiano’s Ward, “wealthy, but simple,” whose “parts consist in acres” (3.2.115–16). The Changeling (1622) and A Game at Chess (1624), for their part, both unfold in a world of closeted intrigue and labyrinthine interiors, where the open spaces of nature grow most conspicuous by their absence. Whether set in a dreamlike Spain or on a fantastic giant chessboard, these plays confront us with the imagined end-product of London’s consumption of the countryside: a universe where chemists in shuttered laboratories open windows into women’s wombs and false confidants pry open their souls, a place whose rare, cloistered orchards contain not apples and pears but “the savin tree” (Game at Chess, 1.1.217), an inedible abortificant grown not to produce but rather “to destroy fruit” (1.1.219). In this sense, Middleton pioneers a

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form of early modern eco-drama, haunted by the death of nature and drawn to enact that death again and again, in one feverish hallucination after another.

2 This claim being made, however, we must qualify it at once. Most importantly, while Middleton’s plays engage what we would now call ecological subjects, the playwright’s sensibility is by no means ecological in the current sense of the term. Middleton’s concern with human souls far surpasses his combined interest in plants, animals, minerals, water, the air, the earth, and its climate. He lacks even the beginnings of a modern scientific temperament; Evelyn’s Fumifugium, printed only thirty-four years after Middleton’s death, might as well come from another galaxy and another era. Middleton does understand that the natural world is changing, and that the growth of London has something to do with that change. Moreover, he sees the change as generally a bad thing. He recognizes that the city is encroaching upon the country, that Essex logs are being felled and arable land diminished. But he understands these developments primarily through early modern Europe’s residual mastercode of religious experience. He sees them, that is, as essentially spiritual rather than scientific events. Indeed, one could argue that Middleton’s proto-ecological observations are in fact an outgrowth of his religious temperament.26 They derive, that is, from traditional Judaeo-Christian associations between spiritual and physical pollution,27 associations that acquire a new particularity in the context of early modern London’s rapid urbanization and environmental degradation. To put it another way: Middleton is able to depict the city so successfully as a site of moral turpitude because he also views it as a place of excrement. In his dramatic world, London’s ordure relates to its depravity as does vehicle to tenor, and his observation of the natural environment achieves biting clarity not as an end in itself, but as evidence of things otherwise unseen. As a result, the vocabularies of moral degeneracy and environmental degradation tend to merge in Middleton’s work, so interanimating one another that they become indistinguishable. In Michaelmas Term the upstart Andrew Lethe’s mother travels to the city in search of her son, finds him, and, when he fails to recognize her, persuades him to accept her as a servant. “I’ll wait upon your worship,” she declares, to which he replies,

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lethe: Two pole off at least. mother gruel: I am a clean old woman, an’t like your worship. lethe: It goes not by cleanness here, good woman; if you were fouler, so you were braver, you might come nearer. (1.2.312–17)

Stow knew the city to be literally a “filthy” place, as he remarks again and again, and Middleton takes this filth as a matter of course. For her part, Mother Gruel may be forgiven for mistakenly regarding it as offensive; new to London, she is not yet inured to the city’s pollution, or to the inversion of moral values that accompanies it. As another character declares later in the same play, “if ditches were not cast once a year, and drabs once a month, there would be no abiding i’ th’ city” (3.1.222–4). Apart from these rare, inadequate intervals of cleansing, environmental contamination and spiritual corruption serve as Middleton’s standard coordinates for the depiction of early modern urban life. Given European culture’s heavy traditional investment in the moral regulation of feminine behavior, it should come as no surprise that the dyad of physical and spiritual defilement is repeatedly figured in Middleton’s works as a juxtaposition of real estate and women’s sexuality.28 As Sir Alexander Wengrave declares at the end of The Roaring Girl (1611), “The best joys / That can in worldly shapes to man betide / Are fertile lands and a fair fruitful bride” (11.202–4). Middleton’s London, by contrast, is a place of squalid, desolate lands and unfair, unfruitful un-brides. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, even the virtuous Moll wriggles out of her bedroom through “a little hole looked into the gutter” (4.4.8) to elope with Touchwood Junior. Elsewhere in the play she is jostled by such other paragons of conventional femininity as the barren Lady Kix and the depraved but fruitful Mistress Allwit. Even the elderly Mother Gruel grasps the sexual application of her son’s rule that “It goes not by cleanness here”: Nay, and that be the fashion here, I hope I shall get it shortly; there’s no woman so old but she may learn, and as an old lady delights in a young page or monkey, so there are young courtiers will be hungry upon an old woman, I warrant you. (Michaelmas Term 1.2.318–22)29

In The Changeling, this pattern of reference elicits one of Middleton’s most celebrated images, as Beatrice-Joanna, taken in murder and adultery, likens herself to a basinful of medical effluvia deposited in the local kennels:30 O come not near me, sir. I shall defile you. I am that of your blood was taken from you For your better health. Look no more upon’t, But cast it to the ground regardlessly; Let the common sewer take it from distinction.

(5.3.149–53)

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As Beatrice-Joanna’s language suggests, the parallel of environmental degradation and spiritual corruption may encompass another term as well: the microcosm of the individual body, as affected by infirmity and disease. In this respect, Middleton’s language can hardly be called distinctive; any number of his contemporaries exploited the capacities of illness as metaphor.31 But as it develops in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing, this language of medical pathology is also a function of ecological change and a product of environmental disturbance. I have already argued for the preeminence and conceptual linkage of two relatively new afflictions – bubonic plague and syphilis – within the early modern understanding of the hazards associated with city life; likewise I have argued that both these ailments should be understood, in their European dimension, as deriving from human interference with global ecological conditions. As it happens, both diseases also functioned as spurs to exceptional artistic and literary productivity, ranging from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the “motifs of memento mori,” and “the various Dances of Death” to Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus.32 In terms of Middleton’s non-dramatic literary output, the poet’s early plague pamphlets must also be included in this roster; written during the pestilence of 1603 that forced James I to postpone his English coronation, they would arguably not exist at all had London been less hospitable to the plague bacillus. But further, beyond such obvious historical and literary associations, Middleton’s dramatic characters instinctively tend to juxtapose these same two diseases. When the courtesan Frank Gullman counterfeits illness in A Mad World, My Masters, Sir Bounteous asks in fright, “Hist, Master Doctor, a word, sir, hark, ’tis not the plague, is’t?” – to which the scene’s counterfeit doctor responds sotto voce, “He ne’er asks whether it be the pox or no, and of the twain that had been more likely” (3.2.30–1, 34–5). The pawnbroker Frip in Your Five Gallants (1607) refuses to do business with a customer from a parish infected with the plague, declaring that he “will n[ot] purchase the plague for six pence in the pound,” sentiments the customer cheerfully acknowledges in kind: “The pox arrest you, sir, at the suit of the suburbs” (1.1.46–7, 51–2). And on a grander scale, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside associates disease metaphorically with a whole series of urban behaviors. The play’s promoters – corrupt informers paid to help enforce the city’s Lenten prohibition against eating flesh – first appear as “poisonous officers that infect / And with a venomous breath taint every goodness” (2.1.117–18). When Sir Walter Whorehound discovers his rival, Touchwood Junior, in an intricate plot to elope with Moll Yellowhammer, he declares, “I must hereafter know you for no friend, / But one that

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I must shun like pestilence” (3.1.51–2). Learning of Whorehound’s promiscuity, Yellowhammer shrugs it off: The knight is rich, he shall be my son-in-law. No matter, so the whore he keeps be wholesome – My daughter takes no hurt then. So let them wed; I’ll have him sweat well ere they go to bed. (4.3.267–70)

Moll herself finally escapes the arranged marriage to Whorehound by feigning that she has “catched her bane o’th’ water” (5.2.7) – i.e. contracted a deadly ailment from unwholesome exposure to the Thames. Whorehound’s sexual plaything, Mistress Allwit, is “the grand whore of spittles” (5.1.153). Again and again, modes of corrupt or underhanded behavior associated with the city are likewise associated with the city’s distinctive maladies, diseases whose own urban character is a product of changing relations with the natural environment. But it does not suffice to point out that Middleton likens urban behavior to environmentally conditioned illnesses. The urban behavior in question is itself environmentally conditioned. It arises, that is, from changes in Londoners’ lived relation to the natural world. As always, foremost among these changes is the city’s staggering population growth, which finds a fit emblem in the preternatural fecundity of Chaste Maid’s Touchwood Senior;33 by Middleton’s day, there were more people per square mile in London than almost anywhere else in Europe, and this fact affected the ways they treated each other. The urban scam, that centerpiece of Middletonian comedy, provides a case in point. It presupposes a difference between country and city manners, a difference grounded in the fact that denizens of the country have far fewer human companions and form deeper personal bonds with the ones they have. Surveying Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets, Katharine Maus summarizes the difference as follows: Greene’s coseners self-consciously exploit rustic modes of identity formation based upon kinship relations, reputation among one’s neighbors, and reciprocal acts of hospitality. They counterfeit social intimacy with one for whom that intimacy involves obligations . . . The wiliness of the thieves, is, Greene emphasizes, a distinctively urban trait, a product of the distance between emerging and traditional ways of life.34

Middleton’s rogues operate in just the same way.35 In Michaelmas Term, for instance, Shortyard insinuates himself into Easy’s company by claiming a mutual acquaintance in the country and invoking the language of mutual obligation:

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shortyard: An Essex gentleman, sir? easy: An unfortunate one, sir. shortyard: I’m bold to salute you, sir. You know not Master Alsup there? easy: O, entirely well.

... shortyard: I am bound in my love to him to see you furnished . . . To Master Alsup, sir, to whose remembrance I would love to drink till past remembrance. [Drinks] easy: I shall keep Christmas with him, sir, where your health shall likewise undoubtedly be remembered. (2.1.7–30)

It has become commonplace for biologists to observe that the behavior of non-human animals can alter radically in response to shifting environmental circumstances. Sharks swim ever closer to shore in search of shrinking food supplies; starving bears learn to forage out of garbage receptacles. In similar spirit, Middleton’s urban scams illustrate a fundamental change in the ecology of human manners: in the increasingly competitive environment of early modern London, human predatory impulses that, given less congested circumstances, would primarily be directed toward non-human species begin now, for lack of a better alternative, to take fellow human beings increasingly as their object. As Quomodo reminds us, “Gentry is the chief fish we tradesmen catch.” If Middleton does indeed pioneer a form of early modern eco-drama, his keen-eyed description of such ecologically conditioned modes of urban behavior must be counted as its crowning achievement. Middleton’s perceptions grow especially acute in the case of what I call his second-order hoaxes: those tricks in which one urban gamester gulls another by himself pretending to be a gullible rustic. The promoter scene from A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (2.2) offers a fine concluding example of how these situations redirect the predatory impulse from non-human species to other human beings, while also operating within the broad framework of Christian devotion that grounds Middleton’s proto-ecological observations. Here the cuckold Allwit escapes from the christening-party for his wife’s latest child and into the street, where he encounters two of Jacobean London’s notorious food police: so-called promoters, whose task it is to enforce the city’s Lenten dietary restrictions. Allwit recognizes these as classic figures of the city’s bad faith, hypocrites who seize prohibited meat only to consume or re-sell it themselves: “This Lent will fat the whoresons up with sweetbreads, / And lard their whores with lamb-stones” (2.2.67–8). For entertainment he turns the tables on them, pretending to be newly

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arrived from the countryside – “a stranger both unto the city / And to her carnal strictness” (2.2.74–5) – in search of a clandestine butcher who can provide him with “veal and green-sauce” (2.2.80). Once the promoters’ greed has been aroused by this rumor, Allwit reveals his true identity and insultingly abandons them, thus demonstrating his own superior cunning. But this indignity only serves as prologue to the promoters’ real discomfiture. Following Allwit there appears a nameless wench, carrying a basket from which protrudes a poorly hidden loin of mutton. The promoters, sensing a “fool” (2.2.139), accost her at once, confiscating the basket. For her part, the wench protests that she carries it for “a wealthy gentlewoman” with a medical dispensation to eat meat, and promises to provide “true authority from the higher powers” to that effect (2.2.147, 151). Apparently afraid lest the promoters might disappear with the confiscated meat while she goes in search of her license, the wench makes them “swear to keep it” for her (2.2.158), and as soon as she disappears they fall greedily to unpacking the basket’s contents: second promoter: I prithee look what market she hath made. first promoter: Imprimis, sir, a good fat loin of mutton. What comes next under this cloth?

... second promoter: Some loin of veal? first promoter: No, faith, here’s a lamb’s head, I feel that plainly . . . [He takes out [a] baby] second promoter: Ha? first promoter: ’Swounds, what’s here? second promoter: A child! first promoter: A pox of all dissembling cunning whores!

... second promoter: The quean made us swear to keep it too.

... first promoter: Half our gettings must run in sugar-sops And nurses’ wages now, besides many a pound of soap And tallow; we have need to get loins of mutton still, To save suet to change for candles. (2.2.159–77)

This exchange is justly celebrated for its startling juxtaposition of human and non-human animals, re-staging Christ’s redemptive sacrifice within the calendar cycle of Lent and Easter. But it also translates this sacred matter into the stuff of city comedy, coarsening and debasing the pattern

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of Christ’s incarnation by placing it in a new environment. The environment in question – that of Jacobean London – lends the entire exchange an ironic, anti-pastoral air, one concomitant with the city’s displacement of traditional rural relations. For one thing, conventional patterns of consumption are disrupted. Allwit describes his promoters as determined “To arrest the dead corpses of poor calves and sheep” (2.2.62) when in fact they apprehend people, inhabitants of the city who take the place of farm animals as the objects of a new and distinctively urban harvest. And where this turn of phrase metonymically endows animal carcasses with the status of human city-dwellers, other lines reverse the transformation, translating human beings into the equivalent of barnyard beasts.36 To the promoters, Allwit is “a bird” (2.2.78), a “[g]reen-goose” ready to be “sauced” (2.2.81); for his part, Allwit views the promoters as “sheep-biting mongrels” (2.2.99) and “rich men’s dogs” (2.2.59), scavengers too vicious to be trusted with guarding a flock. The emphasis, again and again, is upon the unnaturalness of the relations in question, relations which in turn foreground the unnatural character of the urban environment itself. Under these circumstances, the surprise appearance of an infant within the serving-wench’s basket of meat not only enacts a reversal of expectations and of species; it also inverts yet again the set of relations upon which the scene itself is grounded. Tricksters become dupes, predators become prey, Christus Redemptor is reborn as Christus Edax, and the promoters discover themselves to be the ultimate victims of the anti-pastoral environment in which they operate. The flesh they have confiscated from others is now in turn confiscated from them; as the First Promoter complains, “we have need to get loins of mutton still” (2.2.176). The wench’s child presides over this spectacle as a kind of parodic anti-savior: no good shepherd, but rather the archetypal swindler. Finally, this entire catenation of reversals is enabled by one more: the unexpected translation of the promoters themselves from the role of urban rogues to that of country simpletons. It is a change signaled by the promoters’ own naive subjection to traditional customs; they hold themselves bound by the power of an oath in ways that Middleton’s genuine London rogues – Quomodo, for instance, or Allwit – would dismiss with contempt. This wench, the Second Promoter laments, “has made calves’ heads of us” (2.2.179); “[t]he quean made us swear to keep” the child (2.2.170). As the scene closes, the promoters set out for Brentford to find the infant a wet-nurse, abandoning, for the time being, the city whose manners they have so imperfectly absorbed.

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama 3

A dramatic exchange like the foregoing would have offered its original audience at least two discrete sorts of pleasure. On one hand, spectators would have had the satisfaction of seeing their oppressors oppressed, of witnessing poetic justice exacted upon a class of much-despised urban predators. On the other hand, playgoers would also have witnessed a celebration of their own predatory cunning, a skill in laying traps and exploiting innocence that serves to define the people of London as a distinct social group. These pleasurable responses, while equally available, nonetheless remain contradictory. One needs a certain gift for emotional compartmentalization to be able, at one and the same time, to revel in the deserved punishment of an urban con-artist and also to identify, however ambiguously, with the category of urban con-artists itself. But that is what A Chaste Maid in Cheapside invites its spectators to do. And in one sense, these contradictory responses prove consistent: they provide spectators with both strategies for emotional self-preservation and ways of handling the psychological stress that accompanied environmental change in early modern London. At heart, Middleton’s works remain obsessed with this change, whether it takes the form of pollution or enclosure, of disease or deception. The playwright’s city comedies, in particular, register the violence which modern urban life perpetrated upon prior ecological relations, and if the plays dramatize this violence in contradictory ways, that too is understandable. After all, the citizens of Middleton’s London were themselves caught in a contradictory situation, forced at once to recognize the loss of an old order of existence and to find ways of living within – and if possible liking – a new one. Middleton’s city comedy offered them a vehicle for doing just this. In more general terms, one might also locate a similar contradiction in the contours of Middleton’s overall career, specifically as a tension between the encomiastic mode of his civic entertainments and the satirical tone of his writing for the stage. Obviously the former was constrained by occasion; to a less blatant degree, so was the latter. Taken together, the entertainments and stage-plays thus suggest an authorial sensibility itself shaped by specific and incompatible ecologies of literary production. Gary Taylor has recently drawn a contrast between Middleton and Shakespeare by emphasizing Shakespeare’s character as a “company man” whose livelihood and dramatic output were overwhelmingly defined by his affiliation with the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men.37 The point is well taken, but it risks depicting Middleton as a deviation from the Shakespearean norm

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when, if anything, the reverse is true. As a shareholder in the King’s Men, Shakespeare held a place virtually unique in the Jacobean theater world, a place marked by the general convergence of the poet’s obligations to his popular audience and his main aristocratic patron. The plays he wrote for the Globe and Blackfriars stages were, with fairly minor alterations, the same ones he composed for performance at Whitehall; nor did Shakespeare busy himself, as did so many of his contemporaries, with the production of masques and other such entertainments. To this extent, Middleton’s career may arguably be better compared to that of Ben Jonson, another Jacobean playwright whose professional practices represent something like an industry standard. Like Jonson, Middleton wrote widely for the stage without tying himself in the process to a single acting company. Like Jonson, Middleton thus pursued playwriting as one among various interrelated literary practices that sufficed in aggregate to keep body and soul together and that entailed extensive work in non-dramatic genres as well as occasional dramatic forms such as the masque and the pageant. And this is so because, again like Jonson, Middleton drew much of his livelihood from patronage relations that competed with (or, from another perspective, offered refuge from) the demands of writing for the stage. Of course, Middleton and Jonson part company in certain other respects; unlike Middleton, Jonson quarreled endlessly with his audiences and colleagues, and the courtly orientation of Jonson’s masques contrasts most interestingly with the civic focus of Middleton’s pageants. But taken together, the professional lives of these two poets offer fascinating insight into what we might call the socioecological relations structuring literary production in Jacobean London. In Middleton’s case, we might also note that, insofar as it relies upon projects like the New River and patrons like Sir Hugh Myddelton, this ecology of literary production is sustained by literal interventions into England’s broader ecological balance as well. 4 Finally, we might revisit the confrontation between city and country that Middleton staged so effectively throughout his career as a playwright, approaching it this time from a biographical perspective. In this context it bears note that the peak years of the poet’s literary productivity brought him into close contact not just with Jacobean urban life, but with the tension between urban and rural modes of existence. This is so because, at least from 1609 until his death in 1627, Middleton lived outside London,

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about a mile southwest of Southwark in the village of Newington Butts. It remains unclear as to exactly when or why he moved to these lodgings, although this may have happened shortly after his marriage to Mary Marbeck in 1602, and it may have been an altogether sensible response to the plague of 1603. But during the years when he worked on plays like The Roaring Girl, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and The Changeling, Middleton had to walk through the “stubbornly rural world [of Newington] in order to get to the urban rush-and-clutter of actors, alewives, and aldermen.”38 We cannot be certain just how this experience affected Middleton’s practice as a dramatist. On one hand, it has been suggested that the poet’s presentation of the goddess Flora in Honorable Entertainments, where she appears as “the queen of every laughing flower” (8.9), “celebrat[es] the countryside still intact all around Newington.”39 But despite his many other excellencies, Middleton is unlikely ever to be enrolled in the list of Britain’s great nature poets. On the other hand, by the 1600s Newington had become well established as a destination for day-tripping Londoners in search of a country outing. The village’s name alludes to the archery targets, or butts, maintained there, and Stow, for one, repeatedly laments the decline of this rural pastime in the face of enclosure and urban expansion.40 Likewise, a playhouse was situated in the village from 1576 to 1594, offering Londoners of Queen Elizabeth’s day another – and very different – incentive for making the trip out from the city. In this respect, Newington provided an excellent setting for the collision of urban and rural life, with the clash of manners and cultural practices this encounter would presuppose. It thus seems reasonable to imagine that Middleton’s preoccupation with the conflict between city and country might derive in part from his own experience as a Londoner living across the fields, a mile outside of town.

chapter 2

Jonson and the universe of things

Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton bear comparison in ways that exceed the scope of this study, but here their masques and entertainments require special attention. Both poets turned such productions into a personal specialty of sorts, while using them to pursue patronage relations and to supplement income derived from writing for the stage. In the process, both poets also resorted to a traditional vocabulary of celebratory exhortation grounded in the principle of laudando praecipere – instruction by means of praise whereby the poet appealed to his patron’s best self by presenting that self in dramatic form as a model for practical emulation.1 But while thus pursuing similar poetic agendas, Middleton and Jonson addressed their entertainments to very different audiences, with Middleton cultivating civic connections and Jonson turning instead for patronage to the courtly circle of Whitehall’s elite. As a result, Jonson’s masques engage ecological concerns very differently than do Middleton’s entertainments. The essential difference is easy enough to formulate. Middleton celebrated civic figures with a background in trade and urban or industrial development, and in the case of the New River undertaking, he went so far as to celebrate a development project itself. By contrast, Jonson glorified the members of a landed aristocracy with strong customary ties to the countryside and a marked antipathy for the urban commercial sector. Middleton’s entertainments tended to play themselves out within the London environment itself with the result that a Lord Mayor’s pageant like The Triumphs of Truth led its principals and spectators on a tour through the very heart of the city. Jonson’s masques, on the other hand, unfolded in restricted-access venues, against fantastic artificial settings divorced from the realities of early modern London: Palladian temples, mythic seascapes, and rural bowers. Middleton extolled his patrons by praising their personal industry and civic virtue, emphasizing their status as members – albeit particularly distinguished ones – of a broader urban commercial community. Jonson depicted his main patrons – the Jacobean 49

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royal family – as peerless, incontestable, self-sufficient forces of nature. On all these levels, the contrast could hardly be more striking. Jonson contributes to this disparity most visibly through his masques’ ongoing engagement with the pastoral mode, which emerges as a signature motif of early Stuart courtly festivity. For his part, of course, Middleton was also familiar with pastoral forms and gestures: Orpheus’ appearance in The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, for instance, draws deeply on pastoral precedent. However, the Jacobean royal family turned pastoral into something like a personal symbolic preserve, with far-reaching consequences for Jonson’s career as court poet. Stephen Orgel observes that “from 1616 onward[, w]hen pastoral settings appear [in Jonson’s courtly entertainments] they come at the end, and embody the ultimate ideal that the masque asserts.”2 But that is not to say they were absent from earlier productions. Sukanta Chaudhuri has declared pastoral “surprisingly rare” in the Jacobean period, but this is to view things through the lens of Elizabethan and Caroline practice.3 Already in 1605, the first scene to confront the spectators of Jonson’s first court masque consisted of “small woods, and here and there a void place fill’d with huntings” (Masque of Blackness, 25–6). By 1611, Oberon had presented the first “strategic identification between Pan and the reigning monarch” in English literary history.4 Indeed, if Barbara Lewalski can note that by 1632 “the Arcadia/Pan myth had been taken over by the Stuarts,”5 it is largely because Jonsonian masques like Oberon (1611) and Pan’s Anniversary (1621) had already rehearsed the connection decades earlier. For Orgel, the sovereign’s place in Jonsonian courtly entertainment is defined by the figure of the humanist mage, “asserting his control over his environment and the divinity of his rule through the power at his command,” manifesting “a vision of nature controlled by the human intellect.”6 On this view, King James is to The Golden Age Restored (1615) what Prospero is to The Tempest: a proto-Baconian “Renaissance empiricist”7 exerting rational, human control over the powers of nature. But in fact Jonson’s masques often present the king as less mage than demiurge: not so much a human governor of natural processes as their superhuman animating spiritual force. In Oberon “he makes it euer day, and euer spring, / where he doth shine, and quickens euery thing / Like a new nature” (354–6). In Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1615) he embodies “the excellence of the Sunne and Nature” (187). In The Vision of Delight (1617) he is eulogized as “a King / Whose presence maketh this perpetuall Spring,” such that “The founts, the flowers, the birds, the bees, / The heards, the flocks, the grasse, the trees, / Doe all confess him” (201–2, 208–10). Pan’s

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Anniversary presents him as the goatherd god, “Great Pan,” to whom a “hallowed troop of Herdsmen pray / For this their Holy-day” (255, 257–8). The Golden Age Restored depicts him as “Ioue” himself, “[w]hose power is euery where” (230, 233). One could add other examples, too, all resonating primarily in the spiritual rather than the intellectual register. By contrast, the implements of scientific inquiry enter Jonson’s masques in less lofty ways, mainly as accouterments of the poet’s antimasques, where they represent a kind of bleed-over from the satirical concerns of his stage-plays. Most obviously, Mercury Vindicated revisits the subject-matter of The Alchemist (1610) by staging a dance of “threedbare Alchymists” (110–11) followed by a second dance “of imperfect creatures, with helmes of lymbecks on their heads” (183–4). News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) derides the “perplexive Glasses” and “Mathematicians Perspicill[s]” (91, 101) developed by Galileo and his followers to study the heavens. Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624) – which, like News from the New World, employs material to reappear in The Staple of News (1625) – features a cook who rates himself “‘boue all the Chemists, / Or bare-breechd brethren of the RosieCrosse” for his command of the arts and sciences (102–3). Such moments are of course satirical and ironic, but for that very reason they contrast instructively with Jonson’s praise of King James in his main masques. The Cook in Neptune’s Triumph may claim to have “Nature in a pot” (102), but the manipulation of nature via pots, limbecks, and “perplexive” glasses proves in the end to be only a debased, parodic double of the sovereign’s genuine control, which arises not from professional industry but from the royal character itself. Where the labor of alchemists, cooks, and Rosicrucians remains fruitless, King James’s mere existence emerges as endlessly productive. Otium becomes his negotium. It is an attractive vision – at least if you happen to be a king – and it has the further advantage of sorting well with official Jacobean policy on the relation between city and country. Between 1614 and the end of his reign, King James issued “[n]o fewer than nine Proclamations against spending the legal-term holidays in London,” decrees which aimed to “curb the inordinate growth of the metropolis, with the attendant problems of overcrowding, disease, and high food prices.”8 Taken together, these proclamations may represent the first concerted effort by an English government to deal with the environmental problems arising from unregulated urbanization, and the solution they proposed was at heart very simple: to repopulate the country by depopulating the city. At the same time, King James turned the support of rustic holiday pastimes into a

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major element of his cultural agenda. The 1617 issuance (and 1618 reissuance) of the Book of Sports left no doubt on this score, lending royal approval to such traditional parish activities as “dauncing, either men or women, Archery for men . . . hauing of May-Games, Whitson Ales, and Morrisdances, and the setting vp of Maypoles and other sports therewith vsed.”9 The Book of Sports was quite literally born in the country, it being devised in response to a petition presented to King James in 1617 while on progress in Lancashire;10 and in throwing its support behind traditional rural pastimes it also opposed the strict Sabbatarianism increasingly popular with London’s radical reformed community. But King James’s endorsement of rural cultural practices was on record even before the Book of Sports. When Robert Dover began promoting the Cotswold Games around 1612, the king lent his backing to the enterprise, even providing Dover with some “old clothes, with a Hat and Feather and Ruff” from the royal wardrobe as finery for the occasion.11 These “Rural Games,” as William Somervile called them in 1740,12 were originally intended as an anti-Puritan intervention in the Jacobean culture wars, and while the games drew their immediate inspiration from the classical Olympics, they also acquired predictable pastoral associations in the process. The verse anthology Annalia Dubrensia, printed in 1636 to celebrate Dover’s achievement with the games, is full of these. In it, for instance, Shackerley Marmion refers obliquely to King Charles I’s continuation of his father’s support for the Gloucestershire competition, declaring that “Pan for his [i.e. Dover’s] sake, shall often passe that way, / And make your Mountaines, his Arcadia.”13 Dover’s cousin John Stratford goes further: Nymphes, Faunes and Satyres, Thessaly have fled, And pleasant Tempe have abandoned; Keeping their Revells now on Cotswold downes, In thy [i.e. Dover’s] great honour, dauncing Maskes, and Rownes: Which tunes the silvan Queristers doe sing, By Pan instructed for their Revelling.14

For his part, Jonson was no stranger to the royal taste for rural pastimes. He contributed an epigram to the Annalia Dubrensia, and his lost pastoral entitled The May Lord “was in all likelihood written to commemorate the royal declaration [of the Book of Sports].”15 Indeed, Jonson’s masques and Dover’s games may be understood as separate components within a broader, coordinated program of royal policy and self-presentation. This program could be broadly characterized as anti-Puritan, to some degree anti-London, pro-country, and bucolic in

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its formulations, and within this context the Stuart taste for pastoral emerges as something more than an idle affectation. In fact, James I deserves credit for displaying an unusual level of environmental awareness in his proclamations and personal style. Like some prominent latter-day conservationists, he was a passionate outdoorsman who paradoxically translated his zeal for the hunt into various efforts to preserve wildlife and forestry. Likewise his commitment to rural pastimes, his concern over London’s unregulated growth, and his fondness for Arcadian themes in his courtly entertainments all bespeak a personal character with deep emotional ties to the natural world. All this is noteworthy, given the “breathtakingly anthropocentric spirit” of most early modern attitudes toward nature,16 and it only becomes more so when one adds that the king believed dogs, at least, to be capable of syllogistic reasoning.17 In a variety of ways, thus, King James’s pastoral follies deserve a serious place within the pre-history of modern environmentalism. Yet still and all, the king’s nascent environmentalism posed little real challenge to early modern prejudices, and as progressive as it might seem from a modern ecological standpoint, it bore unhappy political consequences in its own day. Most damagingly, it could be perceived less as an item of legitimate policy than as an obstacle to serious government. That is certainly how Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, the Venetian Secretary to England in 1603, viewed matters. Writing within a year of James’s English accession, Scaramelli could already complain, “The new King . . . seems to have almost forgotten that he is a King except in his kingly pursuit of stags, to which he is quite foolishly devoted.”18 Just as the courtly entertainments so important to James and Jonson could be dismissed as “toys to come amongst . . . serious observations,”19 so too could the royal fascination with the chase. According to Edward Berry, by 1610 the king “had become notorious for his personal obsession with hunting, his lavish expenditures on the sport, and his incessant efforts to limit it and punish illegal hunting.”20 Even so determined a theorist of divine right as Robert Filmer could caution monarchs that “the Profit of every Man in particular, and of all together in general, is not always one and the same, and . . . the Publick is to be preferred above the Private.”21 Yet this king’s interest in the natural world was so conveniently personal that it became hard to view as anything but ruinous self-indulgence, pursued at his subjects’ expense. As Francis Osborne complained, in King James’s day “one man might with more safety have killed another, than a raskall-deare . . . [so] tragically was this sylvan prince against dear-killers, and indulgent to man-slayers.”22

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In more recent times, environmental activism has repeatedly fallen prey to the accusation that its “‘love of nature’ (poorly) concealed ‘the hatred of men.’”23 So it is perhaps instructive to see this same charge already leveled against King James and his supporters in the 1600s. Here, already, the conservationist impulse is tainted by its connections both to a broad contempt for humanity and to a more specific politics of privilege. The early Stuart penchant for pastoral thus needs to be understood as one component within the larger complex of administrative policies, cultural preoccupations, and personal foibles that characterized the courtly community of Jacobean Whitehall and that continues to influence environmental attitudes and politics into the twenty-first century. For his part, Jonson seems to have well understood whose attitudes and politics he was writing his masques for. Consider for instance Pan’s Anniversary. First performed at court before King James in January of 1621, it was repeated a month later for Shrove Tuesday.24 The latter occasion recalls the inveterate struggle between carnival and Lent, and indeed the masque enacts a broad version of that conflict, opposing worship to entertainment, peace to strife, and ceremonious duty to riotous self-indulgence. But in its details, the performance’s antimasque also activates the traditional opposition between country and city, drawing its key figures of vice from that classic Jonsonian survey of London low life, Bartholomew Fair (1614). In that play, Jonson associates Smithfield with a variety of representative characters: “a Sword, and Buckler man” (actually, a whole crew of roaring boys who elevate belligerence to an art-form [Induction.14]); “Kind-heart, the Toothdrawer,” in case “any bodies teeth should chance to ake” (Induction.121, 16); a “Seller of Mouse-trappes” (Induction.145); a “Corne-Cutter” (Dramatis Personae.26); “a Iugler” (Induction.17); etc. And as it happens, these same figures reappear as exemplary grotesques in the antimasques of Pan’s Anniversary, where “a Sonne of the sword” leads in a troupe of Thebans that includes “a Tooth-drawer” (87), “a maker of Mouse-traps” (128–9), “a noble Corne-cutter” (108), and “an excellent Juggler” (104–5). Part of the masque’s point is to contrast James’s reputation as rex pacificus with the Thebans’ overdrawn bellicosity; by 1621, after all, it was thanks largely to James’s pacifism that England had escaped entanglement in the Thirty Years War. But the contrast between Thebes and Arcadia also entails the opposition between urban and rural modes of existence; the “thinges of Thebes” who threaten Pan’s solemnities boast that “the Towne is ours” (85–6), while threatening to “daunce [the Arcadians] down on their owne Greene-swarth” (60).

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In the event, it is the Thebans who are danced down, their pretensions firmly belittled by a shepherd who responds to them on behalf of Pan and his followers: Faith, your folly may deserve pardon, because it hath delighted: But, beware of presuming, or how you offer comparison with persons so neere Deities. Behold where they are, that have now forgiven you, whom should you provoke againe with the like, they will justly punish that with anger, which they now dismiss with contempt. (153–8)

And when the Thebans reappear, determined to “adventure another tryall” against their rivals (233), they receive the comeuppance they deserve: “[L]et them come, and not expect the anger of a Deitie to pursue them, but meet them. They have their punishment with their fact. They shall be sheepe” (237–40). The second antimasque thus translated into an ovine extravaganza, the shepherd presiding over Pan’s rites dismisses the Thebans once and for all: “Now let them returne with their solide heads, and carry their stupiditie into Boeotia, whence they brought it” (248–9). The heads in question are “solid” in the sense of “solidified, frozen” (OED “solid” adj. 3.b); in other words, their ovine transformation is rendered permanent. All rivalry thus dispensed with, the Arcadian shepherds return unmolested to their ritual observances. It is a denouement calculated to please a monarch whose politics and manners have placed him increasingly at odds with his urban subjects. Martin Butler is right to observe that while the masque’s blocking figures “[o]stensibly . . . have come from Thebes . . . they sound rather as though they had stumbled in from urban London.”25 One might add that their unceremonious dismissal thus in a sense reenacts King James’s policy of discouraging urban growth; by translating Thebans to sheep, Pan’s Anniversary drains the city of its people and returns them to the countryside, where they presumably belong. In the process, the masque also suggests the extent to which one might view the inhabitants of London as themselves a product of environmental degradation, a sort of urban waste in need of management and disposal. Other Jonsonian masques can be less insistent in their deployment of pastoral form and in their denigration of urban cultural practices, but Jonson is seldom inattentive to King James’s preferred habits of mind and modes of expression. Insofar as these entailed a penchant for outdoor life, a desire to preserve the countryside unharmed, anxiety over London’s unprecedented growth, and an instinctual aversion to the manners and interests of the city’s inhabitants, they must be understood as responding

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in large part to the changing ecological circumstances of early Stuart England. Still, one might object that such motives are not the only ones underwriting James’s policies and preoccupations; that the king’s relationship with the city of London, in particular, cannot be characterized as purely and simply antagonistic; and that for all his interest in the outdoors, James’s financial problems led to various non-eco-friendly policies, as for instance his “ruthless exploitation of the forests” via the monopoly of the King’s Ironworks in the forest of Dean.26 All this is true but largely irrelevant. People in financial embarrassment can do embarrassing things, just as people confronted with the difficulties of others can do helpful things, out of sheer expediency. To return to our opening comparison between Jonson and Middleton, for instance, it is worth recalling that by 1613, when Middleton composed The Manner of his Lordship’s Entertainment in honor of the New River conduit project, King James had become the foremost financial partner in this civic-improvement scheme. But no one celebrates him in this capacity, and it is hard to see how such celebration might be rendered consistent with the king’s preferred selfimage as a god – or at least a force – of nature. King James might cooperate with and support the city’s interests when necessary, but his mental and physical habitat of choice, as reflected in Jonson’s masques, lay altogether elsewhere. 1 When it comes to Jonson’s stage-plays, again the comparison with Middleton proves instructive. Brian Gibbons’ 1967 study Jacobean City Comedy, which first delineated the genre, presents these two playwrights as its principal exponents and devotes a chapter of comparative analysis to their work.27 Other scholarship following Gibbons’ lead has expanded upon this comparison, claiming that these two playwrights “represent most clearly the . . . attitudes toward the city” typical of the genre they pioneered, and pairing Chaste Maid and The Alchemist (1610) as the two most perfect essays in the form.28 Yet much distinguishes the Puritan-leaning Middleton from the Puritan-hating Jonson, even in regard to their equally dismal depictions of Jacobean urban life. Jonson’s classicism offers a case in point. While Middleton is certainly no stranger to classical texts and topoi, these prove far more central to Jonson’s career, offering him not just literary inspiration but something close to a way of life. For Katharine Maus, it is “the Roman moralists” – i.e. “Seneca, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero, Juvenal, Quintilian, and a few

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others” – who take the lead in this respect, supplying Jonson with “a general philosophical outlook” that emphasizes “temperance, self-reliance, fortitude, altruistic self-sacrifice.”29 But for present purposes one might speak more accurately of the Roman satirists – Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Martial, perhaps Tacitus in his more dyspeptic moments – as the prime models of Jonsonian imitation. It is well known, for instance, that Jonson’s Poetaster “borrows from more than one of Horace’s satires,” whereas “in Epicoene Truewit tries to dissuade Morose from marriage in language closely following Juvenal’s arraignment of women in his sixth satire.”30 However, the influence runs deeper than individual borrowings. In Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Jonson found a kind of satire that was sophisticated, urban, and imperial in nature, well suited for a society whose aggressive expansion entailed new modes of dealing with the natural world. Indeed, in many ways the Roman satirists seem to have already experienced the most unsettling novelties of Jacobean urban life: unregulated population growth, with its attendant crowding and disease; the tensions produced by regular anonymous interaction between people from very different backgrounds; the vertigo-inspiring plenitude of a transcontinental marketplace; the discomforting sense that the city has somehow acquired a life of its own. Between the composition of Horace’s satires (before 30 bce) and of Juvenal’s (in the early second century ce), Rome had become an empire, had massively expanded its territorial holdings, and had increased its civic size to match. While estimates of the city’s ancient population have varied wildly over the years, recent research suggests it to have approached half a million at the empire’s height.31 Growth rates are even harder to determine, but scholars nonetheless agree that “during the period ad 1–542 . . . the population increased,” probably reaching its “greatest strength in the second century.”32 The precise “tempo and scale of the population increase” remain “[d]isputable and probably irresolvable,” but the Roman satirists were clearly writing during the worst of it.33 That, at least, is the story told by the surviving demographic evidence. As for the satirists themselves, they are not always so understated. Indeed, to judge by their works, one might think at times that the city of Rome existed for the specific purpose of tormenting and outraging them. Martial, for instance, depicts the capital’s noise and congestion as a grand conspiracy to deprive him of sleep: [T]here’s no place in Rome for a poor man to think or rest. Schoolmasters deny you life in the morning, bakers at night, the hammers of the coppersmiths all day. On one hand the idle moneychanger rattles his grubby counter with Nero’s metal,

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on the other the pounder of Spanish gold dust beats his well-worn stone with shining mallet; neither does Bellona’s frenzied throng give up, nor the garrulous castaway with his swaddled trunk, nor the Jew that his mother taught to beg, nor the blear-eyed pedlar of sulphurated wares. Who can count up the losses of lazy sleep? . . . As for me, the thrusting of the passing crowd awakes me and Rome is at my bedside.34 [N]ec quiescendi in urbe locus est pauperi. Negant vitam ludi magistri mane, nocte pistores, aerariorum marculi die toto; hinc otiosus sordidam quatit mensam Neroniana nummularius massa, illinc balucis malleator Hispaniae tritum nitenti fuste verberat saxum; nec turba cessat entheata Bellonae, nec fasciato naufragus loquax trunco, a matre doctus nec rogare Iudaeus, nec sulphuratae lippus institor mercis. numerare pigri damna quis potest somni? ... nos transeuntis nisus excitat turbae, et ad cubile est Roma.

Passages like this influenced Jonson in at least two parallel ways: on the levels of subject-matter and rhetoric respectively. In the former capacity, Martial’s complaint lends voice to misgivings about the growth of the Roman marketplace, whose exuberance proves inversely proportional to the poet’s ability to sleep. In the latter regard, Martial employs the trope of enumeratio to detail the city’s relentless assault upon his senses. The poet’s satirical epigram thus gains its energy from the very economic expansion that threatens his peace of mind. Rome’s throng of teachers, bakers, metalsmiths, money-changers, priests and worshipers, street vendors, and beggars translates into an indignant sequence of parallel grammatical constructions that leads from “nec turba” through “nec . . . naufragus” and “nec . . . Iudaeus” to “nec . . . institor.” To this extent, Martial’s epigram itself, as hostile as it may at first appear to the poet’s urban environment, emerges in the end as one more product and emblem of Rome’s perversely expansive economy. To paraphrase Juvenal, it is difficult not to write satire under such circumstances, since satire functions as a natural literary expression of the poet’s sense of place.

