Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage [1 ed.] 9781575911731, 9781575911595

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Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage

Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage

Ronda Arab

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press

© 2011 by Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp. All rights reserved. For authorization to reproduce materials in this book, by print or digital means, whether for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, contact the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-1-57591-159-5/11 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.] Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arab, Ronda, 1964– Manly mechanicals on the early modern English stage / Ronda Arab p. cm. Based on the author’s dissertation (doctoral)—Columbia University, 2001 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57591-159-5 (alk. paper) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. Men in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Human body in literature. 7. Theater—England—History— 16th century. 8. Theater—England—History—17th century. I. Title. PR658.M275A73 2011 822'.3093521—dc22 2010047825

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To my mother, Jeanette Poirier, And to my father, Toufic Arab, 1932–1977

Contents

Acknowledgments

9

Introduction: Early Modern Manliness, Early Modern Work, and the Early English Stage

13

1. Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield

44

2. Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Labourer’s Body in Plays of Historical Rebellion

70

3. What Kind of Man is Bottom?: Sex, Civility, and Manly Difference in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Sappho and Phao

94

4. “What do ye lack?” The Shopkeeper’s Masculinity in Early Seventeenth-Century London Comedies

129

Conclusion: The Stage and Work, Again

162

Notes

173

Bibliography

205

Index

221

7

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGING AND THANKING THE MANY INDIVIDUALS who helped in so many complicated ways to bring this little book into fruition is a daunting task. Manly Mechanicals started as my dissertation at Columbia University, in a PhD program as exhilarating as its New York City home. I will always be grateful for those truly formative years; all aspects of my current professional work, and many of my personal life, have been touched by them. My many comrades within the graduate student community, too many to name here, are in the fibre of these pages and the ink that marks them. Without a doubt, I owe my deepest gratitude to the very special Jean Howard, whose brilliance as a critic coupled with her extraordinary dedication to mentoring younger scholars has benefited me enormously. What Jean has given toward my intellectual development and professional success has been the most wonderful of gifts, one that I will hold dear forever. In the years during and since graduate school, many colleagues and friends offered readings, advice, comments, and conversations without which this book might never have been born. David Kastan and Martha Howell each, in their own fashion, vitally inspired my fascination with history and the material world; Julie Crawford, after serving duty on my dissertation committee, offered multiple incisive readings of a scratchy book chapter I thought I’d never get right, as well as the encouragement of a true friend; Thomas Cartelli, as a reader for JEMCS, wrote astonishingly kind words about my article, offered excellent advice, and took it in good-natured stride when I proceeded to hit him up for reference letters for several years to follow; Michelle Dowd, as a reader for Susquehanna University Press, gave the kind of detailed feedback an exhausted writer at the end of a project desperately needs to polish the final rough edges. I’d also like to thank the editors at SUP for their support, especially Carole Levine for enthusiastically encouraging me to submit my manuscript for consideration. My colleagues at Simon Fraser University have warmly embraced me within the best English Department an Assistant Professor could desire; those who have had direct involvement in shaping this book include David Coley, Annette Stenning, and Anne Higgins, to whom I am also grateful

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for crucial undergraduate mentoring. Additionally, Paul Budra read an early chapter and, at a wine-fueled SAA reception, proffered essential advice on how to choose a title, while Tiffany Werth, partner in early modern mischief, commented on every scrap of writing I needily passed her way, from full-on chapters to four-line emails. Prior to finding my academic home at SFU, my dear friend Vincent Carey read chapters with the keen eye of a historian, and, along with the fiercely loyal Elaine Ostry, offered support at a crucial time. From Augusta State University, I thank Paul Sladky, Christine Crookall, and Ray Chandrasekara for many years of support and friendship, and Lillie Johnson for an academic leave that significantly furthered the progress of this book. The professional support of James Bulman of Allegheny College, and our conversations there, were further instrumental to the happy outcome of Manly Mechanicals. Friends through the years—Sulochana Asirvatham, Stephanie Brown, Jennifer Kramer, Lisa McAleese, Stacey Noyes, and, forever and always, the fabulous Cora Cluett—can’t be thanked enough for balancing the solitude of scholarship with the pleasures of intimate companionship. Chloe Wheatley, both companion and colleague since the first week at Columbia, knows how deeply grateful I am for her existence. And, of course, many thanks to J.C. and B.R., for providing the ongoing sound track of home. Finally, my profound thanks to my family, to whom Manly Mechanicals is dedicated: my mother, Jeanette Poirier, sisters, Susan and Anita, brother, Louis, and sisters-in-law, Rachel and Donna. Without their abiding faith, incessant teasing, and abundant liquor cabinets, I know not where the notorious book would be. Portions of two chapters of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage appeared in earlier printed versions. Part of chapter 1 appeared as “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 13 (2001): 182–212. Part of chapter 2 appeared as “Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Labourer in 2 Henry VI” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.2 (Fall/ Winter 2005): 5–36. I would like to thank MaRDIE, JEMCS, and Indiana University Press for co-operating with my requests to reprint.

Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage

Introduction: Early Modern Manliness, Early Modern Work, and the Early English Stage

M ANLINESS MEN OF THE MANUAL LABORING CLASSES IN RENAISSANCE drama, the conventional wisdom of early modern literary studies suggests, are not important characters and, in some form or another, function as comic relief, “to be looked down upon, to be laughed at, not with” (Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 121). When it is noted that sometimes these working men do have more scope in the action of a play and are not merely a source of laughter, they are generally seen to mirror aristocratic codes; Laura Stevenson’s often-quoted 1984 Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature argues that middling-sort craftsmen, and also merchants, were praised only in terms reflecting quasi-feudal and chivalric aristocratic values that had little to do with their own experiences.1 These are grim prognoses for the literary representation of any social group, and it is no wonder that scholarly work on physically laboring men has stalled, leaving it a neglected topic in early modern literary studies. But these descriptions don’t account for such vital characters as Simon Eyre and his shoemakers, who invite us to laugh at foppish, idle aristocrats and celebrate physical labor; nor for Jack Cade and his rebel artisans who also invite us to scorn the elites—while they eviscerate hegemonic social order; nor for the London citizens of Edward IV Part One, who valiantly protect their homes, work spaces, and commercial property from attack when the king fails to send his troops. While there are certainly many derogatory representations of working men in early modern drama, it is hard not to conclude that something is missing from the picture literary criticism offers. Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage seeks to redress this missing piece by examining the many representations of craftsmen, tradesmen, and laborers who emerge as key figures that excite, please, and sometimes frighten the audience, working men whose manliness matters. I argue that representations of these men often invested them with significant cultural value; indeed, stage representations often construct the physically laboring man as an exemplar of English manhood. Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage thus provides a corrective to the limited literary scholarship that currently exists on men who did physical labor, scholarship that has ignored or simplified the ways these men could be and were discursively constructed as valued and manly. 13

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Additionally, addressing this topic offers the opportunity to pose the question of how the masculinities of men who did physical labor could defy, challenge, and deconstruct class categories that served the dominant patriarchal hierarchies, which allotted social and political power primarily to aristocrats and other elites. In this sense, this book continues the work of Annabel Patterson and Michael Bristol, both of whom study the theater as a venue wherein the discourses of peasant ideology and popular festivity could challenge elite culture; however, while both of these authors deal largely with the entrance of the “people” into discourse through the carnivalesque, Manly Mechanicals deals less with the subverting, deflating, and leveling processes of the carnivalesque and more with processes involving the appropriation of power and prestige. As well, Manly Mechanicals deals specifically with constructions of the masculinity of working men, which neither of these authors directly addresses.2 Most literary studies of early modern English masculinity either elide distinctions between social estates, as though masculinity were a socially uniform quality transcending social status, or they take as their focus elite masculinity or masculinities. Bruce R. Smith’s informative Shakespeare and Masculinity, a short overview of discourses of masculinity in early modern England and in Shakespeare’s work, is an informative and useful resource, but it gives scant attention to lowborn men and little acknowledgement of different masculinities among different social groups. The artisans and craftsmen who appear in Shakespeare’s plays come into view rarely in Smith’s study, and in their brief appearance they are dismissed as “low mimetic” (120), that is, having very little power of action and occupying a narrow scale (scope) of action.3 Will Fisher’s inspiringly creative Materializing Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture, a study of how “prosthetics” such as handkerchiefs, codpieces, hair, and beards helped to constitute masculinity, falls short of discussing differences in how prostheses constructed masculinity across the boundaries of social status. Coppélia Kahn’s post-Freudian, psychoanalytic Man’s Estate; explores masculinity as “an intrapsychic phenomenon” (2) but without a sustained analysis of psychic difference among men of different social groups. Her more recent work on masculine identity, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women, takes a more constructivist approach by examining the humanist ideal of Roman virtus as “a marker of sexual difference crucial to the construction of the male sexual subject” (15); however, although Kahn argues that Shakespeare made the concept of virtus available to a socially diverse audience, the book lacks a full examination of how this ideal of manliness may or may not have infused discourses of masculinity concerned with the man who enagaged in manual labor. Using a queer theory analytic, Mark Breitenberg’s Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England uncovers “the ways in which the ‘feminine’

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functions in the early modern period to legitimate and sustain many of the privileges and prerogatives of men” (8) and explores male anxiety as a necessary condition of early modern patriarchy. Breitenberg’s focus is also, however, on elite, if not always normative, masculine subjectivities. Queer theory has made an enormous contribution to masculinity studies in its analyses of the non-normative male subjects involved in male-male bonds and also in its correctives to the critical tendency to see all malemale bonds as non-normative, disorderly, or sodomitical. But queer theory, as well, has paid little specific attention to men of the manual laboring, lower classes. Thomas King’s broad-ranging study, The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, which might also be classified as a work of queer theory, traces the transition to a modern regime in which men claim power through sexuality from an “earlier economy of bodies and spaces, [wherein] power was not shared among men qua men but was a function of one’s (actual or potential) proximity to bodies possessing publicness, within the household or within the state” (4). While there is necessarily a class dimension to his analyses, his concern is more for the intersections of sexuality (hetero and queer) and gender and their historical development toward a modern era. While interrogating the role of sexuality, he also asks: “How did men come to constitute a natural group, one that may be read, retrospectively, as the collective and organic agent of certain characteristic performances? How did a single category of sex come to bind together men of all ranks, qua men?” (ibid., 19). In a sense, then, he approaches the question of masculinity from an opposing, though equally fruitful, historicist quest, seeking to explore how various forms of difference among men are and historically have been elided in order to construct masculine privilege. My focus in Manly Mechanicals is very much on difference within constructions of the masculine, specifically on what constituted artisan and other physically laboring male bodies as manly bodies.4 The figure of the man engaged in manual labor, in my reading, illuminates the often conflicted and contradictory status hierarchy of masculine gender constructions. Control dominated discourses of manliness: the ideal man, outwardly refined and always reasonable, controlled passions and desires understood to originate in the body—sorrow, anger, vengefulness, appetite, lust, etc. This vision of the ideal of manliness displayed, in effect, the characteristics of what Mikhail Bakhtin, based on his famous study of Rabelais, has termed the closed or classical body; in its control over the body, it denied all relationship to the corporeal aspects of the body and to its messy passions. Such control involved the assertion of mind over body; men of perfect temperament gave primacy to reason and this allowed them, in the words of Lemnius, “through a ready utterance in the discourse of matters, [to] be to their country a great stay and ornament” (cited in Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 20). Less body than

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mind, the controlled, refined male body was a great contributor to civil society. Thus, when Brutus considers whether or not to support Caesar’s ouster in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he weighs Caesar’s ability to rein in the humors that could overwhelm his manly virtue: “to speak truth of Caesar, / I have not known when his affections sway’d / More than his reason” (2.1.19–21). Brutus’s words testify to the discursive construction of the ideal, rational Renaissance man. The ideal, rational Renaissance man was most often imagined as a member of the social elite, and ideas about bodily refinement could be used against laboring and lowborn men through representations of their bodies as out of control, as grotesque or open (to return to Bakhtin’s terms). The Bakhtinian open body is close to the processes of birth, death, procreation, and digestion, one with physical needs and pleasures that are denied by the closed body. Existing scholarship on the intersection of social identity and somatic signification by critics such as Norbert Elias, Gail Paster, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White has called attention to these representations and has documented how the grotesque body was under attack by dominant high cultures that promoted the closed, controlled body. In what Elias has termed “the civilizing process,” certain somatic behaviors became less acceptable, and thus became the means of distinguishing the socially civil and the socially uncivil. Reinforcing social hierarchy, dominant cultural authorities associated the physically controlled and contained body with culturally superior, elite social groups, and uncontrolled bodies with the socially powerless and those who threatened conservative social hierarchies. As Paster has persuasively argued, the uncontrolled body, even when associated with men, was gendered feminine and, thus, could serve as a particularly powerful distinguisher between the manly and the unmanly. Her example of the laborer Hodge of the anonymous play Gammer Gurton’s Needle is a trenchant one: infantilized and demeaned by his lack of control over bodily functions and his inability to keep his backside covered in clothing—properly contained—his feminization is driven home by his dependence on a woman for the necessary clothing repairs that his bodily problems necessitate. A university play, the drama reflects both the class and gender anxieties of young privileged men moving from boyhood to manhood, a significant number of whom were also poised between the lower estate they had left behind and the more elite worlds they would inhabit as university graduates. However, not all early modern representations of men who did manual labor denigrated them as unmanly through association with the open, grotesque body. I offer Bottom, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as an example: this lowborn weaver adopts the refined bodily behaviors of a manliness usually coded elite when he tells his fellow mechanicals before their theatrical performance to “eat no onion nor garlic, for we

INTRODUCTION

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are to utter sweet breath” (4.41–42), and he performs with gentleman-like civility when he is conducted into Titania’s court. Furthermore, when the play juxtaposes aristocratic violence with artisanal civility, it shows the artisans as the social group that better embodies civility, and the mocking accusations of bestial inferiority leveled at the mechanicals by the aristocratic characters are revealed as a hollow discourse that attempts to bolster and naturalize established privilege. Thus, while I recognize the powerful force of the high/low binary inherent in Paster’s analytic of early modern bodily representations, I argue that it offers a restricted picture of the ways the bodies of early modern male manual workers entered into discourse. These working men could be, and were, represented as embodying some of the manly traits most valued by cultural authorities, yet scholarship has slighted literary representations of physically laboring men who exemplify elements of ideal masculine corporeal behavior. These representations offer bold challenges to the social and political hierarchies that justify elite privilege through notions of difference between men of distinct social groups. Challenges to aristocratic masculinity also included challenges to the ideal of the closed, controlled body and the idea that evident corporeal passions reflected a degenerate or not-fully-developed manhood. In Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday the rough corporeality of the shoemakers is presented as a quintessentially English vigor, vital to the well-being of the city and the commonwealth. Heywood’s The Second Part of If You Know Not Me celebrates the rough, hearty artisan in Hobson, a “plain and honest” haberdasher with manners very much like Simon Eyre’s. Hobson’s merry roughness is manifest in a down-to-earth vernacular salted with his favorite expression, “Bones a me,” and the play climaxes when he gallops through London at top speed “without saddle, bridle, boots, or spurs” to save a man from hanging. The haberdasher, his friends note, will care little if his rash action leads people to “take him for a madman,” as he “does not stand on bravery,” that is, refined appearances (321). In these plays, the suave, cool control of the courtier—the refined exterior of “ideal” closed masculinity—is not valued; passionate vitality is. This may be because the etiology of self-controlled masculinity contained contradictions that meant that corporeality could itself be defined in positive ways. Manliness entailed control of the body, but it was also created by constituents of the body, specifically by blood and choler, which produced heat, the vital property that separated men from boys and women. The heat generated from blood, particularly, putatively engendered “a promptness of mind, quickness in device, and sharpness in practice, however, blood was also the humor responsible for fierce, fearless, and often bloody action, the sort of passionate action that was antithetical to reason, but, paradoxically, could also be a sign of manliness. If a

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perfect, reasonable, temperament could not be achieved—and even Lemnius, in The Touchstone of Complexions (1576), conceded that it rarely was (Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 16)—“the second best [was] for blood to dominate the other humors” (ibid., 20), in essence because a fierce manliness could be a “reviving force.” Thus, apprentice energy, so often viewed in early modern England as an unruly force in need of containment, could also be admired as indicative of a vital masculinity. In The Honest Whore, for instance, the master linen draper’s apprentices raise the hue and cry, beat up on gulls and gallants, and take justice into their own hands in a myriad of ways that are disruptive to civic order, but, at the same time, they stand juxtaposed as real men in contrast to their master, whose patience is orderly but whose manliness is suspect. And thus, stage displays of unbounded fury and ruthless violence such as those enacted by the artisan rebels of 2 Henry VI can be read as displays of an awe-inspiring, powerfully physical masculinity embodied by working men and an attractively exciting spectacle meant to evoke a fear-laced pleasure. In all probability, the dramatic displays of dangerous puissance by the artisan rebels of 2 Henry VI also provided a safe, vicarious satisfaction for audience members harboring disdain and class resentment toward socially powerful elites. Corporeality was also valued as manly when reflected in physical strength. Indeed, the control of the body involved in idealized constructions of refined manliness was often underwritten through the bodily characteristics of physical strength: bodily strength was seen to both reflect and result in mental and spiritual control. This relationship between physical strength and masculine control opens up more possibilities for discourses resisting dominant hierarchies between the masculinities of highborn and lowborn men, since those engaged in manual work were often perceived to develop great strength through their daily labor. Military discourses and what one might call the discourses of health science, both of which proliferated in printed manuals during the period, constructed the manual worker as strong as a direct result of his engagement in physical labor. In Thomas Cogan’s oft-published Haven of Health (London, 1596), Cogan asserts that husbandmen and craftsmen “live longer and in better health” (3) because labor “increases heat”—that most manly of complexional qualities—which allows for better digestion and “nourishing” (2). And having been toughened by labor, men of the “base occupations” could be seen in military tracts to embody the masculine qualities necessary for that most manly of activities, war: “men of such occupations, as are accustomed most to labor with the strength of their armes, are to bee preferred for this purpose [wars],” wrote Thomas Proctor in Of the Knowledge and Conducte of Warre (1578). Western gender systems did not and do not only involve permutations of the terms masculine and feminine and

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the characteristics assigned to them. Gender systems are also inexorably caught up in a society’s organization of status or class: one’s social position is expected to align with certain gendered characteristics, and gender characteristics take on the hierarchical valences of their place in the class/ gender system. The physical power of male bodies that engaged in manual labor could create contradictions in the class/gender system of early modern England, which valued bodily strength and the control it signified but also sought to construct highborn men as the holders of the most valued masculine traits. Seeing in the male working body—and admiring, respecting, celebrating, or simply acknowledging—enhanced strength and vigor built up from physical labor, military and health manuals provide an account of the male worker’s body that underwrites a number of the literary representations I examine in Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage. In Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, for instance, the fitness of Simon’s journeyman, Ralph, to fight in the war, is linked to his physical activity in the shop, making shoes. Similarly, George of Robert Greene’s George A Greene, evokes his identity as a pinner whenever he brags how he’ll offer “pilles” to the king’s enemies. For the purposes of my argument, what is most significant about these discourses is how they point to physical labor as the source of that valued manly strength—not riding, hunting, fencing or any other elite male activity. Physical labor, an activity primarily associated with the lower classes, results in a trait that is broadly considered crucial to achieving masculinity. It is possible to see here how evaluative, gendered discourses of manual work can interfere with dominant, official class hierarchies among men.

WORKING M EN, WORK , AND I DEOLOGY The men that make up the subject of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage are those engaged in manual labor, primarily the crafts- and tradesmen who produced goods for or sold their skills on a commodity market but also the unskilled laborers who made their livings working for them. Thus, my general references to work do not include public service, law, labors of the mind such as writing, or service to nobles and royalty. For clarification, some discussion of terminology is necessary. “Craftsman” and “tradesman” were, to a certain extent, overlapping terms in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. “Trade” was the slightly broader expression, functioning, for the most part, as an overarching term for all non-professional occupations, skilled or unskilled, whether involving manufacture, wholesale or retail sales on a large or small scale, or services such as those offered by barbers, surgeons,

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innkeepers or taverners. Around and after the middle of the seventeenth century, the term “trade,” at times, was used exclusively to denote activities involving sales, but this exclusivity, for the most part, was not the more common usage in early modern England.5 In the Middle Ages, the terms “craft” and “misterie” denoted the formally organized occupation to which a working man with particular skills belonged, although in the early modern period, those groups were more likely to be referred to as “companies.”6 Nevertheless, in the early modern period, the term “craft” was still used to denote an occupation requiring special skill or knowledge, especially a manual art or handicraft, and, as in the Middle Ages, “a craft took its name from some one commodity or class of commodities or some skill with which its members were associated.”7 Throughout this book, I use the terms “laboring bodies” and “working bodies” interchangeably, and I refer to the “working classes” in the plural, in recognition that there were many social groups that worked. My use of the term “class,” however, is as a heuristic device, and I mean only to invoke classes “in their abstract social sense” rather than as “properly historical” categories (Kastan, “Is There a Class in this (Shakespearean) Text?”, 150). However, to prevent confusion and a-historicity, I avoid the term “working class” in the singular, as it is too closely identified with Marxist theories of economic divisions that are not fully applicable to my period of study.8 By no means did all working people share common economic and social interests,9 as is implied by the Marxist phrase “working class,” and socioeconomic groups were not defined strictly by relations of production or divided along the lines of who owned and who did not own the means of production; indeed, even the poorest laborers generally owned their own tools. Neither was the organization of manufacture divided categorically by those with direct access to markets and raw materials and those without: in late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury England it was becoming increasingly common for craftsmen to be supplied raw materials by middlemen, and the many skilled journeymen who worked for master craftsmen within the handicrafts system were not involved in the acquisition of materials or the sales of final products;10 nevertheless, direct access by manufacturers to markets and raw materials was still a significant feature of industrial organization in this period.11 Social estates existed in early modern England, of course, but the criteria of divisions were multiple and not consistently based on one’s relationship to work. William Harrison, a contemporary commentator, divides English society into four estates: nobles and gentlemen; citizens and burgesses; yeomen; and artisans and laborers (The Description of England, 94). In his last category he puts “day laborers, poor husbandmen, retailers without free land, copie holders and all artificers: tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, brickmakers, masons etc.” (ibid., 118). Members of this lowest

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of social groups were, for the most part, employees who sold their labor or small householders who sold their products to larger retailers or producers; some were apprentices who trained to become day laborers or journeymen or eventually (and ideally) masters of their own household production units; at the bottom of this group were unskilled house servants. The activity of work, however, was not limited to this estate, and, thus accordingly, I do not limit my study to the men who fell within this category; master craftsmen, the employers of journeymen and apprentices, might themselves work and also be citizens, and country yeomen might work trades while also holding land. Furthermore, gentlemen’s sons were sometimes apprenticed to the wealthier trades, such as the haberdashers, goldsmiths, or drapers. Thus I do not restrict my definition of the man who labors to a particular social estate, and although I am interested primarily in artisanal and craft labor, I recognize the impossibility of restricting my study to these types of work when craftsmen also engaged in agricultural labor.12 Similarly, it is impossible to make a perfectly clean division between manufacture and retail within a pre-industrial work world, where, despite a significant economic divide between those with access to distribution and those without, there continued to be overlap, particularly among small-scale tradesmen. Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage does not examine the work of large-scale trading merchants, but, in my final chapter, I shift my focus from working men engaged primarily in manufacture to small shopkeepers who have moved from the work of making to the work of selling. Over the course of the early modern period, ideologies of work underwent significant change; these must be considered in a study of dramatic representations of working men. While occupational promotion and pride in one’s professional identity were salient features of the late medieval guilds and guildsmen, Reformation ideology in concert with economic conditions in early modern England led to work gaining greater valuations. Increases in population led to food shortages and price inflation, which underscored the importance for the commonwealth of productivity, and also, as Tom Rutter points out, “augmented the wealth and power of groups whose position depended not on an army of feudal retainers but on the industry of themselves and their employees” (Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage, 18). As well, expanding overseas trade, which brought needed revenue to England, bolstered the prominence and influence of middling sort company men and increased the status of commercial activity. Ideology also contributed to what Max Weber termed “the spirit of capitalism”; Protestant reformers constructed work as a duty and promoted a work ethic that valued work for spiritual reasons. The Protestant ethos of work equated methodical, diligent labor in one’s calling to an act of worship, a means of glorifying God; as a calling, work was “to

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be pursued with a sense of religious responsibility” and “mundane toil [became] itself a kind of sacrament.”13 In Luther’s formulation, it was the usefulness of a calling that made it pleasing to God, and usefulness was measured in terms of contribution to the community or commonwealth, in a conflation that effectively fused secular and spiritual interests. As Luther wrote: A cobbler, a smith, a farmer, each has the work and office of his task, and yet they are alike consecrated priests and bishops, and every one by means of his work and office must benefit and serve every other, that in this way many kinds of work be done for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the community. (Christopher Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” 30)

The Puritan preacher William Perkins defined a calling as “a certain kind of life ordained and imposed on man by God for the common good” (446), elaborating on the final phrase of his description to emphasize its role for “the benefit and good estate of mankind” (449) and noting that “the works of our calling [must] be profitable not only to the doers, but to the commonwealth” (462). Thus, while promoting the spiritual benefits of work, the Protestant ethic of work also valued work for its productivity and incorporated into its ideology the increasing importance of commercial activity to the wellbeing of England. Work and working people could be and often were valued for their tangible contributions to the Commonwealth, while any and all of the idle, including religious clerics, aristocrats, and idle ladies and gentlemen, were vulnerable to criticism by the middling-sort preachers and writers who were largely responsible for codifying and disseminating these ideas about work through print and pulpit. Slingsby Bethel, a Puritan member of Parliament during the revolutionary era and a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, lauds merchants and tradesmen, “who make and prepare, and then transport and exchange our commodities” as “the Principal Members of our Body Politick . . . as to action and improvement of our Trading-stock for publick good” (Some Reflections Upon a Discourse Called Omnia a Belo comesta, 6). English Protestant commentators repeatedly stressed the importance of work for all members of the Commonwealth. John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote that They that apply themselves to labor for their livings do eat their own bread, and are profitable to others; whereas, those stately idle persons are driven to put their feet under other men’s tables, and their hands into other men’s dishes. Every man, of every degree, as well rich as poor, as well mighty as mean, as well noble as base, must know that he is born for some employment to

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the good of his brethren, if he will acknowledge himself to be a member, and not an ulcer, in the body of mankind. (Hill, “The Industrious Sort of People,” Society and Puritanism in Pre- Revolutionary England, 140)

Richard Baxter’s reading of St. Paul’s precept “He who will not work shall not eat” was unyielding: “[the wealthy] are no more excused from service of work . . . than the poorest man” (Puritan Divines I.108). Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury fervently insisted that St. Paul meant for men to put their hands to use and feel sweat on their brows: “And to work with your own hands.” God hath ordained that all sorts of men should labor, and eat their bread in the sweat of their brows. And here the apostle doth not only charge them to work, but that they work with their own hand. Thou that hast hands and settest them not to work, thou that abusest the grace of God by the idleness, shalt not give an account there of. (Jewel, “An Exposition Upon the Two Epistles of St. Paul to the Thesalonians,” John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, 864)14

These discourses in praise of those “who make and prepare, and . . . transport and exchange commodities” and against those who have “hands and settest them not to work” are foundational to plays such as The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Second Part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday we find diligent, skilled shoemakers celebrated for, among other things, producing goods and contributing to the commercial well-being of the commonwealth. Meanwhile, aristocratic idleness is censured, and the idle, incompetent gentleman-citizen, Hammon, is mocked and scorned. Similarly, The Second Part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body (1606) has the prodigal John Gresham redeem himself by adopting a work-oriented masculine identity: he “leave[s] off bravery,” becomes an apprentice to Hobson, and wears the frieze coat of his livery (260). In its ideal form, then, the Protestant doctrine of vocation stipulated that rich and poor alike labor for divine glory. In actuality, however, in Protestant society the doctrine of vocation maintained divisions of status based on traditional hierarchies of activity. William Harrison characterizes the gentleman as one who “can live without manual labor,” but also as someone who has done service “whereby his commonwealth is benefited” (Description of England, 113). The Elizabethan Homily Against Idleness states that “whosoever doth good to the commonweal and society of men with his industry and labor, whether it be by governing the commonweal publicly, or by bearing public office or ministry, or by doing any common necessary affairs of his country. . .is not to be accounted idle, though he work no bodily labor” (Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory, 439).

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And Bishop Jewel, for all of his rousing celebration of the sweat on men’s brows, ultimately sees manual labor as necessary only for certain classes: “the nobleman and magistrate, if he regard his country, be careful for the laws, aid the poor, repress tyranny, comfort the weak, punish the wicked, is not idle,” he writes, and, indeed, “these labors are greater than all of the labors of the body” (Jewel, Epistles of St. Paul, 864). The opposite of idleness, then, was not merely the more tangible forms of labor, and, in fact, the less tangible forms of labor remained higher in status. Thus, while discourses allotting dignity to work were strenuously asserted from pulpit and press, moving beyond manual labor remained a distinction in status.15 The more salient change in the sixteenth century, as Tom Rutter demonstrates with acuity, was to definitions of work, which broadened to include the traditional activites of the gentry and even the nobility. Expanding the category of work to include public service, as the above examples make clear, allowed the social elite to avoid charges of idleness; they could be presented instead as “laborers in the vocation of government, public office, and provision of counsel” (Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage, 55). Even in its capacity to confer higher status on people who worked, the doctrine of the dignity of work was a double-edged ideology. It allowed people who worked—from middling-sort householders and shopkeepers vying for political power to rebellious laborers demanding better access to food and commercial goods—to make demands for political, social, and economic remuneration based on the fact of their productive contributions to the commonwealth. These kinds of rewards are staged in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, master shoemaker Simon Eyre becomes Lord Mayor of London, and in both plays, the protagonists, along with other working men, feast and socialize with kings. On the other hand, the religious principles and social ideals stressing one’s duty to labor in a vocation and to shun idleness could function to keep wage workers laboring in work situations that served the interests of proto-capitalists and landlords far more than themselves. At this time, enclosures were denying many working people their traditional access to land,16 creating what was essentially an impoverished rural class dependent on barely adequate wages from industry for subsistence.17 Work may have been gaining higher status in certain quarters, but work’s improved status did not amount to better lives for most of the working classes: “Full time wage-earners were assumed to be paupers” (Christopher Hill, “The Poor and Wage Labour,” Liberty Against the Law, 64), and while skilled, independent artisans and yeomen generally lived in various levels of comfort, one quarter to one half of the population of England during the Stuart era lived in what officials of the period considered poverty (Coleman, “Labour in the English

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Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” 283–84). This group, according to economic historian Coleman, “undoubtedly included the majority of both unskilled and semi-skilled working class: cottagers and labourers, agricultural and industrial, the poor weaver as well as the poor husbandman” (ibid., 284). Discourses of poverty are voiced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 2 Henry VI, and in other plays. Annabel Patterson notes the “allusion to a time of hardship . . . in the name of one of Shakespeare’s artisan actors, Robin Starveling” (56), and their fervent longing for six pence pensions speaks also to the economic neediness of many rural artisans. That group of one quarter to one half of the population who lived in poverty is also represented in 2 Henry VI by Simpcox, who fakes lameness and promotes a phoney miracle “for pure need” (2.1.149), and even by Jack Cade, whose crimes include stealing sheep, a typical crime of the hungry and poor. The breakdown of the traditional guild structures of the towns, which ideally involved upward mobility from apprenticeship to journeyman status to master, contributed to employment problems for working people. Many craftsmen and artisans were no longer afforded the opportunity of becoming independent master craftsmen and instead joined the increasingly large pool of struggling day workers and wage laborers as permanent journeymen18—a situation obscured by the idealized portrait of upwardly mobile artisan life presented in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Workers who made very little money had little incentive to work regular or long hours when there was little opportunity to improve their lot in life and when wages were so low that the extra wages would not significantly alter their level of subsistence.19 An ideology stressing the intrinsic value of work could keep people working in situations wherein upward mobility was not a likely recompense for hard work and wherein the profits produced benefited themselves very little. An ideology that dignified work and vilified idleness functioned for proto-capitalist entrepreneurs to ensure a dependable labor force and encourage high levels of productivity. For municipal and court authorities, the projects of entrepreneurs had a different function; they were the means of keeping the poor busy and thus eradicating the widely perceived problems of vagrancy and masterless men, problems that emerged out of the changing, unstable economy. Denied access to the means for an adequate livelihood because of enclosures and inadequate wages, some unemployed, disenfranchised craftsmen and farm workers, along with discharged soldiers, wandered the countryside seeking work, begging, and thieving. Such people were often feared, stigmatized as vagrants, and subject to the strictures of the Elizabethan poor laws.20 Vagrancy created a host of social problems, and, to these authorities, as well as to numerous social commentators, keeping the poor working was a social good not only because of its productive contribution to the Commonwealth but also

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because of its contribution to social order.21 For both entrepreneurs and political authorities, defining idleness as sinful and criminal was a means of controling the poor. Poor workers, however, were not always passive pawns of a work ethic imposed from on high. Unemployed or poorly employed craftsmen and farm workers responded to unfair conditions by participating in organized riots protesting food prices, enclosures, and job losses to aliens, as staged in plays such as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and 2 Henry VI and in the anonymous plays The Life and Death of Jack Straw and Sir Thomas More. Buchanan Sharp writes that “Food riots were not spasmodic outbursts of mindless rage or mere cloaks for criminal behavior, but were, rather, disciplined forms of popular action. The rioters had clearly defined objectives and employed only that minimal amount of force or coercion necessary to achieve those objectives” (In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660, 32). The political intelligence of these dissatisfied workers no doubt fed the fire under the discourse of idleness: stigmatizing agitators as idle vagrants was in the interests of both political authorities and proto-capitalist entrepreneurs. It is not difficult to uncover discursive attempts to discredit the arguments of politicized workers. The Fox in Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubberd (1591, in Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale), who complains that he has done his “countrey service” (61) but has not been “advaunced” (63), voices the agitator’s view that the rich fed off the labor of the poor and convinces his companion to join him in refusing to “be of any occupation” (155): For they [those who work] doe swinke and sweate to feed the other, Who live like Lords of that which they doe gather— And yet doe never thanke them for the same, But as their doe by Nature doe it clame. (163–66)

Agrippa’s Fable of the Belly, told to the food rioters in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, articulates a similar relationship between a fat, idle elite and a disenfranchised laboring poor: There was a time, when all the body’s members Rebelled against the belly; thus accused it: That only like a gulf it did remain I’th’midst o’th’body, idle and unactive, Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing Like labor with the rest, where th’other instruments Did see, and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel And, mutually participate, did minister Unto the appetite and affection common Of the whole body. (1.1.95–104)

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Spenser’s Fox, of course, is shown to be a crafty and dishonest creature, and Agrippa tells the fable of the rich, idle belly hoarding food while the rest of the body labors in order to insist that, in fact, the belly does do its duty—the angry, rebellious parts need the belly to administer nourishment. What is evident here is the existence of subversive ideas from the laboring classes with sufficient cultural potency that counter-discourses must articulate, then challenge, in order to put them to rest. Correlatively, working people could co-opt the discourses that functioned to keep them in their place, as when Holland, an artisan rebel of 2 Henry VI, argues (syllogistically) for the working man’s inclusion in government: “[I]t is said ‘labor in thy vocation,’ which is as much to say as, ‘let the magistrates be laboring men’; therefore should we be magistrates” (4.2.15–16). Protestant commentators would have been highly unlikely to support the insurrections of politicized workers, yet their articulations of the duty to work gave fuel to arguments of the disenfranchised, as Holland’s use of the Elizabethan Homily Against Idleness demonstrates.

M EN AT WORK IN E ARLY E NGLISH THEATER Actors were, of course, themselves often stigmatized as idle, most commonly by authorities who wished to control their theatrical activity and keep them working productively in more traditional modes of manual labor. Among the many accusations leveled at actors by their detractors was that of having left off manual work—the appropriate activity for men of their social degree—for “play.” This controversy, well known to scholars of early modern theater, underscores the significant connections between the theater and the type of working men this book addresses. I work from an understanding of the early modern theater as a site that engaged with the material conditions in which it existed; its material practices and circumstances influenced its theatrical representations. That it had close practical connections to the world of artisanal work made it a particularly important site of discursive negotiation over the meanings and value of labor and laboring bodies. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, acting companies became subject to increased regulation and licensing, and only a limited number of companies, with particular aristocratic patronage, were legally allowed to play. Before this turn of events, throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, acting had been the activity of men who had other trades and performed part-time in small troupes (Ingram, “The Economics of Playing,” 321). Ingram argues that, although there are few playtexts extant from the middle third of the sixteenth century, there is evidence of a great deal of theatrical activity, primarily as “an

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avocation or sideline [rather] than a principal activity for the men who did it” (The Business of Playing, 72). Troupes of players, whose affiliations with each other were probably transient, performed interludes at temporary playing spaces using rented costumes. Ironically, city authorities attempting to restrict theatrical activity may have inadvertently led to its professionalization. Regulations about licensing, hours of business, and allowed playing spaces probably inspired the creation of stages in the suburbs to avoid city authority. Thus, gradually, troupes formed made up of men who engaged exclusively in theatrical activity, men who had previously been tradesmen making extra money on the side through theatrical activity. The commercial theater, then, emerged out of the world of craft and trade labor done by guildsmen, or as they became known in the sixteenth century, company men. Anti-theatricalists raged about actors leaving work to play because, in recent history, some of these men had worked in the manual trades, and even more of them had close associations with the world of trade and craft labor. If, by the late sixteenth century, they had moved out of the world of trade and craft labor entirely, the exhortations to work would not fully make sense. But it is not necessary to rely solely on the rants of Phillip Stubbes, William Prynne, and the like to find associations between the world of the theater and the manual trades. Company membership was widespread among actors, owners, managers, and playhouse builders. James Burbage, a member of the Carpenter’s Company,22 joined with John Brayne (a Grocer) to build the Theatre, and Henslowe (a member of the Dyer’s Company) joined with Edward Alleyne to build the Fortune, while John Chomley, Philip Henslowe’s partner in the building of the Rose playhouse, was a tanner (Ingram, “Economics,” 323). Many actors were company members, too; John Heminges was a member of the Grocer’s company, Robert Armin and John Lowin members of the Goldsmiths, Ben Jonson of the Bricklayers. Furthermore, all actors who apprenticed with a theatrical troupe eventually became members of the trade company to which the actor who apprenticed them belonged. Only members of trade companies—master craftsmen free of the city—could take on apprentices, so the theater continued to be a place where company men acted, even as the company association of actors became primarily a matter of paying yearly dues (Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, 65). The imbrication of the world of the trade companies and the world of the commercial theater is also revealed in David Kathman’s research, which has exposed the interesting practice wherein freemen who practiced nontheatrical trades allowed their apprentices to be trained by theater men for the stage rather than training them themselves for their own trade, at times being paid by the theater company

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for the use of those apprentices (Kathman, “Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers,” 15). Furthermore, some theatrical workers of the Renaissance stage did, in fact, practice their trade, or had done so at some point in their careers. James Burbage was a joiner by profession before he became an actor and playhouse owner (ibid., 20); Andrew Cane, actor with Palgrave’s Men, made silverware and kept a goldsmith’s shop for forty years (ibid., 22). Evidence suggests that Thomas Downton, a twenty-year sharer and actor in the Admiral’s-Prince’s-Palsgrave Men, gave up playing to become a practicing vintner (ibid., 24), and William Hunnis, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal November 1566–75 and 1580–84, owned a grocer’s shop (ibid., 30). Anthony Jeffes, freeman of the Brewers and a member of the Admiral’s Men and Prince Henry’s Men, is listed after 1609 as “brewer” rather than “player” in the St. Giles Cripplegate parish register, which suggests that he had left playing and had returned to brewing to make his living (ibid., 30–31). Robert Keysar practiced as a goldsmith before he became an investor in, among other ventures, the Blackfriar’s theater (ibid., 33). The famous clowns, Richard Tarlton and Robert Armin, quite likely engaged in manual labor, as well: Tarlton, according to his Tarlton’s Jests, kept an ordinary and a tavern (ibid., 38), and Robert Armin apprenticed as a goldsmith between 1581 and 1591 but didn’t become a professional player with the King’s Men until 1599 (ibid., 18), so between 1591 and 1599 he may well have been practicing the trade for which he had been trained. As far back as Henry VII, professional players had artisanal backgrounds; John English, of Henry VII’s Players, was a joiner, and Richard Gibson was Yeoman Tailor and Porter of the Great Wardrobe. Among Henry VIII’s Players, “John Young was a mercer, George Birch a courier, and George Mayler was a merchant tailor or glazier.” As W. R. Streitberger notes, “most players left their trades for the opportunity to join a prosperous company” (“Personnel and Professionalization,” A New History of Early English Drama, 339). The number of theater workers who were free of the city is significant in and of itself, because while many may not have practiced their trades independently as adults, many did learn them as apprentices and, thus, spent approximately seven years of their youth working within that world of craft and trade labor. Some players became free of the city through patrimony, but the majority of the company men (actors and managers) who took on theatrical apprentices previously served their own apprenticeships in shops with master craftsmen who had no connections to the stage. For instance, it is highly likely that Ben Jonson served his apprenticeship as a bricklayer with his stepfather, Robert Brett, because patrimony as a means to the freedom was available only to biological sons (Mark Eccles, “Ben Jonson ‘Citizen and Bricklayer’,” 446; Kathman, “Freeman,” 31).

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Furthermore, many actors, playwrights, and managers had family ties to trade and craft labor and, in that way, were familiar with it: Shakespeare’s father was, of course, a glover; Edward Alleyne’s father, an innkeeper (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 90); William Kemp was the son of either a printer or a gentleman’s servant (S. P. Cerasano, “The Chamberlain’s-King’s Men,” A Companion to Shakespeare, 331). Anthony Munday’s son Richard “worked on several [Lord Mayor’s Pageant’s] as a painter-stainer” (Kathman, “Freeman,” 35), and John Webster’s father and younger brother were coachmakers by profession, although Webster himself claimed freedom of the Merchant Taylors by patrimony. Having spent a significant portion of one’s youth as a craftsman-in-training and/or having parents and siblings who practiced trades must have influenced the identity formation of these early modern theater people; while the bonds of identification with the world of craft labor were undoubtedly experienced in diverse and complex ways, their existence must be recognized and considered.23 The theatrical entrepreneurs of the Renaissance stage not only came from and were, to a degree, part of the world of craft and trade labor, the geographical locations of the playhouses were such that these men also witnessed manual work on a regular basis. The playhouses were materially close to the world of manual labor, particularly those located in the suburbs, where the rougher, smellier, more hazardous trades were forced to set up because of restrictions created by the authorities of the gentrifying city. That rents were lower beyond the walls of the city and the monopolies of the companies easier to avoid (Beier, “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London,” 157) meant that at least some of the workers found in the suburbs were among the less privileged and well off. The Globe and the Rose theaters, located in the entertainment-oriented Southwark, were neighbors to brothels and inns but also to brewers (Keene, 13), feltmakers, tailors, weavers, certain leather workers, and transport, distribution, and building trades (154 Beier, 154). Shakespeare’s residence before 1599 was near Bishopsgate (Shapiro’s map), home of a substantial silk manufacturing district with both wealthy merchants and poor householders (Keene, 13); just south of Bishopsgate at Aldgate were more poor silk workers, as well as an increasing number of bakers and butchers (Beier, “Trades,” 153). Toward the river, near the Tower of London and across the Thames from Southwark, could be found “tallow melting, bell founding, gun making, brewing, vinegar yards, alum yards, timber yards, [and] rope makers” (Keene, 13). The men of the early modern theater, then, had family and professional ties as well as personal experience with craft and trade labor, witnessed a variety of forms of manual labor in the daily world they traveled through, and themselves worked in a commercial industry. While their work was

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not identical to craft and trade labor, Tom Rutter’s study establishes not only that “playing was becoming more like other forms of labor,” that is, “repetitive, geographically fixed, [and] carried out on weekdays” (Work and Play, 37), but also that “theater professionals made a conscious effort to respond to [charges of idleness], portraying actors as skilled and industrious craftsmen” (ibid., 27). Thus, my study of the masculinity of craft and tradesmen as presented on the stage is a study of representations constructed by men whose subjectivities were largely formulated within the conditions of craft and trade labor, and who self-presented as working men, as men who worked with the same discipline and industry as trade and craft laborers. Manly Mechanicals offers the contributions to discourse of working men who had gained enough social power to have access to a forum for disseminating ideology. The drama’s representations of manually laboring men allow us to view the idealizations and demonizations of this social group as constructed by another social group—theater men— who had intimate knowledge of manual labor and who shared significant identity overlap. Indeed, being alert to what the drama owns, disowns, and reformulates of circulating early modern discourses about artisanal masculinities allows a glimpse of a social group positioned on the cusp of two work worlds, writing its origins. What is most distinctive about the theater’s writing of craft, trade work, and workers is its focus on the physical body. As I’ve noted already, discursive intersections between masculinity and the body, manual work and the body, and working and lower-class men and the body were particularly rich and prevalent in early modern England: this accounts, in part, for the stage’s focus on the masculine body of the working man. However, I contend that theater workers’ bodily experience of manual labor offers another, material explanation for this focus, as does the fact that the theater was able to display the physical body in its constructions of discourse—indeed, the theater was in the business of displaying bodies. And it was through its exhibition of bodies on stage that it shaped ideologies of work; when the theater put working men and work in action on view for the consumptive pleasure of its audience, it shaped ideologies of work through a celebratory aestheticization of it. Ideologies of work and working men emerged from the material conditions of bodily display on the stage, display which was informed by practical experience and somatic knowledge. When a group of men led by Richard Burbage of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and armed with “fwordes daggers billes axes and fuch like” weapons (Charles William Wallace, The First London Theatre, 278)24 marched in the cold of a late December night to the Theatre playhouse to reclaim the building they believed to be legally theirs, they provided future scholars with a fascinating emblem of how very close the men of

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the theater still were to the world of manual labor in the late sixteenth century. Negotiations with Giles Allen over the lease of the land on which the Theatre stood had failed, so Richard and Cuthbert Burbage faced the possibility of losing their investment in the playhouse that had been the permanent home for the productions of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The sons of James Burbage, joiner, their solution was to put their own knowledge of carpentry to work by dismantling the playhouse themselves, along with a master builder, Peter Street, their friend of fourteen years, William Smyth, and a group of twelve other men. Depositions from the lawsuits that followed make it clear that Cuthbert and Richard were themselves involved in the manual labor of “pulling . . . and throwing downe the fayde Theatre” and “tak[ing] and carry[ing] awaye . . . all the wood and timber” (Wallace, Theatre, 278, 279). One wonders if the group of twelve men who helped the core group of four included other players, perhaps even other Chamberlain’s shareholders. The dismantled timbers of the Theatre, of course, became the Globe, built on a new site in Southwark. It would have been prohibitively expensive to build an entirely new playhouse without the pieces from the Theatre, so these theatrical entrepreneurs put on a different role, that of manual laborer; it seems they were sufficiently comfortable with this role that under pressure of imminent arrest they were able to quickly and efficiently complete their task over the course of two to four days before Giles Allen was able to return from the country (Berry, “Aspects of Design and Use of the First Public Playhouse,” 34–35). To the crowd watching, they offered a performance of themselves as working men with a stake in the world of wood, bricks, tools, and building contracts, a performance of identity that their theatrical activities often hid from view. Notably, the incident shows not just a conflation of the player and laborer; it also presents that figure as one with a potentially violent will and agency embodying the dangerous characteristics of the laboring man who takes the law into his own hands aided by tools of his trade. The theatrical artisans’ dangerous tools of the trade were the “fwordes daggers billes axes and fuch like” weapons (Wallace, Theatre, 278) they used as stage props. These theater artisans acted in this situation using strategies much like other sixteenth-century artisans and apprentices during rebellions and riots and much like those portrayed by Cade and his men in 2 Henry VI; they took the law into their own hands, using the tools of their own trade as weapons with which to fight their battles and defend what they perceived as their rightful access to property. The stripping of the Theatre incident establishes lines of identification between strategies of violence among craftsmen and assertions of agency and will by theatrical artisans. Furthermore, it must also be noted that Burbage and his men created a great moment of theater when they took to arms in the traditional mode of the artisan and the apprentice, as testified by the crowds that

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gathered to watch; this supports my argument that early modern culture held an interest in work as a spectacle, which the stage both forwarded and exploited. It also supports my argument in chapter 2 that Cade’s artisan violence might have been glossed with a patina of glamour that, in part, resulted from the fame of the actor, Will Kemp, who played his role. The notoriety or near-celebrity status (depending on one’s perspective) of such theater men likely rendered their performances of work and artisan violence, on and off the stage, all the more compelling. It also seems likely that tradesmen were among the crowd drawn by the dramatic spectacle of the Theatre’s midnight dismantling, curious to inspect, gossip, and comment on how Burbage and his men went about their clandestine labor. It must also be stressed, along a similar vein, that the representations of working men offered by the stage (on stage) were constructed, at least in part, for working men. That working men and women were a significant portion of the audience seems incontrovertible after Martin Butler’s thorough refutation of Ann Jennalie Cook’s argument that the theaters catered exclusively to a privileged audience. The commons consisted of approximately 95 percent of the population; they must have made up a large proportion of theatergoers, and, indeed, Butler offers evidence suggesting that the less privileged and the unprivileged were a distinct presence, especially (although not exclusively) at the outdoor public playhouses. Butler offers a two-page catalogue of contemporary references to theatergoers of “the meaner sort of People” such as servingmen, chambermaids, applewives, butchers, tailors, tinkers, cordwainers, sailors, yeomen, feltmakers, grooms, and whores, to name a selection.25 Given how greatly these social groups outnumbered the gentry in London, it simply makes sense to, in Walter Cohen’s formulation, insist upon “a heterogeneous audience, with a plurality of artisans and shopkeepers” (Drama of a Nation, 168). He writes that this popular clientele, along with servants and an underclass of “prostitutes, transients, soldiers, and criminals,” was “probably the heart of the English public theater audience and the section of it that seems to have determined the financial success or failure of a play” (ibid.). Some attempt to please this “popular clientele,” particularly the more respectable elements of it, was surely made in this commercial enterprise. Although they have been neglected in literary studies, it is not surprising to find in early modern drama complex and salutary representations of work and working people that would have engaged the interests of the working people in the audience. Access by working men in England to public theatrical power in order to display and celebrate artisanal manliness was not something that began with the professionalized commercial stage. A book that addresses the early modern stage’s involvement in formulating discourses of the working man cannot ignore the Corpus Christi guild theater of the late medieval

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period, a non-commercial, amateur English theater whose demise after almost two centuries of popularity came about just as the early modern commercial theater was becoming an important cultural presence. The causal factors for the emergence of the Elizabethan stage are too complex to call the Corpus Christi guild theater its parent, but there are various lineal connections between them. One such link is a shared association with craft and trade labor. The medieval guild theater was produced by amateur players who, first and foremost, were craftsmen working at trades for most of the year; indeed, it seems possible that some of the unemployed or underemployed artisans who found work as players in the first semiprofessional troupes may have been journeymen from town guilds who became involved in commercial playing as a sideline, putting to use acting skills they had developed through their involvement in Corpus Christi plays. But it is not just personnel that linked the two theaters. The construction, assertion, and celebration of tenets of a working man’s masculinity were fundamental to the ontology of this earlier form of theater,26 as was what might be called a dramatic aesthetic of work; that is, an aesthetic assumption that viewing work, working bodies, and the material products of work is a pleasurable activity. All of these dramatic associations with trade and craft work are found to a greater degree in the Corpus Christi guild theater than in the early modern London commercial theater, but their continued existence in the early modern theater suggests, nevertheless, that we might think of these associations to and celebrations of work as part of an English theatrical tradition. Working men dominated the Corpus Christi guild theater, huge public spectacles celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi, during which the trade guilds of medieval towns each took responsibility for the production and performance of an episode in Christian history, this society’s most important historical story. The identification between trade labor and actors that existed in the early modern theater was significantly closer in the medieval guild theater, not only because the producers of the guild drama were amateur players, but also because of dramaturgical principles of the theater that allowed the guildsmen to maintain their identities on stage as medieval workmen. As critics such as V. A. Kolve and Anne Higgins have established, the cycle drama never fully attempted to mimetically transform medieval men and women into biblical figures from ancient times and foreign places. Instead, a conflation of the actor’s role and his identity as a workman was achieved through anachronism, anglicization, and “the principle of appropriate guild casting” (Higgins, “Work and Plays, 77). Contemporary costumes, language, mannerisms, and props were used; contemporary social issues were inserted into the dramatic action; and guilds were assigned episodes based on their skills, tools, and products (ibid., 76–97). These associations between the past and the present allowed

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medieval audiences to understand the guildsmen/actors very specifically as figural types of the men from biblical times who played parts in Christ’s life. There were significant spiritual lessons to learn thereby, but there was another important effect as well. Each time recognizably contemporary men—in some instances friends and neighbours—were seen on stage within work contexts that identified them both as biblical characters and the laboring people they were, the drama imparted a significant message about the central historical role of work and working men; the guildsmen were essentially saying “we were there” at the beginning of Christian history. Corpus Christi guild theater highlighted the centrality of working men in history by emphasizing that they were agents of history, not merely its re-creators. But even in their roles as actors representing history, the guildsmen asserted their centrality and, in a sense, mirrored the selfimportance they performed, by taking over public space and garnering attention to their displays of the working body. Within this framework of situating crafts and tradesmen within the most important history of their society, Corpus Christi guild drama promoted the manliness of the artisan body in ways that are evident in the plays I examine. Like the plays I examine, this medieval drama privileges craftwork and the values of the English working man, particularly artisanal skill and commercial productivity, and does so by performing scenes that focus on the skills, tools, and products of trade labor. Indeed, I would argue that these scenes point to a distinct aesthetic of work within this medieval theater. The dramatic tradition carried into early modern drama from the Corpus Christi guild theater is one based on the display of work and working bodies, and if we are to assume that the producers of these plays were concerned about making them a success, then we must conclude that the various aspects of work on display were held to be potentially interesting and pleasing spectacles for audiences. The instances of trade guilds highlighting their products in their dramatic episodes are so numerous that one scholar argues that it functioned as advertising, anticipating “the modern practice of product placement” (Gil Harris, “Properties of Skill,” 35). The Bakers of Chester, who were responsible for the Last Supper episode, threw loaves of bread to the audience (Higgins 83); in Norwich, the Grocers, purveyors of luxury foods and exotic spices, and the Rafflemen, dealers in imported lumber, together produced “Adam and Eve in Paradise” and quite likely displayed a tree decorated with the “paradisal fruits” supplied by the Grocers (Higgins, “Work and Plays,” 84); York’s goldsmiths, when they performed the “The Coming of the Three Kings” and “The Adoration” had a perfect opportunity to exhibit fine gifts for the baby Jesus. Whether or not this was an overt marketing ploy, it was most certainly a display of artisanal selfpride. But for this to work as a marketing ploy or as a means to express

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self-pride, something akin to a generic expectation must have been in operation: it had to have been presupposed that audiences would enjoy viewing these displays of craftsmanship. This same principle appears to operate in The Shoemaker’s Holiday when Ralph gives a lovingly crafted, carefully detailed pair of shoes to his wife before going to war, shoes made collectively by the men of his shop. The city comedies I examine in chapter 4 also glory in, even while they satirize, the plethora of fine goods and services the members of trade companies made available to residents and visitors of London. Many of those fine things are simply mentioned, but stage directions and dialogue make it clear that many more were props. In The Roaring Girl alone, we see or hear of feathers, fine linens, fancy clothes, chairs, stools, cushions, carriages, and capons, just to name a few. The audience is invited to laugh at the outlandish decadence of material London, but also to admire the quality, craftsmanship, beauty, and pleasure potential of the wonderful array of things made or, more often, supplied by the tradesmen of the city—just as the audience of the Corpus Christi episodes cited above is meant to enjoy the Chester Bakers’ fresh bread or marvel at the richly designed gold vessels the Goldsmiths would have carried their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh within. While city comedies reflect anxiety over the effect on masculinity of a luxury trade culture, both of these English theaters, nevertheless, make the assumption that there is pleasure in viewing the products of consumption that result from craft labor and trade. Tools, as well as goods, are held up for the admiration of the audience. Chester’s “The Annunciation and the Nativity,” appropriate in its assignment to the wrights (carpenters) in that Joseph plays a major role, has Mary’s husband present to the audience the implements with which he plies the craft of carpentry: With this axe that I bear, This percer and this nauger and this hammer all in fere, I have wonnen my meat. (376–79)

One can hardly doubt that Joseph displays an axe, a hammer, and two instruments for piercing as he says his lines, and it is certainly possible that the tools might even have belonged to the actor himself. A similar moment occurs in Thomas Dekker’s 1599 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, when the cheeky journeyman Firk catalogues the tools of the shoemaking trade while interrogating Hans, the “Dutch” journeyman: And hark you, skomaker, have you all your tools—a good rubbing pin, a good stopper, a good dresser, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls

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of wax, your paring knife, your hand- and thumb-leathers, and your good Saint Hugh’s bones to smooth up your work? (4.78–82)

Given that small moveable props were a staple of the early modern stage and “who or what an actor represent[ed]” was conveyed through dress and props,27 this might have been an opportunity to display not simply a few shoemaker’s tools for the sake of verisimilitude, but all of the tools mentioned in the dialogue—it would suit Firk’s rambunctious pride in shoemaking to stage him dramatically presenting each and every one of his precious instruments. William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman has Barnaby the journeyman catalogue “Saint Hugh’s Bones” twice, once in prose and once in verse (4.3.219–24; 4.3.250–62); Barnaby’s words, “whatsoever he be that is a gentleman of the Gentle Craft, and has not all these at his fingers’ end to reckon them up in rhyme” (4.3.225–27; my italics), suggest that the tools might be on the stage for the audience to view, as his use of “these” suggests proximity. It is, of course, the workingman’s skill at using his tools that is the ultimate object of pride, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday stages its shoemakers laboring heartily, as when we see the men working on high-end orders such as shoes for Lord Mayor Oatley’s daughter, Rose. As well, 2 Henry VI features laboring men fiercely proud of the skills, tools, and processes of their trades, when its bellicose rebel artisans gleefully imagine how they will put those mechanisms to use killing their elite foes. Tanners will make gloves from the skins of enemies, and the butcher will use the techniques of the abbatoir to kill them like “sheep and oxen” (4.3.3)—while both operations (we can assume) are left largely to our imagination, the butcher is congratulated for his brutality during a battle scene, so it seems likely that he would have been staged wielding something along the lines of a blood-soaked meat cleaver. The butcher’s violent blood shedding associatively links him with a kind of brutal open body, but the hard, strong tools of the artisans’ trades can be seen as extensions of their hard, strong—closed—bodies. John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao is another example of a play that offers up physical skill as spectacle, although in this instance it is a spectacle of beauty rather than spine-tingling violence. In one scene, when Phao ferries Venus across the river to Syracuse, the explicit foregrounding of his laboring body is particularly telling. Venus asks Phao if he can “devise any pastime” “to pass the time in [his] boat”; to which he responds, “If the wind be with me, I can angle, or tell tales; if against me, it will be pleasure for you to see me take pains.” Venus’s pleasure will come from watching Phao’s powerful body at work, either skilfully handling a fishing line or battling rough waters with his oar. Venus and Phao’s exchange assumes that the spectacle of the strong male body engaged in physical labor or activity is a pleasurable one.

