Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare 9781487585938

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CITIZEN COMEDY IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

This is the first book to survey comprehensively the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean citizen comedy. Most studies of the period focus on major authors; this one follows recurring themes and motifs, through a variety of plays by many authors from the moralizing comedies of the public theatres to the satiric comedies of the boys’ companies. Professor Leggatt provides not only a fresh perspective on familiar plays by such figures as Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, but also a new look at a number of neglected comedies, some by unfamiliar authors, some by major authors working together. Standard figures – the usurer, the prodigal, and the prostitute – and standard plots – notably intrigues based on money or sex (or both) – are traced to show the changes that occur in apparently stereotyped material at the hands of individual authors. The result is to display the range and internal variety of a genre that too often is seen as all of a piece, and to show the different ways in which social thinking can interact with the demands of comic form.

This book will interest students of Renaissance English drama, both for its treatment of a neglected type of play and for its comments on individual citizen comedies. Those who are concerned with drama as a vehicle for social commentary will find many points for discussion. is a member of the Department of English of University College, University of Toronto. ALEXANDER LEGGATT

ALEXANDER LEGGATT

Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

© University of Toronto Press 1973 Toronto and Buffalo

Reprinted 2017

ISBN ISBN

978-0-8020-5288 -9 (cloth) 978-I-48 75 -8692-8 (paper)

For Clifford Leech

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Contents

ACKNOWLE DGMENTS / ix 1

Introduction I 3 2 Citizen hero and citizen villain/ 1.4 3 The prodigal/ 33 4 The comedy of intrigue: money and land/ 54 Who wears the breeches / 78 6 Chaste maids and whores / 99 The comedy of intrigue: adultery / 125

8

Conclusion

I 1. 50

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY/ 153 INDEX/ 163

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Acknowledgments

The present study began as a PH o thesis for the Shakespeare Institute, and my first debt of gratitude is to those who helped me at that stage. Eric Pendry and Peter Davison were patient and painstaking advisers, and I also profited from consultation with the Institute's Director, T.J.B. Spencer, with Stanley Wells, and with three of my fellow students (as they then were) who were working on related projects: Doug Sedge, Alan Somerset, and Gordon Williams. In making the revision, I have had the advice of Clifford Leech, J .M.R. Margeson, and Brian Parker, not to mention the anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press, all of whom have commented, helpfully and in detail, on the manuscript at its various stages. I have been saved from much folly and error, and led to explore important material I would otherwise have neglected; I am deeply grateful to all concerned. The follies, errors, and omis­ sions that remain are, of course, my own responsibility. I would also like to thank the librarians of the Shakespeare Institute and of the Nuffield Library at Stratford-on-Avon, who have been unfailingly helpful; and Molly Goodeve, Kitty Page, and Philippa Simpson, who have at various stages produced clear typescript out of chaos. Finally, since money is an important theme in this book, I am glad to ac­ knowledge three debts of a more material kind. The Canada Council provided a research grant that allowed me to spend a summer in re-reading and re­ writing. The book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and with the help of the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press. ALEXANDERLEGGATT

June 1973

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CITIZEN COMEDY IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

NOTE

All references to plays are to the editions listed in section (a) of the Bibliog­ raphy; where there are no line numbers, page numbers have been given. In quoting from these editions, spelling and punctuation have been modernized. Unless otherwise stated, information given about the dates and auspices of the plays is based on Alfred Harbage's Annals of English Drama 975-1700, revised by Samuel Schoenbaum (London, 1964).

1

Introduction

'Citizen comedy' is one of those conveniently vague terms that seem serviceable enough until an attempt is made to define them. A general idea of the sort of play one has in mind (Eastward Ho rather than Twelfth Night) may do for casual references, but the reader of an extended study of citizen comedy in the age of Shakespeare will want a more exact sense of what the term means to the writer. For this writer it means comedy set in a predominantly middle-class social milieu. That definition, however, raises the considerable problem of defining the middle class. Shopkeepers, merchants, and craftsmen who are rich enough to employ the labour of other men fit easily enough into this category, and usually are clearly identified as such in the drama. There are, however, other figures, such as Ford and Page in The Merry Wives'of Windsor, who, without having specific occupations which would help us to place them on the social scale, seem to occupy a middle station-high enough to have comfortable homes, but too low to be called aristocrats. Still others (like Middleton's gal­ lants), though they belong to the landed g�ntry, live and operate in a citizen environment, and (such was the flexibility of social classes at the time) have close relatives in that environment. It is most convenient, then, to define the social milieu of citizen comedy by exclusion. I have selected plays which do not deal predominantly with the court or the aristocracy, but with the fluid, often ill-defined area that lies between this and the lowest class of workmen, servants, rogues, and vagabonds. I have also applied a check which, though it has nothing to do with defining the genre, is intended to keep the discussion within reasonable limits. I am dealing only with plays set in England. This is because, as I will explain in a moment, I am