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The field of Renaissance studies offers a comparable spectacle played out on both the global and local levels. To begin with the broad view, in recent decades scholars have placed new emphasis on market activity as a defining feature of early modern cultural expression. The period’s colonial expansion, artistic productivity, emerging bourgeoisie, menageries and Wunderkammern, bibliographical innovations and compendia of natural philosophy can all be understood as “a celebration of the urge to own, the curiosity to possess the treasures of other cultures, and pride in a new craftsmanship that can make the most humdrum commodities desirable.”35 More specifically, the early English drama can be seen as imbued with the energies of the marketplace, as various studies have argued.36 Jonson provides more than a typical case in point: his plays adopt and transform the enumerative impulse of classical satire into a phantasmagoric panoply of objects and vendors, commodities and purveyors. Jonsonian city comedy unfolds within a universe of things, indeed a universe of thinginess, in which the items that populate our lives seem ready to overwhelm us at the slightest opportunity. The general impression is of a creative process gone mad, producing a seemingly endless series of random, illogical forms until the entire catenating assemblage collapses in upon itself to reveal an essential poverty beneath the giddy display. In a sense, thus, Jonson’s greatest characters all speak in the same voice, in the trope of enumeratio, constantly counting things, distinguishing among them, moving them around, embellishing them, savoring them. Mosca does this in Volpone (1605): “Turkie carpets, nine – / . . . Two sutes of bedding, tissew – . . . / Of cloth of gold, two more – . . . / Of seuerall vellets, eight – . . . / . . . Eight chests of linen – ,” and so forth (5.3.1, 3, 6, 7, 11). Volpone does it too: Thy bathes shall be the iuyce of iuly-flowres, Spirit of roses, and of violets, The milke of vnicorns, and panthers breath Gather’d in bagges, and mixt with cretan wines.

(3.7.213–6)

So does Sir Epicure Mammon: My meat, shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded, With emeralds, saphyres, hiacynths, and rubies.

So too does Zeal-of-the-Land Busy:

(The Alchemist 2.2.72–4)

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I wil remoue Dagon there, I say, that Idoll, that remains . . . a beame, a very beame, not a beame of the Sunne, nor a beame of the Moone, nor a beame of a ballance, neither a house-beame, nor a Weauers beame, but a beame in the eye, in the eye of the brethren. (Bartholomew Fair 5.5.4–9)

Such fantasies of enumeration spring from a deep imaginative engagement with London’s marketplace, which, like Rome’s before it, holds out the prospect of an infinitely proliferating material world full of effortless comfort and variety. But, as with Milton’s Belial, all is false and hollow. The satisfactions which Jonson’s characters gape after disintegrate in the end, leaving behind only the detritus of urban blight. In The Alchemist, Lovewit searches his house for evidence of fabulous commerce only to discover that the place has been trashed in his absence: Here, I find The emptie walls, worse than I left ’hem, smok’d, A few crack’d pots, and glasses, and a fornace; The seeling fill’d with poesies of the candle: And Madame, with a Dildo, writ o’ the walls. (5.5.38–42)

In Volpone, Sir Politic Would-Be’s private diary reduces his schemes for attaining fortune and power to a catalogue of inanities: notandum, A rat had gnawne my spurre-lethers; notwithstanding, I put on new and did goe forth: but, first, I threw three beanes ouer the threshold. Item, I went, and bought two tooth-pickes, whereof one I burst, immediatly, in a discourse With a dutch merchant ’bout ragion del stato. From him I went, and payd a moccenigo For peecing my silke stockings; by the way, I cheapen’d sprats: and at St. Markes, I vrin’d.” (4.1.135–44)

For Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Joan Trash’s gingerbread becomes a “basket of Popery,” a “nest of Images” with the diabolical power to make “children to fall downe . . . and worship” (3.6.73, 58–9); for cooler heads, however, it is nothing but “stale bread, rotten egges, musty ginger, and dead honey” (2.2.9–10). The profusion of goods provokes both desire and anxiety, but when the life of things has run its course, an ever-rising tide of rubbish remains. Herein lies Jonson’s chief environmental insight, at once simple and profound: goods decay, but trash is forever. In The Staple of News (1625),

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Penniboy Junior fantasizes about the mining industry’s infinite riches: “[Y]ou Myne-men want no money, / Your streets are pau’d with ’t: there, the molten siluer / Runs out like creame, on cakes of gold” (1.3.58–60). By play’s end, however, Penniboy Senior’s pursuit of the “Infanta of the Mynes” (Dramatis Personae.13) has reduced him to madness, “Examining, and committing [his] poor curres, / To two old cases of close stooles, as prisons” (5.3.39–40). Not by coincidence, Dapper explores the same storyline in The Alchemist, where his initial plan to “leaue the law” and “win ten thousand pound” (1.2.91, 136) as a gambler evaporates into internment in Lovewit’s privy. In The Devil is an Ass (1616) the plot remains basically the same, leading from a vision of “[t]issue gownes, / Garters and roses, fourscore pound a paire, / Embroydred stockings, cut-worke smocks, and shirts” to the sulphurous combustion of Newgate Prison: “Such an infernall stincke, and steame behinde, / You cannot see St. Pulchars Steeple, yet” (1.1.126–8; 5.8.132–3). From a jaundiced perspective it is the story of London itself, in little: the arrival of new goods, the growth of markets, the increase of desire and frenetic activity, all in the end reduced to sewage: the contents of a close-stool, a shithouse, a prison. 2 For Jonson’s great voluptuaries, the cataloguing impulse asserts itself in long lists of luxury items designed to tickle – and unpleasantly confuse – the senses. Volpone imagines dining on “The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales, / The brains of peacocks, and of estriches” (3.7.202–3); Sir Epicure Mammon prefers “The beards of barbels, seru’d, in stead of sallades; / Oild mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps / Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off” (2.2.82–4). Even a lesser character like Sir Politic Would-Be “seems to be rummaging through the contents of some gothic lumber-room of the imagination, turning out tooth-picks and baboons, oranges, musk-melons, apricots, porpoises and lion-whelps, tinderboxes, onions, sprats, frayed stockings and Selsey cockles.”37 Promising unimaginable sensory gratification, such inventories regularly collapse into thin air, leaving nothing behind but a spume of garbage. Indeed, in some cases the lists are transparently empty from start to finish, with no material substance worth mentioning. In Poetaster (1601), for instance, Crispinus vomits up a series of inkhorn words symbolic of his vacuous literary pretensions: “O, I shall cast vp my – spurious – snotteries – / . . . / Chilblaind – o – o – clumsie / . . . / O – barmy froth – / . . . / – Puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventositous” (5.3.483, 485, 492, 494). The eponymous

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newsroom in The Staple of News retails journalistic dispatches with “no syllable of truth in them” (To the Readers, 14). One such report credits “the Brotherhood of the Rosie Crosse” with perfecting “[t]he Art of drawing farts out of dead bodies” (3.2.98–9), the fictitious words of the news story itself thus compounded out of the fictitious gas extracted from a fictitious rectum. Volpone and Mosca may have real wealth with which to beguile their clients; Subtle, Face, and Doll Common may have beakers and retorts and furnaces; but in the most extreme cases, Jonson’s lists are reduced to nothing but sound and air. Here again the Roman satirists leave their mark on the poet. After all, Martial 12.57 is all about sound – the sound of the city, which drives its speaker to distracted exhaustion. For his part, Juvenal fiddles on the same string: Here at Rome very many invalids die from insomnia, although it’s food undigested and clinging to the fevered stomach that induces the malaise in the first place. Which lodgings allow you rest, after all? You have to be very rich to get sleep in Rome. That’s the source of the sickness. The continual traffic of carriages in the narrow twisting streets and the swearing of the drover when his herd has come to a halt would deprive a Drusus or the seals of sleep.38 Plurimus hic aeger moritur vigilando (sed ipsum languorem peperit cibus imperfectus et haerens ardenti stomacho); nam quae meritoria somnnum admittunt? Magnus opibus dormitur in Vrbe. inde caput morbi. raedarum transitus arto vicorum in flexu et stantis convicia mandrae eripient somnum Druso vitulisque marinis.

Like Martial before him, Juvenal then segues into a catalogue of the city’s riotous street life: “One pokes me with his elbow, another with a hard pole. This guy bashes my head with a beam, that guy with a wine cask,” etc. (“Ferit hic cubito, ferit assere duro / alter, ad hic tignum capiti incutit, ille metretam”).39 As it happens, noise pollution does not acquire legal status as an environmental hazard until the 1970s, when it is addressed in legislation such as the United States Noise Control Act of 1972 and Part 3 of the United Kingdom Control of Pollution Act of 1974.40 Such laws acknowledge that “exposure to constant or high levels of noise can cause countless adverse health effects,”41 but Martial and Juvenal recognized as much, on the practical and poetic level, almost two thousand years earlier. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for Jonson’s treatment of the same subject-matter.

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The association between market activity, anthropogenic noise, and health hazards thus recurs in Jonson’s plays, suggesting the poet’s sensitivity to the acoustic environment in which he lived and worked. Crispinus’ literary emetic offers an obvious case in point. The Staple of News, too, not only drives Penniboy Senior mad, but also provides the usurer with a chorus of roaring boys who propose to “ieere him downe . . . in noyse” until he “dye a calues death” (5.5.22–3, 11). But the supreme Jonsonian exploration of the effects of urban noise pollution is surely Epicoene (1609), whose racket-averse villain, Morose, “cannot endure a Costard-monger, he swounes if he hear one” (1.1.154). To protect himself from London’s cacophony, Morose institutes an elaborate system of sound insulation that proves more ridiculous than effective: swathed in “a huge turbant of nightcaps on his head,” he “has beene vpon diuers treaties with the Fish-wiues, and Orange-women” and “hath chosen a street to lie in, so narrow at both ends, that it will receiue no coaches, nor carts, nor any of these common noises” (1.1.144–5, 149–50, 166–7). “A Brasier is not suffer’d to dwel in [his] parish” (1.1.155–6); an unfortunate bear-ward “cryed his games vnder master Morose’s windore” and for his pains “was sent crying away, with his head made a most bleeding spectacle to the multitude” (1.1.175–7); the endless ringing of London’s church-bells has led Morose to “deuise a roome, with double walls, and treble seelings; the windores close shut, and calk’d” (1.1.183–4); and so forth. The heart of Jonson’s comedy encompasses two plots: Morose’s design to marry a perfectly silent woman, beget heirs, and thus disinherit his scapegrace nephew, Dauphine Eugenie; and Dauphine’s counter-plot, which tricks Morose into marrying a crossdressed boy and opening his house to a riotous wedding celebration. To escape the resulting clamor, Morose must guarantee Dauphine an annual income out of his estate, and the play thus ends with silence vanquished and noise triumphant. In recent years it has become standard to view Epicoene as a staged charivari or skimmington-ride: a dramatic version, that is, of the clamorous parades by which early modern townspeople shamed their compatriots for such perceived violations of normative social and sexual order as adultery, shrewishness, and May December marriage.42 On this logic Morose, the “senex” (2.6.12) who seeks to wed a young woman to disinherit his nephew, falls under immediate censure, and there is no doubt that folk practices like the skimmington-ride inform Jonson’s play. But Epicoene is about noise in a much broader sense, encompassing not only a staged charivari but comparable versions of bear-baiting (as Mistress Otter sets upon her unfortunate husband in 4.2), quarreling (as Sir Amorous La Foole and

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Sir John Daw settle their imagined differences in 4.5), and academic disputation (as the disguised Cutbeard and Captain Otter debate impediments to marriage in 5.3). Throughout everything, the city looms large. Truewit warns Morose that if his wife is fair, “all the yellow doublets, and great roses i’ the towne” will pay court to her (2.2.67–8), while if he indulges her she will insist upon filling his house with a succession of groomes, foot-men, vshers, and other messengers; beside embroyderers, iewellers, tire-women, sempsters, fether-men, perfumers; while shee feeles not how the land drops away; nor the acres melt; nor forsees the change, when the mercer has your wood for her veluets. (2.2.105–12)

The play’s pretentious ladies of fashion dream about outings “to Bed’lem, to the China houses, and to the Exchange” (4.3.24–5). Morose’s ostensibly silent wife, Epicoene, actually babbles “like a conduit-pipe” (4.4.78–9), and rather than suffer her company, Morose offers to do “supererogatorie penance, in a bellfry, at Westminster-hall, i’ the cock-pit, at the fall of a stagge; the tower-wharfe (what place is there else?) London-bridge, Parisgarden, Belins-gate, when the noises are at their height and loudest” (4.4.12–16). The sonic environment of London carries everything before it, overpowering any efforts to resist or ignore it, swelling into the acoustic equivalent of an urban landfill. In all this, one can discern the standard gestures and language of the Roman satirists: the revulsion at noise, the impulse to enumerate its sources, the horrified fascination with a seemingly uncontrollable marketplace, all implicitly contrasted with a satirical sensibility that values silence, solitude, collectedness, and calm. But strangely, in Epicoene the locus of that sensibility turns out to be Morose himself, the disagreeable blocking figure whom Jonson’s play exists to humiliate. As Morose himself makes clear, his aversion to noise derives from an upbringing with strong overtones of classical stoicism: My father, in my education, was wont to aduise mee, that I should always collect, and contayne my mind, not suffring it to flow loosely; that I should look to what things were necessary to the carriage of my life, and what not: embracing the one, and eschewing the other. In short, that I should endeare myself to rest, and auoid turmoile: which now is growne to be another nature to me. So that I come not to your publike pleadings, or your places of noise . . . for the meere auoiding of clamors, & impertinencies of Orators, that know not how to be silent. (5.3.48–59)

It is a classic moment of Jonsonian moral confusion, comparable to Adam Overdo’s discomfiture in Bartholomew Fair, or Lovewit’s opportunistic acquisition of “a widdow, and . . . wealth” at the end of The Alchemist

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(5.5.148), or Volpone’s “morally subversive epilogue”:43 the censurer is censured, the satirist satirized, the exponent of law and order set to school. In their way, such moments may be understood as the Jonsonian counterpart to Middleton’s celebration of the urban scam. For all his vices, Allwit exhibits real verve and ingenuity when he outwits Chaste Maid’s Promoters, and it is hard not to regard his trickery as on some level praiseworthy. Likewise, Epicoene’s figures of noise and confusion – Captain Otter, Mistress Otter and the ladies collegiate, Daw and La Foole, etc. – display both a contemptible, self-serving pretension and a baffling, irrepressible vitality, this latter quality, in turn, deriving as much from the characters’ surroundings as from the characters themselves. In this sense such figures represent a new order of life and a new kind of environmental relation, one which Jonson, like Middleton, beholds with a kind of admiring horror. In a way, indeed, one could describe Jonson’s plays as acts of quasi-zoological observation: carefully contrived trips into a strange ethnographic wilderness that contains such monsters as the “animal amphibium” Otter (Epicoene 1.4.26); or the courtiers in Sejanus (1603) whose “soft, and glutinous bodies . . . can sticke / Like snailes, on painted walls” (1.7–9); or the “flies” of Bartholomew Fair who “engender . . . excellent creeping sport” for visitors to Smithfield in August (1.5.140–1); or the “tortoyse” Sir Politic Would-Be (Volpone, 5.4.64); or the crack-brained traveler Puntarvolo in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), who “has dialogues, and discourses betweene himselfe, his horse, and his dogge” (2.1.137–8). Such characters abound in Jonson’s stage-plays, where they serve as the downmarket equivalent of the herd of Theban sheep in Pan’s Anniversary. But unlike the masques, the stage-plays provide no countervailing natural force, no serious equivalent to the royal presence. At best, they offer instead a series of “early modern hipsters,”44 self-interested, opportunistic wits – Quarlous and Winwife in Bartholomew Fair, Face and Lovewit in The Alchemist, Peregrine in Volpone, Dauphine and his fellows in Epicoene, Wittipol and Manly in The Devil is an Ass, Penniboy Canter in The Staple of News. Preserving the balance of nature is a task far beyond the pay grade of such protagonists, who settle instead for a series of minor tactical victories: cozening a Puritan hypocrite out of a rich widow, relieving greedy townspeople of their valuables, playing humiliating jokes on those less clever and more pretentious than themselves. It is a dispirited sequence of holding actions, offering temporary satisfaction but no real answer to the problems the plays explore. As for those problems, they remain essentially environmental in character, deriving from a new sense of urban

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place and a new urban economy that in turn engender their own order of life-forms and their own social ecology: a universe of things – and people – without substance, proliferating furiously, transforming the world and all its wonders into rubbish. 3 Arthur Marotti’s description of Jonson as “an artistic schizophrenic, with a Dionysian and an Apollonian side,”45 thus finds generic expression in the contrast between masques and stage-plays, the former celebrating a pastoral vision of orderly nature regulated by the calm stasis of the royal presence, the latter typically depicting a chaotic artificial environment sustained – insofar as it can be – by a feverish catenation of desire. Inasmuch as ecology requires us to “think . . . of ourselves as planted in place,”46 this contrast arguably characterizes the poet’s own living conditions as well, and these conditions can thus be understood to inform Jonson’s artistic practice. Like Middleton, Jonson was a child of the greater London area, and he grew up near Charing Cross, amidst “extremes of poverty and wealth” that paralleled the later division between his Dionysian and Apollonian instincts.47 According to David Riggs, this same division of experience also marked the poet’s early education, split as it was between his formal schooling under William Camden and his more casual “familiarity with the street life of the ‘Bermudas’” – the notorious suburban enclave around St. Martin’s Lane that “put him in touch with the criminal types who would people his greatest comedies.”48 Later in life, the poet would spend much time residing with distinguished friends and patrons, and these figures – among them Sir Robert Cotton; Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury; and Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle – would extend into maturity Jonson’s childhood connection with the culture of classicism and privilege. But even so, the poet would return both literally and figuratively to the unsavory world of London’s rookeries, which continued to fascinate him throughout his adult life. In terms of its associations with place, Jonson’s Apollonian impulse leads straight to the non-dramatic genre with which his name is most durably connected: the country-house poem. This is natural, given that few poets can boast such deep and varied experience of country-house life.49 From Penshurst to Theobalds to Conington and Hawthornden and beyond, Jonson’s biography presents him again and again as a nonproprietary resident of landed estates, a status which generates complex

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tensions in his work. For Raymond Williams, these tensions manifest themselves in contradiction: a commitment to “the Christian tradition of charity” whereby “the providence of nature is linked to a human sharing,” but also a concomitant tendency to view this tradition as “a charity of consumption only,” one unable or unwilling to imagine “loving relations between men [sic] actually working and producing what is ultimately, in whatever proportions, to be shared.”50 The result, for Williams, is a kind of sociopolitical “mystification” that ignores the work required to maintain a grand estate while also identifying “the poet . . . as guest . . . with the social position of [his] host . . . consuming what other men had produced.”51 Williams of course approaches Jonson’s country-house poetry from a Marxist perspective, and he therefore focuses mostly on changes in the character of labor relations as reflected in the poet’s writing. Despite occasional references to the dire “physical effects on the environment” produced by capitalism and industrialism,52 The Country and the City is in no way an environmentalist treatise; insofar as it deals with environmental issues at all, it conflates them with the socioeconomic questions that are Williams’s real concern. As it happens, Jonson’s description of Penshurst does more or less the same thing, but in two directions at once; that is to say, it not only effaces the character of human labor by attributing it to the natural world (Williams’s main point); it also effaces the character of environmental relations by folding them into the social, as if the Sidney estate were itself a contented servant, complicit in its own exploitation: Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish, Fat, aged carps that run into thy net. And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat, As loath, the second draught, or cast to stay, Officiously, at first, themselves betray. (32–6)

This second level of mystification proves largely invisible to Williams, whose work thus remains open to Gabriel Egan’s charge that Marxist criticism in general lacks any sense of human responsibility for the earth, preferring to treat the environment “as an infinitely rich supplier of raw materials and an infinitely capacious sink for wastes.”53 In fact, “To Penshurst” demands eco-critical study because of the way it naturalizes exploitation on both the human and environmental levels. In the process, it stages a return of the enumerative impulse so richly present in the poet’s stage-plays, now rehabilitated under the sign of moderation: The early cherry, with the later plum, Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come:

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama The blushing apricot, and woolly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

(41–4)

Ian Donaldson is right to class Penshurst among the “magic houses,” “animated and sentient,” that populate Jonson’s work, and equally right to relate Penshurst in this respect to the animated but enclosed spaces “in [Jonson’s] plays written for the public stage”:54 the “Cornu copiae” of Cymbal’s news staple (The Staple of News, 3.2.119), the “golden mines” of Truewit’s Blackfriars residence (The Alchemist, 2.1.3), etc. For all of Jonson’s artistic schizophrenia, his Apollonian poetry embodies fantasies surprisingly similar to those of his satirical grotesques, and gives voice to them in surprisingly similar language. In both cases we encounter the urge to consume, a fascination with the variety of forms that consumption – and consumables – can assume, and a sense of quasi-magical engagement with the materials of a developing market economy. These qualities, in turn, can all be traced to changes within the poet’s physical environment. His experience of country-house life offers them up in a benign form that parallels the less noble aspect they assume in plays like Volpone and The Alchemist. Indeed, the Dionysian side of Jonson’s artistic personality presents a similar spectacle, once again with a direct connection to the physical circumstances within which the poet lived and worked. Jonson’s career as a professional house-guest took him not only to landed estates like Penshurst and Hawthornden, but to city residences as well. Most famously, he appears to have lodged in 1604–5, and later from 1613–18, with Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny and third Duke of Lennox, at the young nobleman’s town house “near Playhouse Yard next to the Blackfriars Theatre.”55 This location – like Jonson’s own private domicile a short distance away in St. Anne’s, Blackfriars – kept the poet in the midst of London’s growing sprawl, close by the imagined household of Lovewit in The Alchemist. It also placed him inconveniently near the city’s most notorious waterway-cum-sewer, the Fleet River. As it happens, the Fleet makes a memorable appearance in Jonson’s non-dramatic verse, providing the backdrop for the mock-heroic narrative that concludes his only book of Epigrams (1612–13), a scatological minimasterpiece entitled “On the Famous Voyage” (Epigram 133). The tale of two fashionable gentlemen who row an open boat up the Fleet from Bridewell to Holborn to visit a house of ill repute, “On the Famous Voyage” has generally been dismissed as an embarrassment, “among the filthiest, the most deliberately and insistently disgusting poems in the language.”56 But it may also be the first verse exploration ever attempted

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of the effects of urban pollution on London’s waterways. It is surely one of the most powerful accounts of urban environmental degradation to survive from the Jacobean period, despite the fact that Jonson intended it as nothing of the sort. Indeed, the Fleet emerges as by far the most important character in “On the Famous Voyage,” far overshadowing the two gamesters who traverse its length, and it derives this distinction from its compendious nature as a microcosm of the city as a whole. Dramatic characters like Mosca and Sir Epicure Mammon give voice to a misguided furor enumerationis, constructing elaborate catalogues of the riches, comforts, and sheer variety that city life seems to offer, only to see their fantastic lists collapse into so much rubbish. By contrast, “On the Famous Voyage” enumerates the rubbish itself, detailing the infinite forms of degradation that remain after the fantasies of wealth and comfort have evaporated: The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs, The heads, houghs, entrails, and the hides of dogs: For, to say truth, what scullion is so nasty, To put the skins, and offal in a pasty? Cats there lay diuerse had been flead, and rosted, And, after mouldie growne, again were tosted, Then, selling not, a dish was tane to mince ’hem, But still, it seem’d, the ranknesse did conuince [betray] ’em.

(146–53)

Broken down for consumption into a variety of carefully detailed forms, the food animals here embody a debased cornucopian abundance, superficially enticing (or at least meant to be), but in the end reduced like everything else in London to sewage. Jonson’s cooks may embellish and enhance the food they serve, rendering it as appealing as possible to the palate and as manageable as possible for its journey through the alimentary tract. In the end, however, they cannot disguise the final product. Here, in the Fleet Ditch, Jonson’s verse encounters the ghost of its Apollonian self: the “Atomi ridiculous” of Democritus (127), the “spirits transmigrated” of Pythagoras (159), all gathered into a new and unwelcome sense of place. In fact, for all their Apollonian and Dionysian contrast, Penshurst and the Fleet exist on a spatial continuum, each in its way embodying Jonson’s experience of his physical environment. 4 Among other things, the continuum connecting Penshurst to Fleet Ditch lends expression to deep-seated anxieties about the sustainability of a mode of life. For most of the characters in Jonson’s plays – the gullible likes of

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Dapper or Kastril or Corbaccio or Win Littlewit or Bartholomew Cokes – the life of abundance and ease remains a mirage, accessible only on the level of poetic fantasy. For Jonson’s few sharp dealers – Volpone and Mosca and Subtle, for instance – this life becomes a real possibility, but not in any lasting form, and the efforts required to achieve it repeatedly subside into disappointment, dishonor, imprisonment, disease, and death. Even the undisputed winners in Jonson’s comedies come away with little enough: a household of goods and a young wife for Lovewit, a guaranteed future of privileged irrelevance for Dauphine Eugenie. The end of the game, the end of the play, the end of the world as we know it: these remain always just around the corner. Indeed, it is hard not to come away from Jonson’s comedies with the impression that the entire elaborate scaffolding of London life is one more confidence-game in constant danger of collapse. In the end, whatever confidence the poet may feel for the future – or for a particular mode of life – he reserves for his royal patrons. Among his various magic houses, none seems more magical than the Banqueting House at Whitehall. There, within the protective space of his own theatrical fantasies, Jonson insists upon imagining a world in unending natural harmony, governed by a benign super-human presence for whom the exertions of alchemists and cooks, Puritans and Rosicrucians, tradespeople and projectors remain at worst a trivial, impertinent toy. But this fact only renders the Banqueting House’s subsequent history all the more ironic. The architectural achievement of a man – the royal architect Inigo Jones – who had come by the end of Jonson’s life to represent everything the poet despised, this building not only provides the grand setting for the execution of a king, it also represents one of the few architectural fragments of Jacobean London to survive into the twenty-first century. As such, it helps lay the groundwork for the city’s next grand incarnation: the extraordinary congeries of Palladian and neo-Palladian buildings, organized around stately neo-classical city squares, that comprises the basic fabric of modern London. In short, the Banqueting House very much points the way to the future, and Jones’s hand in creating that future can be even better appreciated by his role in the construction of Covent Garden. There he undertook an urban development project designed specifically to evade royal proclamations aimed at limiting the size of the city by curtailing new construction.57 To this extent, the new London Jones helped to create must be understood as a repudiation of King James’s policy, celebrated obliquely in Pan’s Anniversary, of discouraging urban growth and returning city-dwellers to the country. Here Jones’s vision for London already proved far removed from the ideals of Jonson’s courtly entertainments, representing a future of which one suspects the poet himself would largely disapprove.

chapter 3

Shakespeare’s dirt

For all their artistic differences, Middleton and Jonson were both Londoners born and bred. Their depictions of the urban environment draw on a shared vocabulary that correlates the city’s physical pollution to its moral turpitude and that presents the surrounding countryside mostly as a supplier of raw materials – firewood, drinking water, gullible rustics – for the city’s exploitation. Shakespeare cuts a different figure entirely. For one thing, of course, he was born and raised in the country, a child of the rural Midlands with its patchwork of farmland and pasture, woodland and market towns. For another thing, he exemplified the new order of urban immigrants – newcomers to the city from its rural environs – whose ranks so taxed London’s resources during the 1500s and 1600s. Indeed, from the standpoint of Jacobean urban management policy, Shakespeare was part of the city’s biggest problem. As for the poet’s own temperament, the evidence suggests he maintained strong emotional and material ties to the countryside throughout his London career. For one thing, there is his expansive investment portfolio, most of it in real estate located in and around Stratford-uponAvon. But more of that later. Shakespeare’s plays, too, betray the same attachment to place. As Jonathan Bate remarks, “Shakespeare was unique among the dramatists of his age in locating scenes in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire” – a fact that proves embarrassing to anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theorists.1 In The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593), Christopher Sly traces his lineage to “Burton-heath” and his acquaintance to “Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot” (Induction.2.18, 21–2) – both villages in the vicinity of Stratford.2 3 Henry VI (c. 1590) contains a whole series of local references, all “added to the play without the authority of the chronicles”;3 as the Earl of Warwick declares, “In Warwickshire I have true-hearted friends, / Not mutinous in peace, yet bold in war” (4.8.9–10). “What a devil dost thou in Warwickshire?”, Falstaff asks Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV (c. 1597; 4.2.50–1). And so forth. 71

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These references not only reveal detailed geographical knowledge and a certain regional pride; they also suggest the depth of Shakespeare’s self-identification as a Warwickshire man. And they display a curious feature of timing: all these passages derive from plays composed during the 1590s, and in general Shakespeare’s fondness for Warwickshire scenes and allusions belongs to his Elizabethan rather than his Jacobean years. Possible explanations for this fact are numerous, speculative, and perhaps therefore not very useful, but one is tempted to venture a couple nonetheless. One imagines, for instance, that the younger Shakespeare, newly arrived in London, might cling with special tenacity to his country origins, which would lend him a reassuring sense of self with which to confront the stress and anomie of his new urban environment. Likewise, one can imagine the older Shakespeare, now an established figure on the London theater scene, no longer in need of such psychological moorings. One might also note that the theatrical references to Shakespeare’s native soil occur in inverse proportion to his actual acquisition of local property, with the result that the poet’s emotional need to identify with his place of birth seems to be gradually assuaged by the sovereign salve of ownership. In any event, the Elizabethan Shakespeare displays greater rhetorical attachment to his rural origins than does his Jacobean counterpart. Along with this investment in local color, the Elizabethan Shakespeare also develops a style of drama famous for its sympathetic engagement with the natural world. Although more than fifty years old, C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy remains the definitive study of this dramatic mode. For Barber – whose reading of Shakespeare’s early comedies also encompasses a chapter on the second tetralogy – plays like The Merchant of Venice (1596–7) and Twelfth Night (1601–2) derive from a tradition of saturnalian holiday behavior extending through Roman festival practice back to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. In its basic form, this tradition comprises a sort of “nature worship,” committed to “the pleasures of nature and the naturalness of pleasures” and designed to “present a mockery of what is unnatural.”4 In Shakespeare’s plays, the mockery in question typically attaches to outsiders like Shylock and Malvolio, who serve as “foreign bod[ies] to be expelled by laughter” from the festive occasion.5 And by 1599 this style of drama had produced Shakespeare’s sunniest, most eco-friendly play, As You Like It. There, once again, the poet indulges his taste for Warwickshire geographical reference when he elides the Ardennes forest of his source-text – Thomas Lodge’s

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Rosalynde – with the Forest of Arden in his native county, this latter also carrying the imprint of his mother’s maiden name.6 Indeed, Shakespeare’s Arden grows increasingly English as his play progresses, its Englishness offering an antidote to the toxic duplicity of the French court where the comedy’s opening scenes are set. In the process, the Forest of Arden also emerges as an enduring emblem of nature’s healing capacities, replete with “tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (2.1.15–16). The play’s latest Arden editor detects “a conservationist strain” in its concern over the suffering of hunted deer.7 And its caramelized vision of life in the state of nature led Bernard Shaw to dismiss the play as “[a] mixed diet of pious twaddle and venison.”8 In fact it is hard not to agree, at least to an extent. To be sure, Shakespeare’s Rosalind may offer refreshing common sense on the subjects of courtship and marriage (“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” [4.1.106–8]). But two scenes later, when Orlando rescues his “unnatural” (4.3.124) brother Oliver from the jaws of a lioness and Oliver responds by instantly repudiating a lifetime of sibling rivalry and oppression, one may feel that the case for nature’s therapeutic virtue has been somehow overstated. So this, in part, is the playwright Shakespeare had become by the start of the seventeenth century: a self-identified gentleman of the provinces, a virtuoso in the comic mode whose work treated regularly of civilization and its discontents, a playwright who invested the natural world with magical properties and redemptive powers. From here, the picture starts to change. One conventional, if inadequate, way to frame the change is to cast it in terms of genre-shift, from the Elizabethan comic period to the tragic preoccupations of the Jacobean years. Conventional, but inadequate: in 1598, Frances Meres could already extol Shakespeare’s excellence “for Tragedy,”9 nor does the comic mode disappear from the poet’s later works. Barber proposes a shift less in genre than in the poet’s understanding of vice: “the festive comic form . . . can only deal with follies where nature to her bias draws; the unnatural can appear only in outsiders, intruders who are mocked and expelled”; “in Hamlet,” by contrast (and despite that play’s excellent comic moments), “it is insiders who are unnatural.”10 At stake here is not just the quality of wickedness, but also its location, its insideness or outsideness, its character as integral to or disruptive of a given community: in a word, its environment. Jacobean Shakespeare views his surroundings differently than did his Elizabethan predecessor, and this difference lends a broadly darker tone to the work of the poet’s later period.

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama 1

Writers of Shakespeare’s day could draw upon a broad set of interrelated topoi that depicted civil society as more savage than uncivil nature. In essence, these turns of phrase comprise a variant subset of the mundus inversus – or world upside-down – motif, and one may track specific examples all the way to classical antiquity. Thus Erasmus’s Adages (1500–36), one of the great educational texts of Renaissance humanism and a work Shakespeare is likely to have known in at least some form, collects certain of these tropes with commentary. They include Plautus’ celebrated “Man is a wolf to man,” of which Erasmus declares, “Here we are warned not to trust ourselves to an unknown person, but beware of him as of a wolf.”11 In similar vein, Erasmus also cites Strabo’s “A great city is a great solitude” as well as the proverbial Greek “The city is now country,” which the humanist applies to cases “when someone in a city overrides the laws, and rules by violence just as he pleases; for in a civilized community men live in equality under the law, and in the country they are more free to act as they please.”12 As a group, these figures of speech give voice to the fear that culture, for all its comforts, may have failed to improve upon the state of nature. In a sense, they supply the pre-history for Sartre’s “L’enfer c’est les autres”; more directly, they offer a pessimistic counterpoint to Renaissance humanism’s celebration of man. By Shakespeare’s day, these tropes have also attached themselves with some regularity to the subjects of greed and usury. Alciato’s Emblematum libellus of 1534, for instance, includes an emblem “In Avaros, vel quibus melior conditio ab extraneis offertur” (“On the avaricious; or being treated better by strangers”). There, under a woodcut of Arion riding his dolphin ashore while strumming a lyre, one encounters the following verses: Astride a dolphin, Arion cleaves the dark blue waves, and with this song charms the creature’s ears and muzzles its mouth: “The mind of wild beasts is not so savage as that of a greedy man. We who are savaged by men are saved by fish.” Delphini insidens vada caerule sulcat Arion, Hocque aures mulcet, frenat & ora sono. Quàm sit avari hominis, non tam mens dira ferarum est, Quique viris rapimur, piscibus eripimur.13

The mythic reference here is to Aulus Gellius’ tale of how Arion escaped from robbery on the high seas by enchanting a dolphin with his music and persuading the creature to carry him to shore on its back.14 By contrast, the

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Huguenot explorer Jean de Léry (1578) views nature as offering no respite to unfortunates caught in the grip of miserly moneylenders. Writing on the subject of New World cannibalism, he exclaims, If you consider in all candor what our big usurers do, sucking blood and marrow, and eating everyone alive . . . you will say that they are even more cruel than the savages I speak of. And that is why the prophet says that such men flay the skin of God’s people, eat their flesh, break their bones and chop them in pieces as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.15

Michel de Montaigne’s great essay “Of Cannibals” (1580) echoes these sentiments, now inflected toward the French Wars of Religion: “I thinke there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, then to feed vpon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, to make dogges and swine to gnawe him and teare him in mammockes . . . and which is woorse, vnder pretence of pietie.”16 Of these last three passages, the first two help supply the discursive context for Shakespeare’s Shylock, with his murderous pound of flesh and his pariah status as a “stranger cur” (1.3.118) outside the Christian community of Venice. Simultaneously, Montaigne’s use of the same language in connection with religious persecution challenges the brutal sanctimony of Venice’s Christians, with the result that The Merchant of Venice mobilizes two distinct but interrelated motifs of civil barbarism – one associated with usury, the other with sectarian bigotry – against one another. Likewise, tropes of civil barbarism (as we might call them) constitute a central feature of As You Like It’s Edenic pastoral, where they work to distinguish the “golden world” of Arden from life in “the envious court” (1.1.118–19; 2.1.4): Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude.