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Naturally, the audience would not have witnessed an actual ferryman rowing a boat across a river. One does not always see work itself; however, in concert with the choreographed action on stage, the repeated suggestions and calls on the imagination to envision spectacles of work in action are significant, as they suggest that such imaginings provide pleasure. The medieval guild theater operates on the same aesthetic assumption but seems to have more often actually staged the processes of work than did the early modern theater. Examples of onstage work displays include the York “Building of the Ark” and Chester’s “Noah’s Flood,” which suggest that an entire ark is constructed during the production. A 1976 BBC Play of the Month production of the The Chester Mystery Cycle re-creates this remarkable feat in a few short minutes.28 Episodes enacting the crucifixion and/or the removal of Christ from the cross, such as the York “Crucifixion” by the Pinners and the Chester “Crucifixion” by the Ironmongers, revolve around these technically difficult and dangerous procedures, the mechanics of which would have been fascinating to watch and most certainly part of the attraction for the audience. It takes an enormous amount of strength to lift a cross with a body on it off the ground and then carry it a distance; the York “Crucifixion” calls for four men to do this together, and even four strong men would have struggled with the labor, as the episode suggests. Work and the manly strength and skill necessary for it are visually foregrounded in these and several other episodes.29 One might argue that plays wherein guildsmen present themselves as the torturers of Christ hardly put working men in a favorable light.30 But these more horrific episodes also sustain the masculine status of the guildsmen who take them on and foreground the intersection of work and manliness that I see operating in early English theater. Through the visual language of physical action, the plays suggest that a prodigious power and capacity for violence belonged to working men and was directly connected with their identities as workers in rough trades such as butchery and building. Although this violence is ordered by the elite authorities, it is executed by working men with their tools and technologies; raw, violent, physical power belongs not to the male elites but to the male workers. I’m not suggesting that the guildsmen of medieval towns were intentionally presenting themselves as a social threat. But whatever their intent, these plays affirm the capacity of working men for violent action, and, consciously or unconsciously, this may have been thrilling for audience and actors alike. The effect of this self-presentation must have been similar to that of the rebels’ characterization in 2 Henry VI, in which Jack Cade and his fellow artisan rebels, with their work-hardened bodies and the tools of their trades, have the power, skills, and weapons to terrorize their adversaries and disrupt social order. As Foucault reminds us, forms of public violence authorize the “absolute right” and “absolute hold” on violence

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that the state possesses (Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 154). In both the medieval and Renaissance theaters, whatever actual desire or potential the working men on the stages—and in the audiences—might have had for violent social disruption, the opportunity to show it off or view it as an attribute of the working classes offered a vicarious experience that challenged the political elite’s absolute hold on violence. In such hierarchical societies, there may well have been satisfaction in this challenge. While work was exhibited proudly as the essence of masculinity in both the medieval cycle plays and early modern English theater, the burdens of the working man are also openly articulated. Joseph, of Chester’s “The Annunciation and Nativity,” highlights his occupational status, but he also complains about the tax levied by Octavian. With words that would no doubt have resonated with the many in the audience who struggled to make their living, he laments that age and lack of strength have led to small earnings: “for great age and no power / I won no good this seven year” (371–72). Equally likely to have drawn recognition is his griping about the unfairness of a head tax levied on the poor as well as the rich: “Ah, life sir, tell me, I thee pray: / shall poor as well as rich pay? / By my fay, sir, I hope nay. / That were a wondrous wrong” (392–95). The Christ of the guild drama is the common man’s Christ, one who will release working men from such burdens; when in the York “Judgement Day” play he voices his accusations toward the damned, he directs them not at disbelievers or heretics but at the rich, the greedy, the oppressors of the common and the poor, the hard of heart. There is no lack of sympathetic material on the subject of inequities between rich and poor in early modern drama. As I discuss thoroughly in chapter 1, that inequity shows itself in The Shoemaker’s Holiday primarily through the disproportionate military burdens the working classes are subjected to, when the journeyman Ralph wounds a leg in battle while the decadent aristocrat Lacey evades his military responsibilities even after lecturing Ralph on his patriotic duty. The economic vulnerability of the rural mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (chapter 3) is openly displayed for the audience both in their trenchant longing for annuities from the Duke and their need to be deferential to the elite characters, who derive pleasure from mocking them. And while the charismatic artisan rebels of 2 Henry VI (chapter 2) are not unambiguously sympathetic characters, their discontent is represented as the well-known, and to many minds justified, discontent of contemporary food and enclosure rioters. Indeed, when Jack Cade shores up his cause by linking it to ancient English rights, his resistance to oppressive socioeconomic changes associates his masculine identity with a true English one. The multiple ways working men entered into cultural discourses of early modern London is manifest at the level of theatrical genre. Different

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genres do different cultural work, and the discourses deployed by a particular genre are, in part, determined by the problems that genre is meant to resolve. I organize each chapter of Manly Mechanicals around the “fluid and supple” relationship between a dramatic genre and the particular ideological conflicts or desires that are “represented through the discursive strategies of [that] particular dramatic form” (DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, 49). Dramatic genre and ideological treatment of a certain topic are never exact or absolute fits, of course; however, I do see genre as “a set of interpretations, of ‘frames’ or ‘fixes’ on the world” connected with “kinds of knowledge and experience” (de Bruyn, “Genre Criticism,” 80). They are, in Fredric Jameson’s words, “essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (The Political Unconscious, 105). Different genres work out particular types or categories of concerns, often, but not always, drawing similar conclusions or constructing discourses with a particular ideological valence. Thus, taking genre into consideration allows us to examine working bodies from a variety of angles or lenses and to understand how the stage sought to construct and situate early modern male working bodies within particular frameworks of social concerns. Organizing the book’s chapters around genre offers a perspective on how discourses of the working man’s masculinity are constructed differently from different institutions but in negotiation with the constructions of other institutions. Of course, as Jameson stresses, the ideological function that is mediated by genre is always historically contingent. And not only do “proper uses” change; cultural artifacts do too. The set of conventions that is a genre and their attached meanings shift into new configurations in a process as complex as that of all discourses. Genre categories, then, are useful but limited heuristic tools, not ontological entities, just as the ideological concerns that I link with particular genres are social constructs of an historic moment, and are thus always unstable, rather than inherent, conjunctions. In chapter 1, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield,” I primarily examine “chronicle comedies” (Howard, Theater, 20), a subset of “chronicle plays,”31 which are developed around fragments of history or historical legend that feature the laudatory accomplishments of the middling sort. While these plays “confirm . . . the pre-eminence of the monarch” (Howard, Theater, 21) and extend an attitude of unwavering loyalty to him, the dramatic focus develops around the lives and concerns of commoners. Many plays in this genre belong more broadly to the genre of city plays, and indeed The Shoemaker’s Holiday is sometimes understood as a city comedy, though of the celebratory variety rather than the satiric.32 Celebratory city comedies and chronicle comedies, unlike satiric city comedies

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(discussed in chapter 4), draw on and contribute to a discourse of the lowborn male working body that focuses on its strength and vitality as an asset to the military and economic needs of the realm. Work, productivity, and vigorous, work-hardened bodies are represented in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) and George A Greene (1599) as the defining factors of a quintessentially English masculinity, and claims to political power and social status for artisans are forged on the basis of this masculinity. But The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s celebration of artisanal masculinity has an insidious underside: extolling work as a central characteristic of masculinity and a common ethic shared by artisans facilitated the construction of a class of wage laborers, by creating pride in work and discrediting commoners who did not. The construction of a work-centered masculinity also supported the emerging patriarchal ideology of workplace gender relations that would eventually insist upon clear distinctions between domestic and productive labor. The Shoemaker’s Holiday elides actual sixteenth- and seventeenth-century power differentials among men within guild society and instead, presents sexual difference as the defining difference of the workplace. The threat posed by the economic importance of sixteenth-century women’s contribution to market production is revealed by the representation of their bodies as physically grotesque. The plays I focus on in my second chapter, “Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Laborer’s Body in Plays of Historical Rebellion,” take as their main subject political history, a genre of history writing in which the aristocracy and the monarch are the most significant players. Not surprisingly, given the social, political, and economic change—some would say turmoil—of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, political history plays of the period stage a great deal of tension in the relationships between aristocrats and commoners. I examine plays in which this tension emerges in scenes or subplots of commoner rebellion, focusing particularly on Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, alongside of the anonymous Life and Death of Jack Straw, which enacts many of the same themes, and the anonymous Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (c. 1590), the play I give most attention to in this chapter, like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, expresses fascination with and revels in the hyper-masculinity of the male working body. Unlike Dekker’s play, though, Shakespeare’s sensationalistic representation seems intended to evoke fear, as well as pleasure. Jack Cade and his fellow artisan rebels, in their brutal ruthlessness, are frightening as well as exciting, and the puissant masculinity of their work-hardened bodies—particularly Jack Cade’s—underscores the failure of aristocratic and monarchical masculinity in the play, pointing to the possibility that some audience members identified with and admired the bellicose artisans. Furthermore, the performative skill of the rebels’ jesting fills the stage with appealing play, and they control a great deal of

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the political rhetoric of the drama through their festive, self-referential, sometimes self-parodic black humor. That the athletic and enormously popular Will Kemp may have played Cade further suggests the potential charisma associated with the role in performance. While political history plays take part in the discursive construction of aristocratic masculinity, my chapter examines instances within this genre in which the masculinity of the rebel-laborer’s body forces aristocratic masculinity into negotiations for hegemony. Romantic comedies work out the politics of the sex-gender system, and in chapter 3 of Manly Mechanicals, “What Kind of Man is Bottom? Sex, Civility and Manly Difference in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and Sappho and Phao,” I shift my focus from the threatening working bodies of history plays to the sexually potent erotic bodies of lowborn men in romantic comedies. Romantic comedies privilege eroticized heterosexual love, but they also express anxieties about eruptions of animal sensuality, anxieties that could be projected onto lowborn men. I examine Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost as a particularly visible example of this anxiety. The two other plays I examine in this chapter— Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594) and John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao (1584)—stage an aristocratic lady’s involvement with a working man of low estate as an instance of social shame, suggesting the potential danger of sexually potent laboring men cuckolding aristocrats. Additionally, in MSND, the political threat of rebellious artisans who would rape elite women (as in the Quarto version of 2 Henry VI and other plays) continues to lurk below the surface, though in both plays the sexuality of laboring men is by no means entirely demonized. Laboring bodies in romantic comedies are sexy as well as sexual, sexually appealing as well as sexually potent. And in MSND, the juxtaposition of aristocratic violence with artisanal courtesy ultimately demands the question: which is the beast, and which the gentleman? The successful adoption by Phao and Bottom of elite codes of civility and courtesy exposes faultlines in the dominant gender ideologies that shore up elite male gender privilege. In my final chapter, “‘What do ye lack?’: The Shopkeeper’s Masculinity in Early Seventeenth-Century London Comedies,” I deal with the changes that occur on the seventeenth-century stage when the most commonly represented working man no longer engages in physical, productive labor but is, instead, a shopkeeper whose work within the commodity circulation economy is less physically demanding. The shopkeepers represented in seventeenth-century city comedies such as The Honest Whore Parts 1 & 2 (1604 and 1630), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), and Eastward Ho (1605), among others, are neither lauded for the work they do, celebrated as an asset to the military needs of the kingdom, nor presented as dangerous and exciting; instead, they are satirized for being

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insufficiently masculine. This genre of plays anxiously scrutinizes the effects of increased commercial activity on the sexually potent, physically powerful male working body and suggests that a shift in activity from making to selling can result in the diminishment of aggressive English artisan masculinity. Shopkeepers’ willingness to please constitutes an emasculating submissiveness that is connected with transgressions of gender and sexual codes. Candido, the master linen draper of The Honest Whore, neither fights when audaciously provoked, nor, the play hints, satisfies his wife sexually. Manly Mechanicals opens a place for working men in the critical conversation of Renaissance literary studies and, more specifically, in the field of Renaissance masculinity studies. In this book, I present an argument for the significance of manually working men to early modern English discourses of masculinity and particularly to the embodiment of those discourses on the stage. As I have suggested above, working men were integral to the English theatrical tradition in which they organized and performed plays, and they used the theatrical forum to construct and display a range of social identities of working men to a broad public. Mark Breitenberg writes that “any social system whose premise is the unequal distribution of power and authority always and only sustains itself in constant defence of the privileges of some of its members and by the constraint of others” (Anxious Masculinity, 3). Breitenberg’s project is to uncover and deconstruct the ways in which the construction of sexual difference and the feminine reproduce aristocratic male privilege, but aristocratic male privilege was also sustained by the construction of class difference and the policing of borders between high masculinities and low ones. Subtle and nuanced understandings of the ways in which “low” working men could achieve cultural capital through their iterations of masculinity are crucial for recovering their challenges to the hegemony of aristocratic patriarchy and their place in the historical record. Those challenges are the subject of the study that follows.

1 Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield

THE TITLE OF THOMAS DEKKER’S THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY refers to the staging within the play of a civic holiday celebration in the name of the shoemakers’ guild.1 The celebration is of common artisan men, who are staged throughout engaged in praiseworthy activity. What Shoemaker’s Holiday presents as worthy of praise and celebration makes the play an interesting historical artifact, and an important register of social, cultural and economic change in early modern England. At the center of the play, and at the center of its system of values, is a workshop—the typical household production unit of the late medieval and early modern English world, which was typically represented as a humble place outside the complex circulations of power, prestige, and national affairs. In Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), however, the household workshop and the artisan men who inhabit it are represented as the energy and strength of England, and the source of the major assets of the emerging nation: work, productivity, and patriotism. The politics of a play that displaces age-old social hierarchies to insist that it is artisans who matter, not aristocrats and gentlemen, are worthy of notice in and of themselves. The Shoemaker’s Holiday stands as probably the best example of such a play in the early modern period, although Robert Greene’s George A Greene: The Pinner of Wakefield (1593–94; 1599)2 does some of the same cultural work. However, both plays are particularly significant because, by expressing their displacements of high and low in terms of the body, they run counter to current understandings of dominant and emerging early modern social and cultural constructions of the body. The bodies of the lauded artisans are foregrounded again and again, and are usually found engaged in some kind of vigorous activity. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, they feast with gusto, require large volumes of beer to quench their thirst, make bawdy references to their sexual activity, and dance morris dances with such vigor that, as one journeyman expressively puts it, their buttocks go “jiggy-joggy like a quagmire” (13.30–31). And, of course, they work, with hammers, awls, leather and other rough tools and materials. In George A Greene, the hero of which is “framde, / Like to the picture of stout Hercules” (Er), the artisans’ activity is generally combative, although a band of shoemakers is seen onstage working, and there is no dearth of 44

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hearty feasts. Common artisan bodies and the activities they engage in are generally written as “low” in early modern discourses, but in these plays the artisan body is written as vigorous, vital and crucial to the nation; it is, in fact, the measure of national value, the foundation of the nation. The characteristics of the low body are perhaps best known from Mikhail Bakhtin’s proposal that in the Renaissance “high” official and “low” popular cultures were structured by the canons of the grotesque and the classical body. Bakhtin’s grotesque body resembles the humoral body of Medieval and Renaissance science: it is porous and permeable; its boundaries with the rest of the world are fluid; and its relationship to the processes of birth, death, procreation, and digestion is emphasized. Its physical needs and its pleasures are evident: it is a vital, mobile, corporeal body. The classical body, on the other hand, is the body whose corporeality is denied; it is the body represented as self-contained, whole, pure, and closed off from the world, the body whose relationships to the processes of digestion, birth, death, and procreation are hidden from view, the isolated body that is “alone, fenced off from other bodies” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 29). The classical body is, essentially, more spirit than body; the classical-grotesque dichotomy reflects the Medieval and Renaissance hierarchy of mind over body. This hierarchy was gendered, with significant social implications, in terms of male as mind or spirit and female as body.3 As many scholars have noted, the grotesque body was assailed in the early modern period by what Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing process.” In Gail Paster’s words, “the canons of bodily propriety underwent a significant transformation in sixteenth-century Europe as a self-reinforcing mechanism of social (and, I would add, gender) differentiation. Increased expectations of bodily refinement and of physical and emotional self-control worked to lower thresholds of shame” (Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 14). Eventually, as Paster and others have noted, even the medical model of the humoral body, which opposed constraints on bodily functions “was repressed and transformed over time” (ibid., 16). But even while the humoral model remained the dominant medical model, certain bodily behaviors became less acceptable in polite society and, thus, became another means by which status distinctions were drawn. Elias, Paster, and other scholars such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have documented how dominant cultural authorities assigned value to the physically controlled and contained body and associated that body with culturally superior, elite social groups. Representations of uncontrolled bodies were used as a means of reinforcing the low status of the socially powerless and those who threatened conservative social hierarchies; the gendering of the uncontrolled body as feminine worked to consolidate gender hierarchies and also contributed to the shame attached to the open body, making it a trenchant distinguisher of high and low.

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But while there are indeed many historical traces of how “‘high’ languages [art, literature, philosophy, theology, statecraft, law] attempt to legitimate their authority by appealing to values inherent in the classical body” (Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 21) and correlatively, how the grotesque body is transcoded onto cultural forms, spheres, activities and social classes deemed “low” by discourses in positions of power, critics and theorists who have discussed early modern bodies have largely ignored historical traces of contestation that problematize the high/low paradigm of somatic symbolization. Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday and Greene’s George A Greene are evidence of contestation. Whereas scholarship on Renaissance social identity and the body has tended to focus on either the ability of the impure, incomplete corporeal body to destabilize and decentralize the structure of dominant authority,4 or on the possibilities for upward mobility through the mimicry that a social system reliant, at least in part, on external signs, invites,5 Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene represent “low” bodies appropriating rather than subverting dominant authority and valuing corporeality rather than mimicking high canons of bodily behavior. High canons of bodily behavior could and did inspire some anxiety in early modern England, particularly in their realization in court-based behaviors. In a world where the playing field for aristocratic masculinity was increasingly the court rather than the battlefield, the parameters of male identity were changing dramatically. Wallace MacCaffrey notes that the fifteenth-century requirements of elite men—“the brutal skills of the armed retainer, half soldier, half-gangster”—had shifted in the sixteenth century: “now it was the suppler skills of the courtier, suave and persuasive, or the administrator, clear-headed and literate, which were in demand” (“Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” 95). The masculinity of that suave and supple courtier was sometimes problematic. Not only did courtiers consort with women far more regularly than did warriors—a dangerous activity in that proximity to, as well as desire for, women was understood to potentially erode masculinity; but also, any courtier who adhered to the dictates for social and political success was an exemplum of refined bodily countenance and, thus, in danger of effeminization through over refinement. Thomas Laqueur, citing Castiglione’s The Courtier, discusses how the self-contained, hard, closed body of the male could be seen as in danger of dissolving into imperfect feminine openness: Men can gain a “soft and womanish” countenance through over refinement—curling their hair, plucking their brows, pampering “themselves in every point like the most wanton and dishonest women in the world.” Men of this sort seemed to lose the hardness and stability of male perfection and melt into unstable but protean imperfection. Becoming effeminate becomes a sort of phantasmagoric dissolution: “Their members were ready

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to flee from one an other . . . a man woulde weene they were at that instant yielding up the ghost.” (Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 125)

The masculinity of the elite, and its emerging canons of refinement, could teeter dangerously near the feminine realm of artifice, fashion, appearance and superficiality. And canons of refinement were powerful—they provided the increasing numbers of socially ambitious middling sorts with an accessible means of mimicking and thus associating themselves with the elite. I would like to suggest, however, that the anxieties provoked by the emerging and spreading court-based constructions of masculinity opened a space for positively valenced constructions of other types of masculinity, such as that of the artisan, as found in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene. This construction takes its cues from courtier behavior as a model to define itself against. The idleness and disdain for work that traditionally defined the elite classes are replaced by an ethic that puts work at the center of male identity, and bodily refinement and gentle manners are replaced by rough corporeality and hearty vitality. But although the excesses of elite canons of masculinity and bodily propriety provide an exploitable weak spot to boost the social status of an artisanal class, in The Shoemaker’s Holiday elite males are not the only social group stigmatized in this vision of an artisan’s utopia. The artisan’s utopia is distinctly a man’s world, and within the idealized workshop the bodies of the female artisans and servants who work alongside the men are denigrated. In a bifurcation that takes place along gender lines, the low body effectively becomes divided into aspects of disgust and aspects of celebration with the disgusting aspects transcoded onto the women of the workshop. The Shoemaker’s Holiday reinscribes traditional gender inequities in ways I will explore in the second half of this chapter. But first I will look more closely at some of the complexities of the adulation of the male artisan body in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The construction and celebration of an artisanal masculinity involves a critique of a lazy, effeminate aristocracy and constitutes a discursive means of forwarding the place and status of artisans in early modern English society. These, I would argue, are the overt intentions of the play; however, an historically informed reading can also see regressive elements in the play’s adulation of artisans. The celebration of artisans also consolidates social and political hierarchies of high and low that work against artisans. By the late sixteenth century, the artisan workshop represented in The Shoemaker’s Holiday was in actuality disappearing as the primary center of production, as structures of work moved toward the regimes of capitalism. Tensions between masters and their journeymen and apprentices often ran high because of conditions that were transforming most of the artisan class into a wage-earning working class. The Shoemaker’s Holiday

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depicts artisans as a cohesive social group and offers a nostalgic, idealized picture of the late sixteenth-century work world which masks the considerably grimmer reality. Through its sanitized representation, the play erases artisan protest against unfavorable conditions and strips the powerful artisan body of its dangerous agency to act against such conditions. The increased status given to the productive laboring man and his corporeal masculinity deflects attention from the transformation of working men into a laboring class. Thus, ironically, the adulation of the artisan body makes possible its pacification and submission to capitalist work regimes. The Shoemaker’s Holiday allows us a glimpse of the contradictory historical process by which work and production gained significant social value in conjunction with the development of an undervalued and underprivileged working class. *

*

*

The main plot of The Shoemaker’s Holiday stages the upward mobility of Simon Eyre, master shoemaker, who does not mimic the aristocracy when he achieves prominence but rather retains the cultural markers of his social group. From the beginning and throughout, his activities and countenance identify him as an artisan. He is first seen negotiating to make shoes for Lacey in exchange for Ralph’s freedom from conscription; the next scene with Eyre has him “making himself ready” (23, sd) for work, one of many scenes in which his body is materialized on the stage as a body that works in a workshop with other artisan men. Although a sixteenth-century master who had become Lord Mayor would likely be involved primarily or even exclusively in trade rather than manufacture and might not even have practical knowledge of his guild’s handicraft,6 after Simon Eyre becomes Lord Mayor he continues to be seen on stage with his men, whom he calls his “brethren” (20.39; 21.6). He also insists on his identity as a “handicraftsman” (21.10) and a shoemaker, and adamantly resists the idea that he need transform his artisanal identity in any way in his new roles of Sheriff and then Lord Mayor. Much of Eyre’s characterization as an artisan depends upon his loud voice and blustery manner, bodily cultural markers that he refuses to modify. His response to his wife when she suggests that “he must learn now to put on gravity” (11.10) is “Peace Madgy, a fig for gravity” (11.11), and as she continues to urge him to eschew his rough manners for finer ones, she is heartily abused for her efforts. Simon is perfectly confident that his rough ways are appropriate and that he knows how to speak and behave toward the highest of authorities: “Sim Eyre knows how to speak to a pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamberlain an’ he were here. And shall I melt, shall I droop before my sovereign? No!” (20.55–58). When, in the next scene, he meets

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the king, his hearty bellowing has not much lessened. He beseeches the king to “pardon my rude behavior. I am a handicraftsman, yet my heart is without craft. I would be sorry at my soul that my boldness should offend my king” (21.9–12), but his words seem less an apology than a proud assertion of his cultural identity. Ben Jonson would later write that “[l]anguage most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” Eyre, like Hobson in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, materializes through his speech as a hearty “huffcap,” a rough and merry presence who redefines the parameters of proper countenance. While for Simon Eyre there is little distance between his identity as Lord Mayor and shoemaker, the other Lord Mayor featured, Lord Mayor Oatley, is constructed very differently. Although Oatley also has company origins—he is a grocer—he is never seen in the context of the guild he belongs to, and he has adopted all the trappings of the gentry lifestyle: he has a house in the country, a daughter who doesn’t work, and recreational hunters on his land. But it is Simon Eyre, not the snobbish Oatley, who achieves distinction and familiarity with the King, who having heard what a “huffcap” Simon is, anticipates meeting him and fears that Simon’s “madness will be dashed clean out of countenance” (19.12) by his royal presence. When the King meets Oatley, on the other hand, he is not sure who he is and must ask a nobleman in an aside for confirmation that Oatley was the previous Lord Mayor (21.75). Indeed, the hearty vitality that is represented as intrinsically connected to Simon’s identity as an artisan is seen to renew the civic realm. Even the snobbish Lord Mayor Oatley feels the invigorating effect that Simon breathes into elite society; he gives Simon a hearty welcome to his home saying, “By my troth, I’ll tell thee, Master Eyre, / It does me good, and all my brethren, / That such a madcap fellow as thyself / Is entered into our society” (11.6–9). But while Simon is a merry madcap, he is not merely merry entertainment; his actions as Lord Mayor make it clear that the artisans are worthy of the status the play grants them. Simon is greatly respected for his work in office: a nobleman tells the king, “thus much I’ll assure your Majesty: / In all his actions that concern his state / He is as serious, provident and wise, / As full of gravity amongst the grave / As any Mayor has been these many years” (19.5–9). The artisanal takeover of the sphere of power staged in this play vehemently resists mimicry of the newly forming canons of civilized behavior which have been associated with upward mobility in early modern Europe, if not as a causal factor, then as an external signifier that reinforced identity within a privileged social group. Instead, the most important body in the play iterates its performance as a rough and boisterous “low” artisan within a privileged context outside of its usual social sphere, and subtly disrupts, at least on this stage and for this moment, a dominant discourse of civic and national authority.

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The worthiness of artisanal identity is similarly insisted upon in George A Greene. The patriotic hero of the play is a pinner who, significantly, bears the name of the patron saint of England. The patriotic hero’s identity is continuously yoked to his occupation as a pinner, first in the title and then within in the text of the play; echoing the title, George identifies himself at the outset as “George a Greene, / Right merrie pinner of Wakefield towne, / That hath phisicke for a foole, / Pilles for a traytour that doeth wrong his sovereign” (B1v). At the end of the play, after he has proved his claim to be a “true liegeman to [the] king” (A5v), and otherwise thoroughly demonstrated his value, he declines knighthood, preferring to maintain his yeoman identity: “let me live and die a yeoman still: / So was my father, / So must live his sonne” (Gr). Like Simon Eyre, George a Greene will not turn his back on the identity he has forged in the work world that he comes from. And George’s blustery, salt-of-the-earth, common-sense mentality—he has “phisicke for a foole” and “Pilles for a traytour that doeth wrong his sovereign”—like Eyre’s “gravitas,” allows him to be a leader of men. The townspeople choose him as the spokesman for their resistance to the aristocratic rebels over the town Justice, who seems to accept unflinchingly George’s authority as the natural good thing that it is, despite the blow to his own authority that it implicitly delivers. Just as Eyre, on becoming sheriff, is feasted by Lord Mayor Oatley, George a Greene’s entry into the realm of civic authority is marked by an invitation from a higher authority, the Justice, to be his guest. Eyre’s relationship to his king is also mirrored in George A Greene: George’s king, Edward IV, is as eager to meet the well-reputed George as Henry VI, Simon’s king, is to meet Simon. Having heard him spoken of in nearly legendary terms, Edward asks Cuddie and Warwick about him and, upon hearing their report, the king exclaims, “Why this is wondrous, . . . / Sore do I long to see this George a Greene” (E1r). Shortly thereafter, he decides to go north in disguise in order to meet George. The “merrie journey” (E1r) he foresees and the happy feasting that ensues when he gets there construct a vision of a merry old England with hearty artisan and king at the center, an England defined by king and commoner with little place for the treacherous, traitorous aristocrats of the elite. In the worlds of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, it is unnecessary for the artisan body to transform itself in order to assume a position of power. On the contrary, these plays participate fully in the aesthetics of staging powerful working bodies as a source of both commendation and visual pleasure. The Shoemaker’s Holiday presents the shoemakers performing a lively morris dance, as well as numerous scenes of the men at work making shoes. George A Greene has its own shoemaker staged working with his tools on display, and although George himself is not seen laboring at his craft, on three separate occasions in this short play

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the audience is witness to the spectacle of the pinner, who “For stature . . . is framed / Like to the picture of stoute Hercules” (857–59), fighting multiple men at once: three traitorous aristocrats, then Robin Hood and two of his men, then a band of rowdy shoemakers, whose custom it is to challenge strangers passing through the village. George, we are told, “is good inough for three” (864), and given his description, he must have been played by a well-built man. So, too, are we told that Robin Hood and his followers are large, strapping fellows: “We are no babes, man, look upon our limmes” (1058). Muscled lowborn bodies in action are the main fare of this stage-play. It is not only the case that artisan bodies are celebrated for their vigor in these plays. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, another imperative is that aristocratic bodies transform themselves into artisan bodies in order to gain respect and worthiness. The relationship between Lacey and the shoemakers is the most important relationship between artisanal and elite men in The Shoemaker’s Holiday; in the figure of Lacey, a competition of embodied masculinities is played out. Lacey, a foppish, decadent aristocrat whose name is a pun on his style, is redeemed by his foray into the world of the shoemakers. Something like a reversal of what we’ve come to understand as “self-fashioning” is embraced when Lacey leaves his courtier ways to learn the shoemaking trade and adopt the shoemakers’ ethos. His courtier ways are the object of ridicule. They appear as an excess of over refinement and pride, that all but disguises the man beneath; Rose’s servant describes him: By my troth, I scant knew him—here ‘a wore a scarf, and here a scarf, here a bunch of feathers, and here precious stones and jewels, and a pair of garters—O monstrous!—like one of our yellow silk curtains at home here in Old Ford House, here in Master Bellymount’s chamber. I stood at our door in Cornhill, looked at him, he at me indeed; spake to him, but he not to me, not a word. “Marry gup,” thought I, “with a wanion!” He passed by me as proud—“Marry, foh, are you grown humorous?” thought I—and so shut the door, and in I came. (2.27–37)

Lacey, in his role as aristocratic courtier, is the epitome of the early-modern fashion slave, and this description easily has a place within the variety of early modern discourses that marked ostentatious, extravagant dress as feminine or effeminizing.7 That, according to Sybil, he is “humorous” as well as overdressed further marks his as a feminized body. In early modern psycho-social conceptions of the subject, a humorous temperament was indistinguishable from a humorous body, and the two were homologously linked to the feminine. Excessive humour was a differentiating factor between maleness and femaleness, and, thus, an excessively humorous man was an effeminate one (Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 36–38).

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Eventually, however, Lacey is rehabilitated among the shoemakers. He trades in his scarves and feathers for “St. Hugh’s bones” (4.46), the tools of the shoemaking trade, proudly itemized for the audience, catalogue style, by Firk,8 and is initiated into the workshop fraternity with a round of beer drinking. The aristocratic courtier’s body can then become part of the play’s celebrated aesthetics of the body, and he appears on stage both working (7.89) and taking part in the morris dance (57 sd), a dance form distinctly associated with plebian culture.9 When Simon Eyre says to Rose, “those silken fellows are but painted images, outsides, outsides, Rose. Their inner linings are torn” (11.43), he is invoking a “conventional binary of inner and outer, with the inward valued as virtuous and manly, the outward deplored as superficial and feminine” (Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, 126). That “silken fellows” have innards at all may be a concession to their putative manhood; that inner manhood, however, is compromised. Eyre is referring to Lacey with this comment, but at that point Lacey has already attained the attributes of masculinity that Eyre values. The critique of courtier manhood shifts to focus on Hammon, the “proper gentleman, / A citizen by birth, fairly allied” (6.60–61) whom Oatley wishes to match with his daughter, and who functions as something of a scapegoat, never redeemed nor pulled into the feel-good comic action even at the end of the play. It may be that Hammon is treated especially harshly because he is a city gentleman with social pretensions; his allegiances are to the values and lifestyles of the aristocracy. As Smallwood and Wells point out, “in a play filled with scenes of men working, he is always idle, standing, observing Jane in her shop, affecting the pursuits of the nobility at his first entrance in the hunt” (R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells, eds, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 36). Hammon stands for all that Simon Eyre and his men stand against, and the two present competing constructions of the values of the city and citizens. Both are citizen members of the middling sphere, but while Hammon looks to the aristocracy to fashion his selfhood, Simon Eyre insists that the middle be defined by the world of work below it, from which he has emerged. Significantly, when Hammon is represented as not physically idle, his activity is recreational, and he is inept. In the hunting scene, Hammon loses track of the deer, which is then captured and killed by a group of Lord Oatley’s servants, including Sybil the maid; a mere serving-class woman proves to be more adept at lofty aristocratic enterprises than the gentleman. Hammon’s verbal acumen, another important trademark of the courtier, is undermined as well. His wooing is ineffectual at best and insincere at worst; with his use of elaborate word-play and rhymed couplets, he is “consistently presented in terms of linguistic artifice” (ibid., 34). Rejecting Hammon’s words, Rose invokes a binary of inner and outer similar to

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Simon Eyre’s: “Can it be possible you love me so? / No, no; within those eyeballs I espy / Apparent likelihoods of flattery. / Pray now, let go my hand” (8.5–8). Hammon’s dishonest language is further revealed when he turns his attention towards Jane, as he convinces her to marry him based on the dubious revelation that Ralph has died in battle. Hammon’s verbal manipulations contrast unfavorably with the bold, straightforward language of Simon Eyre. By the end of the play, Hammon is left wifeless because his objects of love interest, Rose and Jane, prefer shoemakers to courtiers. In the world of this play, there will be no regeneration of the nation’s population from the gentrified citizen; the productive classes will also produce the next generation of Englishmen. Similarly, in George A Greene, Bettris, the love interest, rejects advances from elite men in favor of the yeoman. Lord Bonfield promises Bettris riches in the form of social elevation if she will forsake the pinner—“gentle girl, if thou wilt forsake / The pinner, and be my love, I will advaunce thee high” (B2v)—but Bettris categorically renounces earls, knights, and barons as inferior to the “merrie pinner”: “I care not for Earle, nor yet for knight, / Nor Baron tha is so bold: / For George a Greene the merrie pinner, / He hath my heart in hold” (B3). Rebuked by Bettris’s loyalty, Lord Bonfield’s promise looks much like bribery, and Bettris’s choice of George over Lord Bonfield and his status reinforces the message that merry workingmen are the true Englishmen, despite their low ranking in dominant schemes of social hierarchy. The superior manliness of the English artisan is asserted in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV as well, wherein Hobs the Tanner will marry his daughter to a courtier only if he’ll leave service and take a trade. To Ned, the King’s butler (really the king in disguise), who asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he responds: I like thee so well, Ned, that hadst thou an occupation—for “service is no Heritage”: “a young courtier, an old beggar”—I could find in my heart to cast her away upon thee. And, if thou wilt forsake the court, and turn tanner, or bind thyself to a shoemaker in Lichfield, I’ll give thee twenty nobles ready money, with my Nell, and trust thee with a dicker of leather, to set up thy trade. (I.14.59–65)

Marriageable men are associated with production and hard work, not with leisure, elite culture, or the court. Hammon, deficient in both production and reproduction, also disgraces himself by bringing bribery into the realm of courtship and marriage. Linking himself to the superficial values of commercial culture, Hammon attempts to buy Jane, both from herself and her husband, when he appears at the wedding. He eyes Jane in a shop window where she works, as if she herself were a commodity, and then enters the shop and asks

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her, “How sell you this hand?” (12.25). At the aborted wedding, Hammon offers Ralph twenty pounds for Jane, allowing the shoemaker to reveal his superior values toward love and money: “dost thou think a shoemaker is so base to be bawd to his own wife for commodity? Take thy gold and choke with it! Were I not lame, I would make thee eat thy words” (18.84– 87). This episode constructs cultural anxieties about material consumption, projects them onto the elite, and shores up the play’s portrayal of the artisan class as a social group with superior values. Hammon’s refined body, a body that buys instead of works, consumes rather than produces, marks him as a failure and ostracizes him from the work-centered English community of the play.10 The somatic constructions in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, with their emphasis on the value and worthiness of bodies made rough by work, go against the dominant constructions of power and worthiness of the period, which emphasized the qualities of spirit and reason over corporeality and used this emphasis to justify the power of elite males over male commoners and women. The normative bodies in this play are artisan bodies, and in The Shoemaker’s Holiday they are specifically connected to sexualized and phallicized power. Artisanal acumen is aligned with sexual vitality; when Eyre lobbies Lacey to have Ralph released from war duty on account of his recent marriage, he uses language that conflates Ralph’s economic duties fulfilled by work with his sexual duties; Jane, Simon Eyre claims, will be left uncared for because Ralph is “as good a workman at a prick and awl as any in our trade” (1.142–143). Work as sexual activity is a constant source of puns and jokes throughout the play, as when Firk boasts that “For yerking and seaming let me alone, an’ I come to’t” (7.91). The artisan’s fitness for work and reproduction also goes hand in hand with fitness for war. Artisanal participation in the war effort is another means by which this class is lauded at the expense of the aristocracy, whose involvement is represented as minimal. Of the four thousand Englishmen who die in France, only two are “of name” (8.9), and aristocratic shirking of war duty is held up for scorn when Lacey insists that Ralph must serve because “His country’s quarrel says it must be so” (1.182–183) and then does not serve himself.11 And in George A Greene, two artisan men— George and Musgrove—fight two separate battles against aristocratic rebels, battles that foreground artisanal patriotism in the face of aristocratic treachery and underscore the power of the loyal artisan body by having it prevail against extraordinary odds. George A Greene avoids explicitly sexualizing the fighting body, but in Shoemaker’s Holiday, Ralph’s soldiering abilities, like his artisanal acumen, are expressed with phallic double-entendres. Hodge urges, “Prick thine enemies, Ralph,” (1.185) before Ralph goes to war. Similarly Firk tells him to “firk the basa mon cues”

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(1.223). Both statements inscribe sexual penetration as domination and the male artisan body as a fit agent to subordinate the English enemy. But while sex is power, it is also pleasure, as suggested by the references to Simon and Margery, and Rose and Lacey, dancing “the shaking of the sheets” (16.80; 21.29). The phallic artisanal body is productive of heirs as well as goods; Simon tells the King he hopes to beget “two or three young Lord Mayors ere I die. I am lusty still” (21.30–31). Not only is it remarkable that the procreative abilities of a commoner are celebrated, it is also notable that, unlike many history plays which commonly elide the involvement of women and sex in the begetting of sons,12 this play links lineage production directly to sexual contact with a wife, thus taking its place in the emerging naturalization of heterosexuality. Against the dominant view that sexuality compromises and effeminizes the body, destroying the integrity and wholeness of the individual, the play presents a lusty sexuality as a productive one, and the male sexual body as the power engine of this highly esteemed productivity.13 Bodily integrity and wholeness are, in fact, challenged as qualities necessary to true masculinity. When Jane chooses Ralph over Hammon, her preference for a physically mutilated man emphasizes the play’s commitment to a politics of the male body that defies high canons. Manhood is not defined in terms of the completed whole closed-off body, nor in terms of the self-sufficient individuality of the body. Jane’s preference for Ralph over Hammon drives home the point that the lame Ralph, worker and soldier, is more of a man than the physically intact Hammon, who neither works nor participates in the war. Ralph’s wounded body—a body decentered and made unsymmetrical by a lame leg, perhaps an amputated leg—is neither complete nor self-sufficient. It calls attention to its own vulnerability and to the ability of outside forces to impact upon it and change it in uncontrollable ways. Furthermore, Ralph’s wounded body is dependent for its survival upon its membership within another body; he is taken in by the social body of the guild, without whom he would be in danger of becoming destitute, like the many other veterans who came back from wars wounded and unable to find work.14 It is not, however, only the wounded body that is part of a greater body; the artisan men are all represented as a solidarity that stands together in mutual interdependence. They are bound together by the collective activity of their work and by their mutual loyalty. The men are almost always seen on stage together, and when they do appear individually, as when Firk is interrogated by Lord Oatley, his unshakeable loyalty to his guild-brothers continues to define him as part of a greater body. Simon, of course, repeatedly emphasizes his attachment to his band of shoemakers and even uses an explicitly bodily metaphor when he describes his men as the “arms of my trade” (7.61). And like the grotesque body “which was usually multiple

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teeming always part of a throng,” (Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 21), this collective body of shoemakers teems with vital energy. This is represented most emblematically in the staging of the morris dance that the shoemakers perform at Lord Mayor Oatley’s home. Dancing together, the artisans become one teeming body made up of multiple bodies moving in patterned unison; the simultaneous multiplicity and oneness of the workmen’s body is staged here. The action of the play works hard to consolidate the artisans as a unified body of powerful, energetic and productive bodies—as a class with unified interests. But in this presentation, the play seems to be engaging in what David Kastan calls “wish-fulfilling operations” (“Workshop and/as Playhouse,” 157) as a response to actual conditions in the late sixteenth-century work world. Artisans were not always unified; they were very often factionalized by differences of interest. Their powerful, energetic bodies could be productive, but they also could and did pose dangers to the social and political order. Contemporary tensions in the workplace and contemporary fears surrounding dissatisfied, unruly artisans and laborers were extensive. The realities of artisan life were often harsh, and artisan behavior was often rougher than even a celebratory model of a rough masculinity could make acceptable. To bolster claims of respectability, The Shoemaker’s Holiday answers the turmoil of the work world with a whitewashed fantasy that masks both the very real divisions within artisan society and the extensive social fears of dangerous, rebellious, and politicized artisans. While in this chapter I deal with the positively valenced male working body, in the next my focus will be on the complex discourses of danger that could surround the masculinity of that low-born working man. One of the The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s central fictions is that guilds functioned as unified, fraternal bodies—horizontal communities—rather than hierarchical, patriarchal work systems riddled with conflict between masters and their journeymen and apprentices. In the work world of the play, the master will do anything for his boys, and while this may be seen as a kind of paternalistic relationship—as when Eyre lobbies Lacey to release Ralph from conscription—it has a distinctly horizontal element in that Simon allows his men to make certain decisions. He is even guided by their advice, as when he hires Hans. At this moment in the play, the values of equality inherent in maximum employment, at a time in London of high unemployment, are given precedence over the values of maximum profit for a master at the expense of a trained artisan. The guild is presented as a place of fraternal homosociality; as Simon heartily declares, “By the Lord of Ludgate, I love my men as my life” (4.69–70). It is also a place of benevolent communality: when Ralph returns from war, he is accepted by the guild despite his lameness.15

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But even in its ideal form, the household workshop was not a place of fraternal relations; it was one of patriarchal relations. The master-apprentice relationship involved, ideally, “complete obedience and faithful service” on the part of the apprentice toward his master in return for “moral and religious instruction as well as vocational training” (Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” 222). It was also the master’s responsibility to discipline unruly apprentices. Historical evidence, including court cases of apprentices suing their masters for severe mistreatment, make it clear that the patriarchal relationship often was abused.16 In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, power struggles between the guildmaster and his men do not extend farther than squabbles over how much beer will be consumed on the guild’s tab, with Firk constantly complaining of his dry throat and Simon promising drink, then reneging on his generous orders (7.71–80). Power differentials between Simon and his men get written as jokes, as essentially harmless foibles that are not a barrier to the unity of the fraternal body. The creation of a false solidarity in The Shoemaker’s Holiday masks much of what was going on in the late sixteenth-century work world. Hierarchies at all levels of industrial organization were becoming more and more entrenched. The gap between the position of masters and that of servants, and the disparities in their interests, were widening; higher fees and greater restrictions, such as lengthened terms of apprenticeship and the requirement of creating a masterpiece, made becoming masters increasingly difficult for journeymen and apprentices (Cahn, Industry of Devotion, 21–22). Highly skilled journeymen and apprentices kept at a trainee level permanently or for longer periods of time allowed masters a greater production output and higher profits (ibid., 22). In so far as apprentice and journeyman status increasingly was not a way-station to the relative autonomy that mastership and householder status offered, the traditional guild structure itself was weakening and giving way to the creation of what would eventually be a wage-laboring proletariat (Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 48).17 The 1590s were a period of social instability and unrest, and during this period the energies and frustrations of the less privileged apprentices, journeymen and laborers often broke out into disorderly riots.18 Able bodies untethered from the patriarchal authority of a household workshop, or uncontrolled by the masters of the household to which they belonged, were a frightening phenomenon.19 A description by John Stow makes it clear what formidable destructive force a crowd of London rioters could unleash.20 The dangerous power of the rioting artisan’s body is also recorded in the drama of the period; the description of Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI as a “wild Morisco” who fights so long and fiercely that his thighs are quilled with arrows like a porcupine’s constructs the

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artisan rebel’s body as almost superhumanly vital and powerful and provides a sense of the fear inspired by the male artisan’s body, to which The Shoemaker’s Holiday seems to respond by offering powerful artisan bodies that sustain, rather than endanger, the realm. Shrove Tuesday, the traditional apprentice holiday, was particularly notorious for riots and other incidents of disorderly conduct. Apprentices were known on this day to harass prostitutes, attack brothels, assault foreigners and gentlemen, and destroy property. The situation was so extreme that mayoral precepts of the period attempted to require that apprentices be kept indoors on that day and doubled the watch on duty (Archer, The Pursuit of Stability, 3). The Shrove Tuesday holiday represented in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, however, is invested with a very different meaning. Dekker represents the invention of a merry, festive communal feast that functions as a symbol and constitutive element of not only a cohesive society of artisans but also a society that crosses over the ultimate class divisions—the King attends the celebration and eats pancakes with the apprentices.21 Dekker’s idealized presentation of the holiday and of artisan life in general, seems part of a strategy to assert the importance and respectability of the artisans of London. George A Greene’s vision of a merry England, where pinners protect the king, does the same for rural artisans. Both playwrights sanitize the public image of the unrulier elements of the artisan class in order to appease very real contemporary anxieties about the bodies they wish to celebrate. Dekker represents artisans as unified and orderly, as channelling their powerful energy into productive work and well-deserved but controlled holiday. In George A Greene, the artisans channel their abundant physical energy more directly into fighting the seemingly never-ending battle against the troublemakers of the realm. Through these representations, the plays make pleas to grant artisans social and cultural status that more commonly was attached to wealthy citizens and the aristocratic elite. But while both works overtly participate in cultural negotiations to displace deeply entrenched hierarchies of high and low, some of the ways in which the celebration of artisans take place reinscribe old hierarchies on new terms. When George a Greene declines knighthood and proudly insists on maintaining his status as a yeoman, commoners in the audience might well have received the message that it is more honorable to be a yeoman than a gentleman, especially after being treated to the spectacle of rural artisans defeating countless aristocratic traitors. The “low” artisan is presented as more worthy than the “high” aristocrat. Nevertheless, it is important to note the implications of a pride in commoner status that forestalls upward mobility; George may be honored by the King’s pleasure and attention, but he will remain within a world where his power and influence

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will always be limited. The reinscription of traditional hierarchies is more complex in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Most obviously, the political power of the rebellious artisan body is occluded as the apprentices’ Shrove Tuesday holiday is transformed from anarchic protest to escape valve, in what Terry Eagleton calls “that mutual complicity of law and liberation” (Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 26); apprentice energy is released, but in a way that is entirely unthreatening to the social order, and the protest inherent in servant unruliness is occluded. More insidiously, holiday in the play contributes to an increased control of work time; after the regular Monday holiday Hodge displays the characteristics of the self-regulating disciplined subject when he says: “Ply your work today—we loitered yesterday. To it pell-mell” (13.2–3). Changes in the length of the work week and the number of annual holidays were one of the marks of the transition from a medieval agricultural society to a modern industrialized one, and increased work time was stressed and urged by Protestant reformers, many of whom were employers who stood to gain from greater productivity.22 In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the tensions, controversies and disparities of interest that surrounded issues of work time in early modern Europe are glossed over. When the artisans will work and when they will loiter or rest is, like beer drinking, a source of humor; when Firk comically complains “O master, is’t you that speak bandog and bedlam this morning? I was in a dream, and mused what madman was got into the street so early,” (4.10–12). Eyre’s response is, “well said, Firk; well said, Firk—to work, my fine knave, to work!” (4.14–15). The play does not seem to suggest that we take the complaints too seriously; as Hodge enters the scene, he also remarks at the hour but looks forward to the day—“I could have slept this hour. Here’s a brave day towards” (4.21–22). Furthermore, one of Eyre’s favorite phrases to urge his workers on is “trip and go” (4.28; 4.122), which is the name of a morris dance (Parr 24n). Work and play are conflated, and the suggestion is made—and reinforced by the general lightheartedness of the play—that work in this household is well-orchestrated group merriment. Similarly, when Firk urges Simon to hire Hans, his rationale is that “‘twill make us work the faster” (4.48) because “He’ll make me laugh so hard that I shall work more in mirth than I can in ernest” (4.85–86). What the text attempts to produce for artisans—status—comes at a price. The Shoemaker’s Holiday represents artisans submitting with humor and discipline to the work rhythms of a soon-to-emerge capitalist regime that imposed, in E. P. Thompson’s words, “time-measurement as a means of labor exploitation” (“Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 382). The artisans earn their status through submission to a work discipline that ultimately will make them good wage-laborers for capitalism. Thus, the play foreshadows capitalist exploitation of the energetic vitality of lowborn bodies.

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The play ends on a note that reinscribes monarchical power over artisan bodies. The King gets the last word, and it is a chilling reminder that the revels will end with many of these men going off to war: “Come, lords, a while let’s revel it at home, / When all our sports and banquetings are done, / Wars must right wrongs which Frenchmen have begun” (21.192– 194). But although the King’s power over the shoemakers is underscored, there is a way in which the play, by insisting on the social, economic and cultural centrality of the artisan, constructs an artisanal sense of class pride that may be understood as working toward deflecting protest when, as a social group, they bear the brunt of social hardship. Thus, when aristocratic shirking of war duty is held up for critique in this play, most notably when Lacey insists that Ralph must serve in the war and then stays in London himself, and when the Dodger reports to the Earl of Lincoln that, killed in France were “Four thousand English, and no man of name / But Captain Hyam and young Ardington” (8.9–10), we may imagine that the audience is meant to accept this news as more evidence that it is commoners—soldiers like Ralph, recruited from the artisan classes—who are responsible for keeping the nation intact in every way. This is particularly trenchant because it does not take much critical effort to expose the gap between the artisanal status the play promotes and actual artisanal access to power in sixteenth-century England. As much as The Shoemaker’s Holiday may be able to play a role in negotiations over the cultural status of artisans, its plot lines reveal the very real socioeconomic limitations within which the late sixteenth-century artisan body operated. The play extols a work ethic, but at the same time acknowledges the hierarchy of privilege that obstructs the mobilizing capacity of work. Hodge’s equation between working hard and upward mobility—“To it, pell-mell, that we may live to be Lord Mayors, or aldermen at least” (13.3–4)—is pure fantasy. Even an ascent such as his from foreman to shopkeeper (10.143) was not guaranteed by hard work, and, of course, in The Shoemaker’s Holiday it is entirely contingent on Simon’s serendipitous rise, which is anything but the result of the small workshop-based industrial production that is represented. The play’s fictions of upward mobility would probably have appeared as utopian fantasy even to sixteenth-century audiences. 23 As has been well documented by Paul Seaver, “no cordwainer ever rose to be lord mayor,”24 and not only would a small master like Simon Eyre be unable to acquire sufficient wealth for such a position from making shoes, he would not have the credit or the capital necessary to acquire a cargo of luxury items for profitable resale. Indeed, Simon makes his fortune by borrowing aristocratic money and elite prestige; the money to buy the merchant’s cargo comes from Lacey, and he dons an alderman’s robe to invest himself with the degree of authoritative weight necessary to secure the deal. The play doesn’t go quite so far in

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its fantastic imaginings as to elide all the barriers to the upper realms of power. The fantasy involving what Simon Eyre does when he achieves prominence may be represented as the most crucial element of his rise; however, from a critical position outside of the play, how Simon achieves prominence is equally significant. That the common artisan cannot claim political power without resorting to borrowing privileges that still belong to the aristocracy and the highest elites of the citizen class is part of the irony in Dekker’s celebration of work and working bodies. Work is not preparing apprentices, journeymen, or even small masters for roles as leaders. As the historical record reveals, all it is preparing them for is a place within the ranks of a permanent proletariat. *

*

*

In the preceding discussion, I have focused entirely on the ideologies and politics of the play as they pertain to artisan men in late sixteenth-century London. It is, however, in relations between men and women that the idealized picture of a unified class is most put under pressure. The exaltation of male artisans that the play attempts is fraught with anxieties about gender, which are played out in the denigration of female artisans. And again the play uses the body to mediate its designations of value; while the low body of the male artisan is celebrated for its open vitality, the low female body is written with the most disgusting aspects of the grotesque. Vilified, it is made distinct from its male counterpart. All aspects of the artisanal world celebrated by the play are opposed, threatened, or made problematic by or through the principle female character. Margery, Simon Eyre’s wife, opposes the co-option of power on artisan terms; rather, she would have the elite realm retain its snobbish ways, only with her and Simon inside the power circle instead of outside. She immediately begins to mimic fine ways, buying fashionable clothes and speaking in an affected manner. She also threatens the idea of a horizontal, fraternally organized community. As her social position begins to rise, she reveals a desire to inscribe hierarchical paternalistic relationships within the community, the very sort of relations between high and low that Simon denies by insisting on fraternity with his men. Margery imagines herself in the role of the fine Lady benefactress; when the news comes that Simon may be chosen as sheriff, she says to Hans and Hodge (whom she now begins to call Roger), “perdie, if ever he comes to be Master Sheriff of London—as we are all mortal—you shall see I will have some odd thing or other in a corner for you. I will not be your back friend” (10.24–27). When it is confirmed that Eyre has been made sheriff, she becomes even more grandiose: “I thank you, my good people all. Firk, hold up thy hand, here’s a threepenny piece for thy tidings” (10.126–28).

