Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama 3031355636, 9783031355639

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Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama Edited by Ronda Arab Laurie Ellinghausen

Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama

Ronda Arab · Laurie Ellinghausen Editors

Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama

Editors Ronda Arab Department of English Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

Laurie Ellinghausen Department of English University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, MO, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-35563-9 ISBN 978-3-031-35564-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume originated with two Shakespeare Association of America seminars centering broadly on the topics of Shakespeare, class, and social identity: “Class and Intersectionality in Shakespeare” (directed by Laurie with an invited contribution from Ronda) in April 2019 and “Class and Identity in Shakespeare” (co-directed by Laurie and Ronda) in April 2021. We would like to thank the program committee of the SAA for supporting the inclusion of these timely topics, as well as the members of both seminars for sharing their fascinating work and important insights. Quite a few of them feature here as contributors; their essays will allow readers a glimpse into the richness of those conversations. We also wish to thank Palgrave Macmillan for its interest in and publication of this project. Eileen Srebernik, Editor for Literature, Theatre & Performance, attended our 2021 seminar and guided us through the proposal stages leading up to approval. Saranya Siva, Project Coordinator for Springer, assisted us with the manuscript submission and production stages. We wish to extend our thanks as well to any members of the Palgrave Macmillan/Springer team that we did not personally meet, but who nonetheless lent their professional expertise to the creation of this volume. We also thank the English Department at Simon Fraser University for publication funding, which allowed us to access thorough, precise, and expert copyediting. In addition to the above, Laurie would like to thank Ronda, first and foremost, for her partnership in the creation of this volume. Her v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

persistence and professionalism not only made the process achievable, but enjoyable as well. Laurie would also like to thank friends and colleagues at UMKC and throughout the profession—too numerous to name here, but she hopes you know who you are—for their many forms of support, which ranged from casual conversations over coffee, lunch, or dinner to concrete suggestions for promoting and publishing the project. Finally, Laurie wishes to thank her husband, Jeff Callan, for his loving support during even the most difficult days, and her cats, Myles and Reggie, for visiting her home office to provide warmth and softness during the longest and most arduous hours. Ronda thanks Laurie for her remarkable efficiency and precision, for being so easy to work with, and for embodying all that is great about this profession. She thanks the SFU English Department for providing a stimulating and collegial environment for academic and intellectual growth. Ronda would also like to thank her loving and fun family, particularly for their refreshing obliviousness to the work she does.

Contents

1

Introduction Ronda Arab and Laurie Ellinghausen

2

“As of Moors, so of Chimney Sweepers”: Blackness, Race, and Class in George Chapman’s May Day Emily MacLeod

3

“The Moor? She Does Not Matter”: Intersections of Class, Race, Religion, and Gender in Novelizations of The Merchant of Venice Peter Lewis

4

Working-Class Villains: Iago in the Trump Zeitgeist Timothy Francisco

5

Filiation and White Freedom: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Brome’s A Jovial Crew Derrick Higginbotham

6

“Portraiture[s] of Schism”: The Trans-Rogue-Royalism of Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and Mary/Jack Frith Juan Pedro Lamata

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35 53

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CONTENTS

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Class and Climate, or Redemption Comes to Pericles but Not to Spring Sharon O’Dair

8

Red-Green Intersectionality Beyond the New Materialism: An Eco-Socialist Approach to Shakespeare’s The Tempest Daniel Vitkus

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129 149

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Logic-Chopping Servants, Politic Jesters, and Pet Fools Paul Budra

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Wench, Witch, Wife, Widow: The Power of Address Terms in The Witch of Edmonton Laura Kolb

165

Advancing Him, Subjecting Herself: Class, Gender, and Mixed-Estate Marriages in Early Modern Drama Kimberly Huth

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12

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“Too Slight a Thing”: Jane Shore, Womanhood, and Ideological Conflict in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Anna N. Ullmann Women’s Intersectional Shop Labor in the Royal Exchange Christi Spain-Savage

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Counsel, Class, and Just War in Shakespeare’s Henry V Anne-Marie E. Walkowicz

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Sexual Violence as Class Conflict: Seizing Patriarchal Privilege in Early Modern English Drama Ronda Arab

Index

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217 233

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Notes on Contributors

Ronda Arab is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (2011) and The Bonds of Love and Friendship in Early Modern English Literature (2021) and co-editor of Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (2015). Ronda has published in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Renaissance Drama, as well as in several edited collections. Her current book project is entitled Younger Sons in the Age of Primogeniture: Affect, Industry, and Economics. Paul Budra is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. He has published seven books and numerous articles on early modern drama and contemporary popular culture. He is the director of SFU Publications and a past president of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society. Laurie Ellinghausen is Professor of English at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, where she teaches courses in early modern English literature. Her previous publications include Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 (2008) and Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing (2018). She is also the editor of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays (2017). Laurie’s current projects include a digital edition of Thomas Nelson’s Device of the Pageant for the Map of Early Modern London

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(MoEML) and a monograph exploring representations of maritime labor in the popular literature of proto-imperial Britain. Timothy Francisco is Professor of English and director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. He co-edited (with Sharon O’Dair) Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, The Profession, and The Production of Inequity (2019) and has published essays on Public Shakespeare, Marlowe, journalism education, and American politics, in addition to numerous journalistic pieces. Derrick Higginbotham is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa. Currently, he is finishing his book, Winners and Wasters: Queer Desires, Economics, and Theater in Premodern England. He has published articles in Exemplaria, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, and Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. He co-edits the Routledge book series Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities with Nicolas R. Jones. Kimberly Huth is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Her research explores the intersection of the body and the community in early modern English drama. Her work has been published in Studies in Philology, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Renaissance Drama, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. Laura Kolb is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College CUNY. She is the author of Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford 2021) and co-editor of Early Modern Debts 1550–1700 (Palgrave 2020). Her current research focuses on the interplay of gender, power, and trickery in comedy and conduct literature. Juan Pedro Lamata is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. He is currently working on a book project that recovers “masterlessness” as both one of the pivotal challenges confronting the early modern world and one of the period’s central discourses for understanding the rise of early capitalist social relations. Peter Lewis recently completed his doctorate at the Centre for Adaptation Studies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Researching the adaptation of Shakespeare in fiction, his project was entitled, “The Neglect of Portia and Adapting the Unadaptable in Twenty-First-Century

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novelization of The Merchant of Venice.” Its key research question was not what has been adapted but what is not being adapted and why. Related articles have been published in the Shakespeare and Borrowers and Lenders journals. Emily MacLeod is Assistant Teaching Professor of English, theater, and humanities at Penn State Harrisburg. She holds a Ph.D. in English from George Washington University. Her article on racial performance in the Blackfriars boys’ repertory can be found in Early Theatre, and she has written book and theater reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin and Borrowers and Lenders. She is also a director and dramaturg for Shakespeare, musicals, and devised productions for high school and college students. Sharon O’Dair is Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She co-edited Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (2019); edited “Shakespeareans in the Tempest: Lives and Afterlives of Katrina,” a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (2010); is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (2000); and co-edited The Production of English Renaissance Culture (1994). She has published over sixty essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, critical methodology, and the profession of English studies. Christi Spain-Savage is Associate Professor of English at Siena College. She has published articles in the academic journals Studies in English Literature and Early Theatre and chapters in the book collections, Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World and Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London: Gendering the City, which investigates dramatic depictions of women’s labor in relation to London neighborhoods. Anna N. Ullmann is Assistant Professor of English at Bradley University. She writes primarily on early modern English history plays and historiography, city comedies, social and ideological history, and genre theory, and has published articles on Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI . She is currently working on a project entitled Citizens and Kings: Dramatic Genre and Social Consciousness in Early

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Modern England that looks at the generic and ideological relationship between the English history play and the city comedy. Daniel Vitkus holds the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Early Modern Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Vitkus has edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press) and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press). He is also the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Palgrave Macmillan) and numerous articles and book chapters on early modern literature and cultural history. Anne-Marie E. Walkowicz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Humanities at Central State University in Wilberforce, OH. She is currently working on a monograph on the interconnection between the discourse of counsel and the representation in early modern drama of the practice of counsel as a means of political power. In addition to researching political aspects of early modern drama, she also engages in the study of the role of the liberal arts in workforce preparation, and her work appears in Transforming Leadership Pathways for Humanities Professionals in Higher Education.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Ronda Arab and Laurie Ellinghausen

Defining class broadly as an identity categorization based on status, wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama explores class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by social categories apart from those defining terms, including, but not limited to, race, gender, and sexuality. This collection explores intersectional factors influencing class status in early modern England, including how cultural behaviors and non-class social categories affected status and social mobility, in what ways elite prerogatives could be disrupted or entrenched by intersectional factors that informed social identity, and how class position informed the embodied experience and expression of affect, gender, sexuality, and race, as well as relationships to place, space, land, and the natural and civic worlds.

R. Arab Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] L. Ellinghausen (B) University of Missouri – Kansas City, Kansas City, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_1

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To objections that the term “class” is anachronistic, we note that we use “class” as a heuristic device, not as a term strictly germane to any particular period. We recognize that non-elite working people in early modern England did not constitute a “working class” in a strictly Marxist sense: not all working people shared common economic and social interests, and many working people sold what they themselves produced and/ or owned their means of production, rather than selling only their labor power. Moreover, wealthy members of early modern society did not necessarily own the means of production—and thus the labor power of workers—in the sense that the industrialists of the nineteenth century, that period of intense Marxist analysis, held such economic power. As David Kastan writes, “classes in their abstract social sense” have long existed,1 and class in early modern England informed not only one’s role in economic production but also one’s place in the social hierarchy, one’s possession of cultural capital, and one’s educational attainments. Like John Guillory, we define class “in such a way that it assumes both economic and cultural constituents.”2 Class in early modern England was constituted by both culture and economics and, as this collection will show, modified by other sub-categories as well. Why, then, single out class for special consideration? Class matters because of what it helps us explain and understand: inequality; stratification; privilege and marginalization; social, cultural, and economic change and stasis. Structures of hierarchy and obedience, conceived on the basis of bloodlines, wealth, and occupation, permeated day-to-day interactions in early modern England, and class suffused all corners of life, from the revolutionary to the seemingly mundane. Nevertheless, class analysis of early modern English literature has lagged far behind burgeoning critical scholarship on gender, race, and sexuality. New Historicist and Cultural Materialist studies of those identity categories have brought necessary attention to marginalized identities and their relationship to hegemonic iterations of power, yet class remains comparatively elusive as a focal point. Our volume, in response to that gap, aims specifically to explore class and, in response also to recent developments in public policy and the social sciences, treats class as an intersectional phenomenon. The term 1 “Is There a Class in This (Shakespearean) Text?” Renaissance Drama 24 (1993), 101–21, 150. 2 Cited in Sharon O’Dair, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (U of Michigan P, 2000), 9.

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“intersectionality” emerged out of legal discourse in the late 1980s, when Kimberlé Crenshaw employed it to describe how gendered, racial, and class identities (among others) do not operate independently, but intersect in ways that create unique perceptual and experiential lenses not reducible to a single category of identity.3 As a critical tool, intersectionality helps investigate the structural causes of inequality and interrogate and explain the entrenchment of privilege in its various manifestations. It is a useful term for analyzing the politics of inequality in a given society and how those politics show up in various cultural productions. After all, the languages of class possessed a foundational status in early modern English society but were not the sole determining factor in an individual’s social identity. Literary works, drama in particular, tease out the important modifications of class status that go unacknowledged in social descriptions such as William Harrison’s Description of England (1577), where Harrison carefully details the differentiations of degree and status he perceives in his world. One need not look far to find examples of class intersections at work. The political self-presentation of Elizabeth I, for one, reveals an intense awareness of her subject position as both woman and monarch—as the Tilbury speech famously proclaims, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too.”4 Likewise, Shakespeare’s Othello is a “black” Moor whose otherness in Venice is modified by the fact that he proclaims descent from “men of royal siege”5 ; similarly, his status as an important military leader impacts upon his blackness while also intersecting with his royal heritage. His family background and occupation mark him as a different kind of Moor than Shakespeare’s Aaron, a character of indeterminate origins. In both cases, the term “Moor” also signifies Islam and thus the specter of religious difference, as we see in historical accounts of Leo Africanus, a real-life figure believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s Othello. The essays in this collection uncover many

3 “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique

of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989), 139–67. 4 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (U of Chicago P, 2000), I: 326. 5 David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed. (Longman, 1997), 1.2.22.

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such examples, analyzing how dramatic works plot class intersectionalities in a variety of contexts. While much work remains to be done, we are by no means the first scholars to consider class in early modern English literature. Early groundbreaking work by Annabel Patterson and Michael Bristol laid important foundations. In Carnival and Theatre: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, Bristol studies the theater as a forum wherein challenges to elite culture were voiced through the discourses of peasant ideology and popular festivity.6 In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Patterson demonstrates Shakespeare’s engagement with social realities that affected the lives of common people and traces voices of popular protest through his plays.7 Chris Fitter positions his much later work as a development of Patterson’s, arguing in Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career that Shakespeare’s class politics are considerably more subversive, populist, and anti-establishment than has been generally accepted.8 Along similar lines, Shakespeare and the Politics of the Commons: Digesting the New Social History, edited by Fitter, offers a collection of essays that “demonstrates Shakespeare’s sympathetic representation of a critical popular voice.”9 Patterson’s interest in Shakespeare’s attitude toward ordinary working people is one that many early modernists have developed; the greatest amount of work on class explores the social and ideological implications of how common, working people appear in literary texts. Studies of working people in early modern literature mostly began in the 1970s and 1980s. Alexander Leggatt’s Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare first brought attention to a genre of comedy “set in a predominantly middle class social milieu”; he examines plays celebrating “the wealth and social usefulness of the citizen-hero,” as well as the more satirical citizen comedies that offer a “keener awareness of class distinctions, and a tendency to depict class warfare.”10 Relations among social groups in city plays are also taken up by Theodore Leinwand in The City Staged: Jacobean City Comedy, 1603–1613, which examines “status group rivalry” and “the 6 Methuen, 1985. 7 Basil Blackwell, 1989. 8 Routledge, 2011. 9 Oxford UP, 2017; Oxford Scholarship Online, 2022, 29. 10 U of Toronto P, 1973, 43, 15, 9.

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sources of the conflict that pitted one status group against another.”11 Laura Stevenson’s Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Culture argues that middling-sort craftsmen and merchants were praised only in terms reflecting quasi-feudal and chivalric aristocratic values that had little to do with the experiences of actual craftsmen and merchants.12 Stevenson’s argument, however, is incomplete, as shown to some degree by Leggatt and Leinwand’s work and by a great deal of later work. Jean Howard’s analysis of the non-Shakespearean history play, for instance, demonstrates how Thomas Heywood foregrounds the world view of the burgher class “whose identity was bound up with their productive labor, their patriotism, and their companionate marriages.”13 Joan Pong Linton demonstrates that “bourgeois heroism” (Stevenson’s term) could be “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,”14 thus introducing ways in which mercantile acumens may have revised and even disrupted traditional definitions of nobility. Ronda Arab’s Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage illuminates a range of work-oriented masculinities in early modern drama that position positive models of manliness in terms particular to work or the working man’s experience and that challenge the hegemony of aristocratic masculinity.15 Arab also offers evidence from seventeenth-century plays that the urban environment of London could disrupt cultural distinctions between gentlemen and citizens, helping to forge high-status, performative modes of early modern masculinity that were not contingent on claims of gentility.16 The experiences and subjectivities of working people are explored by several other critics as well. Mark Thornton Burnett’s Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture examines “mixed 11 U of Wisconsin P, 1986, 8, 7. 12 Cambridge UP, 1984. 13 “Other Englands: The View from the Non-Shakespearean History Play,” Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (U of Delaware P, 1999), 141. 14 The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge UP, 1998), 63. 15 Susquehanna UP, 2011. 16 “Witty City Boys: Urban Masculinity and City Gallants in The City Wit, Greene’s

Tu Quoque, and The City Madam,” Renaissance Drama 49.2 (2021), 155–77.

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attitudes towards patterns of labour, a developing class consciousness, court and country relations and growing opportunities for social aggrandizement” in a wide range of literature in which servants prominently appear.17 Laurie Ellinghausen’s Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 examines “the texts of non-aristocratic writers who represented their own writing as material work and claimed labor as a positive value for writing” against the values of “decoration, ambiguity, and effortlessness” that characterized writerly personas associated with the court.18 Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda’s Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama offers a collection of essays that explore the “interface between changing or historically emergent modalities of work and forms of subjectivity.”19 The value of work and the ideological discourses constructed around work are the focus of both Dowd’s Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture and Tom Rutter’s Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage.20 Korda’s Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage recovers a lost history of women’s work in theatrical production.21 These studies, taken together, complicate contemporaneous associations of work, particularly manual labor, with ignoble drudgery, showing ways in which labor generated new forms of social and economic value. This is not to say, however, that all early modern literary representations of class did serious revisionary work—some aimed primarily to entertain, even as they revealed widespread cultural anxieties about social mobility and the effects of capitalist modes on traditional ways of life. The phenomenon of “rogue literature” provides a case in point. Below middling-sort working people in the social hierarchy was an underclass of vagrants, beggars, and masterless men that inspired a great deal of anxiety among their social superiors. William C. Carroll’s Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare engages with the social problem of poverty, describing “some of the aesthetic, political, and socioeconomic uses to which different representations of the beggar were put” and asking why beggars were “so often feared by 17 Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1997, 5. 18 Ashgate, 2008, 1. 19 Routledge, 2011, 3. 20 Palgrave, 2009; Cambridge UP, 2008. 21 U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.

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the general public.”22 Linda Woodbridge’s Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature argues that rogue literature was a “mythmaking engine” which, along with government statutes exaggerating the threat vagrants posed, manufactured a public enemy in order to “project or displace fears of other kinds of change and mobility: religious and intellectual change, social mobility.”23 In similar fashion, Ellinghausen’s Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing explores the figure of the rogue in his internationalized form, that is, as the renegade who sought illicit forms of social mobility and economic gain by operating abroad as pirate, unofficial diplomat, or mercenary soldier.24 Another significant area of early modern class studies takes emergent capitalism as its framework, often in a way that displays the influence of Marxist analytics. Gabriel Egan in Shakespeare and Marx “aims to explain the past and present influence of Marxism for Shakespeareans,” while Richard Halpern’s The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital uses a Marxist theoretical framework to situate the literary and rhetorical culture of the English Renaissance within the pre-capitalist process of primitive accumulation.25 The essays in Marxist Shakespeares, edited by Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, anticipate the intersectional focus of the present volume by aiming to “model the many ways in which contemporary Marxist scholarship can be in productive conversation with feminist, anti-racist, and post-structuralist work”; the editors argue that “‘class’ relations cannot be considered to possess a priority” and that contemporary Marxist scholarship must not take a “simple methodological focus on the analytic category of ‘class’ as opposed to race, gender, or ethnicity.”26 Daniel Vitkus and Mark Netzloff consider emergent capitalist systems within the globalized economy of overseas trade and colonialism. Netzloff’s England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern Colonialism examines how “relations of class and labour shaped

22 Cornell UP, 1996, 1, 3. 23 U of Illinois P, 2001, 2, 26. 24 U of Toronto P, 2018. 25 Oxford UP, 2004, 1; Cornell UP, 1991. 26 Routledge, 2001, 6, 7.

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colonial projects and settlements” and addresses the “mutual constitutiveness of internal colonialism in early modern England and early English overseas colonial ventures.”27 Vitkus, in much of his work, stresses the role of the maritime economy in the extraction of surplus value and pre-capitalist primitive accumulation. In “Labor and Travel on the Early Modern Stage: Representing the Travail of Travel in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare’s Pericles ,” he examines representations of maritime travel that either occlude suffering or emphasize it, arguing for the ideological purposes of presenting “the difficulty of travel as a heroic test” or, contrarily, concealing “the harsh labor and the high mortality rate that underpinned the profitability of commercial voyaging.”28 In “English Captivity Narratives, Commercial Transformation, and the Economy of Unfree Labor in the Early Modern Period,” Vitkus focuses on the “production and function of captivity narratives,”29 which concealed the violence of the trade in bodies at the foundation of the emerging modern world capitalist system. Another area of class study in early modern English literary analysis examines the boundaries between social groups, boundaries rendered considerably more permeable by economic changes in pre-capitalist England. Anxieties and tensions surrounding wealthy, upwardly mobile commoners run through seventeenth-century city plays, examined by the critics mentioned above as well as others, such as Urvashi Chakravarty in “Livery, Liberty, and Legal Fictions” and Paul Yachnin in “Social Competition in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term.”30 Frank Whigham, in “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama,” examines how cross-class courtly sexuality is problematized and marked as transgressive in Jacobean drama.31 The theater itself was a target of moralist concern about the seeming fluidity of social rank, as Kastan notes, for while sumptuary laws were meant to curb social cross-dressing on the streets, “[t]he successful counterfeiting of social rank” in theatrical productions “raise[d] the unnerving possibility that

27 Palgrave 2003, 2, 1. 28 Dowd and Korda, 226. 29 Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean, 1550–1810, ed. Mario Klarer (Routledge, 2018), 56–75, 58. 30 ELR 42:3 (2012), 365–90; Explorations in Renaissance Culture 13 (1987), 87–99. 31 ELH 55.2 (1988), 333–50.

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social rank is a counterfeit, existing ‘but as a change of garments’ in a play.”32 Patricia Akhimie shifts the focus toward the presumed alignment between class and conduct in Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, where she argues that only “a privileged group was characterized by its capacity and desire to improve.” That privileged group was distinguished by the presumed associations of nobility with whiteness, as within the early modern ideology of conduct, “a somatic marker like indelible blackness signal[ed] an indelible social difference” and was “understood as an incapacity for engaging in self-improvement.”33 While most early modernists approach class from a historicist perspective, critics such as Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco connect these perspectives to present-day concerns. The essays in their edited collection Shakespeare and the 99% interrogate both the inequities across higher education in the United States and higher education’s contributions to inequity. Early modernists from a range of different institutional positions “offer ways to reimagine scholarship, pedagogy, and indeed higher education” in an effort to guide academia toward greater equity.34 This volume can be seen as extending O’Dair’s earlier work in Class, Critics, and Shakespeare, which addresses “the role of education in establishing and maintaining class distinction or inequality” and “the existence, indeed the persistence, of class bias among intellectuals.”35 In that monograph, O’Dair interweaves themes of class, status, emerging capitalism, and education in Shakespeare with issues of class within the contemporary academy. The sort of intersectional analysis that inspires this volume is found in some of the studies mentioned above. Akhimie’s work is particularly notable for bringing race and the marked body to bear directly on performative class, or conduct. Given that class or status, despite its relative fluidity in early modern England, was often conceptualized as a type of absolute bodily difference, a difference of blood, it is perhaps not surprising that early modern scholars of race have been particularly attuned to the intersectionality of race and class, as well as the importance of other identity categories in the construction of race. Women, “Race,”

32 “Is There a Class,” 106. 33 Routledge, 2018, 5. 34 Palgrave, 2019, 7. 35 2.

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and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, offers several essays analyzing intersections of race, gender, and class.36 Ania Loomba demonstrates in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism that “we can trace how vocabularies of race draw upon a whole range of ideas about skin colour, location, religion, rank, and gender.”37 Similarly, for Ian Smith, “speaking of race means positioning whiteness in relation to other social identities and classes.”38 In Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England, Sujata Iyengar engages in conversations “between various early modern ways of figuring difference (bodily, cultural, and social),” while in “Is Black so Base a Hue?” Jean Howard asks: “Can racialized figures be assigned stable class positions in early modern drama? Does race in some way determine class or does race obliterate class distinctions?”.39 On the intersection of class and gender, there is also much fine work. A number of the essays in Marxist Shakespeares focus attention “on the gendered nature of work,”40 as does Korda in Labors Lost and Dowd in Women’s Work. Karen Raber’s Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama argues that well-born women writers used closet drama to critique gender relations, examine “the nature of collective class identity,” and valorize “aristocratic and humanist values.”41 Constance Jordan in “Renaissance Women and the Question of Class” brings class and gender together, using a Marxist definition of class “to assess more precisely the usefulness of considering Renaissance women in relation to the structures of class, and especially the status of the ‘unfree’ worker.”42 Gender and class are considered intersectionally in Arab’s Manly Mechanicals, where she examines the intersection of discourses of manliness and the common-born, male manual laborer.

36 Routledge,1994. 37 Oxford UP, 2002, 7. 38 “Speaking of Race,” in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of

America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (Bloomsbury, 2016), 118–22, 121. 39 U of Pennsylvania P, 2005, 1; Callaghan and Gossett, 107–13, 108. 40 Howard and Shershow, 8. 41 U of Delaware P, 2001, 16, 20. 42 Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James

Grantham Turner (Cambridge UP, 1993), 90–106, 91.

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There are, however, no essay collections that take intersectionalities of class as the primary lens of analysis in the study of early modern English literature, and this is the gap we set out to fill. Given the diverse identities populating the early modern social landscape, readers can expect to see a rich variety of intersections explored here. Moreover, each permutation will register differently according to the nature of each dramatic narrative, the generic form it adopts, and its intended audience. Drama presents an ideal opportunity for exploring intersectional dynamics, given the proliferation of genres and audiences that characterize the early modern stage. Moreover, performance contexts themselves call into question the putatively essential nature of class, gender, race, and other markers of difference. Some essays in this collection contextualize their analyses within early modern social, political, and material practices. Others explore modern adaptations (novels, films, and live productions) in order to expand upon the cultural work done by early playtexts and thus bring those texts to bear on present-day concerns. Readers will find approaches from all over the historical and methodological spectrum here. The first essay, Emily MacLeod’s “‘As of Moors, so of Chimney Sweepers’: Blackness, Race, and Class in George Chapman’s May Day,” offers an example of how the material conditions surrounding a play can shape its engagement with class. This Jacobean comedy features the spectacle of a child actor in blackface playing Lorenzo, a foolish old gentleman who disguises himself as a chimney sweep, a working-class figure, in order to seduce a married woman. That Lorenzo blackens his face with soot, the same materials used on the early modern stage to impersonate Moors, demonstrates what Akhimie calls a “racialization of class difference” through a physical marker. Through this common material stage practice, May Day is linked to other plays depicting class and race and helps us see how the two categories exert pressure on each other and on the lives of individuals. Peter Lewis’s “‘The Moor? She Does Not Matter’: Intersections of Class, Race, Religion, and Gender in Novelizations of The Merchant of Venice” also takes up class and race and adds religion to the intersectional analysis. Lewis cites Kim Hall, the first scholar to pay sustained attention to the presence of the Moorish servant at Belmont—a silent, invisible character who nonetheless raises the disturbing possibility that Portia, the play’s wealthy white heroine, is a slave owner. While the influence of class is highly visible at Belmont, a locale that exemplifies the power of hereditary wealth, the mention of the female Moorish servant—allegedly

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pregnant by the clown Launcelot Gobbo—deepens the gendered and racial tensions initially evident in Portia’s far more-discussed dismissal of the Prince of Morocco. Noting the ways in which stage productions have historically struggled to adequately represent the Moorish servant, Lewis shifts our focus to contemporary novelizations of the play, where frictions between class, race, gender, and religion foreground important aspects of Merchant that often do not come through in performance. With Timothy Francisco’s “Working-Class Villains: Iago in the Trump Zeitgeist,” we pivot away from the white moneyed classes of early modern Venice toward the white working classes of the twenty-first-century United States, a population that has received much media scrutiny since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Francisco analyzes several of the productions of the play that surged in number during the Trump era, alongside concomitant political discourse that took shape on television and social media. Critics reviewing these productions noted the ways in which Iago appeared as a resentful “white working-class” embodiment of simmering racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, thus loading Shakespeare’s most iconic villain with contemporary political significance. Francisco’s analysis uncovers how white working-class masculinity was represented in high culture during Trump’s ascendancy. Just as Lewis sees novelizations of Merchant bringing race–class tensions to the forefront in ways that productions have not, so does Francisco find that raceand class-conscious productions of Othello vividly picture the conflicted discourses of race and class that characterize, yet are often muddled within, a wider political landscape. Derrick Higginbotham’s “Filiation and White Freedom: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Brome’s A Jovial Crew” also engages race and class, situating them in early modern discourses about land ownership, freedom, and heteroerotic desire. The play follows the daughters of the wealthy landowner Oldrents as they decide to become beggars and, in search of adventure and freedom, join a crew that arrives on their estate. Complicating this pattern of upper-class women cosplaying vagrants, however, is Oldrents’ steward Springlove who, despite Oldrents’ attempts to help him improve socially, joins a community of vagabonds every spring, temporarily leaving Oldrents’ carefully managed estate for “the highways and commons.” Significantly, the frustrated Oldrents resolves to no longer try “to wash this Moor,” a statement that explicitly racializes Springlove’s desire to join the significantly lower-class vagabonds, casting that desire as a compromise of his whiteness. Higginbotham explores the

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play’s depiction of the relations between place and race, ultimately arguing that the play invokes heteroerotic desire in order to render whiteness a feature of the landowning class. The concept of freedom links Higginbotham’s essay to Juan Pedro Lamata’s “‘Portraiture[s] of Schism’: The Trans-Rogue-Royalism of Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and Mary/Jack Frith,” which examines freedom in transcontinental context and also within the field of transgender studies. Lamata considers the literary and historical lives of two well-known cross-dressing women from the early modern period: Mary Frith, aka England’s “Moll Cutpurse,” and her Spanish contemporary Catalina/Antonio Erauso, aka “the lieutenant nun,” so-called for having lived as a man in Spain’s American colonies. Lamata asks why, at precisely the same moment during the English and Iberian empires, these two criminally “masterless” yet staunchly royalist figures garnered such widespread fascination. The answer seems to rest in the way Frith and Erauso became sites of ideological contestation, prompting audiences to examine the shifting ways in which land, property, and labor were conceptualized, distributed, and amassed in the early modern period. Land, travel, and migration figure heavily in accounts of Frith and Erauso, as they do in Sharon O’Dair’s “Class and Climate, or, Redemption Comes to Pericles but Not to Spring.” While Spring, Ali Smith’s 2019 novel addressing the problem of global migration, is not a direct adaptation of Pericles, the novel’s teenage character Florence draws on Shakespeare’s Marina in the sense that Florence sings beautifully, helps prostitutes escape their situations, and urges authority figures to do their jobs. Unlike Marina, however, Florence is not of noble parentage, is not destined for a noble marriage, and empathizes greatly with the lower classes. Her goodness, that is, does not imply high social status as it does in the case of her Shakespearean counterpart and therefore, O’Dair argues, the novel prompts us to ask what individual goodness offers us in the twenty-first century. If Pericles charts redemption through the passage of time, Spring urges faith and hope in the future as time dwindles and the catastrophe of climate change looms. O’Dair’s eco-critical approach to examining twenty-first-century capitalism and climate change links it to the following essay by Daniel Vitkus, who also considers these topics with respect to one of Shakespeare’s late romances. “Red-Green Intersectionality Beyond the New Materialism: An Eco-Socialist Approach to Shakespeare’s The Tempest ” is grounded in a critique of the “new materialism,” an approach that is sometimes framed

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as radical eco-critical anti-anthropocentrism. Yet when this form of materialism becomes the basis for critical practice, Vitkus argues, it fails to properly locate the causes of ecocide within humanity itself; it also lacks attention to social class as a key category. Rather than turning away from questions of human agency toward the non-human, Vitkus proposes a dialectical materialist approach, one far better suited to confronting the ravages of neoliberal capitalism and its agents. Taking Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a case study, Vitkus takes that play’s attention to nature/ culture boundaries and hierarchies as an opportunity to test the possibilities and limitations of the new materialism and, as a better alternative, imagine a critical practice that more fully accounts for the connections between class structure and ecocide. The Tempest, set on an enchanted island in which magic mediates between spirit and matter, presents an ideal occasion for exploring the impacts of human-centered hierarchical domination on the natural world. With Paul Budra’s and Laura Kolb’s essays, the volume turns toward an exploration of affect, a topic of recent critical attention that nonetheless remains under-explored with respect to class. “Logic-Chopping Servants, Politic Jesters, and Pet Fools” analyzes affect as a class-related phenomenon, as Budra argues that early modern class hierarchies required the common majority to perform supplication to their superiors and thus proclaim their own putative inferiority; these humbling, often humiliating, gestures reified class-based social divisions as much as codified restrictions imposed by laws. However, Budra notes, social inferiors could also subvert those affective postures, as we see in plays such as Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, Budra examines how small acts of passive resistance, when performed onstage, complicate the relationship between emotion and affect in class-charged encounters, with “logic chopping” as a key illustration of how class resistance complicates the emotion/affect dialectic. Laura Kolb’s “Wench, Witch, Wife, Widow: The Power of Address Terms in The Witch of Edmonton” extends the exploration of class and affect, with explicit attention to how those categories intersect with gender. Kolb analyzes the play’s acts of naming and how these acts confer various classed and gendered identities among characters, discovering, through tracking characters’ reactions to being named and therefore “placed,” two radically divergent perspectives on the relationship between selfhood and social identity. In the witch plot, the “witch”

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Elizabeth Sawyer maintains that the names for social categories represent false constructions and that social place therefore does not equal person. The parallel domestic tragedy plot represents the general consensus that names stabilize social places and social places stabilize persons. The play’s acts of naming, therefore, highlight both the ways in which naming defines a person’s “place” and how such naming calls attention to the disjuncture between name and self. While Kolb homes in on the role of address terms in shaping gendered and classed identities, Kimberly Huth’s essay examines class and gender within the context of mixed-class marriages. “Advancing Him, Subjecting Herself: Class, Gender, and Mixed-Estate Marriages in Early Modern Drama” begins by noting the uneasy coexistence of the aristocracy with wealthy commoners in early modern England, a tension which invites us to scrutinize the intersection of bloodlines and economic status within the discourse of marriage. Examining Twelfth Night and The Duchess of Malfi, Huth analyzes situations in which an aristocratic woman is united with a man of lower status, asking whether women, from within the circumscribed position allotted to them by patriarchal discourse, could effectively serve as instruments of status transformation for their husbands. A comparison of plays reveals the systemic and generic factors enabling women to be a means of class transformation for their husbands; it also uncovers the dynamics that can limit this mobility. Anna N. Ullmann’s “Too Slight a Thing: Jane Shore, Womanhood, and Ideological Conflict in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV ” also explores the discourses of marriage that Huth’s essay shows to be rich terrain for intersections of class and gender. Focusing on the domestic tragedy plot of Heywood’s play, Ullman argues that Jane’s dilemma encapsulates the tension between the play’s domestic and political elements and that the play’s treatment of Jane demonstrates the particular struggles of an early modern citizen woman caught between the cultural dictates of monarchical society and the values of the citizen class. Heywood’s version of Jane differs considerably from the “Mistress Shore” of his source material: rather than a “warning for fair women” and other ambitious, discontented wives, Heywood’s Jane is a dutiful wife in a happy, companionate marriage and an example of chaste, middle-class womanhood. Her tragic fall is therefore not due to her moral failings, but to the ideological and generic dilemma in which she is positioned as a female citizen protagonist in a history play, a genre dominated by kings. The ideological conflicts that exist between the male characters thus are literally embodied in Jane

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and in the impossibility of fulfilling her duty to both her king and her husband. Ullmann’s essay raises questions about the status of women in protocapitalist London more generally, and Christi Spain-Savage’s “Women’s Intersectional Shop Labor in the Royal Exchange” follows with a consideration of the female producers and consumers who populated the upper-level arcade of London’s Royal Exchange, known as the Upper Pawn. Critics have observed how male customers in city plays frequently view female shop workers as sexual objects to be purchased and female customers as greedy wives taking advantage of their husbands. Spain-Savage shifts the critical focus toward financial exchanges between women, which she analyzes in the unattributed play The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Peter Erondell’s French–English language manual The French Garden. These texts depict women of different classes making investments, trading with one another, and competing for economic advantage, and they show how literary portrayals of women’s shops brought gender, class, and geography into conversation during England’s transition to a capitalist consumer economy. With the last two essays, the volume turns toward direct confrontations between the elite and the low-born, with attention to episodes of war and violence. In exploring the interrelation between the concepts of counsel and just war in early modern political thought, Anne-Marie E. Walkowicz’s “Counsel, Class, and Just War in Shakespeare’s Henry V ” explains how monarchs were advised to seek input and thoroughly weigh consequences before pursuing military engagement, as Henry appears to do at the start of the play when he seeks the advice of his inner circle on pursuing the French crown. But the scene also shows, as Walkowicz demonstrates, that the practice of counsel depends on the politics of intimacy. Henry’s vision of a great war speaks mainly to members of his own class in terms of mutual ideals of wealth, ancestry, and reputation; the privilege of bloodlines reinforced here is then reiterated by frequent references to “blood” throughout the play. However, the meaning of “blood” alters in the discourse of the rank-and-file of the battlefield, where common soldiers must shed their blood in Henry’s “argument.” The play’s representations of these conscripted soldiers bring class differences to bear on questions of just war, presenting a different perspective than that of Henry and his aristocratic intimates.

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In “Sexual Violence as Class Conflict: Seizing Patriarchal Privilege in Early Modern English Drama,” Ronda Arab also focuses on representations of lower-class men, examining the intersection of sexual violence with class relationships and class conflict. Arab examines a number of plays—Heywood’s Edward IV Part 1, Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday—that depict sexual violence or threats of sexual violence being used by lowborn men against higher-status women as a means by which to level class distinctions between men and to assert authority and status within a patriarchal society that distributes masculine privilege unequally among men. As Arab notes, these dramatic examples depict lowborn men’s attempts to make gender privilege trump class privilege, as these men assert their alleged masculine superiority over women whose class status is greater than theirs. These essays explore not only a range of identitarian markers that intersect with class, but the variety of ways in which these identities relate to one another—in mutual support, as modifications of one another, or in conflict for ascendancy. Yet perhaps more importantly, they argue for an approach to early modern identity that not only attends to class but also pays close heed to the ways in which race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and culture determine how class is embodied and expressed. The rich array of topics and approaches featured here will, we hope, prompt scholars to seek new ways in which drama depicts class intersectionalities across early modern society.

CHAPTER 2

“As of Moors, so of Chimney Sweepers”: Blackness, Race, and Class in George Chapman’s May Day Emily MacLeod

Performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at Blackfriars around 1604, George Chapman’s May Day is most recognized today for its slippery presentations of gender and sexuality, along with themes of age, class, and status.1 Lucy Munro observes that the boy company’s “performance of age helps to prevent their performances of gender and class from becoming fully naturalized within the narrative fiction.”2 These

1 See Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Volume V: 1603–1608 (Oxford UP, 2015), 139. 2 “Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children’s Drama,” in Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, ed. Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston (Palgrave, 2018), 229.

E. MacLeod (B) Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_2

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performances of gender and class, I argue, include an additional citation of racialized stagecraft: the spectacle of a blackened face that makes a cross-class disguise also a racialized one. In one subplot of the play, the old Venetian nobleman Lorenzo desires Francischina, the wife of the swaggering soldier Quintiliano. Angelo, a servant, convinces Lorenzo to disguise himself as a chimney sweep named Snail so the old man can visit Francischina undetected.3 Lorenzo paints his face black to imitate the sooty visage of the chimney sweep (and to shield his identity from passersby). On his way to Francischina’s house, he is waylaid briefly by some friends, who have heard of the plot from Angelo and have come to mock him. Thinking that he has escaped them unrecognized, Lorenzo arrives at Francischina’s, only to be thrust into the coal house until her husband Quintiliano comes back and chases him out into the street. The play ends with a May Day celebration, during which Lorenzo appears with a clean face and his friends discuss bringing Snail (the real one) to be part of the night’s entertainment. Thanks to some quick thinking on Angelo’s part, Lorenzo is spared that confrontation (or, potentially, the opportunity for a repeat performance of his own). The temporary black cosmetic applied to the disguised Lorenzo’s skin represents a sooty substance that created a much more lasting mark on the actual laboring bodies to which it adhered in this period. Patricia Akhimie has identified a strong link between such “stigmatized” bodily markers of class and race, and she defines such markers as “an arbitrary bodily sign that has taken on a specific and negative significance.”4 According to Akhimie, certain individuals in early modern society were deemed incapable of “cultivation”; in other words, they were unable to implement “strategies for self-improvement through coded conduct” that allowed privileged others to advance in early modern society.5 These lower-class individuals often acquired and maintained somatic bodily markers that were perceived as indelible both to them as individuals and to the social

3 The moniker “Snail” also gestures toward potential houselessness (he might “carry his house on his head,” As You Like It , 4.1.59), his slow pace, and his horns. Another connection with the sweep is soot, which, according to Gervase Markham, can also be used for the killing of snails (The Second Booke of the English Husbandman..., London, 1614, 46). 4 Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018), 4. 5 8.

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group to which they belonged. They were “bruised and beaten, wasted, hardened by toil, and darkened by exposure to sun.”6 It is in this manner of marking, Akhimie argues, that the subjugated body is associated with the black body, when darker skin color becomes a somatic mark synonymous with coerced labor, violence, and oppression. A sweep’s continual contact with dirty chimneys made the darkening of his skin and clothes a daily reality. Charles Phythian-Adams describes eighteenth-century sweeps as “permanently stained with soot,” and the young apprentices were “said in many cases to have worked for four or five years without once being washed.”7 While soot as a substance could be easily washed off, the frequent comparisons discussed below of the dark skin of Africans with that of chimney sweeps in this period shows that even if the mark of soot could literally be removed, the association between sweeps and blackness was permanent. I contend that the stain of soot on the chimney sweep in this period— like the examples in Akhimie’s work of Dromio’s bruises in Comedy of Errors or Caliban’s pinched skin in The Tempest —became a somatic marker that brought negative associations of working-class individuals and foreign ethnicities together. May Day offers a particularly compelling staging of this phenomenon. The play presents a cross-class disguise that becomes racialized by the language used to describe Lorenzo’s performance. The spectacle of his black painted face was akin to other painted faces of stage Moors, for example in Othello (which might have premiered around the same time as May Day).8 What begins as a crossclass masquerade transforms into a spectacle akin to what Ian Smith has termed “racial cross-dressing” as well as a performance that highlights a

6 27. 7 “Milk and Soot: The Changing Vocabulary of a Popular Ritual in Stuart and Hanove-

rian London,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 98. For more about sweeps in later literature, see Claire Lamont, “Blake, Lamb and the Chimney Sweeper,” The Charles Lamb Bulletin 76 (1991), 110. 8 For a comparison of May Day and Othello (without reference to their shared blackface performances), see Bart van Es, “Shakespeare versus Blackfriars: Satiric Comedy, Domestic Tragedy, and the Boy Actor in Othello,” in Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (Cambridge UP, 2017), 100– 20.

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repertory system using repetition of stage images to render its stagecraft more legible to its audience.9 The absence of the real sweep Snail from the play reflects the absences of both the working poor and people of color in historical archives. Writing on the comparisons of chimney sweeps and Moors or Africans in this time is doubly challenging due to the lack of historical records concerning both populations. There was no official guild for chimney sweeps in the seventeenth century, so there are few early official records of the profession.10 That scarcity of information also affects the histories of people of color in early modern England, as Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives has shown. The difficulty of recovering histories that have been erased or never recorded at all leads, Habib argues, to the “historical reality” of people of color “fad[ing] under the deformative force of cultural metaphor” and becoming “exotic fiction.”11 While my work here is focused on metaphor and the ways that language and spectacle in early modern performance influenced ideas about race and class, I acknowledge the lived realities of the Africans present in London at this time and the work of scholars of color like Habib who have advanced the study of early modern race and its intersectionalities. In other words, I am not implying in my focus on blackness that skin color has ever been the sole marker of racialization. It is but one component among many— such as family lineage, nationality, and religion—that constitute what Ayanna Thompson calls the “unstable, inconsistent, erratic, unbalanced, mercurial, and seemingly capricious” nature of early modern racecraft.12 By contrast, early modern concepts of social differentiation—such as rank, degree, and estate—are usually categorized as determined; despite “individual mobility,” Keith Wrightson explains, the social hierarchy was

9 Smith, “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-dressing on the Early Modern Stage,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003), 33–67. 10 Sweeps occupy a similar status to the “unsettled” poor and other day laborers of the time. See Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (U of Chicago P, 2006). 11 Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Ashgate, 2008), 7. 12 “Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries? An Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge UP, 2021), 8.

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“deemed to be unchanging in its essential structures.”13 Early modern performance puts pressure on this idea of fixity by featuring many depictions of cross-class mobility and disguise and emphasizing the performative aspects of class, where an ordinary player could portray a king. In thinking about the performance of race and class together, Jean Howard wonders if “racialized figures” can even have “stable class positions in early modern drama” and whether “race in some way determine[s] class or... obliterate[s] class distinctions.”14 By engaging with blackness as a symbol of class difference that then becomes racialized, I see class and race in early modern London as what Mark Netzloff calls “mutually constitutive categories,” shaping one another and reflecting old anxieties while also creating new tensions.15 May Day and its festive performance of racialized disguise illustrate through metaphor and spectacle how racial difference becomes legible through (and linked with) a depiction of social inferiority. The blackface disguise of the chimney sweep in the play might also have its roots in traditions such as medieval mumming and morris dancing, which used blackened faces and disguises in their performances at festive times of the year, including May Day celebrations.16 May Day begins with the customary dancing and youthful spectacle of a May Day celebration from its outset, where the old Lorenzo celebrates the “lusty bloods” of the children after their song and dance , “fit observance for / this May morning” (1.1.1–2). The use of the chimney sweep as the disguising figure in the play translates this custom to the urban setting and combines English anxieties about foreignness

13 “Class,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Palgrave, 2002), 134. 14 “Race and Class: Is Black So Base a Hue?” in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (Bloomsbury, 2016), 108. 15 England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Palgrave, 2003), 4. 16 Andrea Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2013), 91. John Forrest questions the relationship between “Moor” and “morris” in The History of Morris Dancing, 1438–1750 (U of Toronto P, 1999), 365– 7. See also Claire Sponsler, “Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring Class Festivities,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (Routledge, 1997), 321–48, and Noémie Ndiaye, “‘Come Aloft, Jack-little-ape!’: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie,” ELR 51.1 (2020), 121–51.

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with a nostalgia for what Sujata Iyengar calls “the English rural past.”17 Iyengar calls the morris dance “at once a quintessentially English tradition and a sharp encounter with the foreign.”18 May Day observances in England evolved over time and, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the holiday specifically featured the chimney sweep as part of its celebrations.19 The fact that May Day features a chimney sweep a hundred and fifty years before sweeps are linked to the celebration of May Day in London shows that there is a precursor for this association that centers on blackness, situated at the intersection of race and class. A title like “May Day” also invokes histories of violence against immigrant populations in London. Tensions between the English and foreigners erupted on “Evil” May Day of 1517, when London workers, mostly young apprentices, rioted in protest of the growing urban population of French and Dutch immigrants (“an insurrection of youthes against Aliens,” according to John Stow).20 The same terminology is used in 1641 for a petition to Parliament by “poore trades-men and artificers” that references workers who have had to rely on charity or to “turne Porters, Day-labourers, Waterbearers, Chimney-sweepers, and the like,” while “the Aliens are cherished, and many of them get great and unknowne estates, as it were even out of the subjects mouths.”21 To “turne” sweep was clearly a position of degradation but one that Englishmen were compelled to take as a last resort, according to this xenophobic rant. But sweeps may well have come from abroad if the depiction in John Fletcher’s Women Pleased (first performed around 1620) can be trusted. There, two young chimney sweeps speak in heavy French dialect, and one is addressed as “Monsieur Black,” a moniker

17 “Moorish Dancing in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 87. 18 87. 19 George L. Phillips, “May-Day is Sweeps’ Day.” Folklore 60.1 (March 1949), 217–27. 20 A Survey of London. Reprinted From the Text of 1603, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Clarendon,

1908), 99. 21 To the Right Honourable the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses Now Assembled in

Parliament. The Humble Petition...in the Behalfe of the Multitude of Poore Trades-Men and Artificers, in and about the Cities of London and Westminster... (London, 1641). According to Lloyd Edward Kermode, the term “alien” in early modern England referred to someone from a foreign country, which included Scotland and Ireland at this time. See Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge UP, 2009), 2.

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that suggests a linkage between non-Englishness and blackness.22 This inclusion of non-English chimney sweeps makes it possible to imagine the more likely scenario that foreigners were not taking labor away from native workers, as suggested above, but were scraping by on the bottom rungs of the social ladder alongside them.

Sooty Marks, Chromatic Metaphors When he dons his disguise, Lorenzo enters with “a pot of painting” (rather than an actual sooty substance) and applies it to his own face onstage (SD 78). Earlier in the scene, the servant Angelo compares Lorenzo’s process of “beautifying his face” with black paint to the sight of a “lady [painting] her lips”: “for as of Moors so of chimney sweepers, the blackest / is most beautiful” (3.1.8–12).23 The English chimney sweep became associated with the blackness of foreign figures like the African and Moor not only through this cosmetic spectacle but also through simile and metaphor, significant rhetorical tools used in the cultural formation of identity categories including gender and race. Colleen Rosenfeld describes “simile” as a figure of speech that “exerts an organizing force on the world” and “remakes the elements of that world according to ‘like.’”24 Ian Smith identifies metaphor as a vital part of early modern race-making that made ideas more legible for English audiences. In response to Thomas Browne’s 1646 description of “Aethiopians” as “coal-black,” Smith calls the “persistent connection of ‘soot’ to Africans” a “dominant metaphor” that is “resonant and comprehensible for Browne’s audience.”25 By engaging with comparisons between sweeps and Africans in a variety of texts, I argue that these

22 Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, Volume VII , ed. Alexander Dyce (Edward Moxon, 1844), 74–5. 23 All quotations from The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, ed. Allan Holaday (U of Illinois, 1970), 317–79. This simile comparing Moors and chimney sweepers plays upon gendered associations that echo Kim F. Hall’s argument about blackness and femininity in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell UP, 1995), 130. 24 Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (Fordham UP, 2018),

174. 25 “White Skin, Black Masks,” 51–2.

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rhetorical devices shaped the English imagination and gave rise to both racist and classist assumptions that can still be seen in culture today.26 Multiple early modern plays refer derogatorily to African characters, usually women, as “chimney sweepers,” and compare the color of their skin to soot and coal.27 Shakespeare aligns chimney sweepers with “Ethiops” based on their supposed shared blackness in the description of Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost : “To look like her are chimney sweepers black... And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack” (4.3.264–6).28 “Coal-black” had early usage in the medieval period to describe the fallen angels in the Wakefield Cycle: “We, that were angels so fair, / and sat so high above the air, / Now are we waxen black as any coal.”29 Blackness here is evoked as the ultimate contrast to both “fairness” of complexion and height of social stature (“sat so high”). The comparison also appears in early narratives of English contact with Africa, such as George Best’s 1578 description of “an Ethiopian as black as a coal.”30 Sir Thomas Herbert’s 1638 African travel narrative also describes the people he encountered there as “chimney sweepers,” a label he deems fit to describe the entire continent, equating them all with this low rank of English common laborer: “let one character serve them all: they look like chimney sweepers.”31 Later in the eighteenth century, we also see the reverse effect when sweeps are compared to Africans. Edward Ward in

26 Two modern examples include Ben Stiller in Zoolander (2001) when he appears covered in coal dust and makes a “minstrel blackface expression,” and the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins. See, respectively, Ayanna Thompson, Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), 56, and Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface,” New York Times, January 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/ 28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-blackface.html. 27 See All’s Lost by Lust, The Knight of Malta, The Fair Maid of the West Part II ; Othello’s so-called “sooty bosom” and Aaron’s “coal-black” likeness; Mason’s The Turk, a Whitefriars children’s play, refers to “cole blackmoores” (3.4.2). 28 The fact that boy actors played these female roles like Rosaline might have also strengthened the link between chimney sweeps as being “like” black women. 29 “The Creation,” in The Wakefield Mystery Plays, ed. Martial Rose (Anchor Books,

1963), 63. See also Erik Wade, “Ower Felaws Blake: Blackface, Race, and Muslim Conversion in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Exemplaria 31.1 (2019), 22–45. 30 Quoted in Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007), 108. 31 Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique... (Printed by Richard Bishop, 1638).

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1706 refers to sweeps as having “Negro Hands and Face.”32 The growing visibility of the African presence in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries likely explains this shift from categorizing black people as “like coal” or “like sweeps” to the sweeps becoming like “Negros.” When audiences encountered these rhetorical figures linking sweeps with Moors, the two terms shaped one another and created a specific conceptual blend. Historian Anna Mae Duane designates this type of metaphor as a literary form that “provides a powerful means of accessing historical content.”33 She deploys the work of cognitive theorists Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to show how “both terms of a metaphor exert influence on the other, subtly changing the ways in which each term is understood.”34 This emphasis on metaphor shaping perception and shifting definitions of familiar terms in cultural consciousness serves as an apt theoretical framework for these textual encounters between “chimney sweeps” and “Moors.” In this case, the Moor becomes “classed,” the sweep “raced.” Jean Feerick associates this understanding of early modern racial difference with evolving discourses of class or “social rank”: “differences of colour emerge, as it were, in dialectical relation to social rank, allowing social tensions originating with the difference of rank to be resolved, mitigated, or exploited with reference to this emerging difference of colour.”35 Metaphorical associations in May Day and elsewhere racialize the blackness of the sweep’s sooty skin, a somatic mark identifying a laboring body, and link his color with that of an African. Robert Hornback notes how the “supposed celebration of blackness” when Angelo proclaims that “the blackest [Moor] is most beautiful” is “steeped in cruel irony.”36 These comparisons are a site of racist and classist harm, just as somatic marking is “an active and violent process of

32 Quoted in Benita Cullingford, British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of British Chimney Sweeping (New Amsterdam P, 2000), 213. 33 Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (U of Georgia P, 2010), 4. 34 11. See also Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Basic, 2003). 35 Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (U of Toronto P, 2010), 5. 36 Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New

(Palgrave, 2018), 123–4.

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degradation” that contributes profoundly to the formation of raced and classed identities in this period.37

The Role of the Sweep in May Day When Lorenzo suggests that he’ll “smurch / [his] face like a chimney sweeper,” he uses language reminiscent of other cross-class disguises in the early modern repertory, such as that of Celia in As You Like It , who pledges to “with a kind of umber smirch [her] face” to portray the shepherdess Aliena (1.3.118), and Edgar in King Lear, who “grimes” his face “with filth” in the guise of the beggar Poor Tom (2.3.9). Benjamin Minor and Ayanna Thompson argue that Edgar dons a blackface disguise as Poor Tom that traffics in English anxieties about beggars, criminality, and racial identity. Edgar fears that tears will “mar [his] counterfeiting” because they will smear his darkened visage and reveal his face underneath.38 In May Day, Lorenzo likewise acknowledges the vulnerability of his cosmetic mask: “I was afraid my tongue would have likt away the soote of my / face, and bewrayed me” (3.2.5–6). This danger of washing their skin clean and thus revealing their true status is indicative of the power ascribed to whiteness as that which makes dirt visible.39 This ability to shapeshift, to change their status in a way that does not ultimately harm their gentility within the dramatic fiction, is a privilege only really afforded to upperclass characters like Edgar and Lorenzo.40 Yet his friends express concern for Lorenzo’s choice to masquerade as a lower-class (and racialized) individual. Honorio uses the language of deformity when he wonders, “to what end…wil [Lorenzo] dis- / figure himselfe so?” (3.1.30–1). Gasparo, another old nobleman interested in marrying Lorenzo’s daughter, worries that Lorenzo might be called to sweep a chimney “in earnest,” thus making him not a lower-class pretender but the thing itself (3.1.75). This thin line between performing another social position and actually 37 Akhimie, 24. 38 Minor and Thompson, “‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Blackface in King Lear,” in Staged

Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (Palgrave, 2013), 160. 39 See Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, 1997), 75. 40 Rarely does a servant successfully rise through the ranks and stay there (even though

Mosca in Jonson’s Volpone gets quite close). And we can’t forget, of course, that the actors themselves were performing characters high above their social status.

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adopting it echoes anti-theatrical fears of actors becoming like the parts they played, and Lorenzo’s appearance as himself at the end of the play mitigates this fear of permanent damage to his standing. The chimney sweep disguise is so attractive to Lorenzo because Snail occupies a role similar to that of the beggar, as a subject often present but unremarkable. While more commonly associated today with the young sweeps of Victorian London, the occupation of chimney sweep originated much earlier, around the same time as the two-story house, which necessitated the chimney itself. Benita Cullingford writes that it was a sign of status to have a house big enough to necessitate hiring a sweep at all. Because smoke from the fire would cause a “sooty residue to form through the entire length of the flue,” sweepers would be brought in with brooms and scrapers to clean the chimney by removing the soot.41 The soot could then be sold for fertilizer, or it might have been sold to dyers to blacken cloth, which could have been used on the stage to signify black skin, as Ian Smith has shown.42 Sweeping was menial labor, and workers often paired it with other odd jobs to support themselves. For instance, at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire in the mid-seventeenth century, a man was paid one year’s allowance for “sweepeing chymneis” and “killing rats and mice.”43 In 1618, there was a petition to the King from “the Poor Chimney Sweeps of the City of London,” who were “ready to be starved for want of work,” to enforce more strict ordinances that would require people to have their chimneys swept in order to prevent fires.44 Sweeps could be travelers, technically “vagabonds,” who roamed the area looking for employment.45 Jacobean preacher Thomas Wilson, in reference to the chimney sweep, proclaimed that “how base soever their trade be,” it was still “a lawfull vocation.”46 Nonetheless when Chapman is writing May Day in the early 1600s, the chimney sweep is mainly associated with precarity and poverty.