(2.7.174–9)

Here again, Shakespeare’s comedies of the late 1590s reveal the poet’s growing interest in this pattern of conventional representation. In the Jacobean plays, however, this same interest expands into a ubiquitous feature of Shakespeare’s language and dramaturgy, representing a major investment of the poet’s imaginative resources. Thus tropes of civil barbarism abound in the late plays. In Cymbeline (1609–10), for instance, Belarius prefers worship al fresco in the mountains of Wales to the courtier’s magnificence:

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama The gates of monarchs Are arch’d so high that giants may jet through And keep their impious turbands on without Good morrow to the sun. Hail thou, fair heaven! We house i’ th’ rock, yet use thee not so hardly As prouder livers do. (3.3.4–9)

As Imogen declares elsewhere in the same play, “Gods, what lies I have heard! / Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court. / Experience, O, thou disprov’st report!” (3.2.32–4). Likewise, and despite his faults of character, Coriolanus (1607–8) figures in his play as “a lamb” to be devoured by the citizens of Rome (2.1.11), who for their part “Deserve such pity of him as the wolf / Does of the shepherds” (4.6.110–11). Timon of Athens (1607–8), while collaboratively written, includes a scene always attributed to Shakespeare in which the eponymous hero renounces human society, declaring, “Timon will to the woods, where he shall find / Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind” (4.1.35–6). Apemantus claims in the same play that “The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts” (4.3.347–8). In King Lear (1605), Albany imagines his world as a wilderness where “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.49–50). “There’s many a beast . . . in a populous city” (Othello [1604] 4.1.64–5), Iago assures Othello, and if anyone should know, Iago is the man. Indeed, this same pattern of comparison – man is a wolf to man, the city more barbarous than the wild wood, the palaces of princes fouler than the meanest country hovel – proves even more central to the broad design of Shakespeare’s late plays than it does to their language. On this score the record is most impressive. Betrayed by the fellow-citizens whom he has led to victory in battle, Coriolanus departs the city of Rome and is murdered not long thereafter. Betrayed by the fellow-citizens whom he has befriended and supported in the past, Timon leaves Athens for the forest and dies in exile. Betrayed by his brother and his subjects, Prospero is expelled from Milan only to find sanctuary on an island scarcely “honor’d with / A human shape” (The Tempest [1611] 1.2.283–4). Betrayed by the king he has faithfully served, Belarius finds contentment and security in banishment to Wales. Betrayed by her father’s miserable jealousy, Perdita discovers unexpected refuge on the wild coast of Bohemia. Betrayed by his daughters Goneril and Regan, Lear seeks solace in a pitiless storm. Betrayed by Iago, Othello would have done better to remain amidst the “antres vast and deserts idle” (1.3.140) of his youth rather than ever to have set foot in Venice. Betraying his gracious king and master, Macbeth so offends the fabric of nature that Birnam Wood rises against him in

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symbolic revolt. Mark Antony achieves his apotheosis as a hero eating strange flesh “on the Alps” (Antony and Cleopatra [1606–7] 1.4.66); in Rome he is betrayed by Octavius, in Alexandria by Cleopatra. Thus, apart from the collaborations of Pericles (1607–8), Henry VIII (1612–13) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), virtually every play Shakespeare composed after 1604 involves the motif of civil barbarism as a central component of its dramatic structure. This record falls into even sharper relief when set against the concurrent practice of Jonson and Middleton. As a rule, Shakespeare’s major Jacobean characters – Lear, Othello, Prospero, Antony, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Timon, etc. – either flee the society of city and court or end up wishing they had. Even the urban sybarite Cleopatra finally prefers death in “a ditch in Egypt” to “the shouting varlotry / Of censuring Rome” (5.2.55–6). By contrast, Jonson’s plays for the Jacobean stage seem almost incapable of imagining a world outside the city walls. Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, Sejanus, Catiline, The Devil Is an Ass – one searches these works in vain for a single scene with a rural setting. As for Middleton, his rare foray into the country in A Mad World, My Masters quickly develops into an act of despoliation; more often in his plays, it is the country that comes to the city in the form of rural gulls – Easy, Witgood, the Ward in Women, Beware Women – who obligingly present themselves for fleecing. Debunking P. G. Wodehouse’s reputation as a critic of the upper classes, George Orwell remarked that “No one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much,”17 and one could say much the same thing of Jonson and sewage, or Middleton and the urban scam. For all their revulsion at the vices of their fellow-Londoners, it never seems to occur to either of these dramatists that anything of interest could happen outside the city. Nor is this simply the difference between city comedy and Shakespeare’s preferred genres. One could illustrate the point differently by considering patterns of contemporary reference: allusions to current events and mentions of current celebrities. Middleton’s and Jonson’s plays are full of these, sometimes very thinly veiled (for instance, Middleton’s attack on Gondomar in A Game at Chess or Jonson’s on Nathaniel Butter in The Staple of News), sometimes open and unguarded (as when Jonson mentions Ambrosio Spinola, Hugh Broughton, and the fool Stone in a single scene of Volpone [2.1]). By contrast, Gabriel Egan notes, “Shakespeare named only one of his contemporaries in his plays, and it was not a person but the bear Sackerson.”18 Indeed, such reticence only sets the poet’s allusions to Warwickshire and the Midlands in higher relief. Middleton and Jonson remain mesmerized by the ongoing parade of crises

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and triumphs, crimes and criminals, scandals and novelties, heroes and personalities that circulates through London in the early seventeenth century. But this same spectacle leaves Shakespeare unmoved. Instead, the Shakespearean imagination gravitates to the wilderness: the “[r]ough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven” of Othello’s storytelling (1.3.141), the “[s]ounds, and sweet airs” of Caliban’s island (3.2.136), the “cataracts and hurricanoes” of Lear’s storm scenes (3.2.2). In the later plays, these spaces can feel like a hollow mockery of their antecedents in the Forest of Arden or the wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – so much so that one feminist scholar describes Timon’s departure from Athens as “a puzzling parody of the green world comedy, a retreat from the patriarchal city, but a retreat that will offer no hope of either fertility or harmonious return.”19 However, Shakespeare’s wild spaces have little to do with feminism and much more to do with the poet’s experience of urban and courtly life – an experience he almost never depicts as desirable. Thus, as the green comedies of the 1590s give place to the tragedies and romances of the Jacobean years, his confidence in nature’s redemptive capacities diminishes. “Nature cure” may provide “the deep structure of romance,”20 but after As You Like It, no Shakespearean character ever again discovers in nature the antidote to urban or courtly ills. Lear finds the storm horrific, only less so than the society of his “pelican daughters” (3.4.75). Othello discovers that the skills acquired in his travels may help him to cope with slavery and anthropophagi, but they leave him pathetically defenseless against Iago’s refinements of cruelty. The late romances appear once again to offer a pattern of renewal through nature, but it is a renewal deferred, reserved for a generation not yet poisoned with the sophistications of culture: for figures like Prospero and Leontes there is no return to innocence, no more “boy eternal” (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.65). It may be, as Robert N. Watson has argued, that As You Like It voices the fear “that words stand between us and any pure encounter with absolute reality,” so that “every definition of nature produces an equal and opposite one.”21 But it does not therefore follow that Shakespeare has no faith in the existence of nature: only that he has no faith in theory’s ability to define it. In any case, the later plays offer no vision of a natural world with the power to redeem human vices. The most nature can offer Shakespeare’s later characters is a place to hide. Still, for Prospero, Perdita, and Belarius, a place to hide may be benefit enough. The alternative is a civil society barren of redeeming attributes, even the questionable ones of novelty and sophistication. Measure for Measure (1604) offers the clearest case in point, it being the Shakespearean

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play closest in genre and tone to the Jacobean comedies of Middleton and Jonson.22 Here – and despite the fact that Middleton probably introduced revisions into the play’s surviving text – Shakespeare gives us a city comedy completely shorn of the exuberance that marks Middleton’s grand experiments in the form. For all their shamelessness, Quomodo and Allwit excite admiration through the sheer energy and diabolical ingenuity with which they fend for themselves in a world full of scoundrels. By comparison, Shakespeare’s Angelo seems designed to illustrate the banality of evil. Allwit and Quomodo derive an engaging particularity from various carefully drawn traits of character – not just their greed and immorality, but also their dispassionate appraisal of others, and the creativity with which they protect their own interests against others more powerful than they. For his part, Angelo’s only distinctive marks of character are his sanctimony and hypocrisy. His craft as a villain exhausts itself in the tired expedient of seducing a nun, to which end he employs that most unimaginative of strategies, administrative coercion. And his poverty of imagination is rendered all the more striking by the fact that he pursues this wickedness in the absence of any equal adversary. With the Duke away, Angelo lays uncontested claim to the powers of “[m]ortality and mercy in Vienna” (1.1.44), yet he can think of nothing better to do with his authority than to lay clumsy siege to Isabella’s defenseless virtue, and this is because at bottom, Shakespeare does not share Middleton’s commitment to the devious inventiveness of urban culture. So here, then, are some basic coordinates for an eco-critical understanding of Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. Their language repeatedly turns upon disparaging comparisons of city or court to wilderness areas, comparisons in which the wilderness may lack any redemptive potential but nonetheless emerges, for all its harshness, as kinder than human society. In their broader design, these same plays repeatedly rediscover human perfidy and betrayal in urban and courtly settings while enacting fantasies of flight to the rural world. Shakespeare does not share his younger colleagues’ penchant for contemporary name-dropping and topical reference, and to this extent he lacks their engagement with the London social scene. And when he does write a play that approximates the tone of urban satire one encounters in Jonson or Middleton, it lacks the minutely detailed observation of urban manners and the obvious delight in urban ingenuity that distinguish city comedy more generally. At the end of The Tempest, when Miranda first lays eyes upon the assembled courtiers of Milan and Naples in all their finery and famously exclaims, “O brave new world / That has such people in it!”, Prospero responds with the equally famous rejoinder,

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“’Tis new to thee” (5.1.183–4), and this exchange is often read as a valedictory expression of world-weariness on the part of a playwright at the end of his career. But it is in fact quite consistent with Shakespeare’s treatment of society in his Jacobean plays more generally. Prospero’s return to Milan offers him nothing but a chance to ponder his mortality (“[t]here / Every third thought shall be my grave” [5.1.312]), and more broadly, the urban and courtly spaces of Shakespeare’s late plays figure as degraded environments, darkened by the shadows of duplicity and death. 2 On a more specific level, however, Shakespeare’s plays of the 1600s also engage with matter of direct environmental consequence for the poet’s contemporaries. The engagement is diffuse rather than explicit; as a rule, that is, it works through the evocation of broadly familiar circumstances rather than the direct mention of people, events, or places. In its overall form, this pattern of engagement has to do with environmental change and its relation to England’s agricultural capacity. Indeed, if Middleton deserves to be remembered as the poet of Jacobean London’s waterworks, Shakespeare may deserve equal memorial as the poet of Jacobean England’s food supply. Here again, As You Like It anticipates the plays of the next ten years. Scholars have long understood that Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden bears more than a nominal resemblance to the eponymous Midlands forest of late Elizabethan England.23 This resemblance has usually been characterized as “a discursive rehearsal of the enclosure legislation” with which early modern England sought to suppress the popular discontent of tenants evicted from their traditional homes and common lands.24 In their exodus from court to forest, Shakespeare’s characters enact a pattern of flight to the greenwood performed in earnest by enclosure-afflicted squatters, and in As You Like It this pattern leads to the ironic spectacle of the deposed Duke Senior trespassing on what should be his own property. It also leads to the Duke and his men poaching what should be their own deer, and to such other putative violations of property rights as “damaging trees, sending letters in fictitious names, blacking, and crossdressing”: all “felonies associated with forest rioters” in Shakespeare’s England.25 To this extent, As You Like It gives voice – albeit in a guarded and ambiguous way – to popular attitudes toward enclosure in Shakespeare’s day, attitudes which James R. Siemon has described as “overwhelmingly negative” and “remarkably consistent” in this respect.26 As it happens, this aspect of As

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You Like It also seems to afford a tantalizing glimpse into Shakespeare’s personal world, for surviving biographical records directly connect the poet with efforts to enclose a piece of Warwickshire property outside Stratfordupon-Avon, near the hamlet of Welcombe. We shall reconsider these records in due course. In the meantime, however, As You Like It has earned a reputation as the one Shakespearean play most heavily influenced by contemporary changes in English agrarian practice that include enclosure and forest squatting. And some twelve years after the play’s composition, the other great Warwickshire poet of Shakespeare’s age, Michael Drayton, could offer independent testimony concerning the Forest of Arden’s decline. Opening the Warwickshire section of Poly-Olbion (1612), Drayton has the Forest speak in propria persona of its recent despoliation: My many goodly sites when first I came to showe, Here opened I the way to myne owne ouer-throwe: For, when the world found out the fitnesse of my soyle, The gripple wretch began immediatly to spoyle My tall and goodly woods, and did my grounds inclose: By which, in little time my bounds I came to lose.27

Likewise, modern historians conclude that by the second decade of King James’s reign, the Forest of Arden had reached something like a critical point in its ecological history, with its timber being cleared on an unprecedented basis for the support of mining, farming, pasturage, and squatters.28 This much is well known, and it suggests that As You Like It should be understood as a response of sorts to early modern England’s ongoing landmanagement crisis and the single practice most definitively connected with it: enclosure. But enclosure was only secondarily a legal and political problem, and it only became so because in the first instance it represented a serious problem for the nation’s food supply. Thus, as historians have noted, both the most threatening social unrest associated with the enclosure movement and the most earnest legal efforts to restrict the practice occurred during periods of dearth and famine.29 For its part, As You Like It may at first seem unperturbed by such issues. However, on closer inspection the play’s benign pastoral setting reveals a nagging preoccupation with food and the lack of it. “Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them?”, Orlando resentfully asks his oppressive brother in the opening scene (1.1.37–8). Duke Senior and his followers may worry about the justice of killing forest venison for food, but they do so nonetheless, and Jacques reviles the surviving deer as “fat and greasy citizens” with no compassion

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for their fallen comrades (2.1.55). Following Orlando into the forest, the servant Adam cries out, “Dear master, I can go no further. O, I die for food!” (2.6.1–2), and when Orlando carries the famished servant into Duke Senior’s company, the Duke welcomes the two men by telling Orlando to “Set down your venerable burthen, / And let him feed” (2.7.167–8). Orlando rescues his brother from a “hungry lioness” with “udders all drawn dry” (4.3.126, 114). Even a minor character like the courtier Le Beau is described “with his mouth full of news,” which news, as Celia tells Rosalind, “he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young” (1.2.92–4). Rosalind’s dry response – “then shall we be news-cramm’d” (1.2.95) – anticipates Hamlet’s “I eat the air, promise-cramm’d” (3.2.94). Indeed, As You Like It’s dramatis personae might usefully be divided into two groups: those characters who have eaten too much, and those who have not eaten enough. A very similar distinction also characterizes Coriolanus, another Shakespearean play long associated with early modern England’s crisis of agricultural production. There the issue is foregrounded in the play’s opening scenes, as Shakespeare’s hero suppresses a grain riot which has gained head among Rome’s starving plebeians. Within this context, the political division between plebeians and patricians emerges as almost entirely food-centered, correlative to the difference between the starving and the well-fed; as the play’s First Citizen complains, speaking on behalf of all the rioters, “We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us” (1.1.15–17). Here accusations grounded in class resentment fly thick and fast. The First Citizen continues his complaint by insisting, “The leanness that afflicts us [the plebeians], the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their [the patricians’] abundance” (1.1.20–2), and later he declares that the patricians “ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their store-houses cramm’d with grain . . . If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us” (1.1.79–81, 85–6). For his part, the patrician Menenius responds with simple denial – “I tell you friends, most charitable care / Have the patricians of you” (1.1.65–6) – and then spins this denial into an elaborate fable in which “all the body’s members / rebell’d against the belly,” despite the fact that the belly provides them all with “that natural competency / Whereby they live” (1.1.96–7,139–40). Andrew Gurr observes, “It is an extraordinary demonstration of [Menenius’] contempt for his hearers and his faith in verbal smokescreens that he should offer this defense of the Senate to citizens whose whole complaint . . . is that the Senate is refusing to distribute its stores.”30 In the event, however, Menenius’ cynicism pales

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next to that of his fellow-patrician Coriolanus, who, having suppressed the grain riot, exults in news of coming war with the Volsces: “I am glad on’t, then we shall ha’ means to vent / Our musty superfluity” (1.1.225–6). Where the citizens complain of artificially induced famine, Menenius and Coriolanus view the problem not as a dearth of food but as an excess of plebeians, who may be conveniently eliminated by the coming conflict. Scholars have long viewed this dramatic sequence as reflecting the Midlands Uprising of May, 1607 – an event which Shakespeare, as a Midlands landowner, would have had good reason to watch closely.31 In form, this uprising played out as a series of enclosure riots. In June, for instance, “at Newton, near Kettering [in Northamptonshire], about a thousand armed people set about tearing up the hedges with which Squire Tresham had inclosed the open-field arable land on his estate.”32 This incident “was one of a number at that time in the counties of Oxford, Warwick, and Northampton,” and while in the end the rebellion was brutally suppressed, it “so alarmed the government that a Commission to Inquire into Depopulation was set up” in its wake.33 Officially, thus, the revolt presented itself as yet another protest against the enclosure movement and the demographic changes attendant upon it; however, one need not delve far into the matter to discover fear of starvation as a major motive underlying the peasants’ resistance. That June, for instance, William Combe, then High Sheriff of Warwickshire, wrote to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, warning him of “such grievances as the common people of this country . . . are troubled with: videlicet, with the dearth of corn, the prices rising to some height, caused partly by some that are well stored, by refraining to bring the same to the market out of a covetous conceit that corn will be dearer, and by engrossing of barley by maltsters” – developments which “make the people arrogantly and seditiously to speak of the not reforming of conversion of arable land into pasture by enclosing.”34 Likewise, an anonymous manuscript declaration of “The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers,” apparently penned when the uprising was at its height, insists that: “ye com[m]on ffields being layd open, would yeeld . . . much com[m]odity, beside ye increase of Corne, on wch standes our life,” and warns that “if it should please God to wthdrawe his blessing in not prospering ye fruites of ye Earth but one yeare . . . there would a worse, and more fearfull dearth happen then did in K. Ed. ye seconds tyme, when people were forced to eat Catts and doggs flesh, and women to eate theyr owne children.”35 Thus, the

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Diggers conclude, if the authorities were to assault them, “better it were in such case wee manfully dye, then hereafter to be pined to death for want of yt wch these deuouring encroachers do serue theyr fatt hogges and sheep withall.”36 To this extent, Coriolanus engages the same enclosure-related issues that troubled As You Like It some seven years earlier, and like the earlier play, Coriolanus gives voice to these issues with the language of dearth and starvation. Indeed, in an oft-cited study, Stanley Cavell traces the thematics of starvation from the grain-riot scenes of Coriolanus into the play as a whole. For Cavell, Coriolanus and his mother Volumnia are “starvers, hungerers,” who “manifest this condition as a name or a definition of the human, like being mortal,” and for whom this condition “present[s] itself equally as being fed upon, being eaten up” – in effect, as the state of being “consumed by hunger.”37 The result, for Cavell, is a staged “circle of cannibalism, of the eater eaten by what he or she eats,” in which Rome itself finally figures as “potentially a cannibalistic mother,” feeding upon her own children and thus, by extension, upon herself.38 It is a coincidental testimony to the power of this reading that the same vision of cannibalism should emerge from the Warwickshire Diggers’ manifesto as a nightmare spectacle of “people . . . forced to eat Catts and doggs flesh, and women to eate theyr owne children.” If As You Like It and Coriolanus thus both fret about the enclosure movement, they also both translate their concerns about enclosure into a thematic preoccupation with food and famine. More generally, this same preoccupation saturates Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. For instance, there is Antony and Cleopatra. Leeds Barroll has noted that “the Elizabethans were almost unanimous in condemning [these two lovers], if contemporary accounts of Roman history, tracts of morality, and dictionaries are adequate indication”; moreover, “the terms of condemnation . . . are . . . concerned often with the idea of gluttony.”39 In this respect, Shakespeare simply expands upon tradition. Inquiring into rumors of Antony and Cleopatra’s riotous excess, Maecenas asks Enobarbus, “Eight wild-boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there; is this true?”, to which Enobarbus responds, “This was but as a fly by an eagle; we had much more monstrous matter of feast” (2.2.179–82). Cleopatra herself figures as such another “Egyptian dish” (2.6.126), and as such she contrasts with Antony’s diet in his heroic military phase, a regimen which included “[t]he barks of trees” and “[t]he roughest berry on the rudest hedge” (1.4.66, 64). Then there are the disrupted banquets of Hamlet (whose “funeral bak’d-meats / did coldly furnished forth the marriage tables” for

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Claudius and Gertrude [1.2.180–1]); of Macbeth (3.4); of Timon (3.6); of The Winter’s Tale (4.4); and of The Tempest (3.3). There are the “clust’ring filberts” and “young scamels” to which Caliban offers to help Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest. There is Macbeth’s Porter, who imagines opening the gates of hell for “a farmer, that hang’d himself on th’expectation of plenty” (2.3.4–5). There is Gloucester’s vision, in Lear, of a world where “distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough” (4.1.70–1). Indeed, when considered as a whole, Shakespeare’s late work seems constantly to be raising hopes of abundant provender, hopes which then, more often than not, go painfully unrequited. The broken feasts of Shakespeare’s late plays prove especially intriguing in this respect. There is nothing like them in the poet’s Elizabethan work. Quite to the contrary, in fact, they represent a wholesale rejection of the festive comic tradition, with its emphasis upon cakes and ale. In particular, Timon, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest develop something like a consistent pattern of frustrated dining. Two of these plays stage an incursion of courtly and urban figures into an essentially wild setting, while the third (Timon) depicts an ironic “city feast’ (3.6.67) hosted by a character preparing to abandon his urban compatriots for the wilderness. In The Winter’s Tale, the courtly characters spoil the native harmony of a sheepshearing festival, while in Timon and The Tempest, inhabitants of the wilderness stage false banquets for the representatives of civilization as an expression of hostility to them. In all three cases, the result is a kind of poetic justice and a revelation of personal character. When Alonso approaches the banquet table laid out for him in The Tempest, Ariel not only removes the table itself but rebukes him and his companions with a metaphor of imperfect digestion: You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in’t, the never-surfeited sea Hath caus’d to belch up you; and on this island Where man doth not inhabit – you ’mongst men Being most unfit to live. (3.3.52–8)

Timon serves his guests covered dishes full of warm water that emblematize their own false loyalty, for which he offers the gods ironic thanks: “Make the meat be belov’d more than the man that gives it . . . For these my present friends, as they are to me nothing, so in nothing bless them, and to nothing they are welcome” (3.6.75–6, 82–4). Polixenes disrupts the

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sheep-shearing feast in The Winter’s Tale so as to prevent his son from marrying beneath his station, and in doing so he not only reveals his own lack of social discrimination (Perdita being, after all, every bit Florizel’s equal) but prompts Perdita to another Shakespearean trope of civil barbarism: I was not much afeard; for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. (4.4.442–6)

In each instance, the exponents of urban society and courtly culture are found wanting; their pretensions, hypocrisy, and selfishness are exposed to the audience’s universal gaze; and the exposure is configured as a failure of nourishment, a rupture not just of good faith and the rules of hospitality but of the nutritive cycle itself. In essence, of course, this is the same disruption – both of the social contract and of the food supply – that Shakespeare dramatizes in As You Like It and Coriolanus. This recurring concern with stores of food distinguishes his plays of the 1600s from those of the 1590s. And it coincides with a historical crisis of food production that played itself out quite literally in the poet’s back yard. Indeed, despite the personal selfeffacement that distinguishes his career as a whole, one thing is certain about Shakespeare the individual: he was keenly interested in amassing and manipulating reserves of food. We know this not from his plays, but from his surviving business accounts.40

3 Pondering Shakespeare’s life records at a distance of four hundred years, Stephen Greenblatt lines up with biographers both before and after him in lamenting the paucity of information about the poet’s inner life and personal relations. “Where,” Greenblatt asks, “are his personal letters? . . . Why, in the huge, glorious body of his writing, is there no direct access to his thoughts about politics or religion or art? Why is everything he wrote – even in the sonnets – couched in a way that enables him to hide his face and his innermost thoughts?”41 Greenblatt’s conclusion – that Elizabethan England’s culture of political repression could have sufficed in itself to account for such reticence – deserves to be borne in mind. But the political atmosphere just as certainly failed to restrain many of the poet’s colleagues,

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with Jonson, for one, offering an instructive case in point. To this extent, Shakespeare’s early version of British reserve seems to emanate not just from contemporary circumstances but from deeply ingrained qualities of character; in effect, one must view his personal silence as itself a personal statement. Indeed, when understood as such, it harmonizes perfectly with the dismal depictions of human society in his later plays. After all, who but a fool would reveal a scintilla of his inner life in a world populated by Iagos and Jachimos, Lady Macbeths and Cleopatras, Angelos and Gonerils? In such a setting, self-concealment becomes just as essential to survival as it is at the bottom of the sea. Nor must we view Shakespeare’s personal self-effacement as necessarily a bad thing for posterity. On the contrary: the absence of inner life creates a vacuum that needs to be filled, a tantalizing set of biographical problems that call out for resolution all the more loudly because they appear so clearly insoluble. Again the comparison with Jonson proves instructive. The latter poet lays his opinions and personality bare, again and again, in his plays and non-dramatic verse, in his conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, in his commonplace book and recorded anecdotes and legal history, with the result that Jonson’s biographers have no central enigma around which to spin their work, nothing comparable to the questions that remain about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation, or his relationship with his wife, or his connections to his patrons, or his religious and political views. In this respect one could argue that Shakespeare’s greatest gift to posterity – or at least that part of it known as the Shakespeare industry – lies not in what he wrote, but in what he didn’t write. In any case, one cannot reconstruct Shakespeare’s inner life on the basis of personal correspondence or private revelations, which do not exist. In their place there survives only a paper-trail of biographical trivia: minor lawsuits, tax assessments, property acquisitions. These may reveal little enough about Shakespeare the individual, but at the very least they prove the following: first, that he retained a principal residence in – and a personal attachment to – Stratford throughout his life; second, that this attachment eventually assumed the form of an investment strategy as well; and, third, that the investment strategy in question centered upon the acquisition of local property and speculation on the local agricultural market. The basic facts of the case are well known.42 In 1596, Shakespeare successfully renewed his father’s unfinished efforts to obtain a coat of arms, and having thus acquired the appropriate social status, he proceeded next year to buy a grand home in Stratford for himself and his family. In 1597, New Place was the second-largest house in town, with three storeys, five

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gables, and ten fireplaces. Built in the late 1400s by a former Lord Mayor of London and mentioned in Leland’s Itinerary,43 it had also for some time housed one of Henry VIII’s physicians. However, it was already in disrepair in the 1540s, a fact which explains the low price of £60 for which Shakespeare acquired it half a century later. Once in possession of the Great House – as the townspeople of Stratford called New Place – the poet seems at once to have gone about refurbishing it; thus “the load of stone that ‘Mr. Shaxpere’ sold the Corporation [of Stratford] in 1598 was quite likely left over from work done on the mansion.”44 So Shakespeare signaled his coming of age in Stratford by purchasing a grand and distinguished home. But our understanding of that home should not be limited to the stone and timber of its construction. The daily running of a mansion like New Place entailed constant interaction between the house proper and its surrounding environment. Hence the foot of fine confirming Shakespeare’s acquisition of the property notes that it included “two granaries, & two gardens with appurtenances,”45 while in 1706, the house’s “Great Garden” was described as three-quarters of an acre in size.46 Likewise, “a fine levied five years after [Shakespeare’s] purchase [of New Place] refers also to two orchards,”47 while in 1631 Sir Thomas Temple sought “some few shutes of the last yeares vines” from the house’s garden, vines (probably grapevines) that must either have been part of the garden in Shakespeare’s own day or planted after his death by his elder daughter, Susanna, and his son-in-law John Hall.48 By the same token, the poet’s purchase in 1602 of a cottage and another quarter-acre of garden on the south side of Chapel Lane, directly across from the garden of New Place, has generally been understood as aimed at providing a residence for the servant charged with overseeing the grounds at the Great House.49 In sum, when he bought New Place Shakespeare became a man of property, and most of the property in question was given over to gardening. Then there is the matter of New Place’s granaries. Shakespeare purchased his new home after a spectacularly bad run of harvests, during a time of steep increases in the price of wheat and barley. Concerned that these increases were being fueled by hoarders and speculators, the Corporation of Stratford conducted a survey of the town’s grain supply early in 1598, less than a year after Shakespeare’s family took possession of New Place. The survey lists Shakespeare as owning ten quarters of malt, and scholars have put varying constructions on this fact. Mark Eccles, noting that “the schoolmaster, Mr. Aspinall, had eleven quarters and the vicar, Mr. Byfield, had six of his own and four of his sister’s,” declares ten quarters to be “a normal supply for household use.”50 B. R. Lewis, looking

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at the same information, concludes that “William Shakespeare took advantage of a prospective rising market in ‘corne and malte’ and had ‘engrossed and forestalled’ along with some of his fellow townsmen.”51 Noting that “[o]nly two residents in Chapel Street ward are credited with more” than ten quarters of malt, Samuel Schoenbaum seems to agree with Lewis.52 In any case, it seems an odd coincidence that Shakespeare went to court just a few years later to recover payment owed him by a neighbor to whom he had sold twenty bushels of malt.53 At the very least, all this indicates that the poet’s practical concern with grain supplies preceded Coriolanus by seven or eight years, becoming visible in his domestic records at about the time he would have been writing As You Like It. In fact, ten quarters of barley – or eighty bushels – would have made a considerable measure, although just how considerable remains somewhat unclear. As established by Henry VII, the London quarter can be recomposed “from the variable natural standard on which it was based, viz. ‘The dry grains of barley corn taken from the middle of the ear.’ Of these 32 make an English penny . . . 20 pence make an ounce; 12 ounces a pound; 8 pounds make a gallon of wine; 8 gallons of wine make a London bushel; [and] 8 bushels make a London quarter,”54 with the result that Shakespeare’s ten quarters of malt would have been the rough volumetric equivalent of 640 gallons, or 5,120 pounds. One imagines that this quantity must have sufficed to fill at least one of New Place’s granaries, and Eccles has argued that this same malt was intended for the household’s brewing needs.55 However, a brewmaster at Young’s PLC who has kindly consulted with me on the matter estimates that an Elizabethan housewife would have converted this supply of malt into no less than 1,260 gallons of home-brewed ale at a strength of 4 percent alcohol by volume.56 This seems excessive for a household normally consisting of Anne Shakespeare and her two teenaged daughters. As for Shakespeare’s lawsuit for recovery of debt from his neighbor Philip Rogers, to whom he had sold twenty bushels of malt in six installments between March and May of 1604, this may not in itself prove that the poet regularly augmented his income through the purchase and sale of grain, but it proves that he did so at least on six interrelated occasions within a limited compass of time. And the quantity of malt in question here – one-quarter of the recorded supply in New Place’s granaries in February, 1598 – is by no means trivial. Moreover, Rogers himself was an apothecary who presumably would have converted the malt into vendible ale – the kind of wholesale-to-retail arrangement that might easily take on a lasting character. So the Rogers transaction was not a petty one, and circumstances suggest that it probably would not have been unique.

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Thus by the start of King James’s reign, Shakespeare had established himself in Stratford as the keeper of a great house, the owner of large gardens and granaries, a man with generous stores of barley which one could purchase, at need, for a price. In short, he had become an entrepreneur specializing in real estate and agricultural products, an aspect of his identity further enhanced by his investments in local farmland and farm produce. These were apparently two in number: in May of 1602, the poet acquired 107 acres of arable land north of town in Old Stratford, while in July of 1605 he assumed the remaining thirty-one-year term on a half-share lease of the “Tythes of Corne graine & Heye” from Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton together with the “Tythes of wooll Lambe, & other smalle & pryvie tythes” from Stratford proper.57 These were both large-scale business transactions, the former costing Shakespeare £320 – more than five times the price of New Place five years earlier – and the latter £440. By purchasing the Old Stratford property, Shakespeare became landlord to the local farmers Thomas and Lewis Hiccox, and it seems likely that he would have collected most of his rents as he did his tithes, which is to say in kind, with barley that might have filled New Place’s barns before being transported, in turn, to the storehouses of local buyers. As for the lease of tithes, this amounted to speculation on the local market for agricultural commodities, whose value the poet clearly expected to increase. Under the circumstances, his hopes were well requited. In 1606, his lease seems to have yielded a net annual return of 14 percent, with this rate apparently rising to 22.4 percent by 1624, eight years after his death.58 By concentrating his capital in these various ways, Shakespeare was developing a portfolio of interrelated agricultural investments; like Hamlet’s much-maligned Osric, he was becoming a fellow rich in dirt. Surveying these transactions in aggregate, one is impressed first by Shakespeare’s ambition and energy as a businessman, second by his understanding of Stratford’s local and regional economy. It appears, in fact, that the poet was pursuing something like an overall investment strategy aimed at controlling as much as possible of the local grain market. By buying tithes and farmland, he guaranteed himself a steady supply of product; by purchasing New Place, he secured the granaries, the central location, and the community status necessary to distribute the product; and by selling barley to Philip Rogers, he seems to have sought to establish himself as a supplier of grain to local retail tradesmen. It is an impressive undertaking, and one that in a sense completes the nutritive cycle so notably disrupted by the broken banquets of the poet’s Jacobean plays. Indeed, given the common concerns that dominate both Shakespeare’s

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writing and his business dealings, one is tempted to view these two enterprises as more than coincidentally interconnected. They seem, in effect, to develop into something like an ecological relation, with the dramatic writing supplying the capital for the business investments, which in turn seek to redress the imbalances and inequities explored in the plays. To this extent one may imagine Shakespeare’s venture into the Warwickshire grain business as something of a utopian undertaking: an effort to realize Gloucester’s dream of an equitable society by devising a marketing system whereby “distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough” (King Lear, 4.1.70–1). This undertaking, in turn, grounded itself in the poet’s relation to his native county’s natural environment. Plays like As You Like It and Coriolanus could probably never have been written, nor Shakespeare’s lease of tithes ever purchased, had the poet not started his life in a rural community that cultivated the soil to feed itself, only to see the fruits of its labor expropriated by a privileged and distant urban population. After all, it was one of the ironies of early modern England’s economy that famine hit hardest where one would least expect it: in the nation’s rural breadbasket. But of course Shakespeare’s stockpiling of malt need not be regarded as a utopian venture at all. It can just as easily create discomfort for readers unwilling to think of the poet as “a notorious hoarder of grain.”59 For one thing, the stores of malt at New Place can make Shakespeare seem suspiciously like Macbeth’s sharp-dealing farmer “that hang’d himself on th’expectation of plenty” (2.3.4–5) – a self-serving profiteer who winds up in hell, where he clearly belongs. And the same historical context can lead scholars to view the poet’s plays as celebrating the exploitation of England’s poor by moving their audiences “from the merry world of ‘service’ to a world of servility and intimidation” in which submission to the powers that be is the only acceptable response to oppression.60 These are serious concerns, and one cannot entirely dispel them, but the poet’s iconic status renders them easy to exaggerate. Given our incomplete knowledge of Shakespeare’s business transactions, the most one can say is that in the process of providing for himself and his family he took advantage of a rising market in grain, and that he did so in ways one could view as ethically (or perhaps even legally) ambiguous. In this respect he simply appears to have behaved as most people do, more or less. As disappointed as one may be to see Britain’s national poet acting like an ordinary human being, one should hardly be surprised, nor does such behavior in any way diminish the achievement of his poetry.

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In any case, Shakespeare’s involvement in the Warwickshire grain market developed over many years, in a way that attests to the durability of his Stratford connections. As early as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania laments a harvest failure very like the back-to-back dearths then afflicting the Midlands: “The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain, / the ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard” (2.1.93–5). And on January 24, 1598, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire friend Abraham Sturley wrote to Richard Quiney, father of the man who would marry Shakespeare’s younger daughter, concerning the poet’s investment plans: [O]ur countriman Mr Shaksper, is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shottreie or neare about us; he thinketh it a veri fitt patterne to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes. Bi the instruccions u can geve him theareof, and bi the frendes he can make therefore, we thinke it a faire marke for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to hitt. It obtained would advance him in deede, and would do us muche good.61

Thus, in the late 1590s, Shakespeare was already considering how to do business in Stratford, and Sturley’s letter makes clear that the poet was already cultivating a circle of local “frendes” to assist – and apparently also to benefit from – his projected enterprise. As for the actual investments themselves, these would have to wait until the very end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of James’s, making Shakespeare’s venture into the Warwickshire grain market a distinctively Jacobean undertaking. We have already considered some of this project’s implications for the plays of Shakespeare’s later years, but it should also be noted that the poet’s concerns with property management seem to have increased toward the end of his life, just as his involvement with the theater was diminishing. John Aubrey asserts that Shakespeare “was wont to goe into his native countrey once a yeare,”62 and while Aubrey also retails some clearly apocryphal stories about the poet, this remark has the ring of truth. From 1602 onward, Shakespeare’s obligations in Warwickshire grew so extensive and varied – purchasing property, leasing tithes, collecting rents and tithes, selling malt, pursuing litigation – that it seems most unlikely he would have entrusted them to a proxy without some sort of regular, personal, on-site supervision. And in late 1614, when the poet’s literary career was effectively over and he himself had less then two years left to live, his business in Warwickshire came to a head with an ambiguous dispute over enclosure.

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The basic details of the case are simple enough, and while it appears to have concerned Shakespeare a good deal, his precise role in it will probably remain unclear. In late 1614 three local landowners – Arthur Mainwaring, William Replingham, and (later) William Combe – started an action to enclose property near Stratford in the hamlet of Welcombe. The proposed enclosure threatened to reduce the income of neighboring tithe-owners by restricting access to common lands. As a result, the corporation of Stratford opposed the enclosure move and delegated the town clerk, Shakespeare’s self-described “Cosen” Thomas Greene,63 to meet with Shakespeare and his son-in-law John Hall in London, apparently with the aim of enlisting their support against the enclosers. At this meeting Shakespeare and Hall sought to calm the clerk, who recalled them as saying “they think there will be nothyng done at all,”64 and a later entry in Greene’s diary records Shakespeare’s final position on the matter in cryptic terms: “Sept W Shakspeares tellyng J Greene that I [J] was not able to [word deleted] beare the enclosinge of welcombe.”65 But what does this mean? For all its apparent specificity, this note tells us almost nothing about Shakespeare’s position on the Welcombe enclosure issue, for it is marked by problems of both a paleographic and a semantic nature. Terence Hawkes has summarized the former as follows: “J Greene” probably refers to John Greene, the brother of the diarist. But the second J who “was not able to beare the encloseinge of Welcombe” presents an unresolvable ambiguity . . . For the peculiarities of Thomas Greene’s handwriting permit the sign here lamely recorded as “J” to function as “J” or “I” or even “he.” Thus an entire spectrum of potential meaning offers itself since the reference could be to any of the three persons involved.66

As for the semantic problem, it centers upon the verb “beare,” whose possible meanings extend “from our modern sense of ‘endure,’ through ‘justify’ and ‘support,’ to the rather more problematical, even opposite sense of ‘promote’ or ‘carry through’ or even ‘bear the cost’.”67 Nor does the word deleted before “beare” offer any help. Greene at first scribbled the letters “to he,” “perhaps starting to write ‘to help’ and then seeing that this could be taken in two ways, ‘to remedy’ or ‘to aid’,” before settling on the equally unsatisfactory verb “beare.”68 So the textual record of Shakespeare’s response to the Welcombe enclosures remains as enigmatic as anything he wrote in the sonnets. If we look beyond the diary entry itself, however, context makes certain things clear. First, Shakespeare resisted the powerful emotional appeal mounted by the Stratford corporation against the enclosers, even when

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that appeal was carried to him by an intimate associate and possible kinsman. His advice as recorded by Greene makes that much clear: [H]e told me that they [the enclosers] assured him they meant to inclose noe further then to gospell bushe & so vpp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedge & take in Salisburyes peece: and that they meane in Aprill to servey the Land & then to gyve satisfaction & not before & he & mr Hall say they think there will be nothyng done at all.69

Even in this terse summary, Shakespeare’s language aims to placate, to reassure, to cool, to delay. Second, we know that rather than making common cause with the local diggers, Shakespeare reached a separate agreement with the enclosers such that “if his tithe interests were at all compromised,” he would have “reasonable satisfaction . . . in yearly rent or a sum of money.”70 And third, throughout this unpleasant business Shakespeare maintained his typical low profile, remaining on cordial terms with all while avoiding divisive public declarations of allegiance or principle. One might even speculate that Greene’s final memorandum on Shakespeare and the proposed enclosures remains ambiguous because Greene himself did not really know what Shakespeare was saying on the subject. All of this – the cool detachment, the politic maneuvering, the quiet protection of personal interests, above all the studied evasiveness – seems consistent with the poet’s personality as displayed elsewhere in his work and biographical record. Greenblatt has described the Welcombe business as “merely and disagreeably ordinary,”71 and much of its disagreeable quality arguably derives from Shakespeare’s refusal to take a stand, from his apparent willingness to let pressing matters of social equity and ethical commitment get buried under issues of procedure: meetings and memoranda, promises and reassurances, more meetings and more memoranda. It is all too disheartening; to use Greenblatt’s language, it is all too ordinary. It makes Shakespeare look shifty. But of course one man’s shiftiness is another’s survival strategy, and everything we know about Shakespeare’s work and life suggests that he viewed other human beings as the single biggest threat to his survival and prosperity. As Troilus and Cressida’s Ulysses observes of society in general, [E]very thing include[s] itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite, And appetite, an universal wolf (So doubly seconded with will and power),

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Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. (1.3.119–24)

From the standpoint of environmental activism, this may seem like a reasonable intuition, but it has the unfortunate consequence of rendering activism itself suicidal. After all, if man is a wolf to man, what sense is there in risking oneself for others?

chapter 4

John Fletcher and the ecology of manhood

Superficially, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher pair up well. Apart from Jonson, they are the only English playwrights collected in folio prior to the Restoration. (Francis Beaumont of course shared title-page billing on the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, but he had no hand in most of the plays represented there; likewise, most of the commendatory verses prefacing that folio address Fletcher alone, and Fletcher alone appears in the volume’s frontispiece engraving.) Fletcher and Shakespeare are known to have collaborated on productions like Henry VIII (1613), The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–14), and Cardenio (1611–13), and even when the two playwrights are not writing the same script one may still trace affinities between Shakespearean romance and Fletcherian tragicomedy. After Shakespeare retired to Warwickshire, Fletcher succeeded to his position as house playwright for the King’s Men. In short, the two poets moved in the same circles and wrote plays performed by and for many of the same people, sometimes working together in the process. Fletcher has been described as the “principal collaborator” of “Shakespeare’s late phase,” and rightly so.1 From the environmental standpoint, however, the two playwrights remain easy to distinguish. Shakespeare’s career embodies a distinctive attachment to specific geographical locales – Stratford, Warwickshire, the Cotswolds and the Midlands more broadly – and although this attachment changes form over time, taking on a symbolic character in the poet’s early career, while metamorphosing later into a more material and prosaic set of property investments, it remains a constant throughout his adult life. In Fletcher, by contrast, the relationship with geographical space is supplanted by a relationship with social space, specifically the limited segment of English social space identified with fashion, wit, and privilege. The difference becomes clearly visible in the front matter of the poets’ early folio collections. The Shakespeare folio of 1623 approaches the reader with little fanfare: an epistle dedicatory to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, followed by four commendatory poems by Ben Jonson, 96

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Hugh Holland, L. Digges, and a certain I. M. (apparently the translator James Mabbe). The Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 offers a notable contrast. Following an epistle dedicatory to the fourth Earl of Pembroke (the younger of the two brothers to whom the Shakespeare folio had been dedicated, and the only one of the two still surviving in 1647), the Beaumont and Fletcher folio regales its readers with over a score of commendatory verses, including effusions by a viscount, two baronets, three knights, and a “muster-roll of cavalier writers” associated with Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court.2 Nor can this display of social connections be dismissed as a post-Naseby expression of royalist nostalgia. The 1647 folio’s title page identifies its authors as “Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen,”3 a presentational style that in turn derives from publications of the Jacobean period such as the 1616 and 1625 quartos of The Scornful Lady and the 1620 and 1622 quartos of Philaster. After 1596 Shakespeare was of course equally entitled to style himself a gentleman, but his quarto publications of the Jacobean period do nothing of the sort, generally referring to him by name alone and only rarely, as in the 1608 quarto of Lear, as “M. William Shak-speare.”4 An author’s title-page billing may of course reflect preferences other than the author’s own, including particular marketing choices made by publishers and printers during the production of a volume. But whether or not these choices are the author’s, they remain meaningful, and it is clear from the title pages of their published works that, as commodities, Shakespeare and Fletcher related to their social status differently. Moreover, in Shakespeare’s case the difference comes to the fore yet again, in a more personal manner, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599). There Jonson famously mocks Shakespeare’s recent acquisition of a coat of arms, transforming the newly minted Shakespeare family motto of “Non Sans Droit” into an artifact of the lower bodily stratum: “Not without mustard” (3.4.86). Every Man Out was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s own company, guaranteeing that the poet “would have listened to this insult again and again in rehearsal and in performance.”5 Such treatment would have given him good reason not to insist overmuch on his newly improved social standing; as for Jonson, his bricklayer associations haunted him throughout life and could easily have fueled resentment at an older colleague’s social advancement. The son of a former Bishop of London and royal chaplain, Fletcher might not have been a better-quality playwright than either Jonson or Shakespeare, but he was without doubt a playwright of better quality. For his earliest audiences, this seems to have amounted to much the same thing.