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Similarly, as I have noted, she attempts to curb Simon’s rough vitality and urges him to adopt refined manners around the king. Unlike Simon, who brings morris dances into the elite world, Margery desires to join the realm of power on its existing hierarchical, paternalistic terms. Margery resists the horizontal community that the play offers as an idealized vision of England. Her national vision is not that of the play’s. Disdain for Margery is expressed in the play by giving her the wrong politics, but it is also expressed by associating her with the grotesque body. When Margery urges Simon to be grave and serious, his response is to hurl insults at her that associate her with the sphere of digestion; he names her as food and contaminated food: “Away you Islington whitepot! Hence, you hopperarse, you barley pudding full of maggots, you broiled carbonado!” (20.49–50). Whereas the body of the artisan man is celebrated for its vitality and vigor, the body of the artisan woman is associated with the repulsive and disgusting. In this way, only one gendered body can stand as emblem of all that is valued and admired in the emerging nation. Margery is not the only working woman in the play who is represented in this manner. Simon complains that Margery’s maid, Cecily Bumtrinket, “has a privy fault: she farts in her sleep” (4.35). The names of other women in the economic sphere are equally evocative of the grotesque body: the landlady at a lodging house for lawyers is Mistress Frigbottom; Madge Mumblecrust is the name of one of Simon’s workers. And when Simon gruffly calls his crew to work, there is a bodily distinction between the way women and men are figured: Where be these boys, these girls, these drabs, these scoundrels? They wallow in the fat brewis of my bounty, and lick the crumbs of my table, yet will not rise to see my walks cleansed. Come out you powder-beef queans! What Nan! What Madge Mumblecrust! Come out, you fat midriff-swagbelly whores, and sweep me these kennels, that the noisome stench offend not the nose of my neighbours. What Firk, I say! What Hodge! Open my shop windows! What, Firk, I say!” (4.1–9)

Simon is rough toward the whole crew, but it is the women and not the men who are abused with insults that associate them with unpleasant bodies—fat, toothless, old and tough. The division of labor in his call to work further emphasizes the bodily division; while the men open the shop windows, the women sweep out the gutters that are responsible for the noisome stench. Artisan women are associated with the bodily orifices of the grotesque body—the mouth, the anus—and the processes of digestion; their bodies are represented as open in the most repulsive of ways. What accounts for this gendered division in the value of bodies in the household workshop? Martha Howell, in Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities, discusses how early modern workers’ status

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in the workplace was determined according to their degree of control over the economic resources of production and distribution; the more control a worker had, the higher his or her labor status (Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities, 24). Throughout the early modern period, high labor status began to confer “unprecedented cultural, political, and economic status” (ibid., 181); work, particularly high status work, gained unprecedented social value. The Shoemaker’s Holiday celebrates and contributes to the social status of work, but it also has a place within discursively constructed anxieties about the conjunction of gender, status, and work that early modern work systems often inspired. In the late medieval and early modern period, the male-headed household was the foundation of the patriarchal system of male dominance; Howell writes that “it was in good measure their positions as heads of households and families where economic, social and political power was lodged that gave men dominance over women” (ibid., 20). Women’s labor, however, made a valuable contribution to the household economy; in fact, the management of the household economy was generally understood to be a joint venture of husband and wife, with wives taking part in the commercial ventures of the household as well as in its domestic affairs (ibid., 19). In the northern cities of Europe and England, the household production unit—the independent household economy that produced for the marketplace as well as for subsistence (ibid., 27)—was the most important center of economic production, and women who were members of families who managed household production units often accrued high labor status and considerable authority within the work sphere. Women’s important roles in economic production could be, as Howell and Susan Cahn have argued, a definite source of anxiety. Women’s economic responsibilities at times led them to operate as legal agents independent of their husbands, a situation that undermined patriarchal hegemony even while it contributed to the patriarchal institution of the household economy (ibid., 20–21). Female members of families that managed independent family production units generally had considerably higher labor status than that of the apprentices and helpers hired by the family and, consequently, a considerable amount of authority over them. In the patriarchal economic system, where apprentices would, in theory, eventually head their own household economies, subordinate status to a woman constituted a contradiction in the sex-gender system; the period of male submission to female superiors threatened the completeness of male dominance. And although not all women had the authority and labor status held by wives of household heads, women did operate at various levels of importance within the household economy; this meant a system where even female members of the household who were not closely

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related to the male head could and often did have more status than certain male members. Significantly, just after Simon insultingly comments on Cecily Bumtrinket’s “privy fault,” he calls for her to come to work and roars that “If my men want shoethread, I’ll swinge her in a stirrup” (4.36–7). This is an emblematic moment. In the midst of his insults, Simon reveals that Cecily has an important function within the household business: she is responsible for spinning and waxing the thread that the shoemakers use for making shoes. That Simon reveals her importance at the same moment that he names her body as grotesque says something about the logic of the misogyny that characterizes both this incident and the play overall. Women in the workplace are a threat to a male power that is based on work and authority in the shop; Cecily’s body, a female body which contributes to the economy of the workplace, is a threatening body. Stallybrass and White write that most locations of the grotesque body, commonly the carnival, the circus, the gypsy, the lumpenproletariat, “play a symbolic role in bourgeois culture out of all proportion to their social importance” (Stalleybrass and White, Transgression, 20). In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, bodies that get marked as grotesque are, in fact, important; they are marked as grotesque because of the anxiety their importance engenders. Women in the artisan household are marked as grotesque bodies because they are a threat to the idea of a male-dominated society based on the power and authority of the distinctly masculine artisan body. Although women with low labor status like Cecily Bumtrinket would not be a direct threat to a male household head, the economic household was a place of complex hierarchies, and even maids sometimes had authority, official or otherwise, over younger or newer male apprentices. Cecily is never shown to have any authority in Simon’s workplace; if she even appears on stage, it is without a single line of dialogue. I don’t want to suggest that a maid such as Cecily would necessarily have clout within the household—she certainly would have very little official power; however, her marginalization in The Shoemaker’s Holiday may be read, along with the denigration of female bodies, as strategies for dealing with women in the workplace. Writing Cecily as powerless helps to construct her as socially powerless. Writing her body as grotesque helps to ensure that she remains on the margins of the increasingly important work world. Other literary texts of the period reveal more directly the tensions between men and women that workplace hierarchies could create. Francis Kirkman’s The Unlucky Citizen tells of a mistreated apprentice who complains that, as Steven Smith writes, “his feelings of degradation were made worse by the maids who were in a position of authority over him, as were the daughters of masters, whom he charged with being haughty in their dealings with him” (“The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century

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Adolescents,” 223). Simon Forman’s brief autobiographical account of his life as an apprentice during the years 1564–1572 is particularly rich in its account of gender tensions in the workplace. He tells the story of his altercations with a kitchen maid, Mary Roberts, who regularly boxed his ears when he was the youngest and smallest apprentice, until five years later, at the age of sixteen and possessed of somewhat more status within the household, he gets his revenge by beating her “black and blue all over” (Rowse, Simon Forman, 272) when she refuses to help serve customers in the busy shop. The prolonged strife between Mary and Simon, in itself an indication of the potential depth of gender antagonism in the workplace, is made even more significant by the response Simon anticipates—correctly its turns out—when his master and mistress return. “He thought, if his mistress should come home first, she would take the maid’s part, and then should Simon be well beaten. But, if his master came first, then he thought it would be so much the better” (ibid.). His master does come home first and it is “so much the better” for Simon; the master agrees that Simon has given Mary her just desserts and tells him that “if she be so obstinate, serve her so again” (ibid., 273). When the mistress gets home and hears the story from Mary, she is furious at the treatment meted out to her maid, but the master, having made his stance, “stopped her mouth and fury, and would not suffer her to beat Simon as she would have done” (ibid.). Although as Simon tells it, he and Mary eventually reconcile their antagonism, the workplace he describes is divided along gender lines with allegiances split into two camps that contend for power against each other. Significantly, after the incident during which Simon gets the best of Mary, she changes her attitude toward him: “But after this Simon and Mary agreed so well that they never were at square after, and Mary would do for him all that she could. Many a pound of butter she yielded in the bottom after for Simon’s breakfast, which before that she never would do” (ibid.). The final moral seems to be that women in the workplace must and can be dealt with through the proper exertion of male authority. Mistresses, not maids, were, of course, a more acute source of anxiety, as they could, indeed, expect to have a considerable amount of legitimate authority over subordinate male workers in the household workshop. The Shoemaker’s Holiday dedicates a lot of energy toward undercutting Margery’s position. Simon’s men are incensed when Margery attempts to boss them around. Hodge protests indignantly, “Master, I hope you’ll not suffer my dame to take down your journeymen” (7.32–33), and Firk adds to the protest with a remarkably hostile threat of sexual violence that inscribes the male body with the same sexual power over women that earlier it was said to have over the French: “If she take me down, I’ll take her up—yea, and take her down, too, a buttonhole lower” (7.34–35). As though she herself is a threat to the nation, the mistress here is positioned like the French,

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an enemy to be controlled, but while the French opportunely present a foreign “other” against which to prove one’s national worth, the female artisan must be cast as a kind of sexual foreigner, or “other” because she threatens the national value of the male artisan by her dangerously equal contributions to the commonwealth’s economy. Significantly, the logic of sexual domination in Firk’s aggression is absent in relations between men in the workshop, despite the potential for such master-servant relations in the period.25 Such sexual economies kept social hierarchies intact, and here the assertion of a powerful male body with the potential for sexual violence compensates for the threatening social and economic power a woman in Margery’s position might have over this segment of the artisan population, a power all the more threatening at a historical moment when journeymen were less likely to move up to become masters. Dekker’s play might even be read as eliding the contribution a woman in Margery’s position would make toward the household economy. We never see Margery engaged in high-status commercial work; the only work she does is make breakfast for the workmen—domestic work of low status rather than commercial work for the market place. However, while expressing its disdain for Margery, the play manages to reveal the prominence a woman in her position would surely hold. When Margery questions Simon’s offer to make shoes for Lacey for seven years if he excuses Ralph from the draft (1.136), she looks ungenerous and uncaring in contrast to Simon’s benevolent generosity; similarly, her opposition to hiring Hans is an occasion for staging her lack of artisanal solidarity. But while these incidents stage Margery’s distance from the central values of the artisan class as constructed by the play, they also stage her proximity to the economic concerns of the commercial enterprise; in both cases, Margery reveals her sense that she knows what is best for the household economy, and, in the case of hiring Hans, Simon’s position is initially the same as hers. When Firk suggests that Simon should hire Hans, Margery and the apprentices squabble over who knows what’s best for the business, and when Simon agrees to hire him, he appears to do so in order to appease his men and show his solidarity with them in the ongoing gender struggle. Margery is always silenced and her advice never taken, but the nature of the battles that she always loses and the very staging of them speak volumes about women’s place in the workplace and the male anxieties that accompany it. Relationships within the mini-commonwealth of the household, understood in popular and dominant discourses to be analogous to those of the presumably male monarch and his subjects, could be threatened by the authority of women like Margery, who worked in tandem with their husbands in the household business. Significantly, Thomas Deloney’s mistress character in The Gentle Craft is portrayed quite differently; Deloney’s Dame is represented as an ally of the journeymen who

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is granted much respect for her power and willingness to grant favors and services, and for her ability to influence the Master. Dekker’s portrayal of Simon Eyre’s wife must be understood as engaged in a discursive contest among competing ideologies of gender in the workplace.26 Jane, Ralph’s wife, who drifts away from Simon Eyre’s household when Ralph is off at war, is another working woman whose representation reveals the play’s investment in patriarchal gender ideologies of the workplace. Even Jane, the figure of one of the play’s romance plots, is represented as a grotesque, “leaky” body;27 in the conscription scene Eyre calls her “blubbered Jane” (1.131) and describes her as “whining” and as having “whimpering, puling, blubbering tears” (1.117–18). And when Ralph leaves, Jane is not embraced by the community of shoemakers the way Ralph is when he comes back; the guild is a place of benevolent communality for artisan men, not for artisan women. Significantly, Jane leaves after a quarrel with Margery; there are no strong bonds between the guild women as there are between the guild men. While the severing of ties with Jane seems a contradiction within the play’s idealistic vision of a benevolent caring artisan community, in fact, Jane’s estrangement is consistent with the play’s insistence on the guild as a place of male authority and homosociality, where women take a secondary, subordinate position. Jane’s drifting away from the shoemakers’ community serves another important function; it allows the play to stage her rescue. Jane’s rescue allows men to appear as protectors of women, marriage, and a social order based on affective marriage rather than marriage as financial transaction. But more significantly, the play constructs Jane as vulnerable and in need of rescue, and this serves the play’s ideology of gender. Certainly, Jane is happy to learn the truth about Ralph, and she does need to be rescued from marrying Hammon and committing bigamy, but the play never makes it clear why she agrees to marry such an unappealing man in the first place, after explicitly expressing her desire not to marry him. The play implies that she has no choice but to marry Hammon, as if being alone in London is simply not a viable option for a young woman. Reports about Jane suggest that she is doing fine; we witness her working in a shop, and Hodge says someone he knows saw her and reported she was “very brave and neat” (10.104), that is, very smartly dressed. The play elides its own suggestion that Jane is fending for herself quite well by staging her marriage to an undesirable character. Being alone, independent, and not under the control of a male-headed household is a threat to patriarchal power; Jane must be shown to be vulnerable in that position and then brought back into the protective fold of the shoemakers’ society.28 There is one woman in the play who never bears the brunt of misogynist scorn and whose body is never coded as grotesque, and that is Rose, Lord Oatley’s idle, lady-like daughter. Margery, the authoritative working

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woman, is demonized while Rose, the artisan’s daughter who leaves the sphere of production and enters the emerging private sphere, is idealized; whereas aristocratic idleness in men is scorned, in women it is admired. Anxieties about women in the workplace in early modern England were eventually resolved by women’s withdrawal into the newly emerging private domestic sphere (Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy, 181), and this was achieved by the destruction of the household production unit under capitalism and by ideological forces which worked to define the role of the English woman as domestic. The traditional division of labor had always emphasized a gendered split between domestic and commercial labor (ibid., 177), but when labor was located in the household, the boundaries between domestic labor and commercial labor were fluid and easily and often overstepped. Prescriptive literature defined women’s place as in the home; it tended to advocate female work as the management of the domestic affairs and economy and to stress the male role as provider. Eventually, however, it became a sign of prosperity and status for the husband to provide for his family so well that his wife need not take on even domestic tasks, but have these tasks taken care of entirely by servants (ibid., 178). Unlike the women who took an active part in commercial production, these women posed no threat at all to patriarchal power but were, in fact, reflections of it. Rose is allowed to be virtuous and unsullied by association with the grotesque body because she does not engage in work and, thus, poses no threat to the hegemonic male working body. “Spending eight hours each day in the workplace and bringing home a wage packet is central to masculine identity, to what it means to be a man” (Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 40). This wasn’t always the case, of course, and what I’ve previously discussed is one cultural artifact among myriads of ideological and material conditions that helped construct the capitalistbased configuration of masculinity which Pateman describes. The Shoemaker’s Holiday shows both the positive and negative of this equation. By staging work as a central value, it contributes to the increased social status of those who work and, thus, helps create a foundation for demanding and reaping social benefits; through the character of Simon Eyre, the play directly suggests that the working man should have a political voice. But the status attached to the identity of worker also can be exploited by more dominant powers, and the play both reveals and engages in this process. The work ideology it celebrates will help create a class that will see its labor as its proud contribution to the nation despite its lack of access to capital. In this way, a construction of masculinity in which work is central can be seen as contributing to the ideological foundations of capitalism. A work ethic did not alone open the ideological gates to capitalism. It is no coincidence that contract theory emerges at capitalism’s early moments, soon after the time of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. As Pateman

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characterizes it, contract theory involves the shift from a concept of paternal patriarchy to one of fraternal patriarchy; the theory posits a model of political understanding that makes every man an individual with free will, able to make contracts with other men. Hierarchical relationships such as those involved in employment or government are justified and dignified by the idea of contract. As such, contract serves the perennial problem to patriarchal societies of inequities of power between men.29 But as Pateman carefully delineates, the free individual able to make contracts is insistently male; “sexual difference is political difference” (Pateman, Sexual Contract, 6). Sexual difference, then, must be obvious in order to secure the gains of contract theory for patriarchy. Inequities of power between men are best elided if even the men with less power have some power. By the mid-seventeenth century sexual difference is becoming clear in the social world; it “is revealed by the subjection of women within the private sphere” (ibid., 11). But in the late sixteenth century, this isn’t yet the case; women are working alongside men in a space where the boundaries between private and public are not entirely clear. The gender politics of The Shoemaker’s Holiday are ultimately about constructing sexual difference; the strategy is to locate difference in the bodies of those men and women who work in such uncomfortable proximity. The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene represent the working male body as a national treasure, a patriotic powerhouse of energy and vitality, defining and embodying a masculinity that is as loyal to the realm as it is powerful in its daily activities. Obscured by the celebrations of working men, inequities of power and class hierarchies among men are deflected. But inequities and hierarchies existed, in actuality and in theatrical representations, and the powerful body of the working man remains a focal point in the constructions of masculinity negotiated within the discourses of class conflict. I’ll turn now to an examination of working bodies that are both powerful and dangerous, the disloyal bodies of artisan rebels: political, intelligent, and angry, driving the energy of their workhardened bodies into riot and disorder, and configuring a masculinity that excites even while it frightens.

2 Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Labourer’s Body in Plays of Historical Rebellion “If the feet knew their strength as well as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do.” —Fulke Greville to the House of Commons, 1596

“ FEET” DID KNOW THEIR STRENGTH IN THE tumultuous late sixteenth century, and, as Greville’s comment implies, the privileged classes were not only aware of the oppression of the lower classes but also of their strength and of the potential volatility of such a combination. The drama of the period is one place where fear of commoner rebellion is registered, and in many of the early modern plays that staged rebellion—2 Henry VI, Sir Thomas More, The Life and Death of Jack Straw—the physical strength of lowborn bodies is a particular focus of anxiety. Of these plays, 2 Henry VI provides the most chilling representation of the breakdown of unity among social groups and stages the most notable and gruesome reign of lower-class terror. The play makes clear its awareness of both the oppression and the strength of the commonwealth’s “feet.” The lower-class rebels are particularly frightening because of the source of their power— their weapons are the common tools of artisan shops, and their skill and strength are the natural result of their familiar routines of work in shops and fields. Their anger, as well, is familiar—Cade and his fellow rebels protest enclosure and food prices; their discontent was the well-known, and to many minds justified, discontent of contemporary food and enclosure rioters in England. Through its representation of the Cade rebellion, the play articulates the potential power, as well as the motives, of late sixteenth-century laborers to wreak bloody havoc on the social body. 2 Henry VI, the play to which I give most attention in this chapter, like The Shoemaker’s Holiday, expresses fascination with and revels in the hyper-masculinity of the male working body. The artisans of 2 Henry VI, however, embody a different sort of vital, rough, corporeal masculinity than those of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and constitute a masculinity formulated in opposition to, rather than in alignment with, establishment values of order and productivity. Like Dekker’s merry shoemakers, the artisan rebels of 2 Henry VI have work-hardened bodies

SOME OF THE

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and are identified with craft labor, but they operate at the margins of society, not the social center. These are the men who are discredited by the work ethic extolled in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, men whose failure to achieve prosperity through work branded them idle by punishing statutes and Protestant pulpits, men who then channeled their masculine energy into violence against the state rather than into vital contributions to its well being. Nevertheless, these rebel laborers, like their shoemaker counterparts, are often remarkably appealing characters. Many critics see the rebels’ brutality as functioning solely to discredit their cause and rarely take note of their physical prowess;1 I’d like to suggest that dangerous bodies, mediated by a representational distance, can be aesthetically appealing and exciting to watch. 2 Henry VI suggests that fear does not entirely dispel admiration and may even help to create it. Furthermore, bellicose masculinity as embodied by Cade was valued in Renaissance England as a quintessentially English trait. The ethos of the warrior was generally associated with the aristocratic classes, but in 2 Henry VI the spotlight on the rebels calls attention to a powerfully combative masculinity located in the world of work, similar to the artisanal class warrior masculinity found in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene. Cade and his fellow rebels display an English puissance that is a threat needing to be controlled, but its lack is also detrimental to the realm; Cade’s strength and resolve, his masculine body, underscores the failure of the king himself to embody masculinity.2 The ineffectual, passive king does not command the audience’s attention, creating a void on the stage—Cade and the rebels fill that void. The audience’s attention is kept on the rebels through their exciting duality—their frightening monstrousness and their admirable bellicosity. Additionally, the performative skill of the rebels’ jesting fills the stage with appealing play: the rebels are funny and festive, and through their self-referential, sometimes self-parodic humor they control a great deal of the political rhetoric of the play.3 They do not, however, fit seamlessly into the paradigm of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a paradigm that most modern discussions of the early modern working body have relied on to understand the political valence of the lowborn body and which provides a restricted picture of the ways working bodies enter into discourse on the early modern stage.4 Despite its focus on physicality, the Bakhtinian carnivalesque curiously elides physical strength, thus ignoring both a means by which the masculinity of the lowborn man could rival that of the highborn man and the potential dangers that physical power of strong bodies could pose to social hierarchy. Part of the attraction of the rebels in 2 Henry VI is their merry, carnival-like approach to subverting the social order, but never does their festive

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merriment obscure their horrific ruthlessness or their admirable physical prowess. *

*

*

Jack Cade, clothmaker, and his fellow artisan rebels are the antitheses of docile petitioning commoners; they are manly, dangerous, powerful, and frightening bodies. The first we hear of Cade is the Duke of York’s description of him in battle against the Irish: In Ireland I have seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself against a troop of kerns, And fought so long, till that his thighs with darts Were almost like a sharp-quill’d porpentine: And, in the end being rescu’d, I have seen Him caper upright like a wild Morisco, Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells. Full often, like the shag hair’d crafty kern, Hath he conversed with the enemy, And undiscover’d come to me again, And given me notice of their villanies. (3.1.359–70)

Cade appears as almost superhumanly vital and powerful; he is seen singlehandedly taking on an entire troop of Irish foot soldiers, and he fights so long and fiercely that his thighs are quilled with arrows like a porcupine, and still he has the energy and force after his battle to “caper upright like a wild Morisco,/Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.” While the description of Cade as a morris dancer casts him as a performer, a dancer of a popular dance, it also marks his body as dangerous, his physicality as violent. The morris was physically demanding and highly skilled, and it was a festive spectacle linked with war in various historical dance venue contexts: medieval morrises performed at court dramatized the combat narrative of tournaments (Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–1750, 90), and in the early sixteenth century, morrises were included in the urban watch processions, martial spectacles with the dual purpose of maintaining order and advertising military readiness (ibid., 95). The morris was, thus, a form through which martial masculinity was exhibited. When, in the mid-sixteenth century, the watches were abandoned, the morris attached itself to May game celebrations, possibly finding an appropriate point of connection through the displays of archery that the Robin Hood characters added to these games (ibid., 130). In the 1590s, morris dances were still part of festivals and May games and still regularly performed on the London stage, although commonly considered by the higher estates to be rustic, uncouth, and unsophisticated.

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York sees the “wild morisco” as violent and common, a figure of both awe and disdain; to him, Cade is a powerful body, but one to be exploited, an impressive but common performer. York’s perspective, however, does not necessarily represent the audience’s. To many audience members, Cade as morris dancer would fuse the impressive and the awe-inspiring with the familiarity of well-loved festive pleasures.5 Popular festivities such as the May games, as well as the mid-winter festivals, are well known to have staged inversions of order and parodies of authority that rendered, as David Wiles writes, “the boundary between game and rebellion . . . ill defined” (“The Carnivalesque in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 44). The threat to social order of the rituals of popular festivity and misrule was a familiar discourse during the heyday of these activities, and morris dancers were among the festive characters commonly singled out for outright demonization. In his Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), Phillip Stubbes makes much of morris dancers in their carnival roles as “lords of misrule,” noting that the name itself “carryeth a taste of notorious evil,” and tautologically likening them to “devils incarnate” because of their “devils daunce.” To Stubbes, morris-dancing lords of misrule are outlaws who pose a threat to social order by dancing on the sabbath, disrupting church services and “fight[ing] under the banner and standard of the devil against Christ Jesus, and all his lawes.” Within this discourse, the festive body of the “wild morisco” was, indeed, a threat. I begin with York’s image of Cade morris dancing because the image emblematizes the various dualities with which the play presents the rebel artisans: they are festive and bellicose, playful and demonic. Another doubleness the play presents, one that ultimately links the terms “demonic” and “bellicose,” is that of the rebel as both warrior and worker. York’s attitude toward Cade is disdainful, but his description of him taps into an early modern discourse of the male working body that focuses on, and quite often revels in, its strength, power, and manliness, and consequent suitability for war. As I discuss in chapter 1, plays such as The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield, present the soldiering abilities of the common artisan as uncompromised good for the country, although not for the artisan. Thomas Deloney’s Thomas of Reading tells of clothiers providing King Henry I with an army, and his Jack of Newberry has Jack, a weaver, supply 250 of his own workmen to fight against the Scottish invasion: a nobleman tells the Queen that “there is not, for the number, better souldiers in the field.”6 Similarly, a ballad entitled “The Honor of a London Prentice” features a Cheshire-born apprentice of common stock who performs superhuman feats at arms for the honor of Queen Elizabeth.7 Parts of Deloney’s The Gentle Craft boast of artisan prowess, as well. In Part 2 a rich shoemaker, “lusty Peachey,” and his men are insulted by the sea captains Stukeley and Strangewidge; in the resulting

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sword fights, the shoemakers are repeatedly victorious. Military manuals, as Patricia Cahill’s research has revealed, explicitly articulated what these literary texts thematized, declaring the bodies of lowborn Englishmen to be “repositories of [England’s] endangered martial stock” (Cahill, Tales, 45).8 In Of the Knowledge and Conducte of Warre (1578), Thomas Proctor writes of the ideal soldier: for their exercyse or trade of lyfe, first it is cleare, that the stronger, better breathed, and harder man of bodie by nature or custome, is the more avaylable for warres: and therefore it is to conclude, that men of such occupations, as are accustomed most to labor with the strength of their armes, are to bee preferred for this purpose, as smythes, butchers, masons, dyggers in mynes, Carpenters, & most principallye the husbandman, both for his wonted enduringe of hardnes in fare, and of all weathers and toyle in the fielde[.] (F1v-F2r. Cited in Cahill, Tales, 45)

Matthew Sutcliffe’s 1593 The Practice, Proceeding, and Lawes of Armes also calls attention to the significance of a potential soldier’s trade, while it grapples with the apparently problematic contradiction that working men made some of the best soldiers. With respect to the choice of soldiers, Sutcliffe writes, one must consider the . . . trade of their living. . . . For many to win themselves a living, are oftentimes driven to follow base occupations, that otherwise are couragious, & of liberall disposition, & have bodies fit for labor. So that although the Spartans and the Romans refused such for souldiers, as exercised manual occupations, and kept shops, yet do I not thinke they deserve generally to be refused, but onely such of them that are weake, tender, and effeminate. All those that are hardened with labor; as husbandmen for the most part, and those that can suffer raine, heate, and cold, and use to fare hard, and lie hard, and sleepe little proove brave men. (M2r)

Having been “hardened with labor,” men of the “base occupations” embodied those masculine qualities necessary for that most manly of activities, war. And on the other hand, according to government papers on county militias, “those rich men, which have been daintily fed, and warm lodged, when they came thither to lie abroad in the fields, were worse able to endure the same than any others.”9 Significantly, as Cahill notes about the Sutcliffe passage, “the word ‘brave’ suggests [that] the laboring man was imagined not simply as a paragon of courage, but also as an object of desire, as a splendid or handsome creature” (Tales, 45).10 The idea that the working body was an especially hardy—and manly—body is upheld by household health manuals such as Thomas Cogan’s oft-published Haven of Health ([London, 1596]). Cogan asserts that husbandmen and craftsmen

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“live longer and in better health” (3) because labor “increases heat,” the most manly of complexional qualities, which allows for better digestion and “nourishing” (2). That ploughmen made strong soldiers, their muscles strengthened by work in the fields, was also an argument made against the enclosure for pasture of previously cultivated lands and for the conversion of forest to arable.11 But what about the strong ploughmen who were dispossessed by enclosures? Or what if these ploughmen, smiths, butchers, masons, miners, and carpenters were discontented wage-laborers?12 What if they’d been to war and had acquired further endurance and discipline, which they had little inclination to channel into laboring “to enrich others”?13 All these strong men, potential warriors for the realm, were potential threats as well. Cade and his fellow artisans are these dangerous angry men, demonic and bellicose, using their warrior abilities in an attempt to destroy the social order. Theirs is a dangerous masculinity. In Sir Thomas More, mixed censure and admiration are expressed about the hotblooded commoners who ready themselves to rise up against the perceived injustice of laws that protect aliens and bar common Englishmen from seeking redress against their abuses. The Earl of Surrey comments: But if the Englishe blood be once but up As I perceive theire harts already full, I feare me much, before their spleens be colde, Some of these saucy aliens for their pride Will pay for’t soundly, wheresoere it lights: This tyde of rage that will with the eddie strives, I feare me much, will drowne too many lives. (1.3.57–63)

Surrey, significantly, names the craftsmen’s bellicose masculinity as specifically “English.” But volatile English blood, particularly when embodied in commoners, could be a dangerously unstable power. Uncontrolled by higher authorities, the disgruntled commons of Sir Thomas More will engender a fearful massacre. York tries to make Cade’s military might an asset for his cause, but the terms he uses betray the difficulty. After describing “Stubborn Cade” using his prodigious strength in battle against England’s enemy, he then identifies him as “like” a “shag hair’d crafty kern”—the slippage between friend and foe, English foot soldier and Irish kern, suggests the slippage between the potential benefit to the realm of hard, powerful bodies such as his and the potential danger. As York reveals, Cade is a double agent; he infiltrates the Irish camps and provides the Duke of York with intelligence. His strength is described in the context of his participation in battle

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against the Irish, yet he is as Irish as the Irish themselves. The Irish were associated with savagery, craftiness, vagrancy, but most of all, unquellable rebellion. Cade fights against these threats, but he also embodies the rebellious desire for independence that was a threat in the Irish and in the strong English laboring man. The play expresses fear of manly artisan bodies, and it also expresses fear of their power over bodies. It vividly conceives of the work that artisans do in such a way as to construct horrified imaginations of the mechanisms of terror artisan men might have at their disposal. The first rebellion scene focuses on the rebels as working men and expresses a barely veiled fear of what manual laborers are physically capable of doing. The horrific imaginary of the play is expressed as the rebels first congregate; at the same time, the glee with which two of the rebels anticipate putting artisanal skills to work for the cause of rebellion suggests a festive, if macabre atmosphere surrounding the gathering, which may well have infected the audience.14 Hol. There’s Best’s son, the tanner of Wingham,— Bevis. He shall have the skins of our enemies to make dog’s-leather of. Hol. And Dick the butcher,— Bevis. Then is Sin struck down like an ox, and Iniquity’s throat cut like a calf. Hol. And Smith the weaver,— Bevis. Argo, their thread of life is spun (4.2.21–29)

The specific skills of artisans provide fodder for the play’s imaginings of a laborers’ rebellion; tanners will make gloves from the skins of their enemies, and butchers will kill by giving hard blows and slashing throats. Artisan rebels, the play suggests, could reduce high men to animals, to the beasts upon which their lowly trades operated. But as monstrous as his scenarios are, Bevis’s verbal play is clever and amusing, moving as it does from macabre association (human skin to leather) to bible-like pronouncement to pun. Pleasure and horror compete for dominance in this scene and probably in the response of the audience. The action of the play soon realizes the fear the rebels create that human bodies are no different than the bodies of beasts when subjected to the gruesome processes of certain trades. After a battle in Blackheath, Cade congratulates the butcher: They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behaved’st thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughter-house. Therefore thus will I reward thee—the Lent shall be as long again as it is; thou shalt have licence to kill for a hundred lacking one. (4.3.3–7)

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The connection between artisanal work and violent artisanal power could not be made clearer: Dick, the butcher, uses the very techniques he employs everyday in the slaughterhouse to carnage the elite enemy. By doing so, he reduces his enemies to the status of the animals that are slaughtered for food. The connection between the enemy and slaughtered meat is underlined by Cade’s immediate reward to the butcher of a special license to kill during Lent, the period when, by order of the Privy Council, all butchers were to close shop, save a few with special licenses to provide meat for the sick and for ships (Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, 81). The bodies that the butcher slaughters, Cade pronounces, “shall be dragg’d at my horse heels til I do come to London” (4.3.11–12). When Cade displays the slaughtered bodies, he usurps what Foucault calls the “spectacle of the scaffold” or the “theater of terror,” that is, the displays of power over the body that supported the penal-judicial system of the sovereign and underscored the sovereign’s “unrestrained presence” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49). Cade and the rebels seek to destroy the documents of the court, government, and educational apparatuses, and, in doing so, they, and the play, acknowledge that elite power is enforced and created by the statutes, laws, and systems of literacy.15 But the power of the sovereign is also a coercive power over bodies, as is depicted in instances of state coercion enacted in 2 Henry VI. The “all-powerful sovereign” displays his strength on the bodies of violators of the law when Simpcox is “whipp’d through every market-town” (2.1.151), when the Duchess of Gloucester is paraded through the streets barefoot in a white sheet, and when the master armorer and his apprentice are forced to take part in a physical duel, despite the apprentice’s objections that he has no skill or training in fencing.16 When Cade has the butcher’s slaughtered bodies dragged at his horse’s heels and when he has Lord Say and Sir James Cromer decapitated and then rides through the streets with their heads on poles, stopping at every corner to have the heads “kiss,” he produces his own theater of terror which challenges that of the sovereign by its very existence—the sovereign’s power over bodies is meant to be exclusive and enacted only by those to whom he has delegated his force. That Cade’s intended display of the butcher’s slaughter is announced while celebrating a battle won with artisanal skills and powers is an anxious acknowledgement that those common skills and powers closely resembled the instruments of secular bodily punishment and control used by the King’s deputies. Foucault cites an early eighteenth-century account of a French execution described with references to the processes and tools of the butcher’s trade.17 Other early modern accounts of tortures and executions name tools, materials, and processes commonly found in a variety

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of artisans’ shops: cauldrons of boiling water (used by launderers), boiling oil (used by cooks), molten lead (used by metal workers), wax (used by candlemakers), hot irons for branding, apparatuses for stretching leather, pincers, resin, sulphur, etc. (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 3). When Bevis and Holland joke, and Cade congratulates the butcher, they call attention to the potential of their tools, materials, and products to function not in their usual roles on behalf of human comfort and civilization but as instruments of torture.18 It would be easy for the early modern imagination to be persuaded that artisans have not only the physical strength to usurp state power over bodies but also the means. The fear of lowborn men registered in 2 Henry VI had a real-life social counterpart based in contemporary events. Commoner riots were frequent in the late sixteenth century, largely in response to changing socioeconomic conditions that were harsh for many. Roger B. Manning cites thirty-five general outbreaks of disorder in London between 1581 and 1602 (Village Revolts, 187), and hundreds of riots specifically “protesting enclosures of commons and wastes, drainage of fens and disafforestation” between 1530 and 1640 (3). Buchanan Sharp cites forty riots in England between 1586 and 1631, “all of which were related in some way to the state of the food market” (In Contempt of All Authority, 10); the forty, he asserts, do not include those rumored or planned but unexecuted and those less serious riots that did not reach the attention of the Privy Council. The most active participants in riots were artisanal cottagers and laborers who had become dependent for subsistence on wages and on the market for food (ibid., 7).19 These artisans, among the least privileged members of English society, were losing access to land and, with it, autonomy throughout the early modern period. Individual holdings were, in most cases, too small to provide adequate support for the cottager families that inhabited them;20 this meant increased reliance on cottagers’ other important means of access to land: rights of common usage. The resources of common lands were a traditional source of supplemental support, providing pasture for grazing, a variety of fuel types, building supplies, and even, in some parishes, rights of fishing and fowling (Everitt, Farm Labourers, 169–70). As the demands of commercial farming led to disafforestation and enclosures, cottagers and laborers (particularly in the more densely populated areas) increasingly lost these traditional rights, and many descended into even greater poverty. Loss of autonomy and the inability to sustain a household did not sit well with early modern English men of the manually laboring classes. Independence and financial success were necessary for achieving full manhood throughout the medieval and early modern periods.21 What Ruth Mazo Karras concludes of medieval craftworkers is equally applicable to their early modern counterparts: when “economic and social forces prevented them from taking up the duties and responsibilities of a man as

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head of household . . . they might turn to other means, including violence, to demonstrate their manhood” (From Boys to Men, 110). Self-assertion, resistance, and a willingness to resort to violence to achieve independence were understood by many as manly responses to the loss of masculine independence. The many extant commoner petitions and grievances from the early modern period indicate unwillingness to accept economic injustices stoically, and although documents addressed to officials rarely, if ever, threaten violent responses, unsurprising considering the danger of punishment, less formal documents and the historical record reveal clearly the willingness to engage in aggressive forms of resistance. When Robert Crowley has the poor man articulate the causes of sedition in The Way to Wealth, the character, after complaining about the greed, oppression, and lack of conscience among the rich and powerful, urges the oppressed to fight back in the name of their manhood: we must nedes fight it out, or else be brought to . . . slauery . . . ! These idle bealies wil deuour al that we shal get by our sore labor in our youth, and when we shal be old and impotent, then shal we be driuen to begge and craue of them that wyl not geue vs so muche as the crowmes that fall from their tables. Such is the pytie we se in them! Better it were therefore, for vs to dye lyke men, then after so great misery in youth to dye more miserably in age! (Tawney and Powell, Tudor Economic Documents, 3.58).

A “readiness to engage in riot and insurrection” (Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 3) is evident here, what Buchanan Sharp points to as part of a “long history of artisan radicalism,” sufficiently long to be considered a “tradition” (ix). That tradition is apparent in justifications for the 1517 Evil May Day riots against alien craftsmen, which took the position that “as byrdes would defende their nests, so oughte Englishemen to cheryshe and defende them selfes.”22 Also, a rhyme against enclosures recorded as early as 1496 in a Coventry Leet Book threatens rich landowners with ominously unspecified ill luck if they deny the common man his rights: “Cherish the Cominalte and se they haue their right, / For drede of a worse chaunce be day or be nyght” (Tawney and Powell, Tudor Economic Documents, 3.13). Manly pride in autonomy and economic independence was a locus from which rebellion could emerge. However, the hungry and the unemployed could not be, and were not, ignored. The Elizabethan Privy Council issued the first Book of Orders in 1587; it was subsequently reissued in 1594, 1595, 1596, 1608, 1622, and 1630 and vigorously enforced during periods of scarcity and depression. In order to reduce food scarcity, the Book of Orders legislated against “hoarding, engrossing and regrating, and the nonessential use of grain; as much food as possible was to reach the market and, once there, was to be sold first to the poor at low prices and in quantities to satisfy their needs”

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(Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 51). “Restrictions were also placed on overseas trade” (ibid., 52). Sharp describes the Privy Council’s activity during times of unemployment and harvest failure as “frantic” (ibid., 58) and argues that their intense concern and vigorous enforcement of the Book of Orders were significantly more motivated by fears of insurrection and riot than by pity toward those in need (67–68). He cites a letter written by the Privy Council to the justices of Somerset in 1586, ordering them to provide work for unemployed clothworkers; according to the letter, it was “a matter not onlie full of pittie in respect of the people but of dangerous consequence to the State if speedie order be not taken therein” (ibid., 67–68). 1586 was a year of exceptionally high grain prices23 and was also a year notable for the concentration of food riots that took place (Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 11–12). Prices dropped with the vigorous enforcement of the Book of Orders in 1587 but quickly began to rise again. Given the multiple factors that contributed to the price of wheat, it was, no doubt, unclear whether or not prices would continue to rise, whether or not the dearth of 1586 would be repeated with its consequent social unrest. Shakespeare’s play, written between 1587 and 1592, needs to be considered with this backdrop.24 That food could be an issue of security, rebellion, and class tension is clear from the anonymous 1593 play, The Life and Death of Jack Straw. Wat Tyler complains that he and the other rebels are “pincht with povertie, / To dig our meate and vittels from the ground, / That are as worthie of good maintenance, / As any gentleman your Grace doth keep” (D2v). Tom Miller worries about starving on the battlefront and sneaks with him a stolen goose. When the king, sailing to the shore of the Thames to meet with the rebels, flees in fear after hearing their “cries and fearfull noise” (C4), the crowd he flees from are figured in grotesque terms as insatiable mouths: “My thought there was sufficient mouths though, / At highest tide to have drawen the Thames drie,” is Spencer’s response to the scene on the river. These rebellious bodies are named as grotesque in an episode that makes apparent the sort of power and terror the needs of the grotesque body could evoke. The grotesque body is not a body of harmless but shameful appetites; these mouths and the noise they make are physically threatening. Although a crowd such as this would have contained women, its power is coded here in terms of the phallic masculine: The king is in danger of violent penetration by this force. He is “pearst” by the noise: “From the water did an echo rise: / That pearst the yeares of our renowned king.” Of the king’s flight, Spencer explains: “He thought they would have al like spaniels, / Tane water despretly and borded him” (C4). Spaniels were reputed as a familiar, ready, and bounding animal, associated with amorous fawning; “bord” had sexual connotations of mounting

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and penetrating. The bestial appetites of these rebel commoners threaten to violate the body of the king. As in this late-sixteenth-century rebellion play, land and food are contested ground in 2 Henry VI. Shakespeare brings the specter of enclosures into the play in both the first and last scenes that feature commoners: in act 1, scene 3, humble petitioners make a complaint against the unfair enclosure practices of the Duke of Suffolk, a detail not found in the play’s sources, and in act 4, scene 10, Cade breaks into Iden’s enclosed garden, where he is killed. Shakespeare also strays from Hall’s Chronicles, which does not mention Cade’s profession, by making Cade a clothier—an artisan of one of the most important and volatile industries in the kingdom, where protests and food riots were most common (Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 3, 11, 13, passim; Manning, Village Revolts, 325). Cade’s rebellion is not specifically a food riot or an anti-enclosure protest, but access to food is high on the agenda of the rebels and the ideology of common usage of land reigns among the rebels. Cade commands that “of the city’s cost, the pissing conduit [will] run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign” (4.6.2–4) and proclaims: There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves for a penny. The threehooped pot shall have ten-hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my paltrey to grass. And when I am king, as king I shall be, there shall be no money. All shall eat and drink on my score . . . (4.2.70–80)

The goals of the rebellion, as articulated by Cade, are bread, beer, wine, grass for the horses, and the right to the common usage of land that was endangered by enclosures. It’s a festive vision, an appealing utopian world where the money economy is nonsense and food and drink are almost absurdly, comically abundant. It is also, as Michael Bristol writes, “the cogent expression of the hopeful desires of underprivileged men and women” (Carnival and Theater, 88). And it is an assertion of the right to food and land that many—not just rebellious subjects—believed to be a specifically English liberty, part of the Ancient Constitution. Cade’s call for a reign of plenty is a moment when humor and pathos combine to make a powerful political statement, and his incorporation of these desires and values makes his a kind of heroic, Robin Hood-like masculinity, a man who fearlessly turns against authority to return England to a just state. Cade speaks the language of ancient constitutionalism when he appeals to the rebels not to surrender until they’ve regained their “ancient freedom”:25 I thought ye would never have given out these arms till you had recover’d your ancient freedom; but you are all recreants and dastards, and delight to live in slavery to the nobility. Let them break your backs with burdens,

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take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces. (4.8.25–31)

When Cade refers to the nobility taking houses over the heads of the poor, Elizabethan audiences would have recognized his comment as a complaint against engrossing, the practice of annexing farms and evicting the tenants. His references to living in slavery and to the nobility breaking the backs of the lowborn with burdens would easily have been understood as part of a discourse against wage-labor and the exploitation of poor agricultural and industrial workers.26 One often finds a common lexicon within the discussions of controversial agricultural practices, and in several places Cade’s language echoes that of Crowley’s poor man: They take our houses over our headdes, they bye our growndes out of our handes, they reyse our rentes, they leavie great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose oure commens! No custome, no lawe or statute can kepe them from oppressyng us in such sorte, that we know not which waye to turne us to lyve. Very nede therefore contryneth us to stand up agaynst them! In the countrey we can not tarye, but we must be theyr slaves and labore tyll our hertes brast, and then they must have al. (quoted in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 57)

Although arguments for shifts in land use such as engrossing and some forms of enclosure insisted that work was created for the poor by these practices, Crowley and Shakespeare’s characters make clear that many of the poor rejected these wage-labor jobs as an infringement of their ancient right to autonomy. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, laborers who worked for wages, for the most part, were not wholly dependent on wages; they had holdings of their own. In the sixteenth century, those working for wages had often lost their land and were also losing access to common lands; as a result, the status of wage labor significantly decreased (Hill, “Pottage,” 219). As wage laborers were obliged by law to stay with their employers unless the employer consented to their leave-taking (ibid., 222), they were, in some sense, and were understood by many to be “unfree,” although of an unfreedom different from that of serfdom.27 Within this social and economic context, a protesting, rebellious masculine subjectivity was fostered, which fought to maintain independence and autonomy and refused to be pulled into the emerging tide of capitalist work relations. Like Crowley’s exhortation, Cade’s call to the poor to refuse the denial of their ancient rights as English men, including their rights to household, wives, and daughters, is a call for a manliness equated with freedom that won’t submit to the oppressions of the privileged classes. 2 Henry VI underlines its preoccupation with the politics and economics of food and land distribution by drawing heavily on chronicle sources

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of the Jack Straw rebellion, which made social conditions and access to resources significant concerns. When Cade announces that “all the realm shall be in common,” he is voicing the ideology of Wat Tyler, who, in Holinshed’s account demands that, all warrens, waters, parks and woods should be common so that as well poore as rich might freelie in any place wheresoever practise fishing in ponds, pooles, rivers, or any waters, and might hunt deere in forrests and parkes, and the hare in the fields.28

When he announces that all will be apparelled “in one livery” and “agree like brothers,” he is in agreement with Parson John Ball who preached that “there should be an equalitie in libertie, no difference in degrees of nobilitie, but a like dignitie and equall authoritie in all things brought in among [the commons]” (Bullough, Sources of Shakespeare, 133). John Ball, in Grafton’s account, complains that the great lords have “Wines, Spices, and fyne bread: and we have the drawyng out of the Chaffe, and drink water” (ibid., 129); Cade would remedy that situation with claret in the pissing conduit and inexpensive bread. And when Stafford insults Cade’s occupation, Cade’s retort of “And Adam was a gardener” (4.2.128) echoes Parson Ball’s famous lines, “When Adam delved, and Eve span, / Who was then a Gentleman”—the battle cry of those seeking to level status distinctions. Land use, food distribution, and the social distinctions they constituted were significant concerns in the late sixteenth century, just as they were in Jack Straw’s day; Jack Straw’s rebellion offered a model of commoner rebellion that resonated with socioeconomic issues of Shakespeare’s own world. Cade’s defiant retort to Stafford—“And Adam was a gardener”—must have elicited some cheers from the socially mixed audience, many of whom would not have appreciated the insulting dismissal of both Adam’s vocation and Cade’s. The exchange between Cade, Stafford, and Stafford’s brother veers close to charged contemporary debates over entitlements based on work and the evils of luxury and idleness. Cade calls Stafford and his brother “silken-coated slaves” (4.2.122) while claiming to be heir to the crown; Stafford responds with “Villain! thy father was a plasterer; / And thyself a shearman, art thou not?” (4.2.126–27); Cade retorts: “And Adam was a gardener” and his brother, rather obliviously, asks, “What of that?” Stafford and his brother are voicing what in the 1590s was an increasingly retrograde position that manual labor brings no inherent honor in itself, that it is an activity to be disdained. Cade’s response, on the other hand, suggests that vocation does not preclude entry into the highest of political estates. The scene is played for laughs, with Cade himself admitting to the audience that he is not the son of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. But

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it is Cade who makes the audience laugh, with his cheeky presumption and his subtle although self-interested use of an old political slogan now attached to emerging discourses honoring work, while the haughty nobles look bad for not even acknowledging in Adam’s profession the age-old reminder of all of humankind’s humility. Cade’s invocation of Adam’s profession echoes an earlier scene of clever repartee between John Holland and George Bevis, one that humorously but astutely exposes the disingenuousness of official propaganda claiming to value work. The Elizabethan Homily Against Idleness preached, “Apply yourself, every man in his vocation, to honest labor and business” (4.2.15n), but as Holland complains, the “nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons,” and Bevis notes, “The King’s Council are no good workmen” (4.2.12–14). In their interpretation of the official Homily, Holland and Bevis see value and rightful reward for the laboring man, and define the laboring man literally, as one who performs manual labor. “[I]t is said ‘labor in thy vocation,’ which is as much to say as, ‘let the magistrates be laboring men;’ therefore should we be magistrates,” Holland asserts, and Bevis agrees “Thou hast hit it; for there’s no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.” (4.2.15–20). The Homily, in fact, tried to have it both ways: it preached that if “[we live] like drone bees by the labors of other men, then do we break the Lord’s commandment,” but backtracked on the implications of this doctrine, which subversively suggested that even the ruling elite should perform manual labor, by saying “whosoever doth good to the commonweal and society of men with his industry and labor . . . is not to be accounted idle, though he work no bodily labor” (Hill 139). Bevis and Holland astutely articulate this contradiction when they complain of the nobility’s attitude toward labor and present themselves as the appropriate candidates for magisterial positions. And, as throughout the scene, they are carrying lathes, if Bevis were to slam his into an available object while he says “thou hast hit it,” he would underscore the point that when “the magistrates be[come] laboring men” the power moving into the magisterial realm would be the physical—and potentially violent—power of hard hands and bodies. Thus, by the time Stafford denigrates trades in his exchange with Cade, Bevis and Holland have already articulated a discourse of entitlement through work, and they’ve shown what strong bodies and the tools of their trades can do. The nobles’ scorn is displaced by the consideration of just how scary the trades can be, and one can imagine the audience considering, along the models that Bevis and Holland have set up, just what kind of gruesome damage a plasterer and a shearman might be able to effect. Furthermore, before Stafford even enters and begins to disparage both Cade’s artisanal and putatively aristocratic lineages, the rebels themselves have already done both, a preemption that effectively undermines any purchase

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Stafford’s scorn may have. Whenever Cade makes self-elevating claims, his own men deflate his pretensions with punning asides that insist upon his commoner birth. Cade. My father was a Mortimer,— But. [Aside.] He was an honest man, and a good bricklayer. Cade. My mother a Plantagenet,— But. [Aside.] I knew her well; she was a midwife. Cade. My wife descended of the Lacies,— But. [Aside.] She was, indeed, a pedlar’s daughter, and sold many laces. Weaver.[Aside] But not of late, not able to travel with her furr’d pack, she washes bucks here at home. Cade. Therefore am I of an honourable house. But. [Aside.] Ay, by my faith, the field is honourable, and there was he born, under a hedge; for his father had never a house but the cage. Cade. Valiant I am. Weaver. [Aside] A must needs, for beggary is valiant. Cade. I am able to endure much. But. [Aside.] No question of that, for I have seen him whipp’d three market-days together. Cade. I fear neither sword not fire. Weaver. Aside.] He need not fear the sword, for his coat is of proof. But. [Aside.] But me thinks he should stand in fear of fire, being burnt i’th’hand for stealing of sheep. (4.2.37–60)

Cade’s men wryly call attention to the social distance between Cade’s identity claims and the world they know him to belong to—the world they share with him. They make joke after joke associating Cade with vagabondage. Vagabondage—the life of a so-called sturdy beggar—was about the lowest one could get on the Elizabethan social scale, and Cade is associated with this life at least five times in this passage. He is born under a hedge, as the butcher tells it, because his father was a homeless vagrant whose only place of shelter was the “cage,” that is, the marketplace prison for harlots and vagabonds (4.2.50fn). His wife’s father was a peddler, an occupation officially considered “seditious or fraudulent” (Beier, Masterless Men, 86) and outlawed by the Vagrancy Acts of 1572 and 1597 (89). And he himself has “all the hallmarks of a vagabond” (41), as William Carroll has pointed out: he is “a ‘valiant’ beggar, who has been ‘whipp’d three market-days together,’ and been ‘burnt i’ thi’ hand for stealing of sheep’” (“The Nursery of Beggary,”42). But locating Cade in this social group has far more rhetorical effect than simply stripping him of all social status. The wisecracks highlight that the world these rebels come from is

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a world of poverty; Cade’s history is that of a poor man and his crimes are the crimes of hunger—he has been punished for begging and for stealing sheep. Not all members of Elizabethan society believed the Poor Laws to be just and, the fact that Cade is burnt for stealing sheep is certainly significant; it was for the purposes of grazing sheep that landlords were enclosing the common lands that had historically helped the poor to feed themselves. The rebels’ witticisms playfully mock their leader and simultaneously point to the legitimacy of their grievances. More brilliantly still, the utter ease with which they bandy about what dominant discourses considered the worst of insults is an act of reclaiming the “low” and shameful; their ability to make fun of their world’s distance from the “respectable” world shows little respect for that “respectable” world. The rebels make fun of their leader, but they do it in good humor, and in the process they remove the taint from his background and underscore the political legitimacy of their cause. Through all the humor, however, the physical threat of the artisans’ rebellious masculinity stands. Nothing Cade’s followers say about him dispels the threat of his body. While they joke about his low birth and criminal connections, he boasts that he is “valiant,” “able to endure much,” and fears “neither sword nor fire”; even at the very end of the play, these claims are proven to be accurate. Furthermore, Cade’s presentation as a vagrant, a masterless man, is part of what makes him so frightening—he operates outside of law and social order, and he has no regard for the potential consequences of his actions. Vagrants were widely feared as an “uncontrollable, chaotic energy threatening the entire social order of both country and city” (Carroll “The Nursery of Beggary,” 36) and linked to a variety of criminal activities, including theft and murder (Beier, Masterless Men, 6). The play displays on the stage—gives flesh to—the notorious discursive figure, the masterless man. Outlaw Cade will fight to the end and does so; he is like Wat Tyler and John Ball of the Jack Straw stage play, whose cavalier attitude toward the possibility of hanging casts them as a particularly pernicious threat. They plan their rebellion because “they owe a death” after killing the king’s tax collector; their attitude is, they will die as a result of this deed anyway, so they may as well go after what they want while they can. These are men who have nothing to lose (“Well then we know the worst / He can but hang us and that is all”), and are unrepentant and seemingly undistressed about their fate (“And what I said in time of our business I repent not, / And if it were to speak againe, / Everie word should be a whole sermon, / So much I repent me” (Fiv)). Similarly, Cade cries defiance to “ten thousand devils” (4.10.60) and claims his soul “unconquer’d” (63) when he meets his end. Execution confessionals were a popular genre in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; one might conjecture that pamphlets such as

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“The Apprentices Warning Piece,” putatively the contrite final words of an apprentice who poisoned his master, served to control fears about criminality by offering evidence of the social and judiciary system’s ability to reform criminals into penitent subjects who embodied, at their deaths, the imperative to uphold social and legal order.29 The Life and Death of Jack Straw and 2 Henry VI do the very opposite; they amplify social fears by portraying violent rebellious masculine subjects who are constructed by the socioeconomic conditions of the contemporary world and physically enabled by the very work that keeps their status low. These rebellious characters are hardened and brutal ideologues, impervious to redemption or human feeling. Cade, in fact, cultivates cruelty, refusing to be swayed from his agenda even by his own occasional impulses of pity. When Lord Say begs eloquently to live, he suppresses a merciful response: “I feel remorse in myself with his words; but I’ll bridle it: he shall die, and it be but for pleading so well for his life” (4.7.99–101). But after establishing Cade as the center of both warlike acumen and ruthlessness, the play does a surprising about-face in bringing on his end. Suddenly, in Alexander Iden the landowner, it presents a body far more powerful than his. Iden compares himself to Cade before he slays him: Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser; Thy hand is but a finger to my fist; Thy leg a stick compared with this truncheon: My foot shall fight with all the strength thou hast. (4.10.46–49)

What has happened to the manly Cade, that he has become so weak and powerless and small? Cade is hungry and Iden is, we can assume, wellfed, but how could a complacent landowner suddenly have the power to bring down the soldier who, we’ve been told, could “oppose himself against a troop of kerns” fighting so long “till that his thighs with darts / Were almost like a sharp-quill’d porpentine” and still have the stamina to “caper upright like a wild Morisco”? The play focuses throughout on Cade’s hypermasculine strength and indomitable power, yet, remarkably, at the end of act 4 his performance is truncated by his entrapment within the walls of an enclosed garden. What ideological operation is taking place in act 4, scene 10? Having Cade slain within an enclosed garden allows an institutional victory to the commercial interests of agriculture and property ownership that Cade and his rebels implicitly and explicitly challenge. When Cade’s emblematic strong body is tamed by hunger, his dangerous lowborn masculinity is checked, and the system that helped create that threat then provides a means of control. Cade, as outlaw, is forced outside of the social and economic world that controls the distribution of food. That world,

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it seems, has the power to starve the manly-but-lowborn-and- rebellious body and, therefore, to defuse its threat. Cade spends five days in the woods and is forced to climb the walls of an enclosed garden to steal food; there are no unenclosed gardens from which he may steal more easily. In Hall’s Union of Families there is no mention of Cade’s hunger; nor, for that matter, is the garden described as Iden’s own or enclosed; Iden merely finds Cade in “a garden.”30 On the other hand, both the Folio and the Quarto (The First Part of the Contention) specifically use language that makes clear not only that the garden is Iden’s own, but that it is an enclosed one.31 In 2 Henry VI, Cade’s complaint—“these five days have I hid me in these woods and durst not peep out, for all the country is laid for me” (4.10.2–5)—offers an image of perfect surveillance, one that has implications for all vagrants and masterless men, not just for seditious criminals such as Cade. The scene of Cade in the woods imagines the ideal of a perfectly mapped out landscape; that which remains wasted woodland is no real haven for the idle because it offers no means of survival. Those unpropertied commoners who are not locked into the work system are locked out. Using metonymy and analogy, the play insists that Cade’s great strength is really very small and his dangerous masculinity is, after all, very manageable.32 It does so by constructing in Iden a physical emblem of the power of absolute ownership, one who easily overpowers Cade. The institutional power structure that destroys Cade is here reduced to and embodied within one man who is bigger and stronger; and if the actor playing Cade is physically impressive, the actor playing Iden must display some form of physical advantage over him: I imagine a beefy, brawny man greatly out weighing a muscular but sinewy (as well as hunger-weakened) Cade. Absolute ownership is presented as institutionally more powerful than the forces of common ownership; thus, it is symbolically appropriate that its men be physically more powerful. Cade’s refusal to bow to the hierarchical imperatives of absolute ownership contributes to his downfall. Iden is not only an owner; he is a giver of charity. By his own account he “sends the poor well pleased from [his] gate” (4.10.23). But Cade’s rebellious demands, after all, were those of the dispossessed who desired autonomy, not the charity that often replaced access to common resources.33 Cade, it seems, is one of those dispossessed men spoken of by Hythloday in More’s Utopia, a “man of courage” “more likely to rob than beg” (Carroll “The Nursery of Beggary,” 34). Cade and Iden essentially come to blows over how and by whom food is to be administered. As a man who, presumably, is used to appreciation in return for his handouts, Iden is enraged that Cade should be “rude,” use “saucy terms” toward him, and break into his garden to rob his grounds (4.10.30–35). Suspicious of Iden’s self-professed charitable inclinations,