41 5–6. 42 Anonymous, The Chimney-sweepers Sad Complaint (Printed for John Johnson, 1663),

4. 43 Cullingford, 8. 44 Quoted in Cullingford, 9. While the King was in favor, the mayor rejected the

petition due to its cost. 45 Cullingford, 7. 46 Saints by Calling: Or Called to Be Saints... (Printed by W. Iaggard, 1620).

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The low social status of chimney sweeps also led to assumptions about criminality and promiscuity. With respect to Lear, Minor and Thompson describe Edgar’s ability in his beggar’s disguise to “circulate outside of the strictures and structures of proper society” as “not unseen but unremarked,” thus making “the socially invisible subject visible.”47 Lorenzo and Angelo choose the sweep disguise specifically because he is similarly “socially invisible,” but, unlike the beggar, he has the ability to move into restricted spaces: such an “abject” (as Lorenzo calls Snail the sweep) would “have free egress and regress into men’s houses without suspicion” (2.4.138–41). Access to private spaces linked sweeping with criminality; in the nineteenth century, according to George L. Phillips, “chimneysweeping and stealing often went hand in hand.”48 This disguise plot in May Day also resembles the typical “disguised Moor” tropes of later Jacobean drama where, as Virginia Mason Vaughan observes, “the European character adopts the role of a black servant,” thus giving the character an “ability to maintain a kind of invisibility while participating in complicated sexual intrigues.”49 Chimney sweeps were also associated with excessive sexuality and “often believed to make the most of amorous opportunities.”50 The language used to describe the sweeps’ relationship to the maids in The Chimney-sweepers Sad Complaint (1663) is heavily suggestive: “we having liberty to wait... every morning for imployment, whether the London Lasses and Virgins of the City repaired upon all occasions... to make clean their Chimneys, and sweep the sut and dust out of all their private Corners.”51 Lorenzo’s use of the typical chimney sweep’s “crie” as he walks to his hoped-for assignation with Francischina evokes the same kind of innuendo: “Maids in your smocks, / Set open your locks... Let chimney sweeper in: / And he will sweepe your chimneys cleane” (3.1.104–8). His lustful behavior and blackened face align him with other theatrical figures associated with amorous desires, such 47 “‘Edgar I Nothing Am,” 153, 158. 48 “Two Seventeenth-Century Flue-Fakers, Toolers, and Rampsmen.” Folklore 62.2

(June 1951), 289. 49 Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2005), 110. 50 Cullingford, 211. Gordon Williams has collected references to chimney sweeps as

sexual figures in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Volume 1, A–F (Athlone, 1994), 234. 51 The Chimney-sweepers Sad Complaint, and Humble Petition to the City of London (Printed for John Johnson, 1663), 6.

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as Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus and Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion. By evoking these other plays and characters, I follow Erik Wade’s formulation of “race as a series of citational performances that constantly cite previous performances in order to create ideologies of race.”52 Here, we can see how it is not only race being formulated through these performances; assumptions of criminality and sexuality are also implicated in this representation of the sweep. The chimney sweep’s cry advertising his services also necessitates that, unlike the beggar, he is not altogether invisible in public spaces: he must be seen and heard to sell his labor. As Lorenzo experiences, this signaling of his presence invites the potential for violence, both physical and verbal. Akhimie’s emphasis on the violence that laboring bodies often endured, along with their perceived immutability (an inability to be “cultivated” or rise in social status through following certain codes of conduct), also applies to the treatment of Lorenzo in this play. In the blackened guise of Snail, Lorenzo becomes a figure vulnerable to violence and ridicule. When warning Lorenzo’s friends of the old foolish man’s coming, Angelo declares that “in this, we shall / have the better sport at a Beare baiting” (3.1.21–2). His nephew Lodovico wishes that he could “get boyes to pinne cards at [Lorenzo’s] / backe, hang squibs at his tayle, ring him through the towne with / basons” and “besnowball him with rotten eggs” (54–7). They promise to “make…sport” with the old man and compare him again to a “blind Beare” who “deserved to be bayted” (3.1.51–2).53 Boy players were often compared to animals (especially apes, who also were forced into types of baiting), and there is an uncomfortable history of violence in the possible coerced labor of the boy players themselves.54 As Lorenzo walks to Francischina’s house, his sweep’s cry calls forth his nephew Lodovico and other nobles, Honorio and Gasparo, to mock him. Rather than attack him physically as they had fantasized, the men

52 “Ower Felaws Blake,” 30. 53 Rebecca Ann Bach’s work on early modern bearbaiting as a metaphor for English

colonialism, domination, and mastery ties these references back into emergent discourses of race and oppression. See “Bearbaiting, Dominion, and Colonialism,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green Macdonald (Associated UP, 1997), 19–35. 54 For more on the boys’ working conditions and impressment, see Bart van Es, “Captive Children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Child Impressment on the Early Modern Stage,” Renaissance Studies 33.2 (2018), 166–84.

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make fun of his age and lack of sexual ability. Lodovico accuses “Snail” of being too familiar with his uncle Lorenzo’s maid, and when “Snail” (aka Lorenzo) denies it, Lodovico speculates that perhaps it is Lorenzo himself who is dallying with her, only to dismiss the thought due to his uncle being “as gentle as an Adder that has his / teeth taken out” (3.1.134–5). Honorio likewise emphasizes Lorenzo’s advanced years: “his very age would make him asham’d to be overtaken with those / goatish licences” (144–5). These comments do not dampen Lorenzo’s resolve to cuckold Quintiliano, but when he arrives at the house, he is immediately thrust into the dark coal house, due to the scheming alliance of Angelo and Francischina, to make “the old flesh-monger fast for his iniquity” (3.2.34). This action recalls Twelfth Night , where Malvolio the steward is punished for his aristocratic pretensions to marry the countess Olivia and thrust into a dark, enclosed space. Lorenzo’s sexual desire also leads him to betray his class identity but, in this case, he is punished for moving down the social ladder in his blackface disguise, not for aspiring to move up. His attempt at mimicking the chimney sweep’s inappropriate desires is what gets him into the most trouble. When caught by the husband Quintiliano, Lorenzo narrowly escapes being stuffed in a coal sack and “hung up for a sign” after he has been confined for some time in the coal house (4.1.73). In these scenes, we see Lorenzo ostensibly being ridiculed, threatened, and punished for sexual desires that are inappropriate for his age, while wearing the black guise of a classed and racialized character associated with sexual desire and cuckoldry. Lorenzo here is a blackened figure who is completely desexualized and emasculated by the end. The threat of his blackness, as well as the “egress and regress” of gentlemen’s houses allowed by his occupation, is diminished by his foolishness and the fact that the play does not allow his disguise to be successful (since Angelo reveals it to almost everyone without Lorenzo’s knowledge). While Quintiliano, the only one who seems to believe he is Snail, accuses him of “creeping” into his “wive’s cole-house” (4.1.56–7) and being “an old luxurious hummerer about wenches” (71), the audience knows that while Snail fit that description, Lorenzo in the guise of Snail certainly fails at performing that role. Rather than obscuring his identity, the blackface disguise is staged to highlight the wide gaps between Snail, Lorenzo, and the boy actor who played him. Blackness here is a distinct marker that not only ties these intersecting classed and

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raced identities together but also highlights the boy’s actual whiteness for the playgoers. While Lorenzo later washes his face and rejoins the Venetian upper crust, the real character of Snail must remain only in the audience’s imagination. We never actually meet this character in the play. In the final act, after Lorenzo has removed his black face paint, the gentlemen at the feast wonder if they should send for Snail to dress him up in a “Magnificoes sute of the Citty,” in other words, a suit like Lorenzo’s (5.1.37). This suggestion hearkens back to the representations of sweeps and other “laboring bodies as entertainment” at court, such as the reapers in the wedding masque in The Tempest .55 This tempting possibility for the audience is thwarted by Angelo’s shrewdness when he promises to fetch Snail but never does. Just as white actors donned blackface to portray racialized figures, the representation of Snail in May Day is a false one, a disguise, and nothing more. While Lorenzo, a white male magnifico, can masquerade (however unsuccessfully) as Snail, Snail is not allowed even to attempt to “pass” as Lorenzo. If he did appear, it would be for the amusement of these upper-class men due to his probable failure to assimilate.

Conclusion By tracking the visual and verbal linkages of chimney sweeps with Moors and Africans in May Day, we see a pattern of racist thought building upon the familiar figure of the subjugated English sweep. Akhimie writes that “blackness is made to mean through a particular process by which it may come to be associated across all its connotations, with the absence of trust, comfort, and familiarity—a stigmatized mark of difference.”56 Blackness here clings to the chimney sweep in the form of soot, the markings of which transform the body through the pain and oppression associated with labor. Just as enslaved bodies in antiquity were made “legible,” as Miles P. Grier argues, through the ink of the tattoos that designated them as slaves, the likening of chimney sweepers to Africans made foreign subjects legible to the white English subject with negative associations of 55 Akhimie, 34. Sweeps also appeared in early modern court entertainments like Francis Kynaston’s 1635 masque Corona Minervae and the 1613 Gray’s Inn Masque of Flowers at Whitehall. 56 49.

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criminality and promiscuity transferring between them.57 The recognizable sooty black face of the English chimney sweep became a useful analog to the skin color of the African, and how the sweep was treated reflected upon the African, and vice versa. As Habib writes, “racism is not only a colonial reflex fashioned to deal with the distant other but a part of the very making of Europeans themselves.”58 Racist metaphors of theatrical encounters between sweeps and Africans discussed above likewise shaped ideas of Englishness, race, and class through their performative power. Race and class intertwine in the early modern English cultural imagination through the somatic marker of sooty blackness.

57 “Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination,” in Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as Political, ed. Vincent Wimbush (Routledge, 2015), 195. 58 Black Lives, 12.

CHAPTER 3

“The Moor? She Does Not Matter”: Intersections of Class, Race, Religion, and Gender in Novelizations of The Merchant of Venice Peter Lewis

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice presents, in Belmont, a site where class, race, religion, and gender intersect at both the upper and lower levels of society. Within this, the privileged classes interact in the marriage lottery undertaken by the royal suitor, the Prince of Morocco, in his attempt to win the hand of Portia, the wealthy heiress of Belmont. Existing alongside these, in a world that Portia barely notices, are the two-faced clown, Lancelot, manservant at one time or another to Shylock, Jessica, and Bassanio, and the woman Lancelot makes pregnant—an unnamed “Moor”—who represent the serving classes. Jessica, meanwhile, is a character whose position at Belmont appears to be defined by her

P. Lewis (B) Centre for Adaptation Studies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_3

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Jewishness despite her conversion to Christianity. The complex nature of Jessica’s difference, an identity circumscribed by both religion and race, is the type that Ania Loomba describes as “elusive, hard to define, and yet culturally central.”1 It is a heritage that puts Jessica into a class of her own: not servile but, at the same time, lacking in privilege. In the interactions of these characters, Shakespeare’s play reveals a critical four-way intersection between class, race, religion, and gender in determining how they envisage their identities in relation to each other. Loomba stresses that when considering race, racial and religious prejudice should not be divorced from each other and goes on to identify how “religion and skin colour intersect in the development of race as a concept” in the early modern period.2 In the present day, according to Vanessa Corredera, the meaning of the term “race” can be “readily applied to the complex construction of difference” covering “distinctions between culture, religion, ethnicity, and race.”3 She cites Michael Banton’s claim that “when in English-speaking countries reference is made to race … the reference is to race as a social construct and not a biological category.”4 In modern performances of Merchant, however, a distinction between racist and religious bigotry is often still evident in the directorial decisions taken. For example, in her 2015 production of Merchant for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Polly Findlay chose to remove all elements that might be considered racist from the performance: references to Morocco’s skin color were excised, and the servant woman was no longer a “Moor” or referred to as such. Furthermore, the portrayal of Lancelot, through his interaction with the audience and his face paint, was more like that of a friendly circus clown than the sinister character he cuts in the text, especially in his treatment of women. These changes allowed the characters of Portia and Lancelot to be used more effectively for comic purposes and, thereby, diluted the tensions in the text between class and race as skin color. The effect of such a light-hearted portrayal is to increase audience identification with the characters and

1 Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford UP, 2002), 141. 2 46. 3 “‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016), 42. 4 Qtd. on 35.

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exemplifies the type of evasive option seen by Ian Smith as “whitewashing” and inhibiting the “scrutiny of racialized whiteness.”5 Conversely, Findlay’s production retained all the examples of anti-Semitism in the play and, if anything, accentuated it by, for example, having Antonio physically spit in the face of Shylock, an action only reported in the text rather than presented. Paradoxically, audience and critical pressure to adhere to the Shakespeare text constrain how radically themes such as those at the intersection of class, race, religion, and gender can be explored in mainstream Shakespeare stage productions. Adaptation, on the other hand, unfettered by the pressure for fidelity to the Shakespeare text, should provide the perfect platform for a more searching interpretation. However, of the novelizations and drama adaptations of Merchant published in the past fifty years, very few have engaged directly with all the various intersections of class, race, religion, and gender embedded in the play. Only one, Grace Tiffany’s The Turquoise Ring (2006), features the entire five-person character set of Portia, Morocco, Lancelot, the Moorish servant, and Jessica, while only one other, Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997), adapts the Moorish woman. This essay explores these two novels. It argues that the way their narratives amplify the frictions between class and race in Merchant foregrounds aspects of the play often obscured in performance and that, in their incarnations of the Moorish servant, Tiffany and Phillips create a character who exemplifies how the influence of racial division often supplants the beneficial possibilities of class or religious unity. The essay also considers the depiction of Jessica, or the character representing Jessica, in these modern interpretations of Merchant and how her otherness further complicates the relationships between class, race, religion, and gender in the narrative. Finally, the essay proposes that this narrative of multifaceted intersections, which revolves around Portia and her household, has been marginalized because of Portia’s relative neglect in recent critical and creative arenas.

5 “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016), 107.

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*** Martin Orkin and Alexa Alice Joubin argue that working-class white people in the United States “are manipulated into deriving a sense of superiority and psychological satisfaction by placing their whiteness above their own socioeconomic inequality” and that such a construct became evident from the late nineteenth century onward, following the American Civil War.6 It is, however, possible to imagine that white prioritization of race over class may have arrived in the United States in a far earlier period, with the influx of the first colonial settlers from England, because there, similar concerns over race and xenophobia can be identified at least as early as the Elizabethan period. Lloyd E. Kermode identifies the later sixteenth century as a period beset by civil unrest among London’s apprentices and artisan classes. A major contributory factor, according to Kermode, was native English workers’ fears over the impact on their livelihoods of an influx of immigrants from Europe.7 A well-documented example of such discontent took place in 1593, three years before the first performance of Merchant. An anonymously written “ultimatum,” now known as the “Dutch church libel,”8 warned “strangers” of the vicious revenge that awaited them, threatening to cut throats and spill much blood if they did not “Fly, Flye, & never returne.”9 The violent tone of the document shows the level to which anti-alien feeling could soar in early modern London. It was common for stage plays to be blamed for inciting some of this disorder. Kermode affirms that “the London authorities were painfully aware of such possibilities, and the inclusion of scenes of civil unrest in the play of Sir Thomas More” (c. 1591–1600)—a play to which Shakespeare is believed to have contributed—led to the Master of the Revels requesting revisions to the play’s text.10 Another such play was Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1581), in which the dramatic action

6 Race (Routledge, 2019), 211. 7 Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge UP, 2009), 6–9. 8 Arthur Freeman, “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel,” English Literary

Renaissance 3.1 (1973), 45. 9 Peter Farey, “Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page: Texts & Documents: The Dutch Church Libel,” accessed July 8, 2021, https://marloweshakespeare.info/farey/texts.html. 10 76.

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and the social problems addressed by Wilson’s characters could negatively influence the audience’s view of the aliens in their midst. Kermode identifies Three Ladies as a play that depicts the alien threat by “placing an inordinate weight on the problem of immigration into London.”11 Through his allegorical characters, Wilson paints a picture of an English economy corrupted by foreign merchants. Meanwhile, English workers’ livelihoods are depicted as being threatened by unethical working practices by alien craftsmen. The impact of this is compounded by the unscrupulous behavior of the upper classes in driving up rents because of increased demand for housing caused by immigration. It can be imagined how such a dramatization would help to stoke the fears of the native population against alien immigration. Certainly, the actions of both the ruling and the lower classes during this period suggest that fear and resentment against foreign settlers was high. Elizabeth’s reign included annual edicts in the years 1571–4 for the expulsion of all immigrants except those who had come to England for religious reasons. Alongside such royal decrees, civil disturbances by workers and apprentices against immigrants were frequent, such as the previously mentioned Dutch Church Libel in 1593 and riots in Southwark in 1595. Although the official line attempted to mitigate against these xenophobic reactions for Protestant immigrants, the case of the Dutch Church Libel intimates that such acceptance did not always trickle down to the lower classes. Expulsions were aimed not only at European aliens but also at the relatively small number of black people who had been brought into England by that time. However, although the orders for the deportation of “Negroes and blackamoors” were issued in Elizabeth’s name in 1596 and again in 1601, their wording implies that concerns over the presence of black people originated from the (white) lower classes who were already placing more importance on their race over their class. For example, the warrant from 1601 begins: WHEREAS the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm … to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which co[vet?] the relief

11 60.

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which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.12

In referring to these black people as “infidels,” the warrant also supports Loomba’s assertion that ideas about race in early modern England evolved at the intersection point of religion and skin color and that, for play audiences at the time, “the word ‘Moor’ was an amalgam of religious and color difference.”13 Miranda Kaufmann casts doubt on whether the warrants issued in 1596 and 1601 resulted in any deportations and were, in fact, designed to repay the trader merchant, Casper van Senden, for the costs he incurred in repatriating English prisoners held by the Spanish.14 Kaufmann suggests that the 1601 warrant may not have progressed beyond the drafting of the statement but the 1596 edict was certainly issued by Elizabeth I as an “open warrant to the lord mayor of London and … other public officers.”15 Despite Kaufmann’s attempt to downplay their significance, the critical point concerning the intersectionality of class and race in these Elizabethan warrants is that both imply how the poorer, white population of England saw black people as an economic threat to their well-being. In Merchant, the portrayal of white superiority is epitomized through the words and actions of both Portia and Lancelot. Portia is derogatory about all her suitors prior to Bassanio but Morocco, as a royal prince, holds the highest rank of all of them. Yet there is never any question of whether Portia, who is only a wealthy landowner, is deserving of Morocco; rather, Shakespeare casts doubt on Morocco’s likelihood of success by constantly drawing attention to the color of his skin.16 If the 12 “License to Deport Black People: Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol 3, 221–2,” National Archives, accessed January 7, 2020. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pat hways/blackhistory/early_times/transcripts/deportation_van_senden.htm. 13 46. 14 “Caspar van Senden, Sir Thomas Sherley and the ‘Blackamoor’ Project,” Historical

Research 81 (2008), 366–71. 15 “Letters Permitting Deportation of Blackamoors from England (Modern),” Internet Shakespeare Editions, accessed April 4, 2023. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Eli zabeth1596_M/index.html. 16 The lines relating to Morocco and referred to here are:

Stage direction: “Enter... Morocco, a tawny Moor” (2.1.0.1); Morocco: “Mislike me not for my complexion / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun” (2.1.1–2);

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relevant speeches are cut from a stage production, as in Findlay’s for the RSC, this racial element is weakened. In fact, even when the text is left intact, the play does not dwell on these matters, moving the action swiftly on so that Morocco quickly becomes an almost forgotten figure. In contrast, Tiffany’s The Turquoise Ring , through its structure and multiple narrative voices, brings the frictions between class and race to the fore. Turquoise is divided into five sections, each with a different female narrator. The first of these is told through Shylock’s wife, Leah, and is set in Toledo, Spain, in the second half of the sixteenth century, a time of fear engendered by the Inquisition for anyone of Jewish or Moorish heritage. This opening storyline sets the context for the remaining four, all of which run concurrently and unfold in Merchant’s Venice while being narrated, in turn, through the voices of Jessica, Nerissa, Portia, and finally, Xanthe, Tiffany’s imagining of the Moorish woman made pregnant by Lancelot in Shakespeare’s play. In this way, Tiffany presents the reader with distinct viewpoints of the same events. In the case of Morocco, for instance, the reader encounters three very different views of the prince through the storylines of Nerissa, Portia, and Xanthe, an opportunity that is only readily available to an adaptation in comparison to stage productions that are more faithful to the Shakespeare script. Furthermore, by granting the Moorish servant woman the final word on Morocco, the novel’s partiality appears to side with Xanthe’s more positive view of the prince. In Tiffany’s novel, Nerissa is a voice of conciliation between Portia’s bigoted views and the mistreated Xanthe. Here, Nerissa’s past as a prostitute, courtesan, and menial servant before becoming Portia’s favorite help to give her a more balanced view of the world in comparison to Portia. It enables Nerissa to recognize the privilege that Portia takes for granted: For her, Incan labourers dug gold from their mountain mines; … With awe Nerissa watched barrels of grain roll into kitchens … [Portia] thought herself arbiter of some natural order.17

Portia: “If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, / I had rather he should shrive me than wive me” (1.3.124–5); Portia: “Let all of his complexion choose me so” (2.7.79). All citations from The Merchant of Venice are from The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works; Modern Critical Edition (Oxford UP, 2017). 17 (Berkley Books, 2005), 205–6.

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Although Portia is a wealthy landowner and not a queen, this is the type of assumed entitlement that comes with royal power, and it is possible to draw several comparisons between Shakespeare’s Portia and Elizabeth I. Both have many unacceptable suitors, know French and Latin, excel in public speaking, and are renowned for their “fair” beauty. Portia takes on male disguise to become a lawyer in the trial scene of Merchant, while Elizabeth challenges conventions in her maledominated society by remaining an unmarried queen and frequently using the signifier “prince” to describe herself.18 In a pre-feminist setting, Tiffany bestows her Portia with these same qualities and makes her an advocate for a more active and rewarding role for women in society. Her progressive views do not, however, extend to her attitude toward those of other races or religions where Portia bases her beliefs on rumor and mirrors the sentiments of the deportation orders of Elizabeth. In this way, Tiffany’s Portia epitomizes the type of modern white feminism that fails to consider its interaction with categories of prejudice other than gender, such as race and religion. It is through Nerissa’s account of events that the reader first encounters Morocco in Turquoise, although it does not become totally clear until later that the suitor described by Nerissa is, in fact, the prince. Nerissa does not mention Morocco’s national or racial identity but instead describes Portia’s despicable behavior toward him and the effect this has on Xanthe. Nerissa complains that Morocco was “cruelly mocked” by Portia, who pronounced herself “well rid of him.” When Nerissa tells Portia that she saw her “maidservant [Xanthe] wince” at her behavior, Portia shows her complete disregard for the feelings of those she considers to be beneath her due to their class and their skin color by replying, “The Moor? She does not matter.”19 It is during Portia’s storyline that the prince’s identity is finally confirmed; Portia taunts Nerissa about “the 18 Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power,” Signs 1.1 (1975): 31–55; Leah S. Marcus, “Elizabeth,” in Shakespeare’s Histories: A Guide to Criticism, ed. Emma Smith (Blackwell, 1988), 147–81; Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC–AD 1603 (BBC Worldwide, 2000), 330–95; Deborah Van Pelt, “‘I Stand for Sovereignty’: Reading Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice” (MA thesis, University of South Florida, 2009), accessed April 18, 2020, https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/65/. (This is my interpretation of Tiffany’s Portia. In a private e-mail exchange, the author stated that such parallels between her Portia and Elizabeth were unintentional.) 19 216.

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Moroccan one you liked so well,” and the contempt concealed in this comment is further accentuated by Portia’s parting shot.20 In Merchant, Morocco’s dismissal by Portia—the only suitor to receive this dubious honor—can be seen to reflect his importance to the narrative. But by transforming Shakespeare’s “A gentle riddance” (2.7.78) into her “Good riddance to his black devil’s face,” Tiffany leaves no doubt about the reason for her Portia’s rejection of Morocco.21 When, in the final section of the novel, Xanthe describes “an enormously tall black man [with] the handsomest face she had ever seen,” it is soon clear that her view of Morocco contrasts sharply with that of Portia. For Xanthe, Morocco’s physicality, including his skin color, supersedes their class difference—the serving woman is able to identify with the prince through their shared (and maligned) race. Xanthe also remarks on Morocco’s religious difference, reporting how he claimed to have slain “the enemies of Allá,”22 an allusion that reflects Loomba’s assertion about the conflation of skin color and creed in early modern times. Thus, through three contrasting narrative viewpoints of Morocco—Portia’s prejudice, Nerissa’s conciliation, and Xanthe’s admiration—Tiffany juxtaposes the Elizabethan attitudes found in the Shakespeare text (Portia) with ideas that seem more relevant to a present-day perspective on the intersections of class, race, gender, and religion (Nerissa and Xanthe). In this, the novel form is a facilitator, with its enabling of diverse perspectives and internal character reflection, techniques that are not so readily accessible in drama, especially when attempting to retain a high level of fidelity to the Shakespeare text.

*** Portia’s dealings with Morocco might be the most obvious intersection point of race with class in Merchant, but Kim Hall was one of the first to identify another, almost hidden in the play’s text, that occurs among the characters of the serving classes—one that has disturbing inferences. When Shylock, during the trial scene, rebukes the Venetians for being

20 252. 21 332. 22 331.

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slaveowners—“You have among you many a purchased slave” (4.1.89)— Shakespeare is not using this for shock effect but, as all good writers do, he is both progressing the plot of the storyline in Shylock’s claim for justice and clarifying an event that happens elsewhere in the text. The event in question refers to the puzzling conversation in scene 3.5 in which Lorenzo accuses Lancelot of making a Moorish woman pregnant—“the Moor is with child by you” (3.5.29–30). Since, at this point in the play, Lorenzo and Jessica have been left in charge of Belmont, it seems reasonable to assume that “the Moor” being discussed is a serving woman in Portia’s household. “It is much that the Moor should be more than reason” (3.5.31–2), replies Lancelot, a response that John Drakakis interprets as meaning that the woman is “quantitatively bigger than she ought to be.”23 It is Hall, however, who reveals just how “big” a role this “pregnant, unheard, unnamed, and unseen … black woman” has in Merchant . Hall explains how the ownership of black slaves increasingly became a sign of status in sixteenth-century England. For her, the pregnant Moor “exposes … [a] nexus of anxieties over gender, race, religion, and economics … which surrounds the various possibilities of miscegenation” in the play.24 Thus, a very recognizable situation for Shakespeare’s audience, in which a maidservant is pregnant, possibly as a victim of abuse, by another member of the household, is made more problematic by the imprint of race and miscegenation. The inference in Hall’s ground-breaking work, as affirmed by Loomba, is clear: for Shakespeare to portray this woman as black/Moorish suggests that Portia is a slave owner.25 While Amanda Bailey confirms that such slave ownership was legal in early modern Venice,26 the situation in England, as Imtiaz Habib documents, was different. In Elizabethan England, slave ownership was not allowed, a position that was spoken about with some pride. In 1577, the influential scholar William Harrison declared that “slaves and

23 The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis (Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 327nn37–8. 24 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant

of Venice,” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992), 89. 25 Loomba, 138. 26 “Shylock and the slaves: owing and owning in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare

Quarterly 62.1 (2011), 1–24.

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bondmen, we have none”27 and Habib details how the black population of the time were engaged in a range of occupations.28 However, Habib also goes on to show that behind the official policy, as reflected by Harrison, hid a system that resulted in civic invisibility for black people who were “not slaves officially”29 but were often “illegally acquired”30 and, therefore, lacked “the minimum humanizing visibility of legal definition,”31 meaning that they became “an invisible, secret population”32 in early modern England. Despite being from the lower classes himself, Lancelot is the epitome of the sense of white, Christian superiority in the play, as shown in his contemptuous attitude toward both Jessica, in whose household he was once a servant, and the pregnant Moor. In Lancelot’s opinion, Jessica is “damned” (3.5.4) seemingly because of her race, as she was born a Jew, regardless of her conversion to Christianity to marry Lorenzo—further supporting Loomba’s assertion that early modern ideas on race were closely intertwined with religion. Lancelot’s arrogance toward the woman he has made pregnant is even worse. “If she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for” (3.5.32–3), he tells Lorenzo. Duncan Salkeld suggests that the scene in Merchant is possibly an allusion to a sexual conquest by one of the acting company and comments that “the scene openly … attributes to [Lancelot] a crime,”33 and Tiffany takes full advantage of her freedom to expand upon incidents such as this in her adaptation. Tiffany’s Xanthe follows early modern characters such as Zanthia in The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606), Zanche in The White Devil (1611), and Zanthia/Abdella in The Knight of Malta (1618), as another Moorish serving woman working in a white household.34 Tiffany brings Shakespeare’s Moorish woman to life. In Turquoise, Xanthe is seen and heard, 27 Qtd. on Black Lives in the English Archives 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Ashgate, 2008), 4. 28 4. 29 5. 30 5. 31 5. 32 5. 33 “Alienating Laughter in The Merchant of Venice: A Reply to Imtiaz Habib,”

Shakespeare 11.2 (2015), 152. 34 Ambereen Dadabhoy, “The Other Woman: The Geography of Exclusion in The Knight of Malta (1618),” in Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000–1700: To the East and

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and her character sits perfectly at the multiple intersections of class, race, religion, and gender. Her incarnation also addresses the gender imbalance in Shakespeare’s text in which the white male servant, Lancelot, is privileged with a significant role in the play while the black female is like an apparition, known only through the contemptuous dialogue of two white men, Lorenzo and Lancelot. Such a discrepancy might be considered to reflect the relative status of these two characters in the Belmont household. Hall analyzes Elizabeth’s representations in art (such as the Armada and Ditchley portraits) to show the link between her whiteness, reflecting her “virgin purity and Christian grace,”35 and her monarchical symbolism of England. The result is a depiction of “England as white—as powerful and favoured by the forces of good and a Christian God.”36 Such a personification of Elizabeth was fostered by herself, her court, and artists and writers of the time throughout her long reign. With her dismissive remarks about Xanthe and Morocco, Tiffany’s Portia exemplifies the construction of a whiteness that, as Arthur Little claims, “works arduously to prove black bodies to be of no matter and white ones to be race-free.”37 The historian Simon Schama affirms that Elizabeth’s reign was a time when “what was truly English was being newly and narrowly defined” in the works of “chroniclers,” “playwrights,” and “churchmen,” such as “a liturgy in the native tongue.”38 Kermode explains this as a response to the perceived threat of European migration to the native population of England’s major cities (especially London). However, those working in the post-colonial field, such as Hall and Loomba, take a different view. They identify the growth of international trade with colonialist intent, bringing with it fears “that English identity will be subsumed under foreign difference”39 as the driving force behind the rise of this reactionary English nationalism. Back Again, ed. Montserrat Piera (Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 243–4. (I am indebted to Dadabhoy for drawing my attention to this connection.) 35 “‘These bastard signs of fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (Routledge, 1998), 44. 36 “Signs,” 44. 37 “Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property,”

Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016), 95. 38 History, 395. 39 Hall, “Guess,” 88.

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In Turquoise, Xanthe is raped by Lancelot, her body appropriated by his white entitlement that is encapsulated in his comment to Xanthe following the attack to “[r]emember that you are a slave.”40 In fact, in Turquoise, Xanthe is not a slave and has arrived at Belmont as a free woman after escaping oppression in Toledo. Both Lancelot and Xanthe are servants, but Lancelot feels empowered to abuse Xanthe due to his gender and a presumption about her status based on the color of her skin. Lancelot’s behavior is driven by his race, a whiteness that he believes allows him to act like a slave owner.

*** Caryl Phillips’ novel The Nature of Blood also includes a character who appears to be an adaptation of Merchant’s pregnant Moor. Phillips’ novel adapts elements of both Merchant and Othello. It compares and contrasts the Jewish and black experience in several diverse strands, including a Holocaust storyline, the persecution of Jews in medieval Venice, and the founding of the modern Israel. This final scenario incorporates the mass emigration of Jews from Africa into the new state, and it is in this episode, which like that of Shakespeare’s Moorish woman, is the shortest narrative in the tale, that the reader encounters Malka. Malka is both a “Moor” and a Jew. In this, she bears another similarity to Tiffany’s Xanthe, who was also part-Moor and part-Jew through her parentage and juxtaposing these two characters shows some of the different possibilities in the four-way intersections of race, religion, gender, and class. Tiffany makes little use of Xanthe’s mixed heritage but does employ it to bring together Xanthe and Shiloh (Shylock) at the end of the novel. Thus, Xanthe, whose otherness has been marked out by the color of her skin throughout the novel, finds unity with Shiloh in this brief closing episode through their common Jewish heritage, a mix of race and religion that overrides both class and race as skin color. In contrast, Phillips’ Malka discovers that the color of her skin defines how she is treated in a society where a shared religion should provide unity and opportunity. Phillips himself is of Caribbean origin, and his novel has drawn criticism for its conflation of the experience of two persecuted peoples, particularly

40 328.

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from the novelist Hilary Mantel, who asserts “it is indecent to lay claim to other people’s suffering.”41 James Shapiro, on the other hand, sees the multi-ethnicity of Phillips’ narrative voices as a challenge to “the current literary tribalism that would mark off black experience as the domain of blacks … and leave the Holocaust to the Jews.”42 For Malka, however, there is no laying claim to “other people’s suffering,” as she is both black and Jewish. Before her resettlement, Malka is looking forward to living in Israel. In her view, she is “going home,”43 but Israel is not what she expects. She is unable to find work even though she is a trained nurse. She is treated like an alien because of her blackness. To survive, she becomes a dancer for hire at a men’s club and, even there, she is “ignored”; she is the woman “who nobody asked to dance.”44 Malka and her people feel rejected in Israel, and she has no doubt who is to blame: “This Holy Land did not deceive us. The people did.”45 Once again, in Phillips’ novel, the identity of Merchant’s Moorish woman is defined by her race rather than her religion and class, as Bénédict Ledent summarizes: For the initial religious and cultural cohesion able to transcend social classes, Israel seems to have substituted new divides, ethnic this time, as if a sense of peoplehood could only be achieved by erecting barriers and rejecting difference, now embodied by the Ethiopian Malka. As a black Jewish woman … Malka represents ultimate Otherness.46

For Malka, race as skin color remains the overriding factor in determining her otherness, superseding religious unity, and defining her as lower class than those with lighter skin. Thus, these novels by Tiffany and Phillips show how adaptations can more fully explore themes that are embedded, but not drawn out, in the Shakespeare text by developing a character such as Merchant’s lightly sketched Moorish servant woman.

41 Qtd. on Craps, “Linking,” 196. 42 Qtd. on Craps, “Linking,” 196. 43 (Vintage, 1997), 203. 44 200. 45 209. 46 Caryl Phillips, 23.

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*** Loomba argues that the “Early Modern” period—marked by the demise of medieval feudalism, the advent of capitalism, and the rise of the merchant classes—is equally an “Early Colonial” age, a time when rapid growth in international trade and travel is accompanied by imperialist intent.47 Commerce with the wider world brought the possibility of crosscultural exchange but also generated a reactionary insularity concerned for England’s “purity.” According to Liah Greenfeld, it was a time when “a whole new class of people emerged whose main preoccupation was to do research and write … in English about England.”48 This sense of Englishness, Loomba suggests, “could only be defined by establishing what lay outside”49 and, just as the nobility considered themselves a “race” apart from the rest of the population, “colonial relations drew heavily upon pre-existing notions of class difference.”50 Referencing Hall’s work on their “depictions of blackness,” Loomba asserts that these writings show “a growing obsession with defining a white English self.”51 Much of Hall’s pioneering scholarship in the 1990s has particular relevance for the way Portia and her Belmont household are portrayed in Merchant. One such area is in the construction of “whiteness [as] the mark of racial privilege”52 and a “recognition of a dominant sexual ideology articulated in relation to a ‘fair’ beauty.”53 The word “fair” and its various derivations occur forty-three times in Merchant. Of these, seventeen are used in direct reference to Portia. From the outset, in the opening lines of Bassanio’s first reference to her, Portia becomes synonymous with the term “fair”: In Belmont is a lady richly left; And she is fair, and, fairer than that word. (1.1.160–1, my emphasis) 47 “Early Modern or Early Colonial?” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14.1 (2014), 148. 48 Qtd. on Loomba, Shakespeare, 9. 49 Shakespeare, 9. 50 Shakespeare, 7. 51 Shakespeare, 10. 52 “Signs,” 42. 53 “Signs,” 43.

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As Hall notes, in Elizabethan writing, “fair” is a term primarily used “in praise of female beauty” that, through its close association with white, “becomes a term referring to skin colour.”54 When in the play, Salerio tells Shylock, “there is more difference between your flesh and hers [Jessica’s] than between jet and ivory” (3.1.29–30), he is connecting Jessica to whiteness while her father, Shylock, is likened to blackness. It is perhaps surprising that the second most “fair” character in Merchant is Jessica, who receives six such commendations. The obvious inference is that because of her conversion to Christianity, Jessica can be considered white. It is not so easy, however, for Jessica to escape her heritage in Merchant. At Belmont, she is still referred to as an “infidel” (3.2.217) by Graziano, while Lancelot tells her she is “damned” (3.5.4) because of her parentage. Tiffany’s portrayal of Jessica closely follows the Shakespeare script, and because of that, she is probably the least interesting of the novel’s five narrative voices. She is a young woman who yearns to escape the restrictions of her way of life within the Jewish ghetto and the likely arranged marriage planned for her within that community. Yet at times, Jessica is defensive of her father. “My father’s not a fool,” she pronounces to Nerissa.55 Once she has eloped with Lorenzo, she soon begins to have misgivings about her new husband, and, at Belmont, references to her heritage again abound. Portia refers to her as “the little Jewess,”56 and Lorenzo calls her “my dear pagan! My fair infidel, gentle Jessica.”57 The type of ignorance Jessica faces is summed up by Portia, who is surprised that “Jessica looked like any other young woman, though prettier than most.”58 As Paul Gaudet points out, Jessica is a figure whose time on stage in Merchant far outweighs her speaking parts, and her silence is something that “must be accommodated in performance.”59 For example, she has nothing to say for the final two hundred and thirty-eight lines of the

54 “Signs,” 44. 55 116. 56 238. 57 278. 58 277. 59 “Lorenzo’s ‘Infidel’: The Staging of Difference in The Merchant of Venice,” in “The

Merchant of Venice” : Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Wheeler (Routledge, 2015), 353.

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play but remains present (at Belmont) for all that time.60 Likewise, in Turquoise, Jessica is portrayed as a peripheral character who “stood a little apart from the others.”61 Thus, Tiffany’s Jessica cuts a figure ostracized because of her Jewish race, rather than her Jewish religion which she has rejected. Jessica’s exclusion is another example of the prioritization of race over class because, while Jessica cannot claim parity of status with Portia and Bassanio, she should, as a family member of the merchant classes, be acceptable at Belmont in the same way as Antonio. If Tiffany’s Jessica mirrors Shakespeare’s, Phillips’ Jewish daughter presents a stark contrast. Eva is the younger daughter of a middle-class Jewish family. Her narrative flits between a happy early childhood that is transformed into one of terror in 1930s Germany and her liberation from a concentration camp by British troops at the end of WWII. The early storyline shows how class becomes meaningless in a society that defines Eva solely through her race/religion. Later, in the liberated camp, where she is broken, emaciated, and suffering mentally, she is befriended by a young British soldier named Gerry. Eva is both wary of and flattered by his attention and tries, at first, to avoid him. When he leaves, Gerry gives Eva his address in London and promises to help Eva find her sister. Then he asks, “When you’re better … Will you marry me?”62 Eva says no but eventually finds her way to London only to discover that Gerry is already married with a young child. Eva is taken into a hospital, but this new abandonment is too much to bear, and she commits suicide. For Eva, class, race, religion, and even her gender have become meaningless in defining her identity. Her only lasting emotion is one of loss and rejection.

*** Portia and her estate at Belmont sit firmly at the intersection point of class, race, religion, and gender, but due to Shylock’s domination within both critical and creative work on Merchant, it is a subject area that is often overlooked. In recent years, scholars such as Kim Hall have identified racial tensions present in the play that were ignored or unseen

60 “Lorenzo’s,” 355. 61 277. 62 43.

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for nearly four hundred years. Similarly, only a small number of adaptations of Merchant engage with the characters involved in these frictions, the same being also true of Portia in general, who has become a character that novelists seem to shy away from in modern times. The novels discussed here, however, show how the complex relationships between class, race, gender, and religion can be explored in adaptations of Shakespeare’s works. They also exemplify how the forces of xenophobia and racial prejudice work against the ties that might be expected to exist through class structures and religion, particularly in their incarnations of the Moorish servant woman in Xanthe and Malka. The sentiments in Orkin and Joubin’s assertion that “race is often privileged above other factors of self-identification such as class” are personified in these characters.63 Xanthe and Malka are a rare species, however, and that indicates something equally significant. The lack of adaptations of Merchant by white, non-Jewish, Anglo-American writers in the past fifty years (just four out of nineteen) is something that may, in part, be due to fears of an adverse critical reaction, such as that experienced by Phillips for his novel, and accusations of cultural appropriation. However, an unwillingness by such writers to confront the themes found at the intersection points present in Merchant can also be seen as dismissive of other viewpoints in society, an example of the way whiteness is often assumed as the default position and perceives itself as “neutral and objective.”64

63 Orkin with Joubin, Race, 211. 64 Ambereen Dadabhoy, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” accessed January 9, 2020,

2. Dadabhoy Public Humanities Submission, Othello, Whiteness Studies, https://www. scribd.com/document/435238237/Dadabhoy-Public-Humanities-Submission.

CHAPTER 4

Working-Class Villains: Iago in the Trump Zeitgeist Timothy Francisco

As a writer well-known for her rich portrayals of working-class characters and communities, Joyce Carol Oates was once dubbed America’s “true proletarian novelist” by none other than Harold Bloom, who acknowledged “her immense empathy with the insulted and injured, her deep identification with the American lower classes.”1 America’s “true proletarian novelist,” however, conjured a Twitter tempest in 2017:

1 “Introduction,” Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates, ed. Bloom (Chelsea House, 1987).

T. Francisco (B) Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_4

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To say Oates has a troubled Twitter presence is an understatement. When ridiculed over a 2015 tweet that seemed to suggest she believed Steven Spielberg was trophy-hunting triceratopses, she said, “Many of my tweets are meant to be funny; but I guess that is not always a good idea.”2 Her prolific tweets (139K as I write this) are an unpredictable compendium that includes anti-Trump liberalism (she refers to him as Tr**p to avoid giving him the name recognition he craves), racial insensitivity, tonedeaf Islamophobia, cat pics, and memes. Michael Schaub calls Oates “the prolific novelist-cum-social media arsonist,”3 while Spike Freidman finds her “the most baffling troll on twitter.” He adds, “to see that great a writer has the twitter feed of a normal [then] 77-year-old patrician woman—with all that entails—is both weird and not that interesting,” but “the reaction to Oates’ twitter feed is as telling than the feed itself.”4 Supporting Freidman’s observation, one can locate in the fray over Oates’ Othello tweets a case for how intersectionality has richly complicated not only “class not race” politics but also popular discourses through which Shakespeare circulates. Oates’ suggestion that “status” might be the crux of Othello, a reading that elides “the racial element,” reflects a politics of a traditional “social” Left grounded in universal class struggle. The backlash this suggestion sparked evidences the tension between such politics and those of a “cultural” Left that rejects such metanarratives in favor of 2 “Joyce Carol Oates Says She Was Joking About Those Poor Dinos,” https://www.

newsweek.com/joyce-carol-oates-says-she-was-joking-about-those-poor-dinosaurs-341838. 3 “Joyce Carol Oates Riles Up Literary Twitter... Again,” Kirkus, March 17, 2021, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/joyce-carol-oates-rilesup-literary-twitter-again/. 4 “Joyce Carol Oates Is the Most Baffling Troll on Twitter,” https://www.dailydot. com/unclick/joyce-carol-oates-twitter-troll/.

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mobilizing exigencies of identity as multiple sites of resistance to capitalist oppression. Oates’ tweets, and the ruckus they sparked, reflect how discourses about class and race in American political and cultural spheres have been complicated by two factors: the entrenchment of intersectional analyses in both realms and a concurrent influence of oversimplified white workingclass identity in politics that crystallized during the Trump campaign and presidency. The legitimation of a white working-class identity in cultural and political discourses is contradictory—it productively draws our attention to whiteness as a socio-political construct while also problematically showing that it can be exploited for a racist politics of division, grievance, and displacement. Linking together disparate domains, I engage intersectionality as a bridge across disciplines5 and also as a method of inquiry within disciplines, guided by “critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation... operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities.”6 Pre-modern critical race studies are inherently intersectional; as Kim F. Hall’s foundational work has shown, whiteness articulates ideologies of race, class, and gender.7 This essay overlays two of my academic subject areas—Shakespeare and working-class studies. Working-class studies, the interdisciplinary scholarship of class, has long been aligned with intersectional analyses. As Sara Appel explains, in defining “new working-class studies,” John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, two of the field’s originators, urged scholars to explore “how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place.”8 Place is especially important to working-class studies and to the reading of Othello in this paper.

5 Devon W. Carbado, “Colorblind Intersectionality,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (U of California P, 2019), 200–24. 6 Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41.1, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014112142. 7 Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell UP, 1995), 10, 265. 8 “A Turn of the Sphere: The Place of Class in Intersectional Analysis,” in A History of Working-Class Literature, ed. N. Coles and P. Lauter (Cambridge UP), 406–9. https:/ /doi.org/10.1017/9781316216439.001.

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Oates’ Twitter scuffle is my starting point for thinking through these complex relations via Shakespeare’s most recognizable “race play,” Othello, and its place within the Trump zeitgeist. I consider a spate of contemporary productions—or, more accurately, the reception of these— as evidence of a cultural reckoning with the white working class, as these performances elicit responses that read Iago, the play’s resident racist, as an embodiment of Trumpian white working-class identity.9 Then I move to a presentist reading of the play that deploys this analog to a contemporary extreme—the white supremacist “Replacement Theory” commonly accepted as inspiration for the 2017 Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, the apogeic demonstration (before Jan. 6, 2021) of the Trump movement’s core principles of white supremacy, class conflict, and nativist grievance. In all of this, I’m less invested in what Shakespeare’s play says about class in its own time than what the play can reveal about class and race in ours.

Aunt Joyce May Be Colorblind10 Posting her tweet about Othello as a proposition to be taken up “(Disagree?),” Oates was deliberately provocative and thus roundly taken to task in the Twitterverse: “So you want to cut out the only black character?” “What if we staged Hamlet, but with his father still alive?” “Oedipus, where he only kisses his mother on the cheek?” More than five hundred respondents insisted on the impossibility of extricating race from the tragedy, one poster calling Oates’ provocation “a tone-deaf bit 9 Ian Smith, “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016): 101–24. 10 “Colorblindness” is problematic. Adia Harvey Wingfield explains sociologists are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology, as “the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of color blindness.” “Colorblindness is Counterproductive,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2015, https://www.theatlantic. com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/. Oates’ tweets are more than colorblind. She has tweeted some problematic ideas about race, including one that endorses essential racial difference and another that suggests “zero-sum” thinking discussed in this paper. https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/sta tus/1489299417962319878; https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/status/155121051 0389022723.

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of white arrogance” and another replying with snapshots from Virginia Mason Vaughn’s Othello: A Contextual History, with pertinent passages on race and Moors underlined. Oates persisted:

But she failed to persuade. Oates was lambasted for subscribing to a “binary opposition between race and class” that “presumes a racial system that is not classed and a class system that is not raced.”11 In supplanting “stature” for race, America’s “true proletarian novelist” was deemed clueless for her unawareness that “the complexities of socioeconomic inequality, labor relations, or class identity” cannot be understood “by examining class in isolation,” as working-class studies scholars know since we have “adopted a multifaceted way of seeing and reading that recognizes the interconnectedness of class with race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of experience.”12 Oates comes across a lot like the “colorblind” Aunt Joyce at the critical Thanksgiving dinner table. One of the gentler rejoinders to Oates’ proposal came from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage:

11 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz, “Introduction,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines (U of California P, 2019), 1–17. 12 Appel, ibid.

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Nottage is right about Othello. Intersectionality is baked into the structure of the play, made plain in Iago’s alternating motivations for taking down the protagonist: he hates the Moor for denying him what he perceives as his rightful socio-economic “place” when Othello promotes Cassio over him; he also suspects “twixt the sheets” Othello has done “my office” (1.3.371–2).13 He instigates the tragic events by exploiting the prejudices of Brabantio and Roderigo, as the notorious banter that opens the play—the “old black ram” and “white ewe” (1.1.91–2)—dehumanizes and animalizes both Othello and Desdemona. Nottage is no stranger to Shakespeare. Her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, written in high school, told the story of an African American Shakespeare troupe, and she earned her second Pulitzer for Sweat, which was co-commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). Nottage’s plays are staples for what Ayanna Thompson describes as “multicultural classical” theaters like OSF, which pair “the classics with contemporary plays (some by playwrights of color), [include] actors of color into the repertory company, and [extend] outreach to diversified audience membership.”14 Nottage’s first Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Ruined, was part of the OSF 2010 season, which also included Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night , Hamlet , and Henry IV , Part 1. Sweat premiered at OSF in 2015, went to Broadway’s Studio 54 one week before the 2016 election, and then toured the deindustrialized Midwest with New York’s Public Theater Mobile Unit (NYPT). Sweat, which the New Yorker hailed in a headline as “The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era,” is a complex, intersectional exploration of race, class, power, and gender amid

13 Othello, the Moor of Venice: Text and Contexts, ed. Kim F. Hall (Bedford St. Martins, 2007). 14 Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America (Oxford UP, 2012),

71.

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the wreckage wrought by global capital’s assault on worker opportunity and solidarity.15 Nottage composed Sweat as part of OSF’s “Revolutions: The United States’ History Cycle,” a program to commission thirty-seven plays (the traditional count in Shakespeare’s canon) treating critical moments in American history. Nottage wanted to tell the story of the “de-industrial revolution,” a socio-economic upheaval that is “changing the landscape of America” through an “incredible erosion of the middle-class.”16 Inspired by Occupy Wall Street, Sweat is set between 2000 and 2008, during the George W. Bush presidency, and chronicles the hard lives of workers in Reading, Pennsylvania, a once prosperous, now impoverished city. Justin Gest, in his study of Youngstown, Ohio (my home) and East London, UK, describes such places as “Post-traumatic cities... that lost signature industries in the mid- to late-twentieth century and never really recovered,” where there is “a sense of marginality amongst a group of [white working-class] people that formerly defined the country in which they lived.”17 Sweat dramatizes the breakdown of community by economic instability, deindustrialization, and globalization, as precarity ignites tensions between long-time friends and co-workers. The characters reflect the diversity of the working class: two women, one black and one white, co-workers and friends, and their sons—also lifelong friends— who splinter under the weight of precarity, austerity, and competition as Cynthia, a black woman, is promoted over her white friend, Tracey. The antagonist of the play is unfettered global capitalism, represented by Olstead’s Steel Tubing, the mill where the group works. Capitalist exploitation strains all the characters to a breaking point that climaxes with the white and black men together attacking a Columbian American “scab” and accidentally inflicting traumatic brain injury on the older white barkeep, who tries to break up the fight. White working-class Tracey resents her friend’s promotion, attributing it to race: “I betcha they wanted a minority. I’m not prejudiced but that’s how things are going 15 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-first-theatrical-landmark-

of-the-trump-era. 16 “Pulitzer Prize Winner Lynn Nottage Talks Broadway’s ‘Sweat’,” https://www. marketwatch.com/story/pulitzer-prize-winner-lynn-nottage-talks-broadways-sweat-201704-13. 17 The New Minority: White Working-Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford UP, 2016), 13–16.

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these days. I got eyes. They get tax breaks or something” (1.5, 1–3).18 She goads her and Cynthia’s sons Jason and Chris, into attacking Latino Oscar for taking their jobs, resulting in the assault that sends the two to prison. While incarcerated, Jason joins a white supremacist gang and, as time passes back home in Reading, both women lose their jobs when the plant moves operations to Mexico. Nottage has said that the play dramatizes “the way that economic stagnation fractures us among racial and economic lines.”19 While I am not suggesting that Sweat is an appropriation of Othello, this crisscrossing of the two plays on the New York theater scene, close to the election of populist Donald Trump, signals a cultural reckoning with a disgruntled white working class that was (erroneously) held almost solely responsible for one of the most consequential political shifts of our time.20 In fact, after its off-Broadway and Broadway runs, Sweat toured the Rust Belt with the New York Public Theater’s Mobile Unit, “a company arm that traditionally brings Shakespeare productions to New York’s outer boroughs.” The Washington Post ’s Peter Marks noted the company was “venturing into what might be regarded for a liberal theater troupe as politically hostile territory,”21 but Oskar Eustis, the NYPT’s artistic director, hoped the tour might help alleviate cultural inequity between coastal elites and the “fly-over” working class centered in the 2016 election: “One of the things that we have done is turn our back to half of America, in the idea that the riches of theater belong to the coasts, to the elites... we’ve said to half the country, ‘We got nothing for you.’ We have done the same thing to that part of the country that the economy has done: We’ve abandoned them.” While Eustis’ conflation of

18 Sweat. Theater Communications Group, 2017. 19 Michael Paulson, “As U.S. Braces for Change, a Play about the Working Class Heads

to Broadway”, New York Times, December 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/ 12/05/theater/lynn-nottage-sweat-to-broadway-at-studio-54.htm. 20 John Russo and Sherry Linkon, “Don’t Blame Youngstown,” November 15, 2016, https://billmoyers.com/story/placing-blame-youngstown-white-working-class/. 21 Peter Marks, “They Just Told My Story: What Happens When a Play About Union Busting Tours Rust Belt Cities,” October 2, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/theater_dance/they-just-told-my-story-what-happens-when-a-play-aboutunion-busting-tours-rust-belt-cities/2018/10/02/13a43648-c376-11e8-8f06-009b39c3f 6dd_story.html.

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the hoarding of cultural “riches” with actual economic inequity and deprivation may read as naïve, it evidences the interest in the working class that the Trump election sparked for much of the political media.

Working-Class Villain: Iago the Trump Voter Just as Oates urged, “theater” was “experimenting” with Othello throughout 2016–2019 in productions that evoked intersections of class and race. Tellingly, in these productions, Iago was repeatedly received by critics, directors, and actors as redolent of the disgruntled, white workingclass male, the anathema associated with Trump’s ascendency in American politics. While Nottage’s Sweat was at the Public Theater, the New York Theater Workshop (NYTW) ran Sam Gold’s Othello featuring Daniel Craig, who scrapped James Bond’s “finely tailored suits for a workingman’s T-shirt and shorts to play a gun-toting, misogynistic Iago.”22 Craig’s Iago was “a straight white man who overestimates his own value,” played by the actor with “working class cadences.”23 Craig, “wearing shorts, T-shirt, knee pads, and flag-emblazoned baseball cap,” played Iago as “an unmistakably Trump-era figure,” one who “seethes with deeprooted contempt for his black boss, Othello, and bitterness at being passed over for promotion,” reminding us that “Hell hath no fury, apparently, like a middle-aged white guy who feels his political leaders have abandoned him.”24 Around this time, California Shakespeare Theater was wrapping its Othello with James Carpenter as Iago, described by director Eric Ting as a character who could be seen as a “career soldier, working class, a good and decent man who has opportunity ‘stolen’ from him by a Black man; but who re-commits himself to this general, this friend, only

22 Diane Snyder, “Daniel Craig Hills the Blood, David Oyelowo Arouses the Passions,” December 13, 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/oth ello-new-york-theatre-workshop-review-daniel-craig-chills/. 23 Alexis Soloski, “Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo Dazzle in Modern Retelling,” December 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/dec/12/othello-reviewdaniel-craig-david-oyelowo-new-york. 24 Christopher Kelly, “Daniel Craig Updates Shakespeare for the Trump Era,” https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2016/12/othello_review_daniel_craig_david_ oyelowo_new_york.html.

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to once more be passed up for a younger man, perhaps even another Black man.” (Black actor Lance Gardner played Cassio in this production.)25 Later, in 2018, Sweat sojourned across the Rust Belt as Oregon OSF’s former artistic director, Bill Rauch, who originally commissioned that play, was wrapping Othello. Rauch’s revival was dictated by the urgency of currency: “now, with where we’re at in the world, in the United States— it’s the play in which Shakespeare most aggressively tackles how society navigates difference.” Rauch’s production featured Danforth Comins as Iago, portrayed as “an ordinary Joe, the sort of guy you’d meet in a sports bar.”26 Rauch then brought Othello to Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in early 2019. There, in a conversation with Stephen Greenblatt, the two agreed that the tragedy is the play for the moment, Greenblatt noting that for the first time in a long time, he’d replaced Hamlet with Othello in his freshman seminar.27 Both Ting’s and Gold’s productions used what Ayanna Thompson describes as conceptual casting in ways that support Nottage’s assessment of the play as incontrovertibly intersectional. In Ting’s production, Cassio is black, which for George Heymont “adds an extra layer of racism to Iago’s betrayal of Cassio.” Heymont finds “that part of Iago’s hatred for Othello is based on the fact that he sees the Moor encroaching on the white/Caucasian power structure of Venetian society (much like Donald Trump accuses Mexicans of taking jobs that should have gone to ‘real Americans’).”28 In Gold’s production, Emilia is Black, played by Marsha Stephanie Blake, and the cadre of soldiers on the stage is multiracial. This casting elicited contradictory responses from critics. Ben Brantley thinks the casting “makes Othello’s blackness less of a cultural issue than it often is.”29 Conversely, Jesse Green finds it amplifies the racism of the 25 Eric Ting, “The Quintessential Outsider: Thoughts on Othello,” February 1, 2016, http://calshakes.org/blog/2016/02/the-quintessential-outsider-thoughts-on-othello/. 26 Laurence Senelick, “Othello at the American Repertory Theater: Un-moored,” January 21, 2019, http://artsfuse.org/179223/theater-review-othello-at-the-americanrepertory-theater-un-moored/. 27 “A Conversation with Bill Rauch and Stephen Greenblatt,” https://americanreperto

rytheater.org/media/a-conversation-with-bill-rauch-and-stephen-greenblatt/https://ame ricanrepertorytheater.org/media/a-conversation-with-bill-rauch-and-stephen-greenblatt/. 28 “Moor Than You’ll Ever Know,” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/moor-thanyoull-ever-know_b_57e9ae82e4b0972364dea234. 29 “Jealousy and Lies in a No-Exit Theater of Othello,” https://www.nytimes.com/ 2016/12/12/theater/review-othello-david-oyelowo-daniel-craig.html.