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As a result, Fletcher wrote plays that catered to his associations with gentility, foregrounding these in ways that underscore their importance to his identity as a dramatist. Dryden noted early on that he “understood and imitated the conversation of Gentlemen much better” than Shakespeare, and whether true or not, this says a great deal about how his plays were initially received.6 In fact, Fletcher’s works are consumed with questions of aristocratic honor and reputation, properties that he likes to place under extreme duress so as to illuminate his characters’ innate nobility. Thus one of his favorite plot-devices sets the claims of sexual honor and of aristocratic loyalty against one another, thereby forcing the hero of the moment to choose between two equally essential aspects of his courtly identity. This is the core conflict of The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1610), perhaps the most celebrated of the collaborations with Beaumont: the play’s nameless king forces Amintor into a marriage of convenience with the king’s own designated mistress, Evadne, whose infidelity Amintor (along with his best friend and Evadne’s brother, Melantius) must then tolerate in the name of a subject’s allegiance to his sovereign. Beaumont is credited with composing most of this play’s individual scenes,7 but its central plot-device bears a notable resemblance to other plays written by Fletcher alone. Thus, for instance, Archas in The Loyal Subject (1616–19) must endure a variety of slights from the Duke of Moscovia, injuries which culminate in the Duke’s demand that Archas deliver his two daughters into the keeping of the ducal court, for implicitly dishonorable purposes. Likewise, The Tragedy of Valentinian (1610–14) centers upon the eponymous Roman emperor’s rape of Lucina, wife to the soldier Maximus, an outrage that Maximus’ comrade Aecius insists must be tolerated in the name of imperial obedience: “How ever you are tainted, be no Traitor. / Time may out-weare the first, the last lives ever.”8 Such situations provide a recurrent motif in Fletcher’s plays, a motif for which there exists no counterpart in Shakespeare. There is, however, a precedent of sorts in Fletcher’s own personal background. In 1595 the poet’s father, the newly appointed Bishop of London Richard Fletcher, lost Queen Elizabeth’s favor and ruined his career by marrying without the queen’s permission, with contemporaries even alleging that the bishop’s death shortly thereafter proceeded “more of grief [at his loss of preferment] then any other disease.”9 If we allow for reversal of the monarch’s gender, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Loyal Subject, and Valentinian all rehearse the same core dilemma: an irreconcilable conflict between a subject’s sworn duty to his sovereign on one hand and his sexual aspirations on the other. For Fletcher the dramatist, conflicts of this sort fascinate endlessly, and for

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an obvious reason: the playwright’s sensibility has been conditioned first and foremost by a social environment, not a biological one, by the threat of courtly disasters such as denial of patronage rather than natural ones such as dearth and famine. This is not to say that Fletcher completely ignores contemporary environmental issues and events. Like Middleton and Jonson, he mentions the New River project in his plays, and his work, like Shakespeare’s, has been read in part as a response to the Midlands Uprising of 1607.10 But in Fletcher such issues remain epiphenomenal; the poet approaches them through a deeper preoccupation with the psychological effects of environmental change, as these manifest themselves in the upper social ranks. To this extent, one could say that Fletcher’s primary interest lies in the shifting ecology of gentility, and more specifically the ecology of masculine gentility. 1 This proposition – that Fletcher’s plays enact a loss of relationship to the natural world, which they replace with a relationship to the world of fashion and courtly politics – threatens to shift the present study in the direction of metaphor, away from environmental issues per se and toward issues of courtly power and privilege instead. But the move from nature to culture is easily theorized by varying schools of ecological thought, and in the case of Fletcher’s work it is also necessary for proper historical perspective. First, as to theory: the fields of primatology and behavioral ecology offer long-range scientific support for the proposition that human social behavior may be influenced in important ways by environmental variables. Primatology’s formation in the 1950s as a sub-discipline of anthropology was driven by a desire to “study . . . the behavior of wild primates for the insights they could offer into human social evolution.”11 While more recent primatological research has not always retained this focus on inter-species continuity, the discipline has consistently studied how environment affects behavior in non-human species, and this work has in the long term led back to inter-species comparisons, prompting researchers to conclude that “non-human primates are able to make behavioural adjustments to their environments by means of cultural traditions; that these are not unique to man as a species, even though differences of cultural learning between man and other primates are immense.”12 At the same time, behavioral ecologists researching the concept of personality – i.e. “behavioural differences between individuals that are consistent over time and across situations” – have concluded that “multiple

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ecological factors can shape – over the short- or long-term – consistent behavioural differences” in non-human animals.13 And across the species divide, behavioral ecologists dealing specifically with human subjects also “tend to focus on explaining behavioral variation as adaptive responses to environmental variation.”14 This body of research, in turn, has led cultural ecologists in the humanities to depict “the sphere of human culture as not separate from but interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles,” while writing matter-of-factly of “the cultural ecosystems of art and literature.”15 One might also note that the present discussion of Fletcher’s plays will focus on the single resource issue regularly described by primatologists as of paramount importance in predicting the environmental behavior of non-human male primates: the “availability of fertile females.”16 But matters of theory remain just that – matters of theory. When taken on their own terms, Fletcher’s plays insist upon the metaphorical conflation of nature and culture, and for two main reasons: first, because Jacobean court culture insists upon this same conflation, and, second, because the metaphorical turn itself participates in real changes to England’s natural environment. To start with the first of these points: the foundational documents of Tudor and Stuart autocracy regularly depict the ruler of England as the ruler of nature. This, for instance, is the governing conceit of the Ditchley Portrait (c. 1592), perhaps the crowning iconographic celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a painting in which the monarch’s appearance chases away storm clouds while an attached sonnet celebrates her as “The prince of light. The Sonne by whom thin[gs grow].”17 This same principle of representation explains the stylized quality of early modern English pastoral, which “has more connection, obviously, with the real interests of the court than with country life in any of its possible forms.”18 And this same principle appears repeatedly in the Fletcher canon, receiving perhaps its definitive statement from the emperor Valentinian when he receives news of the ravished Lucina’s suicide: Why do ye flatter a beliefe into me That I am all that is, the world’s my creature, The Trees bring forth their fruits when I say Summer, The Wind, that knows no limit but his wildnesse, At my command moves not a leafe: The sea With his proud mountaine waters envying heaven, When I say still, run into christall mirrors? Can I do this and she dye? (Valentinian 4.1.20–7)

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Lucina’s suicide may startle the emperor out of his sense of ascendancy over nature, but the more interesting fact is that he needs to be startled in the first place. On some level, in other words, he has been persuaded to take hyperbole for truth, to believe that he really can make trees bear fruit and seas lie still. In a sense, the language and social practice associated with royal supremacy generate their own false ecological reality. Fletcher’s plays, in turn, explore the reality thus generated. Hence my second point: any false ecological consciousness with sufficient resources at its disposal may be expected to affect – probably for the worse – the real ecological balance that produces it. The culture of the Jacobean court offered no exception to this rule. As rural landowners withdrew from their country estates to pursue a life of privilege in London, not only did they contribute to the environmental problems of the growing metropolis; they also effected changes in the rural landscape, transforming arable land to pasture through enclosure, depopulating villages, and opening the countryside to various kinds of proto-industrial exploitation. Such changes were already visible in the reign of Henry VIII, prompting More’s complaint that enclosure “destroy[s] and despoil[s] fields, houses, towns.”19 A century later this trend had only intensified, with the cash-strapped royal family itself leading the way in subjecting previously protected rural properties to commercial development, as for instance with the notorious example of the Forest of Dean. There in 1612 King James authorized the establishment of four blast furnaces and three forges that were together known as the King’s Ironworks. These new facilities far outstripped the capacities of the older mines and forges operated in the area by local miners under customary privilege dating at least to the thirteenth century, and as a result the new ironworks “necessitated a major reconstruction of the local industry.”20 In doing so, these new ironworks also led to increased ore production, expanded mining operations, widespread deforestation, and damming of local waterways, so that by the reign of Charles I a good 4,000 acres of the forest had been felled and then “enclosed for regrowth.”21 In this sense, at least, the English monarchs of the early seventeenth century made good on their claim to be masters of the natural order. Thus while convention depicted the Tudor and Stuart monarchs as allpowerful governors of nature, that is what, in a sense, they became. The royal presence offered courtiers a new environment, an alternative to life spent in the country in relative isolation, with limited diversion and few opportunities, at the mercy of bad weather and poor harvests and other unpredictable natural calamities. And coupled with the monarch’s person

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came the ancillary attractions of city and court, playhouses and baiting rings, ordinaries and gambling houses and brothels and markets: in short, all the accouterments of fashionable society. According to Lawrence Stone, “the London ‘season’ . . . developed with astonishing speed between about 1590 and 1620,” during the peak years of Fletcher’s career, with the result that “[b]y the 1630’s at least three-quarters of the peerage, and probably more, had acquired for themselves by ownership or lease a fairly permanent residence in or about London.”22 Likewise, “the number of gentry who had similarly taken on London houses must have run into several hundreds, to say nothing of those who went into furnished lodgings for the Christmas season.”23 As house playwright for the city’s preeminent gentlemen’s theater, Fletcher found himself professionally implicated in this trend. It became his job to produce entertainment suitable to the better sort of Londoners, entertainment that itself comprised one of the many inducements for gentlemen to undertake the troublesome and expensive move from country house to city residence. If Fletcher’s plays thus abetted a large-scale shift in the living circumstances of Jacobean England’s ruling class, that shift also entailed noteworthy ecological consequences which manifested themselves not only on the material but also on the psychological and social levels. As a group, the English gentry traditionally defined themselves through their relationship to the English countryside, a relationship which was understood to involve regional military and administrative obligations. In 1577, for instance, William Harrison described the degrees of gentlemen in terms that repeatedly stress their connection to arms and to landed property: In old time he was only called a marquis qui habuit terram limitaneam [who held frontier land], a marching [border] province upon the enemy’s countries, and thereby bound to keep and defend the frontiers . . . The name of earl likewise was among the Romans a name of office, who had comites sacri palatii, comites aerarii, comites stabuli, comites patrimonii, largitionum, scholarum, commerciorum [grooms of the palace, secretaries of the treasury, grooms of the stable, supervisors of the imperial estates, of public revenues, of the imperial guard, of commerce], and suchlike . . . Goropius saith that comes and grave is all one, to wit, the viscount, called either procomes or vicecomes, and in time past governed in the county under the earl . . . The baron . . . is such a free lord as hath a lordship or barony, whereof he beareth his name, and hath divers knights or freeholders holding of him, who with him did serve the King in his wars, and held their tenures in baronia, that is, for performance of such service.24

Here, in little, lies the traditional justification for the armigerous gentry’s existence. They occupied land in order to impose civil order upon it by

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defending it from invasion in wartime and protecting it from brigandage in times of peace. In return for this service, the gentry were allowed a range of privileges that included income from the lands thus protected, the loyalty and obedience of their retainers, and the right to extract various kinds of resources from their properties as well. Prominent among the last of these privileges was the right to hunt game – a recreation that was in a sense understood to be no recreation at all, but rather a means of keeping in readiness for one’s duties as a warrior and maintainer of the peace. Thus Castiglione’s Courtier (published 1528) could declare that “[t]here be . . . many . . . exercises, the which though they depend not throughly upon Armes, yet have they a great agreement with them, and have in them much manly activitie. And of them me thinke, hunting is one of the chiefest. For it hath a certaine likenesse with warre, & is truely a pastime for great men.”25 In 1615, Gervase Markham could still hold to the same position: I thinke it not amisse to . . . giue that recreation precedencie of place which in mine opinion . . . doth many degrees goe before, and precede all other, as being most royall for the statelines thereof, most artificial for the wisedom & cunning thereof and most manly and warlike for the vse and indurance thereof. And this I hould to be the hunting of wilde Beastes in generall.26

By this logic, the gentry’s privileges were understood as coextensive with the local ecology. The primary custodians of their territory, they stood simultaneously at the apex of its social order and at the top of its food chain. So what happens when the custodians in question withdraw from their traditionally assigned districts and relocate to the city, delegating their conventional duties to estate managers and constables and justices of the peace while devoting their time and income to urban diversions instead? In a broad sense, this question lies at the heart of the Fletcher canon. More particularly, it receives direct expression in the opening scene of Wit Without Money (c. 1614). There the family and companions of the young gallant Valentine, aghast at his prodigality, seek to dissuade him from selling off his newly inherited estate and settling in London for a life of leisure. As Valentine’s uncle exclaims, “This is madnesse / To be a willfull begger” (1.1.150–1); as the servant Lance complains on behalf of the household in general, Had you Land, and honest men to serve your purposes, Honest, and faithfull, and will you run away from um, Betray your selfe, and your poore tribe to misery; Morgage all us, like old cloakes; where will you hunt next? You had a thousand acres, faire and open:

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The Kings bench is enclosed, thers no good riding, The Counter is full of thornes and brakes, take heed sir, And bogges, youle quickly finde what broth they’re made of.

(1.1.106–13)

For his part, however, Valentine remains obdurate, replying to his uncle, who has asked him how he means to live henceforth, Why all good men’s my meanes, my wits my plow, The Townes my stock, Tavernes my standing house, And all the world knowes theres no want; all Gentlemen That love society, love me; all purses That wit and pleasure opens, are my Tennants; Every mans clothes fit me, the next faire lodging Is but my next remoove, and when I please To be more eminent, and take the aire, A peece is levied, and a Coach prepared, And I goe I care not whether, what neede state here? (1.1.156–65)

In the event, Valentine evades bankruptcy through a convenient marriage to the wealthy and much-sought-after widow Lady Hartwell, and in doing so he gestures toward an expedient that loomed large both in the Jacobean erotic imagination and in contemporary social practice. In the former respect, “[t]he wealthy widow, the bevy of suitors, the courtships tinged with lust, aggression, and trickery, and the triumph of one man . . . over his rivals, are stock characters and situations in early seventeenth-century comedy.”27 In the latter respect, wealthy widows proved popular objects of sexual competition at all levels of Jacobean society, but they became increasingly important to the gentry and peerage: Among the families elevated [to the peerage] before 1603, some 20 per cent. of the marriages between 1540 and 1599 of holders or heirs apparent of titles were with heiresses. Thereafter there is a sudden jump to 34 per cent. for the next sixty years. It is thus evident that around the turn of the century the financial embarrassment of the peerage drove them into a far more single-minded pursuit of wealthy marriages than had previously been their custom.28

So Wit Without Money gives its audience a comic, idealized image of the gentry’s transformation from a rural military to an urban leisure class. In ecological terms, this transformation entails a series of substitutions: removal from country house to city lodgings, liquidation of the former to finance the latter, then replacement of the lost rural rents with a generous dowry obtained through one’s competitive efforts in fashionable society. This final move – whereby lost agricultural profits are supplanted by the prospective wife’s dowry – presents the pursuit of eligible feminine companionship as a

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replacement for the gentry’s customary stewardship of landed property. Women become the new alternative to property, and attending to them becomes the new occupation of the traditionally landed class. 2 On one level, this arrangement is nothing very new. Jacobean society certainly did not invent the idea of mending one’s fortunes through an advantageous marriage – although this course of action did grow increasingly popular amongst English gentlemen in the early seventeenth century, when it was also accompanied by an unusually broad-based relocation of the gentry from country to town. Nor is there anything very innovative about the metaphorical practice of identifying women with the natural world. Following Sherry B. Ortner’s assertion that “the pan-cultural devaluation of woman could be accounted for, quite simply, by postulating that woman is being identified with, or symbolically associated with, nature, as opposed to man, who is identified with culture,” a generation of Renaissance scholars has sedulously documented the ways in which early modern symbolic systems associate the second sex with the natural world.29 For present purposes, the most notable example of such work may be the eco-feminism of Carolyn Merchant, which places “the conflation of woman and nature” at the heart of changing early modern attitudes toward the natural environment.30 Fletcher’s work itself abounds with this sort of conflation, which is too commonplace to need documentation here. However, Ortner herself opened her influential essay on womankind’s identification with nature by noting that “the specific cultural conceptions of woman are incredibly diverse and even mutually contradictory,”31 and again, Fletcher’s work offers a case in point. Alongside the predictable formulations of woman-as-land, land-as-woman, woman-as-game-animal, etc., his plays return regularly to a very different set of associations: one in which the poet’s dislocated male gentry intrude upon a feminized courtly/ urban cultural preserve in which they find themselves at a distinct disadvantage. These associations, in turn, seem driven in part by social developments whereby the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed a significant upgrade of women’s responsibilities and unofficial authority within the sphere of the household. According to Natasha Korda, “the decline of the family as an economic unit of production” led to a shift in “the role of the housewife in late-sixteenth-century England . . . from that of skilled producer to savvy consumer.”32 Wendy Wall has argued for the emergence of a “fantasy of a socially empowering

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housewifery” in early modern English dramatic literature.33 Mary Ellen Lamb has traced similar paradigms of “empowered housewifery” to the plays of Shakespeare.34 Thus, by Fletcher’s day, the traditional understanding of the English gentry’s social function – and of men’s and women’s roles within that function – could find itself threatened by two concurrent environmental developments: England’s gentlemen moved increasingly away from the fields and woods of their landed estates and into the receiving rooms and other domestic spaces of London’s fashionable society, while England’s gentlewomen asserted increasing authority over the management of domestic space in general. These two trends, taken together, could only lead to a crisis in gentlemanly identity, which was thus divorced from its conventional grounding in landed property, while being called upon to display itself in domestic settings defined increasingly as foreign and even hostile terrain. Fletcher’s male characters often find themselves in just this dilemma, and their responses to it typically oscillate between blustering self-assertion and bewildered panic. In the former instance, they insist upon their status as leaders, warriors, gallants, and wits, while subjecting their feminine counterparts to gales of misogynist rhetoric. In The Humorous Lieutenant (c. 1619), for instance, Prince Demetrius enters a tense diplomatic negotiation “with a Javelin, from hunting, attended with yong Gentlemen” (1.1.158, stage direction), while his proud father declares to the assembled envoys, [C]an you imagine (You men of poore and common apprehension) Whilst I admit this man, my son, this nature, That in one looke carries more fire, and fiercenesse, Then all your masters lives: dare I admit him, Admit him thus, even to my side, my bosome, When he is fit to rule, when all men cry him, And all hopes hang about his head; thus place him, His weapon hatcht in bloud, all these attending When he shall make their fortunes, all as sudden In any expedition he shall point ’em, As arrowes from a Tartars bow, and speeding, Dare I do this, and feare an enemy? (1.1.165–77)

This is a bit much, even by the inherently operatic standards of the Jacobean stage, and there is no shortage of such stuff in Fletcher, as for instance in The Mad Lover (1616), when Memnon raises his right arm and declares (in a metaphor best left as such) that “The maidenheads of

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thousand lives hangs here” (1.1.60), or in The Island Princess (1621), when the King of Bakam scoffs, “Merit? I am above it; / I am equall with all honours, all atchievements” (1.3.74–5). As a result, Fletcher’s male characters generally come off as smug, affected gasbags, the sort of men whose noisy pretension would mark them as an easy target in most competitive situations. And their ridiculous qualities are if anything foregrounded further by the very mixed success of their efforts on the battlefield. In The Humorous Lieutenant, for instance, Demetrius’ much-vaunted martial prowess collapses when first put to the test: Demetrius. All the young men lost? Lieutenant. I am glad you are here: but they are all i’ th’ pound, sir, They’l never ride o’er other mens corn againe, I take it, Such frisking, and such flaunting with their feathers, And such careering with their mistres favours; And here must he be pricking out for honor, And there got he a knocke, and down goes pilgarlike, Commends his soule to his she-saint, and exit. Another spurres in there, cryes make roome villaines, I am a Lord, scarce spoken, but with reverence A rascall takes him o’re the face, and fels him; There lyes the Lord, the Lord be with him. (2.2.73–84)

And later, when Demetrius has his enemies cornered, he yields to them again as an expression of respect for their noble natures: “[I]n the way of curtesie, I’le start ye; / Draw off, and make a lane through all the Armie, / That these that have subdu’d us, may march through us” (3.7.099–101). Bonduca (c. 1613) begins with its Roman armies in defeat (“Shame, how they flee!” [1.1.7]), progresses through a disgraceful act of insubordination by the Roman commander Penius, and ends with its British army humiliated as well. In Valentinian, the honest soldier Pontius complains that he has ironically lost preferment for being too competent a warrior: [M]y songs Goe not to’th Lute, or Violl, but to’th Trumpet, My tune kept on a Target, and my subject The well struck wounds of men, not love, or women.

(3.2.9–12)

More generally, paragons of martial success and chivalric virtue – Tamburlaines and Henry Vs – prove scarce in the Fletcher canon, their places taken by more affected, less effective heroes. Contrasting “[t]he well struck wounds of men” with “love, or women,” Valentinian’s Pontius marks a traditional distinction between the masculine

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and feminine spheres of activity while locating his own identity squarely in the former. In the process, he also identifies himself as a dying breed, out of courtly favor and excluded from the circle of courtly preferment, which has been co-opted instead by women and effeminate men. As Valentine exclaims in Wit Without Money, “Hang fighting, hang’t ’tis out of fashion” (5.2.12). Hence the second half of the Fletcherian gentleman’s dilemma: not only is he excluded from his native country – the field of battle and the natural world more generally – but he finds himself forced to operate in a realm of diplomacy and courtship for which he proves spectacularly unsuited, and which emerges instead as very much a feminine enclave. One easy response to such a predicament is to vilify womankind tout court, and Fletcher’s gentlemen waste no time doing just this. Here again is Valentine, this time denouncing his betrothed-to-be, the widow Lady Hartwell: Marke me, widdowes Are long extents in Law upon mens livings, Upon their bodies winding-sheets, they that enjoy um, Lie but with dead mens monuments . . . ... Why tis a monstrous thing to marry at all, Especially as now tis made; me thinkes a man, An understanding man, is more wife to me, And of a nobler tie, than all these trinkets; What doe we get by women, but our senses, Which is the rankest part about us, satisfied, And when thats done what are we? Crest falne cowards.

(2.1.28–31, 45–51)

And here is Mirabell from The Wild-Goose Chase (c. 1621), voicing the same sentiments in almost the same terms: Yes, there be things called Widdows, dead-mens Wills, I never lov’d to prove those; nor never long’d yet To be buried alive in another mans cold Monument. And there be Maids appearing, and Maids being: The appearing, are fantastick things, meer shadows; And if you mark ’em well, they want their heads too; Onely the world, to cosen mystie eyes, Has clapt ’em on new faces. The Mayds being, A man may venture on, if he be so mad to mary; If he have neither fear before his eyes, nor fortune. (1.3.97–106)

But if Fletcher’s gentlemen see their boastful assertions of martial prowess discredited, as often as not, on the battlefield, their misogynist rants seem,

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on the contrary, to be driven by a justifiable fear of feminine agency. At the very least, Fletcher’s men have good reason to beware of the women around them, for time and again, in matters of love intrigue, the women carry the day. In The Humorous Lieutenant, King Antigonus attempts to seduce Celia, the beloved of his son, Demetrius, only to see his efforts scorned and rejected: Your will’s a poore one; And though it be a Kings will, a despised one, Weaker then Infants leggs, your will’s in swaddling clouts: A thousand waies my will has found to check ye. (4.5.60–3)

In The Loyal Subject, Archas’ daughters Honora and Viola similarly face down the lustful Duke of Moscovia. In the subplot of Women Pleased (1619–23), Isabella, wife of the jealous usurer Lopez, evades her husband’s efforts to restrict her sexual availability, finally forcing him to acknowledge the folly of his mistrustful nature and rely upon her to police her own chastity; meanwhile, in the same play’s main plot, the Duchess of Florence and her daughter, the Princess Belvidere, having “got the mastry” of the play’s male principals, deign to offer them “a husbands freedome” in return for submission to their will (5.3.100–1). In Monsieur Thomas (1610–16), the play’s scapegrace title character is lured into climbing into an upstairs window in the hope of bedding his love interest, Mary, who with her maid’s help then casts him back into the street, injuring his legs in the process: Ye’are subtle, but beleeve it Foxe, i’le finde ye, The surgeons will be here strait, rore againe boy, And breake thy legs for shame, thou wilt be sport else.

(3.3.137–9)

These examples of triumphant feminine wit could be multiplied so easily that critics have identified “Fletcher’s assertive women protagonists” as a distinctive feature of his work.35 But for every such resourceful Fletcherian woman, there exists a baffled, humiliated, outmaneuvered gentleman as well, and they too deserve recognition as a defining feature of the poet’s dramaturgy. Indeed, in their most extreme form, these male figures are so overawed by their women that they cannot even speak. Thus, in an ironic reversal of the premium traditionally attached to silence as a feminine virtue, these characters claim aposiopesis as their signature rhetorical trope. Consider, for instance, Belleur in The Wild-Goose Chase, who likes Italian women, “And would fain do as others do,” but who declares that when they speak to him, “I am humbled, / I am gone, I confess ingenuously I am

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silenced, / The spirit of Amber cannot force me answer” (1.2.32, 38–40). By play’s end, Belleur is so cowed by the women around him that he longs to trade their company for a natural environment which he considers more hospitable: “I had rather meet two Beares” (5.5.17); “I’ll travel into Wales; amongst the Mountains, / I hope they cannot finde me” (5.6.29–30); “I’ll keep hounds first [before keeping house with a woman]; / And those I hate right hartily” (5.6.47–8). Likewise, Memnon in The Mad Lover excels on the battlefield, but “knowes no complement, nor curious casting / Of words into fit places ere he speak em” (1.1.39–40); thus, when confronted with the beautiful princess Calis and her ladies in waiting, “He kneeles amaz’d, and forgets to speake” (1.1.108, stage direction): calis. How he stares on me. cleanthe. Knight him Madam, knight him, He will grow tooth’ ground els. eumenes. Speak sir, ’tis the Princesse. 1. captain. Ye shame your selfe, speake to her. calis. Rise and speake sir. Ye are welcome to the Court, to me, to all sir. lucippe. Is he not deafe? (1.1.109–13)

In The Island Princess, the Portuguese adventurer Ruy Dias is so overcome by the Princess Quisara’s beauty that he finds himself speechless, despite the princess’s clear indications of her favor: “Why, how now Captaine, what, affraid to speak to me? / A man of armes, and danted with a Lady?” (2.2.29–30). As Ruy Dias himself summarizes matters later, “My countenance, it shames me; / . . . / Oh I have boy’d my selfe” (2.6.130, 133). And in Wit Without Money, when Valentine’s companions urge him to speak to Lady Hartwell, he replies, “I had rather / March ith mouth oth Cannon” (2.4.156–7). In short, the Fletcherian gentleman, at home with bears and dogs and Welsh mountains and artillery, finds himself regularly infantilized and humiliated by a feminine society rooted in town and court. This topos – so recurrent as to comprise a distinctive feature of Fletcher’s dramaturgy – speaks both to contemporary anxieties about the construction of masculine identity and to that identity’s traditional embeddedness in the natural world. To this extent, Fletcher’s plays attest to the environmental character of Jacobean gender trouble. If it has become commonplace to view those same plays as anticipating the drawing-room comedies of the Restoration,36 that is because they participate in the creation of drawing-room society and register the difficulties, both psychological and ecological, through which it comes into being.

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3 Two of Fletcher’s plays – The Faithful Shepherdess (1608) and The Woman’s Prize (1609–10) – deserve closer consideration in light of this focus upon masculine insecurity. Of these productions, the second, slightly later, comedy represents the first fully developed appearance in the Fletcher canon of the playwright’s distinctive preoccupation with embattled masculinity. The earlier play, by contrast, represents an alternative exercise in pastoral tragicomedy which Fletcher was forced to abandon because of its unpopularity on the stage. Both works benefit from – one might even say they require – comparison with Shakespeare. And in both cases, the comparison involves questions of place and setting, with the natural world or its absence looming large as a determinant of the plays’ respective meaning. In the case of The Woman’s Prize, the overt connection to Shakespeare is so obvious that it has become easy to exaggerate. As noted long ago, Fletcher’s play borrows its protagonist’s name, Petruchio, along with the names of two other characters (Tranio and Bianca), from The Taming of the Shrew. Beyond this, Fletcher’s play shares with Shakespeare’s a broad preoccupation with “the sovereignty of women in marriage.”37 And The Woman’s Prize may to this extent be presented loosely as “a response” to The Taming of the Shrew, whose “pro-patriarchy moral” it “answers and inverts.”38 But the correspondences, such as they are, end here. Most of Fletcher’s dramatis personae consists of characters found nowhere in The Taming of the Shrew, and all three of the Shakespearean characters who survive by name in the later play have undergone major changes. Petruchio himself has been stripped of his Shakespearean energy and wife-taming ingenuity; Shakespeare’s Bianca “merely furnishes a name for the stout-hearted cousin of [Petruchio’s] second wife” in The Woman’s Prize; and “Tranio is promoted from the servant ranks to be a gentleman and a friend of Petruchio.”39 Likewise, the conceit of Fletcher’s play – that Shakespeare’s Petruchio has outlived his first wife, Katharina, and has now chosen to remarry to the “chaste witty Lady” Maria (Dramatis Personae.16), who tames him as he had tamed Katharina in Shakespeare’s prior comedy – is plagued with problems of continuity like Tranio’s unexplained change in rank. Prominent among these lies the central issue of ecology: place. If one were preparing a continuation of The Taming of the Shrew, it would be natural to lay the scene in Italy. Fletcher’s scene is London . . . The play is crowded with local allusions. To name but a few, there are references to Lancashire, Kingston, Lincoln, Sturbridge, and Sedgeley; to London Bridge, Blackfriars, Smithfield, Dog’s Ditch, and Thames Street; to St. Dunstan and St. George; to

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Harry-groats, bear-baiting, Puritans, and Maypoles. In IV, iii, Bianca says “I speak good honest English,” and in V, iv, Petruchio addresses “little England.” From the last-mentioned scene and from IV, v, it is clear not only that Petruchio is, in spite of his name, an Englishman, but also, as shown by the encouragement Maria gives his plan to travel, that he has never been out of England.40

By the same token, it has been argued that “bestial metaphors . . . that liken . . . women to animals” serve as a “common strand . . . of imagery and emphasis” connecting The Woman’s Prize to The Taming of the Shrew.41 But given the ubiquity of such misogynist language in early modern writing, this is a bit like claiming that the plays are specially related by virtue of being written in English. In fact, relations to place, to non-human animals, and to the natural world mark a point of sharp contrast between Fletcher’s play and its Shakespearian predecessor. Animal metaphor does prove central to the earlier comedy’s depiction of gender relations, as made clear by Shakespeare’s Petruchio in his infamous soliloquy beginning “My falcon now is sharp and passing empty” (4.1.190). In effect, this Petruchio subdues Katharina by applying to her certain behavioral techniques and insights derived from the practice of animal husbandry – traditionally a field of masculine endeavor, well associated with such aristocratic, outdoor pursuits as hawking and hunting. By contrast, the central husband-taming mechanism of Fletcher’s play is metaphorically presented as warfare – also a traditional province of the male aristocrat, but here appropriated by the comedy’s womenfolk in the spirit of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Moreover, the warfare in question quickly takes on a very specific character, as urban siege combat, with Maria and her companions barricading themselves in the upper storey of her house so as to resist the approaches of the play’s menfolk. Maria’s bedchamber becomes “nothing but a meere Ostend, in every window Pewter cannons mounted . . . [a]nd all the lower works lin’d sure with small shot” (1.3.89–90, 92); “not a Cathole, but holds a murd’rer [a small-bore anti-personnel cannon] in’t” (1.3.48–9); and Maria’s cousin Bianca “commands the workes: Spinola[, the conqueror of Ostend, i]s but a ditcher to her; there’s a halfe-moone [shaped defensive redoubt] fortified for ever” (1.3.65–6, 71). Fletcher clearly draws his model of the bellum amoris from the Eighty Years War with its trenches and siege-works – a new kind of combat most inhospitable (as Sir Philip Sidney had already discovered) to aspiring knights-errant. So The Woman’s Prize re-casts the animal-husbandry metaphors of The Taming of the Shrew, replacing them with military images whereby its women achieve mastery on the battlefield by forcing the menfolk to abandon chivalric fantasies and engage instead in stationary, urban conflict.

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Beyond this, Fletcher’s comedy rewrites the general movement of The Taming of the Shrew, which leads its protagonists from city to country in the course of resolving their difficulties. Shakespeare’s play has been described as a prescient depiction of Stockholm Syndrome, and it is at least true that both Stockholm Syndrome and Katharina’s affection for her husband grow out of circumstances in which “the victim is isolated from outsiders.”42 In fact, Petruchio’s taming of Katharina depends entirely upon his ability to remove her from her accustomed surroundings in Padua, an act he accomplishes by pretending to rescue her from her wedding guests (3.2.230–9). Once he has sequestered her in his country estate, she has no real choice but to do as she is told. Fletcher’s Maria, by contrast, surrounds herself with women friends and settles in for a siege in her London townhouse, thereby forestalling any efforts to control her by rustication. When travel does occur in The Woman’s Prize, it is Petruchio who prepares to journey, alone, out of England altogether, to “Paris” or “Amyens” or “Lyon” in the hope of escaping his wife. As his servants convey his luggage aboard ship, one declares in spite, “Now I could wish her in that Trunk”; another, anticipating Belleur in The Wild-Goose Chase, replies, “I had rather have a Beare in’t” (5.2.11, 12). Thus Fletcher’s comedy develops less as a continuation than as a wholesale rejection of the themes and dramatic patterns Shakespeare explored in The Taming of the Shrew. Beyond this, however, there exists a second, less obvious connection between Shakespeare and The Woman’s Prize, a connection signaled in Fletcher’s play when Maria and her embattled colleagues receive unexpected aid in their proto-feminist rebellion. A “Regiment of Women”43 from the shires troops to the town in sympathetic alliance, bringing its “Country Forces” (2.5.3) into service on behalf of the sisterhood while drawing predictable cries of outrage from the play’s beleaguered men, and this development has been viewed as a response to the amalgam of “riot” and “festive activities” that characterized popular unrest in early Jacobean England.44 It has been noted that feminine disobedience was a marked feature of popular uprisings such as Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 and the Essex food riots of 1622 and 1629;45 more precisely still, Fletcher’s female reinforcements have been associated with the Midlands Uprising of 1607, the same event with which Shakespeare’s Coriolanus has been connected and which has served to focus much scholarly meditation on Shakespeare’s ties to the Midlands and the enclosure movement.46 Thus, it has been argued, “the onstage solidarity of ‘city wife’ and ‘country wife’ re-enacts one of the most troubling features of the Midlands riots, when sympathetic citizens of Norfolk trooped out to the

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countryside to join the ‘levellers’ who were tearing down new fences and hedges designed to privatize what had previously been public property.”47 On one level, these associations have clearly been overstated. The Woman’s Prize precedes the Essex food riots by more than a decade, and neither Kett’s Rebellion nor the Midlands Uprising can fairly be called a women’s insurrection. However, Fletcher’s comedy does involve images of carnivalesque subversion, and among these, the arrival of the “Country Forces” neatly reverses the city-to-country exodus rehearsed by the citizens of Norfolk during the Midlands unrest. More interesting still, Fletcher’s personal connection to the Midlands trouble serves as an inverted image of Shakespeare’s, for Fletcher came to the issue through his patron, Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon. As Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire, Huntingdon had been tasked by King James with suppression of the rioters, a duty he performed well enough to restore order, but not well enough to escape criticism for leniency.48 Fletcher appears to have been a periodic guest of the Earl at his country estate of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, not far from the site of the Midlands enclosure riots, and it is to be supposed that he followed the events of May and June 1607 through his patron’s involvement in them. To this extent he once more offers a sharp contrast with Shakespeare, whose response to the Midlands enclosure movement can be tracked at street level, as it were, through his personal interaction with neighbors, friends, and relations as well as through his ownership of property potentially affected by the enclosures in question. Fletcher, on the contrary, approaches the same general issues through the mediating terms of patronage and courtly politics. The result is a very different sort of environmental relation, and a very different sort of environmental drama. Composed about a year before The Woman’s Prize, The Faithful Shepherdess arguably responds to the Midlands Uprising with more immediacy than the later play; in any case, it is certainly “the first of [Fletcher’s] plays to represent the dangerous potential of popular unrest.”49 In the process, it also makes an early bid to establish its author as a gentleman catering to gentle tastes. Thus, in the preface accompanying the play’s first quarto, Fletcher seeks to dissociate himself from the riotous potential of his subject-matter, distancing the genre of “pastorall Tragie-comedie” from such humble rustic pastimes as “whitsun ales, cream, wassel and morrisdances,” while expressing his contempt for “country hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another” (“To the Reader,” 7–8, 5–7). By contrast to such worthies, Fletcher insists, the shepherds of his play are in fact persons

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of landed property: “[Y]ou are ever to remember Shepherds to be such, as all the ancient Poets and moderne of understanding have receaved them: that is, the owners of flockes and not hyerlings” (“To the Reader,” 17–20). With this social distinction in place, it becomes tempting to view The Faithful Shepherdess as a dramatic exercise in the Spenserian mode of courtly pastoral, its author a young man of privilege “brought up in a succession of bishops’ palaces, a fit companion for the Spenser-saturated academic first cousins [Phineas Fletcher and Giles Fletcher the Younger] with whom he had been living.”50 The play’s sovereign deity, Pan, has been described as an exercise in “token flattery of King James I,” while the chastity of Clorin, the play’s title character, has been viewed as a “civilizing function” reminiscent of “the powers so long proclaimed for the Virgin Queen.”51 In its celebration of sexual abstinence within love relations, Fletcher’s play eerily anticipates Queen Henrietta Maria’s Platonic love cult of the 1630s. In all these ways, The Faithful Shepherdess seems dominated by an ecology whose variables are social and courtly/political rather than biological in nature. However, Fletcher’s preface to The Faithful Shepherdess needs in part to be understood separately from the play itself, as an exercise in damage control made necessary by the play’s own failure on the stage; within this context, the preface’s emphasis on issues of rank and property seems both inevitable and potentially misleading. Nor is the play’s own commitment to court pastoral as thoroughgoing as it might at first appear. Despite Fletcher’s high-minded debt to Giambattista Guarini’s Il pastor fido and his equally rarified echoes of Spenser, his play “attempt[s] to integrate Italianate pastoral with the English tradition . . . in ways in which each is complicated and ironised.”52 At heart a play of unconsummated desire and romantic confusion, The Faithful Shepherdess may be understood as the middle term in a developmental sequence leading from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1596) to Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634). Like both of these works, Fletcher’s play leads its characters into temptation and perplexity amidst an enchanted wood. Like Milton’s later masque, Fletcher’s tragicomedy celebrates sexual restraint and allows for no sexual union, but like Shakespeare’s earlier play, Fletcher’s struggles to contain its characters’ powerfully transgressive sexual impulses. And like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Fletcher’s play presents those impulses as a function of its sylvan setting: where Shakespeare’s lovers view their forest as a site of sexual desire free from the repressive dictates of Athenian law, Fletcher’s characters regard the woods of Thessaly even more explicitly as a setting for erotic release. In doing so, they invoke popular practices that resist the poet’s declared commitment to chastity.

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For Fletcher’s characters, sexual intercourse is essentially an outdoor pastime, with the natural world providing a discreet enclosure for practices that would be forbidden in more civilized settings. Thus one minor figure summarizes the play’s business as a grand derby of al fresco copulation: [N]ot a swayne This night hath knowne his lodging, heere; or layne, Within these cotes: the woods . . . ... Hath drawne them thether, bout some lusty sport, . . . to which resort, All the young men and maydes. (5.1.25–7, 28–30)

Act 1 includes a song advertising the same sort of diversion: Come Shepheards come, ... Greene woods are dumme, And will never tell to any, Those deere kisses, and those many Sweet imbraces that are given, Dainty pleasures that would even Raise in coldest age a fire, And give virgin blood desire. (1.3.71, 74–80)

The play’s lustful and invidious Sullen Shepherd plans to slander the virtuous Amoret in similar terms: Ile sweare she met Me mongst the shadie sycamoures last night, And loosely offerd up her flame and spright Into my bosome: made a wanton bed Of leaves and many flowers, where she spred Her willing bodie to be prest by me. (2.3.36–41)

The conniving Amaryllis, magically disguised as Amoret, lends credence to the Sullen Shepherd’s lies when she confronts Amoret’s beloved, Perigot, with a similar proposition: Still thinkst thou such a thinge as Chastitie, Is amongst woemen? Perigot thers none, That with her love is in a wood alone, And wood come home a Mayde: be not abusd, With thy fond first beleife, let time be usd. (3.1.296–300)

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As Cloe, the play’s resident slut, exhorts yet another one of the local shepherds, “I understood, / This night a number are about the wood, / Then let us choose some place where out of sight, / We freely may injoy our stolne delight” (3.1.140–3). Such behavior hardly corresponds to the chaste ideals of court pastoral, either in its Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Caroline forms. However, it does closely conform to the charges laid by moralists – especially of the Puritan stripe – against popular rustic pastimes such as those associated with May Day and Midsummer’s Eve. Here, for instance, is Philip Stubbes denouncing the former holiday in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583): Against May, Whitsonday, or other time, all the yung men and maides, olde men and wiues run gadding ouer night to the woods, groues, hils & mountains, where they spend all the night in plesant pastimes, & in the morning they return bringing wt them . . . their May-pole . . . And then fall they to daunce about it like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols . . . I haue heard it credibly reported (and that, viva voce) by men of great grauitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood ouer night, there haue scaresly the third of them returned home againe undefiled.53

To this extent, Fletcher’s play dramatizes differences in social rank by giving them ecological form, concomitant with a changing sexual relationship to the natural world. After The Faithful Shepherdess, the playwright tends to take sex indoors; one may think, for instance, of Maria barricading herself in her bedroom in The Woman’s Prize, or Archas’ daughters in The Loyal Subject, brought from country to court as a prelude to their intended corruption. The turn from extramural sex to intramural sex is consistent with the development of Fletcher’s mature dramatic style, a style predicated upon the establishment of a fashionable, courtly, and urban society dominated by its own ecology of personal and political relations. And the growth of Fletcher’s mature style seems in turn to have been prompted by The Faithful Shepherdess’s failure on the stage, a failure scholars have attributed, paradoxically, to the play’s excessive refinement. It has been described as “too witty, too allusive, and too high-blown,” “excruciatingly boring, if always sophisticated and high-minded,” “too courtly, even for the audience of a children’s company [the Children of the Queen’s Revels] at a private theater [the Blackfriars].”54 In short, the natural world – even when ridiculously stylized – was never Fletcher’s own ideal literary habitat; thus “a certain unease . . . remained more or less constant in his representations of the country” throughout his career.55

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To this point, I have presented Fletcher’s work as expressive of an “anxious masculinity,”56 a masculinity whose governing anxieties can be traced to the gentry’s ongoing transformation from a rural military to an urban leisure class – in effect, that is, to the loss of its traditional relationship with the natural world. In keeping with this narrative, we might observe one final feature of the poet’s work that seems to respond quite directly to a major change in early modern England’s ecological balance: its recurring discomfort with children and child-rearing. In fact, the Fletcher canon lends voice to a distinctive anti-parenthood motif: what we might call a “fear of breeding” topos. It appears in The Wild-Goose Chase when Mirabell asks Rosalura if she could “get two Boyes at every birth” (1.3.125). Her response (“That’s nothing / . . . / Two at a birth? Why every House-dove has it: / . . . / Ye talk of two? [1.3.125, 130, 133]) plunges the gallant into something like terror: “She would have me get two dozen, / Like buttons, at a birth” (1.3.133–4). In The Mad Lover, Memnon contrasts “Pure Love” (2.1.144) – i.e. heavenly love, “[w]hich is the price of honour” (2.1.147) – with mere physical love and the “issues” (2.1.157) – i.e. offspring – that it produces: Things like our selves, as sensuall, vaine; unvented Bubles and breaths of ayre, got with an itching As blisters are; and bred, as much corruption Flowes from their lives; sorrow conceives and shapes ’em And oftentimes the deaths of those we love most: The breeders bring them to the World to curse ’em, Crying they creepe amongst us like young Catts; Cares and continuall crosses keeping with ’em, They make time old to tend them, and experience An asse they alter so. (2.1.160–9)

The Humorous Lieutenant’s title character endures various jests about his exaggerated potency, jokes which culminate when he claims Demetrius has promised him “a charge” (that is, a military command) and another character replies “Of what? Of children? / Upon my conscience, thou hast a double companie, / And all of thine owne begetting alreadie” (4.2.122–4). In The Woman’s Prize, Maria’s sister Livia bids farewell to her beloved, Rowland, while claiming “tis for his more advancement; / Alas, we might have beggerd one another; / We are young both, and a world of children / Might have been left behind to curse our follies” (5.1.106–9). As Valentine prepares to mortgage his estate in Wit Without Money, his tenants beg him

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to desist “[f]or our poore childrens sake” (1.1.90). His response could hardly be more brutal: Who bid you get um? Have you not thrashing worke enough, but children Must be bangd out oth’ sheafe too? Other men With all their delicates, and healthfull diets, Can get but winde egges: you with a clove of garlicke, A peece of cheese would breake a saw, and sowre milke, Can mount like Stallions, and I must maintaine these tumblers.