4 Citizen comedy in the age of Shakespeare most interested in comedies depicting contemporary social situations - situa­ tions the audience themselves might be expected to face - and I feel, as Ben Jonson came to feel, that this can be done most effectively by using a native setting, to which the audience can clearly relate. Two exceptions have been made: The Honest Whore, because its Bedlam and Bridewell scenes give it a definite local reference despite its ostensibly Italian setting; and the Cambridge comedy Club Law, in which Athens is a very thin disguise for the English uni­ versity town. The discussion has also been restricted to plays which can reason­ ably be dated between 1585 and 1625. Jonson's The Staple of News, being a major writer's clearest attempt to deal with two of the commonest themes of the genre, prodigality and usury, has been allowed to slip in, though it really belong to the early months of 1626. Three things should be noticed at once about the collection of plays I have just isolated. First, while these plays are written about the middle class, they are not necessarily written for them. There are exceptions (the citizen-heroes of Dekker and Heywood come to mind), but more often than not the angle from which middle-class characters and situations are portrayed is not determined primarily by the special interests of that class, or of any other. The second point is connected with the first: sometimes class borders are carefully drawn within the plays, so that it becomes important to recognize that we are dealing with citizens, or gentry, or a collision between the two- sometimes, but not always. Often the fluid social group I have attempted to describe will be used to dramatize broad social issues that do not depend on class only. Finally, the category 'citizen comedy' cuts across a variety of comic modes: we find our­ selves dealing with the satiric, the didactic, and the simply amusing, with every­ thing from lightweight farce to pieces that verge on domestic drama. So far this sounds like a recipe for critical confusion, and the question arises, why bother? One answer is that there is a common factor in these plays, au interest in practical social issues: how to get money, and how to spend it; how to get a wife, and how to keep her. This is connected with the social milieu of the plays: the action is often stylized, but the settings are prosaic and familiar - streets, shops, private houses. The characters enter forests only occasionally and courts hardly at all (Simon Eyre does not go to the King; the King comes to him). Courtship and romance, the driving motives of Shakespearean com­ edy, are underplayed here. Young lovers, when present at all, have to make their way in a world of hard bargaining, and it is the bargaining more than the love that commands our attention. This range of interest is still fairly broad, but it is at least clearly defined, and makes of citizen comedy a body of material sufficiently coherent to be worth discussing. In particular, the issues of money

Introduction 5 and sex, and their frequent interaction, will concern us throughout the follo\\­ ing chapters. The standard approach would have been to examine maior authors in succes­ sion, but this creates problems in dealing with Elizabethan comedy, since so many significant plays are anonymous or collaborative works ( expenence shows that in a book with chapters on Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, Eastward Ho gets lost and wanders among the footnotes). It is easy also to lose sight of the rich, varied background provided by lesser known writers, and the loss is twofold: the achievements of the major figures can be more clearly appreciated when compared with conventional work; and the minor figures often have achievements of their own to offer, which have been unjustly neglected. Here, instead, the plays have been approached through the treatment of those social issues that seem to be the common factor in them - bearing in mind that a com­ edy can hardly ever be a simple social tract, and that its tension and energy will depend not on ideas alone but on the interaction of social concern with the requirements and opportunities of comic form. The approach taken in this study puts chronology to one side, and it might be useful to provide here a brief survey of the main lines of development in citizen comedy for the reader (if he feels the need of it) to use as a road map in the next few chapters. The antecedents of c1t1zen comedy are mixed, to say the least. The basic pattern of New Comedy - an intrigue in which a young man plots against an old one to gain money, or the girl of his choice, or both1 - was famil­ iar not only from Plautus and Terence but from the comedy of the Italian Renaissance, which added to it a rival-wooer motif (usually a young man agamst an old one) and a preoccupation with domestic themes, with jealous hus­ bands and Patient Griselda figures.2 This type of comedy found its way to Eng­ land fairly early in the sixteenth century, and there are many instances of Eng­ lish writers, particularly at universities, producing Italianate comedies. 3 The conflict of youth and age, the intrigue based on money and sex, were thus part of a long and vital continental tradition. English drama, in the low-life scenes of the miracle plays, had displayed its own interest in ordinary people and domestic settings. This interest continued in such early comedies as Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1553) and Tom Tyler and his Wife (c.156o). Such motifs See Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Critimm (Pnnceton, 19.57). pp. 44, 163-5 See R. Warwick Bond, Early Plays from the Italian (Oxford, 1911), p. xii, and Marvin T. Her­ rick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana, 1