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play, suggesting Blake’s Emilia provides “cover” for a racist motive, since it’s “not a happy marriage.” Green then puts class and race in conversation, wondering, “When characters played by other black actors do not flinch to hear Othello referred to as ‘sooty’ or as a ‘Barbary horse,’ do we understand that Othello’s presumption upon the Venetian elite, and upon Iago, has not been a matter of color but of class? Is he an outsider because he’s an immigrant? Because he’s great? Or is he merely (cue the dog whistle) uppity?”30 Ira Madison III finds that Blake’s Emilia “doesn’t merely complicate Iago as a character; it turns the play into a timely illustration of racism’s insidiousness. It’s a reminder that white people who love the black people in their lives (the ‘good’ ones) can still hold zealously racist beliefs.”31 Thus, throughout the Trump presidency, one finds a surge of productions of Othello that grapple with the race and class nexus at a time when a distressed Left is trying to come to terms with what was widely construed as a “whitelash”—a broad and consequential racist and xenophobic rebuff of so-called “identity politics,” globalization, and immigration. Such a surge is not surprising, for, as Thomas J. Slagle explains, Othello responds to early modern globalization by dramatizing in Iago a “distinctively white, nationalist identity,” through intersecting discourses on class, citizenship, and gender, in “ways that can provide insights into contemporary racial ideologies”32 ; as James Shapiro notes, Othello is “a litmus test of American values and attitudes towards race.”33 It is this relevance that made Othello, not Hamlet —for Greenblatt and Rauch, for so many others—the play that was the thing for the Trumpian socio-political moment. Gold explains, “It’s a play that makes a director confront basically every major political and cultural land mine we have.... It has a completely racist premise. It engages in domestic abuse and misogyny.

30 “A Pair of Reinvented Othellos” Vulture, December 12, 2016, https://www.vulture. com/2016/12/theater-review-a-pair-of-othellos.html. 31 “Trump as Iago,” MTV News, January 18, 2017, https://www.mtv.com/news/0c3 uie/trump-as-iago. 32 “Fear Not My Government: Discourses of Race and Nation in Othello,” Graduate seminar paper, Youngstown State U, 2017, and Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, October, 2018. I’m indebted to Slagle, and that class, for helpful discussions on alt-right thought, including Replacement Theory, “cuck” discourse, and Othello. 33 https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/how-william-shakespeare-shapedamerica-us-history-othello-race-politics/.

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It’s Islamophobic, and it takes place in a war zone. So, you’re going right towards a lot of pretty volatile, rich, contemporary cultural material.”34 What is perhaps also not surprising but worth unpacking is that among these “cultural land mines” is the white working-class identity that profoundly vexes our politics.

“Honey Badger Don’t Care”: Iago the Proud Boy Embodying the anxieties over the Trump movement’s strategic exploitation of both white working-class grievance and white supremacist extremism, Daniel Craig’s Iago is, for the Wall Street Journal ’s Terry Teachout, “an ambitious working-class bloke,”35 one who, for Tasmin Shaw, also “calls to mind more than anything the ‘honey badger’ that has become the mascot for the white supremacist alt-right” and Breitbart News under Steve Bannon.36 Meanwhile, in politics, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post also thinks Bannon is Iago, and, weirdly, Trump becomes Othello. Bannon eggs Trump “on and feed[s]... his paranoia. He interprets and reinterprets events to lead Trump by the nose down the road of revengeful conspiratorialism.”37 Trump loyalist Rudy Giuliani also sees Trump as Othello, who “turned out to have a close friend betray him like Iago betrayed Othello, and Brutus put the last knife into Caesar—I think they both trusted those people.”38 In his analogy, Othello, a racialized subject victimized by an enemy’s exploitation of his blackness, is equivalent to a white billionaire, nationalist sympathizer—one so white

34 Emily Bobrow, “Tony-Winner Sam Gold’s Next Challenge: Theater’s Greatest Hits,” November 11, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/sam-gold-challenge-theater-greatesthits-520359. 35 “Othello Minus the Poetry,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2016, https://www. wsj.com/articles/othello-minus-the-poetry-1481835821. 36 35 “The Iago Problem, New York Review,” https://www.nybooks.com/online/ 2016/12/14/iago-problem-choosing-evil-othello/. The honey badger is a YouTube video sensation titled “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” that features the fierce animal in a series of battles as a narrator declares “Honey badger don’t give a shit.” 37 “Bannon Pulls Trump’s Strings with Dangerous Results,” March 6, 2017, https:/ /www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/03/06/bannon-pulls-trumps-str ings-with-dangerous-results/. A Google search of “Steve Bannon and Iago” nets 34,800 results as of this writing. 38 https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/30/politics/giuliani-interview-trump-russia/index. html.

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that he regularly tints his skin. And thereby Giuliani recasts Othello’s narrative to one of essentialist male victimization: the tangerine-tinted, white, multi-millionaire is the abused “outsider,” a tragic protagonist in a swamp full of Machiavellian traitors, betrayed by his “free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so” (1.3. 382–3). Orange is the New Black, as the citation unmoors the tragic conflict from both race and class.39 The ubiquitous reception of Iago in these cultural productions as the incarnation of toxic, white working-class masculinity in the Trump era evidences the unease with this subject position in contemporary party and cultural politics. This angst surfaces in myriad postmortems of the 2016 election. Famously, at the conclusion of the 2016 race, former Obama official and CNN personality Van Jones declared Trump the beneficiary of “a whitelash against a changing country” and “against a black president in part ” (my emphasis). Jones’ “in part” here is important for, as the Washington Post ’s Janell Ross explains, “Jones exemplifies a quandary facing the left” that is grappling between “calling out racism and bigotry” and “empathizing with the white working class.”40 That these impulses would be competing is problematic, as Jones recognizes, yet he finds a political divide between a Democratic Party that “will not admit to their elitism and their failure to address the working class in this country in terms that make sense” and a Republican Party of “colorblind meritocracy.”41 Jones voices the inadequacy of “class not race” or “race not class” articulations that enable a politics of white male victimization and zero-sum formulations that stymy cross-identity solidarity, while he recognizes that “many voters were rebelling against a system that failed them.” Such assessments of Trump’s “populist” victory posit inattentiveness to class in Leftist “identity politics” as one cause of, as Gest describes it, 39 See Jeffrey R. Wilson, Shakespeare and Trump (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020), 49–54. Wilson follows and extends Harry Berger Jr. and Scott Newstok’s formulations of “citational opportunism” characterized by “tendentious political analogies to Shakespeare’s characters.” 40 “After Calling Their Votes a Whitelash Van Jones Finds a New Role Reaching Out to Trump Supporters,” March 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nat ional/fromwhitelash-to-calling-trumps-speech-an-extraordinary-moment-in-american-pol itics-thats-van-jones/2017/03/20/240c4aa4-0287-11e7-a391-651727e77fc0_story.html? noredirect=on&utm_term=.972d6097ce4d. 41 “Hugh and Van Jones Discuss Harvard Debacle,” December 2, 2016, http://www. hughhewitt.com/hugh-van-jones-discuss-harvard-debacle/.

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“radicalized” white working-class resentment, manifested in the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny increasingly visible during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The Othello productions and the political commentary form an associative arc. As “honey badger,” Iago is the tenacious alt-right fighter of elitism, the avatar of white supremacy, and a “working-class middle aged white guy who over-estimates his own value.” It’s the story of the disgruntled and radicalized white, working-class male, mobilized by economic and social grievances and zero-sum politics—that is, by the idea that people of color win only when white people lose, which, as Heather McGhee explains, is the “default framework for conservative media” and fuels the conviction that “a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it” (xxi).42 This thinking reached a flash point in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right Rally of 2017.

“I Know My Place”: Venice, Charlottesville, and Le Grand Remplacement “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”—chants shouted by white supremacists at Unite the Right Rally, Charlottesville, VA, 2017 “For if such actions may have passage free, / Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.” (Othello, 1.3.97–9)

The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally of 2017 placed racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism at the center of American life. My emphasis on place is purposeful, as I want to explore place as a means for understanding class, race, and zero-sum thinking through Othello. Places—city squares with Confederate monuments, statehouse buildings in the former capital of the Confederacy, and more recently, the US Capitol—are charged sites of local, communal, and national identity and also of oppression and racial struggle. As the white supremacists of Charlottesville occupied public, civic space, tiki torches blazing, they chanted, “You Will Not Replace Us!” a mantra gleaned from “philosopher” Renaud Camus’ Le Grande Remplacement, a racist, xenophobic treatise on people and 42 The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021), xix–xxi.

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place, and the place of certain peoples. Camus’ “Replacement Theory” assumes that a nonwhite population will replace white majorities and has been mainstreamed into American political discourse by conservatives like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.43 Camus enlists Tocqueville, Corneille, Shakespeare—and place—as essential to the tradition he aims to protect; his Flickr account features images of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Kroenborg/Elsinore, and The Globe, and the genesis of his theory is a disruption of place. He told the New Yorker’s Thomas Chatterton Williams that, before writing the racist polemics that inspired the white supremacist violence of Buffalo, Charlottesville, Christchurch, and El Paso, he was traveling through France to “write a sort of literary guidebook,” and “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!”44 Camus’ places are disrupted by African immigrants, sparking a chain of subsequent “replacements” that usher an end to Western culture. While Camus sometimes tries to distance himself from the radical white nationalism traced to him,45 he self-published a condensed, Englishlanguage version of his theories titled after the Charlottesville chant, You Will Not Replace Us! (2018). In it, he discusses American immigration and bewails the “replacement” of “residents by tourists, natives by nonnatives, Europeans by Africans, White Anglo-Saxons by Afro Americans and Latinos, mothers by surrogate mothers, men by women...” until ultimately all collapses into “undifferentiated matter.”46 Shakespeare’s Othello provides a startlingly prescient analogy for Replacement thinking, as the “internal race war” that Ian Smith finds “initiated by the play’s resident racist, Iago,” is imbricated with place. Venice, Cyprus, the Senate, Desdemona’s bed—all are locations of struggle over position and power, and the destructive “malignancy” aimed at Othello

43 Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory Fostered Online is Refashioned by the G.O.P,” May 12, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/ 05/15/us/replacement-theory-shooting-tucker-carlson.html. 44 “The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us,’” Dec. 4, 2017, https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us. 45 Sarah Wildman, “You Will Not Replace Us” A French Philosopher Explains the Racist Chant,” Aug. 15, 2017, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/15/16141456/ renaud-camus-the-great-replacement-you-will-not-replace-us-charlottesville-white. 46 ! Self-published, 2018.

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is Iago’s anger over “replacement.”47 Place, for Shakespeare, is multivalent, as Marissa Cull explains: it is “an enduring fascination of the playwright himself, and of critics who have studied his work”; it is “geographic” and “familial, political or social,” and place is, in all of these valences, a primary leitmotif in Othello.48 Foreign Cassio has taken Iago’s place under the authority of an African migrant. Iago fumes, “I know my price, I am worth no worse a place” (1.1.11), and his machinations are to get Cassio’s “place” (2.1.376). Iago has been replaced on the ladder of social mobility by the elite, cultured Florentine, a technologically savvy foreigner wielding the “bookish theorike” (1.1.25) that is now privileged in a globalized war economy over Iago’s “practice,” his labor, “got in the field of Rhodes and Cyprus” (1.1.31). This replacement is shaped by a shifting socio-economic order, as Iago’s Venice signifies Shakespeare’s England. Daniel Vitkus explains that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were negotiating “the rise of Western empires, by the socio-economic changes wrought by the expansion of long-distance foreign trade” and that the onset of capitalism and its inequities were often “identified with transnational entities and exchanges” as “the old racism and xenophobia were motivated in new ways by the transmission of capitalist practices from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe, and by the arrival of Italian merchants and Jewish converso refuges in London.”49 Iago is “left behind,” as the present-day cliché goes, replaced by immigrants and by shifting valuations of skills and labor. He laments the passing of an older order that once afforded access to a “good living” without formal education, “bookish theorike”—when “practice” was preferred to “prattle.” This nostalgia for a previous system of “old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th’first” (1.1.34–5), is a prescient performance of what Jens Rhydgren describes as a core feature of the radical Right, “an ethnonationalism rooted in myths about the 47 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s 2018 Othello was inspired by Charlottesville, according to director Cameron Knight, “Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Othello Addresses Today’s Social Rifts,” August 11, 2018, https://www.southbendtribune.com/ story/entertainment/2018/08/11/otre-dame-shakespeare-festivals-othello-addresses-tod ays-social-rifts/45925789/. 48 “Place and Privilege in Shakespeare Scholarship and Pedagogy,” in Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity, ed. Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco (Palgrave, 2019), 204. 49 Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570–1630 (Palgrave, 2003), 165–7.

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past.”50 Iago blames this replacement on Othello, the Black immigrant, described by Roderigo as the “extravagant and wheeling stranger/ Of here, and everywhere” (1.1.138–39) whom Iago imagines has also taken his place sexually: “twixt my sheets” he has “done my office” and “Hath leaped into my seat” (2.1.221). As Slagle explains, the play’s concentration on cuckoldry also resonates with the ethno-nationalist present, as “cuck” is a favorite alt-right insult that sublimates economic and social anxieties into racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. “Cuck” is shorthand for “cuckservative,” conservatives perceived as weak on immigration. Dana Schwartz traces the neologism through Othello to pornography.51 Shakespeare “evokes the sexual element of racial angst” in Iago and Roderigo’s poisoning of Barbantio’s “delight” by proclaiming in the streets: “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, / you’ll have your nephews neigh to you / you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans” (1.1.111– 13). “Cuck porn” is rooted in racism—and replacement, as “the wife of the cuckolded (almost exclusively white) husband is most commonly sleeping with African American men.” Damon Young explains that, in alt-right thought, the “cuck” is “fine with nonwhites infiltrating their land, replacing their institutions, taking their jobs, breathing their air and, most importantly, sleeping with their (white) women.”52 Brabantio dramatizes this anxiety—tortured by Iago’s evocation of miscegenation, “Even now an old black ram / is tupping your white ewe” and “the devil will make a grandsire of you” (1.1.85, 87). Brabantio conflates and racializes place and status with white majority power, warning his peers (and the audience) that “if such actions may have passage free, / Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (1.3.96–7)—white Christians will be replaced by racial, religious, class, and ethnic others at the top of the

50 “The Radical Right: An Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydren (Oxford UP, 2018), 1–6. 51 “Why Angry White Men Love Calling People Cucks: The Problematic History of the Alt-Right’s Favorite New Insult,” August 1, 2016, https://www.gq.com/story/whyangry-white-men-love-calling-people-cucks. 52 “The Racist Roots of Cuck (The White Supremacist’s Favorite Insult) Explained,” The Root, August 15, 2017, https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/the-racist-roots-ofcuck-the-white-supremacists-favo-1797868917.

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pecking order.53 Replacement anxiety is today, and in the early modern period, reactionary to globalization and multiculturalism for, as Kim F. Hall explains, “the exchange of goods (or even the circulation of money) across cultural borders, always contains the possibilities of other forms of exchange between the different cultures,” leaving “unspoken the more threatening possibility: that English [or American or French] identity will be subsumed under foreign difference.”54

“Gratiano, Keep the House”: The Status Quo and the Politics of Division Othello, a play for the Trumpian moment, is a fertile field for exploring white working-class identity and radicalized whiteness, and such explorations are edifying but also problematic. The play remarkably resonates with the weaponizing of whiteness mainstreamed in right-wing politics in the United States at a time of globalization, precarity, and social change. One can easily find Iago’s antipathy and his grievance at the loss of power in those spurred to march through Charlottesville or charge the US capitol, and in those manipulating others to do so. Imaging Iago as a white working-class male reveals the complex ways this identity has functioned as a marker of division in socio-political discourses for both conservatives and liberals in that it divides whites from a broader, multiracial, and multicultural working class, or it is used to authorize the popular narrative of “the left behind,” a tale grounded in loss of normalized and institutionalized white privilege, and zero-sum thinking. Such formulations can also enable the professional and political classes to divest responsibility. White working-class villains may allow upper-middle-class liberals and conservatives to offload culpability for what’s happened to our society and politics onto persons who have little social power. Indeed, culpability is confounded when one “historicizes” the analogies. White working-class voters did not elect Donald Trump. In 2016, only 30% of the Trump vote came from the white working class, and although within that group overall, Trump earned 60% of the vote, Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes have shown this distribution aligns 53 See Kieran Ryan, “Racism, Misogyny and ‘Motiveless Malignity’ in Othello,” British Library, March 2016, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/racism-misogyny-and-mot iveless-malignity-in-othello; Slagle, ibid. 54 Hall, 123–4.

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with white working-class migration to the Republican Party that has been occurring since 1992.55 Trump’s largest share of support did come from whites without college degrees (67%), but he also won 49% of the vote of college-educated whites, compared to Clinton’s 45%, and received the largest share (49%) of voters with incomes above $50,000 a year while Clinton won 52% of voters earning less than $50,000. Abdullah Shihipar explains, “The assumption that Trump voters are working class is born out of a classist assumption that assigns racist behavior to ‘poor white’ people, rather than being a systemic issue with all white people. White working-class people were not solely responsible for Trump—white people as a whole were.”56 In fact, Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally fell flat with white working-class voters: an NPR/PBS Marist poll conducted days after Charlottesville found that while 59% of Republicans felt Trump’s “good people on both sides” response was “strong enough,” just 32% of white working-class voters felt that way. Further polling found that in 2017, 2% of white working-class voters agreed with the beliefs of the KKK, 4% with white supremacists, 5% with white nationalists, and 6% with the alt-right, while 43% agreed with Black Lives Matter. As William L. Galston explains, “This split exemplifies a broader reality that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom: on many issues raised by recent racially charged clashes, white working-class voters are no more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism (and in some cases less so) than are Republicans as a whole.”57 Returning to Othello, one might revisit a critical commonplace that the play invites complicity from its audience: as we are invited into Iago’s psyche and machinations at the outset of the play, he becomes our guide, and we become co-conspirators. As Smith, Hall, Peter Eriksen, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Ruben Espinosa, and others have shown, this complicity is

55 In Katherine Royster, “New Political Science Research Debunks Myths About White-Working Class Support for Trump,” July 29, 2020, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/ news/2020/07/29/political-science-research-debunks-myths-about-white-working-classsupport-for-trump/. 56 Abdullah Shihipar, “Why Americans Must Stop Talking about Trump’s Mythical “White Working-class” Voters,” July 4, 2017, https://qz.com/991072/why-americansmust-stop-talking-about-the-mythical-homogenous-white-working-class/. 57 “Trump’s Charlottesville Response Falls Flat with the Public—And with His Working-Class Base,” August 17, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/ 08/17/trumps-charlottesville-response-falls-flat/.

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rooted in white supremacy.58 As Dadabhoy explains, this is a white gaze apprehending Black bodies, and it’s a gaze amplified by critical practice that not only cordons off the study of racialized subjects to “race plays” (I’m guilty of this here) but that also ignores the material and epistemological whiteness of our practice, enabling “whiteness to be invisible, to escape racialization, and to continue to exert power through its individuation and appeal to universality.”59 Binary “class not race” arguments like the one that conjured the tweet storm with which this paper opens ignore Stuart Hall’s wellknown formulation that “race is the modality through which class is lived,”60 as capital, historically and continuously, relies upon and reproduces class structured by race. But it’s also worthwhile to think about our gaze and the cultural politics of white working-class Iago. In making whiteness visible, white working-class identity can unmask whiteness as a social construct, one that, as David Roediger has shown, secured social position for working-class whites historically.61 But concentrating disproportionately on the disaffected, racist, white working class in our political and cultural conversations renders other classes of racist whites invisible, classing racism in ways that ultimately do little to dislodge the status quo. It’s important, then, also to consider how the critical gaze deployed by academics, politicians, and the cultural elite on the Right and the Left “is implicated in their own racial, gendered, and classed positions”62 and may participate in a process that obscures one class of whiteness by rendering another less powerful class of whiteness highly visible. This may be because, as Alison L. Hurst and Alfred Vitale explain, in addition to a 58 See Ericksen, “Race Words in Othello,” in Shakespeare and Immigration, ed. Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter (Ashgate, 2014); Espinosa, Shakespeare and the Shades of Whiteness (Routledge, 2021); Dadabhoy, “Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 27.2 (2020): 1–17. 59 “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare,” Postmedieval 11 (2020), 228–35. 60 “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980), in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilroy (Duke UP, 2021), 305–44. 61 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso Books, 2007). Roediger’s landmark study documents the ways the Antebellum white working-class defined itself in opposition to blackness to secure psychological and social privileges or “wages.” 62 Dadabhoy, ibid.

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race problem, academia has a class problem.63 This problem includes the structural and systemic barriers for poor and working-class students to enter academia and the professional elite, as debt, requisite mobility, and low cultural capital, to name a few factors, restrict access and safeguard elite class hegemony. Returning to Othello in closing, it’s worth noting that at the end of the play, Iago’s racism has resulted in the deaths of the play’s minoritized and women characters, Othello, Emilia, and Desdemona. But Iago’s deployment of replacement racism has also wrought his own demise, and he has failed to gain Cassio’s “place.” The “working-class villain” is incarcerated, Cassio the educated dandy is in charge, and Gratiano the nobleman seizes “the fortunes of the Moor” (5.2.429): the existing white supremacist social, political, and economic orders are upheld and strengthened, ameliorating audience complicity in these orders by assigning the racism of Venice to a malignant “white working-class” figure.

63 “Academia’s Other Diversity Problem: Class in the Ivory Tower,” December 20, 2016, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/academias-other-diversity-problem-classin-the-ivory-tower.

CHAPTER 5

Filiation and White Freedom: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Brome’s A Jovial Crew Derrick Higginbotham

First staged in 1641/42, Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars dramatizes interactions across class, starkly imagined via the polarity of beggars and gentry. This binary appears in the comedy’s depiction of what constitutes freedom, a depiction that paradoxically demonstrates the shared aspiration of these classes. The play’s beggars, for instance, appear capable of “the full enjoyment of liberty,” given that they wander where they will and engage in merriment of all kinds.1 At the end of act two, for instance, they perform a song about freedom, declaring that they are at liberty because they “have no debt or rent to pay, / No bargains or accounts to make, / No land or lease to let or take” (1.1.511–3). The beggars have no financial obligations and possess no 1 Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew, ed. Tiffany Stern (Bloomsbury, 2014), 2.1.5; cited parenthetically in the text hereafter by act, line, and scene numbers.

D. Higginbotham (B) Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_5

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land, with the play echoing, as Linda Woodbridge contends, a pernicious fantasy about poverty as a life without worry.2 Similarly, after witnessing the beggars’ freedom, the landowner Oldrents characterizes his wealth and property as “dross” that “weighs” gentlemen like him “down into despair” compared to the freedom he seeks (2.2.202). While this comedy initially imagines freedom in these terms, its ending refuses a vision of land and wealth as an encumbrance; instead, it shifts attention, to use Garrett A. Sullivan’s phrasing, “from freedom to filiation” that is, from valuing liberty to endorsing family networks created via reproductive bloodlines and marriage.3 I will develop this shift from freedom to filiation differently than Sullivan does in my conclusion, but at this moment, I want to underscore that A Jovial Crew is more about the gentry and its wealth than it is about the underclass. This comedy highlights a tension within the gentry over the generation and use of wealth that appears to have been acute by the middle of the seventeenth century: the tension between selfish accumulation and the redistribution of some personal wealth for public benefit. In the play, for instance, Vincent and Hilliard, two suitors for Oldrents’ daughters, Rachel and Meriel, pretend to want to join the vagabonds because these women seek, as Meriel puts it, the “absolute freedom / as the very beggars have” (2.1.20–1). In act four, when Vincent and Hilliard appear to embrace begging, Vincent contends that the appeal of joining the vagabonds is the contentment of this class: no “innovation shakes a thought of theirs” (4.2.103). Hilliard also exclaims that beggars experience “no fear of lessening our estates” and do not begrudge “to lend or give” their wealth for “public benefit” (4.2.105 and 107–8). The points that Vincent and Hilliard make here about how freeing it is to be a beggar actually reveal anxieties they feel as gentlemen. The play suggests that the stress of innovating economically and the demand to redistribute wealth troubles some of the gentry. These concerns about the production and use of wealth echo contemporaneous debates about the gentry’s transformation of land use—debates best encapsulated, as scholars have argued, by the new notion of “improvement” or what Vincent calls “innovation.” To maximize profits

2 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (U of Illinois P, 2001), 241–8. 3 Garrett A. Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape (Stanford UP, 1998), 189.

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from the land, many gentlemen embraced agricultural advances like applying new farming techniques to increase productivity. Moreover, the gentry renewed the practice of enclosure, especially after the 1620s, with some claiming they could put “waste” land—land that the working poor often gleaned for food and fuel—to “good” use, privatizing it to produce foodstuffs for the market, frequently selling that foodstuff back to those displaced from the land.4 As is well known, these “improvements” met resistance from the working poor, for whom the transformations were not beneficial. However, not all members of the gentry welcomed this “invention and experimentation”: while some landowners held that their private success because of improvements would better the commonwealth through the creation of employment, articulating a version of “trickledown economics,” others worried that these changes in the production and accumulation of wealth were an expression of sinful greed that lacked the temperance and generosity that traditionally defined the gentry’s obligations.5 While histories of “improvement” have generally focused on class struggles, this transformation in land use also energized racism and racial distinctions anew. A commitment to improvement played a role, for example, in the establishment of plantations abroad, whether in Ireland, the West Indies, or the east coast of North America, with members of the gentry funding these projects. Throughout the 1620s and 1630s, what Robert Brenner calls the “aristocratic colonizing opposition” in parliament formed an alliance with the merchant leadership in London who were committed to colonial projects; this alliance was invested in transporting new agricultural techniques established in England to settlements in different geographic locations.6 These aristocratic projectors hoped 4 On the emergence of improvement, see Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement (Oxford UP, 2015), 91–128; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities (Yale UP, 2000), 183– 212; Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland (Yale UP, 2014), 43–83; and Francis E. Dolan, Digging the Past (U of Pennsylvania P, 2020), 3–7. 5 The phrase “invention and experimentation” is Joan Thirsk’s. See Economic Policy and Projects (Clarendon Press, 1978), 11. Slack discusses how those promoting innovations to secure profits sidestepped accusations of greed by reframing their work as producing happiness, 112–13. See also Eric H. Ash, Draining the Fens (John Hopkins UP, 2017), 281–3. 6 Robert Brenner contends that, for instance, “one of the most spectacular, yet largely unnoticed, political developments of the late 1620s and the 1630s was the creation of a close working relationship between the noble and gentry political groups that operated the

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to intensify commodity production for English markets while securing estates for possible exile as conflicts between this part of the gentry and the crown deepened. Many of these same men funded the work of companies that traded in places like Guiana and Angola, which included the trade in enslaved people, often Black Africans, indicating one of the ways that the freedom of aristocrats in England depended upon the unfreedom of others.7 As scholars have demonstrated, by the late sixteenth century in English culture, dark skin became a primary marker of racial difference, categorizing a range of people from regions in Africa and Asia as different from the English, often reduced to the binary of Black/ White.8 Cassander Smith highlights the intensification of this binary as an outcome of mercantile and aristocratic engagement in colonial projects like the different expeditions by John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, which involved their valuing their own and their crew’s bodies compared to those they colonized and exploited, a material and moral distinction that shaped a specific form of Whiteness.9 Moreover, Kim F. Hall shows that early modern English aristocrats fetishized notions of black and white skin in portraiture and jewelry during this same period.10 All of these factors interacted with the longstanding perception of those people in England who labor, especially those who work outdoors, as having darker

Puritan colonizing companies and the new-merchant leadership of the colonial trades.” See his Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), 242. For his definition of the “aristocratic colonizing opposition” within government, see 243–69. See also Ash, 288–90. 7 On this point, see Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives (Routledge, 2008), 125 and 170. Habib observes that this work only continues a pattern of involvement in the trade in the enslaved that started in the late sixteenth century, yet by the middle of the seventeenth century, England witnessed both substantial growth in this trade and an uncompromising pursuit of colonial projects, with many aristocrats involved in these enterprises. 8 See Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages (Cambridge UP, 2005), 109– 10; Karim-Cooper, “The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge UP, 2021), 18–23. Geraldine Heng asserts that the European racial sensorium began constructing a notion of racialized Whiteness via European contacts with geographically and culturally distant others in the thirteenth century. See The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2018), 181–4. 9 See Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination (Louisiana State UP, 2016), 9. 10 See Hall, Things of Darkness (Cornell UP, 1995), 211 and passim.

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skin, illustrating how notions of racialized identities linked to different classes metamorphosed in this historical moment.11 A Jovial Crew registers this metamorphosis in its portrayal of entanglements between beggars and gentry and its overall effort to distinguish Oldrents and his family as the morally better sort compared to the other landowners in the play. In what follows, I attend to the ways A Jovial Crew imagines intersections between race and class, first insisting that this comedy draws upon racism to create exclusions, effecting forms of separateness that coalesce with the gentry’s domination. Secondly, I show that heteroerotic desire disturbs such efforts to exclude, threatening to dissolve racial and class distinctions and those interlocking hierarchies. In response, the play recomposes the significance of Whiteness, recruiting heteroerotic desire to anchor this racial identity in human bodies, particularly those of the gentle class. From one angle, the play implicitly stitches together the gentry, offering a form of White filiation that could unite this class, even though they have contesting perspectives on the production and use of their wealth. From another, Brome’s comedy also participates in the reformation of a class-inflected and racialized Whiteness as an inherited trait, a prescription that will become vital to the working of racial capitalism, especially in the colonies, in the coming centuries.

Black Rogues, White Landowners: The Labor of Racializing Class Race and class intersect in A Jovial Crew’s first scene when the landowner Oldrents critiques his steward, Springlove, for wanting to join a crew of beggars. While Springlove laments his desire to shift “place and air,” he insists that he “must abroad or perish” (1.1.226). Understanding that

11 There is a long prehistory of linking dark skin color to peasants and the underclass in European culture, as Paul Freedman reveals Images of the Medieval Peasant (Yale UP, 1999), 139–41 and 143–4. Sometimes, dark skin color was a sign of someone who worked outdoors, while at other times, it could signify the stain of Noah’s curse. Hall (99–101) notes that the link between tanned skin and agricultural labor remains operative in early modern English culture.

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Springlove’s desire is intransigent, Oldrents relents, but not before he characterizes Springlove as racially Black: I will no longer strive to wash this Moor, Nor breath more minutes so unthriftily In civil argument against rude wind, But rather practice to withdraw my love And tender care, if be possible, From that unfruitful breast, incapable Of wholesome counsel. (1.1.227–33)

Oldrents’ recycles a well-known racist adage: “To wash an Ethiop/ Blackamoor white is to labor in vain.”12 Via the metaphor of supposedly cleaning Black skin so that it appears White, this adage signifies the effort to do the impossible, capturing the presumed recalcitrance of racial identity as a somatic phenomenon. Oldrents employs this adage because Springlove will not accept the gentleman’s “wholesome counsel,” linking this vision of Blackness to ingratitude and thus constituting White gentlemen as magnanimous yet harsh when the generosity they offer is not welcomed on their terms. This characterization is paradoxical both rhetorically and visually since Springlove is presumably white-skinned, so his seeming a “Blackmoor” cuts against the logic of the adage and the audience’s assumed visual knowledge since, as Margo Hendricks observes, English racism traditionally “privileged somatic perception” when defining racial difference.13 Oldrents’ remark, though, activates a specific understanding of class difference, one that tries to carve out different types of Whiteness by evoking anti-Black racism. To put it differently, for Oldrents, Springlove

12 On the commonness of this adage and the ways that early modern English culture perceived Black skin, see Anu Korhonen, “Washing the Ethiopian White: Conceptualizing Black Skin in Renaissance England,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge UP, 2005), 94–5 and passim. For other examples of the use of this adage in non-dramatic English texts, see Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, Race in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54–5, 119–21, 217. 13 “Moor” can also signify someone who practices Islam, and if it does in this instance, Islam is not a source of difference that the rest of the play utilizes; however, the play, as I will show, frequently returns to race and racism. On English racism and somatic perception, see Hendricks, Race & Racism (ACMRS Press, 2022), xvii.

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appears morally darkened by his unbending desire to join the underclass and his unwillingness to follow Oldrents’ good council, twinned aspects of Springlove’s behavior that differentiates his Whiteness from that of Oldrents.14 Oldrents likely can imagine Springlove in these terms because of Springlove’s supposed underclass origins: Oldrents apparently found Springlove as a “naked beggar” (2.1.319). Oldrents adopts and educates Springlove only to discover, once he is older, that this child has a propensity for estate management (2.1.319). To Oldrents, Springlove could always be morally darker than him because of his class origins. Thus, Oldrents employs racial difference to underscore the social stratification of the two men, even as the play demonstrates the instability of this racialized class difference, exposing the labor needed to sustain this hierarchical distinction. A Jovial Crew offers no indication via stage directions or spoken lines that when Springlove joins the vagabonds, the actor uses cosmetics to alter his presumably light skin. Moreover, other members of Springlove’s crew, such as Scribble, Courtier, Soldier, and Patrico, appear as light-skinned Englishmen who have—by choice or accident—become wanderers. For instance, Courtier chooses to become a beggar, electing not to retain the wealth that his father amassed “begging” in the royal court (1.1.429–42), while Soldier sustains injuries from his punishment for deserting his regiment, and these injuries mean that he must turn to begging upon his return to England (1.1.406–17). Importantly, Patrico—the vagabond priest—refuses to share with the crew why he has become a beggar, although he practices fortune-telling, which he likely learned when he “travelled with gypsies” (1.1.476). That he traveled with a group of Romani implies that he is not one of them: he appears to be like them since he is landless and nomadic. The play thus acknowledges that vagabonds as an underclass were not necessarily racially homogenous.15 14 Lara Bovilsky contends that Othello perceives Desdemona as morally darkened by the accusation of adultery, a moral darkening linked directly to his and the play’s conceptions of race and racism. I am making a similar claim that what Oldrents does is morally darken Springlove via this adage. See Barbarous Play (U of Minnesota P, 2008), 49–65. 15 David Cressy demonstrates that English legislation against the Romani often admitted

that they traveled with English people; when the authorities punished “gypsies,” they sometimes removed the English from the group, protecting them from harsher punishments. For instance, in 1628, the Suffolk authorities arrested a company of “gypsies,” but they pulled John Agglinton, a runaway apprentice, out of the group and sent him back to his master before they executed the thirteen remaining gypsies. Presumably, the

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This invocation of the Romani can circle back to Oldrents’ earlier depiction of Springlove as a Moor since “Egyptians”—an English word that can refer to the Romani—could signify English people who posed as racial others. One of the earliest legal dictionaries, The Interpreter, compiled by John Cowell and published in 1607, with later editions also appearing in 1637 and 1658, offers this definition. Egyptians are: in our statues and lawes of England, a counterfeit kinde of roagues, that being English or Welch people, accompanying themselves together, disguising themselves in straunge roabes, blacking their faces and bodies, and framing to themselves an unknowne language, wander up and downe, and under pretence of telling of Fortunes, curing diseases, and such like, abuse the ignorant common people, by stealing all that is not too hote or too heavie for their cariaage. (sig. Bb1r )16

Cowell construes Egyptians as not Romani people at all; they are, instead, English or Welsh people who pretend to be Black rogues. This impersonation consists of costumes (the “straunge robes”), the use of cant (the “unknowne language”), and blackface (“blacking their faces and bodies”). Oldrents’ representation of Springlove as like a Moor, from this angle, does not appear unusual since the discourse on rogues contained the possibility that this underclass contained English/Welsh people who impersonated racial others. Moreover, Cowell’s definition acknowledges that English Egyptians are like the Italian Cingari, who are, through a corruption in language, called “Saracens,” another word (albeit an antiquated one by the middle of the seventeenth century) for Muslims, although he elaborates later that calling them Saracens is erroneous since they do not necessarily know anything about Islam (Bb1v ). Cowell’s definition creates a series of connections between some White English authorities decided who was English (Agglinton) and who was not before meting out punishment. Cressy contends that this case was an exception in the seventeenth century when the government made fewer and fewer legal efforts to target Romani people. See “Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 59.1 (2016), 58–9. 16 Stern cites this passage in her edition of Brome’s A Jovial Crew (92n6) when

commenting on Oldrents’ friend Hearty’s incredulousness about Oldrents trusting “gypsies,” a remark that Hearty makes in reference to Patrico and the beggar crew generally (1.1.6). Stern, however, does not develop the link between the racist practice of blackface linked to “Egyptians” and Oldrents’ racist depiction of Springlove as like a Moor. See also Burton and Loomba for their translation of Cowell’s dictionary, 282.

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people and racial/religious others within this underclass that resonates with Oldrents’ racist comment about Springlove. Moreover, the play underscores that vagabonds, including Springlove, practice forms of deceit that involve embodied differentiation from the English gentry. While Brome’s play echoes the commonplace notion that the underclass purposely lies, committing different types of fraud to gather wealth, it inadvertently emphasizes the potential mutability of social identities by race and class, destabilizing what the play thinks should be stable.17 For example, Springlove reveals that in the past, when impersonating a beggar, he had an encounter with Oldrents (2.1.326). While traveling in the north, Oldrents meets Springlove, who is dressed in rags and who “did accost him [Oldrents] with a ‘good your worship, / The gift of one small penny to a creeple,’ / For here I was with him [limping ]” (2.1.334–6). The stage direction indicates that the actor might walk with a limp as he delivers these lines, making visible his status as a “creeple.” Oldrents sees through this performance, demanding that Springlove cease his wanderings and return to Oldrents’ estate. Springlove’s disguise is a deception, yet his performance of a physical disability points to a possible embodied difference between the underclass and other English people, echoing the way that this play acknowledges differences between types of class-based Whiteness via the body. Put differently, the play marks a certain kind of class-based, able-bodied Whiteness as more legitimate than other forms of Whiteness, and that legitimate Whiteness, linked to the gentry, is less marked as a visible category. The racial status of beggars thus seems more conspicuous because of its physical manifestations but also more contingent, given its link to possible fraudulence. While this comedy points to the value of able-bodiedness, it imagines the gentry as white-skinned, a signifier of Whiteness that emerges from the comparison of white skin with dark skin. Springlove protects Oldrents’ daughters, Rachel and Meriel, after they join the beggar community in a 17 Rogue literature often portrays its subjects engaging in different types of deception, usually impersonating others, which links rogues with theatricality, an association Brome’s comedy also mobilizes. On the links between roguery and counterfeiting, see Dionne and Mentz, “Introduction,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (U of Michigan P, 2006), 11; Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled (U of Chicago P, 2006), 44–58; William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar (Cornell UP, 1996), 208–15; Ari Friedlander, Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford UP, 2022), 23–5.

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bid to obtain their freedom, and as part of that protection, Springlove secures their dinner one night as well as their breakfast the next day of “comfortable chippings,” or bread crusts (3.1.123–5). Making a joke about breakfast, Meriel displays her skin to her sister, stating, “There was a brown crust amongst it that has / made my neck so white, methinks. Is it not, Rachel?” (3.1.127–8). Here, Meriel mockingly alludes to facial washes that whiten skin, which often had the crumbs of white manchet bread as one of their ingredients.18 She asserts that a brown crust has made her skin “so white,” a claim that cannot be true because brown crust likely would not produce whiteness. Perhaps she indicates that her skin has become brown during her brief sojourn with the beggars, making the audience aware of her previous white skin through the cosmetics that the actor now assumes.19 Her joke could allude to the Whiteness these gentlewomen once had, which shifted once their social status dropped, and to the likelihood that beggars could have had brown skin because of tanning, labor status, or racial difference. Whether or not the actor used cosmetics to alter skin color, Meriel’s joke expresses the entanglement of race and class, their capacity to reinforce each other, even as they produce stratification, since she satirically insists that her skin should be “so white,” a sense of racialized Whiteness linked to her status as a member of the gentry.

Beggar-Nigglers and the Eroticization of Whiteness If racialization exposes the cultural work involved in establishing stratification along the lines of race and class—an effort to carve out social exclusions that the contingency of these identities could compromise— then heteroerotic desire, in and of itself, also destabilizes those attempts 18 Stern, 167n127–8. 19 On the use of cosmetics, see Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renais-

sance Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2019), 54–60. See also Ben Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) since its actors use cosmetics to stage racial difference, and the play ultimately crafts a notion of Whiteness linked to the landowning class, a play probably familiar to Brome because he was Jonson’s servant during its production. On this masque, its representation of race, and its links to Brome, see Andrea Stevens, “Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, The Windsor Text of The Gypsies Metamorphosed and Brome’s The English Moor,” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (Spring 2009), 414–20.

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to order the world. That capacity becomes visible in A Jovial Crew through its attention to those who are, in the cant of vagabonds, “beggar-nigglers”: gentlemen who seek sex with beggars (2.2.320).20 Hearty, Oldrents’ friend, and an impoverished gentleman, employs this term in a conversation with Oldrents after they watch the vagabonds put on a show that Patrico organizes for them. Once Patrico’s drunk wife finishes performing, Patrico tells the men that he wishes he had entertainers that could please them more since “gallants sometimes love coarse fare” (2.2.289). He then offers Oldrents a young woman “disposed to doxy”: that is, a woman willing to have sex with well-to-do men, who remains common to all men afterward (2.2.291).21 After the show, Hearty critiques Patrico’s presumption that he and Oldrents would be interested in one of his “doxies,” rhetorically asking if they look like “beggar-nigglers” (2.2.320). Although Oldrents too scorns Patrico’s offer, it disquiets him since he declares in response that “a sudden qualm overchills” him, a discomfort that will not make sense until the play’s end when audiences discover that Oldrents believes that he had sex with a vagabond in the past (2.2.297). Patrico’s offer possibly stirs up Oldrents’ shame about what he perceives as a past sexual impropriety. Here and elsewhere, the play stresses the capacity of sexual desire to enable cross-class interactions, even if only temporarily. The play thus creates a link between heteroerotic desire and a particular conception of liberty since this desire can enable individuals to cross social lines. The impulsiveness of this desire means that one’s liberty can include violence against others, which I will show when examining another gentleman, Oliver. Even so, A Jovial Crew ultimately depicts this heteroerotic desire as drawing certain White people together in a way that seems spontaneous and thus “natural.” The erotic appeal of Whiteness solidifies and rationalizes class distinctions, effecting the separateness of the gentry, a separateness implied by Hearty’s repulsion at Patrico’s assumption that they could be interested in one of his doxies.

20 Brome, 160n320. 21 Thomas Harman, Caveat for Commen Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (1592, F3r−v ), reprinted in Brome, 274–5.

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The play’s effort to marshal race, class, and sexuality as they interact is particularly evident in the extended depiction of Rachel and Meriel’s eroticized white skin. Just before they join the vagabonds, Vincent and Hilliard see the women costumed as beggars. After Rachel compliments the men on their new attire, Hilliard does the same for the women, telling them: How fairer than fair Flora’s self appear To deck the spring, Diana’s darlings dear! Oh, let us not, Actaeon-like be strook— With greedy eyes while we presume to look On your half-nakedness, since courteous rags Cover the rest—into the shape of stags. (3.1.102–7)

That beggars, from the play’s perspective, wear fewer clothes means that the men see more of the women’s skin, and Hilliard here underscores that the two women now appear “fairer than fair Flora,” a superlative that highlights the whiteness of their flesh in their new attire.22 Teasingly, Hilliard recollects the dangerousness of Actaeon’s illicit glimpse of the goddess Diana naked, leading the latter to transform him into a stag and have her dogs kill him. Hilliard evokes this sense of danger to stress how titillating it is for him and Vincent to see so much of Rachel and Meriel’s skin for the first time. He also intimates the intensity of their desire, claiming they should resist looking with “greedy eyes.” Although all of them are of the same class, the women’s new status as members of the underclass dressed in “courteous rags” makes their skin and its whiteness more visible to the men. Put differently, class difference here amplifies an eroticized Whiteness that the play will connect to their membership in the gentry. While the play indicates that class distinctions can intensify the erotic significance of race, it also suggests that heteroerotic desires can exacerbate class conflict. In a subplot, the gentleman Oliver searches for his father’s clerk, Martin, who has run away with Amy, Oliver’s cousin and 22 Early modern scholars who analyze race have demonstrated the ways that “fair”

can signify racial Whiteness. See Hall, 1–11; David Sterling Brown, “White Hands: Gesturing Toward Shakespeare’s Other ‘Race Plays,’” Plenary Lecture, Shakespeare Association of America Conference, Washington, DC, 2019; and recently, Dennis Austin Britton, “Flesh and Blood,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge UP, 2021), 112–6.

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Justice Clack’s niece. At one point, Oliver pauses his search for them and reflects on the women he briefly saw on the side of the road: I passed by ‘em in haste, but something so possesses me that I must – what the devil must I? A beggar? Why, beggars are flesh and blood, and rags are no diseases. Their lice are no French fleas. And there is much wholesomer flesh under country dirt than city painting, and less danger in dirt and rags than in ceruse and satin. (3.1.294–300)

Oliver’s sexist and classist soliloquy exposes the appeal he finds in “beggar-niggling,” echoing with a difference the eroticism that Hilliard and Vincent feel once they see the women dressed as beggars. During his meditation on his desire for poor women, Oliver tries to rationalize his impulses, admitting that female beggars are “flesh and blood,” just as gentlewomen are, which implies that class difference should not create the separateness that he knows it does. Then, he decides that poor women are better than gentlewomen because beggars are less likely to transmit venereal disease than the women of his own class, who carry “French fleas” (i.e., the pox). He even claims that the cosmetic whiteness of gentlewomen—their use of “ceruse”—makes their flesh less wholesome than the flesh found under the “dirt” of female beggars, contrasting poor women’s “natural” whiteness (and changeable brownness since they can be washed white) to the whiteness of gentlewomen. Even though Oliver will later commit acts of violence that call his judgment into question, his meditation dramatizes the ways that heteroeroticism, in combination with notions of class and race, sort people, not only putting people in certain places within a social order but also explaining their worth within that order. In its capacity to trouble, if not dissolve, hierarchies, as it does in the practice of beggar-niggling, heteroeroticism still can leave those hierarchies intact since it is social stratification itself that partially creates an erotic spark. A Jovial Crew continues in its finale to explore the way that beggarniggling mixes classes, although the play stresses that Whiteness conducts heteroerotic desire distinctively. In the finale, the beggar Patrico reveals to Oldrents that his grandfather swindled Patrico’s grandfather out of his land, causing Patrico’s family to fall in status, although he exonerates

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Oldrents from responsibility for that fraud. He then elaborates on another secret involving Oldrents. Patrico explains: I had a sister who, among the race Of beggars, was the fairest. Fair she was In gentle blood and gesture to her beauty, Which could not be so clouded with base clothing But she attracted love from worthy persons, Which, for her meanness, they expressed in pity For the most part. (5.1.469–75)

Class and race appear somewhat mutable in this situation, with a fall in class status affecting Patrico and his sister’s status so that they become members of “the race / Of beggars,” a class linked to those whose racial identities are imagined as contingent and typically not White. However, he also distinguishes his sister from this “race” that they have joined. She is, after all, “the fairest” among this group, suggesting that her Whiteness not only stands out but also animates the desire of gentlemen (the “worthy persons”) who encounter her. For Patrico, his sister’s Whiteness—presumably even more visible than usual because of her exposed skin, given that she dresses as a beggar—makes her particularly appealing to gentlemen. Heteroerotic desire thus appears capable of restoring Patrico’s family’s racial and class status, of righting the wrong that occurred to their grandfather in a way that seems just and impersonal, as if it were destined to happen. That is, members of the same class are instinctively drawn to one another because of the erotic allure of Whiteness, even if some of those members appear underclass. Patrico further explains that his sister had to fend off assaults by other gentlemen until one of them, Oldrents, proved appealing to her (5.1.476–80). This moment dispels Oldrents’ earlier shame that he had been a “beggar-niggler” since the woman he has sex with turns out to be a member of his class. Her Whiteness now exposed seems to transform the sexual shame that Oldrents had felt in the past into an affirmation that his sexual encounter with Patrico’s sister proves socially proper, re-aligning race and class, Whiteness and the gentry. The result of their union is Springlove who, as Patrico points out, literally stands out among “the rest of [Oldrents’] fair children,” a revelation of paternity

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new for the audience as well as for Oldrents and the other members of the gentry present (5.1.494). This revelation about Oldrents’ past underscores his contrast with the other known beggar-niggler in the play, Oliver. In so doing, it morally elevates Oldrents and his family, along with those who marry into it, above the play’s other landowners. When Oliver, for instance, finds Rachel and Meriel on the road, he surmises that they are the offspring of a gentleman because they speak without the “beggar’s dialect” (3.1.402). He then notices a flea on Meriel, which draws his eye not only to her breasts but also to what he sees when he declares: “Oh, what a provoking skin is there!” (3.1.418). It is difficult to tell what exactly about her skin provokes Oliver since the text does not explain whether Meriel appears white, as she did in her first scene as a beggar, or if the actor uses make-up to darken the character’s skin tone as a sign of her new class status, a darker tone that might appeal to Oliver. Should it be that Meriel’s fairness appears pronounced even as she appears dressed as a beggar, then the play’s final revelation about Oldrents could be thought of as recalling Oliver’s interaction but differently. Soon after this moment, Oliver attempts to rape the women by dragging them into nearby bushes, only to be interrupted by Springlove, Vincent, and Hilliard. Though thwarted, Oliver’s violence differs starkly from Oldrents’ behavior: when the latter meets Patrico’s sister, she chooses to have sex with him, suggesting consent, especially considering that she refuses other gentlemen who try to have sex with her. Oliver’s willingness to rape reflects his disreputable character and shows how erotic impulses like his can easily transform into violence, in part because racialized class difference offers a license for such abuse.

From Romance to Race Brome’s comedy imagines that the right kind of landowners instinctively recognize one another via resemblance, a resemblance that activates a sense that embodiment and bloodlines determine race and class. Early in the play, in response to Oldrents’ query on the whereabouts of Springlove, Hearty delivers an aside to the audience, claiming that “He [Springlove] is ever in his care. But that I know / The old squire’s virtue, I should think Springlove / Were sure his bastard” (2.2.52–4). Hearty’s conjecture will prove correct, suggesting, if retrospectively, that Oldrents’ affection for Springlove is grounded in a familial and class connection

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that exists intangibly and emotionally. In a different scene, at the beggars’ encampment, Rachel and Meriel gossip with Amy about Springlove since Amy has fallen in love with him. Amy contends that “if he be, as fairly you pretend, a / gentleman,” her love for him is viable (4.2.12–3). Rachel and Meriel then confirm that Springlove is a gentleman. Yet how do they know this about Springlove when Patrico has not disclosed the truth to anyone? Possibly the women base their conclusion on his status as the “king” of the beggar community, or they value his good conduct in taking care of them during their sojourn with the beggars (1.1.380). However, this moment could be another expression of an intuitiveness that some of the gentry—narrowed down to Oldrents’ exemplary family—seem to have about each other, a resemblance recognized. Oldrents also grasps something about Patrico’s sister’s status via her conduct and appearance when he desires her, although her resemblance is not familial but racial, a Whiteness that unobtrusively communicates her class status and erotic potential. This emphasis on embodied sameness recalls the Atlantic context of slavery in which notions of “the physiognomy of subjection” had long circulated among Atlantic settlers, slave traders, and slaveowners, notions that rationalized the unfreedom of Black and Indigenous peoples, even as it crafted the Whiteness of those claiming authority and freedom.23 That Brome resurrects the notion that class and race are encoded in the flesh explains his use of romance to structure the main plot of A Jovial Crew, a use he announces in the play’s prologue (8–14). Following romance convention, Springlove’s skill in managing Oldrents’ land contradicts his purported status as a beggar at birth, with the plot’s resolution proposing that Springlove’s capacities are an inheritance from his father. Because romance plots require the restoration of protagonists to their “proper place in the social order,” they are more likely, as Jenny Davidson puts it, “to fall on the side of nature rather than culture” to explain that social order.24 If Brome’s comedy looks backward aesthetically in using this genre that is so suffused with nostalgia, it does so to look forward socially, using this older genre to reinvigorate and prioritize

23 On “the physiognomy of subjection, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” small axe 55 (March 2018), 16. 24 See Davidson, Breeding (Columbia UP, 2009), 27, 32.

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a discourse of Whiteness as an embodied racial identity.25 In this sense, Garret Sullivan’s claim that the play invests in notions of freedom only to shift attention to “filiation” proves correct,26 although he posits the restoration of family as an argumentative endpoint, without recognizing the ways the family and marriage become the frames for the play’s vision of class, race, and sexuality as they interact. A Jovial Crew thus acts as a crucible in which these three forces intersect, summoning a racialized Whiteness linked to the gentry as exemplified by Oldrents and his family, a Whiteness that appears inborn. This vision of an inborn Whiteness works to exclude others from the gentry, limiting the freedom to cross class lines by aligning heteroerotic desire with class and implicitly encouraging the segregation of the wealth unleashed historically by the entrepreneurialism of the improvers within the gentry. As well, this comedy emerges just as race and racism markedly reshaped this social order in England because of the deepening commitment to the plantation as an economic engine. Throughout the 1630s and 1640s, for instance, planters in Virginia imported more enslaved Black people to maximize profits, with English wealth relying on the labor of the unfree, which encouraged the leadership of the colony to conceptualize unfreedom as a cradle-to-grave condition. By 1662, the condition of enslavement in Virginia becomes legally inheritable, codifying “the race/reproduction bind” and stabilizing a particular racial order, with the same laws prohibiting heteroerotic sex between races.27 Brome’s A Jovial Crew furthers this social logic about the inheritability of freedom, contributing, however inchoately, to the fixing of Whiteness as a physical property, one possessable and exclusive to the English gentry as it rapaciously accumulated wealth, locally and globally. Acknowledgements I want to thank Stephen Spiess for his vital feedback on this essay and Ari Friedlander for generously sharing a portion of his book before publication.

25 On the ways that romance as a genre can be “a conduit for white supremacist illogic about the inherent stability of race,” see Hendricks, xviii and passim; italics in the original. 26 Sullivan, 189. 27 Morgan, 10.

CHAPTER 6

“Portraiture[s] of Schism”: The Trans-Rogue-Royalism of Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and Mary/Jack Frith Juan Pedro Lamata

I begin with what appears to be an unexamined historical coincidence: why, in the seventeenth century, did the English and Spanish-speaking worlds concurrently develop separate fascinations with two trans figures who also happened to be both “rogues” and royalists?1 I am speaking 1 I use the term “trans” to point to the multiplicity and mutability of gender systems and experiences. While neither Mary/Jack nor Catalina/Antonio would have been likely to use such or similar words when describing themselves, hesitations over anachronism are misplaced. As Joseph Gamble has shown, the term “trans” develops its reference to gender by at least 1646. See Joseph Gamble, “Toward a Trans Philology,” JEMCS 19.4, (2019), 27. For an overview of trans theory and early modern studies, see Simone Chess et al., “Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies,” JEMCS 19.4 (2019), 1–25; and Ezra Horbury, “Early Modern Transgender Fairies,” TSQ 8.1 (2021), 75–95.