(1.1.90–6)

For Sir Alexander Wengrave in Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, life offers no greater joy than “fertile lands and a fair fruitful bride” (11.202–4). In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–9), Benedick abandons bachelorhood because “the world must be peopled” (2.3.242). Even the anti-marital Hamlet allows that “[c]onception is a blessing” (2.2.184–5). But Fletcher, unusually for a writer of his day, seems to view children as closer to a curse. Here again – as with the motif of sexual competition between subject and sovereign that began this chapter – biographical circumstances seem relevant. After the death of Fletcher’s father in 1596, the playwright’s uncle Giles Fletcher the Elder summarized the condition of his brother’s family as follows: “He [Richard Fletcher] hath left behind him 8 poore children, whereof divers are very young. His dettes due to the Quenes Majestie and to other creditors are 1400li or thereaboutes, his whole state is but one house wherein the widow claimeth her thirds, his plate valewed at 400li, his other stuffe at 500li.”57 Himself a product of Elizabethan England’s extraordinary population boom, Fletcher the playwright had directly experienced the negative side of such growth. His work’s frequent distaste for children and child-rearing may thus be understood as both biographically and ecologically determined – as one more feature of his dramaturgy best accounted for by the stress attendant upon environmental change.

chapter 5

Dekker’s walks and orchards

Thomas Dekker differs from Shakespeare and Fletcher in having been born and raised in London.1 He differs from Ben Jonson – and from Shakespeare and Fletcher again – in lacking major professional connections at court. And he differs from Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson once more in his vocal hostility to Catholicism. Indeed, of the playwrights discussed in this book, it is Thomas Middleton who comes closest to matching Dekker’s personal background, professional situation, and religio-political outlook, a fact which may help explain the success with which the two men could collaborate on projects like Part 1 of The Honest Whore (1603–4) and The Roaring Girl (c. 1611). Still, one may distinguish between Dekker and Middleton too, albeit in finely drawn ways. For instance, Dekker’s attitude toward London’s foreign immigrant population seems distinctively tolerant, while Dekker’s fondness for subject-matter drawn from northern European folklore and fairy-tales, taken with his knowledge of Dutch and his inclusion of Dutch themes and characters in his work, would seem to point toward his own probable Dutch extraction.2 Likewise, Dekker identifies more wholeheartedly than Middleton with London’s population of merchants, laborers, servants, and apprentices, with the result that Dekker’s work, when taken across genres, seems more consistent in tone than Middleton’s. The eulogistic vocabulary of Middleton’s masques and entertainments gives way, in the poet’s stage-plays, to a penchant for detached and cynical observation which often places the residents of London in a cold, unfavorable light. Dekker, by contrast, tends to write as warmly as possible of the city’s inhabitants, whenever possible, so much so that Stanley Wells has identified the poet’s “love affair with London” as a distinguishing feature of his work.3 Of course, these distinctions are not absolute. As a hired writer, Dekker sometimes had to work against the grain of his personal affinities, and in the process he occasionally produced ugly caricatures of London’s citizens. 120

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Perhaps the most famous is Bartervile, the usurious merchant of If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is In It (c. 1611). Designed on the pattern of medieval estates satire, this play replaces the traditional three estates – nobles, clergy, and commons – with an updated English configuration of courtiers, clergy, and city. Here Bartervile exemplifies the villainies of the third group; lending at exorbitant interest, manipulating his debtors into default, exploiting legal technicalities and even faking his own death so as to preserve his fortune, he may be seen as Dekker’s answer to Middletonian characters like Quomodo and Yellowhammer. But for all that, Dekker’s discomfort with his villain remains unmistakable. Critics have noted that Bartervile’s “energy and dynamism endow him with some attractive qualities” such that “Dekker seems hesitant about damning Bartervile totally.”4 In fact Lurchall, the devil assigned by Dekker’s play to lead Bartervile into damnation, complains about the difficulty of his task in pointedly class-specific terms: [W]hat paines a poore Diuell Takes to get into a Merchant? hees so ciuill, One of Hell must not know him, with more ease A Diuell may win ten Gallants, than one of these.5

At moments like this, Dekker lets his personal sympathies show quite clearly, even in a dramatic situation that requires him to work against them. More generally, Dekker’s plays extol the virtues of an urban citizenry notable for its honesty, loyalty, patience, humility, and hard work. In the process, these same plays repeatedly dramatize “conflict between citizen and aristocratic values,”6 while tending to favor the former. In pursuing this course, the plays employ environmental concerns as a medium for enacting the conflict in question. And while doing so, they settle on questions of urban land access as a focal point for their social commentary. As a result, Dekker’s city-dwellers develop a distinct sense of early modern urban identity and a distinct set of early modern urban environmental interests while inhabiting a contested and changing municipal space. In fact, changing space already supplies a prominent theme in Dekker’s contribution to The Magnificent Entertainment of March 15, 1604, the grand civic pageant composed by him, Jonson, Middleton, and Stephen Harrison to welcome the newly proclaimed King James I into his capital city. As James followed the procession route laid out for his entry into London, he encountered a triumphal arch at Soper Lane, south of Cheapside, surmounted by the inscription “nova faelix arabia” (736). As Dekker explains, the motto insisted upon a radical transformation of geography,

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[v]nder that shape of Arabia, this Iland being figured: which two names of New, and Happie, the Countrey could by no merit in it selfe, challenge to be her due, but onely by meanes of that secret influence accompanying his Maiestie wheresoeuer hee goes, and working such effectes. (737–41)

This language may be conventional in depicting the monarch as a reinvigorating force of nature – Jonson’s later court productions often draw on similar rhetoric – but it nonetheless suggests the high hopes with which Dekker and others invested the new king’s arrival at Whitehall. The world would be made “New, and Happie,” space would be bent and England translated into Araby, and the familiar would be rendered exotic, all by virtue of the sovereign’s “glorious presence” (868). In fact, Dekker’s contribution to The Magnificent Entertainment not only announces these changes, it embodies them, and in a way that seems uncanny given King James’s future involvement in the New River project. The visual centerpiece of the Soper Lane pageant was “an artificiall Lauer or Fount . . . called the Fount of Arete (Vertue.),” with “[s]undry Pipes (like veines) branching from the body of it: the water receiuing libertie but from one place, and that very slowly” (769–72). As an actor in the role of Fame explains the allegory, “Vertues Fount, which late ran deepe and cleare, / Dries, and melts all her body to a teare” (821–2); however, when Fame “light[s] vpon the glorious presence of the King . . . The Fount in the same moment of Tyme, flow[s] fresh and abundantly through seuerall pipes, with Milke, Wine, and Balme” (839–41). The scene then concludes with a song celebrating London’s transformation into something like a conventional pastoral locus amoenus: Troynouant is now a Sommer Arbour, or the nest wherein doth harbour, The Eagle, of all birds that flie, The Soueraigne, for his piercing eie, If you wisely marke, Tis besides a Parke, Where runnes (being newly borne) With the fierce Lyon, the faire Vnicorne. (885–901)

Given the precariousness of London’s late Elizabethan water supply (as considered in Chapter 1), it seems more than accident that Dekker should envisage the fount of Virtue as an exhausted conduit. The poet seems particularly bent on anticipating the positive environmental impact of King James’s arrival, registering the new monarchy’s power to restore the realm, to re-fashion it into a new and happy Arabia, to cause milk and wine

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to flow from conduits previously unable to produce even water. As for the scene’s concluding song, this imagines London transformed yet again, into a “Sommer Arbour” or a royal “Parke,” this latter word clearly being used in its early legal sense to denote “[a]n enclosed tract of land held by royal grant or prescription for beasts of the chase” (OED s.v. “park” [n.] 1). In each case, the fantasy is of urban greening, the metamorphosis of London’s streets into an improved, ideal, and yet natural space, with the new king serving as the agent for this transformation. In its defining features, this fantasy seems akin to the pastoral scenarios of Jonson’s later court masques, as exemplified in Chapter 2 above by Pan’s Anniversary. However, Dekker’s pastoral scene works not as an instrument of social discrimination – banishing offensive citizens to the country to live there as sheep – but rather as an occasion for united thanksgiving, as London’s people together celebrate the benefits of their new sovereign’s transformative influence. 1 In the event, Dekker was right to expect change in London under King James, and he was also right to imagine that change in environmental terms. His mistakes lay in thinking of it as a pastoral rejuvenation, and in imagining that all the city’s inhabitants might benefit from it equally. In fact, Jacobean London continued to grow much as the city had done in Elizabethan times, only more so. Most obviously, it swelled with immigrants from the surrounding counties, for the most part young men and women seeking urban employment. Very many of these settled in the suburbs, especially in the extramural liberties, many of which had been broken into tenements following their confiscation from the church. The result was a distinctive pattern of early modern urban growth wherein the old city remained an enclave of relative comfort and wealth, enclosed by the remains of its medieval wall, and surrounded by a growing constellation of squalid slums. These, in turn, radiated axially away from the capital along its major routes of transport, extending ever deeper into the surrounding countryside, filling up the spaces from Aldgate past Whitechapel in the east and from Aldersgate to Saint Giles in the Fields in the northwest, as well as north beyond Islington and east and west along both banks of the Thames. One consequence of such growth was that the city became less verdant. The “most dramatic and visible aspect” of this change would have been “the spread of building over green fields,” but “the effect on the city centre

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was probably no less important,” with Cheapside, for instance, “so densely built up that . . . there were very few gardens and not every house had even a yard.”7 Also, as the city grew larger and denser, it became harder to traverse. The square-mile footprint of the medieval settlement had made for an urban area that “was limited in extent and easily apprehended as an entity.”8 By 1611, however, John Speed could observe that: London, as it were disdaining bondage, hath set herself on each side far without the walls, and left her west gate (Ludgate) in the midst, from whence with continual buildings she hath continued her street to the king’s palace, and joined a second city unto herself . . . [N]o walls are set about this city, and those of London are left to show what it was rather than what it is.9

Such development grew ever more challenging to move around and through, especially since early modern roads were “[a]ll too often . . . seen as a convenient storage space for goods or dumping ground for domestic waste products,” while increasing population naturally meant increasing traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular.10 According to Stow, these problems were already evident by the late 1590s. We may recall, for instance, his complaint about the approach to Aldgate from Whitechapel – “so encroached vpon . . . that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient high way.”11 More generally, Stow laments elsewhere, “the number of carres, drayes, carts and coatches, more then hath beene accustomed, the streetes and lanes being streightned, must needes be dangerous, as dayly experience proueth,” and he further notes that the passage from Smithfield to Aldersgate “is inclosed with Innes, Brewhouses, and large tenements.”12 Stow’s choice of verb in this last case proves noteworthy, since enclosure is usually understood to be an agrarian phenomenon occurring on manorial estates and rural common areas. In fact, as Stow’s language suggests, enclosure was going on in and around London, too, where it led to a unique set of conditions. On one hand, the city itself grew increasingly enclosed, surrounded by wall and ditch, then doubly immured behind an expanding congeries of suburban settlements which in turn encroached on local roadways while simultaneously increasing the volume of traffic that choked them. On the other hand, the neighboring green spaces – fields and farms, woods and gardens and nearby villages – were being enclosed as well, blocked off for private development by farmers and wealthy landowners, with the result that London appeared increasingly isolated from the natural world located all around it. This pattern of suburban enclosure, whereby the city came to seem cut off from its natural environs, derived from the same general cause as did

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the nearby tenements: immigration from country to town. But where the tenements housed the vast majority of London’s new citizens, the surrounding green space fell increasingly into the hands of a privileged few. Peers, courtiers, and wealthy gentlemen, obeying the ever more powerful impulse of the age, furnished themselves with London residences for termtime, settling around the fringes of the city’s growth-pattern, imparking previously common spaces, and constructing extravagant prodigy houses only a short distance from equally new areas of suburban squalor. Again, Stow offers testimony. He famously notes that the fields outside Moorgate, to the north of town, are hedged . . . by means of inclosure for Gardens, wherein are builded many fayre summer houses, and as in other places of the Suburbes, some of them like Midsommer Pageantes, with Towers, Turrets, and Chimney tops, not so much for vse or profite, as for shew and pleasure, bewraying the vanity of mens mindes, much vnlike to the disposition of the ancient Cittizens, who delighted in the building of Hospitals, and Almes houses for the poor, and therein both imployed their wits, and spent their wealthes in preferment of the common commoditie of this our Citie.13

When set alongside this lament, Dekker’s description of London in The Magnificent Entertainment takes on a very particular meaning. “[N]o more a Cittie” (913), Dekker’s capital metamorphoses instead into a “Sommer Arbour” or a “Parke,” one of the private preserves being carved out of the suburban countryside of Middlesex, Essex, and Surrey as a playground for late Elizabethan England’s elite. In this sense, the poet identifies his city with circumferential property from which the city itself is growing increasingly alienated, and whose expropriation by private owners has come to define the city itself as a distinct and closed unit. Where Stow laments the fact that philanthropic development for “the common commoditie” has given way to private “vanity,” Dekker constructs a space of common rejoicing and prosperity, all made in the image of a privatized, aristocratic suburbia. To this extent, the same set of environmental conditions generates both Stow’s complaint and Dekker’s encomium. Of course, Stow writes of London as it was just prior to King James’s accession. For a sense of how the city changed after the new king’s arrival, one must consult the continuation of Stow overseen by Anthony Munday and published first in 1618, then again, with more expansion, in 1633. For his part, Munday does not much share Stow’s dismay over the city’s environmental degradation, preferring instead to document bequests to the poor, public inscriptions, new building projects, and similar improvements. But environmental matters still require notice, and when they surface in

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Munday’s continuation, they predictably involve conflict between citizens and the suburban elite. Thus, for instance, Munday and his colleagues record that on “Friday the 24. of July 1629. King Charles having hunted a Stagge or Hart from Wansted in Essex, kild him in Nightingale lane, in the Hamblet of Wapping, in a garden belonging to one who had some damage among his hearbes, by reason the multitude of people there assembled suddenly.”14 It is a strange interlude in the Survey, offered without further comment, but the geography of the chase says something about the nature of London’s suburban development in the years just following King James’s death. Located in the region of Epping Forest, Wanstead Manor had grown into a royal hunting lodge by the reign of Henry VIII, who oversaw the enclosure of Wanstead Park by 1545.15 Under Edward VI, the estate passed into the hands of the Rich family, who during their tenure challenged the rights of common in the surrounding forest,16 and in 1577 it became the property of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While in Leicester’s possession, the manor hosted Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral entertainment The Lady of May, which was first performed there to grace a royal visit from Queen Elizabeth, probably in 1578.17 By King Charles’s day, the house belonged to Sir Henry Mildmay. Until its demolition in the nineteenth century, it was located about six miles from Nightingale Lane, but in terms of social geography, it might as well have been on the moon. As for Nightingale Lane, this latter location had grown by the early 1600s into one of the major thoroughfares in the area of riverside development stretching east of Aldgate from Wapping to Poplar. Here “[m]any households were found along the main roads, but even more [people] lived in the numerous small alleys and yards which flanked them,” where the inhabitants tolerated “extremely high” housing densities while dwelling in tenements “[s]eparated from their neighbours across the street often by only 15 feet,” often with as little as eleven to fifteen feet of street frontage.18 In this setting, the unexpected appearance of King Charles’s hunting entourage – accompanied, of course, by damage to local property – sets in high relief the contrast between a suburban aristocracy of parks and manor houses, on the one hand, and a suburban citizenry of alleys and tenements, on the other. As luck would have it, a similar contrast animates Dekker’s most famous play, The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), which stages a hunting expedition much like King Charles’s, in much the same area of greater London, but thirty years earlier in point of composition. Here the hunters are the “city gentleman” Hammon and his cousin Warner (Dramatis Personae), who show small concern for property boundaries while pursuing a deer onto the estate of Lord Mayor Sir Roger Otley. A boy in the hunting party remarks

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that “I saw him [the deer] leape through a hedge, and then ouer a ditch, then at my Lord Maiors pale, ouer he skipt me and in he went me” (2.1.11–13), the deer’s territorial transgressions thus anticipating those of its pursuers. Here, however, the resemblance to Charles’s later hunting expedition ends, as the servants seize upon the game, kill it, and slaughter it: .

the deere came running into the barne through the orchard, and ouer the pale . . . but whip saies goodman Pinne-close, vp with his flaile, and our Nick with a prong, and downe he fell, and they vpon him . . . and in the end we ended him, his throate we cut, flead him, vnhornd him, and my lord Maior shall eat of him anon. (2.2.2–9)

Later, when Hammon and Warner wander into the Lord Mayor’s close, his daughter Rose and her maid Sybil deliberately mislead the gentlemen as to the fate of their prey: hammon. [F]aire mistris Rose, Our game was lately in your orchard seen. warner. Can you aduise which way he tooke his flight? rose. Followe your nose, his hornes will guide you right. warner. Th’art a mad wench. sibil. O rich! rose. Trust me, not I, It is not like the wild forrest deere, Would come so neare to places of resort, You are deceiu’d, he fled some other way. (2.2.18–25)

The exchange thus ends with property rights upheld and complacent arrogance punished. It is a scene of reverse poaching, with the gallants Hammon and Warner in the role of trespassers pursuing game, and the entire business is set in the environs of “old Ford’ (2.1.9), at the extreme eastern limit of early modern London’s suburban development, in the privileged vicinity of Wanstead. From a certain angle, King Charles’s later pursuit of game over much the same terrain can feel like an exemplary instance of life imitating art. From another perspective, it can look like a classic example of art proleptically correcting life’s injustices. In either case, this moment supplies a pattern for other, less literal, scenes of poaching in Dekker’s play. Hammon’s hunting banter with Rose makes the point explicit, as he announces his sudden infatuation with the Lord Mayor’s daughter in doubly venereal language: rose. Why doe you stay, and not pursue your game? sibil. Ile hold my life their hunting nags be lame. hammon. A deere, more deere is found within this place. rose. But not the deere (sir) which you had in chace.

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hammon. I chac’d the deere, but this deere chaceth me. rose. The strangest hunting that euer I see, But wheres your parke? She offers to goe away hammon. Tis here: O stay. rose. Impale me, and then I will not stray. (2.2.28–35)

As it happens, Rose follows the example of the hunted deer by successfully evading Hammon’s attentions. In the process, Dekker’s language and juxtapositions present Hammon as an invasive aristocratic presence who intrudes into the enclosures of others in search of prey both cervine and feminine, which he seeks to enclose and engross for himself. It is a pattern further expanded in the rest of the play, as Hammon, frustrated in his pursuit of the Lord Mayor’s daughter, transfers his interest instead to Jane, the wife of journeyman shoemaker Rafe Damport. In both instances, the gentleman’s exalted social position contrasts with the baseness of his courtship behavior, which is signaled in the case of Rose by his explicit equation of women to deer (“For our lost venison, I shall find a wife” [2.2.56]) and in the case of Jane by his naked attempt to buy her affections (“All cheape, how sell you then this hand?” [3.4.27]). Such language also finds a parallel in the play’s main plot, where the Earl of Lincoln opposes his nephew Lacy’s affection for Rose, while Rose’s father, Lord Mayor Otley, shares his disapproval for reasons specifically involving social rank and wealth: Too meane is my poore girle for his [Lacy’s] high birth, Poore Cittizens must not with Courtiers wed, Who will in silkes, and gay apparrell spend More in one yeare, then I am worth by farre. (1.1.11–14)

Appearing at the very start of Dekker’s play, these lines delineate its principal conflict, which shapes up as a series of literal and figurative enclosure acts whereby “Cittizens” and “Courtiers” work to police and expand their respective spheres of privilege, consistently at each others’ expense. As it happens, these acts of boundary maintenance work to the general advantage of the play’s citizens. Thus The Shoemakers’ Holiday approves Rose’s up-marriage to Lacy while repudiating Hammon’s proposed down-marriages to Rose and to Jane. As for Lacy, the aristocratic beneficiary of Rose’s affections, he requires a makeover to become an acceptable mate for the Lord Mayor’s daughter. As Julia Gasper observes, he “takes the part of hero . . . but he is a very strange hero: a deserter, who bribes his own way out of the army in order to pursue a wife, yet refuses to grant the recently married Rafe his legal exemption.”19 In fact, Lacy’s claim

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to Rose derives not from his elite social status but from the qualities of character he demonstrates while disguised as a Dutch shoemaker, such that “Lacy commands most respect when he is least a member of his ‘lacie’ family. He is ennobled by the gentle craft.”20 Thus the play’s various acts of sexual poaching present the citizenry as an aristocratic circle in their own right, preserving and recovering what is theirs in ways that are modeled upon their treatment of Hammon’s deer. When that animal yields its life to “goodman Pinne-close . . . with his flaile, and our Nick with a prong,” its demise anticipates the later scene in which a gang of shoemakers bearing “clubs for prentises” (5.2.28) rescues Jane from Hammon and returns her to her husband, Rafe. Here again, artisans armed with artisanal implements stage a scene of triumph over an interloping member of the warrior class. 2 Beyond The Shoemakers’ Holiday, Dekker’s work remains indignantly transfixed by the idea that gallants and gentry might view citizens and their wives as an exploitable natural resource, to be engrossed, enclosed, and manipulated for personal profit and recreation after the manner of the formerly open fields surrounding Jacobean London itself. Thus the topos of woman-aslanded-property recurs with special insistence throughout the Dekker canon. In Match Me In London (1611), for instance, the bawd Dildoman offers the King of Spain the prospect of seducing the citizen’s wife Tormiella, all in the language of enclosure: king. [H]ow many yeares! lady [Dildoman]. Fifteene and vpwards if it please your Grace. king. Some two-footed Diuell in our Court, Would thrust you out of all. Inclos’d! or Common! lady. ’Tis yet inclos’d if it like your Grace. king. Entayl’d! lady. Newly Entayl’d, as there ’tis to be seene in blacke and white. (1.4.105–13)

2 Honest Whore (1605–6) uses similar language to describe the efforts of Hippolito, the Duke of Milan’s son-in-law, to seduce Bellafront, the reformed prostitute of the play’s title. As Bellafront’s supposed servant (actually her disguised father) Orlando observes to Hippolito’s wife, Infaelice, [M]y poore Mistris has a waste piece of ground, which is her owne by inheritance, and left to her by her mother; There’s a Lord now that goes about, not to take it cleane from her, but to inclose it to himselfe, and to ioyne it to a piece of his Lordships. (3.1.4–8)

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And later, when Infaelice demands proof of this accusation, Orlando continues in the same vein: orlando. [H]ere, Madam, is the suruey, not onely of the Manor it selfe, but of the Grange house, with euery Medow pasture, Plough-land, Cony-borough, Fish-pond, hedge, ditch, and bush that stands in it. infaelice. My Husbands name, and hand and seale at armes To a Loue-letter? Where hadst thou this writing? orlando. From the foresaid party, Madam, that would keepe the foresaid Land, out of the foresaid Lords fingers. infaelice. My Lord turnd Ranger now? orlando. Y’are a good Huntresse, Lady, you ha found your Game already; your Lord would faine be a Ranger, but my Mistris requests you to let him runne a course in your owne Parke. (3.1.33–44)

In The Wonder of a Kingdom (c. 1630), Angelo Lotti is banished from Florence because of his love for the Duke’s daughter, and as he prepares to leave, Lord Nicoletto Vanni sneers, “You must hunt no more in this Parke of Florence; why then do you lie sneaking here, to steale venison?” (1.3.36–7). By contrast to these sexual horti conclusi, the unreformed Bellafront in 1 Honest Whore is “like the common shoare, that still receiues / All the town’s filth” (2.1.325–6). In one sense, none of this is terribly distinctive. On the contrary, “[t]he conceptualization of woman as land or possession has . . . a long history” such that in early modern English writing woman regularly figures as “the fenced-in enclosure of the landlord, her father, or husband.”21 But Dekker pairs this topos to conflicts of social rank, while evoking in the process the contemporary politics of suburban enclosure. Like Hammon in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, the King of Spain in Match Me In London and Hippolito in the Honest Whore plays are specifically bent on engrossing citizen property. In The Wonder of a Kingdom, Angelo simply reverses the pattern by trespassing on the game preserve of his social superior – a gesture also anticipated by Rose in The Shoemakers’ Holiday. As for Bellafront’s symbolic status as “the common shoare, that still receiues / All the town’s filth,” this too impinges on early modern environmental issues. Thus in Munday’s continuation of Stow, the anecdote about King Charles’s hunting expedition to Nightingale Lane gives place to another bit of local eco-history: In the Hamblet of Wapping, in the Parish of Whitechappel, was builded in Anno 1626. A large house of timber by Master William Turner, Gentleman, Master George Lowe, Gentleman, and Thomas Iones, Gentleman, and others, for the making of Allome, which grew to such an inconvenience through the annoyance

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that was with boyling of Vrine and other materials, by reason of the ill savour of it, and the excrement of it being found to be annoyance to the river of Thames, that upon the complaint of the Inhabitants to the King and Councell, it was proceeded withall [to suppress the factory.]22

Munday documents this legal action over the course of seven doublecolumned folio pages, in which it emerges that on July 16, 1627, “a most noysome stinking scum of a frothy substance” issued from a lighter docked off the alum works, which substance “did spread all about the mouth of the Docke, and run downe into the Thames . . . and it did so stinke, that wee were not able to endure the sent of it, insomuch that [it] endangered all the Wells and Ponds thereabouts.”23 Worse still, local residents claimed to have fallen “into extremity of great sicknesses and diseases” as a result of the pollution, while “of late many Fishes in the Thames there neere unto [the alum works], have beene found ready to die, and dead.”24 On their side, the factory-owners responded in a manner that has since grown familiar under such circumstances: by temporizing, by objecting that alum was an essential commodity that could not conveniently be manufactured elsewhere, and, when all else failed, by simply ignoring an order to curtail their operation. Their resistance to legal action may have been emboldened by the fact that the alum industry, protected by royal monopoly since 1607, had turned by King Charles’s reign into “one of the Crown’s most successful ventures” of this sort, producing “on average over £11,000 p.a.” of badly needed royal revenue.25 In any case, Munday’s story trails off inconclusively with the issuance of a second order to close the works, leaving the area around Saint Katherine’s dock a polluted counterpart to Bellafront’s debased body in 1 Honest Whore. Whether figured as an enclosed park or a degraded piece of shoreline, Bellafront and the other characters like her in Dekker’s work all lend focus to questions of physical access: environmental access to the fields and woods surrounding London and sexual access to the area’s women, forms of access that are paired in Dekker’s plays because both appear increasingly problematic in the poet’s lifetime. In short, the natural world seemed to be slipping from Londoners’ grasp, expropriated and privatized by the same gallants who were likewise intent upon poaching the city’s feminine resources for their sexual pleasure. We may recall Stow’s complaint that by the reign of Henry VIII “the Inhabitantes of the Townes about London . . . had so inclosed the common fields with hedges, and ditches, that neyther the yong men of the City might shoote, nor the auncient persons walke for theyr pleasures in those fieldes.”26 Likewise, the area north of Bishopsgate

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within these fortie yeares, had on both sides fayre hedgerowes of Elme trees, with Bridges and easie stiles to passe ouer into the pleasant fieldes, very commodious for Citizens therein to walke, shoote, and otherwise to recreate and refresh their dulled spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre, which is nowe within a few yeares made a continuall building throughout, of Garden houses, and small Cottages: and the fields on either side be turned into Garden plottes, teynter yardes, Bowling Allyes, and such like, from Hounds ditch in the West, so farre as white Chappell, and further towards the East.27

In the long run, this enclosure of London’s periphery led to the compensatory establishment of “parks, gardens, and walks” that were “more formally delineated and self-consciously incorporated into the urban fabric.”28 More immediately, however, it led to further degradation of the enveloping natural areas, as the city’s residents traveled to the suburban fields for recreation whenever possible, in ever-increasing numbers, contributing to “a mass movement of individuals away from the city to its appealing surroundings” that “ironically endangered those very environs.”29 As for Dekker’s plays, they participate in this movement on the levels both of location and of dialogue. Not only does The Shoemakers’ Holiday move its setting three and a half miles northeast of London proper for its scenes in Old Ford; Lacy and Rose escape their repressive fathers by fleeing in the other direction, west of the city walls, where they are secretly “wedded at the Sauoy” (5.2.150). 1 Honest Whore conveys its characters north of the walls to Bedlam, in Bishopsgate Without, for its final act. In the process, the play’s Duke and his followers, intent on forestalling the marriage of Hippolito and Infaelice, “disguise [them] selues / Like Countrie-Gentlemen, / Or riding cittizens” bound for a day’s relaxation in the rural suburbs (5.1.104–6). As for Bedlam itself, it figures paradoxically as both a zone of suburban liberty and as a restrictive enclosure that compensates ironically for the loss of green space; thus “Citizens sons and heires are free of the house by their fathers copy: Farmers sons come hither like geese (in flocks) and when they ha sould all their corne fields, here they sit and picke the straws” (5.2.126–9). In a scene from The Roaring Girl always attributed to Dekker,30 the citizen-wife Mistress Openwork describes the gallant Goshawk’s efforts to seduce her, comparing them to various outdoor exercises associated with the suburbs: mistress openwork. Didst neuer see an archer (as tho’ast walked by Bunhill) looke a squint when he drew his bow? mistress gallipot. Yes, when his arrowes haue flin’e toward Islington, his eyes haue shot cleane contrary towards Pimlico.

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Mistress Openwork. For all the world so does Maister Goshawke double with me . . . Swore to me that my husband this very morning went in a boate with a tilt ouer it, to the three pidgions at Brainford, and his puncke with him vnder his tilt . . . I beleeu’d it, fell a swearing at him, curssing of harlots, made me ready to hoyse vp saile, and be there as soone as hee . . . And for that voyage Goshawke comes hither incontinently, but sirra this water-spaniell diues after no ducke but me, his hope is hauing mee at Brainford to make mee cry quack. (4.2.9–14, 24–6, 28–9, 30–2)

Here, as elsewhere in Dekker, the green spaces beyond London’s walls figure as a site of struggle between citizens and gentlemen of fashion. In an earlier scene from The Roaring Girl usually attributed to Middleton, the Londoners Gallipot and Tiltyard appear onstage accompanied by “water Spaniells and a ducke” (2.1.362, stage direction) and in search of their comrade Master Openwork. Their purpose is to undertake a day trip to Hoxton in the company of their dogs and womenfolk, and there to enjoy “the brauest sport at parlous pond,” where Gallipot expects to hunt “the best ducke in England, except my wife, he, he” (2.1.375, 376). Whether this passage is purely Middleton’s or – as I imagine likelier – the product of collaboration, it very clearly anticipates Goshawk’s later efforts to make Mistress Openwork “cry quack.” As Teresa Grant has noted, “Gallipot and Tiltyard are engaged upon a pursuit in keeping with their class.”31 So too is Goshawk, and while the pursuits in question both involve excursions to the outskirts of London, we might note the public and open-air character of the sport sought by the citizens and contrast it with the more private, enclosed nature of that to which Goshawk aspires. In an environment where common fields are steadily giving place to imparked estates, the former sort of pastime is in constant threat of encroachment by the latter, just as citizens’ wives find themselves in constant danger from sexual predators like Goshawk. 3 The contest between gentlemen and citizens receives particularly vivid treatment in 1 Honest Whore, a collaboration between Middleton and Dekker in which both dramatists appear to have worked in detail on virtually every scene.32 One of the play’s two plots centers on the linendraper Candido and his wife Viola, who, jealous of her husband’s famously mild temper, enlists the play’s gallants to provoke him to anger. Their efforts in this capacity – spoiling an expensive bolt of fabric, publicly insulting Candido while paying court to his wife, and even striking him “in’s shop” (4.3.92) – inspire the bristling resentment and retaliation of his

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servants, but these same provocations do nothing to unsettle Candido himself, who is thus allowed to end his play with a twenty-line eulogy of his signature virtue, patience. This quality he describes as the greatest enemy to law That can be, for it doth embrace all wrongs, And so chaines vp, lawyers and womens tongues. Tis the perpetuall prisoners liberty: His walkes and Orchards: ’tis the bond-slaues freedome, And makes him seeme prowd of each yron chaine: As tho he wore it more for state then paine. (5.2.497–502)

The figurative “walkes and Orchards” of this passage fit well, of course, with the broad concerns about access to green space that we have observed in Dekker’s work more generally. But the surrounding references to “law,” “chaines,” and imprisonment prove equally germane to an ecopolitics of enclosure that can be traced through them to the poet’s own living circumstances. Famously, Dekker spent much of his life in London’s prisons. By 1603, when he and Middleton were likely at work on 1 Honest Whore, he had already undergone brief confinement in the Poultry Counter for nonpayment of debt. On that occasion, in February, 1598, Philip Henslowe had lent the Lord Admiral’s Men £2 to secure Dekker’s release.33 Likewise, just short of a year later on January 30, 1599 (N.S.), Henslowe extended another loan, this time in the amount of £3 10s., “to descarge Thomas dickers frome the areaste of my lord chamberlens men.”34 This second cash advance may have been driven by the desire of the Lord Admiral’s Men to prevent Dekker from completing a play he had contracted to write for the Chamberlain’s company,35 and the associated threat of arrest may not have led in this case to imprisonment. But taken with the earlier Poultry Counter incident, this interlude would have given Dekker ample reason, by the time he came to work on 1 Honest Whore, to ponder the rigors of incarceration. All of this, in turn, offered a mere prelude to the central affliction of Dekker’s career: his confinement for debt in the King’s Bench Prison from 1613 to 1619, an extended personal crisis that consumed nearly seven years of the poet’s adult life. Prison is at heart a kind of enclosure, and one should not be surprised to find Dekker describing it as such. The reader’s preface to Dekker His Dreame (1620), for instance, depicts the King’s Bench as “the lowest graue of Obliuion . . . being a Caue strongly shut vp by most Diuellish and dreadfull enchantments”; more interestingly, this same preface describes

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Dekker as escaping his dungeon through a vision in which he “climbed to the tops of all the trees in Paradise, and eate sweeter Apples then Adam euer tasted” (3:11). As for the apocalyptic poem this epistle precedes, its climax repeats the same movement from punitive enclosure to liberating green space, only in reverse order. There the dreaming Dekker surveys the torments of the damned in hell, only to hear the lament of a soul who sounds a great deal like Dekker himself: If for my Sin [God’s] Son was Crucified Why am I hell’d in Execution In this Damned Iayle, euer to be Vndone? If Hee layd downe his life to set me Cleere From all my Debts, why am I Dungeon’d Here? ... He whom the First bad woman did intice, Was but once driuen out of Paradice, Yet hee (euen then) was Sole Monarchall Lord O’re the whole Globe . . . ... He lost a Garden, but an Orchard found Wall’d in with Seas, with Sun-beames compast round: Where Birds (whose Notes were neuer since so cleare) Seru’d as Musitians All, to tune his eare. (3:54–5)

During his years in the King’s Bench, the poet’s experience of London perforce narrows to coincide with his experience of imprisonment, which he in turn images as a primordial expulsion from gardens and orchards. Indeed, if Hamlet’s bad dreams make Denmark a prison, Dekker His Dreame does something similar to London; nor is this effect limited to Dekker’s prison writing. In A Rod for Run-awayes (1625), the poet turns to one of his favored themes: the selfish cowardice of London’s wealthy when, in plague-time, they quit the city, leaving behind no provision for its poorer and less mobile citizens. Here Dekker vividly conveys the sense of entrapment he and his fellows would have felt as, one by one, the city’s great houses and markets and ordinaries and shops closed their doors, leaving a reduced population of helpless beggars cornered within the city walls: How shall the lame, and blinde, and half-starued be fed? They had wont to come to your Gates: Alas! they are barred against them: to your doores, (woe vnto misery!) You haue left no Key behinde you to open them: These must perish. Where shall the wretched prisoners haue their Baskets filled euery night and morning with your broken meat? These must pine and perish.

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The distressed in Ludgate, the miserable soules in the Holes of the two Counters, the afflicted in the Marshallseas, the Cryers-out for Bread in the Kings Bench and White Lyon, how shall these be sustayned? These must languish and dye. . . Your doores are shut vp, and your Shops shut vp; all our great Schooles of learning (in London) are shut vp; and would to Heauen, that, as our numbers (by your departing) are lessened, so our sinnes might be shut vp, and lessened too. (4:287–9)

In passages like this the populace of London seems to have shrunk to a botchy core of prisoners, cripples, and mendicants immured within the city’s zone of infection. But elsewhere Dekker insists that London’s privileged runaways will fare no better among the inhabitants of the rural parishes to which they flee: Stay therefore still where you are, (sicke or in health) and stand your ground: for whither will you flye? Into the Countrey? Alas! there you finde worse enemies then those of Breda had in Spinola’s Campe. A Spaniard is not so hatefull to a Dutch-man, as a Londoner to a Country-man . . . [N]ow they perceiue the Bels of London toll 40 miles off in their eares; now that Bils come downe to them euery Weeke, that there dye so many thousands . . . they stand (within thirty and forty miles from London) at their Townes ends, forbidding any Horse, carrying a London load on his back, to passe that way, but to goe about, on paine of hauing his braines beaten out: and, if they spy but a foot-man (not hauing a Russet Sute on, their owne Country Liuery) they cry, Arme, charge their Pike-Staues, before he comes neere them the length of a Furlong; and, stopping their Noses, make signes that he must be gone, there is no roome for him to reuell in, let him packe. (4:292–4)

Here Dekker describes the plague that concluded King James’s reign. But that reign had begun twenty-two years earlier with a similar bout of pestilence, and there already, in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), Dekker imagines a similar scene of poetic justice, visited upon a similar well-todo refugee: [T]hou art gotten safe (out of the ciuill citie Calamitie) to thy Parkes and Pallaces in the Country: lading thy asses and thy Mules with thy gold, (thy god), thy plate, and thy Iewels: and the fruites of thy wombe thriftily growing vp but in one onely sonne, (the young Landlord of all thy carefull labours) him also hast thou rescued from the arrowes of infection . . . But open thine eyes thou Foole and behold that darling of thine eye, (thy sonne) turnde suddeinly into a lumpe of clay; the hand of pestilence hath smote him euen vnder thy wing . . . a tombe must now defend him from tempests . . . But note how thy pride is disdained: that weather-beaten sun-burnt drudge, that not a month since fawnd vpon thy worship like a Spaniell, and like a bond-slaue, would haue stoopt lower than thy feete, does now stoppe

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his nose at thy presence, and is ready to set his Mastiue as hye as thy throate, to driue thee from his doore: all thy gold and siluer cannot hire one of those (whom before thou didst scorne) to carry the dead body to his last home . . . with thine owne hands must thou dig his graue, (not in the Churche, or common place of buriall,) thou hast not fauour (for all thy riches) to be so happie, but in thine Orcharde, or in the proude walkes of thy Garden, wringing thy palsie-shaking hands in stead of belles, (most miserable father) must thou search him out a sepulcher. (1:107–9)

Such tableaus are easily construed as symbolic revenge, as the smug enclosers of London’s rural environs find themselves for once trapped in their turn, driven back to the city by paranoid villagers or forced, in an exquisite reversal of fortune, to commit their blasted lineage to a shabby grave within “the proude walkes” of their imparked estates. To summarize, the scant surviving biographical information about Thomas Dekker disposes itself around two long-running traumas: the poet’s repeated incarceration in London’s prisons and his repeated confinement in London itself during plague-time. These events, in turn, offer a kind of biographical counterpoint to the impression of London presented in Dekker’s plays: that of a city embroiled in social competition which manifests itself prominently as a struggle for access to green space. In the plays, that space is largely enclosed and suburban, available only to a select few. Conversely, Dekker’s prison writings and plague pamphlets conjure up a disturbing mirror-image of these privileged, green, suburban enclosures: an urban space of entrapment and desperation properly identified, on the metonymic level, with prison itself. In 2 Honest Whore these patterns of imagery converge in the figure of Bellafront: at one moment a “piece of ground” (3.1.4) that Hippolito seeks to “inclose . . . to himselfe” (3.1.4, 7), at another a “Mare . . . i’ the pound” (5.1.6), imprisoned in Bridewell for prostitution. But both these images – and their interrelation – derive from the local ecology. 4 Finally, we might remark upon one more aspect of Dekker’s engagement with his physical surroundings: a distinctive note of civic pride that creeps into his work whenever it deals with the city of London. This pride emerges in connection with various of the city’s attributes, often in association with its burghers, laborers, and apprentices. 2 Honest Whore offers a case in point when Candido, that unabashed exponent of bourgeois values, delivers an encomium on the signature head-wear of London’s citizens, the flat cap:

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The prince in question was Henry VIII, who introduced the flat cap at court; however, it was the citizens of London who took to the new style most eagerly, with the result that by 1571 an Act of Parliament made it compulsory Sunday and holiday attire for all male Londoners over the age of six.36 For Dekker, this is enough to render the cap worthy of celebration as a metonymic extension of the urban populace that wears it. To extol the cap is to extol the citizens associated with it, which is in turn to extol the city they inhabit. More broadly, Dekker gives voice to this sort of civic pride through a recurring celebration of London’s public buildings, which appear in crucial places within the poet’s work to mark the stature and dignity of London as an urban entity. The Shoemakers’ Holiday, for instance, spends much of its time outside the city walls in the environs of Old Ford, but its final scene is set in “the great new hall” of Leadenhall (5.2.197), where Lord Mayor Simon Eyre feasts the city’s apprentices before receiving the King’s “patent / To hold two market dayes in Leden hall” for the sale of leather (5.5.156–7). Thus the comedy invests its conclusion with a piece of civic history that redounds to the distinction of the Cordwainers Guild; from 1488 onward, Leadenhall Market served as London’s only official outlet for the sale of leather goods.37 In like fashion – and despite the fact that it theoretically takes place in Italy rather than England – 1 Honest Whore reaches its climax in another one of London’s grand public institutions, the royal hospital at Bedlam. Here the choice of locale draws attention to the fabric of the city while simultaneously foregrounding issues of access to suburban recreation; by the early seventeenth century, Bedlam was well established as a site of diversion for pleasure-seekers from the city. Dekker and Middleton incorporate this feature of the institution into their play’s ending, as the Duke of Milan and his retinue postpone their pursuit of his eloping daughter long enough to witness the entertainment afforded by the hospital’s inmates. There, disguised among the other madmen and madwomen, the reformed whore Bellafront confronts her seducer, Mathaeo, in language again partly drawn from the vocabulary of enclosure: bellafront. I know you: Is not your name Mathaeo. mathaeo. Yes lamb.