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Cade offers to make him “eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin” (4.10.28–29). Iden, despite his professed refusal to take “odds to combat a poor famish’d man” (4.10.43), indeed within the same speech as that profession, raises his sword—“Let this my sword report what speech forbears” (4.10.53)—and easily wins the battle over the hitherto unconquerable villain-hero of the play. In some sense, Iden’s power is a threat to the vision of the commonwealth embodied by the Shakespearean genre of history-play writing, which imagines the polity organized around the political and militaristic actions of the aristocracy, the monarch, and the court. When the play casts the Cade rebellion in the shape of the Jack Straw rebellion, it brings the socioeconomic world into the picture and plants the seeds of its deconstruction as a genre. When it creates Iden—landowner, encloser—in order to vanquish Cade, the play acknowledges the importance of an emerging institutional power that rivals the militaristic power base of the traditional feudal aristocracy. Iden is a gentleman, but he is not an aristocrat, and he is not associated with the court. His power does not stem from his proximity to the monarch, the court, or a dynastic feudal lineage. It stems from land rather than title, from his ownership of property and the socioeconomic control that land ownership renders him. Significantly, when Iden conquers Cade, he is not acting as a deputy of the sovereign’s physical force; he is protecting his property rights.34 Iden is loyal to the king, and he is rewarded in an appropriately feudal manner, but Iden is knighted after the fact and importantly, until he becomes a knight he stands as a force of non-sovereign power over the bodies of English subjects. In the figure of Iden the play acknowledges the ascendency of a non-courtly hierarchical institution, that of agricultural commerce, and implicitly authorizes its forms of violence as mechanisms of control. Iden can do what the aristocratic warriors are unable to do—control the seditious, or potentially seditious, artisans, vagrants, and masterless men who were a threat to social order. When he is knighted, he is ushered into the aristocratic network of power that extends from the sovereign, and his force is appropriated for the court.35 The death of Cade is generically and morally appropriate in that the brutal villain is killed, and it would seem to suggest that the dramatic purpose of presenting the raw physical force of the rebel was to assuage social fears about riots and disruptions. However, the death is arguably not a satisfying ending to the dramatic rebellion. The most exciting character on stage is removed by a smug, overfed landlord who represents all that the rebels have been fighting against. The manner in which Cade dies sounds a pessimistic note for the cause of ancient rights of autonomy and gives a bow to the powers of private ownership and enclosure. The play backs away from an explicitly subversive message by reasserting social,

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political, and economic hierarchies, but by creating a hypocritical and unpleasant character in Iden, the representative man of the new regime, it leaves us in doubt of its own affection for the new regimes. And because Cade is a dramatic character and not a “real” rebel, the implications and effects for the audience of his power, his ruthlessness, and even the fears he creates must be considered within the context of the desires and fantasies that theater allows, rather than simply within the context of a social world wherein rebels, however one perceived the validity of their cause, posed actual, material threats. *

*

*

Apologists for the theater “stressed the role of history plays in preserving the memory of English heroes and of encouraging patriotic feelings in the spectators” (Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account Of Shakespeare’s English Histories, 18): “Brave men, brave acts, being bravely acted too, / Makes, as men see things done, desire to do” wrote Arthur Hopton (Heywood, An Apology For Actors, A2v). As Howard and Rackin put it, paraphrasing Nashe, “the stage makes the dead arise, forging a continuity between those who have embodied Englishness in the past and those who are the heirs of that legacy” (18). 2 Henry VI critiques the failure of the aristocratic warrior class and presents common laboring men as the ones with the admirable English prowess the king lacks. I’m arguing that, in the wake of aristocratic failure, some elements of the patriotic sentiment history plays were meant to evoke may have been rerouted to the rebels. Patriotic sentiment is not necessarily woven entirely from support for ideological, political, or moral positions; part of its fabric may consist of the aesthetics of masculine style or canons of masculinity, and this is the sort of patriotic sentiment that might have been directed at the rebels. Aesthetic admiration for the powerful masculinity of the dangerous body can subsume moral repugnance for it. When they make their moral arguments in favor of the theater, commentators such as Nashe, Hopton, and Thomas Heywood seem to recognize the power of identification by spectators with human forms on display, although they are not, of course, advocating admiration for rebellious artisans. Heywood, in his Apology for Actors, gives a great deal of attention both to the staging of manly attributes and to the effect of the stage on the masculinity of English spectators. Because it features action, the stage’s power “to moove the spirits of the beholder to admiration” (B3r) is far greater than that of painting and oratory, and admiration of manly action, in his view, leads to emulation. He gives the example of Aristotle’s pedagogic use of theater with his pupil, Alexander:

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he having the tuition of young Alexander, caused the destruction of Troy to be acted before his pupill, in which the valor of Achilles was so naturally expressed, that it impressed the hart of Alexander, in so much that all his succeeding actions were meerly shaped after that patterne, and it may be imagined had Achilles never lived, Alexander had never conquered the whole world. (B3v)

Alexander’s “hart”—the seat of man’s vital functions, including courage—was indelibly “imprest” by his fascination with Achilles’ courage and valor. Spectators, or “heirs,” vicariously inhabit the codes of ethics and behaviors they see on the stage, and then carry those codes into the contemporary social world. Essentially, an iconography of masculinity can be created on stage through the display of real bodies, an iconography that leaves a mark on the spectators who view it.36 For 2 Henry VI, the theater puts the spotlight on laboring class bodies and allows their powerful masculinity to be viewed and vicariously inhabited. In fact, at some point in the history of the staging of 2 Henry VI, Cade was probably played by the popular comic actor Will Kemp, and Shakespeare may even have written the part with him in mind.37 Kemp was a popular, celebrity clown in the tradition of Richard Tarleton (Gurr, Stage, 88–89); when a character is played by a famous actor, the fame of the actor does not, I would suggest, entirely divorce itself from the representation. Having Kemp—a popular, charismatic actor—play Cade would have added a patina of interest and appeal to the character. As Kemp was famous for his morris dancing, the casting of Cade as a “wild morisco” would have firmly clinched an association between them. More significantly, Kemp’s body on the stage would have made possible a celebration of Cade’s because of its sheer physical impressiveness. Kemp was a physically powerful man, as testified to by his nine-day-long morris dance in 1600 (recorded in his Nine Daies Wonder). David Wiles writes that he was a “man of powerful build” and notes that although “he spread his nine days’ dancing over a month, the dance testifies to his stamina, especially given the condition of the roads in February.” Kemp also, apparently, danced quickly and had “the traditional morris dancer’s prowess in leaping”; as a morris dancer, he was “a species of athlete” (Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 24). Kemp’s body on stage would have reinforced the play’s insistence on the power of the low body and contributed to the creation of an attractive iconography of the working man’s body. Iden’s description of himself, as I’ve noted above, suggests that the actor playing his role was to be physically bigger than the actor playing Cade; the description can be read, I’d argue, as a casting directive, although it is possible, of course, that Iden was not cast as a bigger man. However, that it might have seemed necessary to cast Iden as physically larger underscores the power and danger of presenting the working man’s

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body as a compelling icon. With Iden as the most physically powerful man in the play, the ideologically correct ending effected by his character is not merely one of appropriate punishment for seditious rebels—his ability to physically conquer Cade, and the explicit attention drawn to his body, would seem to be an attempt to steer aesthetic patriotism and audience identification with physical omnipotence toward the right body, the body of the elite male. I would suggest, however, that the attempt to destroy the charisma of the conquered body fails on two counts; Shakespeare may even have been aware of them. First, Cade is killed, but his will is not destroyed. Never does he rescind his claim to indomitability, and he dies defying his torturers, Iden and any “ten thousand devils” (4.10.60) while proclaiming his status as the “best man” (72) of Kent, who “never fear’d any” (73–74); he is, in this sense, one of Foucault’s “illustrious criminals” who, “by not giving in under torture, [gives] proof of a strength that no power can succeed in bending” (Discipline and Punish 67). Second, there is a very good chance that the actor playing Cade literally rose up, after the fifth act, and performed a jig, which was a standard practice for the company clown. By dancing, the clown/Cade would be reasserting and displaying the physical skill and power of the working man’s body, and if the actor remained dressed in Cade’s costume, the message that Cade hadn’t yet been beaten would be tidily made. Wiles speculates that playwrights recognized the jigs as a means of rounding off the action of the play and “could therefore leave their scripts open-ended—in a sense, incomplete” (Shakespeare’s Clown, 53). Of course, playscripts did, in general, end with the resolution of moral order, as we see in 2 Henry VI, but jigs could be a kind of antidote to the moral order created by the play. “[A]fter the scripted play was over, the clown was allowed the freedom of the stage, freedom for improvisation, rhyming and dancing” (ibid., 43). We don’t know for certain that Kemp played Cade, and we don’t know the specific content of Kemp’s post-2 Henry VI jig if he did, but we do know that Kemp’s jigs generally focus on a clown who “rapidly makes everyone else appear more ludicrous” than he (ibid., 53). As Cade, Kemp could well have fashioned a jig that revisited Cade’s death scene and humorously undid Cade’s humiliation and the ideologically correct ending in numerous ways. I would argue that Cade’s defeat at the end of act 4 cannot be assumed as absolute. Furthermore, Cade’s defeat can be seen as a formal structure that enables a deeper audience identification than could otherwise happen if Cade were to prevail. Thomas Cartelli theorizes that theatrical experience “is especially conducive to the representation and entertainment of fantasies that are usually relegated to the background of our consciousness outside of the theater” (Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience, 10), and argues that the degree to which a play can

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satisfy an “audience’s desire for psychic release and fantasy fulfillment” (11) will determine its success, dramatic and commercial. But while spectators may desire that the valiant and defiant working man conquer the powerful elite, among some, full identification with that man could be hindered if it requires conscious, open acceptance of the bloody destruction and chaos he enacts, which celebrating his victory would entail. The formal moral ending allows spectators to enjoy and vicariously identify with Cade’s power, while protecting them from being overwhelmed by uncomfortable, morally unpalatable fantasies. To quote Cartelli again, “the fact that the spectator can generally depend on a drama’s formal structure to keep the play of fantasy within containable limits also eliminates the need to hold tight to normative defenses” (ibid., 35). The possibility that male spectators responded to the rebels in 2 Henry VI by vicariously inhabiting Cade’s near omnipotence or the butcher’s vicious brutality makes the powerful laboring body a double threat; it is not only a physical threat to the commonwealth because of its destructive energy and power (and a threat to the state’s hegemony on coercive power) but also an ideological threat to the hegemony of the aristocratic body as the English body to inspire awe and admiration, to provide the model of English masculinity. To inhabit vicariously codes of nondominant masculinities is to allow those masculinities to cross over into the cultural praxis of dominant masculinities. During this period of social flux, when social identity was becoming less absolute and sometimes jarringly contingent, the masculinity of the powerful working body, the skilled body whose potential for danger is apparent, becomes an attractive contender in negotiations over valued codes of masculinity when it appears on the stage.

3 What Kind of Man is Bottom? Sex, Civility, and Manly Difference in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Sappho and Phao THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY ’S EXPLICIT VALORIZATION of the working man plays its part in forwarding the social position of commercially productive males. In addition to foregrounding the work-centred masculinity of Simon Eyre and his shoemakers, the play also satirizes the excesses of elite masculinities, suggesting that idly indulgent gentlemen and aristocrats could stand to be revitalized by some time spent in a workshop. The artisan rebels in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI are theatrically exciting in their ruthless violence and powerful physicality, and no aristocratic character in the play matches their strength or their resolve. It is less immediately clear how the artisan characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the main focus of this chapter, offer positive models of manliness or pose challenges to the hegemony of elite masculinities. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, after all, a play in which the main artisan character, Nick Bottom the weaver, is transformed into a half-ass; this plot device and the discourse of bestiality that runs through the play would seem to suggest, at least on the surface, that the play reinforces age-old hierarchies that position lowborn men close to the animal world. Nevertheless, I argue in this chapter that the manliness of the sweet but slightly silly weaver and his mechanical fellows reveals contradictions within powerful discourses of gender that support elite male privilege, as does the masculinity of the handsome ferryman, Phao, in John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao. These plays highlight the possibility that men of low status can embody even the most socially elite models of masculine behavior; the lowborn artificers of MSND and the ferryman of Sappho and Phao are evidence that social rank by no means determines who will possess much-valued traits of social civility. More explicitly than the other plays I’ve discussed so far, A Midsummer Night’s Dream directly questions what it is to be a man, by having its characters pronounce judgment on their own manhood and that of others. Also, and less overtly, the play stages an interclass competition over which men of which social group best embody masculine perfection. Through these actions the play calls our attention to competing early modern ideologies of the ontology of manhood. Manhood was frequently understood as a state or status that was attained, a quality a male person achieved, 94

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rather than an essence “simply there in the male body,” to quote Bruce Smith.1 The artisans of MSND themselves display an intensely-felt pressure to prove to the elite characters that they are men and not something lesser—dangerous beasts—and they hope to be “made men” (4.2.17) with royal pensions for their theatrical performance of Pyramus and Thisby. The danger of a constructivist ideology of gender is well known to both scholars of gender and scholars of the early modern theater; if gender is attained rather than inherent in the body, if it is a performance of traits, the door opens for gender differences along class lines to be obscured when commoners successfully deploy the codes of masculinity associated with elite men. The performative nature of gender was a topical subject for the theater, as the theater itself disseminated a constructivist discourse of gender in its very practices when lowborn men convincingly played aristocrats and kings and young boys played women of all social rank. The ideology of innate gender differences between highborn men and lowborn men was a powerful instrument for the offices of power because it constituted and justified social hierarchy between men, just as the regulatory hegemony of naturalized gender differences between men and women justified women’s legal and social inferiority. The elite characters associated with Duke Theseus’s court do not perceive manliness in the lowborn mechanicals—their condescension, scorn, and mocking comments assume an innate sense of their own elite masculine superiority and suggest that they see the artisans failing in their efforts to be men. The class tension so apparent in the interactions between the artisans and the gentlemen illustrates Smith’s reminder that “masculinity, like anything else, is knowable only in terms of the things it is not,” and is further understandable when we consider that a significant point of contrast for early modern masculinity was “persons of lower social rank” (Shakespeare and Masculinity, 104). Manhood was perceived and constructed by means of comparison, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the men of the court think of themselves via a class other, bestializing the lower class men to reinforce their difference. Similarly, Love’s Labour’s Lost comments on discourses of manliness that employ bestiality to construct difference between men of differing social status through its staging of a plot contrasting three lords and a king who attempt to live ascetic lives with a lowborn swain who embraces sensual appetites. The ideological struggles over the nexus of class and masculinity found on the stage are significantly informed by other, more elite, discursive genres. Securing the exclusive nature of elite masculinity is a key concern of gentry-oriented Renaissance courtesy manuals, the most influential of which endeavored to weaken the constructivist tendency in early modern thought that presented manliness as an achievable quality and allowed for the possibility that men like Bottom might perform manliness on a

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par with their social superiors. Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561) attempted to protect true gentility from (again deploying a discourse of bestiality) the “many untowardly Ass-heades, that through malapartnesse thinke to purchase them the name of good Courtier” ([New York: Dutton, 1928, 1948], 29). By precisely defining the perfect courtier and by bolstering what might be called “fictions of blood,” Catiglione advances the idea that aristocratic manliness is not merely performance, and, therefore, achievable by any male person, but rather is the expression of a superior inner essence or bloodline. Not all males are men, but neither is proper manhood achieved by performance alone: one must be born of the gentle classes to possess the potential for ideal masculinity. Castiglione’s spokesman in Book of the Courtier, the Count of Canosse, argues that it chanceth alwaies in a manner, both in armes and in all other vertuous acts, that the most famous men are Gentlemen. Because nature in everything has deepely sowed that privie seed, which giveth a certaine force and propertie of her beginning, unto whatsoever springeth of it, and maketh it like unto her selfe. As we see by example, not onely in the race of horses and other beastes, but also in trees, whose slippes and graftes alwaies for the most part are like unto the stocke of the tree they came from: and if at any time they grow out of kinde, the fault is in the husbandman. And the like is in men, if they be trained up in good nurture, most commonly they resemble them from whom they come, and often times passe them, but if they have not one that can well traine them up, they growe (as it were) wilde, and never come to their ripeness. (ibid., 32)

In Castiglione’s economy of manhood, genealogy matters. Comparing men to horses and trees, he insists on the significance of origins: like produces like, from that unique seed which nature has empowered to reproduce in its own image. If progeny stray from that expected likeness, they “growe out of kinde”; it is unnatural, then, an aberration, when gentles do not embody gentility in “armes and in all other vertuous acts.” Nevertheless, Castiglione’s spokesman slips into a language of nurture that almost threatens his ideology, when he accounts for those born of noble stock who grow away from the path of nature (“growe out of kinde”); blaming the husbandman for bad nurture, he is forced also to acknowledge its opposite, good nurture, and the role of nature is, briefly, eclipsed. He pulls back from this danger, however, with his use of the idea of “ripeness,” a term from nature whose usage allows him to link the growth of a gentleman into virtue and nobility with natural maturity and fruition. Nurture plays a role in nobility of character, but in gentlemen, the tendency is inherently there, in the seed of gentility, passed from generation to generation. Indeed, the

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Count insists he can say what the perfect courtier is—that is, he describes it—but claims he is unable to say how to become one: “Bound I am not (quoteth the Count) to teach you to have good grace, nor anything els, saving onely to shew you what a perfect Courtier ought to be”; “So perhaps I am able to tell you what a perfect courtier ought to be, but not to teach you how he should doe to be one” (ibid., 44). After a final caveat reiterating this impossibility—“although it bee (in a maner) in a proverbe, that Grace is not to be learned”—he does offer to those “who so mindeth to be gracious” the following faint hope and advice : “(presupposing first that he be not of nature unapt) [he] ought to beginne betimes and to learn his principles of cunning men” (ibid.). If there is so little possibility of learning, “malapert assheads” such as Bottom the weaver haven’t much hope of improving their status by means of their manhood. But while Castiglione may have meant his book to be descriptive and, thus, delimiting, any system of status divisions at least partially based on the emulable signifiers and practices Castiglione describes is limited in its force and is likely to enable precisely the sort of struggles for upward mobility that so offend him. By helping to codify and thus demystify the “rules” and by making them more accessible to those he considered “ass-heads,” Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier contributed to the competition he sought to quell. As I’ll demonstrate, Bottom embodies (literally) Castiglione’s low-status asshead who can obscure signifiers of difference between high and low, and, in doing so, he reveals the constructed nature of gender characteristics and the social divisions based upon them. Phao the ferryman, of John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao, is similarly represented. The successful performances by Phao and Bottom of the codes and canons of elite masculinity expose faultlines in the dominant gender ideologies that shore up elite male gender privilege. Castiglione was probably not thinking about weavers and ferrymen when he wrote his influential Book of the Courtier, but the anonymous author of The Institution of a Gentleman (1555; 1568) explicitly identifies virtuous handicraftsmen as a danger to what he calls “the house of worthy fame,” which to his mind should be “an habitacion wherin dwelleth nobilitie, and not obscuritie.” The anonymous author acknowledges certain instances in which commoners, through “knowledge, labor, and industry,” may honorably claim gentle status, but while the social system he presents is one that cannot categorically preclude commoners from obtaining elite or gentle status, the social world he desires is one that makes it difficult for commoners to enter the upper echelons. Social distinctions are best maintained on the basis of rank, not individual virtue. His anxiety about the failure of elite masculinity is expressed through the metaphor of the gentry as a decaying house, whose deterioration has allowed handicraftsmen, who “these days do stand much in the estimacion of their degrees,”

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to seek and obtain titles of distinction, “thoughe (in dede) of them selues they can chalenge no greater worthynes then the spade brought unto their late fathers” (Epistle). In order that the house may be “well repayred,” he exhorts his elite readers to “diligently labore to excel others in virtues, or els there wil rise comparison of worthynes: as why should not Pan as wel as Apollo?” (Epistle). This author openly fears competition from commoners who seek social reward and recognition for their virtue. He perceives a frightening reality that gentlemen might not always fare well when weighed against commoners, and without a low other to secure gentry self-definition as high, difference will be erased. The “comparison of worthynes” that he fears is powerfully staged in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, to a lesser extent, in Love’s Labor’s Lost. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, parallel scenes between the gentlemen and the mechanicals invite a sly and humorous comparison between their masculinities and prove the hierarchy suggested by the play’ asshead mockery to be less self-evident than it seems. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, aristocratic men fail to eschew the passion and appetites that the play strategically associates with lowborn men, thus staging the impossibility of high and low to exist as separate polar terms in an apt demonstration of Stallybrass and White’s argument that, “the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover . . . that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” (Transgression, 5). While difference is obscured in Love’s Labour’s Lost by the deflation of aristocratic pretensions, in Sappho and Phao it is arguably erased. Through the character of Phao, who, like Bottom, successfully adopts elite codes of civility and courtesy and also is elevated to the elite status of Petrarchan lover without the least bit of irony or incongruity, Lyly achieves a powerful blurring of high and low. Furthermore, no actual gentlemen exist in the play, with the exception of the courtier Trachinus,2 who plays a largely incidental role, and our attention is drawn to how easily Phao takes the place of the courtier from the perspective of the court women. While Phao’s status as a working man is always foregrounded for the anxiety it causes, he is, in essence, the only courtier in the play. In the romantic comedies I examine in this chapter, the issues of interclass competition and tension between men and masculinities that I’ve introduced are interwoven with generic concerns of love, sexuality, and marriage. Critics of Elizabethan romantic comedies have noted that the cultural work of these plays was, if not to unambivalently celebrate marriage, at least to legitimate marriage at a time of contestation over the nature of manliness, appropriate unions, and marriage itself. By staging marriage-oriented sexual desire, romantic comedies supported the ideologies of marriage that were proliferating from the pulpits of Protestant

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preachers. These ideologies united sexualized love with marriage and forwarded the process of constructing marriage, and heterosexual sexuality within marriage, as characteristics of masculinity, rather than dangerous threats to it. Furthermore, such ideologies idealized marriage as the foundation of a stable social order.3 But while romantic comedies contributed to the degree of permissiveness culturally allotted to heterosexual expression, they also staged a host of competing discourses, energies, and normative beliefs indicative of anxieties surrounding the Protestant marital norm. The ideological process of making heterosexual desire manly had to contend with still-powerful discourses of a mind/body split that disdained the body and all bodily impulses, distinguishing between men and beasts by contrasting the faculty of reason in men with appetite and sensuality in beasts, and fearing eruptions of “animal” sensuality. Sexual desire, according to this ideology, marked men as beastly. Montaigne describes love as “nothing els but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired subject” (Rose, The Expense of Spirit, 19). He notes disdainfully that “the ridiculous tickling, or titilation of this pleasure, the absurd, giddie and harebraind motions wherewith it . . . agitates . . . that unadvised rage, that furious and with cruelty enflamed visage in loues lustfull and sweetest effects,” and then concludes that Nature created sexual love in mockery, “thereby to equal us, & without distinction to set free the foolish and the wise, us and the beasts” (ibid.). Subduing desire to reason was the only way to maintain (or construct) distinctions between men and beasts, as Richard Braithwaith notes in a passage praising moderation: Moderation is a subduer of our desires to the obedience of Reason, and a temperate conformer of all our affections; freeing them from the too much subjection either of desires or feare. This Moderation therefore, being a note of distinction betwixt man and beast, let us draw neere to the knowledge of this so exquisite a virtue. (Richard Braithwaith, The English Gentleman, London, 1630, 306)

The desire for, and too great a congress with, women was particularly dangerous since flesh was marked female in opposition to masculine spirit, and women were widely understood to be “farre more lecherous” than men.4 A man might become womanish through the union of the flesh, lose his capacity for rational self-governance, and become more fully beastlike. These fears coalesce with alternative normativities, which, according to Laurie Shannon, stood in uneasy juxtaposition to the “merger of disparate, incommensurate kinds” that constituted marriage (“Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98, no. 1 (2000): 186). Shannon’s work demonstrates how marriage, “however normative . . . as hierarchy,” contradicted a “likeness topos at the center of positive ideas about union” (ibid.). This topos is seen

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in high relief in Montaigne’s “On Friendship,” where he articulates his belief that deepness of feeling and attachment cannot exist between men and women but only between two men, musing of his imagined friends that “they mix and blend one into the other in so perfect a union that the seam which has joined them is effaced and disappears” (“On Friendship,” Essays, 97). But while this perfect union between men is a kind of joyful enhancement of the male soul that doesn’t threaten male selfhood—“I” is not lost when “he” becomes “I” and “I” becomes “he”—the mixing of genders could be seen to have negative consequences. As Shannon puts it, Renaissance texts “frequently present gender as a concentrate that is diluted and changed by mixing,” a source of anxiety creating problems for “an emergent ideology urging a heterosexual marriage” (“Nature’s Bias,” 185), since such a construction of gender fed fears that too great an intimacy with one’s wife might contaminate one’s manliness. Not only women were associated with the lower body and excessive appetites;5 lowborn men were as well. Thus, it is not surprising to find in romantic comedies artisan characters used as easy receptacles for anxieties about animal sensuality; it is they who are often cast as embodying the disorderly or shameful sexuality that could be associated with heteroerotic coupling. The sexuality of common working men, such as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost, is constructed, at least superficially, to create distinctions between proper, ordered sexuality and animal appetites. Such distinctions have to be made if the dignity of the higher classes is to be maintained while they are interpolated into a more permissive heterosexual regime. But while Costard is constructed as buffoonish and unrefined, Love’s Labour’s Lost ultimately fails to make a full distinction between elite men and their putative foil, while Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream proves, on close reading, to be more gentlemanly than the gentlemen. As becomes apparent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao, sexual distinctions between highborn and lowborn bodies themselves could be dangerous and work against the hierarchical status quo they were meant to uphold. In these plays, there proves to be an easy slippage between the hypersexual working body and the sexually attractive one. Both John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream stage the overtly sexualized body of the lowborn working man as a body that pleases women, and in this role it challenges the monopoly of gentlemen and aristocrats over courtly practices of manhood. Both plays stage sexually pleasing working men interacting with elite women, thus staging proximity between two social groups that hierarchal, patriarchal discourses posited should be kept at a distance.6 Twice, elite women fall into a state of passionate love with working men and make them courtiers—Titania with Bottom and Sappho with Phao—and in both cases, the sexual appeal of the

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working man is presented as a threat to the honor of the elite woman, who must uphold her social position by channelling her affections into attachments appropriate to her status and title or by foregoing romantic attachment altogether. Additional proximity between elite women and working men is staged when Bottom and his fellow artisans must perform a play to be viewed by the women as well as the men of Theseus’s court. This playwithin-a-play introduces another sort of threat to elite women by sexually powerful working men. The mechanicals’ humorously elaborate preparations to avoid frightening the ladies with swords and wild lions remind the audience of how easily men of their station could be seen as violent forces, sexually and otherwise. The perception that working men were sexually rapacious and a potentially violent sexual threat to elite women is evident in plays such as The Contention and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Part One, wherein rebel artisans rape or threaten to rape citizen wives; this discourse lurks below the surface in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well. It is, however, within these circumstances of social prohibition and class tension that the sexualized working man is seen not only to enact a superior performance of gender but also to embody a sexuality that rivals that of the aristocratic men. *

*

*

Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao, Love’s Labour’s Lost registers anxiety about the bestial nature of sexual desire. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost features highborn male characters attempting to resolve that anxiety by means of ideological mystification and simultaneously undermines that mystification by revealing it for what it is. Worry about the appetites of the body is staged in the king’s pact with three noblemen to live the life of the mind under conditions of remarkable lenten severity. The four agree that while studying for three years, they will fast once a week, eat but one meal a day on nonfasting days, sleep only three hours a night, and, most importantly, abstain from all contact with women. Although Biron protests before he signs the decree—“every man with his affects is born, / Not by might mastered, but by special grace” (1.1.149–50)—even he agrees that whoever breaks the laws will “stand in attainder of eternal shame” (155), thus echoing the language of shame used in the item prohibiting the interaction with women: “Item, If any man be seen to talk with a woman within the terms of three years, he shall endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possibly devise” (1.1.128–30). Abstinence from physical needs, appetites, and pleasures is the means to avoid shame, and the pact is the assurance of abstinence. Thus, the king congratulates Biron when he signs the decree: “How well this yielding rescues thee from shame” (1.1.118).

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The abstinence of the nobles is underscored by the swain, Costard, who is associated with the appetites and activities the lords have foregone. In the scene immediately following the King’s iteration of the oath of abstinence, he is brought in to be punished for being taken with a wench, having been seen in the park by Don Armado with the country girl Jaquenetta. Unlike the lords, who anxiously attempt to avoid shame, Costard shamelessly admits his crime—“Sir, I confess the wench” (1.2.266)—and shamelessly asserts his sexual desire for her—“This maid will serve my turn” (1.1.278). When an ascetic regime is forced upon him—he is sentenced to “fast a week with bran and water” (1.1.301)—he protests that he’d rather “pray a month with mutton and porridge” (281). His desire for “mutton,” with its double meaning of meat and prostitute, locates him within the carnivalesque, where food and sex are celebrated together, and distances him firmly from the world of Spartan deprivation the aristocrats create for themselves. Along with his bawdiness, Costard’s body is made a focus in the play. His name designates him an “apple head,” again associating him with food and also suggesting a certain rustic stupidity (which, as with many clown figures, is belied by his running commentary). His large size is noted on several occasions, most notably when, on account of it, he is deemed suitable by Holofernes the pedant to perform Pompey, the distinguished Roman political and military leader. “This swain, because of his great limb or joint, shall pass Pompey the Great” (5.1.108–9). Armado refers to the strapping country boy as a “horse” and a “rational hind,” suggesting that he is more like a large animal than a man, and thereby locating him in the world of body rather than mind. Indeed, a hind is a female deer,7 not a male one, thus the insult further associates Costard with appetites and distances him from rationality. That Armado calls Costard “a rational hind” (1.2.106; my emphasis) is not an indication of respect; the oxymoron simply underscores his own derogatory view that Costard, while evidently a man, just barely qualifies as one. When Costard misnames himself Pompey the Big (“I Pompey am, Pompey surnamed the Big,” 5.2.543) his dimensions are emphasized once more, and when the lords encourage his insulting of Armado, he becomes “Greater than great—great, great, great Pompey, Pompey the Huge” (5.2.670–71), in Biron’s words. The joke about Costard’s size, on the one hand, is a joke against Costard, playing as it does on the early modern idea that, to quote Castiglione, “men so shut up of bodie [i.e., huge], besides that many times they are of a dull wit, . . . are also unapt for all exercise of nimbleness” (Book of the Courtier, 39). On the other hand, the joke is firmly turned to Costard’s favor when the power of his large physique is highlighted.8 After Armado challenges Costard, he seems reluctant to carry through with the duel, while Costard eagerly embraces

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the combat, even insisting that he will fight “by the sword,” although a country swain would certainly have less skill with swords than a Spanish lord, if any at all. Despite this advantage, Armado seems to perceive a disadvantage, declaring he cannot fight because he wears no shirt under his woolen doublet, and he “breathe[s] free breath” (5.2.705)—that is, he sighs with relief—when the altercation is ended by news of the King of France’s death. Armado may be a natural coward, but the greatest part of the joke, no doubt, is his being daunted by a strapping country boy, a “Pompey” greater in size than status or skill. Costard’s big size makes him “great” for answering a physical challenge, and the strapping English youth, for all that he may not have control over his sensual appetites, proves manlier than Armado within an important arena of measurement. So while the focus on Costard’s body, on the one hand, exploits dominant discourses about lowborn rustic men that stress sensual corporeality, it is discourses stressing the physical power of that lowborn body that make the final joke work. Furthermore, Armado the Spaniard functions as a foreign other, and the episode claims a certain physical prowess for the English body while simultaneously disclaiming the discomfiture physicality could induce by projecting it onto a lowborn body. But even before these negotiations on the relative value of size take place, the shoring up of aristocratic masculinity at the expense of the working man has begun to break down. The distinction between rational minds and animal appetites articulated by the two major episodes in act 1, scene 1—the aristocrats signing their pact and Costard being punished for licentious behavior—falls apart almost immediately after it is constructed. The very next scene in which the lords appear, the scene in which they meet the princess and ladies of France for the first time, finds Biron engaged in flirtatious word play with Rosaline and has each lord secretly seeking information about one of the ladies he has met. Their resolve has already begun to dissolve. Furthermore, Biron’s speech, in which he fully admits to himself and the audience that he is in love, makes it clear that love to him is little more than an animal appetite. In thirty lines of self-loathing and unbridled disgust, he equates love with sex and women with wantonness.9 Once “love’s whip,” he confesses to being now a “corporal of [Cupid’s] field” (3.1.172), a petty officer to the prince of sexual organs: “Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces” (3.1.169). He then displaces his own lust onto his lady and reveals sexual jealousy as another of his unrestrained passions: she’s a “whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes—/ . . . one that will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard” (3.1.181–84). When noblemen have no more control over their passions than do lowly country working men and love, for them, is nothing more than lust, the ontological difference between “rational hinds” and “brave conquerors” (1.1.8) of bestial appetite is disrupted.

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So then, how to maintain that distinction? A variety of strategies can mystify a lack of restraint. Romantic comedies often couple passionate love with idealized notions of marriage as a locus of and foundation for private and social harmony. Shakespeare’s nobles, however, voice earlier discourses, making use of Petrarchan idealizations to justify their desires, thus situating themselves within an elite masculine literary ethos. The princess, according to her admirer, the king, is the “Queen of queens”; Dumaine describes Kate as “most divine”; and Longueville, like Dumaine, deifies his lady and uses her deification to defend breaking his oath. A woman I foreswore, but I will prove Thou being a goddess, I foreswore not thee. My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love. Thy grace being gained cures all disgrace in me. (4.3.59–62)

Even Biron refers to Rosaline as “heavenly” and, in verses to her, he compares her “to twenty thousand fairs” (5.2.37) and proclaims her “the fairest goddess on the ground” (5.2.36). However, he also deflates the very Petrarchan hyperbole he and his fellow oath-takers employ, crudely reiterating his earlier views of women and love: “This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity, / A green goose a goddess, pure, pure idolatry” (4.3.69–70). Lovers, he says, overtaken by the force of violent passions seated in the liver, deify the flesh, idolizing silly maids—or, depending on how one reads “green goose,” young prostitutes10 —as goddesses. Biron’s deflation of Petrarchan hyperbole reveals the now well-known existence within Petrarchan discourse of polarizing tendencies to either idealize or degrade women and love: “these polarizations of women and sexuality inevitably coexist in the same discursive formation, one pole implying the other” (Rose, Expense of Spirit, 4).11 The ladies of Love’s Labor’s Lost reject the noble suitors’ Petrarchan love game, refusing to accept the strategies the men use to present their love as legitimate and worthy of return; their response to the desires voiced by the men suggests an understanding of a logic linking heated desires to lofty but empty courtly rhetoric. The Princess pronounces the love expressed in the noblemen’s letters to be “courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy” (5.2.762), implying that empty conventionality lies beneath their idealizing rhetoric. When she calls their offers “bombast. . . . made in the heat of blood” (5.2.782), the suggestion made is that she sees through their attempts at mystification, believes that their pretty words disguise heated and ephemeral passions, and judges their masculine sexuality as unconstrained and out of control. The King wants the ladies, just before they must leave, to quickly grant the men their love and promises of

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marriage, but the Princess wisely points out that “at the latest minute of the hour” (5.2.769) is “A time, methinks, too short / To make a worldwithout-end bargain in” (5.2.770–71). The aristocratic men have not proven that they possess appropriately controlled and contained sexuality—proper masculine sexuality—and, thus, they are not rewarded with marriage. “Our wooing,” Biron complains, “doth not end like an old play” (5.2.851). Indeed, it would seem that Love’s Labour’s Lost is too anxious about passion and legitimating carnal heat through marriage to end like a marriage comedy. Instead the men must prove not merely the strength and durability of their love but, more significantly, that they can forsake worldly pleasure—something they have thus far failed to do. The King must “go with speed / To some forlorn and naked hermitage / Remote from all the pleasures of the world” (5.2.776–78), and Biron must spend his time attending to sick and weary wretches confined to hospital beds. “You must be purged, too. Your sins are rank. / You are attaint with faults,” Rosalind pronounces to Biron in an early draft of the play (5.2.798.2–3).12 The women engage the men in exercises in ascetic living to cure their passions, exercises not unlike the pact the men themselves had contrived four acts earlier. Love’s Labour’s Lost does not stage marriage as an unproblematic place for sexual love; rather, it ends where it began, with anxiety about bringing sexual passion into marriage. That the aristocratic men’s love emerges from the “liver vein” is underscored in the representation of Don Armado and his “love” for Jacquenetta, the country girl originally introduced as having been caught in a dalliance with Costard. Don Armado, the ridiculous and ridiculed Spanish lord, is stereotypically presented as a sensual Spaniard, functioning on this level as a kind of stock character meant to please a chauvinistically English audience. But he is also in many ways an exaggerated version of the English aristocrats and, thus, acts as a foil to them. Like the English nobles with whom he has promised to study for three years, he falls in love; however, the physical desire at the base of his love is made even more explicit. Like the nobles, Armado deplores the unmanliness of love and then proceeds to adopt the affectations of the courtly lover, ostentatiously attempting to ennoble the passions he has so recently decried. In lofty speeches and letters, Armado elevates his love as “more fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself” (4.1.62–63)—the usual Petrarchan compliments, of the same genre of overblown conceits used by the English lords in their own love poems and lamentations. But Armado’s motives, passionate lust and the desire to dignify that lust, are even more thinly veiled than the English nobles’ mystification of their “heated blood,” and his version of Petrarchan idealizing turns it into a twisted parody that ironically

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reveals the less-than-noble underside the English aristocrats are at pains to obscure. Despite Armado’s exaggerated praise of his loved one, he is far less interested in maintaining her place on a pedestal than in dignifying himself, which he does by fi nding biblical and classical precedents for romantic love and by harping insistently on her low status and how his love will elevate her. When he announces in a letter to her, “I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and my heart on thy every part” (4.1.82–84), thus suggesting that her foot, picture, and every part are far from being sacred and celestial, are in fact negating those qualities in his own heroical lips. When he invokes Caesar’s victorious words “veni, vici, vidi” as appropriate to his own circumstances, it becomes clear that conquering Jacquenetta is both his intent, and, according to him, his privilege. Armado’s lack of sexual restraint is made more obvious when it is revealed that Jacquenetta is pregnant, out of wedlock, with his child. The parallels between the Englishmen and Armado allow the audience to perceive that the Englishmen, whose motives are not fully revealed, may be less obvious, but just as base. The oft-found romantic comedy obstacle, parental disapproval of the love-choice, does not exist in Love’s Labour’s Lost; instead, the obstacle is the masculinity of the male lovers, whose deficit is noted archly by Catherine when she tells Dumaine he must attain “A beard” (5.2.801) over the next “twelvemonth and a day” (5.2.804). Love’s Labour’s Lost is fraught with anxiety over realizing a mode of male sexuality sufficiently controlled that it might be considered manly, so much so that it denies its romantically inclined protagonists the expected comic destiny of marriage. Furthermore, as the play seems to suggest that Armado and Jacquenetta will marry, the only final marriage in the play is one undeniably based on sensuality, the result of unlicensed fornication and an example of what marital sexuality should not be. Thus, the play offers a cynical view of contemporary constructions of marriage as a safe place for proper, restrained sexuality. In the process of doing so, distinctions in masculine sexuality between elite men and men of lower estate are undermined. Love’s Labour’s Lost demonstrates how difference—“points of contrast” based on sexual behavior—can be constructed between aristocratic men and lowborn men: the physical desires and appetites of Costard, the man of low estate, are an explicit source of comic entertainment, while those of the aristocratic characters are obscured through the veil of Petrarchan rhetoric. But the play’s distinction between Costard and his superiors is not great; the play deploys sexualized constructions of difference between highborn and lowborn men only, for the most part, to strike them down and reveal base sexual desire as common to both groups. Costard’s sexuality is not legitimated through the possibility of a future marriage, but the dissimilarity

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between him and the English aristocrats is constructed only as the promise of future dissimilarity. Only in a year will the English lords, we are asked to believe—or to disbelieve?—achieve pronounced sexual difference from their lowborn and foreign others. *

*

*

The distinction in quality in manhood between elite and lowborn men is undermined in Love’s Labour’s Lost, then, by levelling the elite male characters, but not by elevating the lowborn ones. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao, on the other hand, working men are elevated. A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers a particularly powerful challenge to elite manliness by, within a context of fraught class relations, staging parallel scenes between the gentlemen and the mechanicals that invite a sly and humorous comparison between their masculinities. Early on and throughout, the poor state of contemporary class relations is established in the play. It is not often noted critically that Nick Bottom has something in common with Jack Cade, although contemporary audiences may not have needed a reminder. Both characters are artisans during a time of economic hardship that inspired frequent protests and riots, peopled to a great extent by artisans and apprentices. Both, in fact, are clothworkers—Bottom a weaver, Cade a shearman—during a period when clothmakers were often leaders of protests and the clothmaking regions were among the most riotous in England (Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 3, 11, 13; Manning, Village Revolts, 325). It is hard to imagine sweet bully Bottom participating in a riot (let alone leading one), but Shakespeare’s play does reference the conditions of the socioeconomic world that caused such difficulty for many artisans of Bottom’s class and created class tension in his world, in particular the regular bad harvests that plagued England in the late 1580s and the 1590s. As Annabel Patterson has pointed out, when Titania speaks of the effect her quarrel with Oberon has had on the environment, she seems to be referring to the 1595–1596 season, when particularly bad weather yielded a particularly bad harvest.13 The ox hath therefore stretch’d its yoke in vain The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn, Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The-nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green For lack of tread are undistinguishable. (2.1.93–100)

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These lines trenchantly sum up one set of conditions that helped impoverish many rural laborers and inspired them to violence in seeking redress. We are not told directly that Bottom and his fellows depend on working the land for part of their revenue, as did many or most rural craftsmen,14 but the play makes clear that Bottom and his men are of the class and category of men from whom violence was feared and that they are selfconscious of their status as poor artisans during a volatile period of significant class tension. In fact, the title of the play itself would have resonated with audience members as a topical allusion: In 1595, there were at least thirteen disturbances in London and the suburbs protesting social and economic conditions, and at least twelve of them were between June 6 and June 29, the Midsummer season (Manning, Village Revolts, 187). A riot on June 29, 1595, involving one thousand rioting artisans and apprentices took several days to suppress and ended with the execution of five participants (ibid., 209–10). It is no wonder that during their first rehearsal the mechanicals find a minefield of potential offenses in the material they plan to present—as Theodore Leinwand so acutely points out, they recognize that their sort were vulnerable to suspicion, as well as to strict punishment for insubordinate actions.15 These characters are aware of class tension and worry about contributing to it. They worry about how they will be “read,” whether the swords they will wield for the performance will be perceived as real threats, whether the lion’s ferocity might be seen as a sign of their own. Bottom sums it up when he says, “If . . . I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life” (3.1.40–41). As Leinwand writes, “they fear for their lives because they assume that indecorous action on their part will cause spectators to fear for their lives” (“‘I Believe We Must Leave the Killing Out’: Deference and Accomodation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, 147). This seems to me a more viable reading than the standard condescending reading of the artisans as unable to distinguish between theatrical illusion and reality; on the contrary, these artisans are acutely aware that the boundary between theatrical illusion and reality can be easily crossed. One might even read the artisans’ anxiety as yet another metatheatrical reference to the hugely popular The Spanish Tragedy, which thematized the power of the theater to forward a violent agenda.16 As Leinwand argues, the rehearsal scenes and Quince’s prologue to the mechanicals’ play register the oppressive necessity for deference created by tense relations between upper and lower classes, and the mechanicals’ desire to be accommodating to their social superiors. Quince’s prologue— that “tangled chain; nothing impaired but all disordered” (5.1.124–25)— registers how easily these men could be regarded as disorderly subjects, humorously “teeter[ing] back and forth between deference and offensiveness” (“I Believe,” 154) and suggesting, through its ambiguous punctuation,

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that they may indeed intend to cause trouble (the very opposite of what they wish to suggest). Specifically, Quince announces that “if we offend, it is with our good will”; “we come but in despite”; “all for your delight, / We are not here”; and “that you should repent you, / The actors are at hand” (5.1.108–17). The word slippages of Quince’s tangled prologue, along with the artisans’ fears of frightening the ladies, remind readers and viewers of broadly based social fears of aggression in artisans. It reminds us that the oppression and the strength of the masses was known and feared, and it humorously underscores the class tension that characterizes relations between the classes throughout the play. As Leinwand writes, “the text offers accommodation and deference, but on its margins we note raised swords and threatening gallows” (“I Believe,” 153). While it seems safe to say the artisans do not mean harm and while Bottom may be a natural in the arts of pleasure and playing, we know that the mechanicals are not in the amateur theatricals business strictly for the love of the show. They hope their performance will be rewarded with pensions from Theseus, as their disappointment over Bottom’s (temporary) disappearance and the consequent impossibility of performing makes clear. Pensions would mean financial security, and they equate financial security with status as men: “If our sport had gone forward, we had all been made men” (4.2.16–17), Snug laments. Flute concurs with Snug by assessing what Bottom, in particular, has lost: O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a day during his life; he could not have ‘scaped sixpence a day. And the Duke had not given him sixpence a day for playing Pyramus, I’ll be hanged. He would have deserved it: sixpence a day in Pyramus, or nothing. (4.2.19–24)

Sixpence a day was a considerable sum for a rural artisan, about two pence more per day than a joiner such as Snug would earn and about twice as much as the annual earnings of a master carpenter.17 The rude mechanicals, then, are deferential because they need money and they need to convince their audience that they are orderly subjects— both markers of manhood in their view—and they need to convince their audience that they are not the sort of artisans who rebelled and protested. These are men who are socially and economically vulnerable, men who are very much the opposite of Jack Cade and his crew despite their similar socioeconomic place, men whose positions are more likely to engender pathos from audience members than the titillating fear and awe the rebels of 2 Henry VI evoke. The mildness and bumbling of the mechanicals make them mildly ludicrous and, in this way, palliates the “raised swords” at the “margins of the text”; audiences are reminded of fears about artisans only to have those fears put to rest.

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The representation of the mechanicals as deferential to the point of absurdity probably created sympathy in some audience members, a more poignant humor than critics have habitually noted. No doubt it also elicited contempt in others, or the same sort of ridiculing dismissal with which many late-twentieth and twenty-first century spectators, readers, and critics often greet the artisan characters. Such negative attitudes get support within the play from the gentlemen of Theseus’s court, who have nothing but scorn and condescension for the mechanicals. Their attitudes introduce, again, questions of what it means to be a man. The insulting quips and derogatory comments made by the gentlemen viewing the mechanicals’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” invite readers and spectators to consider, over and over, whether the “rude mechanicals,” qualify as “men” or beasts. Theseus, Demetrius, and Lysander amuse themselves at the artisans’ play with witticisms about noble beasts and talking asses; when Theseus wonders “if the lion be to speak,” Demetrius’s response is “No wonder, my lord; one lion may when many asses do” (5.1.151–52). Theseus later quips that “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (209–11)18 and notes: “Here come two noble beasts in, a man and a lion” (211–13). Demetrius, as well, feels equipped to decide just what makes a man: “A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe, is the better: he for a man, God warrant us; she for a woman, God bless us!” (5.1.306–08). Bottom (playing Pyramus) is, in this view, only as close to being a man as Flute (playing Thisbe) is to being a woman. The quip with the most resonance, given Bottom’s earlier transformation to half ass, is their mockery of Bottom’s dramatic rendering of the death of Pyramus. After Pyramus’s emotional “die, die, die, die, die” (5.1.295), Lysander and Demetrius debate Bottom’s ontological status: Dem. No die, but an ace for him; for he is but one. Lys. Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is nothing. (5.1.296–97)

An “ace” at dice is the lowest or worst number and could be used figuratively to signify bad luck, loss, or worthlessness: Lysander’s less-than-generous summation pegs Pyramus as dead and, therefore, less than worthless. Further to the point, “ace,” a word of French origin, was probably pronounced “as,” making it a homonym or close to a homonym of “ass.” The joke that began earlier with Demetrius’s comment about talking asses spins out and reaches its punchline when Theseus twits that “With the help of a surgeon, he might yet recover, / and prove an ass” (5.1.298–99). The humor of the aristocrats’ response to the play only thinly veils the most obvious ideological investment of their name-calling: to shore up absolute difference between aristocrat and commoner, noble

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and ignoble. What precisely does it mean for the aristocrats to call the artisan actors “asses”? Edward Topsell, an early seventeenth-century zoologist, describes asses as, among other things: “slow, burthen-bearing, back-bearing, vile, cart-drawing, mill-laboring, sluggish, crooked, vulgar, slow-paced, long-eared, blockish, braying, idle, devil-haired, filthy, faddle-bearer, four-footed, unsavoury” (Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects. Vol. 1:17); and “of very foolish conditions and slender capacity, but yet very tame, not refusing any manner of burthen although it break his back” (20). In short, asses are stupid, but they work hard and don’t complain, which is exactly, one can easily suppose, how the upper classes of early modern England might have envisioned an ideal commoner class. Calling the mechanicals asses puts them in their place; it reminds them and the audience that these are men of the vulgar and burden-bearing class, the “feet” of the commonwealth. It is a class slur based on the oldest of distinctions: commoners work with their hands and their bodies, gentlemen do not.19 The insults of the aristocrats locate class difference in the body, in a perceived similarity between artisan men and the bodies of an animal whose endurance, strength, and passivity suggest that its “natural” role is to serve others. The greatest emblem of the play’s discourse of bestiality, of course, the main motif and the lynchpin of all its complexity, is Bottom the Weaver as Ass. Bottom’s physical transformation provides a material representation to match the aristocrats’ discursive transformation of him. He is shown to be precisely what they think, or desire, working men to be: half animal. The aristocrats’ perspective is based on an agenda, of course—asserting their status as men and, specifically, as gentlemen—and the ideology represented here supports that bias by suggesting that the artisans’ status as common is based in the body, that it has a significant component of corporeality. Moreover, the construction of Bottom as an ass, and all the mechanicals as more animal than man, is shown to be simply that: a construction. It is one perspective on Bottom in a play that, in fact, overtly calls attention in its very first scene to the significance of multiple perspectives: Hermia’s plight would not exist if, as she expresses her wish to Theseus, “my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.56). Unfortunately for Hermia, the main plot hinges on the conflict created by the existence of these differing personal viewpoints, or more specifically, on Theseus’s response: “Rather, your eyes must with his judgment look” (1.1.57). As surely as Hermia and her father Egeus do not agree on the worthiness of Lysander, Bottom as a dumb ass is neither the only perspective presented in the play nor a monolithic perspective offered by the play. And the intersection of the main plot and the subplot relies for its thematic significance on the conflict created by differing perspectives on Bottom.