J. P. Lamata (B) California State University-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_6

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of the London-based Mary/Jack Frith (c. 1584–1659) a.k.a. “Moll Cutpurse” and the Basque-Spanish conquistador Catalina/Antonio de Erauso (1585 or 1592–1650), who passed most of their life as a man in Spain’s American colonies, becoming known in print and on stage by the paradoxical moniker “la monja alférez,” “the lieutenant nun.”2 Together, Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio share the distinction of being the first living people represented onstage in English and Spanish theaters, and their fame spread through plays, pamphlets, paintings, traveler’s accounts, performances, public letters, and word of mouth. Why did these two people—both associated with proletarianized and often criminal “masterless” underclasses, both held up as proud royalist heroes, and both trans—rise at the same moment to become such subjects of widespread cultural attention? I suggest these are no coincidences at all. Instead, I argue for reading the prominent roles of Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio within the early modern cultural imaginary as an attempt to imaginatively synthesize political-economic challenges facing the English and Spanish empires in the first half of the seventeenth century. Arising at a moment of acute political crisis amid widespread social and economic change, as traditional political structures struggled to maintain control over novel ways of allocating and exploiting property and labor, Mary/Jack’s and Catalina/Antonio’s celebrity performed a kind of ideological metabolism for two early modern imperial societies struggling to draw coherence out of the political-economic contradictions of their age. Following Christopher Chitty’s thesis that historical conjunctures of political and economic upheaval provide “a privileged site for examining how sexual categories and behaviors were undone and remade, and for examining which social forces were brought to bear upon this process,” I take the phenomenon of Mary/Jack’s and Catalina/Antonio’s popularity as an opportunity to interrogate how early modern notions of transness—and its intersections

2 Both Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio were known by, and themselves used, multiple appellations: “Mary,” “Moll,” “Mal,” and “Jack” for Mary/Jack, and “Catalina,” “Francisco,” “Alonso,” “Pedro,” and “Antonio” for Catalina/Antonio. I refer to them as “Mary/Jack” and “Catalina/Antonio” and use third person plural pronouns to be sensitive to the ways these figures call into question fixed, singular, and stable notions of gender and sexuality. In the case of Catalina/Antonio and their many aliases, I have chosen to use their given name and the name they chose for themselves once they received papal permission to continue living in the habit of a man.

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with class and race formations—shaped and were shaped by the emergence of new modes of wealth production amid old political forms of wealth distribution.3 Both Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio come to cultural prominence at a moment of political-economic rupture. King Philip IV of Spain, for whom Catalina/Antonio fought and from whom they received a lifetime yearly pension of 500 pesos for their extraordinary military service to the crown, dedicates his reign to reforming political institutions to better respond to the pressures of nascent capitalist social relations. Undreamed of colonial profits inexplicably coexisted with an immiserated population. An interminable bloody guerrilla war in the Low Countries was matched only by one in Patagonia, a war in which Catalina/Antonio became both hero and criminal. Rebellions by both Indigenous peoples and newly prosperous colonizers—rebellions Catalina/Antonio helped to put down—threatened the crown’s overseas properties from within, while rival empires threatened them from without. In response, the king’s chief counselor dreamed of “turning Spaniards into merchants”—a transformation the warrior nun would themselves accomplish—so as to breathe life into the empire’s declining commercial fortunes.4 Meanwhile, the England in which Mary/Jack and their escapades rose to fame witnessed the beheading of a king, the restoration of his son, and what has been called “the first capitalist and anti-capitalist” revolution in the world.5 When Mary/Jack’s supposed autobiography was published shortly after the English Civil War in 1662, Charles II’s restored regime faced what Jonathan Sawday has termed a “symbolic crisis of representation” that demanded the English commons and the newly emerged and empowered plebeian public sphere be reconceived as fundamentally royalist.6 The central fantasy that the figures of Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio enable as trans-royalist-rogues is that of enlisting a recently proletarianized population of “loose” masterless people in the task of shoring up absolutist monarchies while accommodating new capitalistic economic relations.

3 Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Duke UP, 2020), 35. 4 J.H. Elliot, The Count-Duke of Olivares (Yale UP, 1989), 201. 5 James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger (Verso, 2002), ix. 6 “Re-writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration,” Seventeenth Century 7.2 (1992), 171.

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This fantasy appeals to early moderns because the acute political crises that punctuate and give wider meaning to the narrative lives of Mary/ Jack and Catalina/Antonio are situated along a broader horizon of profound social and economic changes across the seventeenth century. As the production of commodities became increasingly oriented toward a globalized world market, social and economic relationships experienced widescale reorganization. Keith Wrightson notes that these long durée economic changes produced a “tripartite reconfiguration of the distribution of wealth and economic power” shared across a diminishing aristocracy, a growing population of “the middling sort of people” consisting primarily of small landowners, merchants, and members of the gentry who possessed capital, and, of course, the newly emerged mass of landless poor who had only their labor to sell.7 In England, the rise of landless, dispossessed peasants who no longer had access to their traditional means of subsistence swelled the ranks of what Wrightson calls a “wage-dependent laboring population,” a group that would come to account for about half of England’s population by the middle of the seventeenth century.8 In Spain and its overseas colonies, members of this same proletarianized masterless population became known as “gente suelta,” or “loose people,” a term that suggests both their lack of ties to traditional structures of service and their supposed lack of moral selfcontrol, a charge which furnished an ideological justification for their material impoverishment. Operating within a symbolic order in which the dominant political metaphor was that of the body and in which natural and political sciences were inseparable, we should not be surprised that the bodies of two famous trans figures would not only be subject to interrogation by the political and cultural institutions of the period, but would themselves facilitate the act of political-economic interrogation by those who encountered their bodies in the texts in which they were represented. That is, Catalina/Antonio and Mary/Jack were not passive spectacles of early modern transness but catalysts for theorizing how newly gendered and racialized social relations could incorporate the masterless proletariat in a faltering program of royal absolutism amid the rise of capitalistic property relations.

7 Earthly Necessities (Yale UP, 2002) 201. 8 Ibid., 197.

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To understand the recognition Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio garnered as trans-royalist-rogues as intertwined with the changing and incompatible ways property was constituted in the period, I turn to Marjorie Rubright’s use of the term “transgender capacity” and pair it with an insight from Marxist feminism. The term originates in “Keywords for Transgender Studies,” in which David Getsy defines transgender capacity as “the ability or the potential for making visible, bringing into experience, or knowing genders as mutable, successive, and multiple … the trait of those many things that support or demand accounts of gender’s dynamism, plurality, and expansiveness.”9 For Rubright, attending to Mary/Jack’s transgender capacity in The Roaring Girl allows us to “raise questions that recognize and grapple with the productive opacities” generated by the gender nonconformity of this dramatic character.10 Looked at from the perspective of Marxist feminists, for whom “gender as an ideological regime functions as an accumulation strategy,” we may begin to see how Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio’s transgender capacity signals the instability of gender and sexuality as logics for equally dynamic, plural, volatile, and always unstable structures of wealth accumulation.11 In other words, Mary/Jack’s and Catalina/Antonio’s transgender capacity gestures not only to the fluidity of gender and sexuality as social concepts, but also to the changing and contradictory modes of property acquisition and distribution that arose in the seventeenth century, the social relationships of class constructed through these modes of property creation, and how these regimes of accumulation were in turn mediated through ideologies of the body as a way to stabilize those emergent social relations. While Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio were the subjects of plays, epistles, pamphlets, traveler’s accounts, testimonies, and more, I focus this essay on their autobiographies: Catalina/Antonio’s Vida y Sucesos de la Monja Alférez and Mary/Jack’s dubiously attributed The Life and Death

9 David Getsy qtd. in Marjorie Rubright, “Transgender Capacity in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611),” JEMCS 19.4 (2019), 47. 10 Ibid., 47. 11 Kay Gabriel, “Gender as an Accumulation Strategy,” Invert Journal 1.1 (2020),

https://invertjournal.org.uk/posts?view=articles&post=7106265#gender-as-accumulationstrategy.

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of Mrs. Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse.12 What is important about these texts is not that they may have been written by Catalina/ Antonio and Mary/Jack (which is unlikely in the case of the latter), but that as first-person narratives they put forward a trans-rogue-royalist “I” that attempts to hold together political forms and loyalties, economic structures of accumulation, and ideas of gender and sexuality. Invoking the gambling spirit of Mary/Jack and Catalina/Antonio, I wager that approaching the archive surrounding these two figures from a perspective responsive to the ways their transgender capacity points to shifts, rifts, and uncertainties within early modern regimes of wealth production and allocation will help close the distance between trans theory and the political-economic history of the period, contribute, however modestly, to the project of “returning the history of sexuality to the history of property,” and shed light on why two seventeenth-century European empires amid political-economic crisis turned to a pair of trans royalist heroes to make sense of their historical predicament.13 Born as “Catalina” in the Basque city of San Sebastián and dying as “Antonio” somewhere between Veracruz and Mexico City in what was then the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Catalina/Antonio lived an eventful life. Son and daughter of the Basque nobility, one-time novitiate but never a nun, boy servant to many masters, war hero, deserter, fugitive murderer, eligible bachelor, famous virgin, and promised husband to a rich mestiza, Catalina/Antonio met with King Philip IV, who granted them a lifetime pension for loyal service but requested that they “return to the habit of a woman,” and with Pope Urban VIII, who granted a special dispensation to continue living in the habit of a man.14 They challenged every early modern tenet of gender and sex. They owned slaves and lived off the profits of forced Indigenous labor. They were the subject of at least one play, two portraits, a character in numerous traveler’s accounts, colonial 12 The authorship of the Vida has long been debated, though the text’s most recent editor, Miguel Martínez, concludes that it is likely that Catalina/Antonio wrote or dictated the original text. As for Mary/Jack’s autobiography, Elizabeth Spearing finds it likely that printers William Gilbertson and George Horton hired a team of male writers to produce the document. See Spearing, Counterfeit Ladies (NYUP, 1994), x–xii. For what remains the definitive biographical account of Mary/Jack’s life, see Gustave Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), 42–84. 13 Sexual Hegemony, viii. 14 Catalina [/Antonio] de Erauso, Vida y Sucesos de la Monja Alférez, ed. Miguel

Martínez (Castalia Ediciones, 2021), 285 (translation my own).

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histories, and picaresques, are mentioned in thirteen extant texts printed between 1617 and 1698, and authored an autobiography.15 But they were far from the only trans or intersex person to capture the imagination of Hapsburg Spain. Public interest in intersex figures such as the nuns María/Gaspar Muñoz and María Pacheco, the soldier Juliana/ Julian de los Cobos, the mixed-race surgeon Elena/Eleno de Céspedes, the court entertainer Brígida del Río, and others, as well as literary works such as Francisco Lugo Dávila’s novella El Andrógino (“The Androgyne”), or the popularity of plays that staged men giving birth, such as El Parto de Juan Rana (“Juan Rana Gives Birth”) all attest to a wider cultural interest in figures whose bodies pushed the limits of the period’s understanding of sex and gender.16 Importantly, Catalina/Antonio’s story and the way it was understood deviates from these other examples. Unlike most other trans figures in early modern Spain who were at some point forced by religious or political institutions to “choose” a single gender to live by, Catalina/Antonio was allowed to—or rather, carved for themselves the space to—inhabit a zone of gender and sexual indeterminacy. Yes, the Spanish crown insisted that they “return” to the female sex—a demand Catalina/Antonio always successfully resisted— but even in making this request, the crown addressed Catalina/Antonio as “el alférez doña Catalina,” “the (male) Lieutenant lady Catalina,” a self-contradictory title that Catalina/Antonio later adopts.17 Listed among the daughters in their father’s will and among the sons in their mother’s, Catalina/Antonio seems to have always avoided identification with a single sex. Their autobiography, in which Catalina/Antonio adopts postures of violent hypermasculinity or vulnerable femininity depending on the situation, makes varied use of pronouns, offering fortythree instances of masculine pronouns to thirty-seven feminine ones.18 A close look at one section of the Vida offers a glimpse into how Catalina/Antonio managed to purchase this indeterminacy at the price of establishing and maintaining incipient colonial hierarchies to bolster an unstable empire. 15 Ibid., 20, 43–5, and 14. 16 See Victor Pueyo, Anatomías de la Excepción en España y en America Latina

(Tamesis, 2016), 90–102; and Sherry Velasco, Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Vanderbilt UP, 2006), 28–50. 17 Ibid., 285–9, translation my own. 18 Ibid., 58.

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The fluid, violent, and contested landscape of the colonies served as a crucible in which old ideas about race and sex were refashioned to better manage the vast and unrelenting exploitation of people and environment. As a trans-colonial conquistador, Catalina/Antonio provides a perfect opportunity to continue to study what Kim Hall calls “the ways in which gender concerns are crucially embedded in discourses of race” as well as the ways these discourses are themselves embedded within structures of property.19 Sydnee Wagner has offered an illuminating account of how European descriptions of Indigenous Americans as trans were deployed to dehumanize non-Europeans and were “ultimately an important means of reaffirming and naturalizing white masculinity.”20 In these examples, transphobia serves to uphold the colonial architecture of exploitation. Yet Catalina/Antonio’s narrative offers a testament to the pliability of ideologies of sex and race to function as technologies of property accumulation. Whereas European colonial narratives often portray Indigenous peoples as deviant intersexuals and therefore outside the realm of “the human,” Catalina/Antonio offers an example in which transness and nonheteronormative sexual desire are validated, but only to the extent that they may serve racialized colonial hierarchies. Having deserted a military post in Patagonia, Catalina/Antonio finds themselves starving to death alone in a “godforsaken place” at the edge of the empire.21 One of the only two moments in the narrative in which Catalina/Antonio sheds tears, this episode constitutes one of its most highly feminized portions, with Catalina/Antonio deploying more feminine pronouns in just a few paragraphs than in the five previous chapters combined. Here Catalina/Antonio describes themselves as “cansada, afligida y lastimada,” the feminine forms of “tired,” “distraught,” and “injured”22 before writing “I propped myself against a tree and wept— for what I think was the first time in my life.”23 I highlight this section in 19 Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell UP, 1995), 2. 20 “Racing Gender to the Edge of the World: Decoding the Transmasculine Amazon Cannibal in Early Modern Travel Writing,” JEMCS 19.4 (2019), 139. 21 Catalina [/Antonio] de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, ed. and trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Beacon Press, 1996), 27. 22 Erauso, ed. Martínez, 149. 23 Erauso, ed. Stepto and Stepto, 27.

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part because it occurs immediately before an episode in which Catalina/ Antonio dramatically plays the role of a man, thus offering an example in which Catalina/Antonio is able to shift gender presentation and role through the racialized and gendered allocation of colonial property. “Overcome by fatigue and hunger,” Catalina/Antonio is found and rescued by two Indigenous men who take them to their mistress’s ranch. Writes Catalina/Antonio, “The lady was a half-breed [“mestiza”], the daughter of a Spaniard and an Indian [sic] woman, a widow and a good woman.”24 This woman then cares for Catalina/Antonio and treats them “handsomely,” offering “small gifts of this and that.” As Catalina/ Antonio describes the situation, The lady was well-off, with a good deal of livestock and cattle, and it seems that, since Spaniards were scarce in those parts, she began to fancy me as a husband for her daughter. After I’d been there for eight days, the good woman said she wanted me to stay on and manage the place. I let her know how grateful I was, seeing how I was penniless, and told her I would serve her to the best of my abilities. And a couple of days later, she let me know it would be fine by her if I married her daughter—a girl as black and ugly as the devil himself, quite the opposite of my taste, which has always run to pretty faces. Still, I pretended to be overcome with happiness.25

During this time in the mestiza woman’s home, in which Catalina/ Antonio behaved “as the owner, [while] she called me ‘son,’” the narrative stages a negotiation between two parties that lack what the other has.26 Catalina/Antonio may be a “penniless,” malnourished, unemployed soldier, but they possess a particular property that the “well-off” widow “with a good deal of livestock and cattle” can only acquire through the contract of marriage: the property of whiteness and its admission to the world of the Spaniards. Here the idea of Catalina/Antonio as a legitimate object of desire and a non-problematic desiring subject comes at the expense of solidifying “Spaniard” as an anti-Black, anti-Indigenous category. Where the widow begins this section as a “mestiza,” she ends the chapter as an 24 Ibid., 28. 25 Ibid., 28. 26 Erauso, ed. Martínez, 150 (translation my own).

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“Indian,” or “mi India” in the original text, a term predicated on the ownership of the non-Spaniard by the white Catalina/Antonio. In this moment, the text sanctions Catalina/Antonio’s non-heteronormative desire by leveraging it against a potential cross-racial desire that Catalina/ Antonio disavows and in fact aligns with the diabolical. The “problem” is not that Catalina/Antonio will marry a woman—we are informed of a second marriage proposal in the same chapter—but that the woman is not white. Moreover, in this very moment in which Catalina/Antonio adopts a posture of extreme machismo, they attempt to transpose their potentially problematic transness onto the Indigenous would-be bride via the comparison to “the devil himself.” Not only does Catalina/ Antonio come to embody a white masculine ideal of heroic soldier and wanted bachelor, but they also gesture to a potential, if partial, displacement of their transness onto the non-white Indigenous woman. Thus the trans-rogue-royalist “I” of Catalina/Antonio’s narrative becomes a site of negotiation between ideologies of sex, race, and colonial regimes of extraction. Francisco Vázquez García and Richard Cleminson have argued that as imperial Spain faced a perceived crisis of masculinity, a crisis deemed responsible for the empire’s declining fortunes, Catalina/ Antonio became “a paradigm of the perfect Spanish knight.”27 While true, García and Cleminson miss how Catalina/Antonio’s transformation into this ideal was predicated on their commitment to enforcing a colonial hierarchy of race. Catalina/Antonio is able to shed the vulnerable femininity of the beginning of the chapter and embody the archetype of a desirable white male Spaniard by the end of it only to the extent that deviant transness may be reassigned to the non-white non-European; they are allowed to express a non-problematized non-heterosexual desire only to the degree which this desire can be used to solidify a racial hierarchy of property. The need to produce racial ideologies to justify the brutal exploitation of Indigenous and Black workers and imbue the categories of “Spaniard,” “European,” and “Human” with a solidaristic “whiteness” springs out of the non-overlap between the interests of the propertied “white” colonial classes and those of the imperial state, despite each group’s reliance on the other. This is evident when Catalina/Antonio flees the mestiza

27 Sexo, Identidad y Hermafroditas en el Mundo Ibérico, 1500–1800 (Cátedra, 2018), 135 (translation my own).

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woman’s home and finds themselves in Potosí, the site of the most lucrative silver mines in the early modern world. Here Catalina/Antonio enlists in the king’s army to suppress an insurrection among prosperous colonists seeking to direct the colonial project in their favor. This conflict— known as “The War of the Vicuñas and Basques”—pits relatively recently arrived Basque colonists like Catalina/Antonio against a coalition of more established Spanish colonists descended from other parts of Spain. At the heart of the dispute lay administrative control of the mines. Officeholders within the royal administrative state, not private proprietors, were best positioned to reap the profits, and Basque colonists had been successful in taking control of the imperial administrative apparatus, despite their late arrival and more limited access to encomiendas, quotas of forced Indigenous labor.28 As one contemporary describes the situation, “Basques controlled everything else in the Republic, and by their luck, their wealth, and with such offices, they lorded it over everyone in Potosí.”29 This rebellion, in which both parties claim to be fighting in the name of the king, exposes fractures both across the white ruling class within the colonies and between this early colonial capitalist class and the Spanish imperial state overseas. While the Spanish crown depends on the recently constituted colonial ruling class, it is also interested in limiting their power so that this colonial elite may not come to rule over the state itself. One way to do this is by allowing a new generation of Basque colonists—and in the case of Catalina/Antonio, a propertyless one—to administer the properties accumulated and conquered by earlier settlers. Noting that the Spanish crown often backed critics of the encomienda system, that is, that the crown took the side of critics who attacked the colonists the crown had formerly rewarded with property, Ellen Meiksins Wood writes, In its attempts to control the feudal ambitions of colonial settlers and to prevent the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy in America, [the crown] had very practical reasons for welcoming attacks on the encomendero’s brutality and on the encomienda system itself … there can be little doubt that the effort to curtail the independent power of the settlers was an overriding consideration.30 28 Amy Bushnell, The King’s Coffer (Cambridge UP, 1982), 30. 29 Anonymous, qtd. in Salvador de Madariaga, Cuadro histórico de las Indias (Editorial

Sudamericana, 1945), 692 (translation my own). 30 Liberty and Property (Verso, 2012), 91.

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If the episode with the mestiza woman and her daughter demonstrates Catalina/Antonio’s commitment to upholding white heteropatriarchy in the colonies, this next chapter shows the colonial order’s dependence on these overlapping ideologies. This ruling-class rebellion does not occur in the periphery of the colonial empire, but in its beating heart. Located in modern-day Bolivia, the mines of Potosí accounted for half of American silver production in the seventeenth century, and they revolved around the exploitation of enslaved and coerced Black and Indigenous labor and the degradation of the environment. Kathryn Yussoff identifies early modern mines and Potosí in particular as cauldrons in which modern ideas of race were formed, writing that “the racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World.”31 Only by producing a ruling hierarchical ideology of race, maintained through a careful policing of sexual relations and identities, could the colonial ruling class overcome its own divisions and maintain the exploitation of its non-white subjects and their land. And yet these divisions could never be truly overcome, only deferred. Following this rebellion and Catalina/Antonio’s arrival in Spain, they are greeted with fanfare and acclaim. For their loyal military service fighting both Indigenous and colonial rebels, they are awarded a generous pension from the crown and an encomienda. The irony, of course, is that Catalina/Antonio receives just the sort of political-property rights that the crown had enlisted them to fight against in Potosí. The crown was a political body that could only reward its loyal servants by transforming them into future enemies. When explaining the Habsburg empire’s inability to transform military dominance into global economic hegemony, Richard Lachmann points to how “competing elites, in pursuit of their own interests, divert … resources in ways that undermine” the empire they nominally serve.32 The crown and the landed conquistadors were at odds when deciding to whom the spoils of conquest would go. Through the crown’s award of colonial capital, Catalina/Antonio enters the propertied class of conquerors whose interests were not those of the imperial state, who had just rebelled, and who would rebel again in the next century. For the crown, the dream of accommodating a figure such

31 A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (U of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2. 32 Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers (Verso, 2020), 12.

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as Catalina/Antonio—a masterless embodiment of social and political contradictions—could only ever turn into a nightmare. The fissures between the propertied classes and the imperial sovereign that emerge from the political fantasy mobilized by Catalina/Antonio in their Vida form the crux of Mary/Jack’s autobiography, a text which puts forward Mary/Jack’s body as a potential synthesis of social and politicaleconomic conflict. Published in 1662 in the aftermath of the English Civil War, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith purports to contain both the definitive biography of the famous rogue and their never-before-published diary. Returning to the figure of Mary/Jack—who had been put on stage four decades earlier in a far different political climate in the popular play The Roaring Girl —this prose fiction attempts to wrangle the contradictions of the Civil War and the Stuart Restoration into a coherent narrative voice. Above all, this document insists on two facts about the infamous Mary/Jack: that they belong to an English underclass of rogues and are an exceptionally loyal servant to the king. Following the English Civil War, “the need for myths and narratives that highlighted the honor of supporting King and country was becoming increasingly evident,” as Melissa Mowry writes.33 But this was only a symptom of a deeper problem. More fundamentally, Charles II had to contend with shifting social property relations which threatened to make the would-be absolute sovereign obsolete. Responding to this political climate, The Life and Death labors to provide a harmonious vision of an English commonwealth composed of a royalist lower class, a liberal bourgeoisie committed to the principles of a “free market,” and a royal aristocracy that rules by prerogative and decree. This tripartite union comes together in the figure of Mary/Jack. As Sawday and Mowry have remarked, Mary/Jack—who must take to the streets and provide their own living out of financial necessity, and who actively and enthusiastically takes up the royalist cause during and after the Civil War—offers an example of a royalist, loyalist, English proletariat. What has not been noticed, however, are the ways the text mobilizes the character of Mary/Jack to naturalize the notion of a bourgeois market and make this realm compatible with the political form of absolute monarchy.

33 “Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith,” JEMCS 5.1 (2005), 31.

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When Mary/Jack begins their career as a pickpocket, they learn that London’s thieves “had long been incorporated, and had their Governours and assistants as other Worshipful Companies … for the maintenance of their Trade.”34 In The Life and Death, the structure of London’s underground economy mirrors that of the sanctioned economy’s above. Once an official member of London’s “company of thieves,” Mary/Jack establishes a kind of brokerage house for stolen goods, allowing victims to recoup their lost belongings and thieves to make a profit without the costs and dangers of government intervention: In my house … I set up a kind of Brokery or a distinct factory for Jewels, Rings and Watches, which had been pinched or stolen … I might properly enough call it the Insurance Office for such Merchandize.35

What Mary/Jack offers as King Charles’ deputy in this economic underworld is the fantasy of a market that is at once well-regulated and circumscribed within the powers of an absolute monarch. This fantasy, in which Mary/Jack, both ruler and rogue, presides over a kind of royal exchange for stolen goods, subsumes and makes invisible any class conflict between the masterless proletariat, the propertied classes, and the sovereignty of the crown. In Mary/Jack’s rule, king, rogue, and entrepreneur happily coexist. The narrative goes so far as to boast about the liberal market principles Mary/Jack institutes: “My House was the Algiers where they traffiqued in safety without the Bribes to those fellows and … and without the danger of Inquisition or Examination or Fees of silence,” Mary/Jack boasts. Here the reference is to the enterprising thieves and fences who, now under Mary/Jack’s rule, can operate without the burden of “Inquisition or Examination or Fees of silence,” that is, without governmental oversight, intrusion, or tariff.36 Adding to this free market vision, Mary/Jack describes their role as one of discovering certain rules and allowing the market to function on its own:

34 [Anonymous], The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse […] (W. Gilbertson, 1662), 35. 35 Ibid., 43. 36 Ibid., 44.

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Nor were ever the Customs-House Bills shewing what Goods and from whence they are imported more duely published for the advantage of Trade, then was the Account of those Robberies entered with me for the satisfaction of the Owners. So that I may be said to have made a perfect regulation of this thievish Mystery, and reduced it to certain rules and orders …37

In effect, Mary/Jack proclaims their “Mistresship and Government” of London’s criminal underworld by reimagining crime as an economic field reducible to a set of known and predictable modern laws of the market. Mary/Jack’s primary role as sovereign of this market is to publish goods and prices and stay out of the way. It appears Mary/Jack has squared the circle, resolving tensions between the mercantile classes, the rulership of the sovereign, and the masterless proletariat who make up this company of thieves. But Mary/Jack’s power only confirms itself by recognizing the independence of a newly emerged economic sphere into which it will not tread. Mary/Jack is successful where Charles and other absolutists of his era are not precisely because, unlike those rulers, Mary/Jack does not excise customs fees or implement Inquisitions and examinations. For Michel Foucault, the expansion of a market logic and market zone outside of the sovereign’s will in the early modern era represents “a political challenge to the traditional, juridical conception, whether absolutist or not, of the sovereign.”38 The emergence of such a market “strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field.”39 Mary/Jack can rule over the economic world of rogues because in effect they abandon their rule. Their mark of mastery is their mark of absence. Unlike a true seventeenth-century sovereign, Mary/Jack does not intervene in the world of exchange to extract a profit for the state. Thus Mary/Jack comes to simultaneously represent both Charles’ presence in London’s global marketplace and the impossibility of his ever mastering such an economic field.

37 Ibid., 45. 38 The Hermeneutics of the Subject, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave-

Macmillan, 2005), 292–3. 39 Ibid., 292.

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To hold together these tensions, the text puts Mary/Jack forward as the literal embodiment of a body politic capable of harmonizing the contradictory interests of absolutist England into a unified whole. According to Neoplatonic gender theory of the time, this harmonizing of contraries was one of the characteristics of the hermaphroditic body. Rubright has rightfully questioned “whether hermaphrodism will persist as a critical key word as we open onto transgender studies,” but in this case, the text explicitly employs the concept of hermaphrodism as a way of understanding political-economic tensions. In this, The Life and Death draws on a continental tradition in which hermaphrodism figured as a political metaphor. For example, supporters of King Henry III in France adopted imagery of the king as a hermaphrodite to signal his agenda of religious tolerance and his power to harmonize sectarian conflicts.40 Similarly, the anonymous biographer in The Life and Death declares that Mary/Jack “lived in a kind of mean betwixt open, profest dishonesty, and fair and civil deportment, being an Hermaphrodite in Manners as well as in Habit.”41 The author then asks readers “to take her for a Prodigy of those Times she lived in,” instructing us to see in the body of Mary/Jack the fault lines of the English Civil War, to see Mary/Jack as “the Living Discription and Portraiture of a Schism and Separation, her Doublet and Petticoate, understanding one another, no better than Presbytery and Independency.”42 Thus Mary/Jack’s “Hermaphrodite … Manners [and] Habit” becomes a way of making legible and material the conflicting interests and factions that make up the English state. I propose that The Life and Death offers the idea of Mary/Jack’s body as an emblem for both the tensions between crown, commons, and bourgeois market and the ways such contradictions could be reconciled. Mary/Jack does not function solely as a representation of the “schism” that gripped England into a near-decade-long civil war, but as a model for the present and future stability of an England once ruled by an absolutist monarch and the laws of the free market. This text can believe in the stability of the English commonwealth after the Restoration for as long as it can sustain a socially acceptable vision of Mary/Jack as a trans,

40 Kathleen Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Cornell UP, 2006), 2, 215–

35. 41 The Life and Death, B2. 42 Ibid., A3v–A4r.

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loyalist, proletarian rogue who supports market liberalism, which is to say, not for very long. In an encounter with a fellow trans character, Mary/ Jack completely disavows the possibility of unproblematically inhabiting a non-heteronormative space: There was also a fellow a cotemporary [sic] of mine, as remarkable as my self … cloathed very near my Antick Mode, being an Hermaphrodite, a person of both Sexes; him I could by no means endure, being the very derision of natures impotency, whose redundancy in making him Man and Woman, had in effect made him neither, having not the strength nor reason of the Male, nor the fineness nor subtlety of the Female … a kind of mockery (as I was upbraided) of me.43

The episode concludes with Mary/Jack stating their “abhorrence of him” and instructing a group of ruffians to “throw Durt at him” to make “him quit my Walk and Habitation, that I might have no further scandal among my Neighbours.”44 If the political fantasy of a harmonious commonwealth promulgated by The Life and Death can only exist for as long as the text can render Mary/ Jack’s unconventional gender expression viable, then the limits to this political vision become clear. To the extent that Mary/Jack is intended to function as a model for reconciling the English body politic’s competing interests, they cannot do so if they must simultaneously disavow their own literal body and behavior. Mary/Jack, the ultimate royalist rogue and spokesperson for the “rules and orders” of the market, cannot stand by their own synthesis of political-economic contradictions. Published one year after Charles II’s restoration, this text points to the impossibility of harmonizing the various interests of the English commonwealth that would eventually destroy the Stuart monarchy. Animated by the challenges of reconciling the demands of an emerging population of proletarianized workers, the imperial ambitions of absolutist monarchs, and the rise of a market-dominated world order, the figures of Catalina/Antonio and Mary/Jack ascend to cultural prominence as a way for early moderns to reconceptualize social relations and fantasize solutions to irreconcilable contradictions. Across Spain and its global empire, Catalina/Antonio forges for themselves a space within the colonial ruling 43 Ibid., 74. 44 Ibid., 75.

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class by enforcing a hierarchy of race and masculinity. And yet this compromise contains the seeds of its own destruction. The royalist rogue can only be rewarded by becoming a class enemy of the state. In England, after the Civil War and the king’s restoration, Mary/Jack’s body is imagined as a body politic that must hold together contending classes and aging political forms. But this imaginary solution is ultimately disavowed. In Catalina/Antonio and Mary/Jack, Spain and England fashion two “sex symbols” that highlight the mutability of social forms and their entwinement with political structures and emergent economic relations. Their co-emergence as cultural figures and the limits of the resolutions they offer point to the shared challenges of the early modern world, and to a new world still struggling to be born.

CHAPTER 7

Class and Climate, or Redemption Comes to Pericles but Not to Spring Sharon O’Dair

In 2019, Adam Smyth asked, “Why now?” Why is Pericles the play for today? Smyth thinks “the flurry of performances” speaks urgently to Europeans and especially Britons: “Pericles is a play about migration, about storm-tossed passengers who risk their lives traveling across the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas between Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, and Greece. The geography of the play is the geography of our migration crises; the medium of hope and of tragedy is the sea.”1 Recently, Mark Haddon adapted the play in The Porpoise, and Ali Smith attempted something different in Spring, the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet. The Quartet is an ambitious project to publish work quickly—to capture the contemporary, a particularly fraught contemporary, and to return the novel to its early use as news. Smith churned out one a year for four 1 “Play for Today,” London Review of Books 41.20 (2019), accessed January 22, 2022, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/adam-smyth/play-for-today.

S. O’Dair (B) University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_7

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years—Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer—and each engages Shakespeare’s romances to some degree. Spring ’s Shakespearean touchstone is Pericles , and like that play’s tour of the Mediterranean, Spring ’s tour of 2018 in the United Kingdom never settles, its tone and style breathless. The novel edges into 2019 and retreats to the 1970s and even, via a novel and a screenplay, to the early twentieth century and a supposed summer spent unknowingly between Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pericles is not “a source, or a key, or a commentary” for Spring, “but a partially visible precedent tale which … nearly but not quite looking us in the eye, offers another way of navigating the contemporary,”2 the contemporary of crisis-after-seeming crisis: Brexit, migration, climate change, a global pandemic, economic decline, and increasing class inequality. Pericles and Marina, Smyth explains, “provide something like a shape for the two most compelling characters in the novel.”3 Those characters are a grieving and depressed late middle-aged screenwriter, Richard Lease—“Pericles of Tired”4 —and a twelve-year-old girl, Florence Smith, who demonstrates astonishing powers. Each is shadowed by a companion, Richard with his dead muse and mentor, seventeen years or so older than he, Paddy Heal, and Florence with a young woman she meets outside a train station, Brittany Hall, or Brit, who works as a Detention Custody Officer at an Immigration Removal Centre run by a private security company, SA4A, for the Home Office in Britain. The stories merge in northern Scotland at a train station, where Florence spies Richard on the tracks beneath the train, hoping to die. Florence says to him, “Excuse me, Sir … I really need you not to do that.”5 He doesn’t. Like Marina in Pericles , Florence bends people to her will, persuades them by speaking, and she does so again and again. Spring is rich and rewarding, and although I will touch on Richard, Smith’s Pericles, and his lost mentor, Paddy, my focus here is on Florence, Smith’s Marina, and Brit. I argue that bringing class- and climate consciousness into the narrative requires Smith to abandon Shakespearean reconciliation and redemption, something Pericles achieves through the

2 Smyth, “Play.” 3 “Play.” 4 Smith, Spring (Pantheon Books, 2019), 31. 5 112.

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moralizing and galvanizing speech of Marina. When class and climate come to Spring , the novel decenters the human and ends in a weak, qualified hope, with reconciliation and redemption faintly glimpsed and the engine of new life coming from nature’s flora, not from human beings, not from Florence. Having undermined anthropocentrism and living in a modern democracy, Smith feels no generic or ideological requirement for reconciliation and redemption, as is the case in Pericles where, as Suzanne Gossett argues, “the intersection of social, structural, and generic imperatives” requires the play to “end in a courtly and royalist haven” with “no unabsorbed forces brood[ing] on the edges of the happy ending.”6 Spring, in contrast, reveals no happy ending and plenty of brooding, unabsorbed forces. To unpack these differences, I begin with a reading of Marina’s wondrous speech and then turn to Spring. An implication of this analysis is that historical discontinuity remains important to our understanding of the past and the present, including their artworks. Gossett discusses many interpretive frameworks for Pericles in her introduction to the Arden 3 edition of the play: generic, ideological, political, geographical, familial, and economic. Recurring is the emotion of fear, especially regarding incest, which “broods over Pericles.”7 Incest doesn’t hide; it bursts upon audiences in the play’s opening lines by Gower: Widower Antiochus looks to his “buxom” daughter and “her to incest did provoke. / Bad child, worse father, to entice his own / to evil should be done by none.”8 In 1.1, Pericles finds himself a player in Gower’s narrative, aspiring to marry Antiochus’s daughter and to become his son, a man he can emulate. He solves Antiochus’s riddle but doing so grants him neither safety nor the girl.9 He flees the city in horror with a henchman on his tail. But fear also drives the play’s invocations of individual maturation—can Pericles grow up, become a man, a father,

6 “Introduction” in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles (Bloomsbury, 2004), 151. The phrase “end in a courtly and royalist haven” is taken from Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford UP, 1997), 230. 7 137. 8 Pericles (Bloomsbury, 2004), 1.0.25–28. Incest broods momentarily in the reunion

of Pericles and Marina; see 5.1.97–116. 9 The riddle is so transparent that “one can only assume the former contestants were beheaded not for failure to solve the riddle but for their success.” “Introduction,” 134.

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a monarch?10 Can Marina grow up at all, and, most importantly, if she does, can she remain a virgin until she is properly married, a requirement in societies dependent on the exchange of women? In the cases of Pericles and Marina, then, Prince and Princess, individual maturation is also a fear-inducing question of socio-political stability. Although she doesn’t speak until act 4, Marina is the star of this show.11 She speaks only in two acts, but those words are third in number to only Gower and Pericles. More impressively, her speech drives the play toward its conclusion of reconciliation and redemption. Kent Lenthoff sums up received opinion about her: “The sound of her voice fills the final acts, where it resonates with a peculiar potency. Simply by speaking, Marina manages to save herself from violation and exploitation, make a living for herself and others, reform the moral character of individuals in power, and give new life to her disconsolate father.”12 But if I may protest, and I hope not too much, Marina does not succeed “simply by speaking” or simply because she is “a goodly creature”13 ; she succeeds because of her status and wealth. (And luck: her eloquence does not persuade Leonine to spare her; the timely arrival of pirates does.14 ) Enjoined by Pericles to “give her princely training / That she may be mannered as she is born,” Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, and his wife, Dionyza, accept the infant Marina and do just that, indebted as they are to Pericles. For years training proceeds, gifting her skills to complement her beauty. But when Marina surpasses in beauty and skill Dionza’s own daughter, Philoten, Dionza “with envy rare / A present murder does prepare / For good Marina, that her daughter / might stand peerless by

10 In a note to 1.2.99–112, Gossett observes, “for a monarch to leave his domains would be considered a dereliction of duty” (202n4). As is his “failure to contact or visit [Marina]” in fourteen years, even if Pericles may find “it difficult to love or even be with the child whom he may unconsciously blame for his wife’s death, or who he fears will remind him of her.” “Introduction,” 140. 11 See, for example, Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell UP, 2011) and Deanne Williams, “Papa Don’t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles,” U of Toronto Quarterly 71.2 (2002), 595–622. Similarly, in Spring, Marina’s analog, Florence, enters the action late and is the star of the novel. 12 “Marina’s Voice,” Shakespeare Association of America, 2022, 1. 13 4.1.8. 14 4.1.87.

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this slaughter.”15 Seized by pirates as Leonine tries to murder her, Marina escapes, only to be sold to a brothel in Mytilene. But the “princely training” she received in Tarsus eventually saves her from ignominy. Desperate to leave the brothel, Marina persuades Bolt, the servant to Pander and Bawd, to persuade them “to make gain of me” not through prostitution but by placing her in a house “amongst honest women.”16 There she will teach the skills she has learned: “I can sing, weave, sew, and dance / with other virtues which I’ll keep from boast, / And I will undertake all these to teach.”17 Yet although Marina’s voice is golden and her skills exemplary, gold is the guarantor, gold is what saves her virginity in this scene with Bolt, that and a promise that if she cannot find pupils of the “noble race,” he may “prostitute [her] to the basest groom / That doth frequent your house.”18 What does one call this positioning, this attitude? Disgust? Status anxiety? The arrogance of early modern nobility? For despite Marina’s hyperbolic attachment to her virginity—e.g., “If fires be hot, knives sharp or waters deep / Untried I still my virgin knot will keep”19 —losing her virginity isn’t the worst that can happen. For Marina, it’s being prostituted to the basest. All this is frightening. Fear drives the travel in this play; travel drives the rest. As Gossett observes, “the uncertainty of the sea symbolizes the capricious nature of this universe.”20 Fearsome travel’s value, however, is not just a symbol for the play’s dislocations, but a matter of fierce contemporary debate, as England begins to develop its imperial muscle.21 Or, one might say, as England begins to become modern. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty explains: becoming “modern—whether in Europe or its colonies—was fundamentally about overcoming fear in many different senses (including the fear of domestic or foreign oppressors).”22 A “basic condition of modern life,” he writes, is “not having to be fearful … as we go about our 15 4.0.37–40. 16 4.5.185, 197. 17 4.5.186, 188. In the next scene, Gower is more fulsome in praise of her skills (5.0.3–11). So talented is she that “pupils lacks she none of noble race” (l.9). 18 4.5.184; 5.0.9; 4.5.193–4. 19 4.2.138–9. 20 “Introduction,” 115. 21 Gossett, “Introduction,” 115, 132. 22 The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (U Chicago P, 2021), 199–200.

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everyday business.”23 Business like shopping, playing, working, cooking, making love, walking along a river, gazing at the sky—or traveling. Of course, such modernity still does not characterize all 7.7 billion of us. In India, Chakrabarty writes, “the process is still ongoing.”24 And the migrants in Spring know fear, too. One former migrant—now a member of an underground railroad helping other migrants—grimly explains to Richard, I had no rights. I still have no rights. I carried fear on my shoulders all the way across the world to this country you call yours. I still carry the fear on my shoulders. Now I see it like this. Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life.25

In the detention center where Brit works, migrants spark rumors about Florence, about her origins, about how she got to England, rumors in which fear screams: She’d survived a dinghy and come up from Greece. … No, she’d crossed a desert past skeletons who hadn’t made it, kept herself alive by drinking her own urine. … [S]he’d been bombed out, family had had to run for their life, guerrillas had used them as donkeys, made them all carry the encampment for miles, for days, and when her father had stopped and asked for a rest on the first day the guerillas had said, here is your rest, and had shot him there and then.26

But as Florence tells Brit, the rumors are wrong: “My story is lost at sea …”.27 ∗ ∗ ∗

23 200. 24 200. See also Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (U

Chicago P, 2021), 137–8. 25 272. Like Smith’s migrants, early modern vagrants had few if any rights and were subject to the whims of authorities. See Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (U of Chicago P, 2006). 26 141–2. 27 191.

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Smith includes a monolog by the season that gives her novel its title. Spring says, “The winter’s nothing to me. Do you think I don’t know about power? You think I was born green? I was. Mess up my climate, I’ll fuck with your lives. Your lives are nothing to me.”28 Smith here ventriloquizes nature—or what Chakrabarty calls “the planetary”; fear is no longer the province of the not-yet-modern, but has returned to modern, civilized societies. It’s not fear of wild animals, of other life forms, but fear that we are not in control, that large swaths of inhabited land will no longer be habitable—because of massive fires or hurricanes, flooding or pitiless drought, extreme heat, novel disease, and the socio-political dislocations that follow. Think of the encroaching Atlantic in Miami, the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. Flooding in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Fires in Australia, California, or the Arctic. Drought in today’s Middle East, Africa, Central America, or the western United States. The COVID-19 pandemic. Think of migration, hunger, and predatory human beings. Think millions and millions and millions of migrants. Marina encounters predatory human beings several times and, as noted, ably saves herself from sexual predation. Indeed, she dominates those who would dominate her, her social inferiors, the status of whom she is acutely aware. Her contempt toward inferiors and her assumption that rank itself implies goodness is clearly expressed in an exchange with Bolt. She tells Bolt that neither Bawd nor Pander is So bad as thou art, Since they do better thee in their command. Thou hold’st a place for which the pained’st fiend Of hell would not in reputation change. Thou are the damned doorkeeper to every Coistrel that comes enquiring for his Tib. To the choleric fisting of every rogue Thy ear is liable. Thy food is such As hath been belched on by infected lungs.

Bolt’s reply is scathing—“What would you have me do? Go to the wars, / would you, where a man may serve seven years for the / loss of a leg and have not money enough in the end to / buy him a wooden one?” And so is hers:

28 8.

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Do anything but this thou dost. Empty Old receptacles or common shores of filth, Serve by indenture to the common hangman, Any of these ways are yet better than this. For what thou professest a baboon, could he speak, Would own a name too dear.29

In a coup de grace of dominance, Marina gives Bolt money to help her find employment “amongst honest women,” presumably money given her by Lord Lysimachus earlier in the scene.30 Like Marina, Florence is a young girl who encounters predatory humans repeatedly and repeatedly transforms them, bending them to her (good) will by her wondrous speech and example, or perhaps, by miracles, magic, or hypnosis. A co-worker tells Brit, “the age of miracles isn’t past, some schoolkid got into the center and—you won’t believe it. I still can’t. She got management to clean up the toilets.” Much later, Brit decides the girl’s power is “literally hypnosis. Not just me but several train guards and a woman at the Holiday Inn. I saw it happen to other people and didn’t realize it was happening to me too….”31 Florence suggests to Brit she is sometimes invisible: “In certain shops or restaurants or ticket queues or supermarkets, or even places when I’m actually speaking out loud, like asking for information in a station or something. People can look right through me.”32 Brit is skeptical, sarcastically so: “That’d explain how you got into our boss’s office last month…. It would explain how you got past recep … and through the scans… Which is not supposed to be humanely possible. But now I get it. You were invisible.”33 To make the connection to Marina inescapable, however, Florence undoes a brothel: a co-worker tells Brit, “The story went that the bent police had been called in by the

29 4.5.164–82. 30 4.5.196; 4.5.111. Gossett’s note to this speech claims Lysimachus in fact has a

“corrupted mind.” 31 129, 321–2. 32 192. Another co-worker says, “But. Listen. Apparently. There’s been an internal

breach at the Wood and some people got out and there was no visual. But CCTV playback from opposite the front gates show some woman in the middle of the night just walking out of the Wood and a couple of others with her too” (139). 33 193.

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pimps. Come and get her. Take her, they said. Please. She’s fucking ruining us.”34 Who is Florence, this twelve-year-old girl dressed in a school uniform, whose blazer sports the badge of vivunt spe, or “they live in hope”? In this novel, which addresses contemporary inter-state migration and came to being in a democratic society, Smith cannot construct an aristocratic or even contemporarily elite young female to serve as Marina’s analog. Florence is alone, but is she white? A person of color? A refugee? Reviewer Rebecca Makkai thinks Florence is “a cipher to us and to Brit,” a “fundamentally foggy main character.”35 She notes the syntactical ambiguity of Florence’s assertion to Brit about her invisibility: “Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren’t here.”36 This is “a slippery sentence, one specifically constructed so that we could understand Florence to be a person of color, or might equally believe that she includes herself in this hypothesis only because she’s a child.”37 True enough, but the novel suggests she is not white; one reason she may be invisible in the IRCs is that the security company, SA4A, “couldn’t get the facial rec tech to work on the girl’s face, partly because of angles and age and ethnicity—[the] facial rec doesn’t work on black people very well …”38 Further, Florence is not a refugee: her mother was born in the United Kingdom, and during their sojourn to find her, Florence asks Brit to explain what “Refugee Chic” means. She saw the words in a magazine, and since she herself didn’t have a change of clothes for the morning, Florence began to wonder, “what it would be like to never know what was going to happen to you next, or to have no way of getting yourself clean or of knowing whether you’d have a clean place to rest, before it all started again the next day.”39 34 137. Marina “preaches divinity” in the brothel, leading Bawd to lament, “She’s able

to freeze the god Priapus and undo a whole generation. We must either get her ravished or be rid of her.” 4.5.4, 11–13. 35 “Spring Cleaning, Ali Smith Style,” New York Times, May 6, 2019, accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/books/review/spring-ali-smith.html. 36 192–3. 37 Makkai, “Spring Cleaning, Ali Smith Style.” 38 320. Richard describes Brit and Florence at the train station: “a girl and a woman,

one white, one mixed race, the woman in some kind of uniform, the girl in schoolclothes that look too thin for the north of Scotland” (110–11). 39 308.

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Is Florence “a goodly creature” like Marina?40 Brit knows Florence is “bright, like close to insane bright” and, again and again, she ably makes “people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world.”41 She affects officials but also individuals like herself and Richard, who does achieve a new lease on life.42 Brit reaches for a word to describe her; it’s “another old word from history and songs that nobody uses in real life anymore. She is good.”43 Spring has been building toward this moment; it’s a mere thirty pages from the novel’s end. The moment, this judgment by Brit, feels like an end, like the end—Florence is good—but it is not. The eye turns to the recto, a new chapter begins, and Smith writes, “this is the point in the story when the girl will pull a fast one.” She leaves Brit stranded in a Tesco with Richard: So it isn’t, wasn’t, goodness. Or if it is, it’s a good that’s not and has never really been about Brit anyway. So fuck that.44

And fuck it Brit does, throwing away the possibility that she “might have been changed by [her encounter with Florence] … properly changed, changed at a life level.”45 With Richard in tow, Brit ponders what to do and then calls “the SA4A Countrywide 24-Hour Hotline,”46 informing the security company where Florence and her mother can be taken into custody. Days, weeks, months pass, and Brit remains at the detention center, working, her positioning secured. Before she met Florence, still new on the job, Brit was ambivalent about her employment, monitoring “indefinitely interned humans for a salary” and thinking the place “a kind of underworld … Place of the living dead.” On the train with Florence, in contrast, she questions “everything she is doing … about whether it is right or wrong” and wonders why she is so “unpleasant to other people 40 4.5.8. 41 323, 314. 42 269–90. 43 314. 44 315. 45 313. 46 317.

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without even thinking.”47 But her time with Florence did not, as Florence hoped, “humaniz[e] … the machine,” either Brit or that for which she stands, Britain.48 Rather, Brit turns in the girl and her mother; she begins to slip away from her black co-worker, Stel, and her gay and Scottish co-worker, Torq, to gravitate toward her (assuredly white) co-worker, Russell, whom she calls “a dick … filthy-minded, crude as fuck.”49 ∗ ∗ ∗ In an interview, Smith explains that in her Seasonal Quartet, she is “writing these books instinctually, to a deadline, trying to allow the moment to pass through me and them like we’re a porous skin surface, with the novel form itself—a revolutionary and ever-hopeful, ever-sociallyanalytical form—as the mast to which we’re tied through the storm. Culture is porous like us, and it enters us as much as we make it.”50 In saying this, Smith means she does not reduce Brexit to border control, climate change, European Union bureaucracy, or any one given political supposition. Neither does she reduce “humane … choices” to those affecting only migrants. Smith is generous to Brit, if not to Britain. Elkins—and many other readers, no doubt—may wish Brit to make “better” choices, the choices one would make oneself,51 but Smith understands young working-class whites in Britain, who are often cynical and 47 299, 305. 48 309. When Florence and Brit meet, they bond over a joke about the rock band

Florence and the Machine. Brit asks, “Well, if you’re Florence, does that make me the machine?” Brit assumes Florence gets that joke all the time and Florence says she does: “usually they say, where’s your machine, Florence, or something like that. Nobody’s actually declared themselves my machine before…” Brit’s reply is proleptic: “Yeah, but I really am the machine … And not necessarily your machine” (170–1). Brit’s status as the machine is a running but serious joke in Spring. And because, unlike Marina, she has no social power, Florence can’t change her machine, Brit, or the machine for which she stands—SA4A and the government of the United Kingdom. 49 319, 152, 327. 50 “Has Art Anything to Do with Life?: A Conversation with Ali Smith on ‘Spring’:

Amy E. Elkins Interviews Ali Smith,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 3, 2019, accessed January 14, 2022, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/has-art-anything-todo-with-life-a-conversation-with-ali-smith-on-spring/. 51 In the interview, Elkins says, “There are so many moments when the reader wants the central character, Brit (or Britannia, as she is sometimes jokingly called), to make the humane, better choice.” “Has Art Anything to Do with Life?”.

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resentful. When asked one day by BBC reporters whether she voted to leave the European Union, Brit excoriates, I’m not going to tell you what I voted. I’m not going to let you think you can decide something about me either way. All I’ll say is, I was younger then, and I still thought politics mattered. But all this. This endless. It’s eating the, the, you know. Soul…. And you people. Asking us what we think all the time like it matters. You don’t care what we think. You just want a fight…. It’s making us all meaningless…. and the people in power, doing it all for us, for democracy, yeah, right, pull the other one.52

Young people like Brit lack opportunity; her father died from asbestos poisoning when she was young and she now lives with her elderly mother, whom, it seems, she largely supports. Smith intimates that this is a strong reason she works for SA4A, however distasteful; it provides a salary.53 One of the smartest students in her class, higher education was out of reach: She’d been good at everything at school without trying. She’d wanted college, but they couldn’t afford it. Be sensible. They couldn’t ever have. But her mother gave herself a hard time over that not happening. So Brit never complained. Whenever she got home, how was work? Fine. What did you do today? Stuff, you know, the usual. Then you give a little laugh.54

So, Brit never complained to her mother, but inside, to herself, she does. Spring records Brit’s political awakening, a movement to the political right, and a telling moment in that awakening is this exchange with Florence. Tired and overwrought, Brit says, “I have no fucking idea what I’m doing here.” Florence replies, “You’re my private security guard.” And then, Brit focuses, homes in: “You are taking the piss out of me…. Don’t you dare make fun of me…. Why do you even need a private 52 164. 53 In a bitter argument, her boyfriend, Josh, tells her the job she had taken “was the

epitome of excrement.” Furious, and knowing she was hitting below the belt since he “had been laid off from the online delivery warehouse,” Brit retorts: “I’ve taken a job that’s got a salary. … It’s a real job. Security delivers results” (157–8). 54 133. Also, see 157; Brit and Josh “had been top students in their year at school.” Brit’s resentment about higher education is clear when a detainee asks why he cannot do something useful while detained, like take a degree. She scoffs, “Useful. … A degree? Ho ho ho” (159).

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security guard? … You’re fine in the world. You’ve got it made. You do your thing and it all just opens like fucking flowers for you. You don’t need me.”55 From my vantage, this reads like white resentment about perceived special treatment of racial minorities. Spring does not judge Brit. Like everyone, she is “shackled, hobbled.”56 Nor does Spring judge Brexit. Largely, this results from Smith’s understanding of what the novel is and can do, which, as above, is revolutionary and ever-hopeful, an intervention, but also, I think, a weak intervention. Spring abounds in references to narrative—stories, rumors, afterlives, fairy tales, folk tales, scripts, books, notebooks, and postcards.57 Paddy, the screenwriter and intellectual touchstone of this novel, says to Richard, “There’s ways to survive these times … and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.”58 Recounting to Richard a story by Charles Dickens, Paddy explains that what makes it great is that “things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time will be easily possible in another.”59 Toward the end, Richard tells one of the underground railroad that what they are doing is “a pipe dream … a story for children.” And she rebuts: You’re right. We are a fairy story. We’re a folk tale. I don’t mean to sound in the least fey. Those stories are deeply serious, all about transformation. How we’re changed by things. Or made to change. Or have to learn to change. And that’s what we’re working on, change.60

55 309. 56 89. 57 Postcards figure prominently in Spring. See, e.g., 76, 79, 97, 171, 172, 209, 288, 316. Critics have noted in other works Smith’s engagement with Jacques Derrida. Space does not allow me to address the importance of Derrida’s The Post Card to this novel. There Derrida satirizes two genres, the epistolary novel and the detective novel, both of which Spring engages. 58 21. 59 248. 60 276.

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Change is what spring wants; change is what Spring wants, to “move things an inch at a time all these thousands of miles towards the possible.”61 But a couple of problems arise, of which Smith is aware. Much in Spring ’s narrative suggests that it and the characters are unreliable: the story goes, the story went, the story is. My tally shows approximately twenty instances of some version of “the story goes,” all or most of which are or may be contradictory. The narrative teases with conclusions to these stories: “Story over. Well almost.” Or: “We don’t know the end of that story.”62 More disturbing are Smith’s nods to the epistemological and moral status of storytelling—fake news pops into the narrative and, more ominous, is the manifesto of something like Facebook: “We want to narrate your life. We want to be the book of you.”63 Smith dissects the problem in a lengthy episode set at a conference called “Adjust Your Sets: The Future is Spectacular.” A fashionable young graduate of Cambridge University wows spectators with a website he created to “display … the obituaries of people who’d never existed.” The point is to discover “what people will write when they contact the website” and to amass a database of their “personal information.” From the audience comes an objection: “But you are lying … You’re lying about life, about death, and about emotional connection.” The young man retorts, “No, I’m storytelling…. The emotional connection is true…. People like feeling. They like to be asked to feel…. And it’s very very valuable.” When Paddy tells him what he is doing is “the ultimate immorality,” the young man disagrees: “It’s a new morality.” What Smith does not dissect is the difference here from what she is doing. Of course, this problem is as old as storytelling, and Shakespeareans will recall Audrey’s question to Touchstone: Is poetry “honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?”64 Or Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy, in which Sidney counters the objection to his argument, made by some, that poets are “the principal liars.” To lie, Sidney claims, is “to affirm that to be true which is false,” but since a poet “nothing affirms,” he “therefore never lieth”. The poet “never maketh any circles about your

61 275; see also 323, 227. Change is also what Pericles wants. 62 335, 277. 63 122. Arguably this manifesto is written by Florence, 199. See also 3–6 and 225–9. 64 As You Like It (Thomson Learning, 2006), 3.3.15–16.

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imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes.”65 A slick rejoinder this, but dubious, and fit for the fashionable young graduate of Cambridge University. The epistemological and moral statuses of storytelling are ambiguous, potentially beneficial, and potentially not. So too are storytelling’s effects ambiguous on readers or the polity. Smith balances the hope of Florence and the determination of the anonymous volunteers of the underground railroad with reminders that exploitation and oppression have always characterized our species. A potent example is Richard’s imagined, perhaps dreamed, dialog with Paddy, which begins like this: The child Paddy at age thirteen is sitting by an empty grate holding a book in her folded arms pressed to her chest like a talisman. She is so thin he can see right through her. Behind her there’s a line of children that goes so far back it never stops. They’re in clothes as ragged as suits of dead leaves. Their hands are the only things small enough to reach inside the industrial machines and clean out the oily gunk and the fibres, of which their lungs are already full. But no hand can go inside and clean out their lungs.