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bellafront. Baa, lamb! There you lie for I am mutton; [to the Duke] looke fine man, he was mad for me once, and I was mad for him once . . . I had a fine iewell once, a very fine iewell and that naughty man stoale it away from me. (5.2.401–8)

Yet once more, in 2 Honest Whore, events culminate in a visit to one of London’s grand civic landmarks, this time the prison at Bridewell, donated to the city by King Edward VI in 1553.38 In this case, Dekker goes so far as to include a speech, assigned to one of the masters of the prison, detailing the facility’s history and erstwhile royal connections, the latter slightly reconfigured to match the play’s Italian setting: Hither from forraigne Courts haue Princes come, And with our Duke did Acts of State Commence, ... . . . that Duke dead, his Sonne (That famous Prince) gaue free possession Of this his Palace, to the Cittizens, To be the poore mans ware-house: and endowed it With Lands to’th valew of seuen hundred marke, With all the bedding and the furniture, once proper (As the Lands then were) to an Hospitall Belonging to a Duke of Sauoy. (5.2.5–6, 8–15)

At such moments, Dekker’s plays take on the character of an urban cicerone, attesting in the process to the poet’s lasting fondness for the city of his birth. We may conclude with one more example of such language, drawn this time from a non-dramatic source. In 1616, some three years into his imprisonment in the King’s Bench, Dekker brought forth one of the stranger poems to appear during the reign of King James, an historico-chorographical exercise entitled The Artillery Garden. Dedicated to the “Captaines and Soldiers” of London,39 this poem draws its title from the tract of extramural property north of Bishopsgate and west of Spitalfields also known as the Artillery Yard. According to Stow this area had served as a site for crossbow practice until “being inclosed with a bricke wall” toward the end of the sixteenth century.40 Thereupon it became the regular training-field for the Guild of Saint George – the London militia band that survives today as the British army’s oldest regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company.41 In composing an encomiastic poem on the Guild’s London training-ground, Dekker sought to celebrate the city in general and its military men more particularly. In the process, he also drew attention to another one of London’s distinctive civic landmarks – in this case a suburban enclosure that had

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preserved its old function as a venue for the exercise of arms. For Dekker, this space weds civic virtue to rural pastime while reconfiguring the early modern present in the image of the classical past: A Garden is their Martiall schoole, to try The dreadfull practise of Artillery, The Campus Martius once so fam’d in Rome, Hath lost that name there, and is hither come.

(Sig. C3r)

Moreover, the military exercise conducted in this space emerges as the particular province of London’s citizens, who are thereby distinguished from the surrounding crowd of effete, fashionable spectators: The Fields (squard out for walkes & sports) are fild With armed men, Merchants themselues are Drild And taught to double files: the Cittizens goe In their best clothes, when they like Soldiers show. ... Against the day of Fight, they learn to Fight, And in their braue Artillery more delight, Than feasts or triumphs; off are Scarlets layd. To put on armors, Senators vpbraid Our Fetherd Gulls cold resolution, That these should lead out troops, whilst they looke on.

(Sig. C2v)

Thus the Artillery Garden stands in salutary contrast to the prodigy houses going up all around it, and Dekker denounces peace as the eating rust of Time, By whom pyed fooles, & Sanguine Parasites climb To Lands and Liuings our Fore-fathers got By dint of sword, which now (O honors blot!) Are burnt in ryotous fires, that flamd before Even vp to heauen with praise sent from the poore Fed at those Gates where now a gilt Coach stands, Footmen and fools and iades wasting those lands. (Sig. C1v)

These sentiments recall Stow, as when the itinerarian contrasts “the vanity of mens mindes” in latter days with “the disposition of the ancient Cittizens, who delighted in the building of Hospitals, and Almes houses for the poore,” or when he casts scorn upon the suburban prodigy house known as Fisher’s Folly, “so large and sumptuously builded by a man of no greater calling, possessions or wealth, (for he was indebted to many).”42 More generally, indeed, the spirit of Stow looms large in Dekker’s work. It manifests itself in The Artillery Garden as a longing

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for endangered green space, as a yearning for a London that has already ceased to exist, as an imaginative identification with an order of civic citizenry that felt itself increasingly under pressure from the encroachment of outsiders. In this sense, one might say that Dekker’s work embodies a kind of environmental siege mentality – or, to put the thing perhaps more properly, a prison mentality.

chapter 6

Heywood and the spectacle of the hunt

Traditionally associated with Dekker as an exponent of citizen drama committed to “celebration of the common man,”1 Thomas Heywood arguably deserves closer comparison to certain other contemporary playwrights. Like Shakespeare, for instance – and unlike any other author discussed in this study with the marginal courtly exception of Fletcher – Heywood participated in the grand population movement from country to city that transformed London from a medieval backwater into Europe’s preeminent urban space. And like Shakespeare again, Heywood worked as house playwright and shareholder to one of London’s acting companies, the Queen’s Men. Among the playwrights surveyed here, this distinction, once more, is shared only by Fletcher. As to the poet’s rural origins, Heywood describes himself as a Lincolnshire native, and an uncle of his can be traced to Cheshire.2 However, Heywood’s time in the country seems to have left little impression on his personal makeup. His plays do not reveal the kind of regional self-identification to be found in Shakespeare’s, and scholarship has traditionally fixated upon “the esteem, the love he had for his London” rather than upon any particular imaginative connection he may have felt to the provinces.3 On this basis we might describe Heywood as a more comfortably naturalized city-dweller than Shakespeare, but beyond this, it is through his professional affiliations that Heywood’s real sense of self becomes visible. Less than a Lincolnshire man, less even than a Londoner, Heywood presents himself as a man of the theater: a player who “uses the actor’s general popularity as a source of legitimation,”4 the composer of “two hundred and twenty [plays], in which [he] had an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger,”5 the author of Jacobean England’s foremost defense of the stage against the attacks of Puritan antitheatricalists. In this respect, Heywood’s personal ecology seems grounded in a sense of vocational rather than geographical place. But if Heywood’s plays are the work of a theater professional, they differ considerably from the received standard of Jacobean theatrical form as this 142

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is embodied in the interdependent plot-lines and thematic unity of Shakespeare’s works. A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), with its cunningly wrought double plot, shows that when he wished to do so, Heywood could perfectly well supply the kinds of structural parallels and antitheses that scholars have grown accustomed to celebrating in Shakespeare’s plays. On the whole, however, Heywood shows little interest in writing this kind of drama, instead producing numerous plays that seem episodic and disorganized. The first part of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605) has been criticized for its “lack of cohesion,” while 2 If You Know Not Me (1605) has been described as built upon “the merest scaffolding of narrative.”6 The Rape of Lucrece (c. 1607) may be designed as a classically themed revenge tragedy, but its action is repeatedly interrupted by merry ballads which “violate every principle of artistic decorum and good taste.”7 The five so-called Ages plays – The Golden Age (c. 1610), The Silver Age (1610–11), The Brazen Age (1610–13), and parts 1 and 2 of The Iron Age (1612–13) – may mostly derive from a single source (Heywood’s own non-dramatic verse narrative Troia Britanica [1609]), but beyond this, they consist of sequential dramatic actions strung together almost by afterthought around the loosest of mythological frameworks. The Brazen Age’s 1613 quarto title page makes this design explicit by breaking the play’s action down into five unrelated dramatic vignettes: “The first Act containing, / The death of the Centaure Nessus, / The Second, / The Tragedy of Meleager: / The Third / The Tragedy of Iason and Medea. / The Fourth. / VVLCANS NET. / The Fifth. / The Labours and death of / HERCVLES” (3:165). This kind of theater arguably has more in common with variety-show entertainment than with unified dramatic action of the Aristotelian or post-Aristotelian sort. One may even be tempted to view it as a distant anticipation of music hall and vaudeville. In any case, Heywood’s fondness for breaking his plays into loosely connected, autonomous units of action is only enhanced by a second and parallel tendency: his penchant for settling the audience’s attention on individual moments of visual and/or sonic spectacle, virtuoso show-stopping prodigies that appeal to the viewer without referencing any broader narrative or diachronic continuity. Valerius’s songs in The Rape of Lucrece offer one instance of this tendency: in keeping with neither the specific action nor the overall mood of Heywood’s tragic plot, the “merry Lord” (5:161) sings ballads that focus instead upon the moment of their own performance and the musical expertise of the performers. Something similar happens in the Ages plays, as when, at the end of The Golden Age, Pluto is invested with “a burning Roabe . . . and burning crowne” as king of the underworld (3:79), or when,

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in The Silver Age, Jove approaches Semele “in his maiesty, his Thunderbolt burning,” so that “[a]s he touches [Semele’s] bed it fires, and all flyes up” (3:154–5), or when, again in The Silver Age, Hercules invades Hell with “[f]lashes of fire” and “fire-workes all ouer the house” (3:159), or when, in The Brazen Age, Hercules does battle with Achelous, who “enters in the shape of a Dragon” only to be beaten out and then re-enter as “a Fury all fireworkes” (3:175). Heywood was of course by no means the only early modern playwright to entertain his audiences with music and extraordinary visual displays, but in Heywood’s case the emphasis on these devices is unusually pronounced, standing in marked contrast to the poet’s relative neglect of narrative structure. One gets the distinct sense that to Heywood, visual and musical spectacle comprise the essence of dramatic entertainment, while plot-line functions mainly as a life-support system for these all-important special effects. This being so, it should come as no surprise that the poet’s references to environmental problems, like the plot-lines within which they occur, lack consistency and cohesion. They seem, in fact, to be mainly introduced to elicit fleeting emotional or dramatic responses, and as a result they present few recurrent concerns. Instead, Heywood’s environmental allusions offer a kind of composite of the gestures explored in greater depth and with more apparent purpose by the other playwrights already surveyed in this study. For instance, Dekker’s concern with enclosure and imprisonment surfaces briefly in 1 If You Know Not Me when Gage entreats the Constable of the Tower to allow the captive Princess Elizabeth “but [to] walke in the Lieutenants garden,” and the Constable replies, “Come, talke not to me, I am resolu’d, / Nor lodging, garden, nor Lieutenants walkes, / Shall here be granted: shes a prisoner” (1:216). An echo of Fletcher’s fumble-tongued male suitors appears in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c. 1606) in the form of the gallant Bowdler, who attempts to seduce Mall Berry with language drawn from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis – “Fondling I say, since I haue hem’d thee heere, / within the circle of this ivory pale, / Ile be a parke” (2:55) – but is brought to confusion by her superior repartee: “[N]ame her not, I could not endure the carreir of her wit for a million . . . I win her! By heaven, I am not furnish’d of a courting phrase, to throw at a dogge” (2:54). The eponymous protagonist of The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (c. 1605) shares Middleton’s interest in urban sexual misbehavior and the population growth to which it contributes; as she explains her livelihood, Kitchin-maids, and Chambermaids, and sometimes good mens Daughters: who having catcht a clap, and growing neare their time, get leave to see their friends in

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the Countrey, for a weeke or so: then hither they come, and for a matter of money, here they are delivered . . . [I]n the night we send [the infants] abroad, and lay one at this mans doore, and another at that, such as are able to keepe them; and what after becomes of them, we inquire not. (5:306)

The same play recalls Jonson’s fascination with the infinitely expanding London marketplace – “there are brave things to be bought in the Citie: Cheapside, and the Exchange, afford varietie and raretie” (5:318). In 2 If You Know Not Me, the impoverished Tawny-coat cultivates the earth while denouncing human greed in language that could almost come from Shakespeare’s Timon: Hard world, when men dig liuing out of stones, As wretched miserable I am enforst. And yet there liues more pity in the earth, Then in the flinty bosomes of her children; For shee’s content to haue her aged brest Mangled with mattockes, rent and torn with spades, To giue her children and their children bread; When man more flinty than her stony ribs That was their mother, neither by intreats, Tears, nor complaints, will yeeld them sustenance. (1:302)

Such examples could be further multiplied, but to little purpose, since they lead nowhere in particular. Instead, they have the feel of convenient commonplaces, inserted into Heywood’s work for local effect but contributing little to broader formations of meaning. However, one pattern of environmental reference does recur in the poet’s plays with some insistence, and it has to do with the hunt. As one of the signature preoccupations of England’s privileged minority of peers, knights, and gentlemen, hunting looms large in various Jacobean literary, legal, social, and historical discourses. For Heywood, however, it seems to have proven most attractive for its potential as stage spectacle; in this sense it needs to be ranked with the merry ballads and fireworks and burning robes and exploding beds with which the poet strove to capture the imagination of his audiences at the Red Bull theater. As with the other ecological material cited above, Heywood’s allusions to hunting show little sign of being deliberately contrived into a general statement about environmental affairs. Yet for all that, Heywood’s hunters nonetheless tell us interesting things about the transformations to which their pastime had been subjected by changes in the natural world of the seventeenth century. In short, these changes lead to a decline in the symbolic value of hunting as

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a marker of personal status and achievement, a decline that progresses despite – and perhaps even because of – increasing efforts to define the hunt as an occupation of the social elite.

1 The association of hunting with aristocratic culture in the west can be traced back at least as far as Nimrod, the “mighty hunter” of Genesis 10:8–9, and by Jacobean times the hunt was well established as a major exercise for England’s armigerous elite. This was mainly, of course, because of the sport’s resemblance to warfare, which figured regularly in early modern discussions of the subject.8 The establishment of hunting as a distinctly aristocratic and military exercise led to its ritualization, which in turn translated it into a kind of theater which sought on one hand to reaffirm traditional social relations, while on the other hand also offering participants and spectators a rare kind of personal diversion. As Roger Manning puts it, The ceremonies of public worship or the execution of the king’s laws at the quarter sessions and the assizes had been refined over the centuries to achieve the greatest possible dramatic effect. A gathering of the aristocracy and gentry, mounted on their great hunters with dogs and beaters at their feet, or pursuing a stag through the woods and fields to the accompaniment of the music of the hounds and horns, was another spectacle that a countryman was unlikely ever to forget.9

As such, the hunt proved naturally amenable to dramatic representation. An elaborate and carefully devised ceremony that spoke to both participants and observers about their place in the world and thus about the design of the world as well, it offered playwrights a natural source of raw theatrical energy. By the same token, however, the character of hunting was clearly changing in sixteenth-century England, and by the reign of King James the change in question had grown sufficiently pronounced to generate a distinctive set of social, legal, and environmental problems. Scholars generally agree that there were two reasons for this development. First, changes in hunting practice had by 1600 reduced and transformed England’s available supply of game; second, the English gentry’s character as a warrior class had begun to change as well. From 1603 to 1625 these developments were further exacerbated by the king’s own efforts to regulate his favorite pastime, with the result that, apart from their

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intrinsic ceremonial quality, hunting scenes in Jacobean drama tap into a deep reservoir of cultural anxieties and resentments. Over-hunting, driven by increasingly destructive methods of killing, lay at the heart of the problem. As a preparation and symbolic substitute for war, the hunt had achieved its most respected form in the pursuit of great game par force de chiens: i.e. by riders in the company of beaters and hounds, with weapons only employed at the end of the chase to dispatch the exhausted animals once they were cornered and at bay. By King James’s day, this method was particularly associated with the hunting of deer, and it was highly valued as a medium for the development of aristocratic virtue. Thus, in 1575, George Gascoigne begins his account of how to hunt “an Harte at force” by hoping that “the nobility and youth of England [may] exercise themselues as well in that, as in sondry other noble pastimes of recreation, according to the steps of their honourable Ancestors and Progenitors.”10 But in the same breath, Gascoigne waxes nostalgic for the time, not long past, when “every forrest rung with hounds and horns,” and he deplores the condition of contemporary “Princes and noble men [who] take no delight in hunting, hauing their eyes masked wt the scarfe of worldly wealth.”11 In fact, King Henry VIII had given up hunting par force by the 1530s, opting instead for the less rigorous practices of “driving the deer past standings from which the king and his courtiers fired at the deer with crossbows,” or of simply watching while the animals in question were harried to death by greyhounds.12 This change in hunting method was an obvious accommodation to age, the king having at this point reached his forties, but it was an increasingly popular one (the middle-aged Queen Elizabeth, for instance, also shot deer from standings), and it led to massive carnage, even human carnage, as when, in 1621, the ill-starred Archbishop Abbott accidentally released an arrow into a gamekeeper who was herding a group of deer into position for better shooting.13 More usually, of course, the bloodshed was non-human, and there was no shortage of it. On the continent, Louis XV killed 10,000 deer during a fifty-year hunting career, while the hunting diary of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria “records the deaths of 4,783 deer”; on the English side of the Channel, “Henry VIII killed 240 deer in one day with bows, and the next day he repeated a similar level of slaughter by having deer dragged down by greyhounds.”14 Nor were these extraordinary cases. By 1500, wild boars and wolves – two of the five game animals normally associated with hunting in its heroic mode and identified as “beasts of forest, or beasts of uenerie” – had, like the long-extinct brown bear and the more recently eradicated beaver,

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been all but annihilated in England.15 By 1600, in turn, the realm’s deer population had also begun to experience stress prior to suffering “massive depletion . . . during the Civil Wars.”16 In short, the hunters of Jacobean England were killing more beasts than before more efficiently than before, and the realm’s supply of great game was suffering from the strain. An obvious response to this dilemma was to restrict access to the game animals that remained. English forest and game law had been trying to do this for some time before King James’s accession to the throne, but efforts redoubled under the sport-addled monarch and his successors, so that “between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, Parliament made every conceivable circumstance in which an unqualified person might hunt a crime.”17 John Manwood’s 1615 Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest provides ample testimony to the extent of the regulation. There, among lengthy and technical discussions of who may (or must) and may not clear forest land, enclose forest property, maintain common land in forest property, repair bridges and roads within forest property, etc., Manwood singles out for special censure all manner of hunters and trespassers in the forest, that doe any manner of way trespasse, or offend against the uenison and wild beasts of the forest, as with hunting in the forest, either in the day or in the night, with bowes, gunnes, or any other manner of engine, to take or destroy the wild beasts, or with Greyhounds, or any other dogges, with an intent to take or destroy the wild beasts of the forest; this is an especiall Nuisance, for that the uerie offence it selfe tendeth directly to the hurt and destruction of the Venison of the forest, which is the most especiall thing in a forest.18

Such concern might well be justified on the basis of species preservation, as it is in various parts of the world today; however, in King James’s case it was all too clear that the rigors of the law were being invoked less to save animals than to ensure that they could only be killed by a privileged few. The apparent hypocrisy of this action was only heightened by the common law’s understanding of game animals “as ferae naturae – things of pleasure rather than profit and upon which no value could be placed in an indictment”: in other words, things which in themselves could not be stolen.19 All of this – the depletion of game supplies through over-hunting; the employment of hunting methods that led to mass slaughter without requiring courage or even serious exertion on the part of the hunters; the increased efforts to restrict the right to hunt to a privileged few; and the apparent determination to stand the law on its head in pursuit of this end – all of this tended to undermine the old view that the hunt served as essential training for a warrior class whose social function was

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to maintain the peace. And the problems did not stop there, for even in the best of times King James and his followers never did a very good job of behaving either like warriors or like peacekeepers. This was ironically due in part to the king’s pacifist foreign policy, which left his nobles little opportunity to acquire actual battlefield experience, with the result that their ever-more impassioned hunting expeditions lost any functional relationship to the exercise of arms or governance more generally. Indeed, far from preserving the peace, the actions of early modern hunters often seemed calculated to disturb it. In the previous chapter we have already noted the commotion caused by King Charles I’s pursuit of a stag into the streets of Wapping; likewise, the deer-hunting scene in Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday foregrounds the privileged arrogance of Hammon and Warner as they chase game into the Lord Mayor’s private property. As for King James and his courtiers, the record of their trespasses remains extensive. As early as December 1604, less than a year after the king’s English coronation, Archbishop Matthew Hutton could call for “more moderation in the lawful exercise of hunting, both that poor men’s corn may be less spoiled and other his Majesty’s subjects more spared.”20 Not quite two years later, Sir John Harington could declare that “I have passed much time in seeing the royal sports of hunting and hawking, where the manners were such as made me devise the beasts were pursuing the sober creation, and not man in quest of exercise or food.”21 On yet another occasion, while hunting in Thetford, King James “received an affront from one of the farmers belonging to the Town, who being highly offended at the liberty his majesty took in riding over his corn, in the transport of his passion threatened to bring an action of trespass against the King.”22 And so forth. In sum, the Jacobean hunt had evolved from military training to leisure entertainment, from an instrument for the maintenance of social order to an occasion for sowing social discord. As such, it generated much popular resentment, and it drew attention to a yawning disconnect between the rhetoric and theory of aristocratic privilege, on one hand, and its practice, on the other. The resulting conflict focused questions of social justice on a fundamentally ecological issue: the relationship between human and non-human species in an environment that supported the former at the expense of the latter. And, in the process, it gave rise to the possibility that hunting might be the distinctive occupation not of an elite, heroic class of peacekeeper, but of an idle and self-serving species of social parasite.

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Against the backdrop of these developments in hunting practice, Heywood’s five Ages plays repeatedly depict the sport, but in ways that suggest a conflicted sense of its social function and associations. On one hand, Heywood presents hunting as one in a sequence of innovations that contribute to humanity’s moral decline and gradual estrangement from the natural world, while on the other hand he depicts it as a heroic activity of central importance to the civilizing process. In this confusion the poet follows his dramatic source, his own Troia Britanica, which follows its own main source in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troye (1474), which in turn departs notably from Ovid’s influential version of the Four Ages myth as it figures in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses. There the tale is all about moral degeneration and environmental alienation, with Ovid offering a straightforward account of humankind’s decline from a primordial state of harmony and comfort into a condition of ever-greater conflict and discontent, a decline marked by various disruptions in the fabric of nature. Thus during the Golden Age, when the heavens were ruled by Saturn, pines had not yet been felled or carried from the mountains to the waters so that wanderers might see new lands (“Nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem, / montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas”), and the unplowed earth yielded fruit while the unfertilized fields grew white with heavy beards of grain (“Mox etiam fruges tellus inarata ferebat, / nec renovatus ager gravidis canebat aristis”). Under the regime of Jove in the Silver Age, by contrast, cereal grains were first buried in long rows, and twinned oxen groaned beneath the yoke (”Semina tum primum longis Cerealia sulcis / obruta sunt, pressique iugo gemuere iuvenci”), while in the Iron Age ships’ keels which had once stood on the high mountains now danced upon unknown waves, and surveyors measured off the land, formerly as free as the sunlight or the air, and men dug into the bowels of the earth and brought forth the cause of all our evils, riches which had long been removed and hidden within Stygian shades (“navita, quaeque prius steterant in montibus altis, / fluctibus ignotis insultavere carinae, / communemque prius ceu lumina solis et auras / cautus humum longo signavit limite mensor. / . . . [et] itum est in viscera terrae, / quasque recondiderat Stygiisque admoverat umbris, / effodiuntur opes, inritamenta malorum”).23 Ovid’s tale survives as a major early literary treatment of environmental degradation. But for all its details of human rapacity and manipulation of the natural world, details which extend from the felling of trees to

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agriculture to animal husbandry to mining and beyond, it contains no reference, explicit or veiled, to any kind of hunting practice. Following his medieval sources, Heywood hastens to remedy this deficit in his Troia Britanica. There, amidst a euhemerist account of the Golden Age in which the gods figure as men, Heywood attributes various refinements of civilization to Saturn, now the younger son of Uranus, King of Crete: Saturn first found, To till, to plow, to sow, to reap the ground. He likewise was the first that strung the bow, And with a feathered Arrow pierst the Aire. ... Now first began the birds to pearch them hier, And shun mans sight . . . ... To kill the Sauadge beast he likewise taught, And how to pierce the Serpents skale from farre, By him, the wilde-swift-running Hart was caught. He first deuis’d for vs the vse of warre.24

These narrative embellishments, in turn, are not original to Heywood, but enter his verse from Caxton’s Recuyell, where Saturn is described as follows: the renomee of kyng saturne grewe And the worlde was that tyme of gold. that is for to saye hyt was moche better and more haboundant in the dayes of mannes lyf and in plente of frutes of the erthe than in ony other tyme after The poetes by thys colour compared the world at that tyme to gold whiche is moste precyous of alle metals / how well dyuerce men saye that saturne was the fyrst man that fonde the maner to melte metall and to affine gold and made hys vessell & vtensilles of his hows of dyuerce metall. And vnder thys colour they figured at that tyme the worldes to ben of gold / Than began the men by the doctryne of saturne to vse and were gold to myne the roches / to persshe the montaignes perillo[us] / to haunt the thorny desertes / to fyght and adaunte the orguyllous serpentes / the fiers dragons / the dedely griffons the monstrowous bestes / and to sprede a brood theyr wordly engyns. By these excersites was than saturne the fourbesshour and begynner of the style / to lerne men to take all these bestes / And fyrste fonde the maner of shotyng and drawyng of the bowe.25

Nor is Caxton the innovator here; his text translates Book 1 of Raoul Lefèvre’s Recoeil des hystoires Troyennes (1464), which derives from Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum (1360), where the Golden Age is described as follows: First Saturn came from the heights of Olympus fleeing the arms of Jove as an exile with his kingdom taken away. In Italy, according to Macrobius, he was received

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by Janus. And the people were unpeaceable, and dispersed in the high mountains, and he gave them laws . . . They hold the age under that king to be golden, for thus he ruled the people in quiet peace. Indeed, once received by the Italians, he displayed to them many heretofore unknown inventions, and among other things from the skins of beasts toughened by fire money was obtained, he himself first stamped copper coins, and he placed his name upon them . . . Furthermore, they say that he reigned in harmony with Janus and they had neighboring towns, naturally called Janiculum and Saturnia, built with shared labor. The age was golden because then life was free to all, no one was a slave, no one harmful to another, no theft was perpetrated in those lands, nor was any property private. Nor was it lawful to mark out alone or define by limits the fields . . . On this account in retrospect this age was called golden by succeeding generations. And the Romans in the town of Saturn wished the civic property to be made of gold, so that the wealth was held in common . . . Moreover, he taught the ignorant to till their fields, to place seed in the earth, to harvest it when ripe, and in the proper time to enrich the fields with manure.26 Primus ab aethereo uenit Saturnus olimpo arma Iouis fugiens, & regnis exul ademptis. In Italia autem, ut dicit Macrobius à Iano susceptus est. Et genus indocile, ac dispersum montibus altis Composuit, legesque dedit . . . Aurea quae perhibent illo subrege fuere Saecula, sic placida populos in pace regebat. Apud Italos enim receptus multa ostendit ante non cognita, et inter alia cum eo usque ex pellibus pecudum duratis igne pecunia conficeretur, ipse primus aera signauit, & nomen signantis apposuit . . . Aiunt in super cum concors una cum Iano regnaret et uicino communi opera constructa haberent oppida, Saturniam scilicet et Ianiculum aurea fuisse saecula, eo quod libera tunc esset omnibus uita, nemo seruus, nemo alteri obnoxius, nullum etiam fertur in eis finibus furtum factum, nec sub illo fuit aliquid alicuius priuatum. Nec signare solum aut partiri limite campum fas erat . . . Quamobren respectu secutorum saeculorum illa aurea dicta sunt. Et Romani apud edem Saturni aurium publicum esse uoluerunt, ut apud eum locaretur pecunia communis . . . Insuper ignaros docuit arua colere, semina terris dare, matura colligere, & suo tempore stercoribus agros foecundare.

As for Boccaccio, he in turn expands upon source material to be found in Macrobius’ Saturnalia: The region now called Italy was ruled by Janus . . . When Saturn arrived by ship, he was received hospitably by Janus and taught him agriculture; and when Janus improved his way of life, which had been wild and uncouth before the fruits of the earth were discovered, he rewarded Saturn by making him a partner in his rule. When Janus became the first to coin money, he maintained his respect for Saturn in this too: because Saturn had arrived by ship, he had the likeness of his own head stamped on one side of the coin, a ship on the other, to preserve the memory of Saturn for posterity . . . To Saturn people attributed the practice of grafting shoots, cultivating fruit trees, and methodically raising all produce of every conceivable kind . . . The Romans also called him Sterculius, because he first

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fertilized fields with manure [stercus]. The time of his reign is said to have been the happiest, both because of its material abundance and also because the distinction between slavery and freedom did not yet exist.27 Regionem istam quae nunc vocatur Italia regno Ianus optinuit . . . hic igitur Ianus, cum Saturne classe pervectum excepisset hospitio et ab eo edoctus peritiam ruris ferum illum et rudem ante fruges cognitas victum in melius redegisset, regni eum societate muneravit. cum primus quoque aere signavit, servavit et in hoc Saturni reverentiam, ut quoniam ille navi fuerat advectus, ex una quidem parte sui capitis effigies, ex altera vero navis exprimeretur, quo Saturni memoriam in posteros propagaret . . . huic deo insertiones surculorum pomorumque educationes et omnium cuiuscemodi fertilium tribuunt disciplinas . . . hunc Romani etiam Sterculium vocant, quod primus stercore fecunditatem agris comparaverit. regni eius tempora felicissima feruntur, cum propter rerum copiam tum et quod nondum quisquam servitio vel libertate discriminabatur.

A complicated textual lineage if ever there were one, this typically medieval tangle of quotation, conflation, and dilation yields two main consequences for our study of Heywood. First, it revises Ovid’s myth of the Four Ages so as to render that myth compatible with ideas of civilization as progress; second, it introduces hunting into the myth as a specific example of the progress civilization achieves. On the former count, it is worth noting that Macrobius never explicitly invokes the Four Ages, although he may allude to them obliquely in his description of Saturn’s rule as “tempora felicissima.” It is Boccaccio who expressly conflates Macrobius’ account of Saturn’s reign with the “Aurea Saecula” described by Ovid, and this conflation alters Ovid’s tale such that some of the innovations Ovid assigns to the later ages under the rule of Jove – the tilling and manuring of fields, for instance, together with the construction of dwellings and cities, the imposition of laws, and the minting of coin – are now re-cast as products of Saturn’s personal inspiration. When viewed from the standpoint of historical demographics, this change makes a kind of sense. Ovid inhabited early imperial Rome, a city already beginning to experience the urban stress and congestion lamented a century later by Martial and Juvenal and already discussed in Chapter 2 above. It therefore stands to reason that when called upon to imagine a lost ideal of human society, he should present it in terms of pastoral otium. Macrobius, by contrast, dwelt in a later and very different Roman Empire. The Saturnalia appears to have been composed some years after the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410, but even before that calamity the city was experiencing a “gradual process of de-urbanization” that led to its “enormous decrease in size” during the fifth century.28 Thus when Macrobius conjures up the early, lost “tempora felicissima” of Saturn, he may reasonably be expected to think of them in

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different terms than did Ovid, as a period of urban growth and the imposition of law and order. As for Boccaccio, he wrote of course in the aftermath of the Black Death, when Rome’s population had reached its medieval nadir, so Macrobius’ utopia of tilled fields and new towns would have spoken particularly well to his later historical situation. In any case, the conflation of Ovid with Macrobius makes for certain logical inconsistencies: one might wonder, for instance, about the purpose of laws in an age without slavery, theft, personal injury, or private property, and while the recollection of a preceding era in which the Italians were unpeaceable goes some distance toward explaining the imposition of law, it interferes with the narrative of moral decline implicit in the Four Ages myth. As for the introduction of hunting into the Ages myth, this too may be accounted for in environmental terms. Given the extreme complexity of the Matter of Troy, one is reluctant to make categorical pronouncements about where specific features of narrative originate within the textual lineage, but it appears that Raoul Lefèvre was the first author to associate Saturn’s reign with the invention of hunting. He does this in a passage drawn primarily from Boccaccio and Macrobius which also conflates these sources with Guido delle Collone’s Historia Destructionis Troiae (1287), where Saturn is identified as King of Crete.29 None of these sources, however, offers the following, which is translated by Caxton in the above-cited passage from the Recuyell and migrates thence directly to Heywood: That was the Golden Age . . . Then, by the instruction of Saturn, men began to use gold, to explore the perilous mountains, to travel the inhospitable deserts, to battle and defeat proud serpents, fierce dragons, deadly griffons, and other monstrous beasts, and to set wooden traps. By these practices, Saturn became the inventor not only of methods for taking all beasts but also of archery.30 Les siecles furent lors dorez . . . Adont commencerent les homes par le doctrine de Saturne a user d’or, a caver les rochiers, perchier les montaignes perilleuses, hanter les espineux desers, combatre et dompter les orgueilleux serpens, les fiers dragons, les grifons mortelz, les bestes monstrueuses, et a esclercir leurs bocages engins par ces exercites, dont Saturne fu le fourbisseur en trouvant le stille de prendre toutes bestes et de traire de l’arc.

Again, Lefèvre’s introduction of this material may be explained in environmental terms. His Recoeil was dedicated to Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, whom Lefèvre served as chaplain, and whose chivalric obsessions led him to establish the knightly Order of the Golden Fleece. As a center of chivalric culture, the fifteenth-century Burgundian court was also heavily invested in aristocratic hunting practices. Roughly seventy-five years before

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the Recoeil, Gaston Fébus had dedicated his Livre de chasse (c. 1389) to Philippe le Bon’s grandsire and namesake, Philippe le Hardi, and in the grandson’s days “hunting and falconry” remained “the everyday recreations of the Duke of Burgundy and his courtiers.”31 In 1463, as Lefèvre was finishing his Recoeil, the ducal household employed “a masterfalconer, three falconers, three assistants to look after the sparrow-hawks, and valets”; thirty-six years earlier, in 1427, the duke’s “masterhuntsman, Jehan de Foissy, was allowed £2,000 per annum to cover all his expenses, which included the feeding, mainly with bread, of ninetyfive hounds.”32 Such a historical context might reasonably predispose Lefèvre to give the hunt a prominent and honored place in his vision of the Golden Age. In sum, within his source material for the Ages plays Heywood encountered a centuries-old tradition that depicted hunting as an aristocratic and heroic exercise, instrumental to the establishment of civil society and implicated in the discourse of social improvement. For the most part, likewise, that is how the sport appears in the Ages plays. In The Golden Age, Saturn presents the bow as the final item in a triad of civilizing inventions including the practices of architecture and husbandry: The last, not least, this vse of Archery, The stringed bow, and nimble-fethered shaft: By this you may command the flying fowle, And reach her from on high: this serues for warre, To strike and wound thy foe-man from a farre. (3:12)

Earlier, the play’s nameless Clown has offered this admiring appraisal of Saturn’s government: Let his uertues speake for himselfe: he hath taught his people to sow, to plow, to reape corne, and to skorne Akehornes with their heeles, to bake and to brue: we that were wont to drinke nothing but water, haue the brauest liquor at Court as passeth. Besides, he hath deuised a strange engine, called a Bow and Arrow, that a man may hold in hand, and kill a wilde beast a great way off, and neuer come in danger of his clutches. (3:11)

Saturn spends a fair amount of stage time wandering about “with wedges of gold and siluer, models of ships and buildings, bow and arrows, etc.” (3:11, stage direction; also see 3:72, stage direction) – mock-ups which serve as visual cues to focus audience attention on the spectacular benefits of his inventiveness. And by play’s end King Troos can exclaim, “Where hath not Saturnes fame abrode bene spred / For many vses he hath giuen to man; / As Nauigation, Tillage, Archery, / Weapons and gold?” (3:74).

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Subsequent plays in the Ages series offer more of the same. Following a pattern that Heywood once again found in Caxton (who once again found it in Lefèvre), The Silver Age focuses on the exploits of Hercules, which consist largely of a series of spectacular staged hunting expeditions. First he is called to chase the Nemean lion, a “dreadfull beast, / That keeps the forrests and the woods in awe: / Commands the Cleonean continent, / Vnpeoples towns; And if not interdicted, / In time will make all Greece a wildernesse” (3:129). This scourge eliminated, he is straightaway called forth in pursuit of the Erymanthean boar, a “sauadge swine” (3:133) which, according to Juno,” “Deuasts the fertill plaines of Thessaly: / And when the people come to implore our ayd, / Their liues no mortall that dare undertake / To combat him” (3:132). These interludes, in turn, usher in a tableau depicting the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, a civil celebration that descends into chaos when Perithous’ equiform guests attempt liberties with his bride. And this spectacle then yields to one in which Hercules invades hell to reclaim the abducted Proserpine. “Saw you not Hercules?”, Theseus asks Perithous at the outset of this final scene – a question which leads to the following exchange: Perithous. Noble Theseus no. I left him in the forrest, chasing there Dianaes Hart, and striuing to out-run The swift-foot beast. Theseus. His actiue nimblenesse Out-flies the winged bird, out-strips the steed, Catcheth the hare, & the swift grey-hound tires Out-paceth the wilde Leopard, and exceeds Beasts of most actiue chace. (3:156)

The two Iron Age plays segue into a depiction of the Trojan War, thus effecting the traditional association of hunting with combat that served to justify the former’s status as an aristocratic pastime. As for The Brazen Age, its episodic design and subject-matter depart from the heroic register of the first two Ages plays, but even so its rendition of the Venus and Adonis myth returns to heroic figurations of the hunt. Thus Adonis is called forth to his fatal chase in a scene that elides his tale with that of the Calydonian boar, which Meleager describes as yet another civilization-threatening prodigy:33 What better can describe his shape and terror Then all the pittious clamours shrild through Greece? Of his depopulations, spoyles, and preyes? ...