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One social group in this play has nothing but praise for Bottom. Bottom’s mates admire his beauty, talent, and refined ways. Bottom must play Pyramus, we are told by Quince, because “Pyramus is a sweet-faced man; a proper man as one shall see in a summer’s day; a most lovely gentlemanlike man” (1.2.79–82). At least before being saddled with an ass’s head, Bottom is held as a physically attractive man, having the “best person” (4.2.11) in Athens to play the role of the lover Pyramus.20 These descriptors are significant: Bottom’s corporeality is referred to in the highest of terms. His face is “sweet”; he is a “proper” man, that is, an “attractive, fair, handsome; elegant; well-made” man (OED III.7b); and his “person”—his body or outward appearance (OED II.4a and II.4b)—is “best” for the elevated role of a tragic hero. In the arena of beauty, this artisan man does well. Since “person” also meant “personage,” as in “a man or woman of distinction or importance,”21 Bottom is presented here as appropriate for the central role of the drama both because of his beauty and because of the substantial worthiness invested in his being. Bottom’s multiple levels of consequence are further substantiated by Flute, who asserts that Bottom “hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens” (4.2.9–10), and according to Quince, who presents Bottom as “a very paramour for a sweet voice” (4.2.11–12), his malapropism of paramour for paragon suggesting a neat conflation of sexiness and exemplariness. During the mechanicals’ casting meeting, Bottom himself enthusiastically testifies to his skills at the art of manipulating his voice for a variety of registers. Since the actor playing Bottom no doubt possessed these skills, it seems quite possible that Bottom’s claims are followed by a theatrical display of Bottom mimicking eagerly the rage of Hercules, the high voice of Thisby, and the roar of the lion while he makes bids for these parts (1.2.21ff). That Bottom has a (self-professed) “reasonable good ear in music” (4.1.28) may well have been accepted as appropriate by the audience, as it was a talent reputedly possessed by many weavers,22 and he proves his aptitude by singing the song of the ousel bird that wakes Titania from her drugged slumber. Quince sees Bottom as a “most lovely gentleman-like man” (1.2.81–82; my emphasis), and, indeed, a great deal of Bottom’s behavior is truly “gentleman-like.” Bottom’s singing is a skill of the weaver and the player, but it is also, of course, a skill of the courtier: In Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the Count declares that he is “not pleased with the Courtier, if he be not also a Musition” (75) and Sir Fredericke sees singing as one of the most important elements of “faire musicke” (101).23 Bottom also displays most lovely gentleman-like behavior when he warns his mates before their performance to “eat no onion nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath” (4.41–42); here we see him adhering to emerging canons of civilized behavior, to what Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing

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process”—the social demand to restrain the body and its impulses that was gaining increasing currency.24 Bodily refinement and gentle manners were increasingly signifiers of elite masculinity; to some extent, the skills of the suave courtier were replacing (although not without anxiety and contestation) those of the brutal soldier as the most valued skills within court circles (MacCaffrey, “Place and Patronage,” 95).25 Bottom, like a courtier, is handsome and he can sing, and in Titania’s court he conducts himself with impeccable manners, addressing each of Titania’s fairy servants with the formal and respectful courtesy appropriate for a superior to a gentle inferior. Titania is convinced of his gentility, as Leinwand points out: “Titania sees a gentle mortal (III.i.132 Leinwand’s emphasis) and expects the attending fairies “to act courteously ‘to this gentleman’” (“I Believe,” 156). Bottom displays attributes that mark him as a fine man within early modern codes of elite manly behavior; he has perfected the forms of elite masculinity. In doing so, he subverts and destabilizes the idea of an inherent or natural superior manliness belonging to men born high in the social hierarchy. What the audience sees is incongruity and disruption. They see appearances conflicting with appearances. They see manners, gestures, and speech that should identify a man of gentle blood, but do not, and they see artisan clothing that should identify a man of low birth that is belied by manners, gestures, and speech. This subversive confusion effects a displacement of existing hegemonic hierarchies of gender; they no longer appear stable, and their “truth” is, therefore, undermined. But, significantly, Bottom is not merely a mimic of elite forms. When he sings for Titania, for instance, audiences do not merely view a weaver mimicking a courtier; audiences bring their conventional associations surrounding weavers and singing to the spectacle of Bottom’s iteration of gentility. Thus, when Bottom sings in Titania’s court, his elite courtier is reconfigured by the tradition of the singing craftsmen. Thus, Bottom performs elite masculinity with a difference, and I would argue, with a difference that subversively reveals gender as a constructed performance. As Judith Butler has theorized with regard to performances of gender within the regulatory regime of compulsory heterosexuality, most performances of gender create the illusion of an originary source for gender in the body; they create the illusion that gender attributes are expressive of an inherent essence correlated with a stable biologically sexed body. However, in Butler’s view, despite this illusion, gender attributes are actuality merely performative of that “essence” and that “these attributes constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (The Judith Butler Reader, 115). And while most performances of gender—of the various attributes of gender—create the illusion of an originary source for gender in the body, some performances reveal the illusion as illusion, reveal

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“the mechanism of [the] construction” (ibid., 112). Butler’s analysis can be useful for understanding the politics of gender within class hierarchies, and Bottom’s singing weaver/courtier is, I would argue, the sort of performance that reveals as illusion originary corporeal sources for gender. Bottom’s singing weaver/courtier constitutes his own identity; if he were to express an identity, which identity could we say that he expresses? The weaver and the courtier cannot fully be separated from each other in this iteration of gender: it is impossible to identify which gender the singing “expresses” in this context—that of the elite man or of the lowborn man. Thus, in the “failure to repeat” this “de-formity” of putatively stable gender forms (ibid., 115), in this creation of something new, it is revealed that courtier manhood and the ass-head non-manhood ascribed to lowborn men are creations, too. Perhaps the most incongruous aspect of Bottom’s performance is his courteous request for “good dry oats” (4.1.32), “a bottle of hay” (4.1.33), or “a handful or two of dried peas” (4.136). To a certain degree, this spectacle of the ass-headed man displaying assy appetites with the perfect grace of the true gentleman is simply ironic theatrical humor, and, on the one hand, it could be seen to undermine the representation of the lowborn “animal-like” man’s ability to perform elite manliness—the lowborn man does not, one could argue, have the requisite tastes that mark him as truly elite. However, Bottom’s wish can also be seen as a hollowing out of elite manliness; a most courteous request for good dry oats plays like a parody suggesting that the form elite manliness takes is little more than form, an empty shell that must retain its formal qualities but otherwise can be filled with any sort of nonsense. Sappho’s ladies, in Sappho and Phao, suggest that they are acquainted with this sort of empty courtier, when Mileta makes disparaging remarks about men who “fall . . . to good manners” when they “want matter” (I.iv.38–39). It is good to see them want matter, for then fall they to good manners, having nothing in their mouths but “Sweet mistress,” wearing our hands out with courtly discourses—now ruffling their hairs, now setting their ruffs, then gazing with their eyes, then sighing with a privy wring by the hand, thinking us like to be wooed by sighs and ceremonies. (1.4.38–45)

These men, who are all manners and no matter, are unable to utter appropriate words, so they make do with the gestures that would accompany the words if they had them. Returning to Bottom, the parody enacted by his ass-headed performance of courtier manners and habits when he asks for hay and oats further undermines courtly manliness by so obviously being an imitation—it is an obvious imitation because it is a partial imitation. When the parody

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drains the content that is meant to accompany the manners and habits and maintains just the genteel form, it only partially imitates the ideal. Gender, in its ability to be fragmented and manipulated, is again exposed as a non-unified construct and revealed to be performative, rather than natural or essential. Bottom’s “gentleman-like” performance points to what becomes increasingly clear in the play: the impossibility of claiming absolute difference within a culture that at least partially discerns gentility through external signifiers of civility. Bottom exemplifies the ideological contradiction at the heart of emerging canons of elite masculinity; the signifiers of masculinity that are meant to distinguish low men from high men are merely signals, free to be mimicked and manipulated. Through Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream demystifies the ideology of absolute difference. Castiglione wrote his Book of the Courtier in order to separate the authentic from the inauthentic, the real gentlemen from the upstart mimics, but, in actuality, books such as his underscored the faultlines of the ideology of aristocratic male superiority by making available the mysterious signs and practices of that superiority. As noted earlier, Castiglione may have meant his book to be descriptive, but it was also prescriptive. He may have meant to prevent “many untowardly ass-heades, that through malapartnesse thinke to purchase them the name of good courtier” (Book of the Courtier, 29), but the result of his project was to give the “assheades” he disdained easier access to courtier manhood. Like allies of Castiglione, the elite men in Midsummer Night’s Dream contemptuously construct Nick Bottom as an asshead; nevertheless, Bottom convincingly performs the manliness of a most gentle courtier. The play slyly locates civility in the unrefined, “animal” body of the artisan. Shakespeare undermines the aristocratic position of ontological superiority most fully in the forest scene of act 2, scene 1, where civility is dislocated from the aristocratic body. The problem with the arrogant stance taken by the aristocrats toward the mechanicals is that their own behavior, most particularly their sexual behavior, is easily classified as beastly, thus undercutting the cultural function of romantic comedies to legitimize hetero-eroticism for elite men. Laura Levine offers a brilliant reading of the exchange between Demetrius and the lovesick Helena, as he tries to rid himself of her, pointing out the insistent analogy made between wild beasts and the impulse to rape. Levine’s analysis is worth quoting in full: We can see this analogy operating most vividly in Demetrius’ threats to Helen as he describes two different kinds of dangers to her virginity. Trying to get rid of her, he vacillates between threatening to leave her to the “wild beasts” and to his own impulses, as if the two were somehow interchangeable. “You do impeach your modesty too much . . . to . . . commit yourself / Into the hands of one who loves you not; / To trust the opportunity of

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night / . . . with the rich worth of your virginity” he tells her at one moment and at the next threatens, as if the dangers were outside in the wildness of the animals rather than in the wildness of his own self, to leave her to the mercy of the wild beasts. A moment later, treating the two dangers as if they were synonymous, he adds, “if thou follow me, do not believe / But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.” (“Rape,” 218)

Demetrius not only threatens to rape Helena, he also conflates the potential threat he poses to Helena with that of the beasts. Demetrius pronounces sexual violence as beastly, even while he pronounces himself a beast. Helena, herself, confirms his analogy, when she laments that “the wildest [beast] hath not such a heart as you” (2.1.229), in fact, claiming that Demetrius is more beastly than the wildest of beasts. The aristocrat as beast shows up in Love’s Labor’s Lost as well, when Armado declares his power to coerce Jaquenetta sexually, first declaiming his intentions with a “Veni, vidi, vici” (4.1.65), then adding as a postscript: Thus dost thou hear the Nemean lion roar ’Gainst thee, thou lamb, that standest as his prey. Submissive fall his princely feet before, And he from forage will incline to play. But if thou strive, poor soul, what art thou then? Food for his rage, repasture for his den. (4.1.84–89)

Armado slides deftly from conquering warrior to roaring lion and, like Demetrius, barely veils a threat of rape within the figure of an enraged beast tearing apart its victim. We are, it seems, once again in dangerous forests, where men are wild animals and women are sexual prey. Theseus, as well, is guilty of sexual violence and associated with animal appetites, although he is not figured explicitly as a beast. The play begins, famously, with Theseus’s reference to his own acts of sexual coercion: “Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / and won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16–17). As North’s Plutarch tells it, the Greeks, led by Hercules and Theseus, defeated the Amazons in battle; Theseus’s uncontrolled lust for Hippolyta would allow him to accept no ransom and he wrenched her away from her society to take her home with him. North’s Plutarch calls Theseus’s lust his “womannishenes,”26 evoking the ubiquitous early modern equation between sex and the feminine, based on the idea that women had less rational control over their animal appetites than did men. Theseus’s lust thus associates him with the violent and the beastly within the discursive construct of Shakespeare’s play and within that of the culture at large. Ironically, as Demetrius lets loose his violence in one part of the forest, in another part Bottom and his men are carefully rewriting the script

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of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” so loathe are they to frighten any lady through the merest suggestion of sexual aggression. According to Bottom, “ladies cannot abide” (3.1.11) the sight of a sword being drawn; a new prologue must be written, “and let that prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed” (3.1.15–18). The sexual puns are obvious. “Sword,” of course, is a penis word (Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 299) and “die” was popular slang for “orgasm” (98); killing with a sword could have registered then as a violent act of inducing orgasm. The cultural connection between sex and violence that the earlier scene in the forest has already voiced is confirmed here, and the social threat of the rebellious artisan who would rape or ravish elite women is articulated. But Bottom means to promise the ladies of the audience that Pyramus will neither harm himself physically nor them sexually. Pyramus will not be “killed indeed”: no acts of violent penetration with swords will be enacted by these artisan players. However, even with the difficulty of the prologue solved, a new problem arises with the play—its inclusion of a lion on the stage. The mechanicals’ horrified response to this scriptural demand—“to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living” (3.1.29–31)—fits neatly with the play’s earlier insistence on the danger of beasts to ladies. Bottom’s solution is significant; Snug the joiner must be recognizable through the costume, entreat the ladies not to fear, and, finally, identify himself: half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect: “Ladies,” or “Fair ladies, I would wish you,” or “I would request you,” or “I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours! If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing; I am a man, as other men are”: and there, indeed, let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner. (3.1.35–44; my emphasis)

Bottom’s strategy is to insist upon Snug’s ontological status as a man, in a thematically significant assertion that what makes this man a man is his distinction from the violence of the beasts. The play’s strategy, then, is to rearrange the elements found an act earlier in the other forest scene. In both we find the specter of menaced ladies, the danger of beasts, and men whose identities are vulnerable or subject to the charge of beastliness. Bottom, in the woods where the mechanicals rehearse, ensures that the ladies will be appeased and assures that the dangers are illusions by making clear that the beast among them is no beast, but a man. Demetrius, on the other hand, foregoes his status as man when he (and Helena) suggest he has much in common with the beasts of the forest. Ironically, Demetrius the aristocrat is the beast in this play, while Snug the joiner is a man.27

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So much for absolute difference. The parallel woods scenes are, I would argue, the lynchpin of the play’s undermining of aristocratic assurance that they are superior beings, higher in the social order and on the chain of being. I would argue, however, that the play goes further than simply showing that the ideals of elite masculinity are performative and, therefore, can be performed or “mimicked” by the non-elite, that artisan men can be as civil—indeed more civil—than aristocratic men. In exploring the malleability of class-based forms of gendered behavior, the play creates a cultural space for entirely new expressions of gender. In the iteration of civility by the male artisan body, in the iteration of what was understood as an elite form of masculinity, something new is produced. The play constructs what I would call an artisanal civil sexuality. Bottom does more than repudiate the violence of sexuality; he transforms it into something else, something not just unthreatening but also tender and sweet. Bottom’s lion in the forest “will roar you as gently as any sucking dove”; he “will roar you and ‘twere any nightingale” (1.2.77–78). The lion becomes, in Bottom’s formulation, first a sucking dove and then a nightingale. Sexuality becomes, through the artisans’ civility, as gentle as a dove, as innocent as a sucking lamb,28 and as sweet as the song of a nightingale. Levine argues that sexual coercion is a condition of existence in the polis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Rape,” 210),29 a condition that neither Theseus nor anyone else can make go away, and she comments that the “theater as we see it in the hands of the mechanicals is incapable of transforming anything” (219). I would argue that she is wrong. The mechanicals’ performance is not, to be sure, the pomp and ceremony that Theseus imagines will erase his violent past when he promises Hippolyta that he will wed her in “a different key” from the injurious one with which he woo’d her; however, it is in the mechanicals’ theatrical activity that the problem of violence is both figured and resolved. Violent sexuality may be a condition of existence in the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the play most certainly fantasizes an antidote to it, and that antidote is located in artisanal masculinity. Furthermore, it can also be argued that Bottom transforms what Oberon intends as a display of beastly sexual excess, both by his gentle civility and in more symbolic ways. Many critics have, not surprisingly, located Oberon’s manipulation of Titania’s desire as an act of sexual violence and coercion. Without denying the validity of that reading—which situates the incident in line with the sexual violence perpetrated by elite characters throughout the play—I’d like to consider another perspective, one that offers Bottom again as a mitigator of elite male sexual violence toward women. There are interesting mythological resonances in the scene between Titania and Bottom that point the reader or viewer toward understanding Bottom as a kind of protector of Titania. When Titania’s

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fairies sing a lullaby to protect the Fairie Queen while she sleeps, they invoke Philomel, the rape victim who in Ovid’s account turned into a nightingale, to join them. Surely it is significant that the protectress they invoke told the story of her rape through weaving, her instrument of justice thus connecting her directly to Bottom the weaver. The invocation also resonates with Bottom’s earlier promise to convert his identity as lion to one of nightingale—perhaps Bottom’s shared identity with Philomel as weaver and nightingale is meant to suggest that Philomel is not only an appropriate protectress for Titania against sexual violation but also a successful one: Oberon’s intended sexual violence is defanged when Titania falls in love with the gentle Bottom instead of an “ounce, or cat, or bear, / Pard, or boar with bristled hair” (2.2.29–30). Ovid’s story of Priapus’s attempted rape of the virgin goddess Vesta30 also resonates within the liaison between Titania and Bottom. In Ovid’s telling, while Vesta sleeps in a meadow, Priapus creeps silently toward her, only to have his “wanton hope” (Fasti, 345) destroyed when a nearby ass brays and awakens Vesta before Priapus can violate her. Like the ass in the story, Bottom (bestowed with ass ears) awakens Titania with his singing; is Titania thus protected, like Vesta, from violation by a more dangerous and beastly creature? Certainly the flowers Titania winds around Bottom’s asshead (4.1.50–51) recall the necklaces of loaves with which Vesta adorns her assy savior in Ovid’s story, necklaces that in Topsell’s account of the story become crowns of flowers and rich jewels (History of Four-Footed Beasts, 19). Oberon’s manipulation of Titania’s desire can also be seen to reveal cultural anxiety about lowborn working men and the attraction they might hold for more elite women. The relationship between Titania and Bottom, to quote Mary Ellen Lamb’s discussion of Twelfth Night, “make[s] visible the erotic potential within the unequal power relationship inherent in the condition of service.”31 Titania’s affair with Bottom is an affair between a lady and a weaver, but it is also staged as an affair between a queen and her favored courtier, and, although Oberon contrives it as chastisement for Titania’s disobedience, it reveals underlying anxiety about potentially disruptive eroticism within service relationships; one might even read it against the grain of the plot as Titania’s revenge on Oberon, a woman’s revenge against her overbearing husband. Certainly, Lamb has written cogently about how the fractiousness of a household could intensify emotional dependence and sexual attractions between mistresses and their servants. Oberon’s attempt to shame Titania through a rendezvous with a sexually potent animalized man takes the possibility that a highborn woman will defy the culturally normalized power dynamics of gender and class to consort with a social inferior, a possibility that was “a part of cultural fantasy”32 and spins it not as pleasure but as punishment.

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Thus, the cultural taboo of cross-class desire is addressed here. This is another instance of the social anxieties addressed in the play through the artisans’ concerns about sexually frightening the aristocratic ladies. The dangers to the social order perceived by early modern society of cross-class desire between lowborn men and highborn women are well known—blood lines may be tainted and property falsely inherited, difference between commons and gentry will be disrupted, and class and gender hierarchies will be disordered. Cross-class liaisons are debased by casting Titania’s desire as “hateful fantasies” (2.1.258) and by making literally evident the common working man’s low cultural status as near beastly through his half-transformation into an ass. Denigrating the sexuality of the lowborn man as excessive by aligning him ontologically to beasts worked to check the dangers of affairs between gentlewomen and their social inferiors, as did warnings to elite women to stay away from low men, conveyed through certain stage representations and found in advice manuals.33 But through Oberon’s trick, the play slyly stages the threatening possibility that the artisan’s “animal” nature, as represented by Bottom’s ass head, in conjunction with his civil behavior, makes him irresistible; when the sexuality of the artisan is combined with civility, the artisan becomes not just sexual but also sexually attractive, pleasing, and generally desirable. Oberon gets the boy he desires, but, if the scene he creates is one of hateful fantasies, the fantasies are hateful because they are dangerously appealing. There is a great deal of erotic bliss and sweet sensuality in the topsy-turvy carnivalesque of the liaison between the fairy queen and the lowborn man; as Oberon himself describes it, when he demands the child of her, Titania is in her “dotage,” winding flowers around Bottom’s temples and “seeking sweet favours” for him. Indeed, productions of the play have made it evident how Titania’s liaison with Bottom may be seen as an aristocratic woman’s desiring fantasy. In a decision that may have been similar to the practice of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Peter Brook, in his famously erotic and influential RSC production of 1970, doubled the roles of Titania and Hippolyta and Oberon and Theseus, thus creating the impression that the events in the forest were dream events of Hippolyta and Theseus featuring their alter egos and celebrating their repressed sexual desires. His production, as Jay Halio describes it, “stress[ed] the coarse sexuality of the situation. . . [with] a burly actor insert[ing] an arm under Bottom’s crotch as the fairies help[ed] lift him shoulder high” (Shakespeare in Performance, 63). In Brook’s production, Titania was “a woman of taut sensuality who falls for Bottom out of a lust which she could never own to in court” (Dawson, “Doubling Up For a Triumph”) and Bottom, as the sexual alternative to the decorum of the court, is the object of the aristocratic man’s half suspicious and half voyeuristic fantasy of what an

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aristocratic woman might be up to, an analogue of the “strong-thighed bargeman” (2.5.43) Ferdinand imagines his sister is lying with in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. When Bill Alexander, in his 1986 production (also at Stratford-uponAvon), doubled Titania and Hippolyta but not Oberon and Theseus, the main events of the play became funnelled specifically as Hippolyta’s fantasy or dream; critics viewed it as staging Hippolyta’s distaste for a dull bureaucrat such as Theseus and her fantasised desire for “alternative relationships—first with a glamorous cad and then with a rough plebeian” (Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in London, Manchester, and Stratford-upon-Avon 1985–86,” 173). Bottom, played by Pete Postlethwaite in this production, was more gentle than sexual, “no crude symbol of lust but gentle, soft-spoken, and sympathetic” (Warren, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1986,” 88), “a true alternative to the chauvinism of Theseus and Oberon [who] consequently . . . drew from Titania a warm and tender response” (Halio, Shakespeare in Performance, 80). If Brook’s Bottom reconstructed the early modern idea of the sexually vigorous working man, this Bottom was the Bottom who would never sexually frighten a lady, and both Bottoms were characters with sexual appeal. Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sees this potential in Shakespeare’s play as well. Kevin Kline as Bottom is a sweet, mild, sensitive man who, rendered foolish by failure and low status, compensates through elaborate courtesy to the village women; indications of tension between him and his wife hint that, as a ladies’ man, he finds his arena of success. Readings and productions that emphasize the celebration of eroticism, the fulfilment of sexual fantasy, and Bottom’s sweet civility to Titania and her courtiers go a long way toward undermining Oberon’s attempt to humiliate Titania through entrapment within the irrational and shameful elements of sexual lust, with a sexual appetite out of all order and control. The shame Oberon manufactures for Titania is colored by an irrepressibly delightful sensuality between Titania and Bottom. Oberon does, of course, achieve his ultimate goal, which is to reassert his patriarchal privilege and gain control of the changeling boy Titania has denied him. But despite this overt maintenance of the power differential between elite men and elite women, the rendezvous between the queen and the sexually potent “animalized” working man disrupts established hierarchies of class and gender. The elite man is unable to control the gender performances of the working man, and, while on one level, Oberon controls Titania’s emotional and sexual responses, deeper reading shows the ontology of emotion to be remarkably unstable. The parallel roles of Hippolyta and Titania and Oberon and Theseus, accentuated when actors double the parts, open a host of psychological readings of their sexual desires. Furthermore, by

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the end of the play, no clear distinction is made between what is “real” and what is the product of magical intervention—Demetrius is never reverted to his “real” self, and goes on to marry Helena in his transformed state, as if there is no originary, authentic state of emotion, only various states and kinds of transformation. Even Theseus aims for transformation when he claims he will wed Hippolyta in another key. In other words, it is hard to argue that the loathing Titania briefly expresses toward her artisanal lover after Oberon has de-juiced her is any more authentic than her earlier love. Titania’s love for Bottom comes from the same source as Demetrius’s for Helena, which is not only uncorrected at the end of the play but celebrated; furthermore, Titania’s love exists within a drama that thematizes the magical, irrational, and changeable nature of desire—and its refusal, at times, to bend to the will of dominant social powers. Oberon’s struggle with Titania, with its involvement of a working man and its unpredictable results, is emblematic of the hierarchical power struggles among the mortal characters in the play. The male elites assert their cultural privileges—violence towards women and intimidation of their social inferiors—but a threat to their privilege opens up in the process: the emergence of a gentle, or “gentleman-like,” non-elite civil sexuality that is performed in response to class aggression and responsive to elite women who otherwise face sexual violence. The mechanicals’ deference is a symptom or reflection of their staying in their place, of their adherence to their low position in the social order and their hierarchically appropriate response to their circumstantial proximity to elite women. But the supreme effort they make to suppress all hints of potential violence in themselves and to assuage any fears the ladies in the audience might have had another effect, disrupting the polarity of high and low that deference to social superiors generally enacts. The mechanicals’ efforts engender a civil masculinity and a gentle sexuality that belies discourses exclusively connecting civility to the elite. Indeed, the artisans strike a blow against their social superiors by embodying a masculinity that is more civil than their own. *

*

*

Desire in John Lyly’s Sappho and Phao orbits through the same mistressservant, lady-workman constellation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like Titania, the aristocratic Sappho falls in love with a tradesman who is cast into the role of courtier servant. Sappho is also similar to Titania in her defiance of the patriarchal imperative that control by a man take precedence over bonds between women. Titania refuses to obey Oberon when he demands the changeling boy from her, choosing loyalty to her bond with a woman, the child’s mother, over obedience to husband.34 With an obvious allusion to the historical Sappho and her coteries of women,

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Lyly’s Sappho lives in a court surrounded by ladies, with no courtiers or aristocratic men participating in the dramatic action. She is uncontrolled by a man, an unmastered woman, and a female head of a court household avoiding marriage, and seemingly well content with feminine company until, struck by Cupid’s arrow, she falls for Phao.35 Indeed, her historical association as a lover of women and her situation here as the princess of a court of women supports Laurie Shannon’s argument that it was heteroerotic love that needed legitimation in the face of discourses that stressed the superiority of bonds formed along lines of likeness. Sappho, we are told by Cupid, has resisted love; she “hath her thoughts in a string,” and “conquers affections and sendeth love up and down upon errands” (1.1.45–46). Using the language of patriarchal discourse and penetrative sex, Venus insists that Sappho must be “pierced”—“she is amiable and, therefore, must be pierced” (1.1.52). But while dominant ideologies insisted that all women be mastered by a man, Venus and Cupid, with their promulgation of volatile, unstable passion, were never great tools of patriarchal marriage in early modern literature. Lyly adheres to the mythology of Cupid as a random force by directing Sappho’s passion toward an inappropriately lowborn man. If Sappho were to open her heart to love, she laments, it should be to a “great lord” (3.3.112), and in her complaint to Cupid—“O Cupid too unkind, to make me so kind that I almost transgress the modesty of my kind” (4.1.9–10)—she can be seen protesting that Cupid has caused her to feel a love unbefitting of her high birth and her dedication to a life within a court of ladies. When Sappho falls in love with a working man, Lyly makes class difference a central focus of his version of the relatively little-known tale, which he probably read in Ovid’s Heroides.36 Lyly chooses to adopt Phao’s status as a ferryman from Aelian’s story of an encounter between Venus and Phao,37 rather than take advantage of the imaginative possibilities of Ovid’s account in “Sappho to Phaon,” wherein Phao’s status and occupation are left unmentioned. This choice shifts the play toward an almost obsessive focus on the conflict between social hierarchy and gender hierarchy that was created by the love between an elite woman and a working man: men should rule women, but what if the woman is of much higher social status than the man, or indeed the man’s mistress? While Queen Elizabeth never, of course, considered marriage with a commoner, the play’s conflict alludes to her marital dilemma in its portrayal of a princess who overcomes the temptation of desire to retain her status as sovereign, untainted by passion and uncompromised by the presence of a husband.38 Venus, who also falls in love with Phao, sums up the inappropriateness of such cross-class desire when she bemoans her own fate: “I entreat where I may command; command thou, where thou shouldst entreat” (4.2.26–28). The consequences of a liaison with a man far beneath one’s station involve

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not only political autonomy but personal indignity—as Sappho laments, “If he yield, then shall I shame to embrace one so mean” (4.1.17). Yet Phao is depicted as “mean” only in the most literal sense of his actual social status. As is clear in the representation of Costard of Love’s Labour’s Lost, working men were denigrated by means of their construction as more body than spirit, a particularly demeaning construction because of the dominant cultural association of the body with the feminine. And as is clear by the discursive battle represented in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lowborn men faced the construction of their manhood as less than manly and closer to beastly. But Phao’s manliness is never questioned. On the contrary, Mileta, the most outspoken of Sappho’s ladies, compliments Phao’s “quick wit” and “staid desires” (3.4.16), ideal masculine qualities more usually associated with elite men. Nevertheless, Phao’s physicality—his person, to use early modern language—is a major focus in Sappho and Phao. But in the representation of this working man’s physicality there is never a hint of the discourse of animality, nor any of the coy play found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream which balances the sexuality of the lowborn man between excessively sexual animal and sexually attractive gentle. Whereas the representation of Costard levels gentlemen without elevating lowborn men and the representation of Bottom elevates lowborn men, but with a great deal of comic sport, the representation of Phao uncompromisingly constructs an unambiguous portrayal of a lowborn laboring man as an exemplar of manly beauty and desirability. As is made perfectly clear in Sappho and Phao, when the lowborn man’s physicality was discursively constructed, it could be imagined not merely as denigratingly, excessively sexual, but as sexually attractive as well. Indeed, the play specifically draws a link between Phao’s physical attractions and his labor. When Venus asks Phao to devise pastimes while ferrying her across the river to Syracuse, Phao’s laboring body is explicitly foregrounded. VENUS. To pass the time in thy boat, canst thou devise any pastime? PHAO. If the wind be with me, I can angle, or tell tales; if against me, it will be pleasure for you to see me take pains.

Whether or not the wind is with Phao, Venus will be treated to the sight of Phao’s powerful body at work, either skilfully maneuvring the ferry through rough waters or wrestling a fishing line if the river is calm. Venus and Phao’s exchange assumes aesthetic beauty in the spectacle of the strong male body engaged in physical labor or activity; shortly thereafter Venus bestows extraordinary beauty on the already “pretty youth” (1.1.56) and then falls in love with him herself, so much so that she dismisses her previous love for Adonis as insignificant in comparison. In this

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scene, as elsewhere in early modern drama, the man at work is sexualized. To cite Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi again, Venus’s gaze upon Phao’s ferrying calls to mind Ferdinand’s words after the Duchess has given birth: Ferdinand jealously conjures the specter of a vigorous bodied, virile working man as her lover, “some strong-thighed bargeman, / Or one o’ th’ woodyard that can quoit the sledge / Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire / That carries coal up to her privy lodgings” (2.5.43–46). What’s notable about these evocations of the sexually threatening low other is the focus not only on his strong body but on what his strong body can do: he can “quoit the sledge,” “toss the bar,” “carr[y] coal,” sail a barge (or oar a ferry). The working man’s physical acts of labor are presented as sexually alluring to elite women; they, perhaps, rival aristocratic men’s engagement in elite activities such as jousting, fencing, riding, and hunting. Operating on an assumption that viewing work and working bodies is a pleasurable activity, the scene underscores an early modern theatrical aesthetic exploiting interest in the male body in motion. Significantly, Phao’s beautiful person is constructed as a specifically English one. Phao, of course, also suggests that he could amuse Venus by telling a tale, and, not realizing that he has the goddess of love in his ferry, offers further erotically charged entertainment with the story of Vulcan catching Venus and Mars making love. When Venus responds tartly to being featured in mythology’s equivalent of celebrity gossip, her rejoinder puts Phao in his place in a manner that removes him utterly from the realm of ancient Greek mythology and grounds him firmly in the early modern English world: “It is not for a ferryman to talk of the gods’ loves, but to tell how thy father could dig and thy mother spin” (1.1.77–78). Venus’s allusion to the oft-quoted fourteenth-century political slogan of radicalized peasants inscribes Phao within a long line of proud English laboring men; here Phao’s identity as a classical hero is overtly effaced. The play’s attention to the pleasures of gazing on the male working body is explicit. When Phao is brought to Sappho’s chamber to cure the lovesick, bedridden princess, Mileta openly flirts with him: “Were I sick the very sight of thy fair face would drive me into a sound sleep” (3.4.5– 6). And while gazing was precisely the sort of behavior proper women were cautioned to avoid—“Make a Contract with your eyes not to wander abroad les’t they bee catch’d in coming home,” Richard Braithwaith admonished39—Sappho’s ladies are sorely tempted to seek out Phao for the sole purpose of indulging their eyes. Favilla playfully suggests, “it is time to go and behold Phao” (1.4.54), although when Ismena eagerly asks “where?” she backs down from her bold suggestion, responding merely, “In your head, Ismena. Nowhere else” (1.4.55–56). Folded into the narrative of elite women’s illicit attraction to lowborn men are other discomforts, I would suggest. It is possible to see expressed

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in the overt staging of illicit gazing, discomfort over the theater’s trafficking in sexual pleasure for men and women who pay to look at bodies on stage. Sappho and Phao represents women gazing at a beautiful young male working man, but, in actuality, Sappho and Phao was part of the material reality of a theater world where men also gazed at beautiful men on stage, and both men and women indulged in the scopic pleasure of the pederastic gaze that underwrote the commercial activity of the boy companies such as the one that performed Sappho and Phao. I would suggest that anxiety over the potentially discomfiting acts of pederastic and homoerotic pleasure—pleasures that could not be separated from the experience of attending the early modern theater or from its commercial livelihood—is deflected by channeling its sources into a taboo relationship that can be disavowed, specifically an elite woman’s love for a working man. The spectacle-spectator relationship that underwrote the theatrical experience is written as an illegitimate female pleasure that must and can be rejected. Thus Sappho fights against and eventually overcomes her love—she “feel[s] relenting thoughts and reason not yielding to appetite” (5.2.39–40), and the sexually attractive working man is, to some degree, put in his place. Sappho proclaims that she will “direct [Cupid’s] arrows better” and decides that “every rude ass shall not say he is in love” (5.3.103–5). Shutting out “rude asses” from love shuts out the possibility of romance and sexual desire along unequal status lines; with Sappho in command, there will be no progressive elevation of the sexuality of working men, and the masculinity of these men will no longer threaten the status of elite women. But Sappho and Phao is no ranting anti-theatrical tract. Sappho seizes erotic power for herself; she does not hand it over to an emblematic patriarchal figure. With Cupid as her ally, she proclaims herself “the queen of love” (5.2.28), “goddess of affections” (70), and ruler of “the fancies of men” (72). Most significantly, she assigns love to her own cohort, ladies: “It is a toy made for ladies, and I will keep it only for ladies” (5.3.104–5). While a Philip Stubbes or a William Prynne would applaud Sappho’s ability to withstand Phao’s power “to draw a chaste eye not only to glance but to gaze on [him]” (3.4.14–15), Sappho rejects this patriarchal sexual dictate only to endorse another alternative to early modern sex, gender, and class hierarchies: female homoerotic alliances. Furthermore, while there can be little doubt that Sappho’s harsh words about rude asses are engendered by her experience with Phao, she, nevertheless, falls short of disclaiming him entirely; her final words for him are that she “will wish him fortunate” (5.3.107). This amounts to Phao’s being stripped of his position as page to the princess and reminded of his proper social role, but not forced back into it. He laments:

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I must now fall from love to labor, and endeavour with mine oar to get a fare, not with my pen to write a fancy. Loves are but smokes which vanish in the seeing and yet hurt while they are seen. A ferry, Phao? No, the stars cannot call it a worser fortune. Range, rather, over the world, forswear affections, entreat for death. . . . This shall be my resolution: wherever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sappho, my loyalty unspotted though unrewarded. With as little malice will I go to my grave as I did lie withal in my cradle. My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sappho’s good. (5.3.11–26)

Phao leaves the court and almost becomes a ferryman once again, a laboring man. Labor is presented here as a demotion, its value figured in conventional aristocratic terms. But the play allows Phao a more “elevated” fate; rather than “fall from love to labor,” he remains the loyal lover, wandering the land sighing for his unrequited love. His is a chaste Petrarchan love, “unspotted though unrewarded,” and, while labor is denigrated, the laboring man embodies this elite form of masculinity, seamlessly stepping from “rude ass” to Petrarchan lover without the least irony or incongruity. Rather than repudiate the love between a princess and a ferryman, his elevation to Petrarchan lover solves the ideological problem it poses; their love cannot succeed, but Renaissance culture had a model for idealizing doomed love in the Petrarchan dyad, and that model is put to use here. The Petrarchan mode was, of course, an elite literary mode whose actors and subjects were generally understood to be ladies and courtiers. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Petrarchan lovers are elite men and the mode is deployed for cynical purposes—the play reveals it as a response to disgust for sexual, physical love. Yet in Sappho and Phao, in which the ferryman is cast as a Petrarchan lover, no such cynicism is evident—the role of Petrarchan lover retains its status and functions as a means to elevate the working man and his love-that-cannot-be. Nevertheless, Phao’s elevation can only be retained at a geographical remove from the court; as if, so long as the beautiful working man wanders outside the locus of power, the threat he poses as an object of desire is not a threat. In a liminal space, the threat of the rude ass who is not a rude ass is removed. Like the Petrarchan lover, he loves but cannot taint his beloved. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao fall short of fully radical responses to the discourses that denigrate the manhood of working men by focusing on their putative unsuitability for romantic matches with elite women. Sappho and Phao sets its ferryman-cumcourtier at a geographical distance, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream veils its gentle artisans behind a screen of light mockery and silliness, while neither play goes so far as to allow sustained contact between lowborn men and elite women. Nevertheless, the play pose significant challenges to dominant discourses denying corporeality in gentlemen and positing it in

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manual workers: Love’s Labour’s Lost satirizes the notion that gentlemen have more control over their physical appetites than working men and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao both stage working men as gentle, sexually appealing, and posessing impeccable manners, while flirting dangerously with the cross-class heteroerotic implications of this depiction. These latter two plays insist that lowborn men can be just as manly as highborn men, and that the distance between these male social groups may be great when measured hierarchically, but nonexistent when measuring valued traits of civility.

4 “What do ye lack?” The Shopkeeper’s Masculinity in Early Seventeenth-Century London Comedies FRANCIS BEAUMONT’S 1607 PLAY THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE, performed at Blackfriar’s Theater, starts with a complaint. As the Prologue introduces the scene and setting, he is interrupted by a citizen grocer from the audience objecting strenuously to the title of the play and the sneers at citizens he assumes it will contain: This seven years there hath been plays at this house, I have observed it, you have still girds at citizens; and now you call your play The London Merchant. Down with your title, boy, down with your title! (Induction 6–9)

If these players were “not resolved to play the jacks” (ibid., 16), the citizen continues, why did they keep coming up with these new plays rather than sticking to a repertory that unambivalently celebrated citizens, plays such as The Legend of Whittington or The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Gresham, with the Building of the Royal Exchange, or The Story of Queen Elenor, with the Rearing of London Bridge upon Wool-sacks? George, the citizen grocer, is not mistaken in the trend he has spotted. The citizen tradesman, along with his journeymen and apprentices, became popular figures on the stage in the last decade of the sixteenth century, but by 1607 London comedies featuring the working middling sort had undergone a shift. In the earlier years of the genre, with plays such as Heywood’s Four Prentices of London with the conquest of Jerusalem (ca.1592), Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), and Heywood’s generic hybrid King Edward the Fourth (1600), the citizen play primarily celebrated craftsmen and the trade companies and gloried in their achievements and values. Early in the seventeenth century, however, more satiric city comedies became the dominant dramatic citizen genre, following on the satiric mode established by Ben Jonson in his 1598 Every Man Out of His Humor. Fewer sentimental rags to riches stories and fantastic adventures were being written anew,1 although the existing plays were probably still being performed in repertory, though primarily only in the larger, public amphitheateres such as the Fortune and the Globe, which, with their differential pricing, catered to a wider social range of playgoers.2 The 1607 Knight of the Burning Pestle 129

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is part of a newly dominant satiric mode of city comedies that flourished until well into the 1630s. Plays performed in the more expensive private hall playhouses (such as Blackfriar’s, Paul’s, and Whitefriar’s) and written by Thomas Middleton, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Marston, Francis Beaumont, and even Thomas Dekker, whose Shoemaker’s Holiday (played at the public Rose Theater) no doubt would merit the Grocer’s stamp of approval, did often skewer citizens and citizen activity from the entire social spectrum of the middling sort.3 In this chapter I focus primarily on the satires of working citizens and their apprentices that appear in these city comedies. The working citizens I examine are the small shopkeepers who neither produce goods, like Simon Eyre and his apprentices, nor trade internationally on a heroically large scale, like Thomas Gresham of If You Know Not Me. Small-scale tradesmen who no longer engage in physical, productive labor, these ruthlessly satirized working men are strictly in the retail business, sellers not makers of the goods proliferating in London’s expanding commodity culture. Indeed, not withstanding George’s complaint, commodity circulation itself is the main target of satire in these city comedies, and participation in that culture links the tradesmen, wives, daughters, apprentices, courtiers, gallants, prostitutes, and wits who people the plays, all of whom become the butt of playwrights’ jokes based on their various acts of exchange. I’ve been arguing throughout this book for the existence of a discourse of work-centered masculinity in the early modern theater, one that posits and celebrates the manual worker as physically powerful, a vital force, admirable even in his potential for violence and danger and wholly laudable in his potential to contribute to the realm of England as worker and warrior. Although this discourse of masculinity is still produced on the stage in the early seventeenth century, another discourse of working man’s masculinity emerges at this time, a discourse that dominates the genre of city comedy. As Jean Howard writes in Theater of a City, “[t]hrough their place-based dramatic narratives, playwrights helped representationally to construct the practices associated with specific urban spaces,” thus helping to “construct and interpret the city.”4 The small shop is one of the urban spaces that city comedies construct and interpret, and the gendered behaviors of the retail shopkeepers within it are among the practices of concern. The masculinity of the small-scale retailing shopkeeper represented in seventeenth-century satiric city comedies is less volatile, dangerous, and exciting than that of the productive craftsmen I’ve been discussing and is subject to satire for being insufficiently masculine. Additionally, this masculinity, which might be characterized as “precarious” and “corrupted,” includes in its makeup the more demonized traits of city gentlemen, as though city life had broken down boundaries between the social groups; satiric city comedies present both the fawning courtesy

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of the courtier and the idle decadence of the gallant as having become part of a particular masculine culture of the work world, that of the small retail shop. Discourses of masculinity in city comedies chart a rift within the citizen class, as a fraction of that class begins to identify culturally with the behavioral codes of the gentry and the courtier. It is to these discourses of working man masculinity that I will turn here. Work and working men, as represented in satiric city comedies, are changed. No longer do we find the household workshop such as Simon Eyre’s, wherein the master both produces his own goods and sells them himself, all the while working alongside his apprentices and sharing in their particular ethos of masculinity. Neither do we find the rural artisans of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and 2 Henry VI, men whose economic desperation provides a strong determinant of their physically vital masculinity. Instead, we find urban men who sell goods rather than make them and are more fully a part of the privileged economic world of London’s culture of commerce; the working men in satiric city comedies are those who have gained control of the trade functions of commercial activity as manufacture gradually split off from retail throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 They are owners, or are positioned socially and economically to perhaps become owners. In the eighteenth century Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers, and, in the late seventeenth century, one N. H. corroborates his characterization when, in his The Compleat Tradesman, he complains about “the too great number of shopkeepers in this Kingdom,” pointing out “that there are ten thousand Retailing Shop-keepers more in London than there are in Amsterdam” (N. H., The Compleat Tradesman, or the Exact Dealers Daily Companion, 17). The excessive numbers, N. H. posits, are because “the Shopkeeping trade is an easie life, and thence many are induced to run into it, and there hath been no law to prevent it . . . which hath been verified for several years past, by many Husbandmen, Laborers and Artificers, who have left off their Working Trades, and turned Shop-keepers” (ibid., 18). Satiric city comedies seem to anticipate these descriptions: the men shown working in these plays are primarily tradesmen and their apprentices, selling retail to an increasingly purchase-oriented society demanding luxury goods. The artisan/craftsman has been eclipsed, if not from all plays nor from historical London6 then from the imaginative vision of London that is portrayed in the increasingly dominant and popular genre of satiric city comedy. N. H.’s contention that shopkeepers have an easier life than artificers and husbandmen is underscored by his desire to assure that only the right sort of people enjoy this easy trade. Concerned that craftsmen are adopting a life of ease more appropriate to the gentle classes and eager to offer a solution to problems posed by primogeniture, he argues to restrict economic practices in ways that would allow the refined labor of the retail shop to

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become a haven for a gentrified middling strata made up of younger sons; the excess number of shopkeepers must be addressed “Because the Shopkeeping Trade is both a convenient and easie way for the Gentry, Clergy, and Communalty of this Kingdom, to provide for their younger Sons, that so the Bulk of their Estates may go to the Eldest” (ibid., 19). N. H.’s comments help us to see the ambiguous class position of shopkeepers, as he tries to use this more refined type of work to solve the problem of primogeniture. But while N. H. desires to create a space for ease and refinement within the sphere of work for the better sort forced into that world, not all saw shopkeeping as a better sort of work. Thomas Powell in his Tom of All Trades, or the plaine path-way to preferment, argues against setting up as a shopkeeper, presenting the shopkeeping trades as inferior to those trades “that have in them some Art, Craft, or Science” ([London, 1631] 79), and commenting pointedly that “the Maker was before the Retaylor” (ibid., 82). And depictions of shopkeeping men—gentleman and commoner alike—suggest that with an increasingly refined work world comes increased social anxiety about the masculinity of working men. As we move into the genre of satiric city comedy, the celebration of the sexually potent, physically powerful male working body shifts to anxiety about the effects of wealth, leisure, comfort, and consumer society on its continued existence. Seventeenth-century city comedies suggest, that within an increasingly materialistic society, shifts in activity from making to selling, shifts in status from worker to owner, and shifts in location from country to city result in a diminishment of the aggressive English masculinity that marks the working classes. City comedies are not, of course, mimetic reflections of historical reality. However, these plays construct an early modern London whose historical importance as a trade center was burgeoning as it became the prime locale for conspicuous consumption. London’s growth and development as an urban center of sophisticated pleasures and leisure activities were enabled in great part by the rise of the squirarchy: those who came to London in increasing numbers to join the expanding government at Westminster, to work in or use the law courts, to conduct land deals and other types of business, or simply to partake in the company and culture that existed there.7 With the emergence of a London social season and the proliferation of commercialized entertainment facilities, many of the gentry “preferred residence in the capital to the countryside holding that it was one of the advantages of metropolitan life that one could choose one’s dinner guests, ‘men of more civilitie, wisdome and worth then your rude Country gentlemen or rusticall neighboures’” (Ian Archer, “Material Londoners?,” 177). In town, money was spent—on clothes, food and drink, lodgings, coaches, fine furniture and novelty trinkets, entertainment for self and friends. F. J. Fisher writes that “an invariable characteristic of the gentleman come to

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town was his ostentatious display” (“The Development of London as a Center of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” 114). Ben Jonson’s recipe for how “to be an accomplished gentleman—that is, a gentleman of the time” supports his assertion: “You must give over housekeeping in the country and live together in the city amongst gallants where, at your first appearance, ’twere good you turned four or five acres of your best land into two or three trunks of apparel” (ibid.). Jonson’s quip encapsulates one of the strongest stereotypes of the London gentleman; at this time, the English were regularly satirized for their extravagance in and costly obsession with novelty in fashion—some courtiers were reputed, by the 1590s, to be spending the extraordinary sum of £1000 per annum on clothes (Archer, “Material,” 177). The singular importance in urban life of economies of goods and pleasures, not surprisingly, stirred social anxiety in Jacobean England, where consumption generally was pejoratively associated with the feminine.8 Nevertheless, the luxury trades of London “waxed fat” (Fisher, “Development of London,” 114) and a cornucopia of vogue items displayed in shops and on London bodies find their way into the city comedies so obsessively fascinated by their existence: bands, ruffs, lace, lawns, and cambrics (Roaring Girl, Westward Ho, Honest Whore); French gowns, Scotch falls, Scotch bums, Italian head-tires, wigs, high-crowned sugar-loaf hats, busks, masks, patches, and diamonds (WH); cramp rings, spangled feathers, beaver hats, Dutch slop breeches, codpieces, gold-embroidered velvet caps, and tufftaffety (tufted taffeta) jackets (RG); silk stockings (RG & HW); lovelocks (Knight); curled hair (RG); shoes with high corked heels (WH; Chaste Maid in Cheapside) and decorative shoe roses (RG); handkerchiefs (Fair Maid of the Exchange); rapiers and short swords (RG, Eastward Ho); German clocks (WH), tennis rackets (EH), spoons, plate, goblets, and silver and gilt beakers (Dutch Courtesan; Chaste Maid; HW); and fair needlework stools (Chaste Maid). Sumptuous food stuffs, as well, circulate through these plays: cherries priced at an angel (EH); salmon (Dutch Courtesan); lobsters, crabs, and wild fowl (WH); spice cakes, fat pigs, capons, and duck (RG); pickled cucumbers, sugar loaves, comfits, sugar plums, sweetmeats, eringoes (a candied fruit), artichokes, potatoes, and buttered crab, as well as veal, lamb, and mutton purchased during Lent (Chaste Maid); wine (Chaste Maid, HW, and countless others); sack (WH, EH and countless others); and aquavitae (WH), to name but a few. Coaches clog the streets (Epicoene); tobacco smoke causes tears and coughs (RG), bawds provide “complexions” (cosmetics) (WH, HW); barbers and barber-surgeons give haircuts, shaves, and medical treatments (Dutch Courtesan, Knight). Everywhere there are things, things being sold and things being consumed. As sellers, small shopkeepers were associated with these things and some of the stigma attached to their luxury attached to them as well. The

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material culture of the seventeenth century—the concern with goods, bodies, clothing, and entertainment—was emerging part and parcel with the civilizing process, the process by which refined manners, bodily countenance, and civil intercourse took on increased importance. Clearly, gentry who moved to the city for the social activities it offered forwarded the mutual development of civil life and consumer culture, and luxury consumption and new codes of civility were associated primarily with the elite classes. But the middling sort, including the urban tradesman, had a central role in these related cultural phenomena. As Keith Wrightson asserts, “the material culture of polite society was at least as much [the] creation [of the middling sort] as that of the gentlemen they supplied” (Earthly Necessities, 305). Joan Thirsk contends that the supplier class both served London’s consumerism and drove it with their innovations; writing specifically about provincial providers, she argues that “they were not simply obedient servants, they also stirred the pot and stimulated consumerist urges, by supplying to London ever more varied goods, and in a widening range of qualities” (“England’s Provinces, 97). Similarly, Jane Schneider demonstrates how early modern fashion responded to the dyes and fabrics made available by traders and merchants. That tradesmen influenced style is also suggested by character books. The young gallant of the Overburian Characters “studies by the discretion of his Barber” (Overbury, The Overburian Characters, 60); and Overbury makes his tailor’s judgement the chief factor in his success: “He is a thing of more than ordinarie judgement; For by vertue of that he buyeth land, buildeth houses, and raiseth the low-set roofe of his crosse-legged Fortune” (ibid., 25). Earle quips about the close relationship—one of conspiracy, implying mutuality—between tailor and gallant: “He is one never serious but with his taylor, when he is in conspiracy for the next device.”9 Thomas Dekker’s Gul’s Handbook suggests that both actors on stage and tradesmen could be arbiters of the latest fashion in clothing; to the gallant inquiring how to behave in a playhouse, Dekker proposes: “curs[ing] the sharers, that whereas the same day you had bestowed forty shillings on an embrodered Felt and Feather, (Scotch fashion) for your mistres in the Court, or your punck in the city, within two hours after, you encounter with the very same block on the stage, when the haberdasher swore to you the impression was extant but that morning” (“The Guls Horne-Booke.” vol. 2 of The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 254). The sellers of goods and services in London were also purveyors of professional knowledge, and imaginative creators of fashion and consumer culture; as such, they were fully implicated in and a part of London’s world of luxury, civility, and pleasure. Furthermore, despite their reputation for frugality, tradesmen not only provided but also consumed, partaking of the customs that had once been considered reserved for their betters. Wealthy citizens spent lavishly on

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hospitality and “noblemen and gentlemen were regular guests at company feasts” (Archer, “Material,” 187), but it was not merely the most affluent of the citizen class that enjoyed increased consumption. William Harrison, in his Description of England, offers valuable observations, not only on the luxury possessions of merchants and wealthy citizens but also on those of artificers and even farmers: It is not geason [uncommon] to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate, worth £500 or £600 or £1000, to be deemed by estimation. But as herein all these sorts do far exceed their elders and predecessors, and in neatness and curiosity the merchant all other, so in time past the costly furniture stayed there, whereas now it is descended yet lower, even unto the inferior artificers and many farmers, who . . . have for the most part learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joint beds with tapestry and silk hangings, and their tables with carpets and fine napery” (200).

The middling sort in London were known for their good diets, as well. Archer notes that “foreign visitors [to London] were impressed by the standard of living of artisans, particularly their high consumption of meat” (“Material,” 176).10 Foreigners also noted that even less-than-wealthy Londoners had “exceedingly fine clothes,” that women in particular would “give all their attention to their ruffs and stuffs to such a degree indeed that . . . many a one does not hesitate to wear velvet in the streets, which is common with them, whilst perhaps at home they have not a piece of dry bread” (W. B. Rye, cited by Archer, “Material,” 185). Numerous contemporary references can be found to commoners dressing above their station and “passing” as gentlemen.11 And certainly, notwithstanding the abundance of thrifty merchants, the clothing, food, drink, and rich possessions of the trading classes are regular features of city comedy. Mulligrub, the vintner of The Dutch Courtesan, wears a Spanish leather jerkin and is driven near-mad when a nest of goblets, a parcel-gilt standing cup, and a jowl of fresh salmon are stolen from him; in The Roaring Girl Master Openwork the sempster drinks pints with Moll while his wife goes on an excursion to Hogsden with the apothecary, the feather-seller, and their wives; and even Candido in the first part of The Honest Whore calls for wine and raises a toast with the courtiers who beleaguer him. And Birdlime of Westward Ho challenges the tailor (and the audience?) to “name you any one thing that your citizens wife comes short of to your Lady. They have as pure Linnen, as choice painting, love greene Geese in spring, Mallard and Teale in the fall, and Woodcocke in winter” (1.1.26–29). Further, when it comes to manipulating their husbands, they have “a tricke ont to be sick for a new gowne, or a Carcanet, or a Diamond, or so” that “your Lady or Justice-a-peace Madam could learn from” (1.1.30–35).

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Some plays even suggest that shopkeeper husbands, generally represented as uxorious to a fault (a depiction I will return to later), indulged in the illicit pleasures of the brothel, a place more commonly associated with the unruly gallants of the city. Mistress Openwork, the sempster’s wife of The Roaring Girl, suspects her husband of keeping a whore in the suburbs, and when Luce, the prostitute of Westward Ho, is unable to identify which of her clients has blindfolded her, she names both Master Honysuckle and Master Wafer as possibilities, and indeed it is the third of the play’s London citizens, Master Tenterhook, who plays this game with her. You, pray you unblind me, Captain Whirlpool, no, Maister Lynstock: pray unblind me, you are not Sir Gozling Glo-worme, for he wears no Ringes of his fingers! Maister Freeze-leather, O you are George the drawer at the Miter, pray you unblinde mee, Captaine Puckfoist, Master Counterpane the Lawier, what the divel meane you, beshrew your heart you have a dry hand, are you mine host Dog-bolt of Brainford, Mistress Birdlyme, Maister Honysuckle, Maister Wafer. (4.1.59–66)

What is perhaps most significant about Luce’s spirited (and quite possibly titillating) guessing, is the way it presents the body of the prostitute as an emblem of shared city pleasures seemingly consumed by all and sundry—seamen, courtiers, lawyers, tradesmen, bartenders, innkeepers, etc. Of course, in actuality all men did not visit the brothels, but many social groups did indulge in the various services and entertainments available in London—indeed, all but the very poor attended the theater, for instance.12 Without denying the existence of social tensions and class differences, it’s important to acknowledge the formation in early modern London of an urban culture of commerce and leisure to which many had a degree of access. City comedies reflect this access and express anxieties about the ambiguous boundaries between social groups that result from it. But the anxiety they express is not always about commoners accessing privilege that does not belong to them, that belongs to their betters, although social climbing commoners are certainly satirized. Many of these plays express an anxiety that, with access to luxury and more refined work, common working men are losing what is most vital to them: the spirited, hardbodied manliness associated with their engagement in physical labor. Karen Newman’s study on fashion and femininity locates urban consumption as “a feminine preoccupation and pastime . . . indulged in by women and feminized men” (Fashioning Femininity, 137). The feminized men Newman refers to are generally understood to have been gentlemen, and, indeed, as I’ve noted, the over refined, effeminate courtier is a staple of city comedies and other satiric genres. But in many city comedies, the crisis in masculinity crosses the boundaries of social groupings, and tradesmen and gentlemen are sometimes represented as sharing similar

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unmanly traits. In this chapter I examine the ways London’s urban culture, with its dual focus on commerce and leisure, informed discursive constructions of the masculinity of the tradesman-shopkeeper, resulting in a representational shift in the figure of the working man from hearty Simon Eyres to effete Candidos. Having Knight of the Burning Pestle begin with a grocer’s complaint about “girds at citizens” signals the play’s awareness of dramatic trends and slyly anticipates the deflation that will take place in the play of discourses of the hyper-masculinity of the working man. Work in this play is primarily shopkeeping, and shopkeeping, it suggests, is a mundane, staid life in which “valiant acts” involve such tasks as providing a lady with a half-penny’s worth of pepper (1.293–98). It’s no coincidence that a grocer is the representative of this life, as the Grocer’s Company, which dealt to a great extent in imported luxury items, was one of the wealthiest of London’s twelve great livery companies.13 Knight presents shopkeeping as a life of security and contentment and presents the desire of the citizen grocer and his wife to have Rafe, their apprentice, play the role of an oldfashioned chivalric knight who will “do admirable things” like “kill a lion with a pestle” (Induction 34, 42). The play articulates and mocks the logic underwriting the popularity of romance plays, prose tales, and ballads featuring adventurous, heroic apprentices;14 Rafe needs to be dressed up as a knight errant in order to recover a more attractive masculinity for the trading classes. After all, as Rafe himself puts it, “what brave spirit could be content to sit in his shop with a flappet of wood and a blue apron before him, selling mithridatum and dragon’s water to visited houses, that might pursue feats of arms, and through his noble achievements procure such a famous history to be written of his heroic prowess?” (1.248–53). But Knight is far from ready to assign “heroic prowess” to the shopkeepers. Although Knight, unlike H. N.’s work, does not explicitly fault shopkeepers for eschewing physical labor, it does compare their activity to another type of physical labor—soldiering—and it mocks how woefully inadequate standing behind a counter is for fashioning men into warriors. In keeping with the play’s relentless “girds at citizens,” Rafe is given, in his role as leader of an army of tradesmen, lines that satirize his own sort: Gentlemen, countrymen, friends, and my fellow-soldiers, I have brought you this day from the shops of security and the counters of content, to measure out in these furious fields honor by the ell, and prowess by the pound. Let it not, oh, let it not, I say, be told hereafter the noble issue of this city fainted, but bear yourself in this fair action like men, valiant men, and freemen. Fear not the face of the enemy, nor the noise of the guns, for believe me, brethren, the rude rumbling of a brewer’s car is far more terrible, of which you have a daily experience, neither let the stink of powder

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offend you, since a more valiant stink is nightly with you. . . . Remember, then, whose cause you have in hand, and like a sort of true-born scavengers, scour me this famous realm of enemies. I have no more to say but this: stand to your tacklings, lads, and show to the world you can as well brandish a sword as shake an apron. Saint George, and on, my hearts! (V.134–54)

Rafe’s comparisons between trade and soldiering, meant to inspire his men (who, it seems, are in danger of fainting with fear), in actuality emphasize how unlike the two activities are. The work these men do, in shops and behind counters, provides security and contentment, not training for adventure: shaking an apron and brandishing a sword are homologous only within the most absurd of logics, just as ells and pounds are absurd gauges for measuring honor and prowess. Similarly, “the rude rumblings of a brewer’s car” may create a “far more terrible” noise than that of guns, but they are hardly as dangerous. The crowning satire of the speech, however, lies in the fact that Rafe seems almost to be suggesting that it is noise, not danger, that is first and foremost off-putting to his men, just as it is the noxious smell of gunpowder, not its actual effects, that offends them. Rafe’s men are so excessively over refined by the easy life of trade that they are squeamish even of the most superficially unpleasant elements of battle. London’s tradesmen have gone soft. Their squeamishness suggests an over-refinement more characteristic of satiric stereotypes of the effeminate courtier than of the early modern working man, whether portrayed satirically or otherwise. Indeed, the squeamishness of Rafe’s tradesmen-soldiers is much like that of “a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress’d” who, “fresh as a bridesgroom . . . his chin new reap’d . . . [and] perfumd like a milliner” bothers Hotspur on the battlefield with his complaints about corpses being carried “betwixt the wind and his nobility” (1 Henry IV 1.3.32–35; 44).15 In fact, Rafe’s tradesmen have a great deal in common with the knights Rafe rescues earlier in the play (who are also tortured by noise [3.250]). These knights are described as “errant knights,” but they are not much like the ones Rafe aspires to imitate. No mention is ever made of adventures and chivalric deeds, and their only concerns seem to be with the appearance of their bodies: Rafe rescues them from the tortures of a barber, that figure of early modern life who washed, groomed, and took care of “every function relevant to hygiene and the presentation of the body to the outside world.”16 Barbers and barber-surgeons clustered around places of “fashion [and] entertainment” (Pelling, “Appearance and Reality,” 85); there were, for instance, twenty-eight barbers within 300 yards of the western doors of St.Paul’s, that “chief rendezvous for news . . . fashionable display and gull-catching.”17 City gallants were often satirized for their dependency on their barbers and tailors,18 and here they are terrorized and disgraced

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by a barber who cuts their ribbon-tied lovelocks and shaves their stylish beards. These are not the Sir Lancelots and Sir Tristrams of English legend, but the refined idlers, overspending consumers, and diseased gallants of urban culture.19 The canons of refined bodily countenance that supported the barbersurgeon trades characterized emerging forms of aristocratic, court-based masculinity and were, ideally, part of an ethos of masculinity that emphasized control of both mind and body, with the state of the body “assumed to represent the quality of mind and moral nature” (ibid., 90). However, anxiety that bodily refinement was “feminine” in its attention to artifice and appearance meant that, within early modern logic, such refinement could also lead to or be linked with the uncontrolled, open, weak, excessively sexualized body.20 The knights Rafe rescues from Barbarossa, the barber-surgeon giant, are examples of a satiric version of this discourse. Barbarossa’s victims are fashion-slaves, but they are also diseased bodies who come to him for treatment of the pox, a disease that disfigured the body in particularly unattractive ways. The barber-surgeon, then, was a perfect link between refined bodies and uncontrolled bodies, specifically sexually diseased bodies. They clustered around resort areas but also around areas of vice and ill-repute (ibid., 85, 87–88) and offered the most up-to-date treatments for venereal disease, including mercurial treatments and sweating baths. The first knight Rafe rescues comes to Barbarossa seeking the “killing of the itch” (3.376); the second knight, Sir Pockhole, has the gristle of his nose cut away and wears a velvet patch (3.400–401); a caveful of “prisoners” are “in diet [kept]” (3.415) and found “in a tub that’s heated smoking hot” (3.417). Sweathouses, or baths or “bagnios,” Margaret Pelling writes, “were made as congenial as possible and were places of resort” (“Appearance and Reality,” 102), but they were also directly associated with prostitution. The sweathouse, then, well exemplifies the porous boundary between the cultures of civil consumption and decadence in London that worried so many social commentators. Jonson’s 1616 Epigram “On the New Hot-House,” which Pelling cites (ibid., 103), is indicative: Where lately harboured many a famous whore, A purging bill, now fixed upon the door, Tells you it is a hot-house: so it may, And still be a whore-house. They are synonima.21