Richard, startled, thinks: “Thank God those days are over. Thank God it’s better in the world right now.” But “the child Paddy” does not let this pass unremarked: “Update yourself.” In an aggrieved outburst, she describes the world today, the world “you’ve just called better,” as one in which children are Down the mines right now …. They’re mining the cobalt for all the environmentally sound electric cars. Kids right now in the rags of Hello Kitty clothes sitting in slave labor sheds hitting old dead batteries with hammers to get metals out of them that poison them as soon as they touch them. Kids eating rubbish on landfill mountains …

And, says the child Paddy, do not forget “the hundreds of thousands of kids born and living here, surviving on God knows what, on air, in a whole new version of the same old British poverty.”66 The violence does

65 An Apology for Poetry (1595), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton, 2001), 348, 349. 66 250–1.

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not end; the exploitation does not end; it’s here, there, and everywhere.67 As a result, “True hope’s actually the absence of hope.”68 Hope is dying, like Paddy, for whom dying is a gift. I look at Trump now, I see them all, the new world tyrants, all the leaders of the packs, the racists, the white supremacists, the new crusader rabblerousers holding forth, the thugs all across the world, and what I think is, all that too too solid flesh. It’ll melt away, like snow in May.69

Indeed, Spring ’s repeated refrain is for people—in particular, Richard and Brit, but implicitly everyone—to get over themselves: everything is not their story. Their; yours; mine; our too too solid flesh will age, die, and decay. Nature will continue, cyclically. As a species, humans may not. ∗ ∗ ∗ By way of a short conclusion, I note the obvious: this essay is presentist, its focus more on Spring than Pericles , which is necessary for its intersectional analysis. When class and climate come to Spring, the tidy resolution of Pericles falls apart, the happy ending fades. This suggests, contrary to some arguments current today, that historical discontinuity remains a potent force. Inequality persists. But inequality in a democratic, capitalist society differs meaningfully from that in an aristocratic, feudal, or mercantilist society. Class differs from status. Pollution persists, too. Humans always pollute, but scale matters, both with respect to the amount of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere and the number of peoples and societies affected. Florence makes the point forcefully: “Given that I am twelve years old, and there are just twelve years left to stop the world being ruined by climate change, I’d say there’s an urgency the age 67 The place where Florence and her mother are arrested is a battlefield in Scotland: Culloden. Smith describes at length the Jacobites’ resistance to English forces in 1746, cf., 232–7, 285–6, 330–1. She adds, “Fastforward a blink of history’s eye, 272 years from then, give or take a half year.” What one finds is SA4A rounding up Florence and her mother. The cycle of violence never ends: Brit greets her mother at breakfast one morning and muses, “The 24-hour BBC news is already on and blaring in the front room as per. Same old meltdown. What on earth’ll happen etc. Same old noise. Same old, over and over, lots of noise, signifying nothing. Phrase from school. William Shakespeare” (332, 328). 68 60. 69 71.

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of me to do something to stop it.”70 Given that Spring is set in October 2018, the urgency is now the age of a seven-year-old to do something to stop it. And not incidentally, given Spring ’s focus on migration, to stop the weather that is driving it. Otherwise, what Spring addresses so valiantly will only worsen because while animals, including humans, have always migrated from inhospitable landscapes, the problem today is that for animals and for humans, “other humans are in the way.”71

70 233–4. 71 Chakrabarty, 60.

CHAPTER 8

Red-Green Intersectionality Beyond the New Materialism: An Eco-Socialist Approach to Shakespeare’s The Tempest Daniel Vitkus

Much, if not most, critical work today in early modern literary studies tends toward questions of identity politics, addressing racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and ecocidal versions of anthropocentric humanism. Engagement with these present and future issues through the study of the past enables today’s humanistic scholars to pursue an ethical and political purpose suited to the challenges of our troubled world. After all, this is no time for academic research that hides from the times or fails to face the future. In fact, the most exciting academic work in Renaissance studies has always kept one eye on the urgent questions and problems of the day. Like the Renaissance humanists who studied the distant past and its texts, we do so in order to prepare ourselves and our students for an active life in our own society. We differ from those humanists, perhaps, in

D. Vitkus (B) University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_8

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maintaining a greater skepticism and less reverence in our understanding of past cultures, but we might share their hope that the study, “rebirth,” and imitation of the past can help us to learn from past mistakes, produce new forms of useful knowledge, and consequently, discern a new path forward that would diverge from the destructive trajectory of human history. In recent years, we have seen a continuing emphasis on questions of identity and, at the same time, a rising interest, building on an earlier generation of ecocritics, on non-human identity, and on object-oriented, material networks of distributed agency. In particular, the rise of “the new materialism” as a basis for critical practice, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and others, has come to dominate ecocriticism, animal studies, and investigations of species boundaries.1 This new materialist project is an extension of identity politics beyond the human— applied to the opposition between human and non-human—in order to offer a critique of speciesism and anthropocentrism. Despite these wellintentioned attacks on the anthropocentric tradition that would elevate the “human” over “nature,” the new materialism exhibits serious theoretical and political limitations. The shortfall of the new materialism is very clear in the work of Latour, Bennett, and their followers, and it is two-fold: an absolute denial of human subjectivity (rendering all human thought as material and objective) and a neglect of social class as an operative category.2 These problems are then carried over, as I will show, into recent new materialist studies of literature, including those that focus on Shakespeare and early modern culture. By ignoring political economy and neglecting to acknowledge the role of capitalism, a global force that emerged during the early modern period, new materialists fail to get

1 The theoretical texts crucial to new materialists working in literary studies include

Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford UP, 2005); Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP, 2012); Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican, 2018); and Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013). 2 Recently, we have seen a wave of critiques targeting the new materialism. See, for example, R. H. Lossin, “Neoliberalism for Polite Company: Bruno Latour’s PseudoMaterialist Coup,” in Salvage (June 1, 2020); Andreas Malm, “On What Matter Does: Against New Materialism,” Chap. 3 of The Progress of This Storm (2018), 78–118; Stuart A. Newman, “Marx and the New Materialism,” Marxism and Science 1.2 (Summer 2022), 1–12; and Benjamin Boysen, “The Embarrassment of Being Human: A Critique of New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Orbis Literrarum 73 (2018): 225–42.

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at the root cause of ecocide and climate change.3 And not only that, their emphasis on human agency’s limitations—its diffusion, vitiation, and entanglement in a network of “vibrant” objects and non-human agencies—distracts us from the politics of human responsibility and the potential for humanity to employ its unrivaled consciousness, its forms of collective organization, its technologies, and its material culture to slow the damage from human-caused climate change. What, if anything, can we do to maintain certain helpful insights of new materialism while redirecting ecocriticism toward the fundamental, human-centered cause of the climate emergency? Alternatively, what might it look like to undertake a criticism informed by a dialectical materialist eco-socialism, a “red-green” critical practice that would regard the connections between political economy and ecocide as crucial because capitalism is the human system that has widened the ecocidal rift between humankind and nature?4 Shakespeare’s late comedy The Tempest (1611) offers an intensive exploration of nature/culture boundaries and hierarchies in an enchanted world where magic mediates between spirit and matter. As such, it is a fitting text for assessing the ethical and political efficacy of the new materialist approach. Taking The Tempest as a case in point, I will explore some of the interpretive possibilities and political limitations of the new materialism, then offer an alternative. In Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest , Prospero’s magic enables him to control the elemental spirit, Ariel, and Ariel helps Prospero to dominate his slave Caliban who, in the words of Prospero, “serves in offices/ That profit us” (1.2.312–13).5 The play links spirit and matter, culture 3 On the fundamental role of capitalism in causing ecocide and the climate emergency, see Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Books, 2016); Kate Aronoff, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back (Bold Type Books, 2021); John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (Monthly Review Press, 2010); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2015); and Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Yale UP, 2018). 4 Some recent efforts to formulate an eco-socialist methodology for literary criticism include Lance Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 9.2 (2002), 1–25; Leerom Medovoi, “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory,” in Mediations 24.2 (Spring 2009); and Thomas Nail, Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism (Oxford UP, 2020). 5 All citations from the play are taken from Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s edition, Bloomsbury, 2011.

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and nature, through magic, a human capability allowing the magus to tap into a network of divine and elemental forces. Prospero is given a privileged status as the humanist sage whose consciousness, elevated by certain technologies and forms of knowledge unknown to any subhuman creatures, appears at first to stand above or apart from all other beings and objects. The last thirty years or so have seen a huge interest in The Tempest as a colonial text, one that exhibits the power dynamics that were beginning to develop between colonizer and colonized during a time when the Western empires were expanding, and commercial outposts were being established all over the world. Critics taking this approach have urged us to interpret The Tempest in the context of English settlement and plantation in the New World, and to see Caliban and Ariel as racialized figurations of the Indigenous colonized subject under European empire. In the vast body of critical work on The Tempest , we find critics returning, again and again, to a “postcolonial” reading of the play’s representations of race, gender, indigeneity, slavery, and coloniality. Such readings continue to be valid and useful, but they often stress imperial power and colonial discourse without connecting them directly to the political economy of a racialized capitalism. Postcolonial history has revealed, too often, that capitalism, in the form of a globalizing empire uncontained by borders or national governments, has been able to maintain its exploitative control over postcolonial nations and their economies, constraining or defeating local attempts at socialism. As Franz Fanon has taught us, without international solidarity against capitalist exploitation, local and national struggles will face difficult obstacles and fail to truly liberate the common people from social and economic injustice. If this political reality under late capitalism has exposed some of the limitations of recent postcolonial or “decolonial” thinking that fails to confront unjust class relations, what about the new materialism, the official theory of ecocriticism today? At the very least, we might hope that a green new materialism would enable an effective approach to the cultural politics of the climate emergency and make a difference in the urgent frontline struggle to forestall disaster. But the new materialist ecocriticism cannot accomplish that goal without taking the fundamental role of capitalism into account. Instead, the anti-anthropocentric new materialism has merely fueled a new wave of thematic readings of “vibrant matter” as an all-encompassing network of objects. The new materialists are generally much more comfortable with the postcolonial emphasis

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on identity politics than with the Marxist focus on political economy and class conflict. When new materialists identify a large-scale social or cultural force as the primary source, during the early modern period, of violent anthropocentrism, imperial aggression, and ecological destruction, they refer to “empire,” “power,” “coloniality,” or they focus on various forms of identity oppression. If and when they refer to economic matters, they prefer to talk about “trade,” “commerce,” and “exchange,” rather than referring to the class-based system of capitalism. Surveying current early modernist ecocriticism, we struggle to find any substantial discussion of capitalism’s central role in causing ecocide and climate change. Take, for example, Craig Dionne’s self-declared “eco-materialist” study, Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene (2016). Despite the play’s emphasis on upper-class indifference to the suffering of the lower classes, Dionne mentions “capitalism” only twice in his book, in passing references to the work of Jacques Rancière and Frederic Jameson, without ever acknowledging or pursuing the central role of capitalism in producing the Anthropocene.6 Dionne acknowledges the Marxist view of the social order in early modern texts like Lear but prefers to “to push off-center this analysis to repurpose the older materialist critique to one that reveals the ecological theme of its central concern with sustainability.”7 This unfortunate omission or downplaying of economic structural causes (and potential solutions) occurs in spite of the rich body of eco-socialist writing that currently exists in both academic and more popular forms.8 In the scope of this essay, I will not be able to survey all the ecocritical studies of early modern literature, or even of Shakespeare, so I will focus, in what follows next, on recent ecocritical interpretations of The Tempest as examples indicating a broader problem. A group of wellintentioned ecocritics, wearing Latourian new materialism plainly on their

6 Dionne discusses “the decline of feudal values” in some detail (see pp. 123–37) but never mentions the pressure brought to bear on aristocratic power and privilege by the rising capitalist class or the profound changes wrought in political economy by capitalism. 7 158. 8 See, for example, Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective

(Haymarket, 2014); John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill, 2016); and Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

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sleeves, have produced various accounts of arboreal and oceanic materialities in The Tempest . For instance, in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, Steve Mentz begins his discussion of The Tempest with a call to interpret Ariel’s song about “sea-change” literally, urging us not to limit our understanding of the song or the play to metaphorical readings in which “the sea quickly becomes a metaphor for the artistic process or theatrical magic or mutability itself.” Instead, he emphasizes a new materialist sense of Ariel’s “sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.401– 2), denoting “salt water’s transformative impact on human flesh.” “The real ocean creates change,” declares Mentz, “but not through happy fictions.”9 This literalizing move exemplifies a general tendency in new materialist readings of literary texts: because those readings need to relate the images in the text directly to a material network of agentic objects exerting their “thing power” (Bennett), they inevitably emphasize those aspects of the text that refer primarily to such a physical network and only secondarily to a pattern of abstract ideas or concepts elaborated through figurative language, symbol, or allegory. Thus, for Mentz, “[Ariel’s seachange] song represents the transforming powers of oceanic magic”—and by “magic,” he means the kind of entangled agentic force fields that link human beings, ocean-going vessels, seawater, coral, pearls, and sunken treasure—and everything else. The new materialists, following Latour and object-oriented ontologists like Timothy Morton and Graham Harman, do believe in a kind of sympathetic magic or mysticism, a notion of “distributed” cause-and-effect that is produced, not through the will or intention of human subjects, collectivities, social classes, or political movements, but rather by the invisible animistic force fields that connect all things. At the same time, they claim that there is no such thing as a human subjectivity apart from object-matter. In other words, human thought and consciousness, they argue, do not exist on a separate plane of existence from all other forms of matter and therefore should not be given a privileged status or autonomy in relation to non-human objects. From this perspective, it is the agential power of object-matter in general that makes things happen through a network of objects that includes humankind—but not human agency, will, or intention on its own. Mentz briefly acknowledges the main motive and cause of human interaction with the ocean through “maritime activities,” citing

9 Bloomsbury, 2009, 1, 7.

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Robert Norman’s 1584 guide to navigation, the Safeguard of Sailors, which asks Norman’s readers to “prefer Hydropgraphie or Nauigation before any other art and science” because “maritime activities support ‘the whole bodie of the common welth,’ rather than just some of the nation’s competing parts.”10 But instead of elaborating on the way that, by the late sixteenth century, long-distance trade was motivated by the need of European monarchs to pay off their debt, by the energies of early capitalist investors, and by the profit-seeking primitive accumulation of joint-stock corporations and the merchant class, or pointing to the exploitation of maritime labor that facilitated such investments, Mentz quickly moves on to “fathom” the text by measuring the thirty-foot distance (“full fathom five thy father lies” [1.2.396]) that separates Ferdinand from the sea bottom.11 According to Mentz, Ariel’s song leads the listener away from politics toward a general messy merging of all matter: “Now that the King is (imaginatively) gone, everything he represents – political order, social hierarchy, human plans – gets transfigured in the deathly fertility of the ooze. A new marine logic replaces the land-bound world.”12 The sea’s agency takes over, and political consciousness can no longer rule our understanding of the play. In his later study Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719, Mentz doubles down on the new materialist argument that we should not see climate change primarily in human terms. He rejects the term “Anthropocene” as overly anthropocentric: “climate change may be our fault,” he writes, “but it is not only our world. This term, even as tragic lament, continues to place human actors in... the ‘summit position.’ We need other options.”13 This is a counterproductive statement if we want to place human responsibility and human action on the top of 10 Qtd. In Mentz, 4. 11 For two interpretations of The Tempest that do discuss, within a Marxist framework,

the question of colonial and maritime labor in the play, see Daniel Vitkus, “‘Meaner Ministers’: Theatrical Labor, Mastery, and Bondage in The Tempest,” in The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies and Late Plays, ed. Jean E. Howard and Richard Dutton (Blackwell, 2003), 408–26; and the concluding pages of David Hawkes’s important study Shakespeare and Economic Theory, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 180–84. 12 9. 13 Mentz, U of Minnesota Press, 2015. Mentz considers other options, such as

“Homogenocene, Thalassocene, and Naufragocene” (xiv), but he “reject[s] the Anthropos in Anthropocene” (xvi). Nor does he endorse the usage of “Capitalocene,” a useful term

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our list of ethical and political priorities. Furthermore, in a book about modernity and globalization, one that gives a central place to the discussion of maritime labor and colonial expansion, it is telling that Mentz only mentions emergent capitalism in order to dismiss its central role in defining modernity. Despite his presentist agenda in relation to the prehistory of climate change throughout modernity, he does not connect his new materialist analyses to the emerging post-1492 capitalist system that motivated Western voyaging and imperial expansion and ultimately produced the economic activities and industrial technologies that have caused climate change. Even in his discussion of the journals of Edward Barlow, a seventeenthcentury East India Company mariner, Mentz avoids discussion of how the exploitation of labor in terms of class differences (bourgeois merchantinvestors, ships’ captain and officers, common sailors) and the drive for profit through investment were the fundamental impetus of the very voyages that Barlow recounts. In a substantial discussion of the Dutch writer Grotius’s Mare Liberum, a key text in the legal and political history of early capitalism, Mentz explores in some detail the notion of “maritime labor as a counterdiscourse to Grotian liberty,”14 and yet there is no acknowledgment of that labor as part of a class-based political economy. Instead of describing the fundamental structuring of modern labor relations within the framework of the joint-stock companies or imperial investment in extraction, enslavement, commodity, plantation, and so on, Mentz offers the new materialist view: “A Latourian perspective suggests the fundamental continuity among the contributions of disparate actors that include social networks, human laborers, and inanimate tools. Maritime labor provides an exemplary case of collaboration between human and nonhuman actants.”15 It is not human class relations that matter for Mentz’s understanding of maritime labor; instead, he believes that “In Bruno Latour’s sense, a working ship is an assemblage of human and non-human actants, all working together—or failing to work together, as sometimes happens in moments of crisis. Sailors laboring in

that was coined and defined by Jason W. Moore. See Moore’s definition of the term in his Capitalism in the Web of Life. 14 78. 15 80.

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mobile human and nonhuman groups perform embodied and material work through a shared process.”16 In the chapter that treats The Tempest and the colonial history of Bermuda, Mentz discusses piracy, slavery, and long-distance commercial voyaging, with a particular focus on maritime labor as skilled labor. This chapter explores the history of Bermuda as “a story that was disoriented by the ocean, marked by shipwreck, and never straightforwardly progressive,”17 seeking to situate The Tempest within “a richer maritime historical context than conventional source study and New Historicist contextualization have allowed.”18 Here, Mentz falls in line with the post-structuralist and Latourian rejection of any longue durée narrative that would highlight the gradual shift from a domestic-feudal to an imperial-capitalist economy. His turn away from long-term historical narratives about economic change is a turn away from the socioeconomic drive that has wreaked havoc on our planet—from the engine that has propelled Western imperial expansion, the triangular trade, and all of the extractive, consumer-driven violence that has caused the climate emergency. Mentz settles, instead, for the flatness of the never-ending and all-extending network of material objects, proclaiming “historical continuity” and “sameness” as the big picture that subsumes all change. Shipwreck Modernity concludes with a disavowal of both “Human meaning-making systems” and cause-and-effect narratives because they cannot adequately account for the vast and mysterious non-humanity that is oceanic matter.19 Mentz ends his book with a series of what he calls “ecological truths,” including this one: “Out of disasters come possibilities for new order and new ordering systems. The shocking violence of climate change is terrifying, but the chance to reimagine the human relationship with the nonhuman environment is liberating.” Certainly, he is correct to point out that “Catastrophes [such as the climate emergency] are opportunities,”20 but for Mentz, there is no mention of the anticapitalist action that would be required to actually reshape the destructive human relationship with the non-human on an oceanic scale. 16 79. 17 52. 18 68. 19 165, 166. 20 180.

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Like Mentz, Dan Brayton, in Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration, invokes Latour and embraces new materialism, aiming “to locate in literature a representation of human life that defines humanity as part and parcel of the marine environment, not just its plunderer,” and he holds up Shakespeare “as a counterexample to the culture of plunder we now take for granted, for he imagined the ocean not as a void, waste space, adversary, or vast fish cooler but as an integral part of our being.”21 Glossing Caliban’s epithets of “strange fish” and “monster” in The Tempest , Brayton explores the human-animal and nature-culture boundaries in typical new materialist fashion, concluding that Shakespearean drama reveals how “The human connection to the creatures of the sea makes nature strange and the self (a) stranger.”22 Brayton declares his own project to be an avowedly presentist one designed to aid in the “‘the political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world.’”23 But while Shakespeare’s Ocean describes the rise of the commercial Atlantic fishery and a global market for fish as a food commodity, and although Brayton deplores the depletion of various aquatic animals like cod that were once so abundant and laments the plundering of the seas, his economic framework is a liberal one that argues for conservation through laws limiting destructive fishing practices in order to create sustainability. Brayton never refers to the marketplace as “capitalist” and does not call for radical system change to get at the root cause of the ocean’s decline. And while he discusses the commodity form and the proverbial idea that in human society, as in the sea, “big fish eat little fish,” he does so without recourse to any kind of Marxian or cultural materialist framework. Similarly, in Brayton’s chapter “Prospero’s Maps,” where he likens Prospero’s thaumaturgical powers to that of imperial cartographers and geographers, his new materialist exposition of the play’s references to wind, breath, music, and maps, along with his reading of Prospero as both a navigator and a cartographer, does not lead to a broad political or economic vision of the play. Instead, the chapter concludes by linking historical contextualization to a thematic reading that gestures toward a “spatial metapoetics” made up of “cartographic codes.”24 Despite its

21 U of Virginia P, 2012, xii. 22 165. 23 6, quoting Heise. 24 195.

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references to “social hierarchy,” “social domination,” and “European domination,” the urgent ecopolitics advocated elsewhere in the book are neglected and, as a result, Brayton’s interpretation of The Tempest remains disengaged from the needed critique of capitalism.25 The anti-anthropocentric message of the new materialists is clearly announced by Lowell Duckert in For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes: the human “cannot be severed from the environment.”26 Duckert claims that The Tempest illustrates this principle by offering various “ways of unthinking ecological sovereignty” and by defining “the dissoluble human self-in-motion” as an object connected to and penetrated by moisture of all kinds, including rain, seawater, wine, pond water and more.27 His reading of the play insists that in its references to water and wetness, and in displaying the literal wetness of the characters, we see “The Tempest ’s theorization of humans becoming watery via their material entanglements.”28 Duckert interprets Prospero as a figure who initially believes he is higher and drier than all of the other characters but ends the play having learned the lesson taught by water’s power to dissolve all material things “and leave not a rack behind” (4.1.156). For Duckert, Shakespeare’s late comedy is a text that “proves ontological purity impossible.”29 Human agency and subjectivity are downplayed, he insists, as the agentic, dissolving power of wetness is made manifest throughout The Tempest . His reading of The Tempest concludes with an eloquent point about human connectedness to the non-human, but insomuch as this insight is offered as a remedy for human alienation or ecological destruction through greater awareness and connectedness, it is only a bare beginning in moving toward an effective political criticism. There is no mention of how we must address the alienation and ecological destruction produced and sustained by capitalism and its ideology, or of how Prospero’s efforts to remain high and dry bespeak his figuration as an upper-class colonizer and slaveholder in the early days of a globalizing capitalism.

25 174, 122. 26 U of Minnesota P, 2017, 16. 27 16, 2. 28 8. 29 16.

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Vin Nardizzi’s study Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees takes a new materialist approach to arboreal imagery and the materiality of wood. Nardizzi exhibits an admirable presentism in its concern with “resource scarcity” and “eco-wastefulness”—and in particular with deforestation and the depletion of “natural resources” in the English homeland, a domestic problem that became a motive for seeking resources elsewhere through trade and colonization.30 In his chapter on the Tempest , invoking Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter,” he sets out to show how “the woods of The Tempest ’s island, which Caliban’s bundle of logs emblematizes,... are the vital matter of The Tempest ’s eco-fantasies of colonialist extraction and theatrical production.”31 Nardizzi points out that the labor of cutting and gathering logs is central to the “wooden slavery” (3.1.62) of both Ferdinand and Caliban: it is “the material substrate without which bare subsistence for the exiled Europeans would be impossible.”32 In his discussion of colonial projects and economies, Nardizzi emphasizes economic issues, especially labor, but he avoids any explicit discussion of capitalism, preferring postcolonial and new historicist concepts like “power” and “colonialist discourse.”33 While discussing colonial fantasies of abundance (seen in the betrothal masque) in Shakespeare’s play and in contemporaneous promotional tracts detailing economic plans for plantation and extraction, Nardizzi never adopts the kind of presentism that would identify capitalism specifically as the primary driver of ecological destruction and woodland depletion. His chapter on The Tempest is helpful in raising important questions about economics and labor (slavery, wood-gathering, woodworking, building wooden theaters, the labor of the players), but he stops short of locating these economic concepts and processes within a history of capitalism’s emergence during the early modern period. That might not matter so much if it were not that the class system under capitalism is the very cause driving the human suffering and habitat destruction lamented by ecocritics. Distracted by the new materialist agenda, and specifically by the agentic “thing-power” of the logs as stage props and as vibrant materials for building the Globe

30 U of Toronto P, 2013, 113. 31 112. 32 123. 33 133.

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itself, the chapter ends with some observations about metatheatricality and the wooden composition of London playhouses. Nardizzi’s detailed account of economic matters clearly exhibits the potential for a red-green reading of the play’s arboreal labors and objects, but the turn toward new materialism leads away from that outcome. The tendency of new materialist studies to veer away from human agency and class-based techno-power into thing power and vibrant matter is also evident in Jason C. Hogue’s “Ariel’s Anguish: Doing (Arboreal) Time in The Tempest ”. Hogue’s agenda here is to “help work toward a notion of common sentience among humans and non-human others.”34 Zeroing in on Ariel’s twelve years of confinement in a pine tree by the sorceress Sycorax, Hogue seeks to consider “a mode of existence that approaches that of arboreal ontology (or tree-being),” and claims that the play offers “an entrance into thinking before and beyond the Anthropocene’s ‘time of the human,’ through the ‘arborealization’ of Ariel and the ‘Arielization’ of the tree.”35 Aiming “to locate an embodied, posthumanist ethics inhering the arboreal material of the play,” the article takes readers on a deep dive into the esoteric consideration of “dendrochronological” time, asking us to find sympathy for plants as fellow living beings and to learn from the play’s representation of Ariel’s suffering, measured in an “inter-missing time” that is unlike human society’s measured time.36 Certainly, such shared experiences of sympathy or suffering with nonhuman life are a crucial means, though perhaps only a first step, toward doing something that would have a palpable impact, however small, on our overwhelming planetary crisis. And yet, this kind of animist mystification of plant being is a presentism that takes us very far away from the kind of shared project or political movement that will be necessary if climate apocalypse and social collapse are to be averted. These anti-anthropocentric readings of liquid and wood in The Tempest pursue an agenda, one found in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, that could be politically effective if only they would link their micro-materialist insights to larger historical and ecological processes that are driven by human intention, activity, and agency. These critics clearly wish to do beneficial work in our time of climate emergency, but when

34 ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 28.4 (2021), 1483. 35 1482, 1483. 36 1485, 1498.

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they avoid or disavow the larger, long-term process of human history, driven by the crisis of the aristocracy and the emergence of capitalism, they miss an opportunity to bolster their materialist ecopolitics of connectedness with a realpolitik that locates a very human power struggle at the center of things. When these new materialist readings downplay human agency and power, they lead us astray from a politics that would protect the non-human from further harm at the hands of the human race. What is needed instead is an intersectionality of their anti-humanist identity politics with an effective anti-capitalist political vision. One way to reorient our understanding of The Tempest toward that kind of intersectional presentism might be to focus on Prospero’s upperclass “art”—on his ability to raise a storm and effect control over a non-human nature by means of his book-based knowledge and his imperialist will-to-power. Prospero reclaims a place at the top of a hierarchy, one that allows for his control over human and non-human objects, a class-based position of legitimacy that is eventually questioned through his tyrannical behavior, cruel use of power, and his final admission in the play’s closing epilog that he needs the consent of the audience in order to recover his full power in Milan. A connection can be made between early modern fantasies and aspirations about acquiring a technology that could control the elements and the rise of a scientific knowledge that defined the earth not as a living biosphere, but as a repository of raw materials to serve economic ends and enable imperial domination. The long history of modern science, during which technological knowledge production led to the age of steam and coal and then on to full-blown petrochemical industrial capitalism and finally the nuclear age, stretches from the emergence of Baconian empiricism during the seventeenth century to the current climate emergency and the potential for planetary destruction by nuclear weapons. Here, the new materialist notion that human agency must be decentered is unhelpful in comprehending the course of both our economic and climatological history. A clear and unambiguous acknowledgment of human economic activity as the fundamental structural cause is a crucial prerequisite for any effective struggle for radical system change. This means placing at the center of our attention an understanding of climate change as something resulting from centuries of capitalist-driven extraction and consumption. As a colonizer and slave master, and as a man whose goal is to abandon the island so that he can regain the power and wealth of his dukedom, Prospero is a figure who stands for the Western colonial drive to conquer,

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enslave, extract, and then to go back home after having expropriated the labor value of non-European subalterns. The play can be seen as a kind of uncanny, prophetic parable about how the Western empires have used knowledge, technology, and power. The power that comes with Prospero’s magic (his use of knowledge to control nature) must be “abjured” because it is “rough”—it has been used to raise the dead, inflict pain, enslave, and force nature itself to bend to a single human will. By the last act of the play, it threatens to run violently out of control. The purpose of Prospero’s magic is clearly not to pursue knowledge in a disinterested or altruistic manner—it is to gain revenge on his enemies, subdue them, and force them to submit. The imperial impulse visited upon Caliban is also present in Prospero’s ambition to return to Milan and retake his “legitimate” place at the top of the 1%. In contrast to a politics of empire and class-based exploitation stands Gonzalo’s utopian vision of a colonial “commonwealth” where nature’s abundance would make labor unnecessary and where there would be no class differences, no “riches” or “poverty” (2.1.148–51). This labor-free utopia is a fantasy about how “all things in common nature” can have economic and political agency. Gonzalo’s proposal is sneeringly dismissed by the inconvenient truths of an unpleasant Sebastian and Antonio. Here we might see the naysaying, power-hungry duo, Sebastian and Antonio, as cynical pragmatists who are rightly dismissive of Gonzalo’s “impossible matter.” They are no egalitarians, and they understand all too well the role of political violence in taking power. Their coup attempt is villainous and demonstrates the murderous internecine struggle that always afflicted aristocratic power and royal dynasties from within. In contrast, following the postcolonial interpreters of the play, we might retain a view of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo as sympathetic figures who attempt, through their lower-class “conspiracy” of slaves and servants (4.1.139), to overthrow Prospero’s unjust rule. Their necessary “good mischief” (4.1.217) would end the cruel tyranny made possible by Prospero’s knowledge of “the liberal arts,” his magical technology, and his upper-class power that allow him to control the labor of his social inferiors. But they fail, and the failure of the anti-Prospero alliance is a matter of lost opportunity and material temptation: their delay is produced by buying them off with the prize of Prospero’s “glistering apparel” (4.1.193). This is the “trumpery” they “dote” on when decisive action is desperately needed (4.1.225, 232).

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Human action and agency are swayed, drawn in, and entangled by the allure of these objects, but if these are the agentic objects of new materialism, they are also fetishized commodities—the kind of lavish apparel acquired by those who sought to claim upper-class status in early modern Europe. It is the human projection of exchange value through ideology, a kind of networked thing power, that animates them with the power to distract the rebellious trio. Seized by a desire for the kind of aristocratic apparel forbidden to lower-class subjects, they grab the “glistering apparel,” and immediately Prospero’s spirits are on them in the form of upper-class hunters and hounds. The rebels are then hunted, pursued by spirits in the form of vicious dogs, and “pinched” until they “roar” with pain. These dogs are reminiscent of the mastiffs brought by European conquistadors and colonizers to aid in terrorizing and dominating Indigenous people. Animality is repeatedly invoked in this scene, representing a class-based hunt in which Prospero and his servants pursue the lower-class trio, reducing them through pain to a subhuman condition that reasserts and enforces the power of ruling-class humans over human laborers. The text and the action emphasize a hierarchy of labor: Prospero’s managerial “work” directs Ariel and the spirits (here malevolent “goblins”) to perform their appointed tasks obediently in an effort to reestablish rule through revenge. Human time is measured through contractual relations and property relations that dictate when labor ends and “freedom” begins—and when it has no end because the dehumanized victim has become a chattel slave: PROSPERO Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’ mountain. ARIEL Hark, they roar! PROSPERO Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour Lie at my mercy all mine enemies. (4.1.262–65)

In the next scene, Prospero continues to enjoy his vengeful power and uses it to reduce his enemies to mere “roaring” as they become hunted beasts running in terror from the spirits-as-dogs.

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The exchange that follows between Prospero and Ariel serves to interrogate what it means to be truly “human,” in a scene of ontological uncertainty and instability offering a shared vibrancy among species, human and otherwise—but without the emphasis on power and agency that the new materialists attribute to the non-human. Shakespeare employs here the Christian humanist conventions that typically defined human being as a hybridity combining divine and animal qualities in a body that contained spirit, reason, will, and appetite and existed on a sliding scale between divine potential (reason and love) and base, sinful animality (predator and prey, directed by pain, irrational passion and fear, bestial sin). The early modern ontological system centers human being as the microcosmic measure of all things, created in the image of God but also instilled with animal appetites and passions that allow for tremendous instability. Human beings are set adrift in something akin to the new materialists’ network of objects connected by distributive agency, but it is not flat and undifferentiated. It is a hierarchy of being with Prospero the directive power at the center, fallible and vulnerable to “distempered” (4.1.145) passions, but in control thanks to his superior knowledge and the application of that knowledge to his “project.” Human agency, enhanced by the power of Western imperial know-how, shapes events and controls the political outcome. Prospero revels in his cruel revenge, one that reduces his “enemies” to a subhuman condition of fear and pain, but he is shocked into a sudden realization: he must demonstrate a proper human kindness if he wishes to claim the virtue and legitimacy that he needs in order to rule over others. Ariel describes the “sorrow and dismay” (5.1.14) of Gonzalo and the others who are attending on the “distracted” (5.1.12) trio of Alonso, Ferdinand, and Sebastian: “Your charm so strongly works ‘em/That, if you now beheld them, your affections/Would become tender” (5.1.17– 19). The dialog that follows continues to explore the proper definition of humanity: PROSPERO Dost thou think so, spirit? ARIEL Mine would, sir, were I human. PROSPERO And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,

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One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? (5.1.19–24)

Shocked into mercy by the admonishment of the inhuman spirit Ariel, Prospero decides that kindness is a better strategy than revenge. Prospero’s “project gather[s] to a head” (5.1.1), his spirit-servants obey his commands, and the duke makes things happen because he knows how to control time, matter, and other beings through the magicalscientific knowledge that only ruling-class humans can wield. Along the way, human being is shown to be highly unstable, existing in a range of possible positions: from divine magus, who is in contact with invisible agencies and capable of controlling the spirit world that organizes elemental matter, to “men of sin” who can be reduced to a bestial condition, and down to lower-class or Indigenous persons who fall, through drunken folly and dangerous disorder, to a subhuman condition from which they must beg for mercy. The waters, waves, rocks, staff, and book all play their parts in a network of objects, but the play represents a hierarchical universe of both spirit and matter, not one of flattened or horizontally distributed object-agencies. Beyond the material world, invisible forces connect human beings to a spiritual world, over which presumably a prayer-heeding God presides. Prospero gives lip service to time and “providence divine” (1.2.159), invoking His invisible power— and yet, no deus ex machina appears. The theatrum mundi follows a man-made script, and the play’s final lines place power in the hands and voices of the audience. In all of this, we may find a place for the antianthropocentric insights of the new materialists, but our present politics, if we wish it to be as efficacious as Prospero’s project, cannot deny the centrality and power of human agency, even if we confront the same limitations and distributions of matter, time, and space that Prospero faces. Shakespeare’s play warns us against the arrogance of a Prospero who indulged in esoteric learning, neglecting his people and losing touch with the day-to-day concerns of government until he was overthrown. As the play’s epilog indicates, power resides in the urban audience. Ultimately, the mass of common people must decide whether to restore a ruler whose crimes need pardoning. Like Prospero, we must abjure the rough magic that would re-enchant matter so that we can focus our collective power once again in solidarity against tyranny and look to the political economy that is driving us toward global disaster—this time, with a sensitivity to

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our neglect of the climate emergency and its causes in human agency and an unsustainable and ecocidal capitalism. This is a time of political urgency when the esoteric animism and magical thinking of “the new materialism” may not serve our effort to save humanity from itself. Physics and magic aside, it is human agency, human responsibility, and collective, ecosocialist political action that offer our only hope. An intersectionality of green and red can only be politically effective if it combines two forms of presentist purpose—the aims and intentions of those who hope to restrain the destructive forces that threaten our planet and our future, and the pragmatic eco-socialist objective of a revolution in political economy that would achieve radical system change through human action, a vision that recognizes capitalism and class-based exploitation as the root source of our planetary woes. If we hope to play a part in slowing the damage caused to the earth by capitalism, our cultural work must participate in a political movement that aims to protect our planet by targeting the alltoo-human ruling powers that seek profit over life. Though we may exist in a world of material objects, dependent on a precarious web of life, it will be the agency and actions of one species that will determine the future of the planet. Yes, we are part of assemblages or networks that stretch beyond the human and connect us to the non-human, but our future as a species relies on a uniquely human combination of sympathetic “affection” and higher thinking: a proactive “human kindness” that employs our rational capacities, knowledge, and technologies to restrain and undo the “high wrongs” of an unjust and ecocidal economic system. This may be a form of exceptionalism, but it is one that comes not with a privilege to increase and multiply at the expense of all else but rather with a heavy responsibility to act, share, change and restore.

CHAPTER 9

Logic-Chopping Servants, Politic Jesters, and Pet Fools Paul Budra

The editors of this book have posed an important question: how did various social categories impact class tensions and class mobility in early modern England, and how can we trace that impact through the period’s drama? I would like to redirect this question to explore how class tensions forced the lower classes to create affective registers that became a defining part of their social existence. So, rather than examine how potentially marginalizing conditions complicated the early modern subject’s class status, I would like to examine how the subject’s class status necessitated a complex and shifting juncture between emotion and affect. Specifically, I would like to examine how the lower classes used the dis-alignment between emotion and affect to perform acts of passive resistance toward their social superiors and how they had to temper such encounters for material gain. The emphasis here is on performance: the lower classes, either in acts of social rebellion or remunerated entertainment, had to

P. Budra (B) Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_9

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consciously adjust their affect during their encounters with their social betters; class structures compelled them to adopt affective strategies that became crucial features of their lived experience. This was a class politics of emotion and affect, and it was represented on the early modern stage in complex and nuanced ways. A number of contemporary historians have argued that lower-class uprisings such as Kett’s Rebellion (1549), Hacket’s Rebellion (1591), and the activities of the Levelers indicated the potential power of those lower classes and the fragility of the social contract that defined their status.1 Shakespeare critics such as Chris Fitter have taken up this idea. He begins his recent book Radical Shakespeare with a catalog of rebellions and acts of resistance to the political and social structures of Elizabethan England, especially during the “Black Nineties.” He concludes that “medieval and Tudor underclasses were not ideologically quiescent in their servitude” and that Shakespeare’s plays are “relentless in the sceptical ontology of rank”; in other words, they interrogate the essentialism that justifies inherited social status.2 There were indeed rebellions against class privilege (and the economic advantages it conferred), and some were represented on stage: in The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1593), Woodstock (c. 1591–1594), and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry 6 where Jack Cade leads a populist revolt against not only the nobility but also against the literate.3 But despite open acts of defiance against the class system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the representation of such in the popular drama, the class system persisted during Shakespeare’s life. It was not openly subverted by the popular revolution. Since only 3 percent of the population was noble or gentry4 and all the circulating models of social structure were hierarchical, the majority of the population lived within a class system that ranked them as socially inferior to someone else. And while class mobility was

1 Compare Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in SixteenthCentury England (Cambridge UP, 1980), 18, and Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan England (Cambridge UP, 1991), 7, on the fragility of civic life in sixteenth-century London. 2 Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (Routledge, 2012), 17, 20. 3 Class and literacy were intertwined, as William Harrison notes in The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Cornell University Press, 1968), 113–14. 4 Fitter, 9.

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increasing in this period, the Elizabethan class system was inescapable.5 It was enforced through sumptuary laws, the right of gentlemen to carry swords, forms of address, and protocols of courtesy. Commoners had to adopt postures of supplication to their social betters, making a display of their own inferiority. The continuance of the class system, despite the disproportionate ratio of socially privileged to the “meaner sort,” suggests that, despite Fitter’s broad assertions, large portions of the lowerclass population must have silently acquiesced to being defined by their inherited social rank. But what I’m interested in here is what lies between silent acceptance and overt rebellion: various forms of passive resistance both in social practice and as represented on the stage. As James C. Scott notes in his description of class resistance among Malaysian peasants, Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These Brechtian— or Schweikian—forms of class struggle have certain features in common … they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority.6

Or, as Colin Gordon puts it in his summary of Michel Foucault’s meditations on power and subversion, “The existence of those who seem not to rebel is a warren of minute, individual, autonomous tactics and strategies which counter and inflict the visible facts of overall domination, and whose purposes and calculations, desires and choices resist any simple division into the political and the apolitical.”7 Such resistance is much less dramatic than overt rebellion and significantly more difficult to document, but it is infinitely more prevalent, and it entails an ephemeral 5 For a discussion of the lability of class boundaries, see Thomas Anderson, “Class, Class Consciousness and Specters of Marx in Shakespeare’s History Plays,” Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1–12. For the reaction against class mobility, see Peter Sillitoe, “‘Thy State Is the More Gracious’: Courtly Space and Social Mobility in Hamlet and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare 9.2 (2013), 207; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (Oxford UP, 1967). 6 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale UP, 1985), xvi. 7 “Afterword,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writ-

ings 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (Harvester Press, 1980), 257.

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and largely surreptitious, but nonetheless complex, emotional/affective juncture. And it exists along a spectrum, from obstructionist banter to nuanced reactions to one’s superiors in the hope of material gain. To address that continuum, I would like to adopt one of the simplest and earliest definitions of affect, which arises from psychoanalysis: affect is the physical manifestation of the emotion the subject experiences. It is what, for example, an analyst can observe: “physical disturbance and bodily activity (blushes, sobs, snarls, guffaws, levels of arousal, and associated patterns of neural activity), as opposed to ‘feelings’ or more elaborated subjective experiences.”8 Minute tactics of passive resistance are instances of the potential disjunction between emotion and affect because they necessarily mask outward compliance: the lower-class person typically adopts a posture of humility before his social better while veiling any potential resentment. The successful act of passive resistance may generate self-satisfaction or glee that, in most cases, would have to be hidden from the social superior. Passive forms of social resistance, then, necessitate a conscious separation of emotion and affect in the resisting subject: affect is knowingly disassociated from emotion; the subject feels one thing but performs another. Such dis-alignment is necessarily complicated by social contingencies: does it occur during a casual street encounter or as part of a master–servant relationship? Is there money at stake? Do the two sides in the encounter have an established or special relationship? What if the lower-class subject is incapable of disengaging affect from emotion? Let us look at examples of all these possibilities. The adoption of affect necessitated in such acts of passive resistance suggests theatrical performance—the subject is, after all, “acting”—but this sort of resistance is not inherently dramatic. It offers little opportunity for spectacle. It is on a small scale, often so subtle that the powers being resisted may not understand they are being manipulated. But we can find representations of it in early modern English drama. And here, I would turn to one of the most obvious examples: logic-chopping, when a simple query receives a needlessly complicated and intentionally obtuse answer. While such scenes are amusing and can involve displays of virtuoso wordplay, in Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists it is almost inevitably subservient classes who employ logic-chopping 8 Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (Sage, 2012). See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005), 25ff, for a discussion of the history of this distinction.

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when responding to the inquiries of their social betters. The initiating inquiry serves as a gateway to the act of resistance because the persons asking the question, however, exalted their social rank, are at that moment dependent upon the person they are interrogating for some piece of information. The lower-class person leverages the need of her superior into a form of social resistance. The person being interrogated draws out the dependency of the questioner through a needlessly complicated answer that simultaneously demonstrates mental acuity through wordplay. The respondent, then, creates confusion, unease, or simple irritation in the questioner, thereby securing a minute emotional victory. Thomas Moisan has written about some of these scenes and argues that “their effect is at least gently subversive and admonitory,”9 but he does not address the emotional and affective registers of these exchanges. Let us take an obvious example: at the beginning of Julius Caesar, the two tribunes, Flavius and Murellus, question the crowd of commoners who have come out to celebrate Caesar’s triumph. Flavius asks the Cobbler his trade, and the Cobbler responds truthfully but with a quibble: “Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler” (1.1.10–11).10 Playing on the double meaning of “cobbler,” his sentence can be interpreted as “in comparison with someone who does fine work, I am a bungler” (OED). This is how the tribunes interpret it, and it opens the door for the Cobbler to draw out their confusion. When Murellus demands the man’s trade again, the Cobbler delivers a second quibble, punning that he is “a mender of bad soles” (14). This obfuscation angers Flavius: “What trade, thou knave? Thou naughty knave, what trade?” (15) Still the Cobbler does not answer directly, instead feigning indignation: “Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me. Yet if you will be out, I can mend you” (16–17), here punning on “out” as in a “worn out” shoe. Two lines later, the tribunes finally realize that the man is, indeed, a cobbler, and the Cobbler takes his small moment of triumph to self-aggrandize: “I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes: when they are in great danger, I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork” (23–5). The Cobbler’s logic-chopping has frustrated and, apparently, infuriated the tribunes. 9 “‘Knock Me Here Soundly’: Comic Misprision and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991), 278. 10 All quotations from Shakespeare cite The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Norton, 2016).

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For it to be a site of class contestation, this sort of logic-chopping has to be deliberate. It cannot be the product of honest misunderstanding or what Moisan has called “comic misprision,” as when Grumio misunderstands Petruchio’s orders to “knock” in 1.2 of The Taming of the Shrew. Nor can it be the result of inadvertent malapropism such as we get from Bottom or the Clown in the last scene of Antony and Cleopatra. Finally, it will not have the emotional and affective disjunction I am describing if it takes place between social equals, as in the banter of Beatrice and Benedict or Romeo and Mercutio. It is dependent on its disjunction of emotion and affect on social inequality. And I should note that while the vast majority of such scenes involve a person of the lower or middling classes confronting his social superior, social inequality is relative. A prince is of a lower rank than a king, and so Hamlet engages in logic-chopping with Claudius, most notably when he refuses to directly tell the king where he has stashed the body of Polonius (3.6.16–35). A child is not socially equal to her parents, so when Juliet balks at marrying Paris, Capulet assumes her riddling refusal—“Proud can I never be of what I hate, / But thankful even for hate that is meant for love”—is muddying wordplay: “How, how, how, how? Chopped logic? What is this?” (3.5.147–9). Some social superiors (or perhaps just parents) are quick to recognize obfuscation. In real life, a lower-class person who verbally baffled her social superior would most likely hide her glee at having scored that small victory, at least until she was out of the presence of the person she has frustrated. But that was not always true on the stage. The logic-choppers of early modern drama who carve out moments of dignity from socially unbalanced encounters can sometimes take pride in their accomplishments. So, in the second scene of Doctor Faustus , a scholar asks Faustus’ servant Wagner, “where’s thy master?” Wagner replies, “God in heaven knows.” When the second scholar responds, “Why, dost not thou know?” Wagner replies, “Yes, I know, but that follows not” (1.2.4–7). Once he has confounded the scholars, Wagner congratulates himself: “Thus, having triumphed over you, I will set my countenance like a precisian and begin to speak thus” (24–5). He then gives a sarcastically formal answer to the scholars’ simple question. Wagner gloats; he is smug.11 Smugness is associated with self-satisfaction and conceit; it is pride writ small, and it was

11 In Shakespeare’s time “smug” meant “clean, neat, trim, or tidy” (OED): “The smug and silver Trent” (1H4 3.1.100).

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never, as far as I can discover, regarded as positive in Shakespeare’s day.12 But on the stage, some logic-choppers are allowed a moment of emotional indulgence as they revel in a spirit of contradiction informed by the hatred and envy that circulates through the class system. The emotional/affective confluence represented in these moments, then, is as complex as the social dynamics by which they are informed. After all, these exchanges are points of resistance; they are not simply humorous interactions that, in the words of Maya Mathur, “level hierarchies between aristocrats and peasants to facilitate discussions of contemporary social problems.”13 They do just the opposite. Now, neither the cobbler nor Wagner is dependent upon those social betters they are baffling for sustenance or reward. There is no material gain in the balance when they indulge their logic-chopping obstruction. However satisfying it may be for them, their tiny acts of resistance are low-risk. The stakes were much higher in encounters in which the lowerclass people were materially dependent on their betters. Whatever their internal resentment, they had to strike a balance in their affect between deference and expectation because of immediate need. Andy Wood gives an example of how, in the sixteenth century, “when poor people came to a gentleman’s house to plead for firewood, the lord often required supplicants to recognise that he had granted their request only out of grace and that they took wood from his estate by his ‘licence’, rather than according to any customary right.”14 Such exhibitions of subordination were practically scripted by social convention and, as Wood says, such “displays of deference, constituting mere disingenuous disguises, leave the dignity, self-respect and assertiveness of working people essentially untouched” because they were, in essence, rote recitations of a face-saving formula.15 One hopes.

12 See Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall. Corrected, enlarged, and with sundry new discourses augmented. By Thomas Wright. With a treatise thereto adioyning of the clymatericall yeare, occasioned by the death of Queene Elizabeth (London, 1604), 116, 134, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A15775.0001.001. See also René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Hackett, 1989), 106. 13 “An Attack of the Clowns: Comedy, Vagrancy, and the Elizabethan History Play,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.1 (2007), 36–7. 14 “Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England,” Journal of Social History 39.3 (2006), 810. 15 “Fear, Hatred,” 809.

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Perhaps the best place to see the representation of unequal social transactions that are, at least in part, defined by material necessity is in Shakespeare’s court jesters or clowns.16 In these cases, the dis-alignment of affect from emotion is, at least in part, necessitated by the need for financial gain. Professional jesters, after all, were employed by the wealthy and, traditionally, the royal. Their social positions were studies in liminality as they walked the border between humor and offense while hoping for reward. Sprezzatura masked material need; the soliciting agent entertained while displaying social subservience. At the same time, the jester’s unique position could allow for a sort of casual chumminess with, and occasional mocking of, his employer.17 But while the entertainer wanted to amuse and display verbal virtuosity (while avoiding excessive offense), he may have wanted to avoid being conspicuously wittier than the person whom he was soliciting, for two reasons: first, he did not want his potential benefactor to feel intellectually inferior, and second, he wanted his audience to get the jokes. So, while the commoner bamboozled his social superior with punning wordplay while maintaining a posture of supplication, the jester entertained his superiors with punning wordplay while negotiating a highly contingent relationship. Affect and emotion continued to be dis-aligned, but the jester had an eye on the bottom line. Viola in Twelfth Night explains the delicacy of this negotiation in her description of Feste: This fellow is wise enough to play the fool And to do that well craves a kind of wit. He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of the person, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. (3.1.53–8)

“The quality of the person” is the key here. It is perhaps no coincidence that Viola’s recognition of Feste’s careful juggling act occurs in Twelfth

16 For a discussion of the stage terms “clown” and “fool,” see Robert Hornback, The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (D.S. Brewer, 2009), 2, and David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge UP, 2009), 66–72. 17 See John Doran, The History of Court Fools (London: 1858), 48ff, for jesters’ license to mock their betters.

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Night for, as Keir Elam points out, it is “perhaps Shakespeare’s most classconscious play, and at its centre is the irresistible drive towards upward social mobility that characterized early seventeenth-century England.”18 And Feste, of all of Shakespeare’s fools, is the most clearly, as Andrew Stott has noted, “a professional comedian, even if, as a long-term dependant of Olivia’s household, he may not obviously belong to a world of modern ‘careers’, but to an older, organic network of extended kinship groups and feudal hospitality.”19 He is in no way a “natural fool,” as he says, “I wear not motley in my brain” (1.5.49–50).20 He also lives in a world in which services, and even passing comments, are remunerated with cash. In the second scene of the play, Viola pays the Captain for merely saying he saw Sebastian survive the wreck at sea: “For saying so, there’s gold” (1.2.18). In 4.1, Sebastian gives Feste a substantial sum—“thou hast an open hand” (18)—just to go away. Let us spend some time tracing Feste’s negotiations of Illyria’s class structure because he, of all Shakespeare’s professional jesters, is the most adept at modifying his wit and affect to suit his immediate audience. The first time we see him (1.5), he has returned from a prolonged absence and must ingratiate himself anew in Olivia’s household. He begins the scene trading sexually charged puns with Maria whom he seems to know well and who has, perhaps, an analogous class status. With the entrance of Countess Olivia, his wordplay immediately becomes less bawdy, and he addresses, in a backhanded way, Olivia’s grief, reminding her that her brother is in heaven. Olivia is mollified and asks Malvolio, “Doth he [Feste] not mend?” (1.5.65–6). Feste has played her perfectly, so well he can go on to insult Malvolio and have Olivia take his side: “There’s no slander in an allowed fool” (1.5.85–6). She does say that his fooling is getting stale, but when Sir Toby stumbles in, she turns to Feste for a quip: “What’s a drunken man like, fool?” (120). Feste is back in Olivia’s good books. When he is with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, Feste coarsens

18 “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, 3rd ser. (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2008), 80. 19 “‘Let Them Use Their Talents’: Twelfth Night and the Professional Comedian,” in Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader, ed. Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown (Bloomsbury, 2014), 148. 20 For a summary of the difference between the types of fools, see Peter Cockett, “Performing Natural Folly: The Jest of Lean Leanard and the Touchstones of Robert Armin and David Tennant,” New Theatre Quarterly 22.2 (2006), 141–2.

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his humor. He enters 2.3 with a joke that implies the two men are asses: “Did you never see the picture of ‘We Three’?” (2.3.15–16). He has read his audience correctly, for Sir Toby gets the joke and turns it back on him: “Welcome, ass” (17). Both Sir Andrew and Sir Toby pay Feste to sing, and the three of them attempt “Thou knave,” a song in the round that requires each singer to insult the others. Feste, perhaps because he is not as familiar with Sir Andrew as he is with Sir Toby, warns the knight before they sing that “I shall be constrained in’t to call thee knave, knight” (2.3.61–2). He negotiates the implications of insulting his social betters by, in effect, asking for permission in advance. Compare this to the next Feste scene, 3.1, with Viola/Cesario whose class status is less clearly defined than that of Olivia or Sir Toby. The scene begins with some logic-chopping banter. Viola plays the word game well, and Feste compliments her (3.1.10–11). Viola tips Feste, and this— because it is proof that the jester has judged the quality of his audience correctly—gives Feste the license to become freer in his language. Feste’s last joke with Viola, “I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus” (3.1.45–6), while having sexual connotations, is also a learned reference; Feste at once shows off his own knowledge and, implicitly, compliments Viola on her education, in effect implying, “I’m telling you this learned joke because I know you’ll get it.” Viola gives Feste a second coin saying, “‘Tis well begged” (3.1.47). And that’s the crux: Viola recognizes that Feste’s engagement with her, his banter, and even his playful insults, is a form of fleeting entertainment staged for financial gain. However lighthearted the exchange between them, whatever social liberties have been taken, Feste is a professional supplicant selling a clownish affect. He happens to beg well. Tellingly, Feste’s begging is very different with Orsino. At the beginning of 5.1, Feste entertains Orsino with humor that is without sexual connotation or insult and is based rather on a simple riddle about double negatives and the honesty of friends (15–20). Orsino’s response, “Why, this is excellent” (21), suggests that Orsino is easily pleased (or he is not that bright). Orsino gives gold, and Feste solicits more by punning on the Duke’s traditional title of “your grace”: “Put your grace in your pocket, sir, for this once, and let your flesh and blood obey it” (5.1.28–9), “it” being the “ill counsel” of giving more money. Feste tries for a third tip, but Orsino denies him and reminds him of his status: “If you will let your lady know I am here to speak with her and bring her along with you, it

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may awake my bounty further” (37–9). Feste is to run and perform an errand for his social superior if he expects more payment. It is difficult to assess Feste’s emotions under the shifting affects that he both produces and markets with what appears to be unstudied ease. Only his extended cruelty in the treatment of the captive Malvolio and the melancholy of his final song hint at an interior life in conflict with his affect. But then Feste is constrained by material needs. What happens if a jester is not immediately worried about the loss of income or position? We never see Touchstone taking money for his wit, so he is freed from the deference such exchanges impose. And while Feste carefully negotiates class distinctions, Touchstone has been transported to Arden Forest, an environment in which the rigid class distinctions of court life are, if not suspended, muddied. This gives Touchstone a freedom other professional fools never have. It is almost as if Shakespeare wanted to pose a question with this character: if a fool is not being paid, will he still perform? Will he continue to tweak his affect? Before he leaves for Arden, Touchstone has one exchange with Celia, Rosalind, and Le Beau. His joking turns on the notions of knights and honor, a topic appropriate for the court (1.2.62–80). At the end of the play, Touchstone finally appears before Duke Senior. He is, in effect, back in court, and his long turn on the quarrel “upon the seventh clause” (5.4.50) derives its humor from a complex atomization of the protocols of courtesy and ritual surrounding dueling. Touchstone has assessed the quality of the person for whom he’s performing—Duke Senior—and has raised the level of his humor accordingly. The bit is also in service of his declaration that he himself was once a courtier. Between those two demonstrations of courtly decorum, Touchstone’s wit is much more free-ranging than that of Feste. Because he is not clowning in the hope of pay, he can, and does, take liberties: he insults Rosalind in his bawdy extension of Orlando’s poem (3.2.90–101), and he makes bawdy jokes with Jacques (2.7.18–28). His actions and humor take a dark turn: he sexually exploits Audrey; he mocks Corin for not having been to court; and, most significantly, he actively threatens young William in a speech full of class condescension (5.1.42–8). As David Wiles points out, “Touchstone the foolish courtier relies on a rustic clown to give definition to his own gentility.”21 The jester, freed from the constraints

21 Shakespeare’s Clown, 66.

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of financial supplication, summons traces of class privilege to marginalize and demean those he sees as his social inferiors. The affects of insouciance and chumminess disappear; the jester’s mask slips and the resentments that circulate through the class system are revealed. We see something of the same in Lavache in All’s Well That Ends Well . His exact relationship with Countess Roussillon is not entirely clear. The Countess calls him a “foul-mouthed and calumnious knave” (1.3.50–1), but his position in her home seems, at least at first, comfortable: Parolles says he is “A good knave, i’faith, and well fed” (2.4.37). Yet near the end of the play, the clown solicits LaFeu for employment. The French lord tips him but, rather pointedly, does not hire him, and one might guess why: Lavache does little to temper his affect to suit his immediate audience. He is Shakespeare’s least politic professional jester. He is crude in front of the Countess; he briefly and pointlessly logic-chops Helen at the beginning of 2.4, punning on the word “well” as it was used to refer to the dead; he makes fun of the language of courtiers (2.2) as he leaves for court. But, like Touchstone, if he is given a chance to lord it over someone he perceives as below his status, he will take it. At the beginning of 5.2, he roundly insults the disgraced Parolles, calling him “Fortune’s closestool” (14–15) and mocking his body odor. These are not subtle or witty put-downs. Interestingly, this forceful assertion of status comes from a clown who, in three of the five scenes in which he appears, is given orders to perform menial tasks, including taking care of LaFeu’s horse. More than any of Shakespeare’s other clowns, he is relegated to bending and fetching, so when given a chance to lord it over someone less fortunate than himself, he revels in it. So, the dependency on remuneration forces professional jesters to temper and sometimes abandon acts of verbal resistance. While commoners who triumph over their social betters through logic-chopping may become smug, Shakespeare’s jesters display melancholy, rage, and even cruelty when given the opportunity to drop their professional masks. But what happens when a lower-class individual does not have the capacity to disassociate his affect from his emotion even in the presence of his social betters? What if a lower-class person is incapable of masking his emotions? This brings us to the case in Shakespeare that confounds the class politics of emotion and affect, both the minute act of resistance inherent in logic-chopping and the delicate stratagems of wit negotiated by the professional jester, and that is the Fool in King Lear.