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Out of his iawes (as if Ioues lightning flew) He scortches all the branches in his way, Plowes vp the fields, treads flat the fields of graine. In vaine the Sheepheard or his dogge secures Their harmlesse fowlds. In vain the furious Bull Striues to defend the heard ore which he lords. The Collonies into the Citties flye, And till immur’d, they thinke themselues not safe. (3:187–8)

Heywood’s dramatization of the Venus and Adonis myth marks a departure from his source material in Troia Britanica, where “one misses [the myth] completely”;34 nor is the tale of Venus and Adonis to be found in Caxton or Lefèvre. To this extent, it represents Heywood’s own manipulation of his received subject-matter, and its placement of hunting within a discourse of civilizing improvement – a discourse that has already appeared in connection with the hunt at various points in The Golden Age and The Silver Age – says a good deal about the poet’s environmental sensibility. Thus the Ages plays reproduce and build upon a traditional logic that viewed hunting as heroic and civilizing, a logic grounded in “the ancient argument that sports provided men with the physical training and conditioning necessary to their successful military engagement with foreign enemies.”35 In keeping with this tradition, the beasts that Heywood’s characters hunt – the Nemean lion, the Erymanthean boar, the Calydonian boar – are themselves presented as the equivalent of foreign enemies, depopulating the countryside, devastating fields, destroying property, and threatening towns and cities. Less prominently, however, the Ages plays also engage an alternative discourse that challenges Saturn’s status as an heroic hunter and separates hunting itself from the civilizing arts with which Saturn is associated. Thus when Saturn introduces archery as equally useful for hunting and “for warre,” his language undermines conventional descriptions of the Saturnian Age as a time of gentle peace, with “nemo alteri obnoxius.” When The Golden Age’s Clown praises Saturn’s skill as a huntsman, the compliment melts at once into a less-than-heroic bear-garden joke: [L]ast time the King went a hunting, he kild a beare, brought him home to be bak’d and eaten: A Gentlewoman of the Court, that fed hungerly vpon this pye, had such a rumbling and roaring in her guts, that her Intrails were all in a mutiny, and could not be appeased. No phisicke would helpe her, what did the King but caused an excellent Mastiffe to be knock’t in the head, and drest, gaue it to the gentlewoman, of which when she had well eaten, the flesh of the Mastiffe worried the beare in her belly, and euer since her guts haue left wambling. (3:11)

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And in The Golden Age, the goddess Diana explicitly contrasts her “Rurall sports” with Saturn’s urban and courtly government: “Here is no Citycraft. / Here’s no Court-flattery: simplenesse and sooth / The harmless [!] Chace, and strict Virginity / Is all our practice” (3:28). Such language links up, in turn, with other passages that present civilization more generally as a bane rather than a blessing, as for instance in The Golden Age when Pluto, the youngest son of Saturn, is described as traveling to Tartary, “Where he in processe a strange City built / And cald it Hell, his subiects for their rapine, / Their spoils and theft, are Diuels term’d abrode” (3:20); or when, again in The Golden Age, Calisto assures Diana that “Euen in my soule [I] hate mans society, / And all their lusts, suggestions, all Court-pleasures, / and City-curiosities are vaine” (3:28–9); or when, in The Silver Age, Earth upbraids Ceres for the environmental degradation produced by agriculture: “[Y]our remorslesse plowes haue rak’t my breast, / . . . your Irontooth’d harrowes print my face / . . . full of wrinkles . . . you digge my sides / For marle and soyle, and make me bleed my springs / Through all my open’d veines, to weaken me” (3:139). At stake in these passages is the relative prestige of two Golden Age utopian traditions, represented by Ovid’s Metamorphoses on one hand and by the textual lineage descending from Macrobius’ Saturnalia on the other. The former corresponds to a kind of “soft primitivism” as defined in the 1930s by A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, in which one encounters a preference for “the condition of human life in which it is most free from the intrusion of ‘art,’ i.e., in which none, or at most only the simplest and most rudimentary, of the practical arts are known”; a parallel commitment to “human society without private property, and in particular, without private property in land”; and a concomitant attraction to vegetarianism “as an expression of the feeling that bloodshed in all its forms is sinful.”36 The latter tradition, in turn, embodies a mode of anti-primitivism which assumes “that men’s life had once been far less secure, peaceful and comfortable than it was in the present,” and which credits “the discovery of the ‘arts,’ or the invention of the tools that made the practice of them possible, [as] the means of this vast amelioration of the conditions of human life.”37 As noted, Heywood’s principal sources for the Ages plays tend to favor the latter tradition, and Heywood himself contributes to it somewhat in his elaboration of his source material. But the former tradition remains visible as well, and neither tradition is presented programmatically, as an overt ideological commitment of the plays in question. Both the anti-primitivism and its opposite appear instead as spectacular functions, employed to heighten the drama of individual scenes and to

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provoke audience reaction on a scene-by-scene basis. To this extent, Heywood’s Ages plays serve dramatic necessity over any specific set of environmental convictions. 3 Some half-dozen years before he began work on the The Golden Age, Heywood had already depicted a notable scene of hunting at the outset of his tragic masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness. The scene itself is short – only about a hundred lines – and only marginally related to the play’s main plot, but like the hunting scenes in the Ages plays, it clearly aims to create dramatic spectacle. As for the nature of the hunting it dramatizes, this could hardly be farther removed from the heroic undertakings of Saturn in The Golden Age or Hercules in The Silver Age. By contrast with such exercises, the hunting contest that opens A Woman Killed with Kindness is more English, more contemporary, and more petty. One might in fact be forgiven for wondering whether it represents an entirely different kind of endeavor. The play begins with a wedding, a provincial but nonetheless grand affair between Yorkshire gentry with court connections. John Frankford, the groom, is “a Gentleman, and by [his] birth / Companion with a King,” who has retired from courtly service to live on the “many faire reuennewes” of his country properties (2:102); his bride Anne’s “Birth / Is Noble, and her education such / As might become the Daughter of a Prince” (2:93). Their nuptial festivities include a rustic dance for the meaner sort, but as this gets underway the nobler members of the wedding party cast about for entertainment more suited to their rank. As Anne’s brother, Sir Francis Acton, puts the question, Now gallants, while the Towne Musitians Finger their frets within; and the mad lads And countrey lasses, euery mothers childe, With Nose-gaies and Bridelaces in their hats, Dance all their country measures, rounds, and Iigges, What shall we do? (2:95)

It is an exclusionary query, designed to separate the “gallants” from their inferiors, and accompanied by a condescending sneer at the skill of the dancers: Harke, they are all on the hoigh, They toile like Mill-horses, and turne as round;

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama Marry not on the toe; I, and they caper, But without cutting: you shall see tomorrow The hall floure peckt and dinted like a Mill-stone, Made with their high shooes; though their skill be small, Yet they tread heauy where their Hob-nailes fall. (2:95)

Against this backdrop another local squire, Sir Charles Mountford, challenges Sir Francis to a hunting contest, wagering “a hundred pound to morrow / Vpon my Hawks wing,” and then doubling down with “[a]nother hundred pound vpon [my] dogs” (2:96). But within the hunting scene itself the dogs remain firmly secondary, the hawks capturing virtually all of the playwright’s, characters’, and audience’s attention. In effect, Heywood’s gentlemen thus withdraw from the public rituals of nuptial merrymaking and from the community those rituals affirm, retreating to an exclusive space of their own identified with the sports that help define them as a privileged group. But in the process they dissever those sports – and the privileged group they help define – from the broader social collective of which they are a part and whose interests they purport to serve. To the degree that hunting becomes a private affair, it loses its value as an order-affirming spectacle; to the degree that hunting gives place to hawking, aristocratic sport loses its connection to the military arts that served as its practical justification. On the latter score, we have the precept of no less an authority than King James I himself: “As for hawking I condemn it not but I must praise it more sparingly [than hunting]; because it neither resembleth the wars so neere as hunting doth in making a man hardy, and skilfully ridden in all groundes.”38 And regarding the former point – the devolution of hunting itself from public ritual to private pastime – we need only compare the same king’s practice to that of his royal predecessor. Roger Manning has drawn the contrast succinctly: When Queen Elizabeth undertook a royal progress through her realm, she did so in order that she might be seen by her subjects . . . Thus, hunting at the Elizabethan court had become merely another pretext for lavish theatrical displays which made the queen’s subjects admire her all the more. For James I, on the other hand, a royal progress was first and foremost a hunting holiday. Moreover, James was careless about his appearance and disliked having his subjects watch while he was “at his sports.”39

Even before her coronation, Elizabeth upheld the spectacular function of the hunt, as when, in April, 1557, “she was escorted from Hatfield to Enfield-chase, by a retinue of twelve Ladies, clothed in white sattin on ambling palfries, and twenty yeomen in green, that her Grace might hunt

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the hart,” only to be met at the chase “by fifty archers in scarlet boots and yellow caps, armed with gilded bows; one of whom presented her a silverheaded arrow, winged with peacock’s feathers.”40 Her celebrated 1575 entertainment at Kenilworth included various theatrically devised hunting expeditions, retailed to a broader reading public by Robert Laneham’s account of the visit: [T]he earning of the hoounds in continuauns of theyr cry, the swyftnes of ye Déer, the running of footemen, the galloping of horsez, the blasting of horns, the halloing & hewing of the huntsmen, with the excelle[n]t Echoz betwéen whilez from the woods and waters in valleyz resoounding, mooued pastime delectabl in so hy a degrée, az for ony parson to take pleasure by moost sensez at onez, in mine opinio[n] thear ca[n] be none ony wey comparabl too this.41

By contrast, Sir John Oglander records King James’s impatience with the subjects who sought a glimpse of him while hunting: If they came to him in troops, as they usually did to Queen Elizabeth, he would passionately swear and ask the English nobles what they would have. They would answer, they came out of love to see him. Then he would cry out in Scottish, “God’s wounds! I will pull down my breeches and they will also see my arse!”42

Heywood finished A Woman Killed with Kindness in early 1603, just as the transition of rule from Queen Elizabeth to King James was getting underway, so the new king’s behavior in the chase would not have supplied a specific pattern for the comportment of Heywood’s gentry. But when he arrived in England, James came to embody unwelcome trends in the evolution of English field sports, trends which were already so pronounced that “a reaction against [the] aristocratic obsession with hunting and hawking may be discerned during the reign of Elizabeth” as well.43 Gregory Colón Semenza has traced this reaction to Shakespeare’s first Henriad, where hunting and hawking epitomize “the degeneration of aristocratic relations into petty competitions,”44 and something similar is clearly at play in A Woman Killed with Kindness, too. Heywood’s gentry withdraw from the broader social order, retreating to their hunting-parks and chases, where they further isolate themselves through the destructive practice of high-stakes gambling and “the elitist discourse of hawking.”45 Richard Rowland has described these aristocrats as “geeky,”46 and that is perhaps a kind word for the peculiar mixture of pretension and brutality that distinguishes them as a group. In any case, the hunting party degenerates into riot and manslaughter – exactly the opposite of what one would expect from representatives of a warrior class charged with preserving the peace.

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In this sense, Heywood’s hunting expedition enacts a failure of the social contract: a disruption of public ritual in favor of private pastime, and a concomitant neglect of customary social bonds. It is the first such failure depicted in A Woman Killed with Kindness, but others are not far to seek. Bankrupted by the legal costs of his altercation with Acton, Sir Charles Mountford describes his predicament as – what else? – a deprivation of his wonted sport: “I cannot name ye any of my Hounds; / Once from whose echoing mouths I heard all musicke / That ere my heart desired” (2:115). Accepting a friendly loan from his neighbor Shafton, he discovers that it is in fact a ruse to deprive him of his last remaining property, “a pretty house here, and a Garden, / And goodly ground about it” (2:114). Mountford’s continuing financial embarrassment leads to the breakdown of bonds between kin and social allies, with Mountford’s uncle refusing to lend him assistance, while his family’s former tenants turn their backs on him in scorn. Likewise, in the play’s main action, Frankford learns of his wife’s infidelity after sharing a meal with her and her lover, Wendoll; the cuckolded husband emerges onstage “as it were brushing the Crummes from his clothes with a Napkin, as newly risen from supper” (2:118), to illustrate the desecration of community implicit in the broken repast. And when Frankford takes Anne and Wendoll in adultery, it is after another interrupted supper, this time concluding yet another hunting party; as Wendoll remarks, “We that haue been a hunting all the day, / Come with prepared stomackes master Frankford ” (2:132). In sum, A Woman Killed with Kindness consists of a series of violated social rituals whose disruption speaks to deeper violations of the faith and solidarity the rituals themselves are designed to affirm. Paramount among these rituals are the wedding vows that bind husband to wife and the customs of friendship that unite male comrades, the former of course tying John Frankford to Anne Frankford, the latter connecting John Frankford to Wendoll. In general, these bonds acquire an environmental character, as when Mountford’s bankruptcy threatens his ancestral estate, or when Frankford punishes his wife’s infidelity by banishing her to a “Mannor seuen mile off” (2:142). But hunting emerges as the most conspicuous example of this connection to the land. Marcy Norton has observed that the chase “produced categories of participants” defined by social relations structured primarily through “obedience” and “mutual bonds of service.”47 It is just these relations that fall casualty to the hunting brawl between Acton and Mountford. Likewise, when Wendoll insinuates himself into Frankford’s good graces after bringing news of the brawl, he introduces a similar breakdown of relations into his new benefactor’s household.

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At play’s end, Wendoll imagines himself traveling abroad until his ill-fame as an adulterer has subsided; thereafter, he predicts, “My worth and parts being by some great man praisd, / At my return I may in Court be raisd” (2:152). 4 Scholars have noted the isolation and privacy that characterize the world of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Heywood’s Yorkshire is “an inwardlooking community,” “located in a landscape that often seems empty, and ominously silent,”48 and in this respect it actually achieves something like the conditions of detachment and seclusion with which King James sought to invest his hunting expeditions. In other plays, however, Heywood attempts something very different: to celebrate a public and collective environment, often coextensive with the urban space of London and its population of tradesmen and apprentices, citizens and servants, lords and beggars. This is perhaps the most noted feature of Heywood’s work, leading to the playwright’s regular association with Dekker, and it deserves some final comments here. First, then, to the obvious: Heywood’s plays, like Dekker’s, must be understood in large part as exercises in civic pride, celebrating London’s history, its people, and its fabric. As with Dekker’s plays, so too with Heywood’s this quality is apparent in plot-line, characters, and dialogue, but it becomes perhaps most visible in the poet’s celebration of city landmarks. Where Dekker writes Bedlam and Bridewell into the Honest Whore plays, and Leadenhall Market into The Shoemakers’ Holiday, Heywood introduces a whole series of distinguished London locales into 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody: Sir Thomas Gresham and Sir Thomas Ramsey quarrel over Osterley Manor, where Gresham would build a prodigy house in the 1570s (1:265–7);49 caught in a downpour shortly thereafter, Gresham vows to build a roofed place of business where “merchants and their wiues . . . and their friends, / Shall walk . . . as now in Powles” (1:268); the play then proceeds to fulfill this prophecy through the construction of Gresham’s Exchange (1:288); and, as if this were not enough, the action extends still further, to encompass Gresham College as well, the “schoole / Of the seuen learned liberal sciences” that the financier founded in 1597 “neare Bishopsgate” (1:301). This civic boosterism comprises yet another variety of crowd-pleasing dramatic spectacle comparable to the hunting scenes we have already discussed, and civic landmarks seem to have been employed in this capacity by both Dekker and

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Heywood to cater to the citizens who made up the larger part of their audiences at the Fortune and Red Bull theaters. The theatrical staging of sites like the Exchange and Gresham College glorifies the transformation of natural surroundings into urban space, and thus it provides the optimistic counterpart to dramatic actions like that of A Woman Killed with Kindness, which illustrates the degradation of rural communities and the customary rituals and relationships deriving from them. Beyond this, however, Heywood excels at another sort of spectacle, too: he is perhaps the foremost practitioner of the early English pirate play, that dramatic sub-genre – exemplified not only by certain of Heywood’s works but also by Peele’s Battle of Alcazar (c. 1591), Massinger’s Renegado (1623–4), and other comparable productions – which joined “medieval vernacular narratives of chivalric quests” and “Greek romance” to popular accounts of maritime adventure centering on the exploits of pirates and privateers.50 In this respect, Heywood’s 1 and 2 Fair Maid of the West (1597–1603; c. 1630) and Fortune by Land and Sea provide a counterpart to the plays of civic celebration like 2 If You Know Not Me and The Fair Maid of the Exchange; where the latter glorify London and its citizens, the former celebrate England and Englishness more generally, depicting piracy as “the proleptic wanderings of a future imperial power.”51 Taken together, these dramatic works present the emergence of English national identity through parallel acts of environmental transformation, as the realm’s capital expands into preeminence as a European urban space, and as English adventurers trade their own landscape for more distant and exotic climes. To build cities and to engage in travel and exploration, or as Caxton puts it, “to persshe the montaignes perillo[us] / to haunt the thorny desertes”: not coincidentally, these are key features of the Saturnian Golden Age as depicted by the tradition stretching from Macrobius to Heywood, and they become the defining qualities of Heywood’s civic plays and his pirate dramas, respectively. In all these works we encounter essentially the same environmental ethic, grounded in a triumphalist narrative of progress and innovation. But the celebratory plays of national adventure also sound a series of minor notes, in tune with the decay of traditional rustic life evoked in A Woman Killed with Kindness. In 1 Fair Maid we learn, for instance, that Bess Bridges has migrated to Plymouth from Somersetshire, where her father, a “trade-falne” tanner, had “sent her [away] to service” (2:265); likewise the servant Clem tells us that his father was a baker and constable in Cornwall until he died during “the last deare yeare. For when corne grew to be at an high rate, my father never dowed after” (2:277). Similarly, in Fortune by Land and Sea, Frank

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Forrest abandons the wholesome traditional pastime of “leap[ing] in the fields” to consort with drinking companions who murder him in a tavern brawl, while his younger brother, having avenged his death, takes refuge in Anne Harding’s garden close before escaping to a life of maritime adventure; in the play’s second plot we then discover that the Forrests have forfeited their entire estate to Old Harding, a greedy villain who disowns his own eldest son, reducing him and his virtuous but poor wife to a life of abject agricultural labor. In these cases, Heywood’s adventurers are drawn to the sea not so much by hope of prosperity as by the collapse of traditional country life, as this is signified by various environmental crises: dearth and famine, enclosure and engrossment, the replacement of open-air pastimes by drinking and quarreling. These developments provide the unhappy underside, as it were, to Heywood’s fantasies of national adventure and exploit.

Conclusion

In the major surviving works of the Jacobean stage, one encounters repeated reference to ills and anxieties associated with the degradation of the natural world, especially the natural environment surrounding London itself. Among other things, one meets with allusions to the city’s overtaxed water supply; to disruptions in the food supply caused by enclosure and engrossing; to the pollution afflicting London’s rivers and sewers; to the constriction of the nation’s timber supply; to the fogs and mists resulting from urban air pollution; to runaway population growth; to the development of urban noise pollution; to the diminution of – and resulting competition for access to – public green space; to shrinkage in – and, again, resulting competition for access to – the population of England’s various game animals; and to epidemic disease deriving from the introduction of exotic bacteria into overcrowded urban environments. The major playwrights of early seventeenth-century England reference these issues repeatedly, often with great specificity, as when Middleton celebrates the completion of the New River aqueduct, or when Jonson’s Morose names the locales – Tower Wharf, Paris Garden, Billingsgate, etc. – whence emanate London’s most offensive noises, or when Dekker details the sufferings of plague-stricken Londoners sequestered from the relative health of the surrounding countryside. So there is no room for doubt that Jacobean England was experiencing major environmental change, and that Jacobean playwrights and their audiences knew it. But it does not therefore follow that these playwrights – or the audiences for whom they wrote – evince anything like a modern ecological sensibility. Quite the contrary, in fact: ecology itself only emerges as a recognizable discipline some three centuries after the reign of King James I, and in King James’s own day neither ecology nor science in its broadest sense is yet capable of providing a cohesive intellectual framework for understanding and responding to environmental change. In this sense it is misleading to describe the fenland drainage riots of the late 1620s and 1630s as “fenland environmental 166

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protests,” or to characterize the Diggers and Levellers of the Midlands Uprising as “early seventeenth-century environmental protesters,” or to claim that “the early fenland protesters fiercely argued in favor of plant and animal diversity.”1 There is without doubt an “often-ignored environmental component” to protest movements like those of the Midlands Diggers and the fenland rioters,2 but the same could be said of the enclosure riots of preceding centuries – including those associated with the Pilgrimage of Grace3 – or of the organized poaching expeditions that regularly challenged Tudor and Stuart efforts at game management. In each of these cases, environmental concerns figure within a much broader complex of religious, social, and political grievances to which the environmental issues themselves remain distinctly subordinate. To describe the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England as proto-environmentalists is to write history by synecdoche, mistaking a single – and by no means dominant – part of the protesters’ motives for the definitive whole. Modern environmentalists often seek to frame public policy in ways that protect natural resources from unrestrained human consumption, as when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its associated Kyoto Protocol seek to counter “the adverse effects of climate change” by placing a legal limit on “aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions of . . . greenhouse gases.”4 Comparable early modern initiatives are thin on the ground, and when one does encounter them – for instance in the Tudor and Stuart game laws, or the Jacobean proclamations discouraging settlement in London – one comes away with the distinct impression that these are designed less to protect natural resources than to preserve aristocratic privilege. And more often in early modern discourse, environmental problems assume an epiphenomenal status, as a secondary consequence of non-environmental matters. If the Levellers and Diggers of the mid seventeenth century “were concerned . . . principally with issues relating to rights of property,”5 that is because property rights appeared to be the actual root of agrarian abuses such as enclosure and drainage and the environmental disturbance these produced. Likewise, when Shakespeare’s Titania confronts Oberon with an eerily prescient vision of climate change, she attributes it not to environmental degradation but to marital discord: The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

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Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set . . . ... And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. (Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.107–11, 115–16)

In King Lear, Gloucester’s proposed remedy to the problem of famine is not agrarian reform but a combination of heavenly retribution and human repentance: [H]eavens, deal so still! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man . . . . . . feel your power quickly; So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. (4.1.66–7, 69–71)

And the Lady in Milton’s Maske Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634) offers essentially the same solution to essentially the same problem: If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly pamper’d Luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well dispenc’t.

(768–72)

There is a profound yet banal wisdom to these sentiments: meaningful changes in human environmental behavior must of course proceed from changes in the human heart and mind. But these pronouncements all lack the middle term of a policy formulated to make such change visible, and it is precisely here, in the business of formulating policy, that modern environmental action seeks to locate itself. Still, although the writers of the Jacobean stage can in no way be characterized as environmentalists avant la lettre, they do develop certain recurring narrative devices to make sense of the ecological changes besetting them and their culture. Mostly, these devices are of the dystopian or satirical variety: Middleton’s predatory worlds of city and court, Jonson’s urban scams cobbled together out of rubbish and hot air, Shakespeare’s scenarios of pastoral retreat, Dekker’s anxious visions of urban and exurban enclosure, Heywood’s portrait in A Woman Killed with Kindness of a society divorced from its traditional rural roots. Such work prepares the ground for a variety of later eco-dystopias, ranging from the dark Satanic mills of Blake’s London to the mean streets of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. But along with these desperate visions of a natural world turned upside down, the Jacobean playwrights also

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produced a series of encomiastic and idealized scenes of urban improvement and environmental conquest: Middleton’s celebration of the New River, Dekker’s tributes to Leadenhall and Bridewell, Heywood’s glorification of all things Gresham. In their turn, these scenes anticipate more recent discourses of social and technological progress. Together, these utopian and dystopian narrative devices comprise a firstorder reaction to the changing ecology of Jacobean England, registering that change via direct encounters with the natural world. However, one may also make the case that the Jacobean playwrights register a second order of ecological awareness in their depiction of human social behavior, which varies in response to alterations in the natural environment within which it occurs. I have made this case most forthrightly in connection with the comedies and tragicomedies of Fletcher. In these plays Fletcher explores the difficulties encountered by a particular kind of masculine sensibility – conditioned by a military ethic that presupposes close contact with the natural world through warfare, hunting, and the management of affairs in rural parishes and on landed estates – when that sensibility is relocated to an urban and courtly setting which places a premium upon the sedentary skills of compliment, sexual gallantry, and repartee. But I have also argued that other sorts of behavior – as for instance the urban confidence games so central to Middleton’s city comedies – comprise a similar kind of second-order adjustment to environmental change, and I would like to end this study with a final example of such behavior: the urban roguery known as cony-catching. The practice of cony-catching is more traditionally associated with the non-dramatic literature of the English Renaissance than with the era’s stage-plays. Deriving from early exposés of criminal life among the rural poor – e.g. Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566) – the cony-catching pamphlets first exemplified by Robert Greene’s Notable Discovery of Cozenage (1591) fashioned a new sales niche for themselves by describing a specifically urban protagonist, “the versatile London thief, a modern type, whose existence was bound up with the development of the capital.”6 However, the popularity of the cony-catching pamphlets soon led to their appropriation by the stage, where they lend their name to such figures as the “cony-catching rascals, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol” in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1597; 1.1.124–5), and where they provide only slightly less obvious source-matter for plays like Jonson’s Alchemist and Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.7 Dekker, of course, made his reputation not only as a playwright but also as Greene’s foremost follower in the writing of cony-catching pamphlets.

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From the ecocritical standpoint, the first thing to be said about this cony-catching literature is that it represents the transference of a discourse relating to rural vagabondage into a new urban environment characterized by high human population density and mobility and the concomitant erosion of traditional modes of social relation grounded in family and community ties. As Harman’s Caveat metamorphoses into Greene’s Notable Discovery, so too the masterless men of the English countryside transform into the rogues and sharp dealers of the city. The second thing to note is that this translation of rural into urban predators also entails a transformation in the nature of their prey, a transformation made manifest by the term “cony-catching” itself. As John Minsheu observes in his Ductor in Linguas (1617), “cony-catcher” is “a name giuen to deceiuers by a metaphore or borrowed speech taken from those that vse to robbe Warrens and Conie grounds, vsing all meanes, sleights, and cvnning to deceiue them, as pitching of haies before their holes, fetching them in by tumblers, and other such sleights, which they know best that vse them.”8 As metaphor, cony-catching repeats the country-to-town movement enacted by rogue literature as a genre. In the process, moreover, it embodies a changing relation to the natural world, translating rural rabbit-poachers who exploit their human neighbors only indirectly by more immediately pillaging the local game into urban con-artists who take direct advantage of the city’s human population. In this translation, the natural world itself recedes from view, just as it would for the human travelers whose movement to London made the culture of cony-catching possible in the first place. Nor do the parallels stop here. From an eco-historical standpoint, the metaphorical equation of English rabbits to London fools could hardly be more perfect, since both groups come into existence through a process of environmental disruption. This is obvious enough in the case of the fools, whose ongoing migration from country to city effectively gives birth to modern urban life in the west, but the rabbits, too, are migrants. By King James’s reign Edward Topsell seems to misrecognize them as a distinctively English species – at any rate he declares that “There are few countries wherein conies do not breed, but the most plenty of all is in England.”9 In fact, however, “[t]he animal is not indigenous to the British Isles, unlike the hare, but was deliberately introduced from France or its native western Mediterranean by the thirteenth century.”10 Moreover, rabbits at first fared poorly in the English climate and “required careful rearing and cosseting inside specially created warrens.”11 It was only with the advent of the agricultural revolution in the fifteenth century that England’s rabbit

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population established itself in substantial numbers, mainly because, by reconfiguring land use, “the agricultural revolution made it possible for the rabbit as a species to survive [in England] in a feral state.”12 So Topsell’s vision of England as a paradise of rabbits would have been something of a novelty in the early seventeenth century, and in this sense the species provides a perfect metaphorical counterpart for that other recently emerging growth phenomenon, the human population of London. But early modern slang did not equate gullible Londoners to rabbits because both groups were exotic transplants, or because both groups disrupted prior ecological relations in the places to which they migrated. The real point of comparison lay in the fact that the two groups tended to behave alike. Minsheu refers to this connection when he mentions the various subterfuges employed for the poaching of rabbits, such as “pitching of haies before their holes, fetching them in by tumblers, and other such sleights” – tricks which find their unspecified counterpart in the stratagems deployed by urban cony-catchers to ensnare their human prey. In fact, rabbits provide the operative metaphor for urban gulls because, by Queen Elizabeth’s day, rabbits had become a famously easy target for illegal activity. Whereas larger game like deer could be enclosed in parks and monitored by game wardens with relative ease, rabbits escaped any such restraint. As Roger Manning notes, “It was virtually impossible to confine rabbits to their warrens until the invention of wire fences, and, while they did not range as far as deer, they did more intensive damage” to the environment.13 Indeed, “[a]lthough a rabbit might weigh just over 2 lb., ten rabbits can eat as much as a sheep weighing 80 lb.”; they “prevented the regeneration of native hardwood trees” and “encroached upon commons and devalued use-rights”; small wonder, then, that they “were popularly regarded as vermin.”14 Hence the real connection between rabbits and dupes: both groups multiply and thrive, consuming food and space, moving beyond their original habitation into new regions, and in the process both groups become obvious features of the landscape, as it were, assuming the status of abundant, easily exploitable natural resources. It is only a further irony that neither of these resource-groups could be considered at all “natural” in the sense of being indigenous or aboriginal. In other words, the naturalization of rabbits within England’s ecology necessarily altered the quality of the English natural world and the character of human interaction with it. This alteration then established a metaphorical precedent for a second order of environmental change, as human populations began to take on certain of the prominent distinguishing features of their leporine neighbors and hence to invite similar kinds of

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exploitation. The result is an order of urban trickery that derives its logic from the country while adapting that logic to city surroundings, in the process translating ecological criminality (the poaching of wildlife) into social criminality (the fleecing of fools). The nature of this transformation is sufficiently complex to deserve its own full-length study; nor do these closing remarks offer any but the briefest overview of their subject. Still, the literature of cony-catching suggests again, as in the case of Fletcher’s clueless gallants, how changes in relation to the natural environment can influence changes in social behavior as well.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

“Environmental Degradation,” in OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms, September 25, 2001, available at: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp? ID=821. David Clark, Urban Geography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 48. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10. Clive Pointing, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (London: Vintage, 2007), 75. J. Donald Hughes, “Hunting in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” in Linda Kalof (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in Antiquity (London: Berg, 2007), 60. Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 82. Lena Cowen Orlin, “Boundary Disputes in Early Modern London,” in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 345. Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 51, Table 3.1, gives the following estimates: c. 50,000 in 1500, c. 70,000 in 1550, c. 200,000 in 1600, c. 400,000 in 1650, c. 575,000 in 1700. E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities, and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 133, offers the following figures: c. 200,000 in 1600, c. 400,000 in 1650, c. 575,000 by 1700. De Vries, European Urbanization, Appendix 1, 270, offers similar numbers: c. 40,000 in 1500; c. 80,000 in 1550; c. 200,000 in 1600, c. 400,000 in 1650; c. 475,000 in 1700. Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, “Population Growth and Suburban Expansion,” in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds.), London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986), Table 1, p. 39, revise Finlay’s earlier estimates to suggest that the population was closer to 120,000 in 1550, 375,000 in 1650, and 490,000 in 1700. David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State,” in Orlin, Material London, 22, rounds these figures 173

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9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18

19 20

Notes to pages 3–7

off as follows: “perhaps 40,000–50,000 in 1500, 200,000 in 1600, and 500,000–575,000 in 1700.” “Historical Overview of London Population,” in London Online, available at: www.londononline.co.uk/factfile/historical/. Peter Blayney, “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (Spring, 2005), 43. Italicized in original. Sacks, “London’s Dominion,” 22. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (University of Chicago Press), 1995), 75. For the original sources of the arguments in question, see Jeff Goodell, “The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock,” Rolling Stone, October 17, 2007, available at: www.bibliotecapleyades. net/gaia/esp_gaia22.htm, and Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 140–1. John Schofield, “The Topography and Buildings of London, ca. 1600,” in Orlin, Material London, 300–1. John Stow, A Survey of London by John Stow, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1:18; Schofield, “The Topography and Buildings of London,” 303. Wrigley, People, Cities, and Wealth, 134. Wrigley focuses particularly upon the century from 1650 to 1750. However, Finlay’s research into select parish registers from 1580 to 1650 confirms this observation for the earlier period as well: “In no parish did baptisms exceed burials to any extent, yet in the poorer parishes the death rate was considerably greater than the birth rate” (Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 60). More generally, Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 168, note that “London baptism frequencies began at . . . 2.8 per cent of the national totals in the period 1550–74” and rose to “12.3 per cent in 1700–24,” whereas burial rates started at “5.1 per cent in 1550–74” and grew to “17.2 per cent in the period 1725–49.” Wrigley, People, Cities, and Wealth, 135. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 55; Wrigley, People, Cities, and Wealth, 135. Finlay’s study of individual London parishes concludes that “the expectation of life at birth was between 30 and 35 years in the wealthier central parishes and about 20 to 25 years in the poorer areas” ((Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 100). Beier and Finlay, London 1500–1700, 44, estimate that “whereas in 1560 the city . . . contained three-quarters of the population of the metropolis and the suburbs a quarter, by 1680 the situation was reversed with only a quarter of Londoners inhabiting the City and three-quarters in the suburbs . . . The suburbs were growing most rapidly between 1560 and 1640.” Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 21, 31. Schofield, “The Topography and Buildings of London,” 296–321, 298.

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21 Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in H. P. R. Finberg and Joan Thirsk (eds.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 9 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4:49. 22 Sacks, “London’s Dominion,” 23. 23 Thirsk, “Farming Regions,” 4:3, 4:31, 4:95, 4:107. 24 See Charles Reid, Jr., “The Seventeenth-Century Revolution in the English Land Law,” Cleveland State Law Review 221 (1995), 11–12. 25 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 22–3. 26 See William C. Carroll, “‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 34–47. 27 J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, n.s. 36.4 (November, 1983), 494. 28 Ibid., 495. 29 William Camden, Britannia, trans. Richard Gough, 4 vols. (1806; facs. Amsterdam, 1974), 2:265. 30 Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beasts (1607; facs. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1973), 625. 31 Thirsk, “Farming Regions,” 4:10, 4:12, 4:31, 4:59, 4:107. 32 Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 19, 25; Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 9; Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 216. 33 Stefano Perfetti, “Philosophers and Animals in the Renaissance,” in Bruce Boehrer (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 147; Philippe Glardon, “The Relationship Between Text and Illustration in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Natural History Treatises,” ibid., 144. 34 Stefano Perfetti, “Three Different Ways of Interpreting Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium: Pietro Pomponazzi, Niccolo Leonico Tomeo and Agostino Nifo,” in Carlos Steele, Guy Guldentops, and Pieter Beullens (eds.), Aristotle’s Animals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Leuven University Press, 1999), 310. Translation by Perfetti. 35 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Oxford University Press, 1983), 273n, 273. 36 William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. George Edelen (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994), 324. Also see John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges, trans. Abraham Fleming (London, 1576; facs. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), 23–4, 35–6.

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Notes to pages 13–15

37 James Edmund Harting, British Animals Extinct within Historic Times (London, 1880), 142–3. 38 Harrison, The Description of England, 325. 39 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 146. 40 For early modern forest and game law, see Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 57–82. 41 John Manwood, A Treatise of the Laws of the Forrest (London, 1615), 38–9. 42 See Roger Lovegrove, Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife (Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. Harting and other Victorian experts believed the bear to have gone extinct in England “probably before the tenth century.” Harting, British Animals Extinct within Historic Times, 24. 43 For these and other connections, see Christoph Daigl, “All the world is but a bear-baiting”: Das Englische Hetztheater im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte, 1997), passim; James Stokes, “Bull and Bear Baiting in Somerset: The Gentles’ Sport,” in Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken (eds.), English Parish Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 65–80; S. P. Cerasano, “The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991), 195 221; and Barbara Ravelhofer, “‘Beasts of Recreacion’: Henslowe’s White Bears,” English Literary Renaissance 32.2 (Spring, 2002), 287–323. 44 Desiderius Erasmus, Adagia 4.4.54, trans. and ed. John N. Grant and Betty I. Knott, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Beatrice Corrigan et al., 86 vols. (University of Toronto Press, 1974–2000), 36:99. 45 William Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.7.143–5, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Future references to Shakespeare’s work will be to this edition. 46 John Britton and E. W. Brayley, Memoirs of the Tower of London (London, 1830), 359. 47 Ibid., 360. 48 F. J. Fisher, “The Development of the London Food Market, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 5.2 (April, 1935), 50. 49 Ibid., 64. 50 Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford University Press, 1978), 11. 51 Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Finberg and Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4:229. 52 Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 130–1. 53 Ibid., 130–1, 135, 137. 54 Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” 4:233; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 137; Peter Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in Finberg and Thirsk, 4:631–2.

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55 Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Wages, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in Finberg and Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 5.2:1, 4. 56 Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 144. 57 Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” 4:607. 58 Thirsk, “Agricultural Policy: Public Debate and Legislation,” in Finberg and Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 5.2:374. 59 Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” ibid., 4:453; Gordon Batho, “Landlords in England,” ibid., 4:271; Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” 4:453. 60 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 66. 61 Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 144. 62 C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:47. 63 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 22.1604–7, in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1961), 4:465. 64 John Evelyn, Silva: or, a discourse of forest-trees (1662; reprinted London, 1729), 207, 251. 65 Stow, A Survey of London, 1:19. 66 Ibid., 1:20. 67 Ibid., 2:21. 68 Ibid., 1:125. 69 Ibid., 2:52. 70 Ibid., 2:71. 71 Ibid., 2:72. 72 Ibid., 2:71. 73 Ibid., 2:76–7. 74 Ibid., 2:77. 75 Ibid., 2:78. 76 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols., 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), s.v. “conservation” (n.), 2; Statutes at Large from the First Year of King Edward the Fourth To the End of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 67 vols. (London: King’s Printer, 1766–1866), 4 Henry VII c. 15; also see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 276n. 77 Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: A Study of their Effects upon London and Londoners, and the Effects of London and Londoners upon Them (1962; reprinted London: Historical Publications, 1992), 22. 78 Ibid., 22; Stow, A Survey of London, 1:14. 79 Barton, The Lost Rivers of London, 41. 80 Epigrammes, 133.61–5, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 10. Future references to Jonson’s work will be to this edition. 81 “Description of a City Shower,” 61–3, in Harold Williams (ed.), The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 1. 82 Barton, The Lost Rivers of London, 92. 83 John Evelyn, Fumifugium: or the inconvenience of the aer, and smoake of London dissipated (1661; reprinted London, 1772), 18.

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Notes to pages 20–6

84 Ibid., 20–1. 85 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 64; Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, 1:101. 86 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 64–5. 87 Ibid., 64. 88 Gabriele de’ Mussis, Historia de morbo, in Rosemary Horrox (ed. and trans.), The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994), 17. 89 John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 8. 90 See Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004), 52. For an opposing viewpoint, see Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8.9 (2002), 971–5. 91 Kelly, The Great Mortality, 18. 92 Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), 5. For the sixth-century plague epidemic and its relation to the Black Death, see ibid., 10–12. 93 Boccaccio’s young people depart Florence specifically because “in order not to fall prey . . . to what we could well avoid, it might be a good idea for all of us to leave this city, just as many others before us have done and are still doing,” The Decameron, trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: Signet, 1982), 14. 94 See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 1:278, 280–97. 95 Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, 139. 96 Ibid. 97 See Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 61, Figure 3.5. 98 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, The Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 89. 99 See, for instance, R. C. Holcomb, “Christopher Columbus and the American Origin of Syphilis,” United States Naval Medical Bulletin 32 (1934), 401–30; Y. S. Yerdal, “A Pre-Columbian Case of Congenital Syphilis from Anatolia (Nicaea, 13th Century a.d.),” International Journal of Osteoarcheology 16.1 (January February, 2006), 16–33. 100 See Kristin N. Harper et al., “On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach,” PloS Neglected Tropical Diseases 2.1 (January, 2008). Available at: www.plosntds.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371% 2Fjournal.pntd.0000148. 101 John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 22. 102 Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 72. 103 Ibid. 104 Oviedo, The Natural History of the West Indies, 89. 105 Watson, Back to Nature, 3.

Notes to pages 28–33

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1 M I D D L E T O N A N D E C O L O G I C AL C HA N G E 1 Kenneth Friedenreich, “Introduction: How to Read Middleton,” in Kenneth Friedenreich (ed.), “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980 (New York: AMS, 1983), 1–14, 1. 2 Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 17. 3 George Edward Cokayne, “Cokayne, Sir William,” in The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1949–50), 11:683. 4 The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, 107–9, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds.), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Further references will be to this edition. 5 Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 182. 6 Ceri Sullivan, “Thomas Middleton’s View of Public Utility,” Review of English Studies n.s. 58 (April, 2007), 165. 7 Jonathan Gil Harris, “This Is Not a Pipe: Water Supply, Incontinent Sources, and the Leaky Body Politic,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 204. 8 Anthony Parr, Introduction to Honourable Entertainments and An Invention, in Taylor and Lavagnino, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, 1431. 9 Robert Ward, London’s New River (London: Historical Publications, 2003), 23. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 Ibid., 35–46. 12 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 40. 13 Sullivan, “Thomas Middleton’s View of Public Utility,” 167–8. 14 Alan Dessen, “Mist and Fog on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage,” in Virginia Mason Vaughan (ed.), Speaking Pictures: The Visual/Verbal Nexus of Dramatic Performance (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 108. 15 Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 123. 16 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 59. 17 Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 64; for a more detailed discussion relative to the Parisian experience, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 89–110. 18 Mark S. R. Jenner, “Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture,” in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2000), 131.

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Notes to pages 33–9

19 See Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77, n. 20. 20 Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58.4 (Winter, 2007), 465. 21 Dessen, “Mist and Fog on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage,” 107. 22 Ibid., 108. 23 Writers in the Book of Secrets tradition compiled numerous recipes for different kinds of fire, virtually all of which are compounded from gunpowder and additives. However, recipes for mist, fog, or smoke are harder to come by and not always designed for ceremonial purposes. Giambattista Porta in Natural Magick (London, 1669), for instance, offers a formula for a blinding smoke concocted from “Powder of Euphorbium, Pepper, quick Lime, Vineashes, and Arsinick sublimate” for use as an early form of chemical warfare (302). Elsewhere, Porta gives directions for a gunpowder-based fire that burns on water “and is obscured with a black smoak, that you will think you see the sulphureous waters at Puteoli burning there” (295). As Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), 107, note, “fireworks and gunpowder are frequently used for special fire effects” in late medieval religious drama. 24 For “the predatory relation of the city to the countryside” in Middleton, see Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 150–77. Paster sees this relation as also typical of Jonson’s plays, and she does not investigate its specifically ecological dimension. For a complementary description of Middleton’s London as “a profoundly bankrupt society” (76) whose members “support themselves in [the city] on the rent that they extract from their tenants” (102), see Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean City Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 76–80, 99–110, and passim. 25 Lawrence Stone distinguishes between early modern English aristocrats of “a ‘court’ or a ‘country’ group,” the former allied with “the royal officials, some lawyers, the higher clergy, the customs farmers, and the monopoly merchants of the capital,” the latter “resid[ing] on their country estates.” Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 61–2. Middleton’s aristocratic characters largely reproduce this division and its instabilities. For Stone’s account of “the migration to London of everincreasing numbers of nobility and gentry” (386), see 385–403. For James I’s (and later Charles I’s) efforts to discourage or at least control this migration, see ibid., 397–8, and Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 68–76. 26 For the relation between Middleton’s moderate Puritan beliefs and his literary temperament, see Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 48–62, 73–87.