Interestingly, the figure of the barber-surgeon commonly turns up in satires as a kind of scourge of societal excesses, the stand-in for the satirist who “burns, probes, cuts and purges” (M. C. Randolph, “The medical concept in English Renaissance satiric theory: its possible relationships and implications,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941), 143).22 Margaret Pelling

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continues, “thus the writer chose the persona of the practitioner who was seen at times to be combatting the most extreme and visible conditions with the strongest and most effective forms of intervention” (“Appearance and Reality,” 91). But even as satirical scourge to unmanly knights, Barbarosa himself embodies a masculinity nearly as satirized. His ferocity is a parody of the potentially vicious working man in possession of frightening tools, those rebellious laborers of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI; while his straight razor is described as “a naked lance of purest steel” (3.233), the “massacres” (3.235) he perpetrates on knights and “ladies gent” are shaves and haircuts. Barbarosa is not Dick the butcher, who slaughters men “like sheep and oxen” (2 Henry VI, 4.3.3), nor is he the tanner of Wingham, who will make “dog’s leather” out of the skins of his enemies (4.2.22). He is a London tradesman whose power over bodies is, primarily, the power to improve appearances. Furthermore, that he wears “a motley garment to preserve his clothes” (3.234; my emphasis) while engaging in his socalled massacres lands him even more deeply in the world of appearances and possessions—he, too, is a “typical” Englishman, concerned with fashion and with preserving his goods, of which clothing items could be an important portion. The bodies of Rafe’s army of tradesmen are as disabled as Barbarosa’s knights. Rafe’s muster call, made to view the “persons and munitions” of his men, conflates bodies with weapons and reverberates with bawdy puns, all of the sort that suggest sexual corruption and disease, and none suggests prowess, attractiveness, or hearty procreative ability. William Hamerton, despite his name, cannot “shake [his Spanish Pike] with a terror”23—he charges it “with the weakest” (5.97), perhaps because his “pike”—slang for “penis” (Williams, Glossary, 235)—carries the mark of Spain, a country the English associated with the pox (ibid, 283). George Greengoose’s firearm, his “piece,” is “inflamed” from the “shot” it has made, and the “touch-hole . . . runs and stinketh”; in other words, his genitals are heated—perhaps with sexual passion, definitely with infection— from recent emissions. Although “to shoot with one’s piece” is to emit semen (ibid, 276), Greengoose’s sexual corruption is highly feminized: his name, for instance, suggests that he is a young prostitute—green was a color associated with sexuality (ibid 146), a goose was a prostitute (as well as food thought to excite lust), and a greengoose was “a young bird ready for sale” (ibid., 143–44). Additionally, Greengoose’s piece is given a vagina, or possible an arse, when Rafe diagnoses the “touch-hole” (ibid., 159) as the location of “a main fault.” George Greengoose is cast here as a lust-provoking, diseased prostitute—male or female—who, with “ten such [other] touch-holes would breed the pox in the army” (5.109–10). A few lines later, when he is admonished for leaving behind his “horn”— literally, the receptacle for holding gunpowder—his transformation is

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figuratively verified: Greengoose has a hole but no horn, he is a soldier with a vagina/arsehole rather than an erect penis (ibid., 162–63). That the horn stands also for a cuckold’s horn simply makes polyvalent the ways in which Greengoose’s masculinity is seriously compromised. Another soldier, unnamed, has lost the nose of his flask, suggesting both that he is pox-ridden and, as “nose” was a penis word (ibid., 218), that he has lost that as well. Still another soldier is missing a “stone,” or testicle, another has a “sodden,” or poxed, face (ibid., 291, 281).24 As expressed on the body, the boundary between the masculinity of the knight and that of the tradesman has eroded, with unfavorable results. The urban culture of disease is a shared one that emasculates the male body. The mystery of shopkeeping, then, prepares tradesmen for ease and over refinement, and corrupts and feminizes their bodies. These motifs appear again and again, although not all deficient shopkeeper bodies are diseased ones. Mistress Tenterhook’s deficient husband is not diseased, but, unlike Bottom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he has breath “as strong as six common gardens” (3.1.37) as well as the dry hands and dry brains of a melancholic. Master Honysuckle, also of Westward Ho, complains about his stiff legs (like “wodden pegs,” 2.1.6) and the worry wrinkles on his forehead (“more cromples than the back part of a counselors gowne, when another rides upon his necke at the barre,” 2.1.11–13). Luce’s father, the goldsmith of The Wise Woman of Hoxton, is a doddering, sentimental fool, weepy at the thought of his late wife (3.3.138–44) and “dim eye[d]” and befuddled when confronted with his daughter’s philandering husband (4.2.90–94). In Quomodo, the woolen draper of Michaelmas Term, bodily deficiency is sexual and is brought together with shopkeeping practices in a significant and clever conflation that thoroughly overturns the trope of work as vigorous sexual activity that is found in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.25 There are no phallic pricks and awls here, as in Simon Eyre’s shop; Quomodo’s tools of the trade are the Shortyard and the Falselight, by whose devices he, respectively, swindles his customers and “makes coarse commodities look sleek” (1.1.81). The more significant tool (and Quomodo’s most treasured) is Shortyard, whom, presumably because of his physical defects, Quomodo would “dare trust e’en with [his] wife” (1.1.87). Shortyard is presented as a “spirit” who takes on various personified guises, but he also, as Quomodo’s “tool,” constitutes an emblem of, or simply a snide comment on, the relationship between Quomodo’s business outfit and his sexual one; and when Shortyard appears as a citizen he articulates something very like that snide comment outright: We [citizens] could not stand about it, sir; to get riches and children too, ‘tis more than one man can do. And if I am of those citizen’s minds that say, let

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our wives make shift for children, an they will get none of us; and I cannot think but he that has both much wealth and many children has had more helps coming in than himself. (4.1.33–38)

A shortyard will lead to wealth, but not babies. And if the benefits of Quomodo’s other occupational device, the Falselight, are less obviously predicated upon sexual loss and the lack of legitimate heirs, they, nevertheless, require some of the same compromises. So that Falselight may use “subtle art [to] beguile the honest eye[s]” of customers (1.1.2), Quomodo desires his shop to be as “dark as some of my neighbours; where a man may be made a cuckold at one end while he’s measuring with his yard at t’other” (2.3.30–33). Profit from this process can be gained only at the danger of becoming a cuckold, and Quomodo does, indeed, become a cuckold when his wife, believing Quomodo is dead, marries the man whose land he has stolen, happily announcing her sexual satisfaction: “What difference there is in husbands, not only in one thing but in all” (5.1.50–51; my italics). Quomodo’s greatest desire is to possess land—“Land, fair neat land” (1.1.103)—but the rich shopkeeper can seize that gentle privilege only with a corresponding loss of manhood. In his compromise, he is much like Mr. Allwit of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, whose love of other gentle privileges, namely leisure and ease, lead him to forfeit all manly rights, duties, and privileges toward his wife and within the sphere of reproduction. In return for having his house “maintained . . . this ten years” (1.2.16), and congratulating himself all the while for having achieved “the happiest state that ever man was born to” (1.2.22), Mr. Allwit allows Sir Walter the knight to dominate in his home and enjoy his wife, doffing his hat obsequiously to ensure he knows his welcome. Without even the distress of jealousy to trouble him—“the knight / Hath took that labor all out of my hands” (1.2.51–52)—Allwit has complete peace of mind, while Sir Walter “has both the cost and torment” (1.2.55) of marriage. In Mr. Allwit, the unmanly, cuckolded citizen is linked directly to moving out of the realm of work and embracing absolute ease. The wares he trades are the charms of his wife who, about to give birth to another of Sir Walter’s children, is a picture of commercial fecundity. Allwit describes her: A lady lies in not like her; there’s her embossings, Embroiderings, spanglings, and I know not what, As if she lay with all the gaudy shops In Gresham’s Burse about her; then her restoratives, Able to set up a young ‘pothecary, And richly stock the foreman of a drug shop; Her sugar by whole loaves, her wines by rundlets. (1.2.32–38)

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The man of leisure, for whom “the fat of ease o’er-throws the eyes of shame” (2.2.41), beholds his particular store of goods in the Royal Exchange, which allow him to live the easy life. The unmanly traits of leisure are paired in opposition to unmanly traits associated specifically with commercial relationships in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho, which uses two apprentice goldsmiths, both of gentle birth, to satirically examine two deficient models of urban masculinity. Quicksilver, the foppish, would-be courtier, has much in common with Beaumont’s decadent tradesmen and knights, and although his is not a diseased body, the disease that served as an emblem of corrupt urban social life is alluded to in his name; Quicksilver (mercury), is understood as a cure for syphilis. Quicksilver is no model of ideal masculinity, but neither is the pretentiously pious, smug, staid, mundane Golding, whose masculinity is compromised in less flamboyant ways by commercial culture Quicksilver, a younger son of a gentle-born mother, sent to London to become—against his will—a goldsmith, first appears on stage with long hair and all the accoutrements of a city gallant: “hat, pumps, short sword and dagger, and a racket trussed up under his cloak” (1.1 sd). Quicksilver’s long hair and props contribute to what Will Fisher calls “prosthetic gender,” that is, the “materializ[ing] of specific forms of masculine and feminine identity” through physical features such as beards and hairstyles and “particular aspects of dress” (Materializing Gender, 12). The constitutive power of these bodily materializations of the gallant’s masculine identity is further inscribed by Quicksilver’s thorough, unabashed drunkenness on at least two occasions (which lead him to stagger and hiccup around the stage), his keeping of a mistress, and his regular gambling. His speech, as well, makes clear where his self-proclaimed identity is staked. He pronounces that to be a gentleman means to “do nothing” and encourages Golding to “be like a gentleman, be idle; the curse of man is labor. Wipe thy bum with testons, and make ducks and drakes with shillings” (1.1.138–40). His regular quoting of popular plays—“Who calls Jeronimo? Speak, here I am” (1.1.146); “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia” (2.1.97–98); “When this eternal substance of my soul / Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh, / . . . / I was a courtier in the Spanish Court, / And Don Andrea was my name” (2.1. 144, 147, 149–50)26 —suggests that the theater is one of the city entertainments that feeds his excessive appetite for pleasure and leisure. The timing and content of his declamations would support any anti-theatricalist’s claim that the theater was a corrupting influence on apprentices, as they all reflect Quicksilver’s imagination of himself as an autonomous powerhouse; his quoting of the opening lines of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, in particular, declaimed when his master dismisses him, is an assertion of his freedom and superiority. Quicksilver’s disorderly indulgences in London’s

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consumer culture are in excess of his position as an apprentice but justified from his own perspective on account of his gentle birth. William Gouge’s commentary applies perfectly to Quicksilver: “clerks, prentices, waiting women and such like, being borne gentlemen and men of good degree, are for the most part guilty of this fault: the reason is because their birth and parentage maketh them forget their present place and condition; or else maketh them wilfully presume above it” (Works, 1:334–35). Offsetting Quicksilver is Golding. Golding, unlike Quicksilver, is industrious, respectful of trade, modest, and content with his humble position in London as an apprentice-tradesman. On one level, the play is a comic take on the controversial question of whether or not engagement in industry taints or extinguishes gentry, a question implicitly about what did and did not constitute the ideal masculine subject. One side of this social debate is documented in a 1629 tract by Edward Bolton in The Cities Advocate and defends trade in terms of liberty, honor, and contribution to the Commonwealth, which are traditional terms for assessing masculinity. That is, the tract does not redefine the terms of masculinity but instead defends trade as manly activity by attaching it to existing terms of appraisal. Bolton argues against opinions, such as that of Erasmus, that liken service to servitude, as though an apprentice had the same status as a slave in ancient Rome.27 In Eastward Ho, Golding is the advocate for the city, voicing pious defenses against Quicksilver’s verbal attacks on the baseness of both apprenticing and trade in general. Whate’er some vainer youths may term disgrace, The gain of honest pains is never base; From trades, from arts, from valour, honor springs; These three are founts of gentry, yea of kings. (1.1.143–46)

The play gives the victory, at least superficially, to Golding and the master goldsmith, Touchstone, who is also wont to voice clichés and adages touting the virtues of trade. Golding’s fortunate fate is to marry one of Touchstone’s daughters, be taken into the livery of his company, and become a deputy alderman within a week, in a meteoric rise rivaling that of Simon Eyre, while Quicksilver winds up in jail, repentant, broke, and shorn of the gendered prosthetic of the gallant, his long hair. But, as Theodore Leinwand notes, “Chapman, Jonson, and Marston see to it that we find Golding a precise, unpleasant little conformist” (The City Staged, 64), and the masculinity of the industrious tradesman is satirized throughout the play as much as that of the foppish gentleman, ironizing and undermining the victory for trade. If the foppish gentle-apprentice is risible for his decadent, disorderly pretensions, Golding and Touchstone are equally risible in their assertions and declarations of humility. In an exceptionally fine

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moment of self-abasement, Golding refuses Touchstone’s offer of a lavish wedding banquet for his marriage to Touchstone’s modest daughter, Mildred, and insists not only that no dignitaries be invited but also that the meal be made up of the leftovers from the excessively extravagant feast held for the marriage of Touchstone’s proud and socially ambitious daughter, Gertrude, to a decadent (and impecunious) knight.28 Touchstone voices his humility primarily through the sort of pieties of thrift stereotypically associated with his ilk, avowals of low beginnings, honorable practices, and honest living: Did I gain my wealth by ordinaries? no! By exchanging of gold? no! By keeping gallants’ company? no! I hired me a little shop, bought low, took small gain, kept no debt book, garnished my shop, for want of plate, with good wholesome thrifty sentences—as, ‘Touchstone, keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee’; ‘Light gains makes heavy purses’; ‘Tis good to be merry and wise’. (1.1.52–60)

Quicksilver’s response to Touchstone’s maxims—which we can imagine being delivered with self-congratulatory solemnity—is to call Touchstone “old quipper” (3.2.147) and deride his manner of speaking with ironic commentary: “Well said, old Touchstone; I am proud to hear thee enter a set speech, i’faith” (3.2.141–42). Earlier, when drunk and hiccupping, he derides the earnest language that identifies Touchstone within the masculine social group of the thrifty shopkeeper by foregoing his usual arrogant oaths to repeat “forsooth” six times in seven speeches, a verbal tic heard more commonly from humble commoners and pious citizens, and carrying implications of contempt when used by the well-bred (Onions 87). Quicksilver drops the linguistic prosthetics that materialize his own cultural identity in order to mockingly adorn himself with those of another, in an act of parodic verbal drag. But ultimately, both apprenticing and the alternative Quicksilver seeks to it—becoming a courtier—are held up as requiring an undignified humbling of the manly body. When Quicksilver tells his mistress, Sindefy, that he has left off his apprenticeship and will make his livelihood at court, the view of court life she articulates presents the courtier as a pandering, flattering, creeping, tattle-tale. SIN.

What care and devotion must you use to humor an imperious lord, proportion your looks to his looks, smiles to his smiles, fit your sails to the wind of his breath? QUICK. Tush, he’s no journeyman in his craft that cannot do that. SIN. But he’s worse than a prentice that does it, not only humoring the lord, but every trencher-bearer, every groom that by indulgence and intelligence crept into his favour, and panderism into his

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chamber. He rules the roast; and when my honorable lord says it shall be thus, my worshipful rascal, the groom of his close stool, says it shall not be thus, claps the doors after him, and who dare enter? (2.2. 81–91)

Sindefy’s fawning and flattering courtier lacks manly dignity; his chameleon-like body is controlled by his lord, whose whims and moods must be reflected in the smiles and expressions of his servants. Indeed, as discussed in The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo (trans. 1581), if a courtier is to convincingly convey the type of empathetic response Sindefy refers to here—to convince another that one feels what he feels, or to manipulate another to feel what one desires him to feel—the response must be conveyed by the body and not simply by words, and it must involve a kind of inner transformation. It can’t be that you shoulde be sorrowfull for my mishap, if while I recount it unto you, you perceive not me to be sorrowfull. Neither can I possibly wring the teares from your eyes, unless I first wipe them from mine owne. . . . You see then, that the inward action ought to goe before the outwarde, so that the sounde of the wordes, and the motions of the body, bee thrust forwarde by the affections of the heart. (The Tudor Translations 7 [New York: AMS Press, 1967], 132)

Guazzo’s courtesy manual teaches the courtier about what he sees as the all-important art of conversation, and the expert in this art, he makes clear, knows that to speak with diverse persons necessitates that “wee must alter our selves into an other” (ibid., 105). Guazzo, however, stresses the importance to the courtier of not abasing himself to those below him in social status; he would have everyone keepe that majestie and state whiche is due to his estate. For to bee too popular and plausible, were to make largesse of the treasures of his curtesie, to abase him selfe, and to shewe a sign of folly or flattery, whereby a man against his will may . . . give occasion to others to insult over him, and not to respect him so muche as they ought to doe. (Ibid., 158)

But while Guazzo’s courtier, when “consorting with his inferiours . . . neither shall be forced to say or do any thing contrary to his minde” (ibid., 192), Sindefy’s description of the contortions Quicksilver would needs put himself through at the court—to stay in favor with not only the lord but also his “trench-bearer” and “groom of [the] close stool”—suggests that debasement by bowing to one’s inferiors was a necessary and routine part of the life of a courtier. Quicksilver, in Sindefy’s view (and with Quicksilver’s acknowledgement) would have to accommodate and humor, bend,

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bow, and mutate to the wishes of the lord’s servants and favorites, whatever menial tasks they performed29 and whatever their social rank may be. However, the courtier’s skills are, as Quicksilver is quick to point out, also those of any “journeyman in his craft.” And indeed, although the discourse of the shopkeeper was not monolithic, he begins to emerge in the seventeenth century as someone whose job it is to sell and who must be pleasing and submissive in order to do so. Over a hundred years after Eastward Ho was written, Daniel Defoe would write in his treatise The Complete English Tradesman that “the seller is servant to the buyer.”30 But even before Defoe, pandering submissiveness was becoming the stereotype of the merchant shopkeeper. When, for instance, the discussion turns to flattery in Guazzo’s manual, he uses the example of “glosing merchants [who] prayse you, and extoll you to the skies” to make his point. Even William Scott, in his 1635 Essay of Drapery: Or, The Compleate Citizen (London, 1635), which is “the first substantial piece of writing known in English that exults business as a career,”31 barely disguises his endorsement of this manner of behavior. He gives lip service to the importance of honesty—“the unjust ways of deceit which I would have my Citizen to shun are many: as Flattery, Dissimulation, Lying, etc” (ibid., 23)—but he undercuts his own pious exhortations with convoluted double-talk suggesting that flattery, dissimulation, and lying are precisely the arts necessary for a trade dependent on the pleasure of the customer. “Some Customers,” he says, will grow dull and displeased, if they bee not often whetted by a Flatterer; downright honest speeches discontent them. For this cause, as the Apostle said, Be angry, but sin not: So I say, Flatter, but sin not, if that be possible. (Ibid., 25–27)

On dissimulation, Scott muses, “Divines hold it in some cases lawfull, to pretend one thing and intend an other” (ibid.). On lying? “As we may not lie, so we need not speake all the truth” (ibid., 34). And business, according to Scott, necessitates pleasing all customers—of every character and estate; “my Citizen may deale pleasingly with all men” (ibid., 94). Thus the tradesman must not only be humble toward his superiors and familiar with his equals, but he must also be familiar with his inferiors—adopting what Scott admits is a potentially dangerous intimacy that, if handled incorrectly, could breed contempt (ibid.). This is the sort of submissive humility Quicksilver scorns when he berates Golding for complacently accepting the role of shopkeeper: “Wilt thou cry, ‘what is’t ye lack?’ Stand with a bare pate and dropping nose under a wooden penthouse, and art a gentleman?” (1.1.116–18). The subservience Quicksilver rejects involves more than submission to a master and the rules of apprenticeship; it involves the intolerably

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humble manner one must adopt toward the public consumer. Golding, with his bare and vigorously nodding head, accepts that manner; the fi rst words he utters on stage are the ubiquitous “What do ye lack, sir? What is’t you’ll buy?” (1.1.78). The audience is probably meant to agree with Quicksilver when he tells Golding: “how like a sheep thou look’st” (1.1.147). When Touchstone releases Quicksilver from his bond, Quicksilver pronounces himself “free o’ my fetters” (2.1.119), but even before he escapes his apprenticeship he assumes a physical liberty of movement more characteristic of elite men than proper city apprentices. Our first introduction to Golding finds him “walking short turns” (1.1 sd) before the goldsmith’s storefront, his pace and arena constricted by his duty to remain caretaking the shop. Quicksilver, on the other hand, enters from offstage, having been gallivanting about the city, and soon after attempts to mimic the duelist’s “expanded sense of physical space”32 by “offer[ing] to draw” (1.1.153 sd) when Golding insults him as a “rakehell” (1.1.152). Jennifer Low argues that the fencer’s training “influenced [gentlemen] to develop a sense of extended personal space that eventually became a visible sign of gentle birth” (Manhood and the Duel, 7), but also agrees with Anna Bryson, who analyzes the “physically expansive postures” common among elite men, noting that such postures, particularly swaggering, were sometimes critiqued because of the “incontinence and arrogance” they could express (ibid., 42). Low writes that “swaggering was depicted negatively because it conveyed a sense of self-importance contrary to the value of sprezzatura, and because it suggested a likelihood of a gap between appearance and performance” (ibid., 59), whereas sprezzatura suggested nonchalance and effortless grace. Quicksilver, it seems, is a clumsy, swaggering pretender. In a moment of physical slapstick, Quicksilver’s ability to embody physical authority with the grace of a gentleman is toppled when, just as he moves to draw “Golding trips up his heels and holds him” (1.1.153 sd). One would be tempted to stage the incontinent “prodigal coxcomb” (1.1.150) sprawled on the stage. But Quicksilver is not daunted, and he continues to offer glimpses of the compromises to masculinity that the life of trade might require. When he is fired, he sings a ballad rejecting what he sees as the base and ignomious position he has left behind: When Samson was a tall young man, His power and strength increased then; He sold no more nor cup nor can, But did them all despise. Old Touchstone, now write to thy friends For one to sell thy base gold-ends; Quicksilver now no more attends Thee, Touchstone. (2.2.43–50)

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Quicksilver rejects “attending” to Touchstone, seeing service as a submissive servitude, like the opponents Bolton addresses in The Cities Advocate. But he also quite specifically rejects the kind of work he must do, selling, the work of attending to customers. Attending to Touchstone involves selling Touchstone’s cups, cans, and “base gold-ends,” an activity that, according to Quicksilver, was rejected as base by a hero of no less a man than the great Samson; selling is an activity the virile despise. Quicksilver’s specious biblical precedent suggest, in fact, an increase in power and strength with the rejection of selling. That Samson’s strength is associated with his long hair adds a humorous subtext to Quicksilver’s song: it suggests that Quicksilver sees his own foppish long hair as a sign of physical superiority, and implicitly bolsters his argument that selling is for the less-thanvirile because proper apprentices and shopkeepers wore their hair short, to fit beneath their flatcaps.33 The cultural divide between the masculine social group Quicksilver identifies with and the one he has been thrust into against his will is enacted on the playing field of bodily fashion. The play’s scornful view of submissive behaviors and attitudes reaches its peak when it uses Quicksilver’s repentance to parody the well-known prodigal narrative. Quicksilver is “not curious to anybody” about singing his maudlin pre-execution ballads; he “would that all the world should take knowledge of his repentance, and thinks he merits in’t the more shame he suffers” (5.5.11–14). His pride in the degree of his own shame and his desire for fame in it evacuate the messages of obedience and humility carried by both conventional prodigal narratives and the pre-execution repentance letter. When he refuses the offer of clothing upon being released from Bridewell, choosing instead to walk through the streets in his prison garb, his prideful participation in the spectacle of his debased body and his lowly submission further undermines the social value and meaning of codes of humility, and invites the audience to laugh at such exhibitions.34 Furthermore, the blatant performativity of Quicksilver’s humility suggests that Golding’s piety might also be a performance, thus calling to mind the abundance of negative stereotypes of the shopkeeper or merchant as hypocrite that circulated in early modern England. The play leaves one wondering whether its point is to celebrate the thrift, “honest pains,” and humble honor of the middling sort tradesman, or to espouse the idea that, in John Earle’s words, the shopkeeper’s “religion is in the nature of his customer, and indeed [he is] the panderer to it.”35 In Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, the submissive humility of the shopkeeper is satirized most fully through the character of Candido, perhaps the most emasculated of all city comedy tradesmen. Candido, a linen draper who traffics in pieties of honest living and proper place much like those of Touchstone, Golding, and others, lives by patience and self-control, eschewing the violent combativeness and aggressive physicality that more traditionally characterized the masculinity of working

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men. Candido infuriates his wife and exasperates his servants, but, as Jean Howard has argued, his masculinity is presented—with great ambivalence—as the sort required by the state for the successful institution of a civil and orderly society. Candido, “the shopkeeper who conforms exactly to the demands of the marketplace” represents “a new sort of masculinity” (Howard, “The Shaping of Urban Subjects,” 172); furthermore, his complete control of all humoral inclinations matches a lauded model of masculinity in the court, a point articulated through the Duke’s final speeches at the ends of both parts of the play, inviting Candido to “teach our court to shine” (I.15.p.109). However, in its staging of aggression toward the self-controlled “new man” and its exploiting of potential audience pleasure in seeing him ridiculed, the action of the play seems more intended to provide a fantasy outlet for feelings of anxiety and frustration with this model of masculinity than to support or promote it. The body of the master linen draper is not an oversexed, diseased, or excessively consuming body like some of the other feminized shopkeepers I’ve discussed; on the contrary, Candido, who refuses to fight, argue, or get angry at even the most audacious of provocations, is a model of restraint and self-control, his temperament lacking all signs of excessive humor. In this sense, he would seem to be an ideal of masculine discipline, but despite the significant and widespread cultural value placed on masculine discipline, until the very end, the play uses Candido’s lack of humors as part of an anxious satire about compromised masculinity. When a city gallant set on provoking him claims that Candido hasn’t “a thimbleful of blood in’s belly” nor “a spleen not so big as a tavern token” (1.4. 104), he is suggesting, according to humoral theory, that Candido is deficient in passion, high spirits, and courage—all located in the spleen—and more significantly, that he lacks heat, the complexional quality created by blood. Blood and the heat it produced were considered innately good, and the increased quantity of the fluid and the property were understood to bestow the physiological superiority men enjoyed over women and boys. “Blood is the humor that makes men men,” as Bruce R. Smith writes, citing Lemnius’s arguments that blood caused the quick thinking and sharp action that led to “wisdom, knowledge and experience of many things” (Lemnius, cited in Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 20). Blood also allowed men to be fierce and fearless and led them into passionate action that was not consonant with the ideal, reasoned, balanced temperament men were exhorted to achieve, but was, nevertheless, the sort of action that also signified manliness. As Smith succinctly puts it, “In his very person, therefore, an early modern man was subject to conflicting physiological imperatives; on the one hand, accept the promptings of blood that make you a man; on the other, be reasonable” (ibid., 21).

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The Honest Whore marks Candido’s patient, dispassionate temperament as a deficiency of masculinity. His wife, Viola, laments that he “has not all things belonging to a man” (I.2.12)—to which her brother Fustigo responds with comic horror, suggesting that perhaps Candido is not a man at all, but some kind of non-human imposter, perhaps a mandrake, a plant with a phallic resemblance to a man. The humor becomes more pointed and less silly when Viola insists that Candido is a man in form, deficient only in one aspect of true manliness: “I have heard it often said that he who cannot be angry is no man. I am sure my husband is a man in print, for all things save only in this, no tempest can move him” (I.2. 100). Fustigo suggests making him drunk and cutting off his beard, but Viola scoffs at the notion that Candido values his beard as anything more than a superficial signifier of manliness: “Fie, fie, idle, idle! He’s no Frenchman to fret at the loss of a little scald hair” (I.2. 13).36 But Candido’s refusal to get angry is not merely unmanly, for to be unmanly is not benign, and leads to specific gender transgressions. Candido, Viola explains to her brother, would not even be angry if she cuckolded him—“Puh! He would count such a cut no unkindness” (I.2. 13; “cut” meaning to “help oneself sexually”), and when Fustigo, pretending to be Viola’s “cousin,” swaggers into the shop, making all sorts of implications about the “good sport” he has had with Viola and kissing her repeatedly, Candido merely notes “No harm in kissing is” (I.7. 50). A proper seventeenth-century Englishman would and should be angry at such transgressions in his wife, and a portion of the venereal passion engendered by blood would ensure such a reaction. Since early modern England imagined the family as the foundation and model of all other institutions and social relations, extramarital affairs were threats to the well-ordered Commonwealth. That Candido has little regard for his wife’s sexual behavior is a dereliction of his duty to sustain social order.37 Indeed, Candido’s bloodless nature causes transgressions of proper feminine behavior on the part of his wife that could potentially lead to disruptions in social-sexual order. Viola is shrewish and angry in response to his passivity, and “verily [does] long” to make him angry. Though she claims her “longings are not wanton, but wayward” (I.2. 13), in early modern discourses (especially comic ones) there was commonly a slippage between any type of female appetite or longing and female sexual desire. Besides, her language makes it perfectly clear that her longings are indeed wanton—and that anger, sex, and violence are part of the same economy. Her desire to anger her husband is also a desire to arouse him sexually: I am ready to bite off my tongue, because it wants that virtue which all women’s tongues have, to anger their husbands: . . . mine can by no thunder turn him into a sharpness. (I.2.13)

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Furthermore, she laments: I long to have my patient husband eat up a whole porcupine, to the intent, the bristling quills may stick about his lips like a Flemish mustachio, and be shot at me. (I.2.13)

It is hard to miss that Viola desires, as Jean Howard writes, “a certain phallic sharpness, a certain hairy wildness, in her husband”(“The Shaping of Urban Subjects” 171). Viola, it seems, would prefer a Jack Cade type, a man whose sexual potency is implicitly bound up in violent martial valour, who fights “till that his thighs with darts / Were almost like a sharp-quill’d porpentine.”38 Candido, on the contrary, is bloodless, passive, and—implicit in the suggestion that Viola has not been “shot at” recently—impotent. Indeed, as “shoot” was slang for ejaculate, it seems that Candido is deficient as well in that most vital of masculine bodily fluids—seminal emissions. And while excessive desire in women was one of women’s worst faults, a transgression of perfect femininity, Candido’s lack of sexual potency and inability to satisfy his wife sexually mark him as a man at odds with early modern marriage ideologies. In their most generous articulation, these attitudes saw marital sex as an important part of the bond between man and wife and, at the very least, expected the husband to sexually satisfy his wife so that she would have no cause to commit adultery. The mutual marriage debt was seen as a principal duty of marriage, as it ensured its primary ends: procreation and the avoidance of fornication.39 Viola is by no means the only sexually frustrated, henpecking wife of the London stage. Other characters, such as Mistress Gallipot of The Roaring Girl and Fallace of Everyman Out of His Humor enjoy court liaisons with other men while scorning their doting, overly fond “apron husbands” (RG 3.2.31) who, in Mistress Gallipot’s words, do “not know how to handle a woman in her kind” (3.2.25). When Master Gallipot wonders “why we citizens should get children so fretful and untoward in the breeding, their fathers being for the most part as gentle as milch kine,” (3.2.38) and speculates that his wife’s shrewishness is a result of pregnancy, he comically identifies the very problem with citizen husbands, at least in city comedies. What drives these shopkeepers’ wives to distraction are the “city humors” that make men “cookish” with their wives, that turn them into fussy, fond, and fastidious “cotqueans” who concern themselves excessively over their wives’ business. In city comedies, there is none of the fear found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sappho and Phao that working men will violate or charm women of a higher social degree—this brand of working men cannot control or sexually satisfy their own, and, thus, their wives wander with dangerous freedom. As is well known, early

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modern Englishmen who did not control their wives were subject to social scorn: a reputation as a cuckold “was a slur on both [a man’s] virility and his capacity to rule his own household” (Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage , 317), and rough justice in the form of skimmingtons and charivaris could be directed at men who allowed their wives to beat them or to transgress sexually. In a sense, then, in the London theater, the laughter of the audience substitutes for or acts as an analog to those forms of rough justice, those punishment rituals which “exhorted hen-pecked husbands to take command” (Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” 140). Just as Gallipot identifies his gentleness with his identity as a citizen, Candido’s patience is directly linked to his sense of himself as a tradesman, a shopkeeper whose livelihood depends upon selling to the public and keeping them pleased. This is illustrated most clearly when a city gallant, determined to make him “as angry, as vexed, and as mad as an English cuckold” insists on purchasing a penny’s worth of fine linen from the middle of a bolt. Candido cuts a penny’s worth from the middle, thus destroying the entire bolt, and cheerfully justifies himself to his furious wife: We are set here to please all customers, Their humors and their fancies;—offend none: We get by many, if we lose by one. Maybe his mind stood to no more than that, A penn’orth serves him, and ‘monst trades tis found, Deny a penn’orth, it may cross a pound. Oh, he that means to thrive, with patient eye Must please the devil if he comes to buy. (I.5.26)

In order to ensure profits, Candido accepts as a necessity a submissive relationship to the consuming public that anticipates in remarkable detail Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman (1725–1727), which constructs the tradesman as an exemplar of patience, “bear[ing] with all sorts of impertinence” and placing “to the account of his calling that it is his business to be ill used and resent nothing” because “his business is to get money; to sell and to please” (60–61). Indeed, Defoe even echoes Candido’s sentiment that if you are pleasing enough, eventually someone will buy, adding that it may even be the original troublemaker: “if some do give him trouble, and do not buy, others make him amends, and do buy: and even those who do not buy at one time, may at another” (ibid., 61). Candido’s aim is also to “get” and “thrive,” and the means is through passivity, submission, patience, and proper place—“we are set here to please” (my emphasis). Getting and thriving involves kowtowing to the fancies and humors of customers, while suppressing all those of the self. As Defoe writes, again

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echoing Dekker and Middleton’s presentation of the patient shopkeeper, “a tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh or blood about him; no passions or resentment; he must never be angry; no not so much as seem to be so” (ibid., 60). This developing construction of a shopkeeper’s creed illustrates Theodore Leinwand’s claim that affects and affect-laden qualities are “bound up in the mundane negotiations of homoeconomicus” and are shown in early modern drama to ramify significantly within the economic sphere. Theodore Leinwand’s brilliant argument that “affects are neither merely sensations nor responses; they have the capacity to do work” (Theater, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England, 2) is exemplified in the idea that the shopkeeper’s ethos of modest humility will act as a stimulant to sales. But although Candido is described by his wife’s brother as a “rich chough,” a thriving business resulting from Candido’s chosen mode of economic practice is never highlighted or even presented; on the contrary, the effects audience and readers witness most vividly are decidedly more negative. Candido’s extraordinary ethos of patience and humility generates shrewishness and sexual longing in his wife, and it also generates contempt in the gallants of the city, disobedience and frustration in his servants (if not outright disrespect), and bafflement in pretty much everyone. The city gallants get great fun out of doing all they can to provoke and humiliate him, stealing a gilt and silver beaker in part 1, as well as ruining his cloth, and in part 2, for a “good fit of mirth” (4.3.19) forcing him to drink the health of a bawd and tricking him into buying stolen goods. Candido’s apprentices and especially his journeyman are as exasperated and aggrieved as Candido is mild, protesting with irritation at the “cheating companions” (I.5.98) who demand the pennyworth of lawn and exploding into violence after Fustigo flirts with the master’s wife and then demands ten yards of fabric he has no intention of paying for. Since Candido disapproves of any expression of anger, his men use trickery to get him out of the shop, and then defy him by taking justice into their own rough hands and give Fustigo a sound beating. Candido’s apprentices have his best interests at heart when they disobey him; nevertheless, Candido’s inability to control his apprentices is yet another way in which his shopkeeper ways provoke social disorder. Furthermore, that Candido’s men go behind his back to deal with the customers as they see fit points to his alienation from the men who work for and with him. This shopkeeper’s masculinity is affirmed neither through his adherence to early modern ideologies of the husband’s role in marriage, nor through the type of horizontal homosocial bonds within the shop that we see in Dekker’s A Shoemaker’s Holiday. Candido’s steadfast adherence to the shopkeeper’s creed is shown to engender, above all, humiliating situations that are clearly designed to

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elicit laughter from the audience, or even outright ridicule. In addition to the above-mentioned scenarios, he appears wearing the clothes of an apprentice while his journeyman dresses in his, and is beaten in his own shop by gallants who mistake his identity. Further, forced by Bots, a soldier, and the city gallants to drink a toast to a bawd, his unmanly body is again an object of attention when Lodovico asks why his “hand shake[s] so” (it is, Candido responds, the “palsie [which] danceth in [his] blood”) and when he comments that he can “scare get up” after kneeling to make the toast. And when Candido’s wife locks away his senator’s gown, he dons a tablecloth cut with holes to attend his meeting with the senate, the effeminizing implications of which are articulated by George, his journeyman, who notes wryly that “it must come over your head, sir, like a wenches peticoate.” George’s distress over the situation is clear when all he can say in response to Candido’s request that he “not laugh . . . til I’m out of sight” is a helpless “I laugh? Not I.” The journeyman, it seems, finds nothing amusing about Candido’s plight. We might imagine that the satire on Candido is precisely what the grocer of Knight of the Burning Pestle has in mind when he rails about girds against citizens. Indeed, we might even conclude that the shopkeeper’s ethos leads to disrespect in our playwrights, who draw with broad strokes the conventional early modern comparison between shopkeepers and whores. Candido’s servile approach to customers allows him to be compared to the whore of the main plot, and, as Howard notes, “a clear-eyed reader might ask ‘which is the citizen here, and which the whore?’” (“The Shaping of Urban Subjects,” 179). Hippolito, the count, accuses Bellafront of being “as base as any beast that bears,—/ Your body is e’en hired, and so are theirs” (II.1.128), and says of whores in general: Could the devil put on a human shape. If his purse shake out crowns, up then he gets. Whores will be rid to hell with golden bits. (II.1.129)

When Candido is yet again gulled of goods, his wife excoriates him in similar terms: See what your patience comes to: everyone saddles you, and rides you; you will be shortly the common stone horse of Milan: a woman’s well holped up with such a meacok.

Candido and the whore are compared to beasts that bear burdens and are ridden. In Renaissance slang, “to ride” meant “to copulate.” If the devil pays his crowns, “up then he gets” on the whore for a ride with hell as their destination. Candido, similarly, is saddled and ridden; the sexual

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metaphor lurking in this description surfaces and is confirmed when Viola calls him a meacok—an effeminate weakling—who is not much use to a woman. Candido, Viola suggests, passively assumes the feminine position for every consumer in Milan. An odd note is struck, then, when, at the ends of both part 1 and part 2 of The Honest Whore, Candido is held up as a model for courtiers to emulate: “you shall teach our court to shine; / So calm a spirit is worth a golden mine,” the Duke pronounces. The Duke’s endorsement acknowledges that Candido’s complete self-control, his ability to suppress all humor in the quest to please, matched a lauded model of masculinity in the court. The ideal courtier, in Castiglione’s terms, is able “to win universal favour with lords, knights, and ladies” by employing “a gentle and agreeable manner in his day-to-day relationships” (Book of the Courtier, 124), and Castiglione’s description of the docility of the courtier’s temperate mind recalls Candido’s manner: [W]hen [temperance] has not only subdued but totally extinguished the fires of lust in the mind which possesses it, . . . [it] gently infuses [the soul] with a powerful persuasion that turns it to honest ways, renders it calm and full of repose, in all things even and well-tempered, and informed in all respects with a certain harmony that adorns it with serene and unshakeable tranquillity; and so in all things it is ready to respond completely to reason and to follow wherever reason may lead with utmost docility, like a young lamb that runs and walks alongside its mother, stops when she does, and moves only in response to her. (294–95)

Indeed, the Duke has reason to approve Candido’s actions; his ethos of masculinity was the form that the state and monarch had significant investment in advancing. Within a court context, it secured against the violence and the dangerous independence of rebellious figures such as Essex, as well as the lesser disruptions of duels and other violent quarrels. The self-controlled, anxious-to-please courtier obeyed rather than rebelled, assuaged rather than challenged; nevertheless, to many, his masculinity was less attractive than the swashbuckling masculinity of an Essex or a Raleigh, just as Candido’s passivity would have been less attractive to many than Cade’s ferocity and the apprentice drapers’ determination to personally avenge any insult.40 Returning to Howard’s argument, from the perspective of the state, Candido’s ethos of masculinity allows “the constables [to] employ the force he eschews as the state takes over the management of violence from private and particular citizens” (“The Shaping of Urban Subjects,” 173). Thus, to some extent, it is not surprising that the Duke chooses to herald the disciplined and patient Candido, as Candido’s self-regulation involves leaving the punitive violence of justice to the state.

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However, although the Duke’s words are appropriate to his position as ruler, and in both plays they carry the gravity of their status as the fi nal words, the Duke’s approval is ambivalently expressed in part 1, and part 2’s ending glosses over the problem that creates the ambivalence. In part 1, the Duke’s response to Candido’s unwavering patience is initially skeptical: Signor, me thinks patience has laid on you Such heavy weight, that you should loathe it. ... For he whose brest is tender, bloude so coole, That no wrongs heate it, is a patient foole, What comfort do you find in being so calme? (I.5.2.485–87)

It is only after Candido’s long defense of patience as, among other things, a Christian virtue that the Duke’s skepticism turns towards esteem, but his admiration remains laced with doubt. ‘Twere sinne all women should such husbands have. For every man must then be his wives slave. Come therefore you shall teach our court to shine, So calme a spirit is worth a golden Mine, Wives (with meeke husbands) that to vex them long, In Bedlam must they dwell, els dwell they wrong.

Within the Duke’s final words are the ultimate assessment of the problem posed by the patient man, as well as an answer to that problem. Notably, Candido’s inability to control his servants is, in the final analysis, less significant than his inability to control Viola. Candido’s spirit may be “worth a golden Mine,” but if all men were like him, gender hierarchy would be seriously disrupted: men would be the slaves of their wives. Thus vexatious, hen-pecking wives must be labeled mad and made to dwell in Bedlam, the infamous madhouse to which Candido is brought before being rescued by the Duke. For state order, mild tranquillity in men must firmly be asserted as not madness; however, if gender order is disrupted by male patience, such assertions will be irrelevant. Difficult women who make calm, meek men their slaves instead of accepting them as masters, therefore, must be stigmatized and punished as mad. So pressing is the problem of gender hierarchy in a construction of masculinity centered on the regulated man that part 2 of The Honest Whore continues to worry the patient man/shrewish wife conflict. Indeed, the Candido plot of the sequel is, in large part, a shrew-taming tale, as though Candido’s wife must submit to his authority before the patient man can,

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with ease, finally be held up to shine as a model of manliness. In part 2, Candido is first seen at his second wedding, where his new bride cuffs an apprentice for filling her cup with sack instead of claret and then storms off stage in a rage; Candido subsequently agrees to be trained by Lodovico, a gallant, in how to control his wife. Having conceded to Lodovico’s persuasion, Candido begins to behave in ways not fully in character with the imperturbable man of part 1, and his objective is soon attained. When his wife refuses to do his bidding in front of an apprentice, he confronts her about this behavior as well as her earlier conduct at the wedding: You know at table What tricks you play’d—swagger’d, broke glasses! Fie! Fie! fie! fie! And now before my prentice here You make an ass of me, thou—what shall I call thee?

Although Candido will not take Lodovico’s suggestion that he call her “arrant whore,” that he chastises her at all marks a significant shift for the unflappable man. When he challenges her outright with “Wife, I’ll tame you,” we appear to be witnessing a changed man. What follows is a comic scene during which Candido and his new bride prepare to battle “for the breeches” with a yard and an ell-rule, but the moment Candido calls “Strike!” his wife does an about face: Then guard you from this blow, For I play all at legs, but ’tis thus low. She kneels Behold, I am such a cunning fencer grown, I keep my ground, yet down I will be thrown With the least blow you give me. I disdain The wife that is her husband’s sovereign. She that upon your pillow first did rest They say the breeches wore, which I detest. The tax she impos’d upon you, I abate you. If me you make your master, I shall hate you. The world shall judge who offers fairest play: You win the breeches, but I win the day.

Peace is made, and Candido quickly claims to have “play’d thus the rebel only for a jest.” But if Dekker is indeed trying to endorse the patient man as the model of manliness, he seems here to be fudging to score his point. Candido wins mastery over his wife only after exhibiting an aggressive mode of masculinity; it is his aggressive expression of authority and determination to have the upper hand that his wife responds to, not his patience. Thus although the Duke expresses no ambivalence in his fi nal speech, declaring that “A patient man’s a pattern for a king,”

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the fundamental social conflict created by the patient man, set up in part 1 and putatively resolved in part 2, has not truly been resolved. Proper gender hierarchy is restored when Candido “acts like a man,” undermining the Duke’s position, underscoring the play’s satire on mild shopkeepers and reinforcing the popular belief that only when men act like men will women act like women, and that if men do not act like men, women will.41 Additionally, Thomas Cartelli’s argument that moral messages reserved for the endings of plays allow audience members to safely enjoy more transgressive social behaviors represented earlier (Economy of Theatrical Experience, 35) is critical for speculating on audience response to both parts of The Honest Whore. While the Duke’s final words might suggest that Candido is being presented as the ideal male subject—and, thus an exemplar of English masculinity—there is very little in the action of the play that would securely fix this view into the minds of London playgoers. Can we truly imagine the audience leaving the theater with the words of the Duke in their minds, words that are at times ambivalent, and which sound like tacked-on conclusions? What seems far more likely to stick in audience memory are the images of the patient man as comic spectacle, especially if one considers the importance of action, visual impression, and humor as constitutive elements of a theatrical performance produced within the noisy and sometimes raucous atmosphere of the early modern theater. The role of fantasy satisfaction must also be considered. As Cartelli writes, “it is on [a] play’s capacity to satisfy its audience’s desire for psychic release and fantasy fulfillment that its dramatic—and commercial— success will largely depend” (ibid., 11). Would a London audience find satisfaction in the satiric rendering of the shopkeeper as a patient sap? In a civic atmosphere of increased state and social pressure to be controlled, controllable, and in control, it is possible that many would. Envisaging the “psychic disposition of Elizabethan playgoers” (ibid., 62), Cartelli draws a telling summary portrait of the early modern Englishman as, among other characteristics, “‘impatient of anything like slavery’; volatile. . .at virtually every social stratum; sudden and extravagant in expressions of anger and pleasure, haughty and anti-authoritarian” (ibid., 52). “Volatile,” “anti-authoritarian” Englishmen might well have bridled at the curbs and restrictions impelled by the emerging ethos of civil masculine behavior, and felt both disdain for and resentment toward the Candido-types, whose self-regulation and implacable mildness could be interpreted as capitulation to the effeminizing cultural and social forces promulgating such codes. For these audience members, there may have been great pleasure in viewing aggression and ridicule directed at the perfect embodiment of a regulated and restrained manhood.

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That Candido sends George to the constable rather than raise a hue and cry after gallants steal his gilt and silver beaker would certainly have provoked derision in a number of audience members, given English attitudes toward the law in general and constables in particular. Certainly, calling the constable proves him a good subject, as Howard writes;42 however, a great deal of evidence suggests that the English constabulary often commanded little respect among both commoners and the elite classes. Official documents and elite commentators from the seventeenth century frequently implied “that constables were being chosen from the ‘meaner sort’ of inhabitants who were incapable of fulfilling the duties of the office,”43 and while Joan Kent provides evidence that, in actuality, constables were generally “from the more substantial families just below [the] rank” of gentleman (“English Village Constable,” 28), her analysis leads to the conclusion that the office itself had a precarious hold on authority at a time when resistance to centralized state authority was high.44 To the communities from which constables were chosen (even when the communities themselves made the choice), constables were often resisted as agents of the court imposing unpopular writs dictated from on high.45 Occasions when constables were verbally abused with labels of “fool” or “slave,” or had their beards torn by assailants (ibid., 42), are particularly informative of attitudes; “slave” suggests a demeaning submission to a higher power, “fool” could mean a weak-minded dupe (perhaps of the higher authority), and tearing a man’s beard was an insult to his manhood.46 Allying himself with an institution that itself was sometimes scorned as submissive and unmanly could not have helped Candido’s image with the audience. When the Duke lauds Candido’s masculine style as a fit model for the court, some middling sort tradesmen sharing Candido’s values might well have felt vindicated or proud; indeed, William Scott, the early champion of tradesmen, evokes the parallels between the ethos of the docile courtier and that of the polite shopkeeper in his presentation of the ideal tradesman, as if to avoid the balder, harsher constructions of the shopkeeper’s relations and improve his status thereby. Scott’s draper, a self-fashioned man whose multiple talents allow him to “live pleasingly to others” (Essay of Drapery, 85) and be everything to everyone, is similar to Castiglione’s courtier, who “win[s] universal favour with lords, knights, and ladies” by employing “a gentle and agreeable manner in his day-to-day relationships” (Book of the Courtier, 124). And when Scott dwells at length on the importance of adopting the appropriate role for the customer in question—“in as much as [the tradesman] is to deale with men of divers conditions, let him know that to speake according to the nature of him with whom he commerceth, is the best Rhetorick”47—he again echoes the well-known codes of the perfect courtier as voiced by Castiglione, among others: “whoever has to accommodate his behavior to dealings with a considerable number

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of people must be guided by his own judgement and, recognizing the differences between one man and another, must change his style and method from day to day, according to the nature of those with whom he wants to converse” (Book of the Courtier, 124). Scott’s pleasing ways, however, are always motivated by financial profit; indeed, his definition of the complete citizen tradesman inexorably links the two: “I define him to be a man whom seven yeares having made a citizen: now just, pleasing, profitable wayes, have made compleate” (Essay of Drapery, 13). The draper’s pleasing speech, for instance—“not so much words as Honey” (ibid., 89)—is meant to persuade “his Customer to the liking of his commodity” (ibid., 91). And courtesy, with all its implications, “payes a great deal, . . . it hath beene observed that few men have risen to great Fortunes, which have not been courteous” (ibid., 86, my emphasis). The ideal of courtly manliness, as Michael Schoenfeldt describes it, involved “the constitution of the self” by way of “internal liberation from insurgent passions” (Michael Schoenfeldt, “The Matter of Inwardness: Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, 320). But this ideal of masculinity could be corrupt even in its courtly context—as Sindefy’s derogatory terms in Eastward Ho make clear, the courtier could be seen as a kind of hidden prostitute. And the tradesman’s suppression of passion is not about liberation of the self; it is blatantly about profit. The Duke in The Honest Whore first sees Candido as a “patient fool,” and then is converted to the virtues of patience by Candido’s eloquent speech, which notes that Jesus himself was a “soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil. . . . sufferer.” Despite the Duke’s enthusiasm, The Honest Whore seems to be presenting the self-control of the shopkeeper, not as an exemplar of masculine selfhood but as a corruption of it. It’s hard to imagine that Candido’s eloquent speech did not register dramatic irony with some audience members, as Christ, one can probably assume, would not have pleased the devil to sell him goods.

Conclusion: The Stage and Work, Again MACBETH [to the murders]: Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men, As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs. The valued file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous nature Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive Particular addition from the bill That writes them all alike. And so of men. Now, if you have a station in the file, Not i’ th’ worst rank of manhood, say’t[.]1

SOME MEN, M ACBETH ARGUES, ARE MEN. SOME ARE NOT, or are men only in the sense that they benefit from social generalizing tendencies that thoughtlessly lump all males into that category: “the bill / That writes them all alike.” My argument in Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage has been very much focused on claiming and examining difference among men, not only in the obvious sense of difference in social rank, but in the sense of differences in perceptions of what constitutes the manly among males. In this sense, I have begun from premises similar to those of critics such as Bruce R. Smith, who, citing anthropologist David Gilmore’s cross-cultural claims about masculinity, notes about early modern manliness that it “is something quite different from biological maleness[.] . . . It is not a natural given.”2 To quote Alexandra Shepard, there are “gender differences within each sex.”3 What has most animated my study is the prevalent idea within early modern literary studies that the masculinity of the manually laboring commoner man could never be granted eminence, that the laboring man could never have an esteemed “station in the file” of masculinity but instead was always relegated to “th’ worst rank of manhood.” This has seemed to me patently inaccurate, and I’ve set out to explore and establish some of the available discourses of the early modern English working man that asserted his masculine value and manly attractions, discourses confirming that low born craft and tradesmen could, indeed, be considered “men” in the full sense of the word and could even be seen to compete with and challenge the hegemonic masculinities associated with elite men of the gentle classes.

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My focus in Manly Mechanicals has been on potential identifications between forms of manual labor and manliness; I’ve examined the significant masculine status accrued by contributing to the commercial wealth and health of the emerging nation and through the possession of the physical strength associated with performing manual labor, physical strength that could then be channelled into manly warrior activities, whether in defense of social order or in rebellion against it. The London stage has provided a particularly vibrant locus of discourse production on working men, I argue, at least in part because of the various imbrications within the world of craft and trade labor of the theater’s actors, owners, playwrights, and managers. I’ve suggested that so great were the personal and familial connections to craft labor among the men who created and produced London’s theater that we might think of the London theater’s production of discourse on artisanal masculinities as a writing of social origins. But in order for Manly Mechanicals to maintain its attention to differences among social groups of men and their masculinities, it is important not to end over-emphasizing the similarity between artisans and actors; early modern theater men, for the most part, no longer engaged in craft and trade labor, although many of them had come from that world. The work of the theater men was a new kind of labor—physical labor for those on the stage, to be sure, but also creative labor, labor that yielded a potentially wealthy lifestyle, and labor with a dubious status in many eyes. Certainly, many anti-theater Puritans criticized actors for “playing” rather than “working,” but this well-examined territory is not the arena I want to explore in these remaining pages. Rather, I would like to conclude this study by considering discursive formulations of this new type of labor— theatrical work—within the context of the stage constructions of craft and trade workers’ manliness examined herein. That is, I want to consider briefly the implications for men working within the early modern London theater of potential identifications between male work and manliness, to examine the discursive associations available—or not—between work for the early modern stage and manly identity. Close identifications between work and masculine identity within history and across cultures have led to anxieties about masculine identity when the kind of work that defines masculinity shifts. Cultural analyses of masculine identity by writers as diverse as journalist Susan Faludi, historian Mark C. Carnes, and anthropologist David Gilmore offer illustrations. Faludi’s investigations of and conclusions on post-World War II masculinity in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man reproduce nineteenth-century discourses that posit productive labor as the foundation of masculine identity and authority, discourses similar to some of the early modern ones I’ve examined. She writes of the resilience of skilled manual laborers of a shipyard who, in her analysis, maintained a sense of masculine

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identity even after massive layoffs, and she compares their sense of dignity to the anger and emotional fragility of corporate white-collar workers who felt “castrated” after losing their positions. Faludi’s conclusions reveal a discomfort, which I believe is both her own and broadly cultural, with the forms of managerial work that became more prevalent in the latter half of the twentieth century. The strength of the “utilitarian masculinity” she openly champions came from, in her analysis, “commanding the inner skills to work with materials,” which “generated a pride . . . on which a man’ s life could be securely founded,”4 whereas corporate culture seemed to be “all about surveillance”5 and managing other people’s work rather than producing something tangible. Other scholars who discuss responses in masculine culture to similar work trends locate the problematic types of work in earlier historical periods. Mark C. Carnes posits the social and cultural endorsement of aggressive masculinity at the close of the nineteenth century, revealed by historian E. Anthony Rotundo in American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, as a response to “workaday lives [that] were so sedentary” in the “increasingly bureaucratized world of the nineteenth century.”6 David D. Gilmore sees unease over male passivity within the work world in his astute interpretation of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), wherein he sees Bartleby’s refusal to work and take care of himself as a reflection of nineteenthcentury cultural anxiety about the potential for man to simply reject the imperatives of productive, dynamic masculinity and instead regress “to the helplessness of infancy and the ultimate passivity, death.”7 What these and other studies underscore is a prevalent idea—whether held or pointed to by the writers—that some kinds of work (generally defined as productive, skilled, and hands-on) are more manly than others. Perceived or real shifts away from these forms of manly work result in discourses lamenting the “new” threats to masculine identity. I have argued in the final chapter of this book for the existence of a perceived transformation in the work of the artisan class in early modern London from manufacture to purely trade, from making goods to becoming shopkeepers selling goods, a shift that finds expression on the commercial stage. On the stage, this apparent change in work is embedded within a satirical discourse expressing anxiety over the effect of ease, luxury, and less physically challenging work on the masculinity of craft and trade company men, anxieties that mirror those of historically later discursive intersections of new work and masculinity. On the early modern stage, apprehension is particularly expressed over the social relationships the “new” work entails; its orientation in service toward a customer who holds the upper hand in his relationship with the seller could be seen as rendering the shopkeeper servant to a master whose only claim to the superior

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position is money. It seems to me that the vehemence of the satire on the shopkeeper available on the stage might have been related to concerns about the nature of the new work of full-time commercial theatrical activity. The work of acting and playwriting could be seen to have parallels to the work of shopkeeping; with these similarities, I would like to suggest, came related anxieties about the manliness of the men involved. It is to these analogous trepidations that I will now turn. Douglas Bruster argues that “the theater was, a priori, a market, that it was, primarily a place of business.”8 In his view, the drama became, as a result, “the equivalent of what Brecht, speaking of radio, would later call an ‘acoustic department store’” shaping “dramatic commodities to answer to various manifestations of social desire.”9 In its relatively unimpeded participation in the world of commercial exchange, the theater had a certain freedom from the hierarchical relations of master and servant that characterized the traditional workplace, but, I would argue, its engagement in commercial exchange was fraught with anxieties about the emasculating effects of relations of economic dependence and of the restrictions on freedom that answering to the desires of all involved. Of all early playwrights, Ben Jonson is probably the most explicit about articulating the theater’s dependency on the market and exploring dramatically the humiliating, emasculating imperative to please a popular audience. The cost to the playwright of pleasing an audience, according to Every Man In His Humour (1598), is loss of self-respect. In that play, the Prologue tells us that by writing for the stage the Poet serves the “ill customes of the age,” but does so strictly out of “want”: the Poet “for want. Hath not so lov’d the stage, / As he dare serve th’ill customes of the age: / Or purchase your delight at such a rate, / As, for it he himself must justly hate.” In the Induction to The Magnetic Lady (1632), Jonson explicitly compares the theater to a shop, sardonically underscoring their similarities in mandate. The fi rst words of the Induction, spoken by a boy servant of the playhouse, are “What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you lack?,” the overtaxed, obsequious catchphrase of London shopkeepers and their apprentices. Thus begins Jonson’s conceit of the stage as “poetic shop,” wherein two gentlemen entering are offered the purchase of “fi ne fancies, figures, humours, characters, ideas, defi nitions of lords and ladies” “waiting-women, parasites, knights, captains, courtiers, lawyers”—essentially, any type of character a customer browsing for theatrical pleasure might wish to see. The two gentlemen have come on a mission “from the people” to entreat an “excellent play,” having had “very mean ones, from this shop of late, the stage as you call it.” Unable to take their complaint directly to the poet of the day, who is nowhere to be found, they can only pressure the hapless boy in whose hands the stage-qua-shop has been left, reminding him (in Latin and English) that .