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The Fool, according to many critics, is a “natural fool” and therefore has a unique dispensation to speak truth to power. Enid Welsford says Lear’s Fool is “evidently half-witted” but then goes on to claim he is “endowed with a penetration deeper and more far-reaching than that superficial sharp-wittedness and gift for smart repartee which went to the making of a successful court-jester.”22 The Fool’s case is further complicated because the truths he speaks vary between the two versions of King Lear. The Fool in the Quarto version of the play is more satiric and bitter than the Fool in the Folio, but in both versions of the play, I would argue, the Fool’s “natural” simplicity is not in his wits: he delivers quick and devastating ripostes in both the Quarto and Folio. He is not mad like Poor Tom, spouting incoherencies, nor does he fall into temporary lunacy like the king.23 In fact, he is Lear’s most perceptive critic.24 His so-called simplicity is clearly not intellectual; rather, it lies in his inability to disengage his affect from his emotion. Unlike the Cobbler, Feste, Touchstone, or (to a lesser degree) Lavache, the Fool wears his emotions on his sleeve and seems incapable of projecting an affect to distract or disarm his social superiors. The fact that his observations put him in danger suggests that his emotional lability is not a performance, part of his fool’s persona, but a weakness he himself recognizes, as he says to Lear, “Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie” (1.4.148–9 F). For good or bad, he is an embodiment of Edgar’s injunction to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.300 F).25 The relationship of this emotional transparency to the Fool’s social status is difficult to trace because the Fool’s social status itself is uncertain. He is clearly a member of Lear’s household and, we can assume, receives accommodation and sustenance along with Lear’s hundred knights, but

22 The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), 253. 23 See Alice Equestri for the distinction between idiocy and lunacy in early modern

England. Equestri, “‘This Cold Night Will Turn Us All to Fools and Madmen’: Feste, Lear’s Fool and the Border Between ‘Idiocy’ and Mental Illness,” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 99.1 (2019), 23–32. 24 For a discussion of the differences between the Quarto and the Folio’s representation of the Fool, see Robert Hornback, “The Fool in the Quarto and Folio King Lear,” English Literary Renaissance 34.3 (2004–09), 306–38. 25 In this play, and several others of Shakespeare, it is the evil characters who are adept at masking their emotions behind feigned affect.

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the Fool, like Feste, expects money for his witticism. In the Quarto, Lear responds to the Fool’s “Have more than thou showest” speech by saying, “This is nothing, Fool” (1.4.118 Q). The Fool replies, “Then like the breath of an unfeed lawyer, you gave me nothing for’t” (199–200). In the Folio, it is Kent who responds to the song and receives Fool’s rebuke, but in either case, the Fool is looking for a tip. So, while, like Feste, the Fool expects remuneration for the entertainment he provides, his position in the Lear household would seem to guarantee him a certain standard of living. What complicates that position is Lear’s emotional attachment to the Fool, an attachment entirely unlike that we see between other characters of radically different social statuses in Shakespeare. There are other examples of upper-class characters who feel tenderness for the lower-class members of their household: the Countess of Roussillon feels more affection for Helen than she does for her own son; Brutus shows tenderness toward his servant Lucius in 4.3 of Julius Caesar. But the relationship between Lear and the Fool is of a different scale. The very first time we hear about the Fool, it is because Lear has struck one of Gonerill’s men for chiding him (1.3.1–2 Q&F). Lear clearly loves the Fool. But while Lear protects the Fool and gives him a special license, he still threatens him with punishment. As the Fool says, “Truth is a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the lady brach may stand by th’ fire and stink” (1.4.102–3 F). Now, while the Fool is arguing that Truth is a bad dog that must be put outside while, by implication, the sycophant may rest indoors, this witty comparison hints at a truth about early modern class relations and the politics of affect that we may find uncomfortable: the Fool is Lear’s pet. The class divide between them, and the Fool’s purported simplicity, allows Lear to treat the Fool like a beloved dog: indulged, encouraged to perform tricks, punished if he crosses certain lines. And this makes sense if we understand the Fool’s simplicity in terms of his emotion and affect: like a dog, the Fool is emotionally open and immediately responsive to his surroundings. He does not frustrate his betters with logic-chopping, but he will perform verbal tricks, manufacturing witticisms. He whines about discomfort and loyally snaps at Lear’s enemies. This is in no way to disparage the Fool’s innate humanity. Rather, it is to suggest that the uncensored nature of his emotional life, the transparency of his affect, endears him to Lear in the way that we find dogs and small children, in their immediate enthusiasms and untampered affects, endearing. It also reminds us that the upper classes, in certain circumstances, could and did treat specific members of

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the lower classes as, essentially, pets: lesser creatures who, if they were charming in their openness and vulnerability, could provide comfort, affection, solace, and amusement. Welsford calls such a person a “mascot” fool, a person defined by “mental deficiencies or physical deformities which deprive him both of rights and responsibilities and put him in the paradoxical position of virtual outlawry combined with utter dependence on the support of the social group to which he belongs.”26 It is clear that such unfortunates could be loved by their masters: Welsford recounts how a Pharaoh from the Fifth Dynasty was so enamored of his court fool that he prayed to see him in the afterlife and how Roman noblewomen often treated their fools like “lap-dogs and teddy-bears.”27 And so it is with the Fool. His failure to disassociate his affect from his emotion marks him as simple in a world that requires the lower classes to temper their affect. That the upper classes might find such emotional honesty childishly endearing is perhaps the most dehumanizing class condescension of all. I hope I have demonstrated that strategies of affect that the power inequities of the early modern class system necessitated were themselves a defining feature of the lower classes’ social existence. The lived impacts of this condition were (and still are in cultures with rigid social structures or caste systems) often masked or found their expression in ephemeral acts of class negotiation and resistance. But what is perhaps crucial for our scholarship is that, whether the lower classes were logic-chopping their superiors as a form of minute and fleeting rebellion or tempering their affect and wit in expectation of remuneration, they were performing, disassociating their affect from their emotions, and hiding their subjectivity behind socially acceptable postures of deference. They were acting, and we can catch glimpses of the nature and complexity of their performances in the public theater of their time, an institution that, like the lower-class subjects who made up the bulk of its audience, aimed at once to please and slyly subvert by constantly tweaking its affect to suit its audience.

26 The Fool, 55. 27 The Fool, 57, 59. English monarchs regularly maintained natural fools since at least

the reign of Edward II. By the Tudor age, a “fool’s keeper” was often on the royal payroll (see John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Sutton, 1998), 56–64).

CHAPTER 10

Wench, Witch, Wife, Widow: The Power of Address Terms in The Witch of Edmonton Laura Kolb

Introduction The Witch of Edmonton’s opening words—“Come, wench!”—make up the first of many moments in which one character uses a term of address that classifies another in terms of gender, class, age, or relative social position.1 Frank Thorney here addresses his bride, Winifred, whom he is trying to cheer up: the two have been secretly married, she is pregnant, and they are going to have to live apart while he secures his inheritance. Later in the scene, Sir Arthur Clarington, in whose household both Frank and Win are servants, echoes Frank’s language: “Thy lip, wench” (1.1.157), he demands, expecting Win to proffer him both a greeting and continued sexual access to her person (unbeknownst to Frank, he is 1 Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Lucy Munro (Bloomsbury, 2017).

L. Kolb (B) Baruch College CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_10

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the child’s actual father).2 The two men’s hailing of Win as “wench” is later indirectly echoed in the first line addressed to the figure named in the play’s title: “Out upon thee, witch!” (2.1.17). As critics have noted, the play strongly suggests that ostracization and abuse, epitomized by Old Banks’s hailing Elizabeth Sawyer as “witch,” prompts her transformation into one.3 “’Tis all one/To be a witch as to be counted one” (133–4), she laments, and the plot bears out the truth of her complaint. Though Sawyer initially calls attention to the gap between Banks’ externally conferred label and her own sense of identity, the play dramatizes the social and psychological processes that lead to that gap’s closing: before the scene’s end, she enters into a devilish pact. As the first words directed at the play’s central female characters, these terms—wench, witch—demand our attention. Through their prominent position in early scenes and their alliterative echo, they link its domestic tragedy plot, in which Win and Frank’s predicament leads to bigamy and murder, and its witch plot, in which Sawyer seeks vengeance against cruel neighbors. More significantly, this pair of address terms underscores a dynamic central to the play’s representation of social relations, where what a person is called constitutes an inescapable element of who she is. Address shapes identity, and identity—developed dialogically, both in acts of hailing and the reception of those acts—is an ongoing construction. Lynne Magnusson locates in Shakespeare’s plays “a view of identity as always undergoing maintenance and repair, always being patched even in the making.”4 This essay argues for address terms as crucial tools in such 2 On kisses as greetings, see Alex MacConochie, “‘I Had as Lief They Would Break Wind in My Lips’: Contested Kisses in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan,” Shakespeare Studies 48 (2020), 146–51. 3 See Susan Amussen, “The Witch of Edmonton: Witchcraft, Inversion, and Social Criticism,” Early Theatre 21.2 (2018), 167–80; Roberta Barker, “‘An Honest Dog Yet’: Performing The Witch of Edmonton,” Early Theatre 12.2 (2009), 163–82; Muriel Cunin, “‘Within/This Ruined Cottage’: Witchcraft, Domesticity and Inwardness in The Witch of Edmonton,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 85 (2014), 42–55; and Julia Garrett, “Dramatizing Deviance: Sociological Theory and The Witch of Edmonton,” Criticism 49.3 (2007), 327–75. 4 Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters

(Cambridge, 1999), 144. I am indebted to Magnusson’s work and the politeness theory on which it builds, including Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1987) and Roger Brown and Albert Gilman, “Politeness Theory and Shakespeare’s Four Major Tragedies,” Language in Society 18.2 (1989), 159–212.

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processes of identity-making and -repair as captured in dramatic dialogue. Further, it argues that the construction of individual identity, epitomized in moments of address, is inseparable from the maintenance of interpersonal relationships and larger communities. Naming Win “wench” and Sawyer “witch,” their interlocutors place them in relation to themselves, to local hierarchies and communal networks, and to ideas of a social order that specific relationships and communities only ever imperfectly instantiate. Across early modern drama, address terms encode information about the intersections of class—with gender, age, race, and occupation—this volume tracks. Studies in historical pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that examines language use in historical contexts, tell us that early modern English address terms encoded information about identity while also operating as “subtle indicators of interpersonal relations,” expressing feelings like affection or contempt and acknowledging familiarity or social distance.5 In recent decades, interdisciplinary scholarship has brought these insights to bear in Shakespeare studies, though this work has primarily been conducted by linguists drawing evidence from plays, rather than literary critics drawing insights from linguistics.6 The current essay extends this work to non-Shakespearean drama. The Witch of Edmonton is a particularly rich site for exploring address terms’ dramatized social functions because it is centrally concerned both with the dialogic construction of relational identities and with those identities’ instability—an instability that registers in the very words by which characters hail one another. As acts of naming that are always also acts of classification, of placing an addressee in relation to others, address terms capture the uncertainties arising when a character’s place in the world comes into question. In the play, address is a site of anxiety and conflict, as well as collaboration: Win evidently accepts “wench,” but Sawyer rejects “witch,” at least initially. From the first scene, the playwrights deploy these sensitive registers of social and emotional content to reveal the complex unfixity of relational identity within gendered and classed hierarchies. Beyond 5 Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, English Historical Pragmatics (Edinburgh, 2013), 75. 6 See Brown and Gilman, “Politeness”; Roman Kopytko, Linguistic Politeness Strategies in Shakespeare’s Plays (John Benjamins, 1995); Jucker and Taavitsainen, English.

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“wench” and “witch,” the play is rich in gendered address, much of it misogynist—“hag,” “she-hell-cat,” “whore,” “slut”—but naming in the play’s world is a problem that extends to everyone. Men too are subject to labeling and mislabeling, negative (“slave,” “churl,” “villain”) and positive: arranging a marriage between his son and Susan Carter, Frank’s father calls Susan’s “Master Carter” (1.2.1), assigning the yeoman gentry status. Carter rejects this, responding, “No gentleman I” (3), a correction discussed below. These moments dramatize communal relations as they are negotiated and disputed through conversational encounters. Especially in moments of uncertain, mistaken, or abusive address, uneasy fits between name and person index the social order’s instabilities. The play imagines these instabilities producing real threats to society, as when Sawyer becomes a witch capable of actual harm after being called one. The Witch of Edmonton’s intertwined plots emerge from the uneven fit between systems of social classification and individual persons being classified: from gaps between Win and “wench,” Sawyer and “witch,” Carter and “Master Carter.” They explore these mismatches, however, in different ways. Focused on the interactions of established families within a community, the domestic tragedy plot stages social identity as perpetually shifting—augmented by prosperity, threatened by adversity, and undone by sexual impropriety. Identity, here, is not a stable, predetermined social category but an ongoing construction, and the use and reception of address terms reflect this: characters have trouble naming each other (and themselves); renaming occurs repeatedly. Nevertheless, this plot’s central figures share a sense that persons can and should be classified, placed, and named. The witch plot, focused on a social outcast, presents a starker view of identity—an inflexible, externally conferred construct, a kind of illfitting carapace—and of address terms: abusive labels that reshape reality by coercion, not collaboration. Taken together, the play’s two plots call attention to the seam between individual and social grouping and to the work language does in both stitching and unraveling that seam. That seam comes undone or threatens to for figures like Win, Frank, and Sawyer. The play’s two plots chart this unraveling’s effect on these characters and on the fabric of society, which is revealed to be at once tightly woven and riddled with snags and tears.

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Wench Frank’s opening “wench” and Arthur’s unwitting echo of it epitomize the problems of classification that extend throughout the play. Both men use “wench” as a “familiar or endearing form of address.”7 According to the OED, the word can also suggest youth, lower-class status, a servant’s rank, or wantonness, and those meanings come into play here: Win is young, lower-class, serves in Arthur’s house, and has sexual relationships with men. As an address term, however, the word does not so much describe Win as place her—and it does so in two distinct ways.8 First, the word signals a degree of vertical social distance between speaker and addressee, with a higher-status speaker and subordinate addressee; when used by a male speaker, it also highlights gender difference (“wench” is only ever addressed to women). At the same time, the word signals affectionate familiarity. We see the word’s two dimensions—vertical distance, horizontal closeness—in The Tempest: Prospero repeatedly calls Miranda “wench” (1.2.139, 413, 480), signaling her subordination and his fondness for her.9 Similarly, in Henry VIII , Queen Katherine addresses her waiting woman as “wench” (3.1.1), a term appropriate to their relationship’s intermingled familiarity and social difference.10 The word is elastic; exceptions to its “normal” uses abound. Even these, however, tend to play with the built-in combination of distinction and familiarity. In Measure for Measure, Lucio—who has recently met Isabella and taken pains to show her deference—urges, “to him, wench” (2.2.127) as she entreats Angelo.11 Neither her superior nor her intimate, he uses “wench” to signal approval of her rhetorical performance (approval that has a kind of temporary verticality built-in: he stands in a position to approve); the word also flags their situational intimacy as collaborators in the effort

7 “wench, n.” OED Online. 8 A word’s connotations as an address term do not always match its referential senses;

see Eleanor Dickey, “Forms of Address and Terms of Reference,” Journal of Linguistics 33.2 (1997), 255–74. In Shakespeare, “wench” is an affectionate address term but takes on a wider range of senses, including pejorative ones, employed referentially. 9 Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Alden T. Vaughn and Virginia Mason Vaughn (Arden, 1999). 10 Shakespeare and Fletcher, Henry VIII , ed. Gordon McMullan (Arden, 2000). 11 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson

(Arden, 2020).

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to save Claudio. As these examples show, “wench” is not, like “witch,” a term of abuse. It is not even, like “rogue” or “knave,” an insult that can be affectionately repurposed.12 But it can function somewhat like the lighter, playful versions of these latter terms: an entirely nondeferential gendered address term encoding affection or approbation, generally across a gap in social power. Frank’s “wench” differs from Arthur’s because his relationship with Win and their relative social positions differ. Teasing out those differences reveals how address terms operate to both name and replenish relationships and the larger social order. In this scene, Frank addresses Win as “thou” (she calls him “you”); this pronoun is “in keeping with his use of the word ‘wench’”: it encodes intimacy but implies a vertical social relation, with Frank in the elevated position.13 Though he and Win both served Arthur, Frank is by birth a gentleman, and his father retains the estate that underwrites their status (though its loss is imminent). The play offers scant information about Win’s background; the list of characters identifies her only as “Sir Arthur’s maid.” The social gap between them is real, but it is diminished by shared service, sexual intimacy, secret marriage, and—the scene strongly suggests—genuine mutual fondness. In the speech that immediately follows, Frank recalls the wedding ceremony and looks to the future, all in informal, sweetly teasing terms: “Why, here’s a business soon dispatched … thy child shall know/Who to call ‘Dad’ now” (1.1–5). Imagining a future version of the unborn child addressing a future version of himself, Frank invites Win to imagine the trio as a family, the child legitimized by its parents’ marriage.14 If we had only this speech to go on, we might feel that, in place of “wench,” Frank might just as easily have said “wife.”15 And indeed, when Frank uses “wench,” intimacy and affection are dominant.

12 Ulrich Busse, “The Co-occurrence of Nominal and Pronominal Address Forms in the Shakespeare Corpus: Who Says Thou or You to Whom?” in Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. Taavitsainen and Jucker (John Benjamins, 2002), 193–221, 202–3. 13 Munro, n.1.1.5. On thou vs. you, see Brown and Gilman, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (MIT, 1960), 253–76. 14 “Dad formerly occurred most commonly in children’s language.” OED Online. 15 In Of Domesticall Duties (1622), William Gouge advises a husband to address his

spouse as “wife” rather than “wench” or “woman,” words that “set her in too meane a rancke” (sig. Bb2v).

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Arthur’s “wench” encodes less intimacy and more authority. It may also express approval of a plan well-executed, like Lucio’s use of the word. Once they are alone, after demanding a kiss, Arthur exclaims: “This was cleanly carried./Ha! Was’t not, Win?” (1.1.158–9). The two have successfully duped Frank into believing the child is his; marriage has saved Win from disgrace, the child from bastardy, and Arthur from any consequences whatsoever. Yet this moment of address is a command and an expression of approbation. Arthur’s expectation of continued sexual access seems based on his position as her master, one who gives commands without expectation of denial. His exhortation—“Thy lip, wench”—is playful but peremptory. And when Win explains that she plans to be faithful to Frank, he responds angrily: “Pox on your honesty!” (213). Arthur expects to be obeyed; Win’s resistance is an affront. For both men, “wench” encodes familiarity across status difference, but each places the emphasis differently, because each invokes the specific relationship between himself and Win, both as individuals and as social identities within a stratified system. But what is Winifred’s identity, exactly? Although both men name Win with apparent ease, I want to suggest that they have some difficulty categorizing her. At the play’s start, she is, to use a period formulation, “neither maid, widow, nor wife.” Confusion over what kind of woman she is—a classification determined by her relationship to a man or men—leads to confusion over what to call her. Frank does not call her “wife.” His choice of “wench” may in fact result from hesitation to do so. He believes himself married to her, but he insists that they keep their union secret, going so far as to ask Arthur to “assure my father that/I am not married” (135–6). Later, when rumors reach Old Thorney, who confronts his son, Frank vehemently denies the marriage, precipitating his second, bigamous union to his father’s preferred match, a wealthy yeoman’s daughter. Whatever else “wench” expresses, it allows Frank to avoid “wife.” Arthur must have an even sharper sense of Win’s ambiguous, hard-to-classify status; he is, after all, responsible for it: father of her illegitimate child, architect of her clandestine marriage. And though she vows to turn “From a loose whore to a repentant wife” (192), from Arthur’s perspective and society’s, “no polite word exists for her state.”16 For him, too, “wench” skirts around 16 David Nicol, “‘I Knew Not How to Call Her Now’: The Bigamist’s Second Wife in The Witch of Edmonton and All’s Lost by Lust,” Comparative Drama 50.4 (2016), 317–39, 317.

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the linked problems of pinpointing his relationship to Win and naming the precise social position she occupies. The problem of addressing Win—of naming and placing her within local and larger social orders—indexes a broader problem in the play’s world: that of naming and placing women imperfectly attached to men in a society that classifies women based on husbands’ or fathers’ status.17 Win at the play’s start risks becoming like Elizabeth Sawyer, unassimilable into the community. If her marriage fails or is exposed, she will be guilty of bastardy. At the moment we meet her, she is in between, no longer (to use her term) “whore,” not fully “wife.” The crisis of address attending Win points to the difficulties involved in naming and placing anyone whose identity becomes uncertain when external criteria that determine that identity—relationships, wealth, esteem—change. If in The Witch of Edmonton address terms reinforce a collective understanding of the social order and of how particular individuals and relationships fit within it, they also register ripples in that collective understanding. When an individual like Win becomes hard to place, she also becomes hard to name. Writing on pronouns of address, Roger Brown and Albert Gilman link difficulties in selecting address terms with social change: “In a fluid society crises of address will occur more frequently than in a static society.”18 Early modern English society was not necessarily “fluid” in the sense they mean—rapidly shifting from hierarchy toward egalitarianism—but within its “static” structures there was in fact much motion. Hierarchy provided “a framework within which constant movement took place.”19 Calling our attention to local crises of identity indicated by particular address terms, the playwrights in turn highlight the mobility of persons within the larger system. Win’s unfixed, notquite-nameable status—the product of illegitimate or barely legitimate attachments to two different men, both of whom address her ambiguously as “wench”—is rendered even more unstable by Old Thorney and Frank’s potential loss of land and rank, a point discussed more fully in this essay’s final section. The play’s witch plot, discussed in the next section, foregrounds a figure who is not threatened with social expulsion, because she has already been expelled.

17 Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2003), 29. 18 “Pronouns,” 270–1. 19 Wrightson, English, 45.

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Witch From her entrance, Elizabeth Sawyer protests her place in the world and her community’s construction of that place in language. Her first speech, a soliloquy, begins: And why on me? Why should the envious world Throw all their scandalous malice upon me? ’Cause I am poor, deformed, and ignorant, And like a bow buckled and bent together By some more strong in mischiefs than myself, Must I for that be made a common sink For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues To fall and run into? Some call me “witch,” And being ignorant of myself they go About to teach me how to be one … (2.1.1–10)

Sawyer describes a vicious cycle: shaped by social forces into a socially unacceptable being, she receives more abuse, becoming more unacceptable. She is not what she is called—a witch—but she is all the things on which the community bases this assessment: old, poor, uneducated, and female. Notably, Sawyer describes her body as buckled and bent by “some more strong in mischiefs” than herself. Many critics read in this line a reference to Old Banks, “whose blows,” she claims, have “lamed” (2.1.34) her. But “some” points to a more general culprit: multiple abusers and, beyond them, the unequal social order that shapes every aspect of her life, including her body. Her speech makes two separate claims: I am not what they call me, and I am what they have made me. Seemingly contradictory, both are true: she is misnamed; she is shaped by that misnaming. Sawyer’s response to being misvalued is, at least at first, to close the gap between her actual status (impoverished old woman) and reputed identity (witch): to become what she has been called. After the initial verbal skirmish, Old Banks strikes her, addressing her by a fresh abusive term, “hag” (2.1.27). She responds: “Does strike me, slave? Curmudgeon, now thy bones aches, thy joints cramps, and convulsions stretch and crack thy sinews!” (28–30). Sawyer’s curses are merely ill wishes; she has no supernatural powers. Yet in the context of the scene, which opens with her lamenting her reputation as witch and reboots with Banks addressing her as one, her curses destabilize her claim to be nothing but a wronged

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old woman. They may even confirm Banks’s sense of her; the harms she invokes are in line with illnesses witches were accused of causing. Such harms were often understood to be retribution for poor economic treatment: “in the classic case, an old woman requested some kind of help and had been refused; she went away cursing or mumbling, and when some misfortune occurred she was blamed for the misfortune.”20 Sawyer’s term for Banks, “curmudgeon,” implies precisely this sort of failure of charity. The word means “ungenerous miser,” and Banks is denying her even the humblest form of aid, driving her off as she gathers “a few rotten sticks” (21) for fire. The other name she calls him, “slave,” does a different kind of work. Used in the address, “slave” is a serious insult; like the similarly abusive “villain,” it bears strong connotations of low social status.21 Calling Banks “curmudgeon,” she refers to their actual situation; calling him “slave,” however, she posits a revised scenario where she is superior, he is subordinate. Later, she repeats this move: in the extended backand-forth when Arthur and the Justice question her over the villagers’ accusations, she repeatedly gives both men the contemptuous “thou,” refusing deference and asserting her own superiority.22 Sawyer’s brief rhetorical claims to an elevated position relative to her interlocutors suggest a world turned upside-down; her longer speeches, though, excoriate the world as it is. After she declares, “’Tis all one/To be a witch as to be counted one” (2.1.133–4), the devil enters as Dog, promising revenge on her enemies in exchange for her “soul and body” (152). Yet even after this pact, she continues to reject the label “witch,” ultimately assigning it to those she sees as doing more grievous harm than herself. When the Justice asks, “are you a witch or no?,” she answers, “I am none!,” adding: “If every poor old woman be trod on thus by slaves, reviled, kicked, beaten, as I am daily, she to be revenged had need turn witch” (4.1.89–95). Sawyer’s generalized account recalls her own story: mistreatment by “slaves” (really, those with more power) leads a “poor old

20 Amussen, “Witch,” 168–9; see Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584). 21 For “slave” as an address term, see Maria Drazdauskiene, “Address and the Use of Its Potential in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 35 (2000), 179–203; for “slave” as a reference term, see Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn, 2022), esp. 54–5; for “villain,” see Jucker and Taavitsainen, English, 124. 22 On impolite thou-ing, see Jucker and Taavitsainen, English, 83–4.

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woman” to seek revenge. In the ensuing lines, however, she challenges the definition of “witch,” first suggesting it is a “universal name” (121)— “A witch? Who is not?” (120)—then accusing specific social types. She applies the terms “witch,” “witch-like,” and “men-witches” to “men in gay clothes … with titles and honours” (104–5); court ladies; city wives; scolds; lawyers; seducers. Though the Justice claims “the law/Casts not an eye on these” (136–7) and Arthur insists that devilish pacts and maleficium constitute witchcraft, Sawyer holds that the real difference between these people and herself is neither legal nor moral but social. “Coarse witches” are persecuted; “fine” (142) ones go unpunished. Sawyer’s social critique highlights the injustice of a system founded on inequality, punitive toward those it has already disenfranchised and forgiving to those it has already rewarded. At the same time, by applying the insult most frequently leveled at her to the rich and powerful, she places herself on a level with the elite types she criticizes—places herself, that is, in a position to call Banks “slave” and to “thou” Arthur. Sawyer levels her “most compelling criticism” at unnamed “members of the elite.”23 Her speeches’ targets are not locals like Old Banks (better off than she but “of lower status than a yeoman”) but generalized urban and courtly figures.24 Perhaps these figures are suggested to Sawyer’s mind by her interlocutors, Sir Arthur and the Justice, who are of more elevated rank than Old Banks, but I want to suggest that she is looking beyond those two as well. Sawyer’s anger is aimed not only at those in her vicinity but at the entire social order, metonymically represented by a handful of stereotypes. The philosopher Elizabeth Spelman notes that it can be hard for disenfranchised people to pinpoint their anger’s object, especially when that object is “the system.”25 I would like to suggest that Sawyer’s anger is of this kind. Sawyer is angry at Banks, Arthur, the Justice, and her community. But beyond them, perhaps through them, she is angry at the “all-pervasive system of social inequality” structuring English society within and beyond Edmonton.26

23 Amussen, “Witch,” 175. 24 Note, “Old Banks,” list of roles. 25 “Anger and Insubordination,” in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in

Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Unwin Hyman, 1989), 263–74, 267. 26 Wrightson, Earthly, 1.

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Sawyer’s critique effects no change; it does not even imagine change. Beyond a redistribution of address—call them “witch”—Sawyer posits no reordering of the world. Perhaps more significantly, her critique goes unheard. The Justice tells her, “be not so furious” (4.1.91), delegitimizing her anger by classifying it as fury, traditionally attributed to slaves, women, the disenfranchised.27 Sawyer’s critique has no purchase for the same reason her (analytical) anger can be easily dismissed as (irrational) fury. Because of the position from which she speaks, she lacks credibility.28 Strikingly, her most serious act of witchcraft involves converting another woman into the same position. With Dog’s aid, she drives Anne Ratcliffe mad for striking Sawyer’s sow. In her brief onstage appearance, Anne protests social and economic injustice.29 Imagining a mill created by the man in the moon, she complains that “rich knaves” receive “golden grain” while “the poor have nothing but bran” (196–7). To be a witch and to be bewitched are here indistinguishable: both involve a harshly critical perspective on society’s structuring inequalities.30 Like Sawyer’s, Anne’s critique goes unheard. Her husband claims that all she says is, “The devil, the witch, the witch, the devil!” (229–30). It’s possible Ratcliffe’s report is accurate (he is describing offstage speech), but it’s also possible he hears selectively, focusing on what he expects his bewitched wife to say, discounting the rest. Sawyer’s efforts at negotiation over naming come to a climax with Anne who, before exiting to commit suicide, asks, “Are not you Mother Sawyer?” (198). Sawyer replies, “No, I am a lawyer” (199), claiming with a mocking rhyme an identity beyond her grasp in terms of gender, education, status—a “fine” identity whose “witchcraft” is socially sanctioned, whose wrongs go unpunished, whose words have power.

27 Spelman, “Anger,” 264. See also Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (SIU, 2000), 108–11 and Kathryn Prince, “Emotions in The Witch of Edmonton,” Early Theatre 21.2 (2018), 181–94. 28 Miranda Fricker terms this dynamic “testimonial injustice.” Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, 2007). 29 See Anthony Dawson, “Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton,” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989), 77–98. 30 I am grateful to Andy Crow for this point.

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Wife, Widow Even as the witch plot unspools from Sawyer’s anger at how others classify her and are classified themselves, it presents social classification as rigid and inescapable. In the early scenes, Sawyer cannot escape the category “witch,” ultimately conforming to it. Later, she tries to bestow this identity on others but fails; her low social position renders her unable to label others as they have labeled her. Her impassioned critique of “fine” witches clearly assumes that an unfair and inflexible master hierarchy will continue to exist unchanged, even as she blasts it for rewarding birth and riches rather than moral qualities. The domestic tragedy plot, by contrast, presents social order as more flexible and social classification as a dialogic process—one that might ultimately be stabilizing to both interpersonal relations and the larger order. As we have seen, the play’s early scenes are filled with micro-negotiations over status. Carter’s rejecting the title “Master” is a prime example. Old Carter is the father of Susan, whom Old Thorney wants his son Frank to marry. Carter is a prosperous yeoman, Thorney an impoverished gentleman; the two are negotiating Susan’s marriage portion.31 The play’s second scene opens mid-negotiation, with Thorney’s approving “You offer, Master Carter, like a gentleman” (1.2.1). Carter may offer like a gentleman, but he is not one, as he immediately declares: “No gentleman I, Master Thorney … call me by my name: John Carter. Master is a title my father nor his before him were acquainted with. Honest Hertfordshire yeomen; such an one am I” (3–7). Rejecting “Master” for himself, he applies it to his interlocutor, locating them both within a social framework in which relations of inequality determine address and are replenished by it. Period accounts of degree invariably placed gentlemen above yeoman (usually with urban citizens between them).32 Yet the situation is not straightforward: Carter’s wealth places him at the very top of the yeomanry’s ranks, possibly in a position to be recognized as a gentleman, while Thorney’s lands are encumbered, and, if he loses them, his family will eventually lose its claim to gentry status.33 “The line dividing gentlemen from the rest in the body of society was 31 On the play’s economics, see Tim Stretton, “Women, Marriage, Property, and Law: Contextualizing The Witch of Edmonton,” Early Theatre 21.2 (2018), 137–50. 32 Wrightson, English, 27. 33 For yeomen moving into the gentry and gentry losing status, see Wrightson, English,

34–5.

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a permeable membrane”; both men are poised to cross it, in different directions.34 Carter’s rejection of “Master” evidently stems less from humility than a kind of class pride. Immediately after terming his forbears and himself “honest Hertfordshire yeomen,” he adds that his word and deed are “one at all times” (1.2.7–8), an attribute he clearly associates with the group in which he claims membership. While Carter is evidently content enough to match his daughter to a minor gentleman, he—like Sawyer—associates elite status with hypocrisy. So does his daughter Susan, who rejects her rich wooer Warbeck, saying, “I am too coarse for such a gallant’s love” and criticizing his language as “scholar-like,” filled with flattery and “false oath[s]” (56–61). Warbeck, for his part, seeks to distinguish himself from his rival, Frank Thorney, whom he dismisses as a “serving-man” (129); both are gentlemen, but he has considerably more wealth and better prospects (104). These examples reveal that the dialogic construction of social identity could be a site of tension and conflict. At the same time, they suggest that class hierarchy provides a framework through which characters make sense of themselves, each other, and the wider world. Here, too, instabilities within that hierarchy destabilize individual identity. Old Thorney is counting on Susan’s marriage portion to pay his debts and keep his land, which Frank in turn counts on inheriting to keep Win’s (and, he thinks, his) unborn child from “beggary and want” (1.1.18). Downward mobility looms for three generations, bringing a threat to legible social identity. Imagining a scenario in which the marriage does not go through, Old Thorney says that even if he makes “present sale” of his land, he will “For aught I know live in as poor distress/Or worse, than I do now” (1.2.152–3). Strikingly, neither of the Thorneys ever fully articulates what life without land, wealth, and the status they underwrite will be like. Thorney’s “poor distress” does not name the position into which land loss and poverty will place him; Frank similarly has no name for the category of person he himself might become. He occupies a masculine version of Win’s predicament: for both, changes to external sources of social identity—relationships to men, for Win; to land, for Frank—lead to unclassifiability. Though Frank never articulates his sense of his own future, he seems to face a life of wage labor or renewed service at best, “beggary and want” at worst: conditions he terms “Two devils that are

34 Wrightson, English, 31.

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occasions to enforce/A shameful end” (1.1.19–20) when imagining his child’s life. Frank’s “devils” is the first word invoking the supernatural in the play, and the speech in which it appears—like the play as a whole— associates supernatural evil with social misfortune, which drives individuals to criminal action while making them hard to place or name. Unclassifiable people (as Frank risks becoming) or people who can only be classified in terms of deviance (like Sawyer) are susceptible to devilish influence.35 Thorney’s pushing for the marriage and Frank’s subsequent actions introduce further instability. The play’s women in particular become (even more) difficult to classify. Frank’s second wife, Susan, like Win, ceases to “fit into the strict categories delineated by conventional morality.”36 Having wedded her, secured his inheritance, and secretly reunited with a disguised Winifred, Frank warns: “My wife is coming” (3.2.33), then self-corrects, terming Susan, “The woman” (34), admitting “I knew/Not how to call her now” (34–5). In the next scene, he calls Susan “whore” (3.3.27), explaining that she is “no wife of mine” (32), adding, “I do not lay the sin upon your charge,/ ’Tis all my own” (34–5). Frank’s not knowing how to name Susan is echoed in her father’s response to finding her body. Though he initially planned to run away with Win, Frank (perhaps inspired by Dog, who touches him during this scene) stabs Susan instead. Her corpse is discovered by Old Thorney and Old Carter, who cries: “Susan, girl, child! Not speak to thy father? Ha!” (3.3.79). Here he speaks affectionately, but when he next addresses the corpse, he does so peremptorily: “When I speak I look to be spoken to. Forgetful slut!” (105–6). Carter’s angry outburst is not, like Sawyer’s, the protest of the disenfranchised, but the opposite. Reacting as an outraged patriarch, he treats Susan’s death as disobedience. Like “wench,” “slut” could be a familiar form of address, and it also tended to signal a vertical relationship, with an elevated speaker and subordinate addressee.37 But “slut” bore far stronger negative associations, both with unkempt negligence and sexual promiscuity. Perhaps his use of it indicates that he assumes her murder is the result of an illicit liaison. Or perhaps he reacts to his inability to control the situation via fatherly command: terming his

35 See David Dean, “Blasphemy, Swearing, and Bad Behaviour in The Witch of Edmonton,” Early Theatre 21.2 (2018), 151–66. 36 Nicol, “‘Knew’,” 319. 37 “slut,” n. OED Online.

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daughter “forgetful slut” and rebuking her for not speaking, Old Carter confuses death with disobedience and silence (often linked to chastity) with sexual transgression. One key function of the witch plot is to open the domestic tragedy plot’s characters to the critique Sawyer levels against “fine” witches: the real wrongdoers are the fathers and Arthur, whose abuses (and run-of-themill uses) of social power turn out to be tragedy’s engine.38 But Sawyer’s critique is more than a straightforward point of contact between the plots; it also serves to highlight the strong contrast between their handling of social identity. In Sawyer herself, the witch plot presents a totally different kind of character than any we encounter in the domestic tragedy: one structured around a distinct gap between relational or social identity and self-conception and who reacts violently to that gap, first rejecting it, then seeking to close it. From both positions—wronged old woman, witch—Sawyer inveighs against the social order and the way its classifications reward corruption and invite hypocrisy. The domestic tragedy plot, by contrast, presents characters for whom social identity is constantly being negotiated, occasionally protested, but rarely challenged or rejected outright; here, classifying persons is a matter of fine-tuning, of matching situation (Win’s mixed status as whore/wife; Carter’s as rich yeoman; Thorney’s as poor gentleman) to social category. Here, when identity is threatened or made overly complex—by illicit marriage or downward mobility—people become hard-to-classify or even unclassifiable. Though the Carters are secure and the Thorneys unstable in their positions, both sets of characters evince a deep sense that there should be a fit between place and person, label and individual. And though the turbulent events of the play’s middle lead to big changes—Frank executed, Arthur exposed and fined, Win taken in by the Carters—no one here echoes Sawyer in questioning the validity of Edmonton’s or England’s social organization. At the play’s end, Carter seems to speak for all when he advocates acceptance: despite “heavy hearts,” the company should be “as merry as we can” (5.2.189–90). The world is imperfect, but there is no imagining an alternative. The best-case scenario is for every place to have a name and every person a place—as Win finally does. Delivering the epilogue, she terms herself “widow” (5), a licit identity that both signals a return to

38 See Amussen, “Witch.”

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order and revises the disordered past. To be a widow is to have been a wife all along. As the closing transaction between players and audience, Win’s epilogue is also the play’s final act of identity construction, exemplifying its dialogic nature. The speech frames a conventional request for applause in terms of Win’s search for a second husband, for which she needs “good report” (2). Momentarily drawing spectators into the play’s world, it figures them as her reputation’s keepers. Their applause, or “report,” will secure her place in the world. Her final lines—“All noble tongues are free;/The gentle may speak one kind word for me” (5–6)—unmistakably hail the spectators as particular kinds of people. If her identity as “widow” depends on audience approbation, their “nobility” emerges from her calling them so. The play’s end and the applause that follows thus replay in miniature the dynamics of address the tragicomedy explores, where localized acts of naming replenish a larger social order. But in the gaps between Win’s ambiguous status and the legitimizing label widow, and between the mixed theater audience and the elevating labels noble and gentle, the epilogue reminds us of identity’s unfixity, and the instabilities inherent in the fundamental social activity of address.39

39 The play was performed at court, indoors at the Cockpit, and probably outdoors at the Curtain. As Munro notes, the epilogue may have been written for a mid-1630s revival.

CHAPTER 11

Advancing Him, Subjecting Herself: Class, Gender, and Mixed-Estate Marriages in Early Modern Drama Kimberly Huth

Mixed-estate marriages—unions in which one spouse is of higher status or has greater wealth than the other—were common in early modern English society and its representation in the theater. Yet those seeking to find a mate were often advised to avoid such disparity. William Gouge cautions readers that inequality of either noble rank or monetary wealth between spouses will “make the one insult over the other more then is meet.” Setting aside what level of insult is “meet” in a marriage, Gouge explains that a rich man will think of a poor wife as a servant and that a rich woman will “looke to be the master” over a poor husband, “so as the order which God hath established will be cleane perverted.”1 The divinely sanctioned

1 Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 189–90.

K. Huth (B) California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_11

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order Gouge is referring to here is the patriarchal structure of male superiority. Marriages in which the wealth or status of the wife is greater than that of her husband require particular attention, as they potentially disrupt both class and gender hierarchies. Gouge provides specific guidance for a couple in which “a man of meane place be maried to a woman of eminent place”: in giving her selfe to be his wife, and taking him to be her husband, she advanceth him above her selfe, and subjecteth her selfe unto him. It booteth nothing what either of them were before mariage: by vertue of the matrimoniall bond the husband is made the head of his wife, though the husband were before mariage a very begger, and of meane parentage, and the wife very wealthy and of a noble stocke.2

The problem of inequality between a husband and wife is remedied by the transformational event of marriage: the “vertue” of the bond, enforced legally through coverture, rectifies the preexisting imbalance by aligning both material and ideological power with the male position. The success of the marriage, with the wife raising the husband’s status, is realized only when she is humbled in the process: the woman “advanceth” the man as she “subjecteth” herself. This dynamic, which exploits the assets a woman brings to a union as it constrains female agency, reinscribes traditional patriarchal roles alongside class structures, concentrating class and gender prerogatives in the husband. Gouge’s articulation of this transformative institution illustrates the conflicting notions of class identity that coexisted in early modern English discourse. The concept of what Gouge calls “noble stocke,” passed on to the next generation like an inheritance, naturalizes rank in the body of an individual, producing a genetic doctrine of status that would preclude the possibility of class mobility. Theatrical representations of such mixedestate marriages expose the same cultural fault lines as Gouge’s advice manual. Even as the plays show the constructedness of class determination in early modern England—incorporating practical wealth as well as perceived social status and titled rank—they routinely reserve and redeploy the concept of blood-based class identity in a way that both polices the boundaries of class categorization and places limits on female

2 272.

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agency. Both female subjection and elite class status become naturalized in the body and blood. My analysis begins by identifying how the notion of bloodline is a conservative reaction to changes in class determination, specifically the potential for social mobility, in the developing capitalistic economy of early modern England. It will then demonstrate how marriage becomes a point of intersection for naturalized ideas of both class and gender hierarchy through overlapping legal and medical discourses that seek to essentialize passivity and subjection in female bodies and thus enable the advancement of husbands without empowering the women who bring wealth or status to these unions. It will then turn to two plays, Twelfth Night and The Duchess of Malfi, that portray mixed-estate marriages while also retaining the discourse of bloodline in ways that minimize a woman’s power in elevating the man who benefits from her estate, condition, or title. Together, these texts demonstrate how the concept of inherited class identity bolsters male social mobility through the subjection of the woman who advances a man through marriage. The desire for a “good” marriage—one that is financially and socially advantageous—is a common motif in early modern drama, attesting to the economic significance of the institution while also highlighting the strain produced by the coexistence of developing capitalistic class structures alongside the vestiges of feudalism and hierarchies based on bloodline and innate “gentility.” One system is built on the (perhaps false) promise of the potential for mobility; the other is grounded in naturalized and thus durable differences among types of people. Early modern class identification seeks to integrate at times conflicting vectors of wealth, social status, and familial history. In outlining the “degrees” of people in Tudor society, William Harrison asserts that the English “divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or laborers.”3 He defines the first sort, “gentlemen,” a category that includes the king and the titled nobility, as “those whom their race and blood, or at the least their virtues, do make noble and known” (113). Harrison further specifies that “gentlemen of blood” are those who “descend of three descents [generations] of nobleness, that is to say, of name and of arms both by father and mother” (110). Yet even as his delineation of English hierarchical rank emphasizes familial bloodlines,

3 The Description of England (Dover Publications, 1994), 94.

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Harrison also acknowledges the “creation” (100) or “making of new gentlemen” (114). Newly ennobled family lines can “take their beginning” in the current time with good service to the crown plus the ability to “bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman.” A man can, “for money,” obtain a coat of arms, “and thereunto being made so good cheap, be... reputed for a gentleman ever after” (113–14). The essentializing discourse of bloodline is undermined by this “making” of new gentlemen out of wealth and public repute. These new gentlemen rise from the lower “sorts” of people. Citizens and burgesses, as Harrison notes, “often change estate with gentlemen... by a mutual conversion of the one into the other” (115). Yeomen, too, take advantage of opportunities for upward mobility: they “commonly live wealthily, keep good houses, and travail to get riches,” and in this way “do come to great wealth, insomuch that many of them are able and do buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen” (117–18). Conversely, gentlemen can fall in status if they lack the financial capacity to fund a noble lifestyle. If a man’s son is unable to sustain the level of disposable wealth that defines his inherited rank, “he keepeth this degree” with the condition that “if the decay be excessive,” he may be barred from the upper house of Parliament (100–1). The increasing opportunity for such rises and falls, and especially for those occupying the middle realms—below the peerage but above abject poverty—to find a path into the gentry, challenged the durability of class identities.4 David Cressy shows that contemporary writers found it difficult to distinguish “yeomen from gentlemen or gentlemen from esquires” due to social mobility. Yeomen especially were seen as “pressing” on the position of gentlemen,5 successful social climbers having, in Thomas Wilson’s terms, “overreched” those in the gentry.6 In the face of wealth-based upward and downward mobility, commentators like Harrison return to concepts of bloodline and innate gentility to reassert stability in the system, such as in the recognition that

4 On this “middling” realm, see Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (U California P, 1996), and Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” SQ 44.3 (Autumn 1993), 284–303. 5 “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History 3 (March 1, 1976), 29, 39. 6 Qtd. in Cristina Malcolmson, “‘What You Will’: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Cornell UP, 1991), 34.

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even decaying gentlemen keep their titles if not their wealth or practical status. In a culture in which gentlemen could so readily exchange estates with those next to them in the social hierarchy, the discourse of “blood” attempted to naturalize status as reassuringly unchangeable. The convergence of these threads of early modern English class identity—wealth and income, perception of status, and familial bloodlines—in the institution of marriage was rarely simple. Marriage was a point at which increases in an individual’s external wealth and status were possible while simultaneously shaping the future of a family’s internalized sense of identity through blood; thus, it was a site for policing the scope of mobility across essentialized status lines. In his analysis of social mobility in early modern England, Lawrence Stone identified marriage with a heiress as a key pathway for male aspirants to the gentry,7 and marriage for gain in wealth and/or status is commonly portrayed on stage. Harrison, however, does not include marriage as a way for those of the lower sorts to become or make their sons into gentlemen. His list of avenues for yeomen’s sons to rise to gentlemen includes prudence, thrift, and education, especially for legal careers (117–18). Harrison’s omission of marriage as a means of class mobility for men demonstrates his ideological commitment to the idea of class as inborn and durable: great wealth, whether acquired through marriage or by other means, can enable a citizen or even a yeoman to live the life of a gentleman, but it does not ensure transformation of one “sort” of a person into another. Despite these limitations, such marriages had attractions for members of all classes—provided they did not disrupt traditional gender roles within the union. Financially insecure members of the nobility or gentry could trade their status for the capital that came with a wealthy and ambitious citizen bride. Both the initial monetary influx of the dowry and the lasting effects of coverture—through which a woman’s legal identity, including her ability to own property, was incorporated under that of her husband during the marriage—would benefit a cash-poor, status-rich nobleman. Here we see the intersection of patriarchal and hierarchical systems in early modern England. As Hannah Woolley advised gentlewomen, “Superiority and Inferiority” are “Essentials” in marriage, and “the Wife ought to be subject to the Husband in all things.” “Essential” 7 “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Past & Present 33 (April 1966), 34–5. Stone notes that an estimated two-thirds of younger sons and daughters in the peerage were forced to marry down (38).

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gender roles were not to be unsettled by class difference: “Although the Wife be more noble in her extraction, and more wealthy in portion, yet being once Married is inferior to her Husband in condition.”8 Coverture is a materialization of what the Book of Common Prayer calls the “mystery” of the union of man and woman into “one flesh” through matrimony.9 The husband’s legal priority in that union reestablishes Woolley’s essentialized gender roles by remedying the wealth imbalance of a cross-class marriage that might otherwise put a woman into a position of power. Yet coverture was also recognized as pliable in ways that could compromise a man’s control of his wife’s assets and, consequently, his ability to advance through marriage. First, there were numerous methods and reasons to remediate the law of coverture. Advice manuals encouraged husbands to mitigate at least partially the effects of marital inequity for a happier union.10 A bride’s family could also make a provision for her future; a father would be remiss in negotiating a marriage for his daughter if he did not arrange for a dower, jointure, or trust that would ensure her future fiscal well-being—financial instruments that Amy Louise Erickson has shown to have been both popular and “perfectly legal ways to get around” coverture, even if they were enforceable only through an appeal to equity courts rather than common law.11 Such arrangements suggest an ongoing sense of a wife’s right to property during marriage12 and potentially conflicted with male prerogatives to allocate wealth in the future.13 Second, coverture and the conventional absorbing of a wife’s 8 The Gentlewomans Companion (1675), 104. 9 “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony,” ed. John E. Booty (U of Virginia P,

1976), 297. 10 Ex., Henry Smith, “A Preparative to Marriage,” in The Sermons of Henry Smith, ed. John Brown (Cambridge UP, 1908), 24. 11 “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal 59 (Spring 2005), 13; Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993), 103. 12 Tim Stretton, “Contract and Conjugality in Early Modern England,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford UP, 2017), 413; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 2015), 56; Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies (U of Pennsylvania P, 2002), 46. 13 In English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550, Barbara J. Harris shows that common law structures like primogeniture and coverture “often worked at cross-purposes and created disjunctures in the structure of male dominance” (Oxford UP, 2002), 11.

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identity into that of her husband presented a disincentive for families to marry their daughters downward in the social hierarchy. Kimberly Schutte has shown that a strong sense of “rank identity” led the English elite to favor endogamous marriage, particularly for its daughters, due to concern for future generations: a son carried a family’s name and status into the union, bestowing it upon his children; a daughter and her children were pulled outside her natal rank through marrying down.14 Women’s roles in marriage were thus shaped by two parallel types of “inheritance”—financial and biological—both of which were significant when two bodies, and two bloodlines, became one. The intersection of class and gender in those dual conceptions of “inheritance” worked to counter women’s potential power in mixedestate marriages, eliminating female agency through two parallel discursive systems that both essentialized identity in the body. The language and concerns of legal structures such as coverture and primogeniture, designed to ensure unbroken patrilineal descent of wealth, mapped neatly onto biological debates about the functions of men and women in sexual reproduction, the creation of the next generation of a familial bloodline. Both discourses were entrenched in a patriarchal system that sought to assign agency to men and passivity to women; both required women for the process of production, either of children or of wealth, yet feared their ability to adulterate the male line. Aristotelian and Galenic models of reproduction presented theories of which sex was active and which passive in the process of reproduction, each with explanatory problems on issues such as inheritance of maternal traits or redundancy in the processes of generation in this period before the development of modern genetics.15 I do not intend here to adjudicate between these models but rather to show that the question behind the debate—what agency does the woman have in the process of inheritance?—is, linguistically and conceptually, parallel to questions of women’s roles in marriage and, ultimately, in the concentration and growth of familial wealth. The language of medical discussions, which mirrors the legal and religious language of marriage, 14 Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000: An Open Elite? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7, 13, 69. 15 Michael Boylan, “The Galenic and Hippocratic Challenges to Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 17.1 (Spring 1984), 85–7. See also Roberto Lo Presti, “Informing Matter and Enmattered Forms: Aristotle and Galen on the ‘Power’ of the Seed,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22.5 (2014), 929–50.

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embeds gender inequality into the bodily reality of women’s lives in a way that parallels the essentializing of class differences in familial bloodlines. Early modern English medical treatises on generation illustrate this parallel in the way they align patriarchal legal and economic structures of marriage with the naturalization of passivity in the female body, coding women’s agency as either secondary or detrimental. William Harvey, discussing hens’ eggs as a model for the womb, locates the creation of a “Vegetative Soul” in the (male) offspring’s separation from the mother. The signs of that soul, he writes, “cannot issue out of the Mother”; only when the egg is “disjoyned (like a Son who hath obtained his Freedom) and growes up to perfection” does it attain this ensouled state.16 The “perfection” of a fetus, figured as parallel to the financial independence of the male heir, is contingent on “Freedom” from maternal influence. When a woman does exert sway over the child, it confirms the duplicity of women. The anonymous author of Aristoteles Master-Piece (1684) states that “nothing is more powerful than the imagination of the Mother,” because a child will resemble whatever the mother “imprint[s]” onto her memory during conception and so “[even] in unlawful Copulation, yet if fear or any thing else causes her to fix her mind upon her Husband, the Child will resemble him, tho’ he never got it.”17 Here, the female agency in generation is merely a way a woman can fool her husband into raising, and leaving his wealth to, a bastard. Lastly, Jakob Rüff’s The Expert Midwife (1637) cites both the Aristotelian and Galenic models when discussing how the “Feature” of the child is formed. While the former characterizes women’s contributions as “crude” matter that is “form’d & fashion’d” by the male seed, the latter acknowledges that the male and female seed are “not alike”—the latter being “more moist and cold”—yet “although they differ so much in quality, the womans seed doth yeeld and afford the like help and furtherance, in framing the Feature, that the seede of man doth, so that the seeds doe mutually grow, and increase at once together, by the vertue of both of them.”18 The Galenic model provides a more active role for the female seed than the Aristotelian model, but

16 Anatomical Exercitations, Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653),

150. 17 25. 18 9, 10.

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Rüff’s articulation of that role echoes language found in other discussions of early modern marriage, in which women are subjected partners. Rüff’s version of the female seed as a “help” to the male seed parallels the formulation derived from Genesis that a wife is to be a “help” to her husband, and, though a wife is the “weaker vessel,” their “mutual” union can avail them both, provided she is subject to him.19 What this brief survey of early modern theories of generation is intended to show is that the idea of gender inequality is written into the bodies of women in a way that is directly reflected, and materially enforced, in the legal realm’s concern with inheritance and male superiority. Both discourses work to concentrate agency into the male position—biology through the many (mis)understandings of female contributions to generation, law through the effects of coverture and other structures that manifest patriarchal ideology—naturalizing the material and ideological disenfranchisement of women. The effect of this intersection is simultaneously to regulate the boundaries between class categories and to enforce limits on women’s prerogatives, particularly when they bring wealth, status, or rank into a marriage. The more material power the woman contributes, the more ideologically imperative it is to diminish her agency within and through the union. For women who marry downward, marriage must work as Gouge prescribes: a wife can only “advanceth” her husband if she “subjecteth her selfe.” Stage depictions of marriage provide a fertile space for deconstructive critique of these intersecting systems of order in early modern England, as the theater depended upon both gender and class cross-dressing by lower-class male actors, while also illustrating the reactionary ideological pressure to reinscribe traditional class and gender boundaries. This double action is visible in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. As Barbara Correll has argued, these plays share a cultural figure, the steward, whose “historical liminality” and potential for social mobility counteract nostalgia for what might seem to be a “blessedly stable” class structure based on hereditary rank identity.20 It is precisely because of such challenges to that stability, both by socially mobile servants and by 19 This rhetoric that corresponds to Rüff’s discussion of generation is common across early modern writing about marriage. Gouge, for example, tells husbands that wives “were made to be an helpe to you,” calling them “the weaker vessels” (260). 20 “Malvolio at Malfi: Managing Desire in Shakespeare and Webster,” SQ 58.1 (Spring 2007), 65, 92.