Notes to pages 39–41

181

27 For the relation between spiritual and bodily pollution in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956), passim. For pollution as metaphor and symbol in the early modern English drama, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), passim, esp. 79–106; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 113–62; Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 8–23, 147–75; Bruce Boehrer, “The Privy and its Double: Scatology and Satire in Shakespeare’s Theatre,” in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. iv: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 69–88 and passim. For a non-dramatic parallel, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–73, 139–46. 28 For a foundational treatment of this juxtaposition in American literature, and feminist writing more generally, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), passim; Annette Kolodny, “Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction,” in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 170–81 and passim. For this same association in early modern English writing, see Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42 and passim, together with the broad body of scholarship deriving from Stallybrass, examples of which include Cristina Malcolmson, “The Garden Enclosed / The Woman Enclosed,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 251–69, and Lynne Greenberg, “Paradise Enclosed and the Feme Covert,” in Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Milton and the Grounds of Contention (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 150–73. 29 For the role of the monkey in this and related passages, see Gary Taylor, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (London: Routledge, 2002), 228, 297. 30 For a detailed discussion of the language of pollution in this passage, see Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 88–9. 31 See ibid., 64–112; Harris, Foreign Bodies, passim, and Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), passim; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, 40–73; Stephanie Moss and Kaara

182

32 33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40

Notes to pages 41–52 L. Peterson (eds.), Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), passim. Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 48, 56. For Chaste Maid ’s depiction – especially through Touchwood Senior – of changing European attitudes toward male fertility, see Taylor, Castration, 104ff. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25. For the relation of the cony-catching pamphlets to Middleton’s work, and city comedy more generally, see Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston, and Middleton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 208–17. For broader applications of animal imagery to the play, see Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, 102–3. Gary Taylor, “Our Other Shakespeare,” paper presented to the Faculty Research Seminar of the Florida State University Department of English, April 11, 2007. Gary Taylor, “Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives,” in Taylor and Lavagnino, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, 39. Ibid. See, e.g., Stow, A Survey of London, 1:104, 1:166, 2:77. 2 J O N S O N A N D T H E U N I V E R S E O F T HI N G S

1 For the principle of laudando praecipere, especially as reflected in Jonson’s work, see Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 83; David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 146–7. 2 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 50. 3 Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 388. 4 Martin Butler, “Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 22.3 (1992), 375. 5 Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 59. 6 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 54, 55. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 397–8. 9 The King’s Maiesties Declaration to His Subjects, concerning lawfull Sports to be used (London, 1618), 6–7. 10 For the circumstances leading to the creation of the Book of Sports, see Gregory M. Colón-Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Dover: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 93–6. 11 Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols. in 1 (London, 1691–2), 2:614. Also see F. A. Hyett, “Annalia Dubrensia,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucester Archaeological Society 13 (1888–9), 103–17.

Notes to pages 52–7

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12 William Somervile, Hobbinol, or the Rural Games (London, 1740), title page. 13 Shackerley Marmion, “To Mr. Robert Dover, upon his Annuall sports at Cotswold,” in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), Annalia Dubrensia, or Celebration of Captain Robert Dover’s Cotswold Games (Manchester, 1877), 62. 14 John Stratford, “To My Kind Cosen, and Noble Friend, Mr. Robert Dover, on his sports upon Cotswold,” ibid., 43. 15 Marcus, The Politics of Mirth, 106. 16 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 18. 17 For King James and the reasoning abilities of dogs, see Thomas Ball, The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston (London, 1885), 20–6. For commentary upon the incident in question, see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 101–3. 18 Horatio F. Brown and Allen B. Hinds (eds.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 37 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1900–16), 10:70, no. 101, dated July 30, 1603. 19 Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Masques and Triumphs,” in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Odyssey, 1965), 145. 20 Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 203. 21 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (London, 1680), 79. 22 Quoted in Robert Ashton (ed.), James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 250. 23 Ferry, The New Ecological Order, xxii. 24 For the dating of Pan’s Anniversary, see Butler, “Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary,” esp. 388, 397–404. 25 Ibid., 382. 26 Jeffrey S. Theis, Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 15. 27 See Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 156–78. 28 Paster, Idea of the City, 150–1; Leinwand, The City Staged, 44. 29 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton University Press, 1986), 5, 3, 5. 30 Kathryn A. McEuen, “Jonson and Juvenal,” Review of English Studies, o.s. 21 (1945), 92. 31 For representative estimates, see Pierre Salmon, Population et dépopulation dans l’Empire romain (Brussels: Latomus, 1974), 11–12; for a more recent estimate see Glenn R. Storey, “The Population of Ancient Rome,” Antiquity 71.274 (December, 1997), 966–78. 32 Josiah Cox Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985), 9. 33 Paul Millett, “Productive to Some Purpose? The Problem of Ancient Economic Growth,” in David J. Mattingly and John Salmon (eds.), Economies Beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London: Routledge, 2001), 28.

184

Notes to pages 58–68

34 Epigram 12.57.3–15, 26–7, in Martial, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 35 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1996), 34. 36 See, for instance, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Douglas Bruster, Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 37 Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 109. 38 Juvenal 3.231–9, in Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 39 Ibid., 3.245–6. 40 For an on-line text of the acts in question, see respectively: www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/1974/40/enacted; www.epa.gov/air/noise/noise_control_act_of_1972. pdf. 41 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Noise Pollution,” available at: www.epa.gov/air/noise.html#role. 42 See for instance Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 39–40; Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 154–6. 43 Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson: His Vision and his Art (London: Methuen, 1981), 226. 44 Adam Zucker, “‘Of Nothing Commeth Nothing’: Chance and Economic Fantasy from Boethius to Bourdieu,” paper presented to the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, December 1–4, 2005, San Antonio, Texas. Also see this paper’s expansion as the final chapter of Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 45 Arthur Marotti, “All about Jonson’s Poetry,” English Literary History 39 (1972), 210, 209. 46 Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 47 Riggs, Ben Jonson, 10. Also see Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2011), 66–7. 48 Riggs, Ben Jonson, 13. 49 See Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 86, n. 24. 50 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 30–1. 51 Ibid., 31. 52 Ibid., 306. 53 Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 21. 54 Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses, 70–1.

Notes to pages 68–78

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55 Ibid., 62. See also Riggs, Ben Jonson, 191–2. 56 Richard Helgerson, “Ben Jonson,” in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152. 57 See John Summerson, Inigo Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 83–5. 3 S H A K E S P E A R E’ S D IRT 1 Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2009), 24. Also see John D. Cox, “Local References in 3 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (Fall, 2000), 340–52. 2 Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 77. 3 Cox, “Local References,” 341. 4 C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton University Press, 1959), 7, 8. 5 Ibid., 257. 6 For the elision, see Juliet Dusinberre (ed.), “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, As You Like It (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 48, 1.1.109 n., 5.1.23 n. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 George Bernard Shaw, “Shaw on Shakespear,” in Edward Tomarken (ed.), “As You Like It” from 1600 to the Present: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1997), 529–38; 532. 9 Frances Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second part of Wits Common wealth (London, 1598), 282. 10 Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 261. 11 Desiderius Erasmus, Adagia 1.1.70, in Collected Works, 31.115. For the original phrase, see Plautus, Asinaria 495, in Plautus, trans. Paul Nixon, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). 12 Erasmus, Adagia 2.4.54, 2.6.46, in Collected Works, 33.218, 314. 13 Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1534), sig. A8r, available at: www. emblems.srts.gla.ac.uk. 14 Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 16.19. 15 Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 132. 16 Michel de Montaigne, Essays written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1613), 104. 17 George Orwell, Essays, ed. John Carey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 842. 18 Gabriel Egan, “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being,” in Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (eds.), Ecocritical Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), ms. p. 106. 19 Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 50. 20 Bate, Soul of the Age, 47.

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Notes to pages 78–84

21 Watson, Back to Nature, 105, 52. 22 For the long-recognized similarity to Jonson, see, for example, M. C. Bradbrook, “Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure,” Review of English Studies 17.68 (October, 1941), 399. For the connection to Middleton, see, for instance, Ivo Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix and Measure for Measure,” Studies in Philology 92.2 (Spring, 1994), 248–73. In the latter case matters are complicated by the argument that the surviving text of Measure for Measure represents an adaptation of the Shakespearean original by Middleton, for which argument see John Jowett, “Varieties of Collaboration in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays and Late Plays,” in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. iv: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 124–6. 23 See, for instance, Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 222–39; A. Stuart Daley, “Where Are the Woods in As You Like It?,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34.2 (Summer, 1983), 172–80; Richard Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43.1 (Spring, 1992), 1–19; Theis, Writing the Forest, 35–89. 24 Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’,” 17. 25 Ibid., 13–14. 26 James R. Siemon, “Landlord not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 20. 27 Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 13.18–23. 28 For a detailed history of the forest during these years, see Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1674 (Cambridge University Press, 1978). 29 See, for instance, Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Finberg and Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4:229. 30 Andrew Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), 67. 31 See E. C. Pettet, “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950), 34–42; Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” 63; Arthur Riss, “Coriolanus and the Belly Politic,” ELH 59.1 (Spring, 1992), 54–60. 32 R. L. Greenall, A History of Northamptonshire (London: Phillimore, 1979), 48. 33 Ibid. 34 Quoted in Edgar I. Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1938), 2:706. 35 “The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers,” B.M. Ms. Harl. 787, art. 11, in James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, an Ancient Interlude, to which are added Illustrations of Shakespeare and the Early English Drama (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), 141. 36 Ibid. 37 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 148, 150.

Notes to pages 84–93

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38 Ibid., 152, 151. 39 Leeds Barroll, “Antony and Pleasure,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57.4 (October, 1958), 708. 40 For a discussion of food in Hamlet, see Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 21–7. 41 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 173–4. 42 See Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 84–7; also E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2:95–101. 43 See John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 2:49. 44 Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 14. 45 See B. R. Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2 vols. (Stanford University Press, 1941), 1:237–9, docs. 111–12. 46 Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 90. 47 Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 14. 48 Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 91. 49 Ibid., 92; Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives 15. 50 Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 91. 51 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 1:285. Also see 1:280–6 (doc. 139) more generally. 52 Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 14. 53 See Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:368–72 (doc. 179). 54 S. C. Walker, “Report on the Weights and Measures of Great Britain,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 17 (1834), 95. 55 Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 91. 56 Relayed to me in personal correspondence dated October 17, 2010. With modern equipment and brewing methods, the same quantity of malt would produce 3,600 gallons of ale. I am grateful to Peter Edwards and Ken Don for their help with this matter. 57 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:375. See also 2:329–36 (doc. 162) and 2:372–85 (docs. 181–2) for the documents in question. 58 Ibid., 2:382. 59 Bate, Soul of the Age, 50. 60 Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood’,” 18. 61 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 1:227 (doc. 107). 62 John Aubrey, Aubrey’s “Brief Lives,” ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 2:226. 63 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:459 (doc. 236). 64 Ibid.; also C. M. Ingleby (ed.), Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe (Birmingham, 1885), 1. See also Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:141–52.

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Notes to pages 93–100

65 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:463 (doc. 236); Ingleby, Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields, 11. 66 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), 11. 67 Ibid., 11. 68 Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 138. 69 Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:458–9 (doc. 236); Ingleby, Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields, 1. 70 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 383; for the agreement in question, see Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:462 (doc. 236) and 2:451–3 (doc. 234). Also see Ingleby, Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields, 7 and 15, Appendix 1. 71 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 383. 4 J OH N F L E T C H E R A N D T H E E C O L O G Y O F M AN HO O D 1 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 136. 2 Lawrence B. Wallis, Fletcher, Beaumont and Company: Entertainers to the Jacobean Gentry (New York: Octagon, 1968), 13. 3 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647), title page. 4 William Shakespeare, M. William Shak-speare: His True chronicle historie of the life and death of King Lear (London, 1608), title page. 5 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 80. 6 John Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy in The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 19 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–79), 17:56. Dryden’s remark applies to both Beaumont and Fletcher, but this fact in no way prevents its application to a solo discussion of Fletcher. 7 See Cyrus Hoy, “The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (III),” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958), 94, which attributes to Fletcher only four of the play’s eleven scenes: 2.2, 4.1, 5.1, and 5.2. 8 John Fletcher, The Tragedy of Valentinian 3.1.305–6, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1966–96). Further references to Fletcher’s work will be to this edition. 9 Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain: from the Birth of Jesus Christ Untill the Year M. DC. XLVIII (London, 1655), 16.9.233, sig. 3F3r. 10 For the New River project, see Wit Without Money 4.5.60–2. For Fletcher and the Midlands Uprising, see Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 37–84. 11 Karen B. Strier, “Primate Behavioral Ecology: From Ethnography to Ethology and Back,” American Anthropologist 105.1 (2003), 16. 12 Hilary O. Box, Primate Behaviour and Social Ecology (London: Chapman and Hall), 226. 13 Denis Réale et al., “Evolutionary and Ecological Approaches to the Study of Personality,” Transactions of the Royal Society B 365 (December, 2010), 3937, 3943.

Notes to pages 100–11

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14 E. A. Smith, “Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior,” in Lee Cronk, Napoleon Chagnon, and William Irons (eds.), Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 30. 15 Hubert Zapf, “Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts,” New Literary History 39.4 (Autumn, 2008), 851, 852. 16 Strier, “Primate Behavioral Ecology,” 19. 17 See Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 135–42, esp. 137, where Strong supplies a restored transcript of the sonnet in question. The final word of the line is my own conjectural addition, based upon the meter and surviving rhyme-words of the opening quatrain. 18 Williams, The Country and the City, 21. 19 See Introduction, n. 25. 20 Cyril Hart, The Industrial History of Dean (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971), 10. 21 Ibid., 16. 22 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 387, 397. 23 Ibid., 397. 24 Harrison, The Description of England, 95–6. 25 Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1588), sig. Dv D1r. 26 Gervase Markham, Country Contentments (1615; facs. Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1973), 3. 27 Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 28 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 617. 29 Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”, Feminist Studies 1.2 (Autumn, 1972), 11–12. For examples of Renaissance scholarship in this vein, see Introduction, n. 28. 30 Merchant, The Death of Nature, xvi. 31 Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”, 5. 32 Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (Summer, 1996), 111. 33 Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123. 34 Mary Ellen Lamb, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (London: Routledge, 2006), 140. 35 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 167. 36 See, for instance, Orie Latham Hatcher, John Fletcher: A Study in Dramatic Method (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1905), 35–6. 37 Philip J. Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton University Press, 1990), 251. 38 Celia R. Daileader and Gary Taylor, “Introduction,” in John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman’s Prize, ed. Celia R. Daileader and Gary Taylor (Manchester University Press, 2006), 13, 1.

190

Notes to pages 111–20

39 Baldwin Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed,” Modern Philology 32.4 (May, 1935), 358. 40 Ibid., 357. 41 Daileader and Taylor, “Introduction,” 16. 42 Emily Detmer, “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.3 (Fall, 1997), 284. 43 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 124. 44 Ibid., 124, 125. 45 Molly Easo Smith, “John Fletcher’s Response to the Gender Debate: The Woman’s Prize and The Taming of the Shrew,” Papers on Language and Literature 31.1 (Winter, 1995), 38–60. 46 See Chapter 3, pp. 000 00. 47 Daileader and Taylor, “Introduction,” 8. 48 See McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 37–55. 49 Ibid., 55; also 55–70 more generally. 50 Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics, 114. 51 James J. Yoch, “The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance: The Italian Revival of Tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess,” in Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: AMS, 1987), 132, 127. 52 Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 124. 53 Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. M3v M4r. 54 Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels, 132; Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics, 111; Charles L. Squier, John Fletcher (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 24. 55 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 58. 56 For this phrase and its applications, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 13–29. 57 Quoted in Charles Mills Gayley, Beaumont the Dramatist: A Portrait (1914; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 68. 5 D E K K E R ’ S W AL K S A N D O RC H AR D S 1 Dekker refers to his London birth and upbringing on various occasions, as in A Rod for Run-awayes (1625), where he addresses the city as “Mother of my Life, Nurse of my being,” in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 5 vols. (London, 1884–6), 4:285. Reference to Dekker’s non-dramatic works will be to this edition unless otherwise noted. 2 For Dekker’s sympathy for immigrants, see Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1990), 19; M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 122–3. For his use of northern European folklore, see George R. Price, Thomas Dekker (New York: Twayne, 1969), 21; Mary Leland Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 33–4. For his probable ties to the Low Countries, see Marie-

Notes to pages 120–31

3

4 5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

191

Thérèse Jones-Davies, Un peintre de la vie Londonienne: Thomas Dekker, 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1958), 1:29–30. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and the Other Players in his Story (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 110. Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove, 123. If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It, 2.2.4–7, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1953–61). Further references to Dekker’s plays and entertainments are to this edition. Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (London: Macmillan, 1994), 174. Vanessa Harding, “City, Capital, and Metropolis: The Changing Shape of Seventeenth-Century London,” in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (University of Toronto Press, 1972), 124. Ibid., 118. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, quoted in Lawrence Manley (ed.), London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 43. Peter Borsay, “Early Modern Urban Landscapes, 1540–1800,” in Philip Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2000), 109. Stow, A Survey of London, 2:72. Ibid., 1:83, 2:72. Ibid., 2:78. John Stow, Anthony Munday, et al., The survey of London: containing the original, increase, modern estate and government of that city, methodically set down (London, 1633), 462. William Fisher, The Forest of Essex: Its History, Laws, Administration, and Ancient Customs, and the Wild Deer which Lived in it (London: Butterworths, 1887), 319. Ibid., 287. Stephen Orgel, “Sidney’s Experiment in Pastoral: The Lady of May,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 26.1/2 (1963), 198. M. J. Power, “East London Housing in the Seventeenth Century,” in Clark and Slack, Crisis and Order in English Towns, 242, 244, 247. Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove, 27. Ibid., 28. Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories,” 127. Stow, Munday, et al., The survey of London, 462. Ibid., 462. Ibid., 464. Brian Murphy, A History of the British Economy 1086–1970 (London: Longman, 1973), 160. Stow, A Survey of London, 2:77.

192

Notes to pages 132–42

27 Ibid., 1:127. 28 Laura Williams, “‘To recreate and refresh their dulled spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre’: Green Space and the Growth of the City,” in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early-modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192. 29 Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 64. 30 See Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 370–1. 31 See Teresa Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” in Boehrer, A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, 106. 32 See Taylor and Lavagnino, Companion, 352–3. 33 Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 86. 34 Ibid., 104. 35 See W. L. Halstead, “Dekker’s Arrest for Debt by the Chamberlain’s Men,” Notes and Queries 176 (1939), 41–2. 36 See Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to “The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker,” ed. Fredson Bowers, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2:84–6, n. 1.3.3 and nn. 1.3.21–2. 37 “Leadenhall Market: History,” available at: www.leadenhallmarket.co.uk/history.php. 38 See Stow, A Survey of London, 2:44–5. 39 Thomas Dekker, The Artillery Garden, facs. ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1952), sig. A2r. Further references are to this edition. 40 Stow, A Survey of London, 1:166. 41 See “HAC History,” available at: www.hac.org.uk/html/about-the-hac/hachistory/. 42 Stow, A Survey of London, 2:78 (quoted above, n. 13), 1:165–6. 6 HE YW OO D A ND T HE S P EC T A C LE O F TH E H U N T 1 Barbara J. Baines, Thomas Heywood (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 156. A similar association underlies McLuskie’s study of the two playwrights in Dekker and Heywood, and the chapter on Dekker and Heywood in Bradbrook, Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 119–37. 2 A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (1931; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 1–5. 3 Otelia Cromwell, Thomas Heywood: A Study in the Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1928), 24. Richard Rowland’s Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) provides a notable recent exception to this rule. 4 Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124.

Notes to pages 142–52

193

5 Thomas Heywood, Preface to The English Traveller, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. John Pearson, 6 vols. (1874; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 4:5. Further references to Heywood’s dramatic work will be to this edition. Since the edition has no lineation and inconsistent act and scene divisions, references will be by volume and page number. 6 Mowbray Velte, The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (New York: Haskell House, 1966), 33; McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood, 46. 7 Baines, Thomas Heywood, 104. 8 See, for instance, Castiglione, The Courtier, Dv D1r, and Markham, Country Contentments, 3, as cited above, Chapter 4 nn. 25, 26. For further discussion see Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 4–7; Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt, 23–4; Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 130–5. 9 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 33. 10 George Gascoigne, The noble art of venerie or hunting (London, 1611), 109, 110. 11 Ibid., 110. 12 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 198. 13 See Fuller, The Church-History of Britain, 17.10.87, sig. 4L4r. 14 Charles Bergman, “A Spectacle of Beasts: Hunting Rituals and Animal Rights in Early Modern England,” in Boehrer, A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, 68–9. 15 Manwood, A Treatise, 38. For the legal category of “beasts of the forest” – specifically the hart, hind, hare, boar, and wolf – see Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 38–40. For the British extinction of bears and wolves, see Introduction, nn. 35, 36, and 37. The wild boar was still alive (and hunted) in England in King James’s time, albeit in very small numbers, and it seems to have gone extinct in the realm by the reign of King Charles II. See Harting, British Animals Extinct within Historic Times, 100–3. For the beaver, see ibid., 34–42. 16 Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt, 15. 17 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 59. 18 Manwood, A Treatise, 121. 19 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 59. 20 Archbishop Hutton to Sir Robert Cecil, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Laing manuscripts I.99–100, quoted ibid., 202. 21 Sir John Harington to Mr. Secretary Barlow, in Thomas Park, ed., Nugae Antiquae, 2 vols. (London, 1804), 1:352. 22 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Appearances of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London, 1823), 2:275. 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.94–5, 109–10, 133–6, 138–40, in Ovid III: Metamorphoses, Books I VIII, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). My translation. 24 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London, 1609), 1.6.7–8, 7.1–2, 8.5–6, 9.1–4. 25 William Caxton, The recuyell of the historyes of Troye (Bruges, 1474), [15–16]. 26 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium (Basel, 1532), 199–200. My translation.

194

Notes to pages 153–64

27 Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.7.19–26, in Macrobius I, ed. and trans. Robert A. Kaster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 72–7. 28 Whitney J. Oates, “The Population of Rome,” Classical Philology 29.2 (April, 1934), 116. 29 See Guido delle Colonne, Historia Destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974) 10.155–60. The Ovide moralisé (1300–50) follows this tradition as well. See Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. Cornelis de Boer (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1915), 1.513–15. The association of Saturn and Jupiter with Crete may be traced to Book 2 of Virgil’s Georgics. 30 Raoul Lefèvre, Le Recoeil des Histoires de Troye, ed. Marc Aeschenbach (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987), 131. My translation. 31 Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 149. 32 Ibid., 150. 33 The best-known classical account of the Calydonian boar hunt occurs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8.260ff.; for Ovid’s version of the tale of Venus and Adonis, see Metamorphoses, 10.503ff. 34 Allan Holaday, “Heywood’s ‘Troia Britannica’ and the ‘Ages’,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 45.4 (October, 1946), 433. 35 Colón-Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature, 60. 36 A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; reprinted New York: Octagon, 1965), 10, 14. 37 Ibid., 192. 38 King James I, Basilikon Doron (London, 1603), 122. 39 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 201–2. 40 Nichols, Progresses and Public Appearances of Queen Elizabeth, 1:17. 41 Robert Laneham, A letter whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl in Warwik sheer in this soomerz progress 1575 is signified (London, 1575), 17. 42 A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander Kt. of Nunwell, ed. Francis Bamford (1936; reprinted New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 196. 43 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 16. 44 Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature, 80. 45 Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 118. 46 Ibid., 117. 47 Marcy Norton, “Going to the Birds: Birds as Things and Beings in Early Modernity,” in Paula Findlen (ed.), Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2013), ms pp. 4–5. 48 Martin Wiggins, “Introduction,” in Martin Wiggins (ed.), A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays (Oxford University Press, 2008), xiii; Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 109. 49 See John Norden, Speculum Britanniae (London, 1593), 37. 50 Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 111.

Notes to pages 164–71

195

51 Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation,” ELH 67.1 (Spring, 2000), 45. CONCLUSION 1 See Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?, 153, 126, 144; also see Ken Hiltner, “Early Modern Ecology,” in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 2:565–7. 2 Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? 126. 3 As Christopher Haigh has noted of the Pilgrimage of Grace, “Certainly the King’s instructions to the Earls of Sussex and Derby, after the rebellion, imply that agrarian grievances were thought to be one of the causes of the rising.” The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Manchester University Press, 1969), 50. 4 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (United Nations, 1998), 2.3, 3.1. Available at: http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/ convkp/kpeng.pdf. 5 Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?, 127. 6 Harold V. Routh, “Robert Greene’s Social Pamphlets,” in A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (eds.), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 18 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1907–21), 4:243. 7 See, for instance, Jonathan Haynes, “Representing the Underworld: The Alchemist,” Studies in Philology 86.1 (Winter, 1989), 18–41; Jonathan Baldo, “The Greening of Will Shakespeare,” Borrowers and Lenders 3.2 (Spring/ Summer 2008). Available at: hwww.borrowers.uga.edu. 8 John Minsheu, Hegemon eis tas glossas, id est, Ductor in linguas, The guide into tongues (London, 1617), 90. 9 Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beasts, 110. 10 Mark Bailey, “The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy,” Agricultural History Review 36.1 (1988), 1. 11 Ibid., 1–2. 12 John Sheail, “Rabbits and Agriculture in Post-medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography 4 (1978), 355. 13 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 153. 14 Ibid., 128–9, 129, 131, 128.

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Index

Abbott, George, Archbishop of Canterbury, 147 Agrarian History of England and Wales, 8 air pollution, 16, 20 Albertus Magnus, 11 Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, 147 Alciato, Andrea, 74 Emblematum libellus, 74 Alleyn, Edward, 14 animal species in England bears, 13–14 deer, 147–8 rabbits, 170–2 wolves, 12–13 Annalia Dubrensia, 52 Appleby, Andrew B., 15 Aristophanes, 72, 112 Lysistrata, 112 Aristotle, 11 Aubrey, John, 92

Caius, John, 13 Of Englishe Dogges, 13 Camden, William, 10, 66 Cartesianism, 11 Castiglione, Baldassare, 103 The Courtier, 103 Cavell, Stanley, 84 Caxton, William, 150, 154, 156, 164 Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 150–1, 154 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury, 83 Chakravorty, Swapan, 28 Charing, 7 Charing Cross, 66 Charles I, King of England, 52, 101, 126, 131, 149 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, 50 Children of the Queen’s Revels, 117 Cokayne, Sir William, 28–9 Colonne, Guido delle, 154 Historia Destructionis Troiae, 154 Colthurst, Edmund, 30 Columbus, Christopher, 24 Combe, William, High Sheriff of Warwickshire, 83 Conington, 66 conservation of nature, 19 cony-catching literature, 42, 169–72 Cotswold Games, 52 Cotton, Sir Robert, 66 Covent Garden, 4, 70

Bacon, Sir Francis, 12 Baconian science, 11–12, 50 Barber, C. L., 72–3 Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 72 Barroll, Leeds, 84 Barton, Nicholas, 19 Bate, Jonathan, 71 Beaumont, Francis, 96, 98 behavioral ecology, 99–100 Berry, Edward, 53 Blackfriars Theater, 47, 68, 117 Blayney, Peter, 3 Boas, George, 158 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 23, 151, 153–4 Decameron, 23, 41 Genealogia deorum, 151–2 Bridewell workhouse, 4 Broughton, Hugh, 77 bubonic plague, 22–4 Butler, Martin, 55 Butter, Nathaniel, 77

deforestation, 16–18, 101 De’ Mussis, Gabriele, 22 Dekker, Thomas, 5, 26, 120–90 and Thomas Middleton, 120 living circumstances, 134 masques and entertainments Magnificent Entertainment, 121–2, 125 non-dramatic works Artillery Garden, 139–40 Dekker His Dreame, 134–5 Rod for Run-awayes, 135–6

211

212

Index

Dekker, Thomas (cont.) Wonderfull Yeare, 136–7 plays 1 Honest Whore, 120, 130–3, 138, 163 2 Honest Whore, 129–30, 137, 139, 163 If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is In It, 120–1 Match Me In London, 129–30 Roaring Girl, 119, 120, 132–3 Shoemakers’ Holiday, 123–5, 130, 132, 138, 149, 163 Wonder of a Kingdom, 130 Descartes, René, 12 Dessen, Alan, 32–3 “Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers,” 83 Ditchley Portrait, 100 Donaldson, Ian, 68 Dover, Robert, 52 Drayton, Michael, 17, 81 Poly-Olbion, 17, 81 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 87 Dryden, John, 98 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 126 Eccles, Mark, 88–9 Edward I, King of England, 13 Edward VI, King of England, 126, 139 Egan, Gabriel, 67, 77 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 98, 100, 126, 147, 171 and the hunt, 161 Ditchley Portrait, 100 enclosure, 8–10, 81 and food supplies, 15 around Stratford-upon-Avon, 92–4 of London suburbs, 123–5, 131–2 environmental degradation and English colonialism, 11, 17 defined, 1 in ancient Greece, 2 in ancient Rome, 2 in fifteenth-century Portugal, 3 Epping Forest, 126 Erasmus, Desiderius, 14, 74 Adages, 74 Evelyn, John, 17, 20 Fumifugium, 20, 39 Silva, 17, 20 extinction of species bears, 14 wolves, 13 famine, 15, 23–4 Filmer, Robert, 53

Fletcher, Giles, the Elder, 115, 119 Fletcher, John, 5, 26, 96–119 Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 97, 135 birth and upbringing, 97–8, 119 plays Bonduca, 107 Cardenio, 96 Faithful Shepherdess, 111, 114–18 Henry VIII, 96 Humourous Lieutenant, 106–7, 109, 118 Island Princess, 107, 110 Loyal Subject, 98, 109, 117 Mad Lover, 106, 110, 118 Maid’s Tragedy, 98 Monsieur Thomas, 109 Two Noble Kinsmen, 96 Valentinian, 98, 100, 107–8 Wild-Goose Chase, 108–9, 113, 118 Wit Without Money, 103–4, 108, 110, 118 Woman’s Prize, 111–14, 117–18 Women Pleased, 109 professional affiliations, 97 quartos Philaster, 97 The Scornful Lady, 97 social status, 97–8 Fletcher, Phineas, 115 Fletcher, Richard, Bishop of London, 98, 119 food supplies in Jacobean England, 14–15 and enclosure, 162 and famine, 15, 81, 83–4 Forest of Arden, 73, 80–1 Forest of Dean, 56, 101 Fortune Theater, 164 Fracastoro, Girolamo, Syphilis, sive morbus Gallicus, 41 Galenic medicine, 32–3 Gascoigne, George, 147 Gaston Fébus, 155 Livre de chasse, 155 Gellius, Aulus, 74 Genesis, book of, 146 Gibbons, Brian, Jacobean City Comedy, 56 Globe Theater, 47 Grant, Teresa, 133 Greenblatt, Stephen, 86, 94 Greene, Robert, 42, 169 A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, 169–70 Greene, Thomas, 93 Gresham College, 163 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 4, 163, 169 Guarini, Giambattista, 115 Il pastor fido, 115 Gurr, Andrew, 82

Index

213

Hall, John, 88 Harington, Sir John, 149 Harman, Thomas, 169 A Caveat for Common Cursitors, 169–70 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 33 Harrison, Stephen, 121 Harrison, William, 13–14, 102 Hastings, Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, 114 Hawkes, Terence, 93 Hawthornden, 66, 68 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, 115 Henry III, King of England, 18 Henry VIII, King of England, 18, 101, 126, 131, 138, 147 Henslowe, Philip, 14, 134 Heywood, Thomas, 5, 26, 142–65, 168 birth and upbringing, 142 non-dramatic works Troia Britanica, 143, 150–1, 157 plays 1 Fair Maid of the West, 164 1 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, 143–4 1 Iron Age, 143 2 Fair Maid of the West, 164 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, 143, 145, 163–4 2 Iron Age, 143 Brazen Age, 143–4, 156–7 Fair Maid of the Exchange, 144, 164 Fortune by Land and Sea, 164 Golden Age, 143, 155–9 Rape of Lucrece, 143 Silver Age, 143, 156, 159 Wise Woman of Hogsdon, 144 Woman Killed with Kindness, 143, 159–64, 168 professional affiliations, 142 quartos Brazen Age, 143 Holland, Hugh, 97 Hope Theater, 14 Horace, 57 Howard, Charles, Baron of Effingham, 29 hunting and poaching, 13, 53–4, 126–9, 145–50, 154–5, 160–2, 170–1 Hutton, Matthew, Archbishop of York, 149

and the Forest of Dean, 101 and the hunt, 149, 161 Book of Sports, 51–2 environmentalist leanings, 52–4 fondness for rural pastimes, 51–4 proclamations against London expansion, 51 Jamestown, 11 Janibeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, 22 Jones, Inigo, 4, 70 Jonson, Ben, 5, 19, 23, 26–7, 49–70 birth and upbringing, 66 living circumstances, 67–8 masques and entertainments Golden Age Restored, 50–1 Hymenaei, 33 Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, 50–1 Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion, 51 News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, 51 Oberon, 50 Pan’s Anniversary, 50–1, 54–5, 65, 70, 123 Vision of Delight, 50 non-dramatic works “On the Famous Voyage,” 69 “To Penshurst,” 68 Epigrams, 19, 68 plays Alchemist, 23, 51, 56, 59–61, 64–5, 68, 77, 169 Bartholomew Fair, 54, 59, 64–5, 77 Catiline, 77 Devil is an Ass, 61, 65, 77 Epicoene, 57, 63–5, 77 Every Man Out of His Humour, 65, 97 Poetaster, 57, 61 Sad Shepherd, 33 Sejanus, 65, 77 Staple of News, 51, 61–3, 65, 77 Volpone, 59–60, 65, 68, 77 professional affiliations, 47, 49–50 Juvenal, 57, 62–3, 153

industrial growth in rural England, 10, 21

Lamb, Mary Ellen, 106 Laneham, Robert, 161 Lefèvre, Raoul, 151, 154 Recoeil des hystoires Troyennes, 151, 154–5 Leland, John, 88 Itinerary, 88 Léry, Jean de, 75

Jahangir, Sultan of the Mughal Empire, 11 James I, King of England (James VI of Scotland), 3, 6–7, 15, 18, 30, 38, 41, 115, 121, 146–8, 163, 166, 170 and hawking, 160

Kett’s Rebellion, 113 King’s Men, 47, 96. See also Lord Chamberlain’s Men Korda, Natasha, 105

214

Index

Lewalski, Barbara, 50 Lewis, B. R., 88 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 4 London aqueducts and waterways, 4, 17–18, 29–30 Fleet River, 19–20, 68–9 New River, 30–1, 33–4, 47, 49, 56, 122, 169 Saint Katherine’s Dock, 130–1 Tyburn Stream, 19 Walbrook River, 19 Bedlam Hospital, 138 city gates rebuilt, 4 coal consumption, 16–17. See also air pollution enclosure of suburbs, 123–5, 131–2 gardens, 123–4 Leadenhall Market, 138, 169 migration of landed gentry to, 123–4 population, 2–6, 8 prisons Bridewell, 137, 139, 169 King’s Bench, 134, 139 Poultry Counter, 134 Royal Exchange, 4, 163 streets, 18–19, 123–4 suburbs, 7, 18–19 Newington Butts, 48 The Bermudas, 66 Wapping, 126, 130–1 The Artillery Yard, 139 Tower of, 7 Lord Admiral’s Men, 134 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 97. See also King’s Men Louis XV, King of France, 147 Lovejoy, A. O., 158 Lovelock, James, 4 Ludgate prison, 4 Mabbe, James, 97 Macrobius, 152, 164 Saturnalia, 152–4, 158 Manning, Roger, 146, 160, 171 Manwood, John, 13, 148 A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest, 13, 148 Markham, Gervase, 103 Marmion, Shackerly, 52 Marotti, Arthur, 66 Martial, 57–9, 62, 153 Marxism, 67 Massinger, Philip, 164 The Renegado, 164 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 42, 56 Merchant, Carolyn, 16, 105 Meres, Francis, 73

Middleton, Thomas, 5, 26, 28–48 and Thomas Dekker, 120 birth and upbringing, 28 living circumstances, 47–8 masques and entertainments Honourable Entertainments, 29, 48 Manner of his Lordship’s Entertainment, 30–1, 56 Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, 28–9, 32, 50 Triumphs of Truth, 31–4, 49 plays 1 Honest Whore, 120, 133 Changeling, 38, 40–1 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 34, 40–6, 56, 65 Game at Chess, 38, 77 Mad World, My Masters, 35, 37, 41, 77 Michaelmas Term, 35–7, 39–40, 43 Revenger’s Tragedy, 36–8 Roaring Girl, 40, 119–20, 133 Trick to Catch the Old One, 37 Women, Beware Women, 38, 77 Your Five Gallants, 41 professional affiliations, 46–7, 50 Midlands Uprising of 1607, 83–4, 99, 114, 167 Mildmay, Sir Henry, 126 Milton, John, 115 A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle, 115, 168 mining and metallurgy, 16, 21, 56, 101 Minsheu, John, 170–1 Ductor in Linguas, 170 Montaigne, Michel de, 75 “Of Cannibals,” 75 More, Sir Thomas, 9, 101 Utopia, 9 Munday, Anthony, 125, 130–1 Myddelton, Sir Hugh, 30–1, 47 Myddelton, Sir Thomas, 31 Naess, Arne, 4 Norton, Marcy, 162 Norwich, 8 Oglander, Sir John, 161 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1–2 Orgel, Stephen, 31, 50 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 3 Ortner, Sherry B., 105 Osborne, Francis, 53 Osterley Manor, 163 Ovid, 150, 153–4 Metamorphoses, 150, 158 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 24–5

Index Peele, George, 164 The Battle of Alcazar, 164 Penshurst Place, 66, 68–9 Persius, 57 Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, 154 Philippe le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy, 155 Pilgrimage of Grace, 167 Plautus, 74 Pliny the Elder, 11 Plymouth Bay, 11 pollution as concept, 32 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 11 population in ancient Rome, 57, 153–4 in London, 2–8 in rural England, 8 Porta, Giambattista, 180 primatology, 99–100 Queen’s Men, 142 Red Bull Theater, 145, 164 Riggs, David, 66 Roe, Sir Thomas, 11 Rowland, Richard, 161 rubbish and sewage. See London: aqueducts and waterways, London: streets Scaramelli, Giovanni Carlo, 53 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 89 Semenza, Gregory Colón, 161 Shakespeare, Anne, 89 Shakespeare, Susanna, 88 Shakespeare, William, 5, 14, 26, 35, 71–95 agricultural investments, 90 and enclosure, 92–4 birth and upbringing, 71–2 First Folio, 96 grain purchases, 88–90 living circumstances, 88 New Place, 87–91 non-dramatic works Venus and Adonis, 144 plays 1 Henry IV, 71 3 Henry VI, 71 Antony and Cleopatra, 84 As You Like It, 35, 72, 75, 78, 80–2, 91 Cardenio, 96 Coriolanus, 82–4, 91, 113 Cymbeline, 75 Hamlet, 85, 90 Henry V, 14 Henry VIII, 77, 96 King Lear, 76, 78, 85, 168

Macbeth, 85, 91 Measure For Measure, 35, 78–9 Merchant of Venice, 72, 75 Merry Wives of Windsor, 169 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 35, 78, 92, 115, 168 Much Ado About Nothing, 119 Othello, 76 Pericles, 77 Richard II, 29 Taming of the Shrew, 71, 111–13 Tempest, 50, 79, 85 Timon of Athens, 76, 85 Troilus and Cressida, 94 Twelfth Night, 72 Two Noble Kinsmen, 77, 96 Winter’s Tale, 35, 85–6, 169 professional affiliations, 46–7 quartos King Lear, 97 social status, 97–8 Shaw, George Bernard, 73 Sidney, Robert, Viscount Lisle, 66 Sidney, Sir Philip, 112 The Lady of May, 126 Siemon, James R., 80 Somervile, William, 52 Southwark, 7 Speed, John, 124 Spenser, Edmund, 115 Spinola, Ambrosio, 77 Stone, Lawrence, 102 Stow, John, 17–18, 124–5, 130–1, 139–40 Strabo, 74 Stratford, John, 52 Stratford-upon-Avon, 71, 87–8, 92 Stuart, Esmé, Seigneur d’Aubigny and third Duke of Lennox, 68 Stubbes, Philip, 117 Anatomie of Abuses, 117 Sturley, Abraham, 92 Swally, Battle of, 11 Swift, Jonathan, 20 syphilis, 24–5 Tacitus, 57 Taylor, Gary, 46 Temple Bar, 7 Temple, Sir Thomas, 88 Theobalds, 66 Thirsk, Joan, 7 timber supplies in Jacobean England, 16 Topsell, Edward, 170–1 Historie of Foure-footed Beasts, 10

215

216 United Kingdom Control of Pollution Act of 1974, 62 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 167 United States Noise Control Act of 1972, 62 Wall, Wendy, 105 Wanstead Manor, 126

Index water pollution, 19–20. See also London: aqueducts and waterways Watson, Robert N., 78 Welcombe, 93 Wells, Stanley, 120 Whitehall Banqueting House, 4, 70 Williams, Raymond, 67 The Country and the City, 67