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the “ancient poets had it in their purpose, still to please this people” (34–35, my emphasis). Jonson regularly protests the imperative to please the people through a variety of satiric authorial poses that, however amusing and self-aware they may be, suggest a need to shore up the masculinity of the professional stage-writer. His author character in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), for instance, is part high-minded scourge whose portraits of vice are (ostensibly) intended as correctives rather than amusements, part proud Coriolanus-type warrior figure refusing the affirmation of the common people as a dependency that affronts manliness, and part witty poet whose intellectual dexterity is conflated with the manly bellicosity of his moral project. Asper the presenter, as described in the introductory Persons of the Play, is “one whom no servile hope of gain or frosty apprehension of danger can make to be a parasite, either to time, place, or opinion” (3–5). On the contrary, he deigns to “fawn on . . . applause” (58) and would never stoop “to flatter vice and daub iniquity”: But with an armed and resolved hand I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked, as at their birth— —and with a whip of steel, Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs. (15–18, 20–21)

A kind of Tamberlaine of moral force and resolute spirit in times of rank public vice, Asper compares his poetic infliction of wounds—“music worth your ears”(65)—to the weak, diseased efforts of the playwright with “servile imitating spirit,” who, (Plagued with an itching leprosy of wit) In a mere halting fury, strives to fling His ulcerous body in the Thespian spring, And straight leaps forth a poet! But as lame As Vulcan, or the founder of Cripplegate. (67–72)

Using a psychophysiological conceit of the sort so often found in discourses of manliness, Jonson presents the servile playwright’s wit as a leprosy contagion; the true poet’s body—with “armed and resolved hand”—is a manly one: neither servile, diseased, ulcerous, nor lame. But Asper’s manly posturing is so hilariously overstated one suspects it is part of the satire on playwrights and the theater that Jonson is engaged in. Behind the authorial Asper’s “armed and resolved hand,” ready to “strip the ragged follies of the time,” lies the greater authorial hand of Jonson, and the “follies” Jonson strips bare include the self-importance of

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the poet-playwright who constructs himself in such lofty terms. Jonson’s equal opportunity mockery can’t find a comfortably dignified position for his playwright. Similarly, in Bartholomew Fair, the sorry state of theatrical entertainment is lamented through a parody of the lowbrow tastes of audiences, for whom “the printed book” of the play must be reduced “to a more familiar strain” because it is “too learned” (97). It is a commentary on the “ragged follies of the time” that the theater (represented as a puppet show playing “Hero and Leander”) stoops to profanity, violence, and casting Cupid as a tapster who strikes Hero in love by giving her a pint of sherry in order to meet the trite preferences of the undiscerning audience. But perhaps more significant are the names of the author figure responsible for the theatrical spectacle. The puppet master is the aptly named fairground trader Leatherhead, yet he calls himself Lantern, pretentiously transforming himself from a hobby-horse seller—a lowlife purveyor of trivial wares—to a giver of light. Jonson’s self-parody of the stage-writer who takes himself too seriously comments wryly on the risibility of casting oneself as a poet when one writes for a commercial multitude. That the purveyors of the London theater are in the shameful business of creating entertainments for the common masses is J. Cocke’s point of focus in his 1615 tract A Common Player, in which he disparages players for submissive dependence, pointing out that, despite their nominal royal patronage, they are really servants of the people, dependent for their livelihood on the people’s pleasure. Actors are so desperate to please, according to Cocke, that instead of sticking to the scripted action while on stage, they play to the audience, gearing their antics toward the crowd; their concern to please extends offstage, where they take such pains to risk no offense that they submit only to the well-tried views of the multitudes, remaining passively unwilling to have their own opinions. he [does not] entitle good things Good, unlese he be heartned by the multitude: till then he saith faintly what hee thinkes, with a willing purpose to recant or persist: So howsoever he pretends to have a royall Master, or Mistresse, his wages and dependence prove him to be the servant of the people. When he doth hold conference upon the stage; and should look directly at his fellows face; hee turns about his voice into the assembly for applausesake, like a trumpeter in the fields, that shifts places to get an eccho.10

Cocke is explicit that players must please for their money; they are servants of the people, just as Defoe’s seller is servant to the customer. But in silencing their own voices and acquiescing passively to the voice of the people, players allow themselves to occupy the culturally defined position of the feminine—silent, obedient, unwillful—in relation to the most culturally scorned of masters—the common crowd, the many-headed multitude.

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But while Cocke insults actors for being interpolated into passivity and submissiveness by the money and the gaze of the public, doing everything for the sake of applause and its wages, Thomas Heywood mildly accepts the gaze and its power over subjectivity as the lot of actors, as constituent elements of the modest, controlled, and patient masculinity that should characterize men who have public roles. Heywood argues that the actor’s position within the public eye bestows an important responsibility: for, as we are men that stand in the broad eye of the world, so should our manners, gestures, and behaviours, savour of such governement and modesty, to deserve the good thoughts and reports of all men, and to abide the sharpest censures even of those that are the greatest opposites to the quality.11

Heywood sounds much like William Scott when Scott, in his Essay of Drapery, exhorts the “good Draper” to live “by discreete action”12 and “as if he were allwaies in publique.”13 Heywood’s admonition to actors that they must “abide the sharpest censures even of those that are the greatest opposites to the quality” also echoes Defoe’s advice to the tradesman to “bear with all sorts of impertinence” and “resent nothing,” advice embodied by Candido in The Honest Whore. Within Jonson’s plays, however, this is cast not as an acceptable construction of controlled masculinity but as a capitulation to market relations, and in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, a satiric attempt to restrict the power of the audience is launched. In the fictional author’s “Articles of Agreement” between himself and the spectators and hearers, read aloud by the Scrivener, it is acknowledged that audience members have bought the right with their admission fee to critique the play, but it is made clear that they may only critique it to the worth of their ticket price—“it shall be lawful for any man to judge his penn’orth, his twelve penn’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place” but “if he drop but sixpence at the door, and will censure a crown’s worth, it is thought there is no conscience or justice in that” (76–87). This author, it seems, is no passively acquiescing Candido; he will not sacrifice a whole bolt of cloth for a mere penny. As I discuss in chapter 4, shopkeepers and whores were sometimes compared in early modern English discourses, and an analogy is drawn between Candido and Bellafront, the “honest whore” of the play’s title. The passivity, pandering, and economic dependence on giving pleasure seen as characteristic of theater workers also leave playwrights and players open to charges that their activity carries the taint of prostitution. Minister and social commentator Henry Crosse admonishes the poet’s prostitution of his “ingenious labors” and deplores in particular his dependency on the acting companies that bought the scripts. His 1603 plea to playwrights to

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put their talents to more respectable use blatantly appeals to the sort of ego Jonson’s author figures have in abundance: it were to be wished, that those admired wittes of this age, Tragaedians, and Comaedians, that garnish Theaters with their inventions, would spend their wittes in more profitable studies, and leave off to maintain those Anticks, and Puppets, that speak out of their mouthes: for it is pittie such noble gifts, should be so basely imployed, as to prostitute their ingenious labors to inriche such buckerome gentlemen.14

Crosse praises their wit and “noble gifts,” but his critique renders untenable the sort of manly posturing that Asper engages in. Playwrights sell out their talents (and for a pittance) to actors who enjoy the fruits of their economic desperation. Robert Greene makes the same complaint in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. He has a player admit that he is a parasite of playwrights—“men of my profession get by schollers their whole living”15— and he entreats playwrights to employ their “rare wits” in “more profitable courses”—“let these Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inuentions. . . . [W]hilst you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms.”16 In these formulations the player is both pimp and john, the owner and director of “the pleasures” he gains from the scholar’s wit, and the recipient of economic benefit from the exchange. The playwright is demeaningly subject to the actor, and selling to the stage is a prostitution of his talent. But the player, as well, was in the business of pleasing for money, and he could also be subjected to a potentially demeaning sexualization as a result of his economic dependence on a paying public. The gaze of the public eye could well be a sexualized one, and although the spectators’ gaze could affirm the manly beauty of the male body in action, as I have discussed in chapter 3, it might also, more problematically, situate the male actor as a feminized consumable. Comments made by the citizen’s wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for instance, underscore a precarious slippage between consumable goods and provider of goods that was more commonly applied to women shopkeepers; in this play, the slippage threatens the masculinity of the “actor-shopkeepers,” who are suppliers of a product—plays—which, in part, their bodies make up. When the citizen’s wife disrupts the action of the play-within-a-play to comment loudly on the beauty of the actors, the actors, themselves, become sexualized objects of consumption under the female gaze: Sirrah, dids’t thou ever see a prettier child? How it behaves itself, I warrant ye, and speaks, and looks, and perts up the head? (1.94–96)

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And again, That same dwarf’s a pretty boy, but the squire’s a groutnell. (2.371)

It is, I think, significant that the actors in this instance are boys. If the players were full grown men, the representation of a wife’s sexual indiscretion might overshadow an attempt to cast the scene as one in which the actor is “consumed” by her gaze. Nevertheless, I would posit that the scene expresses an underlying anxiety over precisely what is not represented, an uneasiness that gazing by women at adult male bodies on the stage is sexually demeaning to the actors in question and, therefore, a threat to the manliness of those actors. This is figuratively rendered by positioning the actors as boys—infantilized, feminized males who have not yet become men. Positioning the actors as objects to be cooed over and petted by city women with insatiable desires to consume the pretty and pleasing things available in the commercial market of London gets at the anxious logic that female spectators could turn adult male actors into boy-toys by treating them in much the same way the citizen’s wife treats the boy actor. Given the unequal gender relations between men and women in early modern England, the idea that women might exploit male actors sexually, even just by looking, may seem far-fetched, and indeed, it would likely be seen as a conquest for the male actor within the competition of masculinities were he to attract the amorous attention of a more highly placed woman, as discussed in chapter 3. But social anxieties are not always realistically founded in the actualities of existing social relationships and on the contrary can emerge out of fear of unbalancing those relationships, no matter how firmly rooted they may be. Audience pleasure in the grace, strength, and beauty of the vigorous male body can, kaleidoscopically, look very different from a shifted perspective. Seen as a purchasable commodity, the actor’s manly body is dangerously vulnerable to becoming femininely ornamental. Actors and playwrights were neither shopkeepers nor craftsmen. But these types of work were close to their origins and closely aligned with their own. Concerns about compromised masculinity found within theatrical discourses, I would then conclude, might be seen as a result of the theater’s own anxiety about the manliness of its occupational activity in a changing work world. The theater as a commercial enterprise in what was emerging as a leisure-and-luxury-goods-demanding society was in a similar position to the shop and theater workers in a similar position to shopkeepers; that is, they were also in the contentious and difficult position of pleasing customers to make their living. Those emasculating traits of the tradesman that emerge from his dependency on the market— passivity, pandering, and the necessity of pleasing—show up as points of

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tension when the market relationships involved in theatrical production are the subject of discourse. Correlatively, the theater’s idealizations of the corporeal manliness of the manufacture-based craftsman, which I have given most attention to in this study, might have emerged from nostalgia for their own origins and a sense that a certain manly status had been lost in the move from one type of physical work to another: the move from a physical labor that created material objects to a physical labor that created the ephemera of plays.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Joan Pong Linton’s “Jack of Newberry and Drake in California: domestic and colonial narratives of English cloth and manhood,” in which she argues that “the stories of cloth are in fact stories of an ideal bourgeois manhood through the economics and politics of clothmaking” (62), is an exceptional instance in which Stevenson’s thesis about manual, craft workers is challenged. Linton, “Jack of Newberry,” The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In her chapter, she demonstrates how commercial activity and productive labor are conveyed as valuable in Thomas Deloney’s prose narrative of Jack of Newberry. Borrowing Stevenson’s term “bourgeois heroism,” she argues that it is “based not on noble birth or high office, but on commercial skill and the practice of a trade which enriches the individual tradesman as well as the commonwealth” (ibid., 63). 2. Bristol studies the theater as a forum wherein challenges to elite culture were voiced through the discourses of peasant ideology and popular festivity. Bristol’s focus is popular ritual as subversive of social and political hierarchy, and he posits the theater as a venue for the “continuation of popular festive activity.” Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Metheun, 1985), 5. Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage does not deal with popular ritual in any sustained way, but with constructions of the masculinity and social identity of working men. Patterson is interested in Shakespeare’s attitude toward “the ordinary working people inside and outside his play,” and traces his evolving perspectives through his career. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 2. Although I acknowledge some importance to authorial intention, I am less interested in Shakespeare’s intentions than I am concerned with studying discourses that make their way into early modern dramatic texts, intentionally or not; furthermore, I do not limit my study to Shakespeare’s plays, as Patterson does, but examine those of other playwrights also. As well, Patterson’s study is more broadly based on reconstructing the “messages” of the “popular voice” (ibid., 4), unlike my more specific focus on working men, which is less about political messages than it is about subjectivities formed around work. 3. Smith examines biological discourses, reading “early modern medical and ethical texts alongside Shakespeare’s scripts to explore what it was like in 1600 to inhabit a biologically male body” (Shakespeare and Masculinity, 5). He explores conduct books to see “what early modern writers thought masculinity ought to be, and to look for evidence of those ideals in Shakespeare’s plays and poems,” examines how Shakespeare represents the negotiation of the passages between “boyhood to adolescence to maturity to old age,” and considers “the various ‘Others’ against which masculinity in Shakespeare’s works is defined and maintained” (ibid.). 4. Historians have offered more study of the masculine codes of early modern working men than literary scholars. Elizabeth A. Foyster’s Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage acknowledges social differences among men of different social

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groups, but focuses on similarity in the constructions of manliness across the social spectrum, noting that the language differs, but many of the significant concepts essentially do not: the gentry and aristocracy concern themselves with “honour,” while the middling and lower strata defended their “credit,” “reputation,” and “good name” (8). However, she concentrates primarily on married men and how manliness was defined in relation to femininity, “how the desirable qualities and attributes for each gender were defined in relation to each other” (ibid., 1). This is a useful but limited approach, as, to quote Alexandra Shepard, “to discern the full complexity of the workings of gender in any society we need to be as aware of the gender differences within each sex as those between them. Gender means different things for different men and women, and different things during the different stages of the life course.” Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2. Shepard’s Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, like my book, moves away from “a concept of gender defined exclusively in terms of a male-female dichotomy” (ibid., 3) to consider “the multiplicity of masculinities” (ibid., 5). Shepard’s study of male identity examines “claims to patriarchal authority,” “forms of resistance to its dictates,” and “fragmented evidence of alternative codes of manhood that were not primarily defined in relation to patriarchal principles but were instead shaped by expedience and social context” (ibid., 11). But while her examples include many middling-sort working men, her study is not specifically focused on working men and their masculine assertions, embodiments, and place-holdings within patriarchy; nor is it a study of dramatic texts and the theater. Hers is a more traditional historical methodology, using as its source material advice literature and court records “ranging in scope from the regulatory activities of the London livery companies, quarter sessions, and borough courts, to the disputes brought before the ecclesiastical courts, the university courts and the Court of Exchequer” (ibid., 12). 5. N. B.’s A Discourse of Trade (1690) and Thomas Powell’s Tom of All Trades (1631) both use the term “trade” broadly, but N. H.’s The Compleat Tradesman, or the Exact Dealers Daily Companion (London, 1684) is targeted exclusively toward those involved in any type of sales. William Scott’s An Essay of Drapery: Or, The Compleate Citizen (London, 1635) uses the term “trade” to refer to the act of selling. 6. George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (1904, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963), 7–8; Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London [1300–1500] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948, Ann Arbor Paperback edition, 1962), 3. 7. Thrupp, Merchant Class, 4. 8. There is a broad literature of debate on when and where the transition took place; see R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) and Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9. In Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904; repr., London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963), George Unwin details differences in interest within as well as across guilds and companies. Within these organizations, there took place “a growth of social hierarchy” (42), and “a separation into two distinct classes, arising from a differentiation of function” (41) between industrial and mercantile activities. Unwin characterizes conflict within industrial organizations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as primarily “between the small master and the merchant employer” (ibid., 126), but while he argues for the existence of these categorical conflicts, he also notes that “between the smallest master and the largest capitalist engaged in industry there must have been many intermediate degrees in which the functions of merchant and manufacturer were blended in varying proportions” (ibid., 114); his analysis thus precludes a Marxist taxonomy of economic groups. Furthermore, even among the artisans engaged

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in manufacture and processing, there were differences in interest. S. R. Smith and Mark Burnett both write of conflicts between small masters and the servants and apprentices they employed in their households. See also Steven Rappaport’s chapters 2 and 7 on the hierarchical structure of the city and guild. He divides companies into “as many as five status groups” or “estates”: “assistants, liverymen, householders, journeymen, and perhaps apprentices.” Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: The Structure of Life in SixteenthCentury London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 217. 10. See Wrightson’s description of three systems of manufacture. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 38–41. Within what Wrightson calls the “handicrafts system” (citing Unwin for the term) and the “domestic system,” the master craftsman purchased his own raw materials, although within the domestic system, he depended upon a merchant for sale of the final product. Within the “putting out system,” manufacturers working in their homes were given raw materials by “merchant capitalists” and had no access to markets (ibid., 40). Wrightson’s description of three systems of manufacture suggests that working people generally used their own tools, even the poorest working people of the putting out system; The Shoemaker’s Holiday shows the journeymen who live and work in Simon’s shop with their own tools. Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). See also Hans Medick on the putting out system. 11. Unwin delineates the gradual separation of the trading and manufacturing functions but also makes it clear that “the mere trader and the mere craftsman were still the exception rather than the rule” (Industrial Organization, 104). Masters who had become merchants often still kept journeymen and apprentices, and small working masters who increasingly depended on merchants to distribute their goods to a wide market continued to exercise their right to occasional trade (ibid., 103). 12. On the multiple occupations of rural craftsmen and tradesmen, see Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1908), 6, and Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 35. 13. See Richard Tawney, “Foreword,” The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 2; and Richard Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1947), 199. 14. Interpretations of St. Paul stressing the importance of labor for all members of the commonwealth are markedly different from early medieval religious ones: for Thomas Aquinas, as Weber writes, “labor is only necessary naturali ratione for the maintenance of individual and community. Where this end is achieved, the precept ceases to have meaning. Moreover, it holds only for the race, not for every individual. It does not apply to anyone who can live without labor on his possessions, and of course contemplation, as a spiritual form of action in the kingdom of God, takes precedence over the commandment in the literal sense.” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 159. 15. Furthermore, full-time wage laborers had few political rights and in the eyes of many were “unfree,” although they were not legal bondsmen. Christopher Hill, “Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage-Labor,” Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 223. By the 1563 Statute of Artificers, Sections IV and VI, full-time wage earners without agricultural holdings were forbidden to leave their employment, under penalty of imprisonment, “unles it be for some reasonable and sufficient cause or matter to be allowed before two Justices of Peace, or one at the least, within the saide Countie or before the mayor or other chief officer of the citie Burrough or towne corporate.” Richard Tawney and Eileen Power, Tudor Economic Documents (New York: Barnes and Nobles, 1961), 340, 341. The

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“unfreedom” of these wage-earners is articulated explicitly by Puritan commentator William Gouge, who claims that wage-workers, whom he calls servants, “are not their owne” while under contract and admonishes them that “both their persons and their actions are all their masters.” Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises (London, 1622), 604. Consequently, servants “ought to forbeare doing of things on their owne heads without or against consent of their masters,” including marrying within the duration of their contract (ibid., 604–5). Gouge goes so far as to claim, on the authority of the customs and statutes of the land, that masters can give away or sell their servants to another and bequeath them on their deathbeds “to whom they will, even as their goods and possessions” (ibid., 664). Sir Thomas Smith wrote that those who “be hired for wages . . . be called servants” (Hill, “Pottage,” 224) and did not consider them members of the Commonwealth: the commonwealth “consisteth only of freemen” (22). James Harrington, a republican, “not only denied citizenship to servants but regarded them as a class outside the Commonwealth” (Hill, “Pottage,” 223). 16. See Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joan Thirsk, “Tudor Enclosures,” The Tudors (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Metheun, 1985); William C. Carroll, “‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1912); Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority. 17. On preferences for low wages in seventeenth-century economic theory, see D. C. Coleman, Labor in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century, The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 8, (1955–56): 280–281. See also Wrightson, English Society, 141. 18. Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 21–22; George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963), 9–12. 19. As Christopher Hill has pointed out, “so long as there are few consumer goods within the purchasing power of the mass of the population, there is little incentive to earn more than the subsistence minimum wage.” Hill, “The Industrious Sort of People,” Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 124–25. See also D.C. Coleman, “Labour in the Seventeenth Century:” “[Voluntary under-employment] is a normal part of the backward economy in which the volume and variety of cheap consumer goods is small, in which economic horizons are strictly limited on the demand side and on the supply side. It is a reflection of the tight circle of physical and economic circumstances which contrive to keep the poor quite apart from the interventions of policy, at once by reacting on production as well as on consumption” (291). 20. See A. L. Beier, Masterless Men, and Roger Manning, Village Revolts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 21. Beier cites several contemporary views: “By suppressing [vagabonds], Vives suggested, ‘fewer thefts, acts of violence, robberies, murders, capital offences will be committed’; even pandering and sorcery would disappear. Richard Morison wrote similarly in 1536 that those ‘continuing in idleness, fall to stealing, robbing, murder, and many other mischiefs.’ Finally, vagrants threatened government and social order. ‘They sow sedition among the people,’ warned Morison. Henry Smith preached in 1593 that they

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were of the opinion of the Anabaptists that every man’s goods must be common.” Beier, Masterless Men, 6. 22. I follow David Kathman’s practice in capitalizing occupation names when referring to company affiliation but using the lower case for occupation titles of tradesmen who practiced a particular trade but whose actual company affiliation is uncertain. 23. Furthermore, the connections between the theater world and that of craft labor extend beyond the formative experiences of individuals who moved between one type of work to the other. Scholars have pointed to parallels between the structures and conditions of the players’ labor and those of craft workers; the theater and the company operated in a number of parallel ways. Roslyn Knutson suggests that the guild model of cooperation (even between “rival” playing companies) was relied upon among players to maintain stability, offering evidence of long-held personal and professional guild practices that were common among theater workers, who, she argues, probably accepted them as the norm because of their craft guild backgrounds. There was an emphasis on conflict resolutions to prevent personal quarrels from disrupting business, she argues, and friendships and familial ties (unions through marriage and god-parentage executions of wills etc.) created networks of stability within the theater community just as they did among member families of particular guilds (Roslyn Knutson, Playing Company and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 21–47). Knutson also notes that the theaters, like other early modern London occupations, engaged in “cluster marketing”; that is, they set up business in districts with other like ventures in order to encourage greater commerce and benefit from customer overflows. Paul Yachnin also points out a number of ways the work of those he calls “theatrical artisans” (311) maintained the marks of craft labor, arguing that the creators of the theater were more like artificers than merchants buying and selling goods, despite the many contemporary references to the theater as a market. Yachnin, “‘The Perfection of Ten’: Populuxe Art and Artisanal Value in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2005): 306–27. “Theatrical artisans” relied on their skilled labor to make a living, labor which they themselves controlled, they owned their own tools, and even their place of business (ibid., 311), and like a team in a workshop, they “performed their tasks skilfully in concert with each other” (ibid., 309). Even “the custom of charging the companies to have their play scripts inspected by the Master of the Revels or his deputy was consonant with guild practice generally, where producers were charged a fee to have their goods and premises inspected by company searchers” (ibid., 312). 24. See also James Shapiro and Herbert Berry for their narrative accounts of this incident. 25. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis: 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Renaissance playwrights corroborate these various accounts with their own comments on the common quality of their audiences: mentions of the “sixe-penny Mechanicks” in the corners of the Blackfriar’s (Jonson, cited in ibid., 303), plays which “fill a house with Fishwiues” (Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker cited in ibid., 300), and occasions when “either servingmen or Apprentises are most in number,” to give a few examples. And as Butler argues, the complaints of preachers and civic authorities that the theaters “draw apprentices and other servants from their ordinary workes” and stir up disorder among “young people of all degrees” (ibid., 301) cannot be explained away as pure embellishment for the fulfilment of an agenda; their consistency over a period of several decades demands that we accept a certain amount of truth value in them, even if the rhetoric is exaggerated. Playhouse admission was cheap, about the cost of a loaf of bread (Ann Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 232), so even those with little disposable income might be inclined to spend it on an afternoon’s amusement viewing a play. 26. See Christina M. Fitzgerald, Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. She argues that the York and Chester

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cycles form a “drama of masculinity,” a distinct subgenre of dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, merchantile worlds of their performance” (1). 27. Jean MacIntyre and Garrett P.J. Epp, “‘Cloathes worth all the rest’: Costumes and Properties,” A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 270. 28. The Chester Mystery Cycle, BBC Play of the Month, 18 April 1976 (season 11; episode 7). See http://imdb.com/title/tt0074307. 29. David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992). In his introduction to Play 16 of The Chester Mystery Cycle, Mills discusses in detail the mechanics and the dangers of these operations, which he notes “are part of the play’s interest” (270). Another example of work performed on stage is found in “The Shepherds” play of the Chester cycle. Performed by the printers, the play suggests no immediately apparent connection between the action of the episode and the work of printing, but the knowledge, skills, and burdens of work are still a focus. The play opens with forty lines spoken by the first shepherd describing his wearying toils, the diseases his sheep contract, his ability to heal them, and the herbs and other ingredients he uses to do so; shortly after this the focus shifts to the third shepherd, who is displayed on stage boiling an ointment for his sheep. He describes what he does, as he, his words suggest, demonstrates for the crowd: Hemlock and hayrife—take keep— with tarboist must been all tamed, pennygrass and butter for fat sheep; for this salve am I not ashamed. Ashamed am I not to show no point that longeth to my craft; no better—that I well know— in land is nowhere laft. (VII.81–84) 30. Higgins suggests that there may have been a certain pride in playing both a pivotal role in the key events of history and in the play itself—in terms of theatrical value, the passion is the climactic moment of the performance; it offers the biggest spectacle and probably drew the most spectators. Higgins, “Work and Plays,” 91. 31. Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 6; Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 1968 (New York: Metheun, 1980), 1. 32. For full discussions of relational differences between the various genres or subgenres of plays that take London and London life as a central topic and prominently feature the middling sort of England, see Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 1968. (repr., New York: Metheun, 1980); Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603– 1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alexander Legatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); and Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). George a Greene, Pinner of Wakefield does not use London as its setting, but in all other characteristics fits within the genre of chronicle comedy.

CHAPTER 1 1. In this I agree with David Kastan, who argues that “the action of the play itself— and not merely the Shrove Tuesday feast that ends it—is the holiday.” Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599),” Staging the Renaissance (New

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York: Routledge, 1991), 158. From this perspective, as Kastan notes, arguments over the ambiguity of the title—is it The Shoemaker’s Holiday, referring to the holiday declared by Simon Eyre, or The Shoemakers’ Holiday, referring to the holiday for all the apprentices of London?—“miss the central point” (ibid.). However, since Simon Eyre benefits most from the fantasy idealizations of the play, I have chosen to use the singular possessive, The Shoemaker’s Holiday. 2. George A Greene is believed to have been first performed in 1593–94, but the earliest extant quarto is from 1599. Its Stationers Register entry is 1595. 3. Bakhtin elides this gender split, despite its obvious presence in Rabelais’s work and despite its importance in Renaissance cultural politics of the body. 4. I am thinking particularly of Michael Bristol’s Carnival and Theatre. Drawing on Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque and its focus on lower bodily functions, Bristol argues for a strong and pervasive culture of a clearly discernible “inferior sort,” a “plebian culture” which functioned to oppose, deflate, and level the excesses, pretensions, and hierarchies of high, official culture. 5. See Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, and Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) for complex discussions that study, among other things, how manners and outward bodily propriety were increasingly important accompaniments or signifiers of social status. See also Jean Howard’s analysis in The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994) of Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomy of Abuses, wherein Stubbes’s moral outrage over the flouting of sumptuary laws thinly veils his “fears about the ‘counterfeitability’ of social identity in a world in which the visible marks of status can be bought, sold, borrowed, or stolen” (32). 6. George Unwin explicates a gradual separation of tasks within the sixteenth-century guild, such that “as the master craftsman found more scope for his activity as a foreman, an employer, a merchant, and a shopkeeper, he left the manual labor entirely to his journeymen and apprentices” (Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904 [London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963], 11). Unwin notes that, by 1559, “the upper ranks of the company which had been formerly filled with well-to-do master craftsmen who were also traders, were now monopolized by the commission agents and merchant employers who had little or no practical knowledge of the industry” (114). A master householder who did work alongside his journeymen and apprentices was most likely a small master and a member of the Yeomanry Association rather than the Livery (11) and, thus, not in a high enough position within the guild structure of government to be elected into any important city governmental position, let alone that of the Mayor. See Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, chapters 2 and 7, for discussions of the hierarchical structures of the city and the guild. 7. “In early modern England, men dressed up, and often more elaborately than women; but increasingly when they did, they were feminized, even demonized as effeminate.” Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 120. 8. Firk: “And hark you, skomaker, have you all your tools—a good rubbing pin, a good stopper, a good dresser, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls of wax, your paring knife, your hand- and thumb-leathers, and good Saint Hugh’s bones to smooth up your work?” (4. 78–82). 9. Robert Weimann argues that, in the sixteenth century, in matters of “dramatic taste there was as yet no clear division between the rural plebs and the London middle classes. This meant that there was little difference between the middle classes and the plebian reception of the Morris dance, the jig, clowning, and the like.” Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

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Press, 1978), 185. However, Weimann does note a decline in interest in jigging clowns and fools in Elizabethan drama, as a result of widespread aristocratic influence in contemporary taste (ibid., 191). Richard Helgerson provides convincing evidence of emerging divisions in and conflict over control of the theatrical culture of the 1590s. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Helgerson, morris dancing, jigs, and other aspects of “spectacle centered” theater were scorned by playwrights and audiences who sought to remake the sociopolitical identity of the theater in a higher vein. In my observation, the morris dance is a site of contestation, a cultural form whose meaning is manipulated in countless plays and documents for ideological purposes. 10. As David Kastan has noted, this is one of three occasions in the play where “money is offered in exchange for the betrayal of loyalties” (“Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599),” Staging the Renaissance [New York: Routledge, 1991], 156); the other two are when Oatley attempts to keep Lacey away from his daughter by giving him twenty pounds and when Oatley tries to bribe Firk into betraying Lacey’s whereabouts. As Kastan points out, the play reveals “an ambivalent fascination with money and property” (156). Whereas the play stages anxieties about “the temptations of materialism” (156) and the challenges to emotionally authentic relationships that such temptations offer, in all the instances where attempts are made to buy emotions or loyalty, the characters not only maintain their loyalty and emotional integrity but also are allowed by the play to keep the money as well. 11. Simon Eyre was mayor of London in 1445 during the reign of Henry VI, and although the war referred to in the play is the historic war with France, the portrayal of war would have resonated with contemporary concerns for the London audience. From the middle of 1598, men were being conscripted into service to support the Earl of Essex’s expedition to Ireland, and by July 1599, English casualties were being reported in London. David Novarr, “Dekker’s Gentle Craft and the Lord Mayor of London,” Modern Philology 57 (1960): 233. Earlier in the decade, in 1591–92, Essex had led an English expedition in France in support of Henri IV against the Catholic League, and in 1599 England was still at war with Spain and had been since 1585. Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990), 16–21. Dekker believed strongly in Protestant solidarity and, according to Julia Gasper’s study, “was a life-long supporter of what could be called the war-party” (ibid., 10). But while he supported the Protestant military cause, he was also very sympathetic toward the plight of the common soldier, and his combined sympathy and support informs his representation of war in the play, where war is a source of both hardship and honor for those who fight. 12. See Phyllis Rackin, “Foreign Country: The Place of Women and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Historical World,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), along with Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account Of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997), on the danger of heterosexual passion to patrilineal genealogy and the consequent marginalization and vilification of women in history plays: “[T]he invisible, putative connection between fathers and sons that formed the basis of patriarchal authority was . . . always dubious, always vulnerable to subversion by an adulterous wife. In the case of a king . . . it was a threat to royal succession and therefore the worst possible crime against the state” (Rackin, Foreign Country, 79). 13. See Phyllis Rackin, “Sexual Difference/Historical Difference,” Privileging Gender in Early Modern England (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993). She argues that in Renaissance England lust was “a mark of weakness and degradation” (47), and heterosexual contact and male desire for women was seen not as “a mark of masculinity” (39) but “is repeatedly associated in Shakespeare’s plays with effeminacy” (39). The

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Shoemaker’s Holiday seems to challenge this ideology with one of male power based on the male body. 14. A. L. Beier documents that soldiers and sailors made up a large proportion of the vagrant population of London, increasing from about 1.5 percent of all vagrants to 12 percent from 1560 to 1640. According to Beier, veterans were a particularly worrisome element of the vagrant population because of their knowledge of weapons and because they were difficult to reintegrate into civilian life. In 1593 legislation was enacted stipulating that pensions be paid to disabled veterans, and, in 1597, another act was passed which “ordered justices to find work for veterans, again with public taxation”; however, there is no clear evidence until 1601 that pensions were paid. Beier, Masterless Men, 93–95. 15. See Kastan’s “Workshop and/as Playhouse.” Looking to Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), Kastan suggests that Dekker idealizes a guild structure that he laments the passing of, a structure “that once served to unite craftsmen in a fraternity devoted to the welfare and security of its membership” but by the late sixteenth century had become “increasingly hierarchical and entrepreneurial, converting work from a system of solidarity to a system of exchange,” a structure “no longer communal in association but of commercial advantage” (153). Dekker’s idealization is particularly far from the realities of late sixteenth-century London in his portrayal of the supportiveness of Eyre’s journeymen for the foreign shoemaker; as Kastan details, there was great antagonism toward foreign workers on the part of English craftsmen who resented and feared their intrusion on employment opportunities. 16. See S. R. Smith for citations of specific instances of conflict. See also A. L. Beier, who argues that the abundance of conduct literature advising masters and servants of their reciprocal duties and the specificity of statutory regulations codifying the duties, are evidence of frequent breakdowns in master-servant relations. 17. Wrightson suggests that a wage-laboring proletariat had already emerged by the late sixteenth century. Arguing that poverty had previously been “limited in extent and generally the result of particular misfortune—the death of a spouse or parent, sickness or injury—or else a phase in the life cycle, notably youth or old age,” he contends that “by the end of the sixteenth century and still more by the mid-seventeenth century, the poor were no longer the destitute victims of misfortune or old age, but a substantial proportion of the population living in constant danger of destitution, many of them full-time wage laborers. In both town and country a permanent proletariat had emerged, collectively designated ‘the poor.’” Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 141. See Unwin, Industrial Organization, 9–12, for the growth of a class of permanent journeymen in the late middle ages and the subsequent growth of a class of small masters who, as householders, had a certain degree of autonomy but who, as the domestic or commission system developed, became essentially employees of the mercantile elite, no longer employing workers themselves and losing access to markets and raw materials. Wrightson describes this process as well, in his description of the three systems of industrial organization, although he makes more of a distinction between the domestic system and the commission system (or the “putting out” system, as he and other historians such as Hans Medick refer to it). Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 38–40. 18. Roger B. Manning cites 35 outbreaks of disorder in London between 1581 and 1602 (Village Revolts, 187). E. P. Cheyney characterizes the 1590s as a period of crisis, plague, harvest failure, massive price inflation, heavy taxation, depression in overseas trade, and, in the volume of domestic demand, large-scale unemployment, and escalating crime and vagrancy (Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 9). Even Steven Rappaport, who argues for the essential stability of London in the sixteenth century, agrees that the final decade was a tumultuous one (Worlds Within Worlds, 11–17).

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19. See A. L. Beier, Masterless Men; Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority; and Roger Manning, Village Revolts. 20. “The Apprentices of London are so considerable a Body, that they have sometimes made themselves formidable by Insurrection and Mutinies in the City, getting some Thousands of them together, and pulling down Houses, breaking open the Gates of Newgate, and other Prisons, and setting the Prisoners free. And this upon Occasion sometimes of Foreigners, who have followed their Trades in the City, to the supposed Damage of the Native Freemen, or when some of their Brotherhood have been unjustly, as they have pretended, cast into Prison and punished. But they have been commonly assisted, and often egged on and headed by Apprentices of the Dregs of the Vulgar, Fellows void of worthy Blood, and worthy Breeding; yea, perhaps not apprentices at all, but forlorn Companions, masterless Men, and Tradeless, and the like” (332–33). As John Stow acknowledges (Stow’s Survey of London [London: Dent, 1965]), it is not clear that rioting crowds were composed exclusively of men from the trades; in fact, it is likely that there were many unskilled, indigent laborers and vagrants, as well as rogues and thieves. That they were commonly named as apprentices was perhaps a recognition of the dangerous resentment changes in the work world were provoking. 21. Class hierarchies are also displaced when Simon tells the King that he will set “his Majesty’s image cheek by jowl by Saint Hugh” (21.7–8) for the honor he has done him— the King is honored equally, but not more so than the patron saint of shoemaking. This leveling of the King is comic but not ridiculing; the King is respected in the play but not elevated above the worthy shoemakers. 22. Wage-paying employers bought time and, thus, sought to control how it was spent; Unwin cites historic examples from England and France of disputes between masters and journeymen over work hours (Industrial Organization, 49). At the same time, increases in the length of the work week were becoming increasingly necessary for the economic survival of the lesser privileged members of the working population, as the protective guild structure broke down and was replaced by short wage contracts and the domestic putting out system and as competition increased. Christopher Hill discusses structures and ideologies of work time in “The Uses of Sabbatarianism,” Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 145–153. For further discussions of the shift from medieval to modern structures of work time and of the accompanying ideologies of work, see Keith Thomas, “Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Societies,” Past and Present 29 (1964), 50–62, as well as E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991). 23. See David Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse” for his development of this argument. 24. Paul Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 92. The Cordwainer’s Company was neither prestigious nor wealthy. See Seaver for a detailed discussion of their relative standing in early modern London. As Seaver writes, London society was “dominated by a mercantile elite, and its lord mayors all belonged to the liveries of one of the twelve great livery companies—Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Haberdashers, Ironmongers, Salters, Fishmongers and Vintners. Simon Eyre, the historic figure, had begun his career as a freeman of the Upholsterer’s Company but had secured his translation to the more prestigious Drapers some fifteen years before his election as sheriff. . . . A handful of spectacularly successful members of minor companies were elected aldermen in Elizabeth’s reign, but all of these slated for election to the mayoralty were translated beforehand to one of the more prestigious twelve, typically the Grocers or Drapers” (ibid.). 25. See David Halperin for a discussion of sex as “an action performed by a social superior upon a social inferior” (“Is There a History of Sexuality?” The Lesbian and Gay

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Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1993, 418). Halperin’s article deals with ancient Athens, but early modern scholars of Renaissance sexuality largely agree that it can be applied to aspects of Renaissance sexual relations, particularly male-male same-sex relations. See Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (1990), 1–19. See Mario DiGangi’s chapter on “The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy” in The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26. Gender conflicts in the medieval Corpus Christi guild plays also seem intent on defining work as a male bastion, even while they affirm the evidence of the historical record in representing women engaged in work. Chester’s “Noah’s Flood” (as it appears in The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling [East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992]) has the denigration of women’s contribution to the household come from a woman’s mouth, with Noah’s wife commenting that she and the other wives will carry the timber for the ark because they are too weak to do any “great”—admirable or major—work: And we shall bring timber to, for we mon nothing else do. Women been weak to undergo Any great travail (65–68). Ironically, her speech is followed by three more speeches by the wives of Shem, Ham, and Japhet (her sons), each of whom states and, quite likely, acts out the contribution she makes to the project at hand: finding a chopping block for hammering; gathering mud and sealing the ark’s boards with clay and pitch; and making a fire and preparing dinner for all (69–80). It seems there is plenty of useful, important work, after all, for the women to do, and all of these tasks could have been performed on the outdoor platea for the audience to view. 27. For a discussion of representations of the female grotesque body as an incontinent body, see Paster’s chapter “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy” in The Body Embarrassed. 28. Significantly, the means by which Jane is found and then rescued is through recognition of the shoes that Ralph and his fellow shoemakers make for her before Ralph goes off to war, shoes that are “pinked with letters” of her name. Douglas Bruster astutely notes that making the shoes is a collective male effort that reinforces male solidarity and, at the same time, gives this male collective of shoemakers the agency to construct female identity: “the very act of production here bind[s] the men of the ‘gentle craft’ together through the individuality of their separate but independent tasks of labour. Hodge cuts the form from the leather, Firk stitches them together, and Ralph seams them. Like the blazons of Petrarchan sonneteers, the male construction of female identity here depends on violent building of the woman. This production, in turn, constructs a collective male identity.” Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 77–78. Jane is sexually marked by the shoemakers (“Ralph’s perforation of the leather with the marks of Jane’s identity is a sexually symbolic action,” ibid., 78), who are then able to recognize and claim her as their own. Notably, none of the women in the shop are involved in the production of Jane’s shoes. 29. This is particularly significant, as the low status of wage labor was one of the ideological obstacles to capitalism. See Christopher Hill, “Pottage” and “The Poor and Wage Labour,” Liberty Against the Law (London: Penguin Books, 1996).

CHAPTER 2 1. Wilson sums up Cade’s violence by calling his story “one long orgy of clownish arson and homicide” and (citing Brockbank) “the archetype of disorder.” Richard Wilson,

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“‘A Mingled Yarn’: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers,” Literature and History 12, no. 2 (1986), 167. In Wilson’s view and in the view of many of the critics he cites and takes issue with politically (Brockbank, Reese, Bradley), Cade is written as brutal in order to discredit the rebels and the social messages they carry. I read Cade’s brutality somewhat differently, agreeing with Howard that the social critique—a critique with a long history—is not simply cancelled out by Cade’s viciousness; what cannot be ignored is just how often, “the play dramatizes . . . instances of class-based antagonisms rooted in the unequal distribution of wealth and cultural capital” (Jean Howard, “Introduction,” The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, in The Norton Shakespeare [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997], 210). But more to the point of my argument in this essay is that Cade’s ruthless brutality does not fully detract from and, as a reflection of his warrior ability, may even contribute to his aesthetic appeal as a character on stage, whatever moral position the play ultimately or explicitly reflects. 2. The failures of the king’s masculinity are connected to his failures as a monarch. As Howard and Rackin write, “[Henry] can neither fight with a sword; tilt with a lance; nor effectively wield the staff of office once held by Gloucester. His excessive love for Margaret makes him act unwisely in regard to her dowry and the territories demanded by her father; and his response to the turmoil in his land is to pray and weep. Only once does Henry act decisively, and even then he does so at the behest of Salisbury, Warwick, and the enraged commons” (Engendering a Nation, 71). Henry’s one manly action is to banish Suffolk; otherwise, he is effeminized by his devotion to a woman, his lack of self-control, his abhorrence of battle, and his failure to act decisively. 3. Many critics—Rackin, Helgerson, Greenblatt—see the comic aspects of the rebels’ representation as entirely working to discredit the rebels and defuse their power. Rackin, for example, writes that Cade is presented as a stereotypical “comic villain” in order “to defuse the anxieties of privileged property owners” (217); in her view, comedy “marks the commoners and taints their subversive power” (217). Phyllis Rackin. Stages of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Knowles takes a slightly different perspective, arguing for the existence of subversive laughter that is sustained “through the dialogism between comedian and character, art and history.” Ronald Knowles, “Introduction,” in The Second Part of King Henry VI, by William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999), 103. Nevertheless, he, too agrees that propagandist history is forwarded by demeaning Cade through ridicule, arguing that while the comedian actor triumphs by revealing folly and sustaining audience laughter, he must “surrender the character to ridicule” “because he has a contract with the playwright to fulfill the role” (ibid., 103). These critics do not consider the degree to which the rebels can evoke laughter and still evoke fear. Nor do they note how the rebels themselves control a great deal of the humor, including that which “ridicules” them. Closer to my position on how the audience may have responded to the rebels is Michael Hattaway’s “double perspective”; the actions of the rebels may have been seen “with a degree of horror but also with a degree of glee as the privileged get their come uppance.” Michael Hattaway, “Introduction,” in The Second Part of King Henry VI, by William Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31. His use of the word “glee” is apt; gleeful responses from the audience may have resulted not merely from a sense of justice but from the infectious glee with which the merry rebels dispensed that rough justice. 4. Patterson never strays from linking peasant ideology and popular festivity to the Bakhtinian model, where there is no place for the body that forcibly seizes power. Cade, then, becomes the representation of “potential corruption” and “internal confusions” within a narrowly defined discourse of peasant ideology. Bristol’s discussion of Cade primarily involves his linking of the imagery of abundant food and drink pervading the

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rebels’ desires to the Roman Saturnalia, a winter festival that, among other things, celebrated agricultural abundance (Carnival and Theater, 88). He argues convincingly that their focus on food and drink is both sympathetic and a political indictment; he does not, however, address the other ways underprivileged workers enter discourse in this play: through their danger, their physical power, and their self-conscious black humor. Helgerson points to the ways Cade is associated with carnival and argues that the association of rebellion with carnival works to discredit rebellion (Forms of Nationhood, 220). Like Bristol, Helgerson focuses on Cade’s call for a carnivalesque reign of plenty, but in his view, the rebels’ preoccupation with food marks them as inherently risible (ibid.). Stephen Greenblatt takes a similar view, arguing that the focus on food marks the rebels as “buffoons”: their desires are invoked to show the “comic humbleness” of the rebels’ social origins and of their “great expectations”; such lowly concerns mark the “ludicrousness” of their revolt (“Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1, no. 1 (1983), 23). Greenblatt and Helgerson fail to acknowledge the discursive intersection of carnival with food shortages, which opens up other ways of reading the rebels. I question their assumption that hunger would have been comic to audiences during a time of serious food shortages, when some may well have been acquainted with the sight of starving or undernourished people. Additionally, both see the humor in the play as entirely working against the rebels and never for them. 5. A 1609 ballad dedicated to “the taborer of Herefordshire” for his “warlike musicke” associates morris dancers with soldiers and demonstrates not only its continued link to war in the popular imagination but also its festive nature. 6. Thomas Deloney, Jacke of Newberie. Shorter Novels Volume One: Elizabethan and Jacobean (London & Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1929), 28. 7. Other ballads with similar themes are listed by Charles W. Camp in The Artisan in Elizabethan Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), 18–19. 8. Patricia Cahill’s research in her 2000 Columbia University PhD dissertation, Tales of Iron War: Martial Bodies and Manly Encounters in Elizabethan Culture (Columbia University, 2000), appears in altered form in her 2009 book, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 9. State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth 12/93/18. Cited in Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1967), 110. 10. MacCaffrey, 47, argues that in actual practice the majority of soldiers were poor and unhealthy, conscripted from the very margins of society; Falstaff’s band in Henry IV would seem to bear this out. Nevertheless, as Cahill’s research shows, “the image of the strappingly vigorous common man was a staple of the period’s military treatises” (Tales, 86). 11. Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500–1640,” Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750, edited by Joan Thirsk, chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1750, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 84, 125. See also Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 1, 55: “It is a great decay to artyllary: for that do we reken that shepeherdes be but yll archers.” 12. See Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 107–13, for evidence of state attempts to create standing armies—county militias or “trained bands”—from the most well-to-do of middling sort farmers and artisans, who, it was believed, were not only physically suited to the demands of soldiering but also loyal subjects of the realm. Boynton suggests that “the governments feared to arm and train the lower orders” (ibid., 109) because, among other reasons, they were less invested in social stability and, hence, untrustworthy. State papers reveal, however, that governments were not always successful in recruiting socially stable householders and farmers: “Lord North found the Cambridgeshire bands on the eve of the Armada mostly composed of poor labourers and artisans ‘sutch as I darr not nor will not prepare for hir Majestie’s garde.’” (ibid.).

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13. Beier writes that “no occupational group increased as much as sailors and soldiers among vagrants from 1560 to 1640” (Masterless Men, 93). On the fear of vagabonds and the seriousness with which the crime of vagrancy was taken in early modern England, see Beier’s Masterless Men generally. 14. See Hattaway, “Introduction to 2 Henry VI,” 31. Cf. note 3. 15. See Cartelli’s argument that “Cade and his cohorts repeatedly revile the practices of reading, writing, and printing, and the collateral institution of grammar schools and printing mills, less out of ignorance than out of an assured belief in the role they play in dividing society into haves and have-nots.” Thomas Cartelli, “Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 59. Cartelli challenges Wilson on this point, who characterizes Cade’s destruction of documents as “an infantile hatred of literacy and the law” (Wilson, Mingled Yarn, 167) and suggests that Shakespeare himself felt scorn and revulsion toward the illiterate. Steven Justice’s careful historical work on the nature and widespread practice of document destruction by rebels during the peasant rebellions of the fourteenth century supports Cartelli’s and my own position. The destruction of documents was, according to Justice, “the kernel of intention that drove the violence, violence that could spill over into the destruction of persons or property, but did not always.” Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 41. Furthermore, peasant rebels who burned documents did so with an acute political intelligence; they distinguished and targeted the artifacts of written culture that were the instruments of laws. Justice writes that rebels burned documents “with a specificity that shows their familiarity with the forms of literate culture. The insurgent animus against the archive was not the revenge of a residually oral culture against the appurtenances of a literacy that was threatening because alien and mysterious. Both chroniclers and indictments bespeak a precise targeting of legal instruments” (ibid.). 16. Peter Thumpe’s pleas fall on the indifferent ears of official authority. PETER: Alas! My lord, I cannot fight, for God’s sake pity my case! The spite of man prevaileth against me. O Lord, have mercy upon me! I shall never be able to fight a blow. O Lord, my heart! GLOUCESTER: Sirrah, or you must fight or else be hang’d. (1.3.213–17). Craig Bernthal writes that “the dilemma faced by Peter—whether to fight or be hanged—is historically real. Those who were doomed to participate in a judicial duel but refused to fight were hanged, as were the defeated who clung to life long enough to be dragged to the gallows erected beside the field of combat.” Craig Bernthal, “Treason in the Family: The Trial of Thumpe v. Horner,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 49. See Bernthal for a broad discussion of the role trial by battle played within the state judicial apparatus of the Middle Ages. 17. “The confessor whispered in the patient’s ear and, after he had given him the blessing, the executioner, who had an iron bludgeon of the kind used in slaughter houses, delivered a blow with all his might on the temple of the wretch, who fell dead: the mortis exactor, who had a large knife, then cut his throat, which spattered him with blood; it was a horrible sight to see; he severed the sinews near the two heels, and then opened up the belly from which he drew the heart, liver, spleen and lungs, which he stuck on an iron hook, and cut and dissected into pieces, which he then stuck on other hooks as he cut them, as one does with an animal” (Bruneau, cited in Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [New York: Vintage Books, 1995], 51). The association of execution with the skills and tools of the butchery trade suggests not only that butchers may usurp official power, but that official power itself is, or can be, a form of brutal butchery. Ronald Knowles, in his introduction to the third series Arden Shakespeare edition of 2 Henry VI, notes that by the middle of the play butchery “develops as the symbol of barbarism,” a symbol that creates a correspondence between the

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lower orders and the nobles (Knowles, “Introduction to 2 Henry VI,” 100). As he points out, “with Gloucester’s fall and death the King and Warwick invoke the imagery of the butcher and the slaughterhouse (3.1.210–13; 3.2.189), while the Queen disingenuously asks, ‘Are you the butcher, Suffolk?’ (3.2.195)” (ibid.). Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as well, with his “slaughterous thoughts” (5.5.14), is pronounced a “butcher” (5.8.69) by Malcolm after his bloody reign. 18. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter 5, “The Interior Structure of the Artifact,” regarding the “ongoing assumption of animism” (296) that is, the human assumption that objects are almost animate, that they are “compassion bearing” (293) in the way their day-to-day functions relieve human problems. Scarry shows how torture is the unmaking of this object awareness; torturers turn the familiar and comforting objects of daily life into unfamiliar instruments that produce pain rather than relief. 19. There is debate about whether those wages were primarily from agricultural work or manufacture; however, Sharp’s analysis makes it clear that disorder was most frequent in areas where manufacture dominated (Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority). 20. Ibid., 158; Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers, 1500–1640,” Rural Society: Landowners, Peasants and Labourers, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 164. 21. See Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 109–150, on the significance of independence to medieval urban craft workers. 22. Hall’s Chronicle on Evil May Day, cited in Tawney and Powell, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 3, 84. 23. W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1480–1619,” The Agricultural History Review 12 (1964), 37. See also the graph between pages 28–29 on prices of wheat. 24. The certain limits for the date of 2 Henry VI are the second edition of Holinshed in 1587 and Greene’s attack on Shakespeare in 1592 (xlv Cairncross). 25. The Ancient Constitution involved the idea that “there had existed since AngloSaxon time a body of peculiarly English rights and liberties, enshrined in the Common Law and in parliamentary statutes.” David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1996), 26. As Sir Dudley Diggs put it, “the laws of England are grounded on reason more ancient than books, consisting much in unwritten customs . . . so ancient that from the Saxon days . . . they have continued in most parts the same” (ibid.). In his 1550 “The Way to Wealth,” Robert Crowley condemns “gredie cormerauntes” of disobedience to various laws that might be defined as part of an Ancient Constitution: “For without a law to beare you, yea contrarie to the law which forbiddeth al manner of oppression and extortion, and that more is contrarie to conscience, the ground of all good lawes, ye enclosed from the pore theire due commones, levied greater fines then heretofore have bene leavied, put them from the liberties (and in a maner enheritaunce) that they held by custome, and reised their rentes” (Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 3: 59). 26. There was a considerable body of literature for and against the nontraditional agricultural practices that were becoming more and more common throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A 1598 sonnet complains about an engrosser, who is referred to as a “thiefe”: “Houses by three, and seaven, and ten he raseth, / To make the common gleabe, his private land” (Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 3: 80). William Harrison reports on the “verie grievous” practice of “inhansing of rents” whereby “for what stocke of monie soever [a farmer] gathereth and laieth up in all his

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yeares, it is often seene, that the landlord will take such order with him for the same, when he reneweth his lease.” William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994), 71. He explains this practice a little more clearly later in his discourse: “if the leasee be thought to be worth an hundred pounds, he shall paie no lesse for his terme or else another enter with hard and doubtful covenants” (ibid., 72). Harrison blames landlords for “seek[ing] to bring their poore tenants almost into plain servitude and miserie, dailie devising new meanes, and seeking up all the old, how to cut them shorter and shorter, doubling, trebling, and now and then seven times increasing their fines, driving them also for everie trifle to loose and forfeit their tenures” (ibid., 71). His indictment contains within it the suggestion that excessive fines and rent increases were a means of driving tenants off the land. 27. In Edmund Spenser’s 1591 Mother Hubbard’s Tale (in Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale. London, 1613), when the Fox explicitly rejects wage labor, urging the poor to refuse to “be of any occupation” or to work to “enrich others,” he bases his rejection on the same idea of free-born liberty that Cade invokes: Why should he that is at liberty Make himself bond? Since then we are free born Let us all servile base subjection scorn 28. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Volume III: The Earlier History Plays: Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 132. 29. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 65–69, on the literature of crime and its other possible discursive functions and effects. 30. “[O]ne Alexander Iden, esquire of Kent found hym in a garden, and there in his defence manfully slewe the caitife Cade, & brought his ded body to London.” Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume III: The Earlier History Plays: Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II (London: Routledge , 1960), 118. 31. The language used in the Quarto draws more attention to Iden’s status as an encloser than the Folio language: where the Quarto uses “hedges” and “ground,” the Folio uses the less contentious “brick wall” and “private garden.” Thus, as Siemon notes, “the Folio palliates the potential identification of Iden with possessive accumulation” (“Landlord Not King,” 26). But while the language in the Folio is less harsh, Iden’s power as a landowner is, in fact, emphasized when Cade refers to the “lord of the soil” ’s right to impound him as a “stray.” However, what is most significant, I would argue, about the differences in this scene in the Quarto and Folio texts, is not their differences but their similarities. Whether the Folio is a revised version of the earlier Quarto or the Quarto a corrupt reconstruction of a purer text, Iden as landowner and encloser was an important enough element to survive. William Carroll reads the differences in language between the Quarto and Folio versions as more profoundly altering the representation of Iden. “Recasting the historically contested term ‘hedges’ as a ‘brick wall,’ and the ground to a ‘private garden,’ the Folio version ensures that Iden will be seen not as a potential encloser, a ‘greedy cormorant,’ but an emblematic version of the happy rural man. The Folio also adds several lines to Iden’s initial speech about rural contentment, including his charity to the poor, as well as Cade’s extremely explicit reference to the ‘fee-simple’ and Iden’s right to impound him as a ‘stray.’ Iden’s Eden is thus more firmly established as legitimate in the Folio text, as one kind of enclosure is idealized and another condemned” (“‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994], 43). It seems odd that Carroll would assume that the reference to giving charity

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legitimates Iden’s status when he himself, in the same article, quotes a poem that demonstrates the existence of a discourse that protested the substitution of charity for means of livelihood; see note 33. I would also argue that underscoring Iden’s right to impound Cade as a “stray” undermines the construction of Iden as the emblematic “happy rural man,” a “Horatian figure” (43), by reminding the audience of the enormous power the landowner had over the common man, a power many perceived as disproportionate. Cade’s articulation of Iden’s prerogatives reveals the underside of the pastoral ideal; see note 35 for a brief overview of Cartelli’s discussion of pastoral “as a deeply privileged ideological construction” (Cartelli, “Jack Cade in the Garden,” 50). 32. Hattaway suggests: “perhaps Cade’s emaciated state is an emblematic comment on his spent force as a political figure” (“Introduction to 2 Henry VI,” 34). 33. Buchanan Sharp and Alan Everitt both provide examples of charity given as compensation for loss of use rights. Everitt discusses the loss of independence: “Where they were compensated in kind, like the poor of Conisborough who received an allowance of milk in lieu of their cattle-rake on Firsby Moor, they had to walk to the farmhouse each Sunday, vessel in hand, to collect it.” Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers, 1500–1640,” Rural Society: Landowners, Peasants and Labourers, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 173. Charity-giving landlords were not always regarded with gratitude. John Taylor’s 1621 poem encapsulates a view of hospitality that reflects poorly on a category of landowners that Iden may or may not be seen to fall within. Taylor’s landlord Ignobly did oppresse His Tenants, raising Rents to such excesse: That they their states not able to maintaine, They turn’d starke beggars in a yeare or twaine. Yet though this Lord were too too miserable, He in his House kept a well furnish’d Table: Great store of Beggars dayly at his Gate, Which he did feed, and much Compassionate. (For ’tis within the power of mighty men To make five hundred Beggars, and feed ten.) (Carroll, “Nursery of Beggary,” 37) 34. Rackin points out that Iden himself never “defines his act as a defense of private property” (216), but it is Cade’s refusal to defer to and his violation of those property rights that angers Iden. Rackin argues that Iden “defines [his act] in the old feudal terms as service to his king and the killing of a ‘monstrous traitor’” (Rackin, 216), but as a characterization of Iden’s motives, this seems insufficient, as he is not aware that Cade is the famous rebel leader until after he has administered the blows that Cade dies from: “Is’t Cade that I have slain, that monstrous traitor?” (4.10.65). More convincing is Greenblatt’s discussion of status relations giving way to property relations through the figure of Iden (Murdering Peasants, 23–24). 35. In “Jack Cade in the Garden,” Cartelli notes the irony that Iden’s fortunes upwardly turn and he is “effectively transformed into a courtier” after having criticized “the lust for worldly advancement” (48) that characterizes living, in Iden’s words, “turmoiled in the court” (4.10.16). The further irony Cartelli doesn’t note is that Iden, a man who presumably “seek[s] not to wax great by others’ waning, / Or gather wealth” (4.10.20–21), has a power the court proves not to have, well before he is made a knight. Cartelli hints at this point in his discussion of the “crucial difference between [Cade’s] version of pastoral and Iden’s” (ibid., 48–49). Iden presents his country life as an idyllic refuge from the court, an existence of “quiet walks” and contentment with “this small inheritance my father left me,” an inheritance that “sufficeth” personal need and social obligation: “that I have maintains my state, / And sends the poor well pleased from my gate” (4.10.17–23). Cade,

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on the other hand, sees the garden strictly in utilitarian terms as a source of food and the garden’s owner as an adversary. As Cartelli writes, “To Cade, Iden is less a poor esquire grazing on the pastoral margins of political life than the walking embodiment of established authority. Whereas Iden conceives of his walk in the garden as one in a series of daily demonstrations of an unturmoiled life neatly balanced between private pleasure and social obligation, Cade believes that ‘the lord of the soil’ has walked forth expressly ‘to seize me for a stray, for entering his fee-simple without leave’” (ibid., 49). “Cade’s estimate of his position thus reveals the extent to which Iden’s version of pastoral operates as a deeply privileged ideological construction” (ibid., 50). The garden and the pastoral man are by no means part of a nonpolitical idyll outside of the realm of power. 36. While grounded in Renaissance stage theory, my analysis of the spectator/spectacle relationship is also indebted to modern film theorists Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jiminez, who, in their analysis of cinema, discuss both the spectator’s “fascination with likeness and recognition” (17) and a process whereby the main male protagonist becomes the surrogate for the male spectator, so that his power becomes experienced as the spectator’s power, “giving satisfying sense of omnipotence” (20). Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jiminez, “The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World 1970,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 37. Kemp was a member of Lord Strange’s company from 1588 until Strange’s death in 1594, at which time he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As a company’s clown, a “special category of player,” he played a “particular type of part” David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65. Rebellious rustics were generally played by the clown character. Shakespeare, as well, joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, whereupon the Chamberlain’s Men acquired his plays, including 2 Henry VI; it is likely, then, that any productions of 2 Henry VI by the Chamberlain’s Men featured Will Kemp as Cade. There is a great deal of debate over Shakespeare’s allegiances before 1594 and no direct evidence as to who played Cade in early productions of 2 Henry VI. I agree with Gurr’s assessment in The Shakespearean Playing Companies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), based on company ownership of plays and references to the Stanleys in plays, including multiple “figures from the Stanley family” through the first Henriad, that Shakespeare was first a player in Strange’s Men and then a member of Pembroke’s, when it was formed around 1591–92 (Playing Companies 262). If, indeed, this was the case, it is quite likely that Shakespeare wrote 2 Henry VI with Will Kemp, his fellow player in the Strange’s Men, in mind for the part of Cade. See E. A. J. Honigmann for a thoroughly argued case for Shakespeare as a member of Lord Strange’s Men. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” (Manchester, 1985).