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the women who have the power and prerogative to promote them, that these plays continually return to an essentializing discourse of “blood.” The appeal to embodied rank identity, a naturalization of class hierarchy, works to subject the women used as means of advancement for the lower sorts of men. Twelfth Night presents female agency and women’s upward mobility through marriage in Viola and Maria. Though both women are likely gentle-born, neither is a member of the elite aristocracy into which they marry. Viola both has lost her usual estate through the accident of the shipwreck and actively hides her status through performance as the male servant Cesario, facilitating her marriage to a duke at the play’s conclusion. As a waiting gentlewoman, Maria is well-born but still below the status of Sir Toby’s family. The comedy reinforces traditional class boundaries by juxtaposing these upwardly mobile women to the gentleman steward Malvolio, who cannot achieve the same rise and is viciously ridiculed for his ambition. Malvolio’s attempt to marry upward is most pointedly satirized when Olivia asks that her seemingly mad steward be looked after, stating that she “would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry” (3.4.59).21 The casual reference to her dowry within Malvolio’s earshot only underscores his false hopes of rising through marriage; the line also reverberates ironically with Sir Toby’s appreciation of Maria, whose idea for the trick played on Malvolio is the only “dowry” he would ask of her (2.5.160). The female characters can marry for upward mobility, but the male aspirant is blocked from the same type of ascent, a gendered difference that suggests that Viola and Maria can more easily be transformed through marriage than can Malvolio, as women’s legal identities are more malleable than those of men. This gendered difference is complicated, however, by the other marriage that concludes the play. Cristina Malcolmson has observed that Twelfth Night ’s depiction of marriage superimposes one form of social bond—reverence for a superior, such as a servant for a master—with another—romantic love of wife and husband. The play’s model of labor relations as “willing service” becomes correlated to the idealized concept of loving “mutual consent” in the marriage contract. Viola can thus transform her devotion to her employer into adoration of her husband. As Malcolmson argues, “The play therefore transfers anxieties about fluid

21 The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (2016).

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social relations onto gender relations, and solves the problem through its ideal of marriage,” as the upwardly mobile woman is reinscribed into a subordinate gender position. This dynamic also checks the ambitious Malvolio, who seeks marriage to Olivia not out of love but instead for social advancement.22 However, if Viola and Maria become exemplars of a social order naturalized through both class and gender identities, the final marriage, that of Olivia and Sebastian, threatens the stability of that system because, in this instance, the woman marries downward. Sebastian’s comments on his parentage—he is the son of “that Sebastian of Messaline whom I know you have heard of” (2.1.15–16)—imply that he may be somewhat better derived than Malvolio, but in Illyria, his practical status is liminal or marginal, like that of Viola. Neither twin is performing their “natural” class identity in the play, and both comment on the great difference between their current circumstances and their true estate (1.2.40–3; 3.3.13–18). Most significantly, Olivia thinks Sebastian is a servant when she marries him, and that is the starting point for the transformation of his social status as perceived in Illyria. After the marriage is revealed, Orsino capitalizes on the ambiguity of Sebastian’s class and states, “Right noble is [Sebastian’s] blood” (5.1.254). Orsino has an interest in the status of his future wife’s brother, hence his appeal to the language of “blood” nobility as inherent in a familial line. But his comment performs ideological work for Sebastian and Olivia’s marriage as well. The marriage to Olivia has enabled for Sebastian what Malvolio is satirized for desiring: social recognition of superiority as belonging inherently to the individual even (or especially) when that status has been conferred through marriage. Malvolio fantasizes about “sitting in my state,” “Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown,” “telling them I know my place as I would they should do theirs” (2.5.39–49, emphasis added)—repeated indications of his ownership not only of the material wealth but also of the new status he would attain through marriage, integrated as an essential part of his identity rather than bestowed upon him by his wife. Sebastian’s actual marriage to Olivia, by contrast, is governed from the start by her prerogatives. She takes the lead in their courtship and their future wedding festivity: “we will our celebration keep / According to my birth” (4.3.30– 1, emphasis added). It is her status that defines their union, yet the

22 Malcolmson, 39, 31.

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revelation of their marriage makes Sebastian’s supposedly “natural” class apparent to everyone else. With Orsino’s public pronouncement of Sebastian’s “noble... blood,” the play can invent a natural nobility for Sebastian and retroactively assign it to him after the nuptials that bestowed it, allowing Olivia to retain her status even in a union that could pull her away from her natal rank. Thrusting greatness upon Sebastian while insisting on his having already been born great allows Twelfth Night to minimize the role Olivia plays in the conferring of that greatness. Olivia transgresses cultural norms by arranging her own clandestine marriage and choosing a servant as her husband,23 but the comic conclusion is predicated on her having “been mistook” (5.1.249)—not about Sebastian’s class but about the identity of the person she loves. She is not free from the patriarchal structures of early modern marriage that override preexisting differences in spousal estates. The process of Olivia’s subjection begins well before her wedding vows; she starts to lose her agency, her “will,” at the moment marriage becomes a conceptual possibility for her. When Viola first appears at the gate as Cesario, Malvolio reports, “He’ll speak with you, will you or no” (1.5.143–4), a demand that disregards Olivia’s wish to entertain no further wooing from Orsino. Later, Cesario instructs Olivia on the limits of her power, saying that “what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve” (1.5.175), foreshadowing the implementation of coverture. The language of the play erodes the effectiveness of Olivia’s will; though she discovers and pursues her desire for Cesario, she will not marry him. While Olivia cannily uses this developing loss of will to her advantage—sending Malvolio after Cesario with a ring that he allegedly left with her, “Would I or not” (1.5.284)—she also expresses an utter lack of agency: “Ourselves we do not owe. / What is decreed must be, and this is so” (1.5.292– 3). This motif explicitly connects the play’s subtitle with the institution of marriage, as Olivia both performs and negates the idea of “What You Will” by willing her marriage to Cesario but ending up married to Sebastian. The happy ending depends upon Olivia accepting, and enriching, a husband she did not know she had married, undermining Olivia’s choice in a way that anticipates a wife’s legal subjection to her husband.

23 Mihoko Suzuki, “Gender, Class, and the Social Order in Late Elizabethan Drama,” Theatre Journal 44.1 (March 1992), 42.

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Twelfth Night suggests that women’s agency is rewarded when they are marrying up, but in the reverse situation, that agency is both necessary and incongruous, the catalyst for a marriage that results in the wife’s disenfranchisement and the diminishment of her role in conferring status. The comedy falls back on the underlying “truth” of his naturalized status to ameliorate the potential threats to class and gender hierarchies from Sebastian’s marriage. Even when the constructedness of the class and gender systems is exposed in stage representation, conservative essentializing forces remain at work. The same duality is visible in The Duchess of Malfi, where the male steward does marry his mistress, though Antonio, unlike Malvolio, sees ambition as “a great man’s madness” (1.2.337).24 While the marriage is presented sympathetically to the audience, several characters perceive it as threatening to the social order, particularly the Duchess’s brother Ferdinand. I agree with other critics that Webster’s play exposes the constructed and relational aspects of class hierarchy in early modern English society.25 But I also note that, like Shakespeare’s comedy, Webster’s tragedy keeps in reserve a model of inherited status that depends on, even ensures, the ultimate subjection of women. From the start, the play presents competing notions of class: discussion of blood-based identity coexists with an awareness of social interdependence and the ability for individuals to rise through service and reward. Frequent references to the Duchess’s “high blood,” a naturalizing discourse, are juxtaposed with a limited form of social mobility displayed by a figure like Bosola, whose bitter rants on Ferdinand’s “bounty, / Which makes men truly noble,” deconstruct the notion of inborn gentility through the pun on “noble” as a type of coin (1.2.218, 192–3). In neither discourse, however, can Antonio’s marriage to the Duchess effect his class transformation. First, as a clandestine marriage, it exists outside of established structures of social relations. Clandestine marriage could be a means of creating opportunities for class exogamy and female agency,26 and harmonious acceptance of such marriages is key to many comic 24 New Mermaids edition (A&C Black, 1993). 25 Frank Whigham, “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi,” PMLA 100.2

(March 1985), 170; Correll, 70, 81. 26 Amy L. Smith, “Performing Cross-Class Clandestine Marriage in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” SEL 45.2 (Spring 2005), 344. Clandestine marriage was, according to Katharine Cleland, “transgressive” but not “illegal” during the period; couples who married this way “cast suspicion on their new identities as husband and wife” in the public realm. See

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conclusions, including that of Twelfth Night . Yet clandestine marriage only temporarily allowed a couple to evade the class structures that blocked the marriage. Upon returning to the stage and the community, the couple seeks reestablishment within the class and sex-gender systems from which they previously excepted themselves. Antonio’s lack of social transformation is evident in Ferdinand’s description of the steward as “A slave, that only smell’d of ink and counters, / And nev’r in’s life look’d like a gentleman, / But in the audit time” (3.3.71–3), a description that doesn’t merely indicate that Antonio was a poor choice for his sister but that he always will be. The temporality of Ferdinand’s association of Antonio with his job and un-gentle appearance is perpetual, even during the years of Antonio and the Duchess’s secret marriage. Second, Antonio’s marriage does not change his blood, the professed basis of class identity for those in power in the play. Though Antonio states that the marriage will make him “the constant sanctuary / Of [the Duchess’s] good name” (1.2.376–7), it cannot change his designation as “so mean a person,” as a pilgrim onlooker calls him during the dumbshow (3.4.25). Because Antonio’s blood is not changed, and men are the active and controlling agents in inheritance, the marriage will produce only an adulterated bloodline. Ferdinand and the Cardinal are against the Duchess’s marriage for material and misogynistic reasons, disparaging her as a “lusty widow” (1.2.259), but they voice their revulsion for her union through the imagery of infectious blood-borne illness. “Shall our blood,” the Cardinal asks, “The royal blood of Aragon and Castile, / Be thus attainted?” (2.5.21–3). More hyperbolically, Ferdinand claims, “that body of hers, / While that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth” than a soul (4.1.119–20). The Duchess may not have transformed Antonio’s blood, but her brothers claim that Antonio has tainted hers and, by familial extension, their own. Once again, we see that the ability to change the blood of a spouse through marriage is not shared mutually: men can change their wives, even their wives’ families, but women cannot alter the identities of their husbands. And when they do, a fiction needs to be asserted that they do not, such as the claim of Sebastian’s noble blood in Twelfth Night . In The Duchess of Malfi, no one is willing to perform that ideological work to naturalize Antonio to the class into which he has married. Instead, Ferdinand’s embodied entanglement with his twin sister Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature (Cornell UP, 2021), 6, 14.

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drives him to murder to preserve his personal rank identity as well as, in effect, the entire hierarchy of essentialized degrees. Ironically, Ferdinand’s attempt to preserve his sense of identity fails due to the way the play defines and positions women within that hierarchy. Emily Stockard has argued that Ferdinand’s “self-destructive gesture” of killing his blood relation reflects the problems inherent in the culture’s positioning of women as the “linchpin” for communal and familial definition.27 Women are necessary to perpetuate a patriarchal system that hinges on essential, embodied identity, passed down through the generations. Yet because the system does not extend the same type of stable rank identity to women as it does to men—as women can be pulled out of their natal rank through marriage—the system threatens to collapse at the very point of its reproduction. This schema is depicted in the play’s figurative language. Ferdinand laments that men are foolish to “trust their honour in a bark, / Made of so slight, weak bulrush, as is woman” (2.5.34– 5), imagining women as conduits of familial honor, which belongs rightly only to men. Women are valuable for what they carry—the bloodline they continue—not for what they are. The Duchess develops a different metaphor to naturalize her family’s status, especially that of her children by Antonio. In her banter about gardening with Bosola, she meets his snide remarks about the “pretty art” of “grafting” plants with the declaration that it is “a bett’ring of nature” (2.1.148–9). Rather than allowing Bosola’s grafting figure to imply adulteration of her bloodline, she revises the grounds of the metaphor to retain the natural imagery of plants while claiming that her mixed-estate marriage will produce a stronger familial stock in the child she is currently carrying, positing social grafting as a productive endeavor.28 The play ends on the community’s decision to enfranchise that child, who is referred to as “A pretty gentleman his [Antonio’s] son and heir” (5.5.107), with the Duchess’s title. Delio’s suggestion that 27 “Violent Brothers, Deadly Antifeminism, and Social Suicide in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi,” Renaissance Papers (2016), 92. 28 Erin Ellerbeck, “‘A Bett’ring of Nature’: Grafting and Embryonic Development in The Duchess of Malfi,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 85–99. On grafting as a metaphor for class identity, see also Miranda Wilson, “Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits: Shakespeare’s Planted Families,” in The Indistinct Human, 103–17; and Claire Duncan, “‘Nature’s Bastards’: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England,” Renaissance and Reformation 38.2 (Spring 2015), 121–47.

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they seek “To establish this young hopeful gentleman / In’s mother’s right” (5.5.111–12) suggests that the grafted scion of Antonio and the Duchess is enriched by traditional gender roles: this “gentleman” obtains his “mother’s right” by being his father’s “heir,” a mode of inheritance dependent upon coverture. Yet even as this grafting seems to have effectively united Antonio and the Duchess, the productivity of that splicing is only seen in the next generation; the Duchess’s marriage does advance a man, but only her son, not her husband. Moreover, as the community expressly seeks to aid this young man in attaining the dukedom in order to “make noble use / Of this great ruin” (5.5.109–10), his “noble” advancement comes at the expense of his mother’s “ruin[ed]” life, her ultimate subjection to a tragic ending that inspires cathartic pity. Marriage is a complicated inflection point for early modern gender and class identities, particularly in the case of mixed-estate marriages with the potential to increase the wealth or status of the husband. Though male advancement is possible through marriage, it is effected not only, or even primarily, through the acquired wealth but instead through the reinscription of cultural norms of gender inequality within the union. By presenting such social mobility as possible, these types of marriages seem to provide opportunities to expose the period’s conceptions of class and gentility as cultural constructions. That revelation, however, is tempered by conservative ideological forces that reinscribe material and patriarchal power within and through these destabilizing unions. The early modern English conflict between capitalistic promises of class mobility and traditional rank identity is effectively reconciled to the advantage of men, an ideological prerogative sustained by the positioning of women within legal and biological discourses. The period’s drama illustrates the depth of the intersection of identity categories in early modern England, as both class and gender are constructed as embodied, essentialized characteristics. In these coalescing discourses of identity, the culture is written onto the bodies of individuals, serving to reestablish corporeal stability among the radical changes in communal structures that began to take shape in early modern England.

CHAPTER 12

“Too Slight a Thing”: Jane Shore, Womanhood, and Ideological Conflict in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Anna N. Ullmann

In his History of King Richard the Third, the first early modern introduction to Mistress Shore, Sir Thomas More offers a defense of his decision to include her in his history: “I doubt not some shall think this woman too slight a thing to be written of and set among the remembrances of great matters.”1 Scholars have repeatedly quoted these lines when discussing Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Parts 1 and 2, for good reason. The language More uses, describing Mistress Shore as “too slight a thing,” and the history in which she features as “remembrances of great matters,” suggests the generic inconsistency pervading Heywood’s play. History, according to the great chroniclers, was indeed interested in the “great 1 Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third, ed. George M. Logan (Indiana UP, 2005), 66.

A. N. Ullmann (B) Peoria, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_12

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matters” of political life; but Heywood’s Edward IV is more interested in the things that are “too slight to be written of”—those people and deeds not generally included in detail, if at all, in the chronicle histories and traditional history plays. As Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin have explained, the early modern history play “performed the necessary function of creating and disseminating myths of origin to authorize a new national entity and to deal with the anxieties and contradictions that threatened to undermine the nation-building project.”2 These dramatic re-imaginings of historical material played a significant role in shaping political narratives and in both consolidating and challenging the dominant ideology of their time. In this way, even when it presented challenges to monarchical or aristocratic power, the English history play typically depicted history from the perspective of the monarchy and aristocracy. This meant that the plays “highlighted some players in the nation’s history and sidelined or erased others.”3 One of these “others” was the early modern citizenry, who often show up in history plays but who are almost always supplemental to the plot focusing on the monarch and nobility. But by refocusing historical representation upon the subjects and victims of royal power rather than the monarch, Heywood’s Edward IV forces the conflict between the dominant ideology of the monarchy and aristocracy and that of the emergent bourgeoisie to the fore. In doing so, his play reveals the nearly impossible process of incorporating an emerging citizen consciousness into a historical narrative dominated by kings and nobles. Because the history play genre primarily represented the ideological consolidation and contradictions of the ruling class—in the sense that we understand literary genre as being in a dialectical relationship with the material and social order in which it is produced—writing a history play that foregrounds the interests and consciousness of the citizenry creates a contradiction that is difficult to resolve. Many critics have argued that Heywood’s plays, especially when compared with Shakespeare’s, represent a different kind of history; however, they tend to describe this different history as an alternative to the monarchical narrative. Jean Howard explains that Heywood is

2 Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (Routledge, 1997), 14. 3 Howard and Rackin, 15.

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not “really producing a more inclusive view of England than Shakespeare, simply a differently exclusive one,” focusing solely on the citizens’ perspective to the exclusion of others.4 Wendy Wall similarly refers to the “supplementarity” of Heywood’s version, which allows his common characters to forge an “identity separate from their status as subjects.”5 But mutual exclusivity or supplementary identities oversimplify the ideological tension present in Heywood’s text. Every cultural system possesses “determinate dominant features,”6 and in Elizabethan England, “the dominant value system remained that of the landed gentleman” and the court, despite the transitional nature of the period.7 This “aristocratic ethic” included such values as the importance of hereditary blood ties, paternalism toward serfs and citizens, a strong belief in classes as representing the natural order of society, and conspicuous consumption, often to the point of hedonism.8 But as Raymond Williams explains, every dominant ideology contains within it emergent elements, “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” which are “substantially alternative or oppositional” to the dominant9 ; in the case of the early modern period, these were the values of the London citizenry. These values included “self-improvement, independence, thrift, hard work, chastity and sobriety, competition, equality of opportunity, and the association of poverty with moral weakness.”10 This emergent ideology had not yet become the dominant one, and thus the citizens of Heywood’s history play exist in a constant state of contradiction. There was remarkable reciprocity between the Crown and the City of London in the early modern period; Heywood’s citizens do not represent a precisely bourgeois consciousness that pitted itself against the monarchy, nor is the monarchy entirely antagonistic toward or separate from the citizenry. 4 “Other Englands: The View from the Non-Shakespearean History Play,” in Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (U of Delaware P, 1999), 149. 5 “Forgetting and Keeping: Jane Shore and the English Domestication of History,” Renaissance Drama 27 (1996), 135. 6 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford UP, 1977), 120. 7 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, Abridged Edition (Oxford

UP, 1967), 24. 8 Stone, 6. 9 123. 10 Stone, 6.

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Rather, the contradictions within the social relations of the early modern period make themselves felt in Edward IV in the way these competing ideologies interpellate individual characters. It is these moments of hesitation or confusion that show that the traditional chronicle history play, while often challenging monarchical power and ideology, was still too narrowly focused on it to sufficiently encompass the social consciousness of groups such as the London citizenry. In Heywood’s play, the most significant character in which this ideological contradiction can be observed is Jane Shore, who embodies it in her conflict between duty to her citizen husband and subjection to her monarch. Jane is disruptive to the history play’s political mythmaking project both because of her class and because of her gender, and especially because of the ways in which these intersect. Jane’s social status as a citizen of London cannot be separated from her womanhood, and this intersectional subjectivity, positioned in the genre of the history play, enables Heywood to portray not just the conflict between dominant and emergent ideological elements in the period, but the particular ways in which this conflict affected early modern middle-class women. For Jane is subject not only to the emergent ideological elements outlined previously for the citizenry but also to further aspects of this ideology particular to citizen women: wifely duty for the citizen class centered on the cultivation of traits such as temperance, chastity, modesty, contentment with one’s station, and the performance of proper domestic management. A good citizen woman would be a helpmeet and companion to her husband in his private life, emphasizing the connection between a man’s private character and his public worth. It is this status as a proper citizeness which Edward IV threatens in his pursuit of Jane. Jane thus faces the dual constraints of being both a citizen in the history play genre and therefore subject to ideological contradictions, and a woman whose expectations within citizen ideology open her to threats and challenges not faced by the male citizen characters. I will begin by examining how Heywood presents the ideological struggle between court and citizenry. The City and the Crown were intricately and reciprocally linked in Elizabethan England, both politically and ideologically. It is true that, as Ian W. Archer points out, “London’s privileges depended ultimately on the support of the Crown” and that legislation, such as charters of incorporation for livery companies,

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came from the monarchy.11 But this is evidence not of London’s total subordination to and dependence on the Crown, but of the Crown’s delegation of authority, of a “collaboration” between the two which ultimately benefitted both.12 London essentially managed its own affairs and the merchants and livery companies were granted trade licensing that allowed them to profit economically, but when someone such as Falconbridge threatened the city or Crown, the citizens were expected to fight. Steve Rappaport cites, for example, Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary’s Spanish marriage in 1554. When the rebels reached London, they found it heavily defended by members of the various livery companies, despite the fact that “many Londoners sympathised with Wyatt’s opposition” to a Catholic, Spanish consort.13 It was the duty of the City to stand for the Queen in such a situation, just as it is the duty of Crosby, Shore, Josselin, and the others to stand for Edward in Heywood’s play. Maintaining order, both political and economic, benefitted both Crown and City, and the Falconbridge rebellion scenes establish this reciprocal relationship in the play. The Lord Mayor’s authority, the knighthood bestowed upon him because of the loyalty of William Walworth during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, and the companies’ control over their profits and trading practices come from the Crown, and Heywood initially presents citizens who seem to have internalized this. Laura Stevenson O’Connell has identified a tendency in some early modern plays to praise what she calls “bourgeois heroes,” citizen characters celebrated in terms of their similarity to knights and lords, “praised for virtues having nothing to do with economics or the realities of mercantile service,”14 and I argue that this term may be applied to Heywood’s citizen characters in Part I . As “bourgeois heroes,” they seize a moment in service to their king, which ideologically connects them to the nobility based upon values such as respect for chivalric duty, feudal authority, and general contentment with the “natural” social order. 11 The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge UP, 1991), 41. 12 Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge UP, 1989), 185. 13 191. 14 “The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale: Aspects of an Adolescent Social Conscious-

ness,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (U of Pennsylvania P, 1980), 269.

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But while the relationship between Crown and City was reciprocal, it was not perfectly harmonious. Heywood’s Edward IV dramatizes the failure of this reciprocity, the divisions between dominant and emergent that appear when one side, in this case the Crown, fails to uphold its end of the bargain; and when the status quo becomes less than static, the contingency of ideology becomes visible. As Laura Stevenson puts it, the Elizabethan period was characterized by “a peculiar state of consciousness that emerges when society has outgrown an old social ideology, but has not yet formulated a new one.”15 The failure of the “bourgeois hero” motif in Edward IV is a product of the contradictions that assert themselves when a citizenry whose emerging ideology is connected to a commercial, mercantile economy also looks to keep dominant, aristocratic values such as “feudal reciprocity and mutual obligation intact.”16 The two outlooks cannot long coexist. After the Falconbridge rebellion, the words and actions of Heywood’s middle-class characters start to reveal the presence of new ideological elements such as economic independence, self-control and temperance, and even early glimmers of Protestant individualism, and when the City and the middling sort attempt to assert their position within the history play, Jane Shore is ultimately sacrificed. It is Matthew Shore through whom we are first introduced to the conflict between the citizen and monarchical ideologies in Heywood’s play. Matthew makes his debut in Edward IV Part 1 in Scene 3, with a starring role in putting down the Falconbridge rebellion. In this battle, he is not only a hero, but prominent among the “bourgeois heroes” of London, serving as Crosby’s right-hand man and a commanding officer during the defense of the city, a role which makes Edward’s later seduction of Jane especially perfidious. In Matthew’s first scene with Jane, he lists his motivations for fighting, demonstrating the multiple loyalties he must negotiate:

15 Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge UP, 1984), 5. 16 Charles W. Crupi, “Ideological Contradiction in Part I of Heywood’s Edward IV : ‘Our Musicke Runs... Much upon Discords,’” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995), 232.

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First, to maintain King Edward’s royalty. Next, to defend the city’s liberty. But chiefly, Jane, to keep thee from the foil Of him that to my face did vow thy spoil. (8.15–18).17

During the rebellion, these loyalties coincide and can all be honored by the same course of action. The reciprocity between Crown and City is strong in such times of threat, and it is vital for both that the citizens are victorious, but it does not take long after the fighting has stopped for these loyalties to begin to conflict with one another. Matthew’s refusal of a knighthood from Edward is the first time in the play where a citizen betrays a set of values at odds with those of the monarchy, and Edward notices this shift. He specifically asks for Matthew Shore among all the other citizens of London in order to knight him (9.224), but Matthew refuses this honor: Pardon me, gracious lord. I do not stand contemptuous, or despising Such royal favour of my sovereign, But to acknowledge mine unworthiness. (9.229–32).

These lines are more than a show of simple humility on Matthew’s part. The refusal of such a royal honor, particularly when contrasted with the kind of chivalric rhetoric that dominates the preceding scenes, has the effect of drawing a line in the sand between the citizens and the nobility. Whether this stance is malicious or antagonistic toward the monarch is debatable, but a citizen’s refusal of such a vital and visible part of the monarchal ideology does not sit well with Edward. Edward’s response that “Some other way / we will devise to quittance thy deserts” (9.240– 1) is most often read as dramatic irony, but it is also the moment where Edward and Matthew begin to see each other as competition. There are several instances when Edward makes comments which suggest that he still has Matthew’s refusal in mind and has taken it as a slight. When he first meets Jane, he tells her of “the great wrong that [Shore] hath offered you; / for you had been a lady but for him. / He was in fault” (16.91–3). Later, as Edward attempts to woo her, she praises the steadfastness of her 17 All play quotations are taken from Richard Rowland’s Revels edition (Manchester UP, 2009).

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husband: “He that guides my car / is an immoved, constant, fixed star” (19.94–5). Edward replies that he will “give that star a comet’s name, / and shield both thee and him” (96–7), knowing full well that the last time he tried to give Matthew Shore a “comet’s name,” Shore flatly refused. Heywood thus shapes Jane’s story into more than the moral lesson that many of his sources try to make it; his Jane is caught in a conflict between the ideologies of Court and City. Edward’s wooing scenes underscore this; his pursuit of her in her husband’s shop makes the conquest more than an attack upon her sexual honor, though it is certainly that. The scene is staged such that Edward confronts Jane precisely when she most embodies the lived ideology of a citizen woman as a modest and dutiful wife. Jane has sent Matthew’s apprentices away “while I attend the shop myself” (17.11); she is described in the stage directions, twice, as having “her work in her hand” and “sewing in her shop” (10, 18), actions which denote an industrious, helpful citizeness doing her duty to her husband’s business. Edward here is disrupting the industry as much as the marriage, and his pursuit of Jane is also an attack upon the City and its economic and social values. His references to Jane as a “bright twinkling spark of precious diamond” (17.31) and “fairest jewel” (40) enhance this idea, given that her husband is a Goldsmith. Jane is part of the labor and wares of Matthew’s shop, as well as being his loving wife. These are revisions to Heywood’s source material that foreground the ideological conflict between Court and City and assert that Jane’s fall is due not to her personal failings, but to the pressures of this conflict as it played out between men of different classes. As a royal subject represented in a history play, Jane’s citizen status means that her emergent ideology is subordinate to and in tension with the dominant one represented by the king; as a woman and the wife of a citizen, she is subject to further personal and domestic expectations that make her vulnerable to the advances of the king in a way that the male citizens are not. In other words, Jane’s struggle in Edward IV is both systemic and personal, tied to her subjectivity as both citizen and woman. Heywood’s depiction of Jane differs strikingly from his two most significant sources, More’s History of King Richard the Third (via Holinshed) and the popular collection of complaint poetry, The Mirror for Magistrates . Both assign nearly all the blame for Jane’s adultery to Jane herself. Throughout the sixteenth century, Mistress Shore was popularly known as a “warning for fair women,” a cautionary tale of the dangers of ambition and courtly excess. At the end of her tale in The Mirror for

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Magistrates , “Shore’s Wife” tells the reader, “Example take by me both maide and wyfe, / Beware, take heede, fall not to follie so, / A myrrour make of my great overthrowe,”18 an admonition in keeping with the didactic theme of the de casibus tragedy collection overall. More’s History, while taking a sympathetic attitude toward Mistress Shore, nonetheless lays the blame for her downfall squarely at her own door. More tells us that when Richard III punished Mistress Shore, “many good folk... pitied they more her penance than rejoiced therein,” for whatever her failings, she never abused Edward’s love “to any man’s hurt, but to many a man’s comfort and relief,”19 a feature of her character Heywood makes much of. However, More also reports that she easily inclined “unto the king’s appetite when he required her” because “the hope of gay apparel, ease, pleasure, and other wanton wealth was able soon to pierce a soft, tender heart.”20 Rather than Edward being in the wrong for having seduced a married woman in the first place, the fault is placed directly, if pityingly, upon Mistress Shore for not having resisted strongly enough. This sentiment carries into Thomas Churchyard’s poetic version of the Shore story in the Mirror for Magistrates . Like More’s, Churchyard’s Mistress Shore confesses that her own “peacocks pryde”21 induced her to become the king’s lover, and that “there is no cloke, can serve to hyde my fault, / for I agreed the fort he should assaulte.”22 Like More, Churchyard makes sure it is known that she “ever did vpholde the common weale” and used her power with the king “to ryght the poore mans wrong,”23 though these facts are offered to mitigate her guilt, rather than forming the basis of her character as they do in Heywood’s play. More’s and Churchyard’s Mistress Shore is wanton, ambitious, and seemingly unaware of the consequences of her actions until after they have happened. Her use of her position to help the needy and act as an ambassador to Edward on their behalf is offered in both cases as a way

18 Thomas Churchyard, “Howe Shores Wife, Edwarde the fowerthes concubine, was by king Richarde despoyled of all her goodes, and forced to do open penance,” in The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Barnes & Noble, 1938), 386. 19 64, 66. 20 65. 21 376. 22 376. 23 376, 380.

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of evoking some pity from the reader only after she has been sufficiently shamed. Heywood’s most important revision of these sources is to remove this judgment altogether. Heywood’s Jane is a sympathetic figure who has been not seduced but forced into moral deficiency. By lifting her culpability, Heywood transforms Jane’s story into a tale of a king who preyed upon his citizenry and disrupted a loving and productive domestic life, emphasizing not Mistress Shore’s ambition but her oppression. Heywood’s Jane is a good, chaste, and loving wife from the start, voicing solid citizen values and love for her husband throughout the entire twopart play. Matthew laments the loss of this Jane before he exiles himself, describing how she “was praised of matrons, so that citizens / when they would speak of aught unto their wives, / fetched their example still from Mistress Shore” (22.17–19). She who once went about in “seemly black” (22.21) was not seduced but forced to go with Edward against her will. Mistress Blage forms the foil to her in this, offering the kinds of sentiments which More and Churchyard attribute to Jane: You know his greatness can dispense with ill, Making the sin seem lesser by his worth. And you yourself, your children and your friends, Be all advanced to worldly dignity And this world’s pomp, you know is a goodly thing. (19.31–4)

Jane’s response is, “virtue lives, when pomp consumes to dust” (40). Heywood’s Jane Shore does not serve the same moral purpose as her analog in More and the Mirror for Magistrates . She is not a warning to women who might fall victim to the lure of fame and wealth, because she delivers the warning against these things herself at several points before she is approached by Edward and repeatedly expresses that she has no desire for them. Heywood further alters his sources by making the Shores’ marriage a loving, companionate one, emphasizing the ideological importance of domestic life among the citizenry. As I have already pointed out, in scene 17, when Edward first attempts to woo Jane, he does so while she is at work in her husband’s shop, thereby inserting himself into a domestic, economic space which clearly threatens the values and virtues of the City. This scene also establishes Jane as a dutiful wife, one who knows that one of her responsibilities as the wife of a Goldsmith is to help with

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the minding of the shop and the managing of the apprentices, and she carries out this responsibility contentedly. But Jane is more than just an obedient wife; she is a truly loving one, as Matthew is a loving husband. In Heywood’s sources, the unnamed Master Shore and Mistress Shore’s parents are made complicit in the disintegration of the marriage, having forced her to marry too young with a man she did not love. More relates that Mistress Shore was “very well married (saving somewhat too soon),” and that because of this, “she not very fervently loved for whom she never longed.”24 Churchyard is even more explicit: But cleare from blame my frendes can not be found, Before my time my youth they did abuse: In maryage, a prentyse was I bound, When that meere love I knewe not howe to vse.25

By identifying herself as a “prentyse,” she not only protests that she was too young for marriage, but also links her marriage overtly with the concept of an economic transaction; she does not serve willingly and lovingly in her husband’s shop but is “apprenticed” there. But just as he removes her personal guilt, Heywood also removes any notion that Jane’s marriage was forced or unloving. The first time we meet Jane in the play is in a touching scene with her husband as he gets a brief respite from the fighting during Falconbridge’s rebellion. She begs him not to return to the battle, expressing both her love for him, for “My joy, my hope, my comfort, and my love, / my dear, dear husband, kindest Matthew Shore,” as well as the fear she felt as she awaited news of him from the fighting, for “How could [she] choose, sweetheart, but be afraid?” (8.7–8, 11). He calms her, declaring that it is for her that he “fought so desperately” (14), for her safety and for the life that they have together. Before the messenger enters to call Matthew back to the battle, Jane vows that “The greatest prince the sun did ever see / shall never make me prove untrue to thee” (27–8). Of course, Heywood’s audience would have been aware of the end of the Shores’ story and the irony of these lines, but at this point in the action of the play, there is no reason to disbelieve the sincerity of Jane’s words. Here and in several of the scenes that follow, it is clear that she means what she says, that her love for her 24 64–5. 25 377.

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husband is real and strong, and that Heywood has removed any hint of a forced marriage or mismatch. Jane is a good wife, an ideal citizen’s wife; not only does she express proper love and affection for Matthew, but she performs her duties as a citizen without complaint. She helps Matthew mind his shop, and she also serves as a stand-in “Lady Mayoress” for the widower Crosby when he hosts Edward in his home, the banquet scene in which Edward first encounters her. It is in this banquet scene that she voices most clearly the ideological and moral stance that sets her so decidedly apart from her literary predecessors in More and Churchyard. When Edward jokes that Matthew might have made her a lady if only he’d accepted his knighthood, she backs up her husband’s choice and establishes her distance from the source material: And though some hold it as a maxim That women’s minds by nature do aspire, Yet how both God and Master Shore I thank For my continuance in this humble state... ... Heaven bear true record of my inward soul. (16.97–100, 103)

First, the “maxim” that women are by nature ambitious is clearly a nod to how Mistress Shore had been characterized for over a century—as a wanton, grasping woman without regard for her proper place. But more importantly, her thankfulness for her “humble state” and reference to her “inward soul” articulate her citizen values even as she expresses her loyalty and love for her king. By the 1590s, Protestantism was intricately tied to middle-class identity. The “true record” of Jane’s “inward soul” puts one directly in mind of this even if Protestantism had yet to come about during Edward’s reign, and her expression of contentedness with her state establishes the same ideological distance from Edward and the nobility as did Matthew’s refusal of a knighthood.26 But tragically, Jane is not allowed to persist in her happy marriage and confident expression of citizen values. She has been described as having a precarious choice to make, a personal choice which “does not involve

26 Max Weber further elaborates on the connection between bourgeois ideology and the religious convictions of various Protestant sects. See The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Penguin, 2002), 1–202.

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an agonized crisis of conscience.”27 It is true that More and Churchyard portray this scenario, where Mistress Shore acts without a “crisis of conscience,” and then later comes to regret it, but Heywood’s Jane says explicitly that she is considering the issue “with a conscience free from all debate” (19.54). She does not have a “crisis” of conscience per se because her conscience is not conflicted: she knows that her duty and her heart lie with her husband, Matthew. Her becoming Edward’s concubine has nothing to do with disloyalty and everything to do with royal command. Like Matthew, Jane expresses her most prominent concerns with Edward’s courtship to him in terms of the mixing of those of high and low social status. In Edward’s second wooing scene, Jane refers to herself as “the foot” (19.81) of the state and says that it is a shame that “the sun” that should “guide the world with his most glorious light, / is muffled up himself in wilful night” (88–90), implying that his dalliance with a citizen dims the glory of the Crown. She adopts a language of metaphor and evasion in order to avoid an outright refusal of her sovereign, with which Edward becomes impatient. Leave “our enigmatic talk,” he finally exclaims: “Thou must, sweet Jane, repair unto the court. / His tongue entreats, controls the greatest peer... /... Which may not, must not, shall not be withstood” (102–4, 107). Jane is not asked or entreated; she does not ultimately choose to advance herself despite the pain it will cause her husband and family. She is forced, plain and simple, and forced by the only man in England with the power and the political backing to do so. Jane’s tragic end in Edward IV is due not to her ambition, but to the conflict between her king and her own values. Her only error is to be a citizen in a history play, a genre in which she must concede to the king, for Edward embodies not only the literal monarch, but the dominant ideology which upholds monarchy and upon which the history play is focused. Other scholars have discussed Jane’s problem in terms of a conflict between the political and domestic spheres. Lena Orlin says that Jane “faces an apparently irreconcilable dilemma when domestic and

27 Esther Yael Beith-Halahmi, Angell Fayre or Strumpet Lewd: Jane Shore as an Example of Erring Beauty in 16th Century Literature, Vol. 2. (Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 290.

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political authorities conflict,”28 and Wendy Wall similarly argues that “[Heywood] establishes domesticity as a critical leverage point in limiting the sovereign’s domain,”29 a leverage point which ultimately fails in the play. The crucial moment for Jane is indeed acted out in terms of space when the king comes into Matthew’s shop in disguise, but this spatial difference between political and domestic is the material manifestation of ideological conflict. Jane and the domestic are here the embodiment of the City’s and the citizens’ value system, and Edward’s entry into the shop therefore symbolizes the ultimate dominance of monarchal ideology over the emergent citizenry and citizen womanhood, with Jane positioned in conflict, physically standing in her citizen husband’s shop while being propositioned by her king. This conflict of values demonstrates that Jane and Matthew Shore, as citizens, have no place in the history play as it was traditionally constructed around the ruling class, for they pose a threat to the ideological narrativizing and centrality of those of higher status that characterizes this genre. In another genre, such as the forthcoming city comedies, perhaps, their actions and refusal to fully conform would not have been so threatening. A common trope of the city comedy genre would become the seduction of a wealthy citizen woman by an economically inept noble who has overspent himself; usually, the woman is also ambitious and inclined to the attention of such an aristocratic suitor because of his status. In Jane Shore’s case, while there is a difference in status, neither of these character types is present. In Heywood’s Edward IV , a citizen’s wife who does not want wealth or fame is forced to abandon her home and husband for the sake of indulging her king. The difference in outcome is due to the difference in genre and the ideological conflict that this creates. Edward is the king, not a minor noble or an impecunious knight: Jane has no actual choice. Jane’s body therefore becomes the primary site of ideological conflict in Edward IV . Her female, citizen body is doubly subordinate to the king’s, making her existence in a history play untenable. In a genre interested in “great matters,” the citizens of London can obtain only so much autonomy before the demands of the political narrative either relegate 28 “Familial Transgressions, Societal Transition on the Elizabethan Stage,” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (E. Mellen Press, 1991), 41. 29 138.

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them quietly to the background or thrust them violently from the plot. In Jane’s case, her intersectional identity as a citizen and woman means that she is doubly problematic for the final outcome of Edward IV . Even when noble women feature in history plays, it is often to be ultimately either ignored and forgotten by the end or to be despised and shamed30 ; the female citizen stands little chance, trapped between the ideological contradictions of court and City and the gendered nature of political power. The scene that perhaps most clearly emphasizes this comes halfway through Part 2, when Jane Shore comes face to face with Elizabeth Woodville, Edward’s queen. Kavita Finn has argued that in Edward IV , Jane displaces Elizabeth as Edward’s victim, in comparison with Shakespeare’s first tetralogy where the “wooing” scene between Edward and Elizabeth is clearly predatory.31 It is true that Heywood’s play shifts the focus from royalty to citizenry, but it is not clear that Elizabeth is displaced as a victim. In the very opening scene of Part 1, Edward displays a shocking degree of disrespect for both his wife and mother, discussing his marriage in base, animalistic terms, referring to the “cock and the hen” who are “both of one breed” in order to justify his marrying an Englishwoman, and calling his new wife and queen “this wench” (1.43– 4, 47). We are introduced from the outset to a king with little regard for women. Scene 10 of Part 2, when Elizabeth and Jane finally meet, emphasizes not their difference in status but the similarity of their experiences as Edward’s victims. Dorset’s male presence dominates the first part of the scene as he rages over Jane’s entreaties for forgiveness and Elizabeth’s asides to the audience, in which she expresses not hatred but compassion for the woman on the floor at her feet. To her son, Elizabeth puts on a show of contempt, calling Jane sarcastically “Queen Shore, nay, rather Empress Shore!” (10.13) and vowing to take revenge on her. But when Dorset exits, in an action that embodies the movement from public performance to private feeling, the queen “draws forth a knife, and making as though she meant to spoil [Jane’s] face, runs to her, and falling on 30 As Howard and Rackin argue in Engendering a Nation, the presentation of women in Shakespeare’s history plays in particular served to cement the traditional gender hierarchy for centuries to come. 31 The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127.

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her knees, embraces and kisses her, casting away the knife” (10.91–2). The stage direction is quite specific and underscores both Elizabeth’s power over Jane and her affinity with her as she physically brings herself down to Jane’s level. Her words similarly point to both the connection between the two women and the significance of their class difference: Jane, I forgive thee... ... Alas, I know thy sex, Touched with the selfsame weakness that thou are; And if my state had been as mean as thine, And such a beauty to allure his eye, Though I may promise much to my own strength, What might have happ’d to me, I cannot tell. (10.97, 99–104)

Elizabeth notes that they, as women, are “touched with the selfsame weakness,” the same inability to defend themselves in a patriarchal society. But she also points to the difference that Jane’s class makes, for Elizabeth, daughter of a knight and duchess and widow of Sir John Grey, was able to manipulate her situation such that her reputation and position were both secure even as Edward was satisfied. She is therefore not displaced as Edward’s victim by Jane but is simply more protected in her victimhood because of her rank. Elizabeth Woodville, as a noble and then as queen, has no ideological conflict in terms of the struggle between monarchy and citizenry; while she has her own hardships and is certainly oppressed within the dominant ideology because of her gender, she has a place within the history play because of her status and her vital role as mother to Edward’s heirs. Jane’s struggle, by contrast, is profoundly intersectional, impacted by both status and gender. Throughout Edward IV , Jane clearly articulates, in both words and actions, citizen values such as temperance, work ethic, the connection between economic prosperity and moral goodness, and a lack of ambition; such values place her, like her husband, directly at odds with the hedonistic, arrogant, mercenary ways of Edward’s court. But Jane’s conflict is also distinct from her husband’s, as emphasized by the sexual manner in which she is beset by the king and the ways that his violations attack not only citizen values but womanly pride and domestic harmony. In this way, Edward’s pursuit of Jane becomes representative of the impact of the early modern class struggle on citizen women. For women such as Jane, the class conflict between court and City became

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a struggle for bodily autonomy, a conflict between their sexualization by the dominant ideology and the citizen values that framed their everyday lives. Thus, by foregrounding and revising the cultural figure of Mistress Shore, Heywood’s play draws attention not just to the class struggle that characterized the early modern period, but to the unique constraints and expectations this struggle placed upon citizen women.

CHAPTER 13

Women’s Intersectional Shop Labor in the Royal Exchange Christi Spain-Savage

Founded by Thomas Gresham and completed in 1568, the Royal Exchange was early modern London’s premier shopping destination. Modeled after Flemish burses, the Royal Exchange served as an important meeting place for English and foreign merchants who gathered in the large open courtyard. The walls surrounding the primarily maledominated courtyard housed two tiers, the (main) Pawn and the Upper Pawn, both composed of small shops.1 Stocked with items such as fine clothing, pins and needles, textiles, and leather goods, the Upper Pawn became known for its lavish commodities, which were marketed to citizen wives and noble women in particular. Women of all ranks populated the Upper Pawn as landladies, merchants, and consumers in the early years of its founding, and the number of women holding shops there only 1 Ann Saunders, “The Organisation of the Exchange,” The Royal Exchange (The London Topographical Society, Publication No. 152, 1997), 87.

C. Spain-Savage (B) Siena College, Loudonville, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_13

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increased over the course of the seventeenth century.2 As Derek Keene points out, “The ‘excellent, beautiful and rich’ upper galleries at the Royal Exchange... contained at least 120 stalls or shops full of fine goods, especially mercery. Most of these shops were run by women, one of the noted attractions of the Exchange.”3 Despite this historical reality, early modern literary scholarship has largely focused on two misogynist fantasies about shop producers and consumers that appear in literary depictions: one portrays female shop workers as mere sexual objects to be consumed like their wares, and the other characterizes female shop customers as frivolous consumers of luxury goods.4 This essay, however, offers a unique methodological approach in that it examines the intersectional status of shop women and emphasizes the intricacies of their gendered and classed exchanges in literary shop transactions. Focusing on the unattributed play The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1601–2), John Eliot’s Elizabethan conversation manual The Parlement of Pratlers (1593), and Peter Erondell’s French–English language manual The French Garden (1605), I demonstrate that shop women in these texts not only assert economic and social agency with male customers but also uphold financial obligations to female employers and negotiate with female consumers of different 2 Saunders, 90–2. 3 Derek Keene, “Sites of Desire: Shops, Selds and Wardrobes in London and Other

English Cities, 1100–1550,” in Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme (Brepols, 2006), 125–53, 149. For other studies on women’s involvement in the textile industry, see Marian K. Dale, “The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 4.3 (1933), 324–35; Kay Lacey, “The Production of ‘Narrow Ware’ by Silkwomen in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England,” Textile History 18.2 (1987), 187–204; and Sarah Birt, “Women, Guilds and the Tailoring Trades: The Occupational Training of Merchant Taylors’ Company Apprentices in Early Modern London,” London Journal (2020), 1–19. 4 The most prominent example of the sexualized shop girl trope is the story of Jane Shore, the wife of a London goldsmith who becomes the mistress of King Edward IV (see Thomas Heywood’s King Edward the Fourth and Michael Drayton’s 1597 epistle, “Edward the Fourth to Shores Wife,” in England’s Heroical Epistles ). With respect to the second misogynist fantasy regarding consumers, Donald Lupton writes of citizen wives’ propensity for spending their husbands’ money: “The Merchants should keepe their Wives from visiting the upper Roomes too often, least they tire their purses by attiring themselves” (London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quartred into Severall Characters [Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1632], 25–26; EEBO STC [2nd ed.] 16,944. Both stereotypes appear in numerous early modern plays.

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ranks. When they interact with male customers, shop women establish the culture, etiquette, and protocol of the Upper Pawn and thus reveal it as a place where women can economically succeed and flourish, despite the sexual forays of men. When shop women deal with female customers, the desires of men are marginalized, and the Upper Pawn becomes a place of business rather than sexual exchange. Yet shop women must contend with issues that arise from their intersectional status as women and working commoners. They trade with women of different ranks and jockey for economic advantage, negotiating deals that sometimes benefit and sometimes oppose their economic aims. My contention is that, whether interacting with men or women, shop women fashion the Upper Pawn as a feminine place, largely populated, managed, and policed by the economic agency of women. This essay builds upon the work of several scholars, including Jean E. Howard, Juana Green, and Leslie Thomson, who have analyzed shop encounters in early modern literature in order to contextualize, complicate, or critique the common trope of shop girl as a sexual commodity.5 Their studies, though useful in providing more nuanced accounts of shop scenes beyond stereotypical sexualization, have examined this literature largely through the lens of male/female interactions. They have focused on shop women’s dealings with men but stopped short of analyzing the valuable exchanges these shop women conduct with other women, consumers and merchants, both above and below them in the professional and social hierarchy. This essay, by contrast, demonstrates the complexity of shop women’s exchanges in literary scenes both with male and female consumers of various ranks. These texts portray shop women as vital business agents in the Upper Pawn, thus telling a story more analogous to the commercial centrality of their historical counterparts. 5 See Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007); Green, “The Sempster’s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in the Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607),” Renaissance Quarterly 53.4 (Winter 2000), 1084– 118; and Thomson, “‘As Proper a Woman as Any in Cheap’: Women in Shops on the Early Modern Stage,” MRDE 16 (2003), 145–61. Howard suggests that the Upper Pawn was feminized in contrast to the male-dominated space of the main floor, though she does not pursue the implications of this suggestion by analyzing financial interactions between female characters (24). My investigation of women’s economic exchanges reveals that the Upper Pawn is indeed feminized, but in a different way than Howard suggests—women of different ranks are not only ubiquitous but active financial agents in this commercial scene, prioritizing their economic interests and establishing protocols and etiquette in the Upper Pawn.

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The historical record offers evidence of complex economic networks and exchanges among women of different ranks in the mercery trade. Vanessa Harding recounts, for instance, that Margery Symcot, a mercer’s widow and tenant of the Mercers’ Company, was in charge of a substantial business herself until her death in 1599, “when she instructed her executors to let the eastern half of her shop premises, together with her wares in the shop, preferably to her maidservant, who was obviously also capable of running the business.”6 This example of female economic agency was particularly true of the Upper Pawn, as Ann Saunders relates in her notable study of the Royal Exchange. She notes that many women were leaseholders, and several widows maintained shops, such as Lyria White, who “plied an unspecified trade at a stall, the Black Boare.”7 Saunders writes that Mrs. Alice Smith brought the lease of a shop, the Black Greyhound, as an asset to her second marriage to Frederick Powell, and Mrs. Katherine Allen “similarly enriched her second husband, Richard Story,” with one and a half shops. These widows’ investments in shops at the Exchange were, undoubtedly, economically advantageous to them and to their marital unions. Yet Saunders also records women protecting their financial interests in relation to other women. She quotes a dispute between a leaseholder in the Upper Pawn, Mrs. Mary Shawe, and her landlady, Mrs. Roberta Streete, another widow: The Committee sent for the said Roberta Streete, who was appearing before them they did mediate with her that the said Mary Shawe might injoy that part of a shop she holdeth from Mrs Streete for some terme. Whereupon the said Mrs Streete did now promise to lett her the said under tenante to have a lease for that parte of a shop for—years at the rent of xviij per annum. And the said Mary Shawe did now pay xijd [sic] to the said Roberta Streete.8

6 Harding, “Shops, Markets and Retailers in London’s Cheapside, c. 1500–1700,” in Blondé et al., Buyers and Sellers, 155–70, 158. 7 Saunders, 90–1. Also see Laura Gowing’s recent book, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London, which “rewrites the Exchange and its surroundings to include its community of female work” (Cambridge UP, 2022), 17. Though Gowing makes a similar claim to my own about women’s work in the Exchange, her evidence is predominantly historical rather than literary, and her focus is on the late seventeenth century. 8 Saunders, 91.

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This anecdote highlights the fact that women of competing occupations and ranks had professional goals in the Exchange that sometimes conflicted with one another. Mrs. Shawe and Mrs. Streete in this account negotiated for leverage, protecting their respective economic interests. Though they needed to settle the matter in court, the two women seem to have arrived at a mutually beneficial agreement, as the former achieved part of the shop and the latter received the necessary remuneration. This story of a landlady and her female leaseholder serves as an example of the types of negotiations and reconciliations two women could sustain as business associates in the Upper Pawn, providing a dynamic picture of women’s networks and exchanges at this London locale. Like these historical examples, literary texts shed light on the complex intersectional status of shop women and their feminization of the Upper Pawn. For instance, the anonymous play The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1601–2), set almost entirely within the Royal Exchange, dramatizes two Exchange sempsters, Phyllis Flower and Moll Berry, as central characters in the main plot and subplot, respectively. In this romantic city comedy, in which the three Golding brothers vie for Phyllis, the eponymous “fair maid,” the female shop laborers establish the protocol and etiquette of the Upper Pawn and fashion it as a feminine place, policed and controlled by networks of women. The shop women are susceptible to sexual forays and attacks from men, both on the premises and away from the Royal Exchange; however, they deftly navigate important economic and sexual situations and thus demonstrate the independence afforded by their vocations. As Thomson points out, the play “seems to be aware of what might be called the Jane Shore paradigm, while repeatedly reworking and complicating it in such a way as to counter expectations associated with it.”9 I would go further to assert that it is not solely in encounters with men that the shop women prove their economic and rhetorical prowess, as they must take financial, physical, and social risks to earn their livings and placate higher-ranking female bosses and customers. Fair Maid thus serves as an important model for multi-faceted gendered, classed exchanges, as the women shape the Upper Pawn as a feminine place of business through their industry and wit in interactions with men and women of various ranks.

9 151.

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The title of the play establishes the overlapping signification of the shop girl, Phyllis, with her place of business and thus the Upper Pawn’s feminization through her. On the one hand, Phyllis is geographically tied to the Exchange. She not only lives near the Exchange in Cornhill but, more directly, works in a shop in the Upper Pawn. Moreover, Phyllis, as the “fair maid” of the title, is nominally linked with the Exchange; she is identified through this place as it is through her. As Fiddle the Clown describes to Frank, one of the Goldings who has disguised himself as the porter Trusty John in order to deceive his two brothers, “This maid is fair. And this fair maid belongeth to the Exchange. And the Exchange hath not the like fair maid” (3.2.154–55).10 Phyllis’s identification as the “fair maid” plays on the multiple meanings of the word “fair” as both physically beautiful and morally just. Yet the word also contains the connotation of “fair” as a gathering for the buying and selling of goods, a resonance that further establishes her geographical and economic connection to the Upper Pawn and, in turn, its identification through its female laborers. As the title encapsulates the link between shop women and the Exchange, the opening scene establishes the economic obligations, work ethic, and necessary mobility of shop women, who must travel far from the shop in order to fulfill their professional commitments, even into dangerous situations. Phyllis and her assistant Ursula take goods, “suits of ruffs, / Those stomachers, and that fine piece of lawn,” to a lady in Mile End in London, some distance north of the shop in the Upper Pawn where they work (1.1.23–4). As the women walk alone, their business interests do in fact lead them into a perilous encounter, as they are threatened by Bobbington and Scarlet, two thieves who seek to steal their goods and their virginity; the play subverts this situation, however, since the women are “rescued” by an unlikely hero, the disabled shop owner Cripple. The play thus stages the double-edged nature of women’s independence and mobility in the marketplace since, on the one hand, they gain economic and social agency through their transactions yet, on the other, make themselves vulnerable to sexual exploitation or even harm. Perhaps more subtly, though, the play also offers a more complete picture of commercial links between women of different ranks in the early modern economy, since Phyllis and Ursula are delivering goods to 10 All references are from Anonymous, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, ed. Genevieve Love, in The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (Routledge, 2020), 816–81, and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

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a female customer, a lady whom Phyllis is “much beholding to... For many kindnesses” (1.1.38–9). Phyllis and Ursula are bound to the lady, whose “word, her love, and all is honorable” (1.1.42). Phyllis makes a point to emphasize the economic burden the two bear for any mistake. She double-checks that Ursula has the wares and reminds her, “If your forgetfulness cause any defect, / You’re like to pay for’t; therefore look unto it” (1.1.27–8). As shop women, Phyllis and Ursula have social and economic obligations to their higher-ranking paying customer, who will hold them accountable for defective or incomplete orders. These sempsters may encounter dangers from men while delivering goods, but their occupations necessitate this risk since they are financially obligated to honorable, paying female customers such as the lady. The Upper Pawn, the location of the shop where Phyllis works, is a place controlled by networks of women of varying ranks who exert power over male subordinates. The play stages the diverse positions women retailers occupy as sempsters and shop owners, since Phyllis works for an unnamed “mistress.” Just as Phyllis and Ursula have financial obligations to the lady to whom they venture to deliver goods, they are also financially beholden to the shop owner, the mistress, for any lost or flawed items. Phyllis is second in command to the mistress in the shop. For instance, when the Boy who works there wastes time cutting up square parchments and then responds to Phyllis’s accusation of his idleness by informing her that he does “what [his] mistress gave in charge,” Phyllis makes him understand who is in charge of the shop while her mistress is absent. She scolds, “Sir, I will make you know that in her absence / You shall account to my demand. Your mistress! / And your mistress’ will is thus! And thus you’ll do... Or you shall feel you have another mistress now” (3.1.6–10). The Boy thus answers to both women above him, the mistress and then Phyllis, when the mistress is absent.11 Moreover, even though the Boy begrudges and mocks this arrangement, as it places him in a subservient position, he testifies to a system at large that would disparage him if he were to defy it or be too willing a participant. He thus must navigate the constraints of his own gender in this space: he chances being shamed as a man for his submission to women yet, if he is too insolent, he risks 11 As Ronda Arab has argued in her analysis of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, wives and female members of the household economy often had more status than certain subordinate male workers (“Wives, Bodies, and Gender in ‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday’,” MRDE 13 [2001], 182–212, 200–1).