CHAPTER 3 1. In the first book of The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, the author comments: “we ought to followe the opinion of the Philosopher, who at his returne from the Bathes, being asked whether there were in them any great number of men, answered, no: and a litle after, as one asked him if there were good store of people, answered, yea.” M. Steeven Guazzo, The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, Vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 26. 2. Trachinus functions largely to offer narrative information and has no role in the major action of the play. 3. On marriage in Renaissance comedies, see Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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1988), and Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting sexual difference: meaning and gender in the comedies” (Alternative Shakespeares, New York: Methuen, 1985). On Protestant marriage theory, see Linda T. Fitz, “‘What Says the Married Woman?’: Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance,” Mosaic 13 (1979–80), 1–22; William and Malleville Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly, (1942); 235–276; Edmund Leites, “The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage,” Journal of Social History 15 (Spring 1982), 383–408; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, abridged ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and early modern commentators such as William Whatley, William Gouge, William Perkins, and Dod and Cleaver. As scholars have noted, however, ideologies of marriage propounded by Protestant preachers were available in the Middle Ages, if not as powerfully: “the importance of English Protestant sexual discourse in the Renaissance lies not in its originality, but in its proliferation, elaboration, and wide accessibility to a variety of social groups” (Rose, Expense of Spirit, 3). 4. Edward Gosynhyll, cited in Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 27. See Phyllis Rackin, “ Sexual Difference/Historical Difference,” Privileging Gender in Early Modern England (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993) for a discussion of the early modern sex/gender system, which constructed heterosexual sex “as the place where [manliness] is contaminated and lost in congress with [the female].” Modern ideologies of sex and gender, on the other hand, see “heterosexual sex as the place where manhood is proved and affirmed in a conquest of the female” (47). 5. See Elias, Paster, and Stallybrass and White. 6. William Gouge warns against excessive familiarity with servants: “Mistresses oft lose their authoritie by conspiring with their servants to goe abroad, take away goods, gossip, and doe such other like things priuily without their husbands consent” (Domesticall Duties 1622, 651); he also admonishes male servants “utterly to refuse” sexual advances from their mistresses and female servants to refuse them from their masters (ibid., 632). William Perkins argues for equality of station in marriage, noting that “it is a seemly and commendable practice, that, the Prince, the Noble man, the free-man, the gentleman, the yeoman, &c. should be ioyned in society with them, that are of the same or like condition with themselues, and not otherwise”; he points to Roman laws meant to restrain inequalities and cites Tertullian, “who saith, That if a free woman had affianced her selfe to him that was a bond-man to another, and being thrice admonished thereof, by him that had authority ouer her, did not withstanding perseuere in her purpose; she should, according to the law, lose her freedome” William Perkins, Of Christian Oeconomie or Household Government (London 1609), 64–65. Ruth Kelso summarizes her findings as follows: “With her men servants she will maintain due reserve, not conversing much with them or allowing them to play or dally with her, nor will she be over-merry or pleasant of speech. She must take care that they do not misinterpret her words or actions, and if they show signs of licentiousness she must have them dismissed, but not in such a way as to make them enemies of the house, lest they spread lying reports and bring all to ruin. She will therefore spend most of her time with her maids for whose welfare, instruction, and conduct she is more especially responsible” (Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 114). 7. “The female of the deer, esp. of the red deer.” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. 8. While MSND helps construct the idea of large men as lugs, height and a strong muscular build could also be admired, as evidenced from responses to Henry VIII’s great height and musculature. A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays with the two-sidedness of this discourse.

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9. Biron’s speech recalls the shame and loathing expressed in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action, and til action lust / Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, / Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight, / Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, / Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,” etc. 10. See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1960), 149. 11. Rose calls this the “dualistic sensibility”: “women and eros are perceived either as idealized beyond the realm of the physical (often they are viewed as leading to a consciousness of the divine, a transcendence of desire) or as degraded and sinful” (Expense of Spirit, 4). 12. The Norton Shakespeare includes these lines as representing a draft version of 5.2.814–31 from an authorial manuscript. 13. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989) 55. Although no precise date for A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been determined for certain, editors, including Harold F. Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Anne Barton, generally agree that it was probably written and first produced in either 1595 or 1596. 14. See Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 6, and Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 35. 15. See Leinwand, “I Believe We Must Leave the Killing Out,” 149–51, for a summary of the severity of laws on stealing, vulnerability of poor persons to prosecution, and ferociousness with which insurrection was sometimes put down. 16. James Shapiro’s “‘Tragedies naturally performed’” reminds us that the early modern stage “doubled as a site of actual violent spectacle,” some accidental, some not. Shapiro, “‘Tragedies naturally performed’: Kyd’s Representation of Violence: The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587),” Staging the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1991), 103. 17. 4.2.19–20, Brooks’s footnote. A joiner’s four pence a day would include his meat and drink. Without food, he would earn eight pence. 18. As Theodore Leinwand’s comments on this line: “For Theseus, their manhood. . .is contingent upon him” (“Leave the Killing Out,” 155). 19. Between 1540 and 1640 English society experienced or perceived itself as experiencing “a seismic upheaval of unprecedented magnitude.” Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Seventeenth-Century England: Society in an Age of Revolution (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 26. Within the status hierarchy of England there were roughly four to six distinctions (Stone, Harrison, Wrightson); the difficulty with which early modern and modern commentators had and continue to have delineating distinct categories attests to their fluidity during this period. The most important and most contentious border was that between gentleman and commoner; traditionally, this was a “division that was based essentially on the distinction between those who did and those who did not work with their hands” (ibid., 28). With the rise of “four semi-independent occupational hierarchies” (ibid., 27)—merchants, lawyers, clergy, and administrators—able to use money, education, and influence to move into the ranks of the gentry, the equation of commoner/laborer and gentleman/non-laborer became less precise and the border between gentry and commoner became increasingly porous. Furthermore, thrifty husbandmen could acquire sufficient land to become country gentlemen and artisan shopkeepers could develop their enterprises to the extent that “merchant” was a more accurate description of them than “shopkeeper” or “craftsman.” As well, apprenticeships in the wealthier guilds such as the goldsmiths and the haberdashers were increasingly swelled with younger sons of the gentry. Thus, this oldest of distinctions was in danger of breaking down. 20. Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream accurately captures this aspect of Bottom’s character in its turn-of-the-nineteenth-century setting. Kevin Kline’s Bottom is a dashing, dapper fellow with courteous words and smiles for the ladies, who seem to respond to his flirtations.

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21. Bruce R. Smith presents this definition of “person” in Shakespeare and Masculinity, page 9, quoting OED II.2b. 22. Several commentators note that weavers traditionally sang while they worked. See Brooks, 3.1.118 fn. See also Herschel Baker, The Riverside Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV 2.4.133 fn. 23. Sir Fredericke praises in particular the solo voice, “because all the sweetnes consisteth in one alone, and a man is much more heedfull and understandeth better the feat manner, and the aire or veyne of it, when the eares are not busied in hearing any moe than one voice.” Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (New York: Dutton, 1928, 1948), 101. The Count judges that “ther is no ease of the labors, and medicines of feeble mindes to be found more honest and more praise worthie in time of leisure” (75) than music; music “maketh the minde more apt to the conceiving of felicitie” (76) and the soul “lifteth up it selfe, and (as it were) reviveth the virtues and force of it selfe with Musicke” (75). 24. Imperatives to restraint are many in The Book of the Courtier. Castiglione’s Sir Fredericke castigates gentlemen who, in the name of wit, would at the table throw in each other’s faces “potage, sauce, gelies, and what ever commeth to hand” (Book of the Courtier, 128) and “in the presence of honourable women, yea, and oftentimes to themselves, . . . thrust out filthy and most dishonest wordes” (127). He warns that “behaviours, manners, and gestures” (118) such as “going [walking], laughing, looking, and such matters” will be taken as “a judgement of inclination of him in whom they are seene” (118), and further notes that he would like his courtier to be “in all his garments handsome and cleanely, and [to] take a certaine delight in modest preciseness” (117): he “will holde alwaies with it, if [the courtier’s clothing] be rather somewhat grave and auncient, than garish” (116). Certain “well knowne” matters are assumed to be obvious, “as that our Courtier ought not to professe to be a glutton nor a drunkard, nor riotous and unordinate in any ill condition, nor filthie and unclenly in his living, with certaine rude and boisterous behaviours that smell of the plough and cart a thousand mile off” (129). 25. The Book of the Courtier touches on this issue both directly and indirectly. Written early in the sixteenth century, when Italy was under siege by various foreign powers, it is not surprising that Castiglione asserts the taking up of arms as the most important skill and duty of the courtier; nevertheless, his Book of the Courtier is dominated by description of the more refined skills and manners necessary for a true courtier, and the courtier unable to shed his warrior countenance in the court is mocked. The Count notes “wee [will] not have him for all that so lustie to make braverie in wordes, and to bragge that hee hath wedded his harness for a wife, and to threaten with. . .grimme lookes,” etc. (Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 36), and Sir Fredericke tells the story of the inappropriate courtier who, “to entertaine a gentle woman whom he never saw before [,] . . . began to tell how many men he had slaine, and what a hardie felow hee was, and how hee coulde play at two hand sword,” going so far as to try to teach her how to parry certain blows with a weapon (“how to defend certaine strokes with a Pollaxe” (Book of the Courtier, 97). What skills are most valuable in a courtier are also considered in The Civile Conversatione of M. Steeven Guazzo; in the 1581 “Preface to the Reader,” George Pettie, the English translator, asserts to those skeptics of scholarship who would have gentlemen concern themselves only with matters of war that “you wyll be but ungentle Gentlemen, yf you be no schollers: you wyll do your Prince but simple service, you wyll stande your Countrey but in slender steade, you wyll bring your selves but to small preferment, yf you be no schollers. Can you counsayle your Prince wisely, foresee daungers providently, governe matters of state discreetly, without Learning?” (Guazzo, Civile Conversation, 8). A gentleman with only the skills of the soldier will be unable to “inquire the state of forraine Countries, geve entertainment to Ambassadours” or “tell [his] Mistresse a fine tale, or delight her with pleasant device” (ibid.).

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26. See Louis Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 110. 27. There are interesting resonances here between Snug’s assertion of his status as a man, a response to the discursive denial of manhood in working men voiced in the play, and the, at times, gendered politics of the black civil rights movement in the United States. As Michael Kimmel notes, “In the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, during which King was assassinated, workers carried signs that read, in bold block letters, ‘I am a man.’ Malcolm X developed a parallel politic rhetoric that was equally gendered, as he spoke about reclaiming from white slavers a manhood stolen from black men and denied by two centuries of racist politics. ‘Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood!’ exclaimed the actor and civil rights leader Ossie Davis, in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination” Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 271. 28. Harold Brooks points out in his note to this line, “Bottom confuses the sitting dove (‘Columbae. . .cum sedent,’ Erasmus, Adagia) and the sucking lamb (1 Samuel, 8: 9; quoted in Cairncross on 2H6, III.i.71, ‘the sucking lamb or harmless dove’). William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Harold F. Brooks (London: Metheun & Co., 1979). 29. See Laura Levine, “Rape, repetition, and the politics of closure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) for a full discussion of the violence of Athenian society. As she points out, the lovers flee into the forest in the first place in order to escape Athenian laws that would allow Hermia’s father, Egeus, to control her body by forcing her to choose between an unwanted marriage, death, or life in a cloister. When Hermia claims that she will die before she “yield[s] [her] virgin patent up” (1.1.80) she “makes clear how close she comes to understanding [her father’s] privilege as rape” (Levine, “Rape,” 210). 30. Ovid tells a similar story about Priapus, the nymph Lotis, and a rescuing ass earlier in his Fasti; it is told in more detail but does not include the necklace of loaves. See Ovid, Fasti, 31–33. Trans. by Sir J. G. Frazer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959. 31. Mary Ellen Lamb. “Tracing a Heterosexual Erotics of Service in Twelfth Night and the Autobiographical Writings of Thomas Whythorne and Anne Clifford” Criticism 40 no. (1998): 1–25. 32. Ibid. 33. The famous instance of Alice Arden’s adultery with a steward and former tailor, culminating in the murder of her husband, was immortalized not only in an anonymous play, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, but in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; both accounts draw repeated attention to the low birth and status of Alice’s lover and stress her monstrous preference for an inferior man. Most cautionary words about relations between elite women and lowborn men identified the relationship between women and their servants as potential danger points, presumably perceiving this as the type of contact an elite woman would most likely have with a man of lower estate. Ruth Kelso, summing up the advice literature of the period, notes that the proper gentlewoman was counselled to “maintain due reserve” with her men servants, not “allowing them to play or dally with her” nor allowing herself to be “over merry or pleasant of speech” in their company, in order to prevent misunderstandings that might lead to licentious desires on a servant’s part (Kelso, Doctrine, 114). Women were seen to be susceptible to the corrupting charms of servants, too, and servants and apprentices, as well, were warned not to be bold or dally with “their masters wife, daughters, or maidens”

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(John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government: For the Ordering of Private Families According to the Direction of God’s Word, London, 1621, Aa5v) and “be carefull to observe uprightness of manners, that the wife, sonnes and daughters, or other fellow seruants be not corrupted by their bad counsels, or lewd behauiour” (ibid., Aa4r). 34. The mother asked Titania on her deathbed to care for the child. See Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” and Levine, “Rape,” on “the destruction of the bonds between women implicit in Oberon’s capacity to make Titania break her vow” (Levine, Rape, 227 n.4). 35. In some ways, Sappho is similar to Olivia in Twelfth Night, another female head of a court household. See Howard, Stage and Social Struggle, 112–16, for a reading of Twelfth Night that discusses Olivia as a “threat to the hierarchical gender system” (ibid., 114). 36. See Bevington’s introduction to John Lyly, Sapho and Phao (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 155. 37. See Varia Historia of Aelian. 38. David Bevington discusses readings that allegorically link Sappho with Elizabeth in his introduction to the Revels edition; 164–68. See also Jacqueline Vanhoutte, “A Strange Hatred of Marriage: John Lyly, Elizabeth I, and the Ends of Comedy” and Theodora A. Jankowski’s “The Subversion of Flattery: The Queen’s Body in John Lyly’s Sapho and Phao.” 39. Richard Braithwaith, The English Gentlewoman, 141.

CHAPTER 4 1. Plays celebrating working citizens of various statuses did not disappear completely. Two important examples from the early seventeenth century are Heywood’s 1606 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, with the Building of the Royal Exchange, telling the stories of the fictional Hobson the Haberdasher and the historical Sir Thomas Gresham, a rich citizen merchant who built the Royal Exchange, and William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (1617–18), a nationalistic celebration of shoemakers and legendary English history that borrows a number of features from The Shoemaker’s Holiday. 2. See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 49–79, on differential pricing in theatres and on the different classes of society that patronized the amphitheaters and hall theaters. 3. In this chapter I focus mainly on Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605), and the first part of Dekker and Middleton’s Honest Whore (1604–05). Other plays in this genre include Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605), Marston’s Dutch Courtesan (1605), Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1606), Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611), Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), Jonson’s Staple of News (1625), and the second part of Dekker and Middleton’s Honest Whore (1635), to name just a few. 4. Jean Howard, Theater of City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3. 5. By the early seventeenth century, the traditional handicraft system, with its independent master who worked alongside apprentices and journeymen making the goods he would then sell retail, had waned. As Unwin delineates it, the master craftsman of the early guild, who was workman, foreman, employer, merchant (getting raw materials), and shopkeeper, eventually became a trading master, engaged in all of the above activities except that of manufacturing workman, and then eventually acted only as employer, merchant, and shopkeeper (Industrial Organization, 12). This trading master, represented in city comedies in his shop selling merchandise and training apprentices, would, in most cases,

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have supplied his shop by buying from small masters or journeymen, whom, in many cases, he would have supplied with the raw materials for their manufacture. See Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 38–41, for an account of the early development of sixteenthcentury systems of industrial organization. See also Hans Medick, “The proto-industrial family economy: the structural function of the household and family during the transition from peasant society to industrial capitalism,” Social History 3 (1976), 291–315. But Unwin emphasizes that the separation of manufacture and trade was a gradual process, and the merchant shopkeeper and small manufacturing craftsman “had spheres of interest and of activity which largely overlapped each other” (Industrial Organization, 103). 6. Most modern historians agree that early modern London was a centre of trade rather than an engine of production, consuming more than it produced and contributing little to the emergence of industrial capitalism, except by way of prompting “more efficient production in the provinces because of its gargantuan levels of consumption.” This is E. A. Wrigley’s argument, paraphrased in A. L. Beier, “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London.” London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986), 142. Beier disagrees, however, contending that “production was as significant as trade in London’s economy” (ibid., 142). But even while he argues, using burial registers of London parishes, that nearly three-fifths of the occupations in intra- and extra-mural London “involved some form of production of goods, while those mainly in exchange-related positions formed just under a quarter” (ibid., 150), he also notes that “merchants were roughly ten times more numerous within the walls than without” (ibid., 153), that “some of the producers in intramural parishes might have been traders in disguise” (ibid., 150), and that the economies most geared toward manufacture were in the northern, eastern, and southern parishes on the edges of the old city (ibid., 156). 7. See F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” London and the Economy 1500–1700 (London: Hambleton, 1990), 107–12. Fisher cites evidence that “by the early seventeenth century . . . there had developed a clearly defined London season which began in the autumn, reached its climax at Christmas, and was over by June” (ibid., 111). See also Archer, who notes that such great numbers of gentry came to London to take care of litigation that “the demand for grain [increased] by 13 percent during the legal terms as early as the 1570s.” Ian Archer, “Material Londoners?” Material London ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 176. Also, “townward migration” was not just “a purely seasonal phenomenon” of the wealthy gentry (Fisher, “Development of London,” 111). Many poorer gentlemen who could no longer afford country housekeeping and many younger sons took up permanent residence in the capital and entered the professions or commercial enterprises. 8. See Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity, ch. 7 and 8. 9. John Earle, Microcosmography; or, A Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters (Bristol: W. Crofton, 1987), 52. 10. This was not necessarily the case in the rural regions, where wage levels were about 50 percent lower. 11. Robert Burton writes, “let him have but a good outside, he carries it, most men are esteemed according to their clothes. In our gullish times, him, whom you peradventure in modesty would give place to, as being deceived by his habit, and presuming him some great worshipfull man, beleeve it, if you shall examine his estate, he will likely be prooved a serving-man of no great note, my Ladies taylor, or his Lordships barber, or some such gull, . . . a meere outside.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), 205. 12. See Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis: 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 300–303.

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13. For a history of the Grocers Company, see W. C. Hazlitt, The Livery Companies of the City of London (New York: Macmillan, 1892). As well, Unwin notes that “The Mercers’ and the Grocers’ Companies . . . were the earliest to acquire wealth and influence” (Unwin, Industrial Organization, 79), and Seaver notes that the Grocers were among the twelve great livery companies that dominated London society and from which the lord mayors were chosen. Paul Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 92. The Grocers supplied an “endless assortment of domestic necessities” (Hazlitt, Livery Companies, 189) but also imported luxury food items from the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and the East. The goods they provided included groceries such as “cinnamon, sugar, comfits, ginger, caraways, loaf sugar, . . . pepper, English saffron, dates, almonds, . . . raisins, prunes, cloves, mace, aniseed, rice, great raisins, broken sugar” (189), as well as oranges, wafers, syrups, waters, and before the Apothecaries established a separate franchise in 1617 various drugs and medicines (189–90). 14. Some dramatic examples are Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London (ca.1592), the 1618 Life and Death of Guy of Warwick, performed for at least twelve years (Wright, 617–18), and the non-extant 1643 Crispin and Crispianus, based on the fi rst part of Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft; other prose examples include William Vallans’s 1615 The Honourable Prentice: Or This Taylor is a man and the anonymous late-seventeenth-century London’s Glory, Or the History Of the Famous and Valiant London Prentice: Being an Account of his Parentage, Birth and Breeding, together with many brave and Heroick Exploits perform’d by him throughout the course of his Life. Richard Johnson’s Nine Worthies of London, 1592, a work in prose and verse, rehearses the deeds of heroic prowess of medieval craftsmen. A long poem entitled The Honour of London Apprentices (1647) applauds their involvement in heroic ventures all over the world: “At home, abroad, in Europe, Asia, and / Hot Africa, and America by land / Or Sea, no action worth regard / Was done, but London Prentices in it shar’d. / The rayse of London Prentices did shine / Among the Infidels in Palestine, / When that renowned christian Champion nam’d / Godrey of Bulloigne (through the world so fam’d) / Went to the holy war (so called then). . . .” Lewis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935), 29. See chapter 1, “The Craftsman as a Heroic Figure,” of Charles Camp, The Artisan in Elizabethan Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), See also Stevenson, who argues that, while by the end of the Elizabethan period merchants were being praised in literature, the praise “did not reflect a new awareness of the importance of business to the commonwealth; [it] reflected a mentality which saw service to the realm in traditional, chivalric, quasi-feudal terms.” Laura Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 108. While I disagree with Stevenson’s basic premise that praises of business (and work) are not found in literary representations, there are certainly many literary examples of merchants and apprentices valued for chivalric deeds rather than commercial activities. 15. Notably, Hostpur’s figurative milliner is perfumed; even in this early history play, the idea that tradesmen consumed the luxury products they dealt in is evident. 16. The barber-surgeon’s shop, Pelling writes, was “the most important locality outside the home for washing, grooming, and every function relevant to hygiene and the presentation of the body to the outside world.” Margaret Pelling, “Appearance and reality: barber-surgeons, the body and disease,” London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London and New York: Longman, 1986), 94. She goes on to describe some of the functions, skills, and knowledge of the barber-surgeon: “The short hair and constantly changing beardstyles of earlier Elizabethan men obviously required regular

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attention. Beards were dyed as well as shaped; later, not surprisingly, barber-surgeons became involved in wigmaking as well as the shaving of heads so that wigs could be worn. However, there seem to have been few limits to the personal services offered by barber-surgeons. Among these bloodletting and toothdrawing are well-known; but barber surgeons also cleaned teeth by scraping them, pared nails, picked or syringed ears (which could involve the removal of worms or ‘small beasts’), plucked with tweezers, and had a special role in the removal and mitigation of marks and blemishes. Soapballs were used for washing, and perfumes were applied with casting bottles. Even if the customer failed to follow the example of centuries, and did not confide in his attendant, the barbersurgeon was in an excellent position to acquire knowledge of state of health from skin, breath, and even the state of the hair” (ibid., 94–95). 17. Ibid., 86. St. Paul’s, of course, was the location of Paul’s Inn and was next to the Blackfriar’s parish where Blackfriar’s theater was located; both theaters featured many citizen comedies. Paul’s walk, Sugden writes, was, from 1550 to 1650 “a common meeting place for all kinds of people. Here lawyers met their clients, men of fashion came to show their clothes, citizens thronged to hear and tell the news of the day, servants stood to be hired and posted up their qualifications on the Si Quis door, bawds looked for victimes, pickpockets plied their trade” Edward H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 395. 18. See quips about barbers and tailors in character books, cf. note 9. 19. The dialogue in Eastward Ho between Sindefy and Gertrude satirically sums up the distance strayed by the contemporary knight from his mythical counterparts in terms that are typical of city comedies. “GER. Would the Knight of the Sun, or Palmerin of England, have used their ladies so, Sin? Or Sir Lancelot, or Sir Tristram? SIN. I do not know, madam. GER. Then thou know’st nothing, Sin. Thou art a fool, Sin. The knighthood nowadays are nothing like the knighthood of old time. They rid a-horseback; ours go afoot. They were attended by their squires; ours by their lackeys. They went buckled in their armour; ours muffled in their cloaks. They travelled wilderness and deserts; ours dare scarce walk the streets. They were still prest to engage their honour; ours still ready to pawn their clothes. They would gallop on at the sight of a monster; ours run away at the sight of a sergeant. They would help poor ladies; ours make poor ladies. SIN. Ay, madam, they were knights of the Round Table at Winchester, that sought adventures; but these of the Square Table at ordinaries, that sit at hazard” (5.1.32–51). Square tables at ordinaries were gambling tables in ale-houses or inns. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). 20. Castiglione articulates the potential dangers of too great a focus on the graceful arts, although he notes that their cultivation can be used to virtuous ends: “dancing, entertaining, singing, and playing games [are] vain and frivolous, and in a man of rank deserving of censure rather than praise. For these elegances of dress, devices, mottoes and other such things that belong to the world of women and romance often . . . serve simply to make men effeminate, to corrupt the young and to lead them into dissolute ways. . . . But if the activities of the courtier are directed to the virtuous end I have in mind, then I for one am quite convinced not only that they are neither harmful nor vain but that they are most advantageous and deserving of infinite praise” (Book of the Courtier, 284). See also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Bodies and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 125, on how the male body could dissolve into imperfect feminine openness through over refinement. Breitenberg’s discussion of melancholy is an interesting analog to these accounts of slippage from the masculine to the feminine. The disjunction between a sociopolitical

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model that claimed gender difference in absolute terms and the humoral model which constructed difference in terms of gradations and degrees created what Breitenberg calls “anxious masculinities,” as the potentialities of the latter threatened constantly the certainties of the former. Analyzing melancholy as presented in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Breitenberg notes its predominantly Galenic nature and characterizes it as “the overarching term for anything imbalanced or excessive” (37), a “repository for the elements deemed contrary to a specifically masculine vision of social order and individual rationality” (38), and “a term for the Other within, a behavioural category in which masculinity addresses its fears about itself, its individual and collective anxieties” (39). And yet the contradictions between the Aristotelian and the Galenic traditions of melancholy can be seen to parallel—and perhaps inform—the precarious balancing act of the Renaissance courtier: while the Galenic melancholic has a debilitating humoural imbalance that threatens his masculine being, the Aristotelian melancholic is a being of heightened sensitivity and refi nement, a “literary, philosophical and artistic genius” (39). Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21. There are numerous examples in literature of connections between prostitution and the services of the barber-surgeon, although not all mention sweathouses. In Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, Cocledemoy toasts the bawd, Mary Faugh, by calling her “my right precious pandress, supportress of barber-surgeons and inhauntress of lotium and diet-drink!” John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, Four Jacobean City Comedies, 1985 reprint (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 1.2.23–25. When Justiniano, in Westward Ho, rails about vice, he refers to “surgeons . . . full of business; the care of most, secrecy, [which] grew as common as lice in Ireland, or as scabs in France.” Thomas Dekker and John Webster, Westward Ho (London: William Pickering, 1830), 3.3.p65–66. In his Cosmographia, Earle says of a surgeon: “He had been long since undone if the charity of the stews had not relieved him, from whom he has his tribute as duly as the pope.” John Earle, Microcosmography; or, A Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters (Bristol: W. Crofton Hemmons / London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1987), 80. 22. An obvious example, cited by Randolph (“The medical concept in English Renaissance satiric theory: its possible relationships and implications,” Studies in Philology 38, 1941, 145), is the melancholy Jacques of As You Like It, who would “most invectively” pierce through “the body of country, city, court” (2.1.59–59): “Give me leave / to speak my mind, and I will through and through / Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world, / If they will patiently receive my medicine” (2.7.58–61). For discussions and examples of this trope, see Randolph, passim; Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 219–20; and Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire in the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 93. 23. “Shake” was slang for “copulate,” and the early version of the modern word “shag.” Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Althone, 1997), 274. 24. See also Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, for many of these slang terms. In general, however, Williams’s Glossary is more thorough. 25. The Shoemaker’s Holiday 1.142–43 and 7.91. 26. From, respectively, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (2.5.4); Marlowe’s 2 Tamberlaine (4.3.1); and, again, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, opening lines. 27. Archer, “Material Londoners,” quoting a number of contemporary spokespersons, delineates various positions of this debate and concludes that “the predominant position was that mercantile pursuits were incompatible with gentility” (180).

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28. “Let me beseech you, no, sir; the superfluidity and cold meat left at their nuptials will with bounty furnish ours. The grossest prodigality is superfluous cost of the belly; nor would I wish any invitement of states or friends; only your reverent presence and witness shall sufficiently grace and confirm us” (2.1.172–78). The metatheatrical reference to Hamlet’s black humor adds a comic touch, but even more significant is the hyperbolic resonance with King Lear’s exhortation that “pomp . . . mayst shake the superflux” to wretches, as though the distance between Golding and Gertrude were that of a poor Tom and a king. 29. The Groom of the Stool was, in fact, a coveted position in the court, as it was given to one whom the lord was most comfortable and familiar with, and it meant intimate access to the lord and therefore the possibility of influence with him. See M. Girourd, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, who writes that, after the Middle Ages, the Groom of the Stool became “one of the most powerful and confidential of royal servants” (58). Nevertheless, we can see from the satire of the position in Eastward Ho that what modern audiences would see as an irony—engaging in the most menial and debasing of bodily tasks in order to gain influence—was by no means lost in early modern England. 30. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, Vols. 17 and 18 of The novels and miscellaneous works of Daniel Defoe, edited by Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: for Thomas Tegg, 1841), 63. 31. Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London [1300–1500] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948). Ann Arbor Paperback edition, 1962, 1. 32. Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 59. 33. Dekker’s satirical Guls Horn-booke would provide Quicksilver with justification for his views on long hair. Although most of the hornbook’s tribute to long hair focuses on its aesthetic value, after it admonishes its readers never to let “any puritanicall pair of scizzers . . . shorten [their hair by even] the breath of a finger,” it links hair with vitality by noting that “Grasse is the haire of the earth . . . when the Sunne-burnt clowne makes his mowes at it, and (like a Barber) shaves it off to the stumps, then it withers and is good for nothing” (29). 34. See also Jean Howard, Theater of A City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 99–105, on the implications for a masculinity constructed upon the idea of economic credit worthiness of Quicksilver’s ironic performance of penitence in the counter and his “cultural and social competence” (104) in performing the role of the London gallant, a masculine role constructed in alternate terms than those of financial stability. 35. John Earle, Microcosmography, 119. Earle’s characterization of the shopkeeper is in keeping with the idea that being able to read the humor of a customer is an important or indeed necessary skill in business, as suggested by Guazzo and Scott. 36. See Will Fisher on the significance of facial hair to early modern masculinity. Will Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2001), 155–87. 37. As Breitenberg writes, a wife’s chastity not only served “to secure and preserve actual economic interests (patrilineal inheritance and the avoidance of bastardy)” but also functioned “symbolically as a more generalized guarantee of social order and cohesion” (Anxious Masculinity, 24). Natalie Zemon Davis notes that “kings and political theorists saw the increasing legal subjection of wives to their husbands (and of children to their parents) as a guarantee of the obedience of both men and women to the slowly centralizing state.” Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” Society and Culture in Early

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Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 128. Susan Amussen begins her chapter on “The Ordering of Society” by writing that “the bonds of deference and responsibility which were supposed to hold the family together also operated throughout society.” Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 133. William Perkins in Christian Oeconomie (1609) articulates the relationship between the family and society at large in the standard terms of his day: “Upon this condition of the Familie, being the Seminarie of all other Societies, it followeth, that the holie and righteous government thereof, is a direct meane for the good ordering, both of Church and Common-wealth; yea that the lawes thereof being rightly informed and religiously observed, are available to prepare and dispose men to the keeping of order in other governments . . .” (A3). 38. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI (3.1.362–63). See chapter 2. The phallic properties of quills are also registered in Part 2 of The Honest Whore when Infelice pretends to have cuckolded Hippolito with the Irish servant—“Then the wild Irish dart was thrown?” Hippolito asks (part 2:3.1.232). 39. William Whatley is fierce in his exhortation on the marriage debt: “The Married are bound in conscience to afford to each other a mutual enjoyment of each other, according as either of their needs shall require. The scripture is as plain this way as may be, Let the man give unto the wife due benevolence, and also the wife unto the husband. The word signifieth indebted benevolence. It is a debt, you hear, and all debts must be paid when they be required.” William Whatley, Directions for Married Persons: Describing the Duties common to both and peculiar to each of them (A Bride-Bush) (Bristol, 1768), 9. He names due benevolence as the second principal duty of the married, second only to chastity. William Gouge, in Of Domesticall Duties, gives due benevolence a great deal of weight as well: “Matrimoniall Chastity,” of which, in his scheme, due benevolence is a part, that is “absolutely necessary for the being and abiding of mariage” (Gouge, Domesticall Duties, 125). And it is both women and men who are to be satisfied sexually through marriage: “To which purpose [chastity] the Apostle counselling men & women, for avoiding fornication, to have wives and husbands, inserteth this particle OWNE (Let every man have his OWNE wife, and every woman have her OWNE husband) whereby he implieth, that they should not have to doe with any other. That which Saloman expresseth of an husband, by rule of relation must be applied to a wife. As the man must be satisfied at all times in his wife, and even ravisht with her love; so must the woman be satisfied at all times in her husband, and even ravished with his love. By the like rule the precept given to wives, to bee chaste, must husbands take as directed to themselves also, and be chaste” (ibid., 127). Earlier, Gouge names as the first two ends of marriage “that the world might be increased” and “that men might avoid fornication” (ibid., 122), and he argues that the impotent should not marry because they cannot further these ends: “they sinne who conceale their impotency and joyne themselves in marriage, whereby they frustrate the one maine end of mariage, which is procreation of children; and doe that wrong to the party whom they marry, as sufficient satisfaction can never be made” (ibid., 106). 40. Jennifer Low’s book-length study on duels and masculinity argues that masculine honor for aristocrats was often tied to taking the law into one’s own hands, by defying the monarch, ignoring anti-dueling laws, and seizing back some of the power the monarch was centralizing in the state. She also, however, examines challenges to notions of honor tied to violent masculinity. Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 41. This thread of early modern gender discourse is perhaps most well known from the Hic Mulier and Haec Vir pamphlets of 1620. The first accuses women of monstrously appropriating masculine characteristics and privileges; Haec Vir, the responding pamphlet, rejoins with challenges against gender conventions but ultimately accuses men of

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effeminacy and argues that women behave like men only when men have left off proper masculine behavior themselves. 42. Jean Howard, “Prostitution, Shopkeepers, and the Shaping of Urban Subjects in The Honest Whore,” Elizabethan theatre XV: papers given at the fi fteenth and sixteenth international conferences on Elizabethan theatre held at the University of Waterloo, eds. C. E. McGee and A. L. Magnusson (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 2002), 15–16. 43. Joan Kent, “The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: The Nature and Dilemmas of the Office,” The Journal of British Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 27 n.1. 44. As Kent writes, “The subordination of somewhat autonomous local communities to the rule of a central administration and a national code of law was no easy task in early modern Europe.” Kent, “The English Village Constable,” 46. An excerpt from a ballad written by a Surrey constable describes the constable’s difficult position enforcing court orders among a community determined to maintain its own local forms and traditions of justice and law: “The Justices will set us by the heels, / If we do not as we should; / Which if we perform, the townsmen will storm / Some of them hang’s if they could” (cited in ibid., 40). 45. J. A. Sharpe writes, “parish officers were forced to mediate between two concepts of order; that of the state law, and that of the village, where ‘order’ often meant ‘little more than a conformity to a fairly malleable local custom which was considerably more flexible than statute law’” (77, cited in Keith Wrightson, “Two Concepts of Order: Justice, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England,” Ungovernable People: The English & their Law in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980]). 46. See Will Fisher on beards and masculinity. 47. Scott, Essay of Drapery, 91. The idea is found as well in writers on physiognomy such as Thomas Wright, who writes that his Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601) could bring “a goodly and faire glosse of profit and commodity” to its readers. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 78. Thomas Hill, as well, “stressed the utility of physiognomical skills in business, calling them a ‘necessarie and lawdable science, seeing by the same a man may so readily pronounce and foretell the natural aptness unto the affections, and conditions in men, by the outward notes of the body’” (ibid.).

CONCLUSION 1. William Shakepeare. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, (3.1.93–104). 2. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2. 3. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 2. 4. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Perenial, 2000) 86. 5. Ibid, 80. 6. Mark C. Carnes, “Review of American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era.” Journal of Social History 28.2 (1994): 426. 7. David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 109. 8. Douglas Bruster. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 10.

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9. Ibid, 3. 10. J. Cocke, A Common Player (London, 1615). Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923) IV: 256. 11. Thomas Heywood. An Apology For Actors. Cited in E. K. Chambers, IV.252. 12. William Scott, An Essay of Drapery: Or, The Compleate Citizen (London, 1635) 1. 13. Ibid, 3. 14. Cited in Chambers, IV: 247. 15. Cited in Chambers, IV: 240. 16. Ibid, 241–42.

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Index

actors/acting companies, 20, 28–36, 177 n. 23 Admiral’s Men Company, 29 agricultural practices, 187–88 n. 20. See also enclosures Allen, Giles, 32 Alleyne, Edward, 28; father of, 30 Ancient Constitution, 81, 187–88 nn. 25 and 26 anti-theatricalists, 27, 28 Apology for Actors (Heywood), 90 apprentices, 21, 29, 32, 57, 143, 145, 174–75 n. 9, 182 n. 20, 192 n. 19; energy of, 18, 88–89; holiday of, 58, 59; popularity on stage, 129; as theater audience, 177 n. 25 “Apprentices Warning Piece, The,” 87 artisans, 32, 47, 54–56, 58, 60, 61, 70, 71, 174–75 n. 9, 177 n. 23, 174–75 n. 9, 183 n. 24; diet of, 135; female, 61; and loss of access to land, 78–82; as soldiers, 72, 185 n. 12. See also Shakespeare: 2 Henry VI; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Sharp, Buchanan; Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Armin, Robert, 28, 29 audiences, 177 n. 25 Bakhtin, Mikhail: and carnival, 179 n. 4, 184–85 n. 4; on the classical body, 15; on the open body, 16; and Renaissance culture, 45 Ball, Parson John, 83, 86 barbers/barber-surgeons, 19, 138–40, 197–98 n.16, 199 n. 21 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 167, 168 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 164 Baxter, Richard, 23 Beaumont, Francis, 130. See also Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Bethel, Slingsby, 22 Blackfriar’s Theater, 29, 129, 130, 198 n. 17

body: aesthetics of, 19, 29–31, 33–34, 37–38, 51–52, 54, 90, 124–25; classical, 46; theories of, 14–19, 44–48; uncontrolled, 16. See also grotesque (or open) body; humors/humoral theory Book of the Courtier, The (Castiglione), 46, 96, 97, 102, 112, 115, 156, 160–61, 193 nn. 24 and 25, 198–99 n. 20 Book of Orders, 79–80 Braithwaith, Richard, 99 Brayne, John, 28 Breitenberg, Mark, 14–15, 43 Brett, Robert, 29 Brewer’s Company, 29 Bricklayer’s Company, 28 Bristol, Michael, 14, 81 Brook, Peter, 120, 121 Bruster, Douglas: on the theater, 165 Burbage, Cuthbert, 32 Burbage, James, 28, 29, 32 Burbage, Richard, 31–33 butchers: and Lent, 77 Butler, Judith, 113–14 Butler, Martin, 33 Cahill, Patricia, 74 Cahn, Susan, 63 Cane, Andrew, 29 Carnes, Mark C., 163, 164 Carpenter’s Company, 28 carnival/carnivalesque, 14, 71, 73, 179 n. 4, 184–85 n. 4 Cartelli, Thomas, 92, 93, 159 Chapman, George, 130, 141, 144. See also Eastward Ho charity: dispensation of, 189 n. 33 Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton), 133, 142–44 Chester cycle, 189 n. 29, 183n. 26 Chomley, John, 28 chronicle comedies/chronicle plays, 40–41 Chronicles (Hall), 81 Cities Advocate, The (Bolton), 144, 149

221

222

INDEX

city comedies, 40–41, 129–61 Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, The, 146–47 civility/courtesy, 17, 42, 49, 94, 97, 98, 104, 113, 114, 118, 120, 122, 128 courtesy manual. See Book of the Courtier, The; Institution of a Gentleman, The; civility/courtesy class distinctions, 20–21, 192 n. 19 Cleaver, Robert, 22–23 clothmaking: as commercial activity,173 n. 1 Cogan, Thomas: Haven of Health, 18, 74; on the health of the working man, 74 Cohen, Walter, 33 Coleman, D. C., 25 Common Player, A (Cocke), 167–68 company, 27–29, 36 Compleat Tradesman, The (N.H.), 131–32, 137, 174 n. 5 Complete English Tradesman, The (Defoe), 147, 153–54, 167, 168 conscription, 180 n. 11, 185 nn. 10 and 11 constables, 160 contract theory, 68–69 Cook, Ann Jennalie, 33 Cordwainer’s Company, 182 n. 24 corporeality, 18 Corpus Christi guild theater, 33–36 craftsmen, 13, 19, 20, 25, 30–32 Crosse, Henry, 168–69 Dekker, Thomas. See individual works Description of England (Harrison), 135 document destruction, 186 n. 15 Dod, John, 22–23 Downton, Thomas, 29 Duchess of Malta, The (Webster), 121, 125 Dutch Courtesan, The (Marston), 133, 135 Dyer’s Company, 28 Eagleton, Terry, 59 Earle, John, 149 Eastward Ho (Marston), 42, 143–49, 161 Edward IV (Heywood), 13, 53, 101, 129 effeminacy, 46–47, 51–52, 136, 179 n. 7, 180–81 n. 13 Elias, Norbert: and “the civilizing process,” 16, 45 enclosure, 24, 26, 70, 78–82, 86, 89, 188–89 n. 31 English, John, 29

Englishmen for My Money (Haughton), 129 Erasmus, 144 Essay of Drapery (Scott), 147, 160–61, 168 Every Man In His Humor (Jonson), 165 Every Man Out of His Humor (Jonson), 129, 152, 166–67 execution confessions, 86–87 executions, 186–87n. 17 Eyre, Simon, 180 n. 11, 182 n. 24 Fair Maid of the Exchange, 133 Faludi, Susan, 163–64 Feast of Corpus Christi, 34–35 First Part of The Contention, The, 88, 101 Fisher, F. J., 132–33 Fisher, Will: use of “prosthetics,” 14 Forman, Simon, 65 Fortune Theatre, 28 Foucault, Michel, 38–39, 77–78 Four Prentices of London (Heywood), 129 Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 16 gender, 95, 100, 173–74 n. 4, 181 n. 26 genre, 39–40 George a Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield (Greene), 19, 24, 41, 44, 46, 47, 50–51, 53–54, 58, 69, 71 Gentle Craft, The (Deloney), 66–67, 73 Gibson, Richard, 29 Gilmore, David: on masculinity, 162–64 Globe Theatre, 30 Goldsmith’s Company, 28 Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (Greene), 169 Greville, Fulke, 70 Grocer’s Company, 28, 137, 197 n. 13 grotesque (or open) body, the, 16, 41, 45, 46, 55, 61, 62, 64, 67, 80, 139 guilds, 24, 25, 28, 34–36, 38, 44, 174–75 n. 9, 177 n. 23, 179n. 6, 182 n. 29; display of goods, 36; plays of, 35–39, 287 n. 26. See also company Gul’s Handbook (Dekker), 134 Halio, Jay, 120 handicraft system, 195–96 n. 5. See also guilds Harrison, William, 20–21, 25 Haven of Health (Cogan), 18, 74 Heminges, John, 28 Henry VII, 29

INDEX

Henry VII’s Players, 29 Henry VIII’s Players, 29 Henslowe, Philip, 28 Heroids (Ovid), 123 Heywood, Thomas, 168. See also individual plays Hic Mulierand Haec Vic pamphlets, 201–2 n. 41 Higgins, Anne, 34 highborn vs. lowborn, 94–128, 194–95 n. 33 history plays, 41, 42; and patriotic sentiment, 90 Hoby, Thomas, 96 Hoffman, Michael, 121 holidays, 58, 59 Holinshed, 83 Homily Against Idleness, 23, 27, 84 homoerotics,100 Honest Whore, The (Dekker and Middleton), 18, 42, 43, 133, 135, 149–62, 168 “Honor of a London Prentice, The,” 73 Hopton, Arthur, 90 Howard, Jean, 90; on The Honest Whore, 150, 152, 155, 161; on urban space in the theater, 130 Howell, Martha: on early modern worker’s status, 62–63 humors/humoral theory, 17–18, 51, 150 Hunnis, William, 29 idleness, 22–27, 52–54 If You Know Not Me (Heywood), 27, 23, 49, 130 Ingram, William, 27, 28 Institution of a Gentleman, The, 97–98 Jack of Newberry (Deloney), 73 Jack Straw Rebellion, 81–83, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 40 Jeffes, Anthony, 29 Jewel, Bishop John, 23; on manual labor, 24 Jonson, Ben, 28, 29, 49, 130, 143, 144, 165; on gentlemen, 133 See also individual plays Kahn, Coppélia: on masculinity, 14; on virtus, 14 Karres, Ruth Mazo, 78 Kastan, David, 20, 56 Kathman, David, 28

223

Kemp, William, 30, 33, 42, 91, 92, 190 n. 37 Kent, Joan, 160 Keysar, Robert, 29 King, Thomas, 15 King’s Men, 29 Kirkman, Francis: The Unlucky Citizen, 64 Kline, Kevin, 121 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The (Beaumont), 42, 129, 133, 137–38, 141, 155, 169 Kolve, V. A., 34 labor/laborers, 175–76 nn. 14 and 15. See also apprentices; artisans Laquer, Thomas, 46–47 Leinwand, Theodore, 108–9, 144, 154 Lemnius, Levinas, 150 Levine, Laura, 115–16, 118 Life and Death of Jack Straw, The, 26, 41, 70, 80, 87 London: as trading center, 132, 196 nn. 6 and 7 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 31–32, 120, 190 n. 37 Lord Pembroke’s Company, 190 n. 37 Lord Strange’s Company, 190 n. 37 Low, Jennifer, 148 Lowin, John, 28 Luther, Martin, 22 luxury goods, 133–35, 137, 170 MacCaffrey, Wallace, 46 Magnetic Lady, The (Jonson), 165 manliness/manhood, 13–19, 23, 67, 95–96, 98, 130, 131, 144, 161, 170, 173–74 n. 4. See also individual plays manners: and social status, 179 Manning, Roger B., 78 manual labor/laborers, 15, 16, 19, 24, 28–32, 162–64, 173–74 n.4; dishonoring of, 83; and love of autonomy, 78. See also artisans; individual plays manufacturing, 20, 21, 175 nn. 10 and 11 marriage, 190–91 n. 3, 191 n. 6 Marston, John, 140, 144. See also individual plays Marxism, 20 masterless men, 25. See also vagrants/ vagrancy May games, 72, 73

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melancholy, 198–99 n. 20 Merchant Taylor’s Company, 30 Michaelmas Term, 141–42 Middleton, Thomas, 130. See also individual plays misterie, 20 Montaigne, 99; “On Friendship,” 100 morris dancing, 52, 72–73, 91, 179–80 n. 7, 185 n. 5 Mother Hubbard (Spenser), 26, 27 Munday, Richard and Anthony, 30 Nashe, Thomas, 90 Newman, Karen: on fashion, 136–37 Of the Knowledge and Conducte of Warre (Proctor), 18–19, 74 “On the New Hot-House,” 139 Overburian Characters (Overbury), 134 Palgrave’s Men, 29 Paster, Gail Kern: and the uncontrolled body, 16, 17, 45 Pateman, Carole, 68–69 patrimony, 30–31 Patterson, Annabel, 14, 25, 107, 173n. 2 Paul’s Theatre, 130 Pelling, Margaret, 139–40 Perkins, William, 22 Petrarch, 104, 105, 127 ploughmen, 75 Poor Laws, 86 Postlethwaite, Pete, 121 Practices, Proceeding and Lawes of Armes, The (Sutcliffe), 74 Prince Henry’s Men, 29 private sphere, 68 proletariat, 181 n. 17 Protestant work ethic, 21–22 Prynne, William, 28 queer theory, 15 Rabelais, François, 15 Rackin, Phyllis, 90 Renaissance man, 16 rape/sexual violence, 42, 64–66, 80–81 retail, 19, 21, 130–33 riots, 26, 57, 78, 80, 108, 181 n. 18, 182 n. 20, 187 n. 19

Roaring Girl, The (Dekker and Middleton), 36, 133, 135, 136, 152, 153 romantic comedies, 42, 98–99, 104, 106; artisan characters in, 100 Rose Theatre, 28, 30, 130 Rotundo, E. Anthony: on masculinity, 164 Rutter, Thomas, 21, 24, 31 Sappho and Phao (Lyly), 37, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107, 114, 127–28, 152 satiric comedies, 42, 129–61; targets of, 130 Schneider, Jane, 134 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 161 Seaver, Paul, 60 servants, 191 n. 6, 194–95 n. 33 sexual desire, 54, 55, 99, 101, 132, 170, 180–81n. 13, 191 n. 4 Shannon, Laurie, 99–100 Shakespeare, William: acting career of, 190n. 37; father of, 30 —Works: Coriolanus, 26; 2 Henry VI, 18, 25–27, 32, 38, 41–42, 57–58, 70, 71, 75–78, 81–92, 94, 107, 109, 131, 140, 183–84 n. 1, 184 nn. 2 and 3; Julius Caesar, 16; Love’s Labor’s Lost, 42, 95, 98, 100–102, 116, 124, 127, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 16–17, 25, 42, 94, 98, 100, 101, 107–22, 127–28 Sharp, Buchanan, 26, 78–80 Shepard, Alexandra, 162, 173–74 n. 4 Shoemaker, A; A Gentleman (Rowley), 37 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The (Dekker), 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 36–37, 39–41, 44, 46–71, 94, 129, 130, 141–42, 154, 180n. 10 shopkeepers, 42–43, 130–36, 141–61 Shrove Tuesday, 58, 59 Sir Thomas More, 26, 70, 75 Smith, Bruce R., 14; on blood, 150; on masculinity, 95, 162; on the working man, 14 social estates, 20 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 143 Smyth, William, 32 Stallybrass, Peter, 16, 45, 98 Stevenson, Laura: on merchants and craftsmen, 13 Stow, John, 57 Straw, Jack, 83, 84 Street, Peter, 32 Streitberger, W. P., 29

INDEX

Stubbes, Phillip, 28; on morris dances, 73 Tarlton’s Jests (Tarlton), 29 theater, the, 28, 31, 32, 177n. 23; as challenge to elite culture, 173 n. 2; location of, 32. See also individual theaters Thirsk, Joan, 134, 185 n. 11 Thomas of Reading (Deloney), 73 Thompson, E. P., 59 Tom of All Trades (Powell), 132 Topsell, Edward, 111 torture, 41, 77–78 Touchstone of Complexions, The (Lemnius), 18 traders, 196 nn. 6 and 7 tradesmen/trade, 19–21, 30, 31, 33, 136, 138, 141–43, 147, 149. See also luxury goods trading companies, 28–30; glorified on stage, 129, as vehicles for actors, 29–30 Tyler, Wat, 83, 86 Union of Families (Hall), 88 Unlucky Citizen, The (Kirkman), 64–65 Utopia (More), 88

225

vagrancy/vagabonds, 25–26, 85, 86, 88, 176–77 n. 21, 181 n.14 virtus, 14 wage labor, 24, 47, 57, 59, 82 wages, 176 n. 19, 182 n. 22, 183 n. 29, 188 n. 27 warriors: working men as, 46, 54, 70–78, 81–89, 91–93, 137–38, 185 n. 12 Way to Wealth, The (Crowley), 79 Weber, Max, 21 Webster, John, 30, 130. See also The Duchess of Malta; Westward Ho Westward Ho (Dekker and Webster), 133, 135, 136, 141 White, Allon, 16, 45, 98 Whitefriar’s Theater, 130 Wiles, David, 73 Wise Woman of Hoxton, The (Heywood), 141 women: controlled by men, 152–53; in the workplace, 61, 63–64, 66, 68, 100, 101, 125 work: hours, 182 n. 22; ideologies of, 19–27 working classes, 19–27 Wrightson, Keith, 134