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his ability to maneuver peaceably among his female bosses and possibly even his means of earning a living. The Boy sarcastically retorts to Phyllis, “Your pride’s at full in this authority. / But, were it not for modest bashfulness, / And that I dread a base contentious name, / I would not be a by-word to th’ Exchange, / For everyone to say (myself going by), / ‘Yon goes a vassal to authority’” (3.1.13–18). Though the Boy does not want to incur the “by-word” of “vassal to authority” to his female superiors, his mocking tone also indicates his dread of the public shaming he could endure if he doesn’t follow orders—a humiliation that would be enacted by the wider community of the Upper Pawn, which is largely composed of and controlled by women. Fair Maid demonstrates that shop women also hold the upper hand in their interactions with male customers, as well as subordinates. Nevertheless, the patriarchal fantasy that the upper floors of the Exchange fulfill the sexual longings of male customers is certainly at work in the play. For example, when two gentlemen appear at the Exchange and one, Gardiner, convinces his companion, Bennet, to accompany him to buy “certain bands, and other linen,” Gardiner exclaims, “Sure, this is a beauteous gallant walk.... Methinks the glorious virgins of this square / Gives life to dead-struck youth” (3.1.48–52). The stereotype of commodified shop girls in the Upper Pawn, or the “glorious virgins of this square,” occurs specifically with respect to Phyllis when Gardiner responds to her question of “What lack you gentlemen?” with “Faith, nothing, had I thee. / For in thine eye all my desires I see” (3.1.58–60). Yet his erotic suggestion is challenged and complicated by Phyllis’s ability to maneuver in the shop environment both physically and rhetorically. In her conversation with these male customers, Phyllis first emphasizes that it is her wares for sale, not her person. She corrects Gardiner by specifying, “My shop you mean, sir,” and goes on to list all sorts of fabric and dressing accessories that are “fit for the chapman of whate’er degree” (3.1.61, 66). In other words, the shop caters to paying customers of all ranks, as long as they are there to purchase goods rather than flirt with shop girls. As part of their repartee, Phyllis not only highlights the lack of decorum of male consumers but also, importantly, lays claim to the Upper Pawn as a feminine place controlled by women. She voices her opinion of customers such as Gardiner and Bennet by exclaiming, “Dissembling men! What maid will credit them!” (3.1.87). Phyllis, on the surface, means that discerning maids should not trust the flattery of male customers, who only seem to be interested in sexual exploitation. But on

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another level, her use of “credit” has a monetary undertone that suggests that the men in the play are not worthy of economic credit. Her pun registers that, in addition to lacking decorum, these gentlemen, perhaps as a result of their social status, are financially frivolous, lacking the values of thrift and enterprise that she must cultivate as a result of her own class and occupation. Phyllis ultimately threatens the men, “What am I? You cipher, parenthesis of words, / Stall-troubler, prater! What, sit I here for nought? / Bestow your lustful courtships on your minions; / This place holds none. You and your companion, / Get you down the stairs, or I protest, / I’ll make this squarèd walk too hot for you” (3.1.98– 103). Her insults point to the men’s deficiency, particularly verbally, as embodied “parenthesis of words,” which Love glosses as “cipher” or “nothing” in her notes to the play.12 Phyllis’s point is that their sexual advances are not productive in an environment designed for economic exchange. Further, she orders them downstairs to a more fitting area of the Royal Exchange—the open male-dominated courtyard—since their pleasure-seeking behavior doesn’t align with the business of the Upper Pawn. The male fantasy of a “square” inhabited by “glorious virgins” thus becomes a female-controlled reality, a “squarèd walk” policed by a community of women workers. By sending the male customers to the lower level of the Exchange, Phyllis thus reveals the authority of women in the Upper Pawn, as she lays claim to this place and exposes the men’s lack of savvy. Phyllis articulates the feminization of her workplace by outlining the suitable protocol that should occur in dealings between laborers and customers in the Upper Pawn, as well as the behavior that will not be permitted. The shop women in the play are industrious laborers who use their rhetorical and business acumen to establish the etiquette and ethos of this feminine place. Though Fair Maid depicts networks of women of differing ranks involved in trade in the Upper Pawn and demonstrates how they assert their values over male patrons, it does not specifically stage a transaction between Phyllis or Moll and a female consumer. Other texts, however, relate shop women’s interactions with both male and female customers, highlighting the differences exposed by gender and class, as female/ female exchanges prove to be more complex economic and social intersectional negotiations than female/male exchanges. In Eliot’s The Parlement

12 850, n. 324.

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of Pratlers (1593), for example, a scene takes place at the “Pawn,” in which a gentleman suggests to his companions, “Let us go above to buy some thing of these fayre maidens.”13 He is referring not only to the location of the Upper Pawn on the second level of the Royal Exchange but also to the assumption that female, rather than male, merchants are there to assist customers. One of these “maidens,” a young, pretty shop woman, attempts to make a sale to this gentleman, asking him, “What seeke your sir? Come here my friend: see here fine ruffes, falling bands, handkerchers, sockes, coiffes, and cuffes, wrought with gold and silver.” When the shop woman finally asks, “Have I nothing which likes you?” the gentleman replies, “Harke my love will you take a pint of wine?”14 Instead of shopping for items, this gentleman, like the gentlemen in Fair Maid who take advantage of both gender and class hierarchies, instead offers the shop woman a drink in an attempt to woo her. The shop woman politely demurs and diligently continues to sell her wares. In a similar exchange later in the text, another male buyer enacts the commodified shop girl trope when he asks another man, “Will you buy a prettie wench to carrie into the North with you?”15 Again, the shop woman expeditiously moves on to the next customer, crying, “What lackest thou welch boy.” In these cases, the shop woman is not at all shocked or stymied by the sexual advances of male customers of higher rank, seemingly normal exchanges in her day. Rather, she focuses on her financial priority of making a living, politely declining, and moving on to the likelier sale. As Howard points out, the Pawn is a “place that sexualizes the women who work there and makes them seem potentially vendible.”16 But in her brief analysis of The Parlement of Pratlers , Howard omits the interactions the shop woman has with other customers, namely women. The scene in the “Pawne” in this text is intriguing because it depicts both the female merchant’s transactions with male customers and, critically, her dealings with female customers of higher rank. When a gentlewoman 13 Ortho-epia Gallica, Or, The Parlement of Pratlers, in Ortho-epia Gallica. Eliots fruits for the French: Enterlaced with a double nevv Invention which teacheth to speake truely, speedily and volubly the French-tongue (Printed by [Richard Field for] John Wolfe, 1593), d4v-d4r [30–31]; EEBO STC (2nd ed.), 7574. Eliot’s manual is presented as a series of dialogues with French and English printed in parallel columns. 14 d4v-d4r [30–31]. 15 e1r-e2v [33–34]. 16 61.

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customer enters the shop and asks for a “Peach colourd Netherstock,” her conversation with the shop woman demonstrates a vastly different model for a business transaction than the one with the two male patrons. The shop woman replies to her inquiry, “There is a very fine hose, the price is an Angell, at word.” Presumably thinking the price too high, the gentlewoman buyer begins to negotiate by asking the shop woman if she will “take a noble.” The gentlewoman seemingly uses her superior rank to haggle with the shop woman, but the latter does not budge on the price. The transaction finally ends when the gentlewoman responds, “You are too deare.”17 Though the shop woman does not make a sale and the gentlewoman does not purchase the hose, each woman is discerning and careful to protect her financial welfare, the saleswoman avoiding a diminished sale and the customer averting manipulation into spending too much. The female customer, having come to the Upper Pawn to buy wares, prioritizes her economic shrewdness and frugality, whereas the men in the text seem to be there for pleasure rather than business. This interaction reveals that, when solely women are occupying the shop in the Upper Pawn, it becomes a commercialized rather than sexualized space; the scene goes so far as to suggest that women conduct their business there more skillfully than men. Similarly, Erondell’s French–English language manual, The French Garden, depicts complex economic exchanges among women of different ranks, thus highlighting the Upper Pawn as a feminized place in early modern London. Interactions among women in this manual, however, are more contentious than the fairly benign impasse between the shop woman and gentlewoman customer in The Parlement of Pratlers . In The French Garden, which contains thirteen dialogues, the Lady Ri-Mellaine, along with a female friend, Mistress Du Pont-galliard, and her nephew and their escort, Master Du Vault-l’amour, go shopping at the Royal Exchange “for to cheapen,” or to bargain, interacting with a Sempster and her maid, Atire-gain, while there.18 This shopping excursion, largely negotiated through women, demonstrates the complexities of trade among women across ranks, even though there is some critical debate regarding 17 d4r-e1v [31–32]. 18 The dialogues by Erondell and Claudius Hollyband, Huguenot refugees who taught

French in Elizabethan London, are reprinted in The Elizabethan Home, Discovered in Two Dialogues by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell (Methuen & Company, 1949), 36–78.

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the intended audience and purpose of the text at large. Natasha Korda points out that the popularity of Erondell’s manuals, written “for an elite female audience” and published in a second edition in 1621, may be attributed to their “utility as how-to books for elite or middling-sort women who wished to learn the lexicon as well as the latest styles of fashionable, foreign attire.”19 Juliet Fleming, by contrast, argues that The French Garden is actually “‘cross-dressed’; that is, although it seems to offer itself to women, and is, as it were, dressed as a woman, in other ways it is a male text, designed specifically for the enjoyment of men.”20 Though Fleming has a point about The French Garden as a “male text” on the whole, the scene itself presents an intricate, female-controlled, female-negotiated economic transaction at the Upper Pawn of the Royal Exchange. The scene, in a vein similar to other depictions, begins with the trope of the shop woman as a lure to potential male customers, but then the male escort, who is intrigued by this prospect, promptly drops to the background as the ladies negotiate. When the ladies and gentleman are deciding which shop to enter, the Master Du Vault-l’amour, listening to the cries of Atire-gain, suggests, “This Maid doth invite us to it by her tongue, which she hath as free, as any that ever I heard” (57).21 The Lady Ri-Mellaine, who understands his comment to mean that he is sexually interested in the saleswoman, responds, “Yet she is scarce worthy your love, though she be reasonable fine & prettie, but seeing that you affect her, we will see with what she will furnish us for your sake” (57). Ri-Mellaine’s remark highlights the difference in rank between the maid and gentleman, as she belittles his attraction to, in her opinion, such an unworthy subject. She capitalizes on his interest in Atire-gain, however, in order to enter the shop and browse the wares, though she maintains that it is entirely “for [his] sake.” Master Du Vault-l’amour does not speak again in the scene, neither participating in the bartering process nor purchasing any items, and his silence makes evident the feminization of the business space. Yet while 19 Labor’s Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (U of Pennsylvania P, 2011), 105–7. 20 “The French Garden: An Introduction to Women’s French,” ELH 56.1 (1989), 19–51, 19. 21 All references are from The Elizabethan Home and will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.

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the manual sidelines the man’s attempt to sexualize the Upper Pawn, it demonstrates the class inequities that are exposed when women trade with each other exclusively. The major negotiation occurs initially between Lady Ri-Mellaine and Atire-gain and then between the former and the Sempster. In her initial interaction with the maid, Ri-Mellaine attempts to take the upper hand, using her high rank and refined taste to drive down the price of the goods. When Ri-Mellaine asks Atire-gain if she has any “faire holland,” Atire-gain replies, “the fairest lawne that ever you handled.” Ri-Mellaine challenges her claim by questioning, “what knowest thou, what lawne I have handled? it may be that I have had better then [sic] any that is in all thy Shop” (57–8). As Ri-Mellaine endeavors to maintain social dominance in order to reduce the price, Atire-gain employs her own strategy to flatter the lady in an attempt to make a sale, suggesting she must navigate both social and economic situations. Ri-Mellaine turns her attention to the price of an ell of cambric and Atire-gain, humbly acknowledging Ri-Mellaine’s fine judgment and knowledge, responds, “I knowe you have so good Judgement in linnen cloath, that I dare not showe you any for good, unlesse it were so” (58). The saleswoman and buyer confer about a fair price, each with her own agenda in mind. Atire-gain specifies a price of twenty shillings, yet RiMellaine offers fifteen shillings instead. At this point, Atire-gain is caught between two bad choices, losing money on a sale or losing the customer’s business entirely, which she confirms by stating, “Truely Madame I would be verye sorie to denie you if I could give it at that price, but in truth I cannot, unles I should lose by it” (59). Nevertheless, Ri-Mellaine does not budge, offering “sixteen, and not one halfepeny more” (59). Since Ri-Mellaine and Atire-gain are at a standstill in their negotiations, the Sempster, the proprietress of the establishment, has to intervene to make the call about the price. Even as Atire-gain continues to urge the worth of the cambric, diligently trying to avoid losing the value of the product, the Sempster wisely reads Ri-Mellaine’s recalcitrance and concedes: “Madame, I am content to lose in it, of the price that I sell it to others, in hope that you will buye of us when you shall have need” (59). Unlike the male customers in Fair Maid, who lack financial savvy, Ri-Mellaine actually saves money on her shopping venture. Yet she does so at the expense of the lower-rank proprietress, who incurs a loss but must nevertheless capitulate to secure the lady’s business in the future. In addition to this distinction regarding gender, the scene

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demonstrates the dynamics of class—that women of varying ranks, positions, and priorities not only circulated but vied for economic agency in the Royal Exchange. Fleming argues that the text “does not encourage female jouissance” since the women are divided along class lines. Fleming maintains, “At the Exchange, Ri-Melaine encourages Sir Love-Worthy in his frankly sexual appraisal of the sempster’s maid... The ladies in the text are made to stand in opposition to their lower-class sisters, and it is only the lower classes who are represented as being in possession of a sensual femininity.”22 However, the “sensual femininity” of the lower class seems to be beside the point in this dialogue, as the man’s sexual interests are sidelined in favor of intersectional economic and social transactions among women. In its division of these women according to rank and thus interest, the scene ultimately makes a broader point about shopping exchanges among women. Ri-Mellaine uses her high rank, sophisticated taste, and experience to save money on her shopping excursion. The maid Atire-gain attempts to get the highest price possible for the Sempster’s wares, presumably to keep her job and income. And, notably, the Sempster must prioritize the importance of keeping Ri-Mellaine contented in order to maintain her business in the future, even if that means accepting a lower price for her wares. There are thus several factors at stake for each woman. Rather than the gendered and classed power differences between male customers and the shop maids they attempt to treat as sexual objects, Ri-Mellaine, Atire-gain, and the Sempster have to wield their authority by wisely reading the situation, assessing the character and rank of those involved in the transaction, and then employing strategies of negotiation, including compromise, flattery, politeness, or even haughtiness in order to achieve an advantageous financial result. As this shopping excursion reveals, female shop owners, employees, and consumers attempt to fashion the Upper Pawn as a feminine place of business where women assert economic agency. In the absence of men, shop women prioritize their financial interests but, notably, must contend with conflicts that arise from their social status. This essay investigates literary texts through the lens of both male and female interactions to uncover the complexity of shop women’s intersectional trade in the specific area of the Royal Exchange and thus the wider city of London. Historically, the Royal Exchange, the first of

22 37.

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four destination shopping centers—including the New Exchange, Middle Exchange, and Exeter Exchange—built in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury London, “pointed towards a new direction for retailing,” as historian William C. Baer maintains.23 These exchanges anticipated the need for indoor shopping in a convenient location, since street shops were often small, exposed to the public, and subject to filthy conditions and bad weather. This shift in retailing benefited women in particular. According to Baer, “Clearly a booth or stall in an exchange would be preferable to women, with less harassment from the authorities, who associated women on the streets with a certain amount of disorder.”24 Despite the historical prominence of women in business at the Royal Exchange, early modern literary scholarship has often emphasized the unsavory reputation of this locale resulting from the perceived sexualization of shop workers and the frivolity of female consumers. In fact, Baer partially attributes the eventual decline of the exchanges to the large percentage of women shopkeepers, though he acknowledges that most of the accounts regarding these places were skewed fantasies written by men.25 The stereotypical views of shop women and their customers are countered and complicated by not only the historical record but also the literary depictions examined in this essay, which demonstrate that in dealings with both male and female customers, shop women fashion the Upper Pawn as a feminized business establishment through their regulation of proper conduct, attention to their financial interests, and savvy maneuvering of class conflict. Scenes with high-ranking male customers and low-ranking male subordinates in Fair Maid reveal the economic and verbal acumen of the shop women and male customers’ lack of enterprise, who often do not achieve economic profit or sexual conquest. Furthermore, attending to allusions to female bosses and gentlewomen customers in the play, though they may not be actual characters with staged encounters, suggests the vast networks of women involved in the cloth trade at the Upper Pawn and the profound agency they exerted over this place. While Fair Maid does not explicitly dramatize sempsters negotiating with a female customer, The Parlement of Pratlers and The French Garden

23 “Early Retailing: London’s Shopping Exchanges, 1550–1700,” Business History 49.1 (January 2007), 29–51, 32. 24 32. 25 32, 44.

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portray vignettes from early modern urban life that offer more detailed accounts of women selling to women. Such portrayals demonstrate that, when men are sidelined, the Upper Pawn becomes visible as a place of business, where women of different classes prioritize their financial and social interests and then angle to achieve these goals. In short, these texts highlight the fact that women, the owners, laborers, and consumers in the Upper Pawn in particular, were active, invested, and vital participants in the commercial world of early modern London, and thus they tell a story more akin to the historical reality of this place. What is at stake is a shift in focus that views early modern women on their own terms rather than simply through a male-centered methodology that reduces them to the margins of commercial London.

CHAPTER 14

Counsel, Class, and Just War in Shakespeare’s Henry V Anne-Marie E. Walkowicz

As many scholars have argued, Henry V is a highly political play, and a long critical history addresses it in the context of early modern political thought.1 Much of this criticism focuses on Shakespeare’s characterization of Henry’s kingship, but literary scholars tend to be divided on whether Shakespeare imagines a warrior king of great renown or a practitioner

1 Henry V was written around 1599, but the earliest recorded stage performance was on January 7, 1605, at Court. The play exists in the 1600 quarto version, The Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth (London), which was reissued in 1602 and 1619, and the 1623 First Folio version, The Life of Henry the Fifth (London). I quote from the First Folio and use Through Line Numbering from The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charles Hinman (W.W. Norton, 1968).

A.-M. E. Walkowicz (B) Central State University, Wilberforce, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_14

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of dubious politics.2 Still others take a third view, arguing Shakespeare intends an ambiguous presentation of Henry and portrays the political nuances required for a king to rule. As Robert J. Delahunty suggests, “Shakespeare sees more deeply into the nature of rulership” than many of his contemporary political writers.3 I concur that Shakespeare’s Henry is neither the virtuous king nor the dubious ruler. This essay examines the play’s interconnection between the sixteenth-century paradigm of counsel and the just war tradition. It argues that by invoking the just war tradition, Henry V encapsulates the class conflict within the dynamics of counsel, whereby political leaders held a responsibility to protect the people’s interests and welfare. The importance of the idea of counsel to early modern political thought is well rehearsed by social historians who have demonstrated that, for early moderns, good counsel was fundamental to good government.4 The most significant tenet of the paradigm of counsel was that it would protect the people from tyranny and help a monarch rule in the best 2 The works that provide political interpretations of Henry V date back over 100 years

and are too numerous to cite here. The following is a selective list of notable works. For works that argue for Henry as an ideal monarch, see E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Chatto & Windus, 1944); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton UP, 1957), especially 151–93; Sherman H. Hawkins, “Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry IV ,” ELR 5.3 (1975), 313–43. For readings of Henry V and critiques of state power, see Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain (Cornell UP, 1985); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V ,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakkis (Methuen, 1985), 206–27; Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, The Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge UP, 2013), 178–213. 3 “The Conscience of a King: Law, Religion and War in Shakespeare’s King Henry V ,” Journal of Catholic Legal Studies 53.2 (2014), 129–83. Other notable critics who examine the ambiguous nature of Henry V’s character include Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V ” Shakespeare Quarterly 28.3 (1977), 279–96; Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry VI , and Henry V ,” in Shakespearean Negotiations (U of California P, 1988), 21–65; Claire McEachern, “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.1 (1994), 33–56; and Amy Lidster, “Challenging Monarchical Legacies in Edward III and Henry V,” English: The Journal of the English Association 68.261 (2019), 126–42. 4 See A.N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Common-

wealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge UP, 1999); John Guy, “The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. David Hoak (Cambridge UP, 2002), 292–310; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge UP, 2005); and Joanne Paul, Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge UP, 2020).

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interests of the state. The message was reiterated in early modern literature, and scholars have explored how writers emphasized the dangers of flattery and favoritism, the difference between good and bad counsel, and the nature of how best to couch advice so it could be heard. My point of departure is the idea that while counsel was central to a stable monarchical government, there was less consensus on its utility and social depth. I begin my analysis with a brief overview of the just war tradition to contextualize the play’s dramatization of counsel and Henry’s performance of kingship. I then examine several moments of advising that accrue around a set of ideals within the just war tradition, including precepts that a monarch should seek counsel before declaring war and that due proportion of economic and human loss should be considered. These scenes expose significant class dynamics within the paradigm of the counseled king through their incorporation of the vocabulary of blood. Early modern habits of thought considered one’s social station in terms of natural bloodlines. Katherine A. Craik’s examination of blood degree and class in Henry V demonstrates how “plebian personhood hinge[d] on blood-based systems of degree.”5 Craik sheds light on the broader political significance of defining social degree by hereditary bloodlines. As my analysis will show, Shakespeare employs competing usages of blood imagery in Henry V in ways that foreground class conflicts over what defined the best interests of the body politic. Whereas Henry and his lords justify the war to honor his ancestral bloodline, the common soldiers are concerned about their bloodshed in battle. The late sixteenth century witnessed a flurry of texts on the conduct of war, written by English writers and translated from continental publications, voicing theories and concerns about the causes, costs, and practices of war.6 These war manuals drew on the just war tradition and a central corpus of classical texts, including Cicero’s The Republic, St. Augustine’s City of God, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Within this just war tradition, the practice of counsel provided that monarchs would scrupulously consider the causes of war and take precautions to avoid undue military action. As the anonymously authored The Mirrour for English Soldiers warned, “it is a figure of small wisdom to begin wars 5 “Sorting Pistol’s Blood: Social Class and the Circulation of Character in Shakespeare’s 2 H IV and Henry V ,” in Blood Matters: Studies in European Thought, 1400–1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Jonson and Eleanor Decamp (U of Pennsylvania P, 2018), 45. 6 Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Ashgate, 2010), 92.

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without great consideration. Wars undertaken with advice & judgment have ever had an honorable issue: but rashly and unadvisedly, ever scourged with repentance.”7 For a monarch, counsel could perform a two-fold purpose. It could help a monarch determine the just cause of war ( jus ad bellum) and provide the ethical standards for just military conduct ( jus in bello). Counsel could ensure that monarchs were acting in the best interests of the body politic, because the tenets of just war theory advocated that wars were to be waged to achieve peace and fought with responsibility to due proportion. Literary scholars have invoked these principles to analyze Shakespeare’s Henry V , especially the specific conditions for a declaration of war to be considered ethical.8 Rather than focusing on whether we can view Henry’s war as just, the following analysis considers how war is portrayed as part of governmental policy and attends to the class conflicts embedded within monarchical wars of expansion. Within just war theory, class conflicts were invoked within discussions of legal just cause, right intention, and the factors to be considered when judging due proportion. In considering these issues, just war theorists developed an ethics of war upon which counselors could draw when giving advice. Additionally, just war theory encouraged political leaders to consider their responsibility to citizens and subjects in military matters before declaring war. These two interconnected views—that good advice could ensure that war was declared in the best interest of all its citizens and that wars should be fought with account to due proportion—provide an important context for understanding Henry V . Throughout the play, Shakespeare conceives of counsel as a medium of government, portraying a process through which Henry actively seeks advice to manage governmental policy and his advisors rely on personal relationships with him to influence it. The most pressing political issue 7 A Mirror for English Souldiers; or an Anatomy for an Accomplished Man at Armes (London, 1595), EEBO, Bv1. 8 See Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition; John Mark Mattox, “Henry V: Shakespeare’s Just Warrior,” War Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 12.1 (2000), 30–53; R. Scott Fraser, “Henry V and the Performance of War,” in Shakespeare and War, ed. Ros King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 71–83; and Rosanna Camerlingo, “Henry and the Just War: Shakespeare, Gentili and Machiavelli,” in Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England: Literary and Political Influences from the Reformation to the Restoration, ed. Alessandro Arienzo and Alessandra Petrina (Ashgate, 2013), 103–19.

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is Henry’s imperial war with France, and the opening scenes of advising illustrate how the considerations of warfare, especially due proportion and responsibility to the state’s citizens, were far removed from decisions to engage in war. Although the Prologue promises that we will “behold the swelling scene” of “Warlike Harry” (TLN, 4–5), Henry V opens with an invented scene depicting the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely discussing a parliamentary bill that would have stripped the church of its temporal lands.9 Shakespeare dramatizes the short account in Holinshed’s Chronicles that narrates their concern for the bill, which reports that the issue was: feared among the religious sort . . . and therefore to find remedie against it, they determined to assaie all waies to put by and overthrow this bill: wherein they thought best to trie if they might moove the kings mood with some sharpe invention[.]10

Shakespeare takes dramatic license with this history, and the opening scene displays the complex process of politicking associated with counsel, in which the personal interests of both the monarch and the advisor are met through displays of advice. The crux of Canterbury’s plan is to offer Henry a justification for an imperial war with France.11 Canterbury recalls that in an assembly of the clergy, a “Spirituall Convocation,” he revealed to Henry the “severalls and unhidden passages of his true Titles,” including “the crown and seat of France” (TLN, 114, 124–5). Whereas in Holinshed, the clerical establishment plot by “sharpe invention” to avoid being disendowed, Shakespeare’s Canterbury is neither the king’s manipulator nor the mastermind behind the campaign against France. Rather, he employs some politicking, promising Henry legal backing to reclaim the French crown in order to divert his attention away from the parliamentary bill.

9 For contemporary allusions to relations between the church and the Elizabethan Regime, see John Cox, The Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton UP, 1998), 105–8. 10 Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1587), EEBO, 6.545. 11 Several critics have analyzed the first scene as creating an ambiguity surrounding Henry’s claim to France, including Cox, 105–8, and Rita Banerjee, “The Common Good and the Necessity of War: Emergent Republican Ideals in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Coriolanus,” Comparative Drama 40.1 (Spring 2006), 29–49, esp. 32–4.

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Henry is a master of using public performance to write his own narrative, and in the following scenes, he seeks public sanction to engage in military action by inquiring whether his claim to France satisfies the requirements of just cause for war.12 His rhetoric directly takes up the ethical issues of just cause and due proportion, questioning, “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (TLN 234). The scene focuses on establishing just cause based on his ancestral bloodlines, where Edward III claimed his right to France through his mother, Isabella, Edward II’s wife and the youngest child of Philip IV of France.13 Henry seems highly aware that wars based on ambition and vainglory were targets for criticism. He refers directly to his moral responsibility for his soldiers’ bloodshed when he asks Canterbury to interpret Salic law, heeding caution because “God doth know how many now in health / Shall drop their blood in approbation of what your reverence shall incite us to” (TLN 155–8). Whereas Henry acknowledges his moral responsibility for the bloodshed caused by war, Canterbury’s intricate analysis of Salic law appears overly complicated and dismissive of its horrors.14 The opening scene of clerical politicking also places Canterbury’s interpretation of Salic law into what Richard Dutton describes as an “ironic perspective.”15 However, Henry’s performance of counsel is a classical rhetorical affair aimed at the theatrics of kingship. Although Canterbury’s legal interpretation is unconvincing, Henry presses his advisors to provide just cause. Ely resorts to empowering Henry to seek dynastic glory through ancestral bloodlines, advising him, “You sit upon their Throne, / The Blood and Courage that renowned them, / Runs in your Veines” (TLN, 255–7). Ely draws

12 Theodor Meron discusses the spiritual and political importance of Henry’s just cause in “Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the Law of War,” American Journal of International Law 86.1 (January 1992), 1–45. 13 After Philip IV’s death, although Edward III was the nearest male relative, there was a dispute over his claim because he was descended from the maternal line. The French Crown was given in favor of the paternal line to Charles IV’s nephew, Philip, Count of Valois. It was believed that they based this on fifth-century Salic law, but it is now known that Salic law was discovered later. See Craig Taylor, “Salic Law and the Valois Succession to the French Crown,” French History 15.4 (2001), 358–77. 14 Canterbury’s legal account is reported in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) 6.545. 15 Shakespeare, Court Dramatist (Oxford UP, 2016), 194.

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upon definitions of “blood” as both family lineage and a set of inherited values.16 His advice shifts the tenor of the conversation, moving away from issues of bloodshed and due proportion to issues of bloodlines and ancestral inheritance. Motivated by ideals of ancestral honor, Henry’s inner circle counsels him to “unwind your bloody Flagge” (TLN, 239), reenact the warrior-king status of his ancestors, and “rowse [him] selfe / As did the former Lyons of [his] Blood” (TLN, 2691–2). Henry’s lords approve of war out of ideals of masculine aristocratic identity. The blood imagery displays how the moral questions of responsibility and due proportion are easily replaced by aristocratic ideals of family, honor, and glory. Even though Henry has publicly engaged in the practice of counsel, the costs of war—in terms of both economic loss and the loss of human lives—are easily dismissed. The practice of counsel is portrayed as a persuasive art where both sides must balance political and personal affairs. Shakespeare’s blood imagery brings to the fore the class conflicts embedded within imperial wars of conquest. Henry’s initial ethical questions of due proportion are subsumed into political issues of succession. Just war theory held no definitive consensus on whether disputed lines of succession were considered a wrong to be redressed and therefore constituted just cause. Nevertheless, many just war theorists condemned such wars as wars of aggression. As Christine de Pizan explains, “for by the lawe of god it apperteyneth not to a man onely to take ne usurpe nothyng of others nor in no wise to coveite it,” because these wars were aggressive campaigns against other peoples.17 Writers such as de Pizan perceived the lives lost and destruction of towns and cities in such disputes as a heavy consequence for the expansion of an empire. Moreover, Shakespeare’s council scene illustrates the important role counsel played in governmental decisions because, as Theodore Meron contends, “Henry’s counsel would distinguish between recapturing property, which would constitute just cause of the war, and extension of empire, which would not.”18 However, Shakespeare’s dramatic representation also demonstrates the divide between theory and practice, showing how Henry deftly uses counsel to legitimate his preferred course of action. The two opening

16 OED “Blood,” I.5.a and II.7.a. 17 The Fayt of Armes and of Chyvalry (London, 1489), EEBO, A4r. 18 “Shakespeare’s Henry,” 39. See also Lidster, 9–10.

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scenes work together to illustrate that the practice of counsel held no normative standard to ensure political agents acted in the people’s best interests as subjects of the state’s authority. Once Henry has decided to declare war, he uses providential rhetoric to absolve himself of the ethical questions regarding the political morality of his war and his moral responsibility to the soldiers who must fight it. Providentialism helps Henry to evade his responsibility to common soldiers—a class of men subject to his authority—by obscuring the issues of just cause and due proportion. As Peter Lake explains, providentialism was “predicated on the existence of an omnipotent and immutably just and merciful God whose beneficent purposes could be seen working their way through the events of human history.”19 For example, Henry closes the council scene by associating his campaign with God’s divine plan, declaring that it will fall into the “will of God . . . to revenge me as I may, and to put forth / My rightfull hand in a wel-hallow’d cause” (TLN, 429– 33). He continues the association throughout the play. Before the Battle of Agincourt, he commands, “Now Souldiers march away, / And how thou pleasest God, dispose the day” (TLN 2296–7), trusting God will help his men fight a successful battle. The providential discourse is absent from the chronicle sources, but Shakespeare incorporates it to legitimate Henry’s preferred course of action and to conceal his motives to use his blood right to engage his soldiers in a bloody, aggressive, and expansionist war. Despite the rampant use of Henry’s ancestral blood rights and providential rhetoric by the aristocrats to validate just cause, Henry cannot uncouple his war from his moral responsibility as king to protect the people. Shakespeare returns to the class conflicts embedded in the political morality of Henry’s imperial war of succession and the consequences for the state in the climatic scenes dramatizing the Battle of Agincourt. In this series of scenes, the play associates Henry’s moral responsibility to his subjects with his responsibility to the soldiers who shed their blood fighting for his ancestral blood right. Shakespeare dramatizes a debate between Henry and three common soldiers on the night before the battle. The scene has little precedent in the English chronicles but may be expanding the portrait of Henry that appears in Vita Henrici Quinti, which discusses how Henry V “daily and nightly in his owne person he 19 How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (Yale UP, 2017), 497.

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visited the watches, orders, and stations of every part of his host.”20 Anne Barton argues that the scene “plays upon the popular dramatic motif of the king disguised” but defies the “hallmark of a particular kind of play” where the king and commoner can talk together.21 Shakespeare’s employment of the dramatic motif in Henry V is distinguished by its representation of plebian counsel. The debate reflects two significant issues that Henry questions in his opening council scene, namely, whether he can with “right and conscience make this claim” to the French crown and the cost for the common soldiers who will “shed their blood” in the name of his cause (TLN 234 and 156). As Henry walks about his camp in disguise, he meets three soldiers, John Bates, Alexander Court, and Michael Williams, who voice their fears about the upcoming battle. Henry questions their loyalty, declaring, “me thinks I could not dye any where so contented, as in the Kings company; his Cause being just and his Quarrell honorable” (TLN 1911–13). In declaring the justness of his cause, Henry seeks public approbation for his imperial war, but instead, he engages men who would otherwise belong to a politically neglected class in a discussion on the just cause of war. In this respect, Henry receives his most intelligent critique of just cause not from his aristocratic advisors but from his common soldiers. Henry insists that his cause is honorable, but Williams’ response, “that’s more than we know” (TLN 1914), discloses the political reality that common soldiers are not privy to the motives for royal decisions. Bates and Williams directly address the soldier’s subjective role of obedience and military service. Bates asserts, “wee know enough if wee know wee are the Kings Subjects: if his Cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the Cryme of it out of us” (TLN 1915–18). Williams further argues that kings are held spiritually responsible for soldiers killed in battle: But if the Cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavie Reckoning to make, when all those Legges, and Armes, and Hands, chopt off in Battaile, shall joyne together at the latter day, and cry all, Wee dyed at such a place, . . . Now if these men doe not dye well, it will be a black matter for

20 The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth, written in 1513 by an anonymous author known commonly as the Translator of Livius, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Clarendon Press, 1911), 381. 21 “The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History,” The Triple Bond Plays, Mainly Shakespearean in Performance (Pennsylvania State UP, 1975), 99.

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the King, that led them to it, who disobey, were against all proportion of subjection. (TLN 1919–31)

Bates and Williams’ argument shows an awareness of the Christian just war doctrine, which absolved soldiers of sin for fighting in a war whose cause was not just because they were obliged to obey their king and superiors. As St. Augustine’s medieval just war theory contended, “In killing an enemy the soldier acts as agent of the law, and in accordance to his obedience to his king.”22 Not only do the soldiers believe that obedience to the king exonerates them from their actions in war, but Williams also insists that the monarch is held morally responsible for just cause and the loss of human life by engaging men in military conflict. The soldiers’ rhetoric highlights the fact that the actions of those in power have long-term and inescapable consequences for the subjects they rule. Williams’ central question, “for how can they charitably dispose of any thing in Battaile when Blood is their argument?” (TLN 1927–8), is a direct attack on Henry’s justification of war. Rita Banerjee argues that Williams articulates the incompatibility of bloodshed and Christian charity and the “moral dubiousness associated with wars of conquest.”23 I agree with Banerjee that moral issues underlie the scene, but Shakespeare’s use of blood imagery also displays the class divide between aristocratic men who decide to engage in war and the common soldiers who wage it. Williams’ cynical statement that “Blood is their argument” takes readers and spectators back to the opening council scene’s rhetoric of bloodlines and family honor as a justifiable cause for war, and the aristocrats’ presumption that they may use the common soldiers’ bloodshed to claim ancestral rights. However, for the conscripted soldier, military service was compulsory and rarely associated with financial gain. As just war theorist Alberico Gentili contended, wars based on dynastic claims were waged by common soldiers “through no need of our own, with no eye to our advantage, but merely for the sake of others.”24 In Henry V , Williams provides a direct personal appeal to these concerns of the conscripted soldier. He denies that “Blood” or dynastic claims were 22 The Political Writings of St. Augustine, ed. Dino Bigongiari (Regency Publishing, 1996), 213–17. 23 32–3. 24 De Jure Belli, Libri Tres, vol 2, trans. John Carew Rolfe (Clarendon Press, 1933),

67.

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worthy of slaughter, the loss of “all those Legges, and Armes, and Hands, chopt off in Battaile.” The repetition of blood imagery places explicitly on stage the fact that while dynastic claims may provide the aristocratic men reasonable cause for military engagement, for the common soldier, wars based on ancestral bloodlines shed their blood meaninglessly without means for profitable gain. The debate with the soldiers reinforces the political reality that governmental policy was rarely aimed at the public good. Bates and Williams articulate the moral and ethical issues that Henry has diverted since the beginning of the play. Henry’s response to the soldiers is heavily dependent upon analogy, but the crux of his argument is that “Every Subjects Dutie is the Kings, but every Subjects Soule is his owne” (TLN 1961–2). In other words, acts committed by soldiers in their military service are the only acts for which he as king is responsible, while the soldier is accountable for his “soul” and his private acts.25 Henry’s lengthy response focuses on absolving himself from private acts of men committed outside of the battlefield, including “premediated and contrived Murder,” “beguiling maydens,” and goring “the gentle Bosom of Peace with Pillage and Robberie” (TLN 1947–51). Sir William Segar made the same distinction in his sixteenth-century military treatise Honor Military, and Ciuill (1602). Segar distinguishes that acts such as manslaughter, burning of houses, and public violence were “proper to men of war” but were “punishable” when they were “committed contrarie to discipline Militarie.”26 Yet Henry’s answer averts an important aspect of the soldiers’ argument, namely that as king, he bears the burden of moral responsibility for just cause and due proportion. The debate ends inconclusively, but for spectators and readers it reveals that, for all his rhetoric substantiating the righteousness of cause, when Henry is directly confronted about whether his “cause may not be good,” he is unable to answer the question surrounding the political morality of his war. Publicly, Henry circumvents the political morality of war—in the opening council scene, Ely pivots the discussion to ideals of ancestral honor, and in the plebian debate, Henry represses issues of just cause by focusing on personal responsibility for military conduct in war. Privately, Henry cannot avoid his moral responsibility as king. In the only soliloquy 25 Theodor Meron, Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford UP, 1998), 16. 26 London, 1602, EEBO, B2r.

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Henry performs in the play, he reflects on the consequences of public skepticism about the just cause of his war: O God of Battailes, steele my Souldiers hearts, Possesse them not with feare: Take from them now The sence of reckoning of the th’oppsed numbers: Pluck their hearts from them. Not to day, O Lord, O not to day, thinke not upon the fault My Father made in compassing the Crowne. (TLN 2076–81)

The prayer focuses on two of Henry’s interrelated fears. First, Henry believes the soldiers’ courage will be weakened by their doubts about the justness of his cause and their subsequent fears of “reckoning,” or accounting to God after death for their conduct in war.27 Second, the lines asking God to “Thinke not upon the fault / My Father made in compassing the Crowne,” uncover his fear that the war may not be morally just because he may not even rightfully hold the Crown of England. The prayer lays bare the importance that Henry has placed on his bloodline. The inference to the War of the Roses questions the legitimacy of Henry’s military campaign and opens up a dichotomy between Henry’s motivations for the war based on his noble blood and his moral responsibility for engaging English subjects in war in the name of his ancestral rights. The pairing of Henry’s debate with the soldiers and his private prayer displays how Henry accepts Williams and Bates’ opinions as instances of honest counsel. Through plebian counsel, Henry better understands his responsibility to his subjects because he comes to know those whom he leads and serves. In medieval and early modern England, the counsel of citizens typically occurred through the presentation of petitions, delivered in parliament or directly to the monarch.28 Petitions could be rhetorically managed, and yet the debate with the soldiers reveals that Henry cannot dissociate himself from his political responsibility to his subjects. The debate enlightens him that he has led his soldiers into war and must unite them in his cause if they are to win the battle. Just as Henry had managed public policy through the process of counsel in the opening of the play, Henry uses plebian counsel as a medium of government and responds to the concerns of his soldiers in a public speech before the Battle of Agincourt—the St. Crispin’s Day speech. 27 OED “Reckoning” 1.a. 28 Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (U of Wisconsin P, 1993), 57–79.

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Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech is filled with rhetoric of male aristocratic honor earned through scars, wounds, and blood, but it also uncovers for spectators and readers Henry’s inability to understand the class disparity that was integral to vainglorious wars of expansion. The speech may be divided into two halves; in the first part, Henry strives to dismiss concerns of a vainglorious imperial war, and the second part confronts the soldiers’ concern for their lives. Henry attempts to dispel the sentiment of a vainglorious war by professing, “I am not covetous for gold” and “if it be a sinne to couet Honor, / I am the most offending Soule alive” (TLN 2187, 2191–2). Yet, Henry covets both honor and land, characterizing his actions as stemming from one of the most hated vices of the sixteenth century—covetousness. Throughout the play, Henry’s covetousness is associated with his desire for the Crown of France, coveting power, territory, and fame. Many just war theorists warned against dynastic wars because they were seen as motived by private interests in territorial expansion and directly contrasted with the monarch’s duty to protect his subjects. As Desiderius Erasmus contended in On War Against the Turks, monarchs who pursued “collecting the sinews of war” neglected their duties to “plan for the betterment of human life, which is the basis of everything else and which applies with equal importance to everybody.”29 Henry has chosen to collect the “sinews of war”—or the Crown of France—through the bloodshed of his people. The speech is undercut by the play’s dual use of blood imagery as a vulgar covetousness of honor based on disputed bloodlines and succession and the human cost of war. In the second part of the speech, Henry relies on a rhetoric of fraternity to unite himself with his subjects through bloodshed. Henry acknowledges that the men are his subjects, yet he joins them into an aristocratic alliance in which bloodshed in battle elevates their condition: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, For he to day that sheds his blood with me, Shal be my brother: be he ne’re so vile, This day shall gentle his Condition. (TLN 2222–5)

The speech is typically seen as Henry’s masterpiece of persuasion, uniting his men in an act of social leveling that allows each man to share in the 29 Quoted in Lester K. Born, ed. Education of a Christian Prince (W. W. Norton, 1936), 8–9.

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honor of victory as part of Henry’s “band of brothers” and prove their gentleness (or blood degree) through their scars and wounds. Speaking of Henry V , Wayne Rebhorn observes, although “Agincourt constitutes a genuine military victory, Shakespeare shapes his play to make it due to Hal’s rhetorical masterpiece, the Saint Crispin’s Day speech, as much as to battlefield heroics.”30 This interpretation is problematic, though, because Henry outright acknowledges that the glory of battle will not be apportioned equally. Henry imagines that any soldier, regardless of rank, may be part of history and “strip his sleeue and shew his skarres” (TLN 2214). Yet, when he envisions the “story a good man [shall] teach his son,” he only names those of rank, “Harry the King. Bedford and Exeter, / Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester” who will be remembered for their great deeds (TLN 2110, 2215–16, and 2218).31 Regardless of the rhetorical power of the speech, Henry can neither escape the bloodletting of the imminent battle nor erase the social reality that class fluidity—which he promises—is short-lived for the common soldier. Any remorse Henry feels for the common soldier who dies in battle seems to evaporate at its conclusion, as he recalls how “Edward the Duke of York, the Earle of Suffolk, / Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam Esquire” lost their lives, but “None else of name” (TLN 2715–17). Henry reduces the common soldiers to unnamed men of little import, and his dismissal for the loss of their nonaristocratic lives registers a disturbing effect. The list recalls the challenge Williams’ counsel has posed to Henry’s efforts to dominate the way the war is perceived, and the conclusion of the battle reinforces a sense of uneasiness about the human costs of militarization. Henry justifies his war through ideals of aristocratic honor and providentialism, and the play’s depiction of English victory depends upon these values. Henry’s providential values are staged as the stabilizing feature of strong government and military leadership. Agincourt is won because “God thy Arme was here,” and the weight Henry has placed on the war’s outcome to determine just cause can be ascertained because “God fought for us” (TLN, 2720 and 2735). Significantly, Henry’s providential beliefs are not contrary to Elizabethan public opinion. Beliefs in providentialism were part of English Protestant propaganda, and spectators and 30 The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Cornell UP, 1995), 62. 31 For a reading of this speech and the interconnection between history and remembrance, see Walsh, 204–5.

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readers would have recognized providential ideals that still were viewed as quintessential to the aristocratic Elizabethan political world. The play exposes a heavy irony within the ideals Henry uses to gloss over the exploitation of the conscripted soldiers who face deadly consequences in war. The final chorus completes the play’s deconstructive project, exposing the limits of courtly advice to rule in the interests of the public good. Like many histories, Henry V appears to celebrate the honorable achievements of the great. However, rather than ending the play with a portrayal of Henry’s idealized heroism, the Chorus undercuts the military success with a gloomy picture of England’s future. The Chorus recounts: Henry the Sixt, in Infant Bands crown’d King Of France and England, did this King succed: Whose State so many had the managing, That they lost France, and made his England bleed. (TLN 3254–7)

Bloodshed was a condition of Henry’s military achievements, and the play’s final vision is a remembrance of the English men who were made to “bleed” in the hope of maintaining France. Henry’s achievement is a hollow one, for his son and heir squanders his best legacy.32 While the play’s first council scene praises ancestral bloodlines as a justification of war, the epilogue closes the play with a stress on blood and the needless human loss that resulted from Henry’s military pursuits of ancestral glory. The entire military endeavor pales in comparison to the greatness of its loss, for Henry VI’s reign saw not only the loss of France but also the internal political conflicts that drove the peers of the land into civil war and further bloodshed in the Wars of the Roses. Just war theory and its tenets of the counseled monarch, just cause, and due proportion help us to understand the political ideology of Henry V . Shakespeare’s representation of counsel and war emphasizes how the monarch held an interconnected responsibility for determining just cause and due proportion through its focus on Henry’s responsibility to the lives of his subjects. Throughout the play, Shakespeare juxtaposes various definitions of blood—from the shedding of blood in battle to the inferential meanings related to family, lineage, and ancestral rights—in ways that directly question the human costs of wars of expansion. In one respect, the play focuses on the monarchical responsibility of the king 32 For a different reading of this scene, see Dutton, 198, and Walsh, 205.

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to care for his subjects. Henry voices this responsibility in the opening council scene, but the scene also illustrates how the bloodshed of war can easily be subsumed within issues of blood right and aristocratic honor. Henry is confronted by this dichotomy in the plebian counsel scene, and he is unable to escape from his monarchical responsibility to his lowerclass subjects, as represented by the common soldier. Counsel—whether courtly advice or plebian counsel—is shown to be a strategic performance by the monarch that may be used to publicly manage his authority rather than rule for the common good. In this respect, Shakespeare captures the socio-political dynamics of class, particularly its consciousness of a specific class of men, the conscripted soldier, who must shed his blood in battle. From Henry’s opening question regarding the blood loss in war to his debate with his soldiers on wars fought for blood right, to the conflicted ideals of honor earned through military bloodshed, the play explores the dynamics of solidarity and class difference that defined early modern English society. Through its invocations of due proportion and representations of conscripted soldiers, Henry V produces a sustained account of the interconnected issues of monarchical rule, just war, counsel, and class that bring out the class disparity of what defined the best interests of the commonwealth and the limitations of political leaders to act in service to the people’s welfare.

CHAPTER 15

Sexual Violence as Class Conflict: Seizing Patriarchal Privilege in Early Modern English Drama Ronda Arab

Rape and other forms of sexual violence are frequent motifs in early modern English drama and poetry, but despite many studies of the topic,1 1 See Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Suzanne Gossett, “Best Men are Molded Out of Faults: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama,” ELR 14.3 (1984), 305–27; Amy Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2009); Leah S. Marcus, “The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault,” Criticism 25.4 (1983), 293–327; Carolyn D. Williams, “Silence like a Lucrece Knife: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape,” The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993), 93–110; the essays in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (Palgrave, 2001); and Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (ACMR, 2003).

R. Arab (B) Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_15

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there appears to be little or no work on the class dynamics of sexual violence as represented on the English stage. In this essay on the intersection of sexual violence with class relationships, I examine instances in drama showing sexual violence or threats of sexual violence being used as an expression of class conflict or competition, most specifically, as a means to level class distinctions between men. These instances show lowborn men using sexual violence against women of higher status to seize or assert power, authority, and status within a patriarchal society wherein masculine privilege is not equally distributed among men. These dramatic examples of sexual violence also demonstrate low-born men attempting to render gender privilege stronger than class privilege, as they assert their perceived masculine superiority over women whose class status is greater than theirs. Since the late twentieth century, feminist social theorists have largely understood sexual violence as a crime of power rather than a crime of passion, a theorization that continues to provide an essential critical vantage point for studies of rape and its representations. Theorists such as Susan Brownmiller posited rape as a means within a patriarchal society whereby men control women through fear; however, while I largely agree with this assessment, as a universal statement, it can seem to present rape as an immutable transhistorical principle.2 Roy Porter challenges Brownmiller’s transhistorical assessment of rape, writing that it leaves out “how gender relations and gender politics differ radically from society to society.”3 Porter, while acknowledging the validity of the theory that rape is an act of power by men over women, argues that rape was not prevalent in traditional societies such as early modern England’s because such a society “was so securely a man’s world that it did not have much need for the ‘surplus repression’ that endemic rape threats would have conferred.”4 In his view, rape as a mechanism of control over women was, essentially, unnecessary in early modern England because other modes of patriarchal control were so effective. Porter’s perspective is based on a naïve and unfounded speculation that rape and sexual assault in early modern Europe were rare occurrences; he himself acknowledges that “we

2 Against Our Will (Bantam, 1976). 3 “Rape—Does It Have a Historical Meaning?” in Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy

Porter (Basil Blackwell, 1986), 230. 4 223.

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have absolutely no way of knowing with tolerable accuracy how much sexual violence went on in the Europe of two, four, or six centuries ago.”5 His perspective certainly does not take into account the plethora of literary representations of sexual violence in early modern English drama and poetry, which in themselves suggest that rape and sexual assault were by no means merely marginal to the ideologies and practices of early modern English patriarchy. The historical approaches of Garthine Walker and Karen Bamford are more helpful than Porter’s. I agree with Walker that “the meaning of rape is historically and culturally specific” and follow Bamford, who adopts “a feminist understanding of sexual assault as a function of culture, rather than of nature; of a socially constructed male dominance, rather than a biologically determined impulse.”6 What neither Brownmiller nor Porter considers is that sexual violence against women could be a mode of behavior and a means of wielding power between men, even while it always also functioned as a masculinist assertion of power over women. Bamford, in her study of various representational patterns of rape and sexual threat, does consider sexual violence against women as an act between men and notes “a pattern reflecting a patriarchal structure in which women, defined as male property, act as tokens of exchange between men.” While sexual violence done to a woman by a man is always, in my view, an act of power by the man over the woman, part of my examination of the intersection of class relations among men and sexual violence against women will consider sexual violence as, in Bamford’s words, “something men do to other men’s property.”7 This perspective might perhaps be seen to dangerously replicate dominant legal and social discourses and practices that located the crime of rape as one against male property rather than against the person of the raped woman.8 My intention is not, however, to replicate the logic of early

5 220. 6 Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,”

Gender & History 10.1 (1998), 5. Bamford, 3. 7 Bamford, 7, original italics. 8 See Nazife Bashar on the “law’s concern with the protection of male property, rather

than... with the welfare of women” (29–30). “Rape in England between 1550 and 1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance, ed. London Feminist History Group (Pluto Press, 1983). For earlier history, see also James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (U of Chicago P, 1987).

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modern rape laws, but rather to use this important recognition to understand the historical and cultural specifics of how and why sexual violence was wielded as a tool of power in early modern England. Recognizing the significance of rape as an act of power by one man against another man allows for an intersectional analysis of the class and gender dynamics of rape when the social status of the parties in question is unequal. Understanding sexual violence as a tool of power between men, as well as between men and women, becomes particularly important when we consider that the patriarchal sex/gender system of early modern England functioned within a highly stratified classed society, wherein not all men had equal access to patriarchal or masculine privilege. There was a distinct gap between lower-class men’s privilege as men and their lack of privilege due to their social status. One way this was evident was in the lack of sexual access that low-born men had to high-born women; class distinctions between men and women in early modern England rendered certain women entirely off-limits sexually to men of lower classes. Low-born men also rarely had authority over women whose social status was higher than their own, despite their putative gender superiority. The existence of class hierarchies meant that male supremacy over women was by no means complete and total. My focus is on dramatic representations wherein rape and/or the threat of sexual violence can be seen as a way in which lowborn men attempted to readjust the hierarchies of power within their worlds. In these plays, sexual violence is a way for low-born men to assert power over more privileged men by violating “their” women; it is a way of leveling class distinctions between men. It is also a way of asserting masculinist entitlement over women who possess greater class status and privilege than the low-born violator. Sexual violence, it is evident from these literary works, was perceived as a weapon not only within gender struggles but also within class conflict. Rape as a weapon of battle is a form of sexual violence toward women that also functions as a means of asserting power and mastery over men. Sexual violence toward women in the context of war underscores the status of women and their sexuality as property, and seizing that property can function as an act of violent, aggressive dominance by one man or a group of men over another. It can also have significant class implications. In early modern drama, perhaps the most well-known example of sexual assault wielded as a weapon of war is in Shakespeare’s Henry V , when at the gates of Harfleur, King Henry threatens the town governor with a graphically detailed description of merciless rape and pillage should the

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French not surrender immediately. King Henry suggests in his speech that he cannot control his common soldiers once they are inflamed; violent pillage by the “fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart”9 is presented as the satisfaction of an appetite for “heady murder, spoil and villany.”10 The class politics of the scene are fairly obvious: King Henry conveniently leverages a common early modern trope, that of the violent and sexually rapacious lower-class soldier, in order to distance himself from the horrific threat of rape that he, as king and commander, is in fact using as a weapon over the French enemy should they not concede English dominance on their own. By claiming that he is incapable of controlling his men, the common soldiers, Henry signals to them that he is forfeiting his responsibility to stop them from raping and pillaging; he is essentially condoning or even encouraging that behavior. The trope of the rapacious lower-class soldier weaponized by King Henry is especially common in dramatic representations of peasant or laborer rebellions. Both Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2 and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Part 1 use the trope to present rebellious lowborn men as a potentially violent threat to the wives and daughters of their betters; in both plays, the artisan rebels rape or threaten to rape the wives of the elite men they challenge. In these two historical plays featuring rebellions, as though to shore up the idea of low-born men as driven by appetite, the sexual use of women’s bodies is to some degree conflated with the seizure and consumption of food and other goods, sometimes by the rebels themselves and sometimes by the authorities who oppose them. But while the pillaging of goods and the threats of sexual violence against women are depicted as acts of class warfare that involve what early modern patriarchal society perceived as male-owned property, the logic underpinning these acts differs in some significant ways. When rebels appropriate goods in these plays, they appropriate the privilege of consumption. However, when they sexually threaten the wives and daughters of elite men, they seize and leverage powerful, well-known, well-established tools of oppression and intimidation that elite men are perceived to use against their social inferiors. These plays suggest that the rapacious actions of low-born rebels against elite women take place within

9 Shakespeare, Henry V. The Norton Shakespeare Volume 1: Early Plays and Poems, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (W.W. Norton, 2016), 3.4.11. 10 3.4.32.

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an existing social context that allowed elite men to assert their social and political privilege by sexually threatening women of lower status. The plays reflect the fear that low-born men will sexually threaten elite women in order to leverage the same tools of power used by elite men against the lower classes. Henry VI Part 2 and Edward IV depict rebels seizing or desiring to seize two forms of elite male privilege: the privilege of substantial, unlimited consumption, achieved by raiding goods and appropriating food, drink, and land, and the privilege of access to elite women. In Henry VI Part 2, the rebel leader, Jack Cade, commands that “of the city’s cost, the Pissing Conduit [will] run nothing but claret wine”11 and proclaims that “seven halfpenny loaves [will be sold] for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops”; as well, under his reign, “All the realm shall be in common.”12 Similarly, in Edward IV , the rural laborers who threaten the city of London anticipate looting “silks and satins,” “chains of gold and plate,” and tanks full of “Hippocras”13 when they break past the city walls. These depictions of appetite-driven rebels can be read critically in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they draw on dominant early modern ideas about low-born men which stigmatized them as closer to the animal world than elite men and less able to control their corporeal appetites. Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, has described the rebellion as “the archetypal lower class revolt both in its motives and in its ludicrousness,” notes the “comic humbleness of the rebels’ social origins,” and labels the rebels “buffoons.” On the other hand, the rebels’ goals can also be seen, as Michael Bristol writes, as “the cogent expression of the hopeful desires of underprivileged men and women,”14 and as such may have elicited sympathy in audience members well aware of the deep disparities between the elite and the poor in access to the necessities of life. Whether seen as sympathetic or dangerous, the rebels in these plays aim to

11 Shakespeare, The First Part of the Contention (Henry VI Part 2), The Norton Shakespeare Volume 1: Early Plays and Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (W.W. Norton, 2008), 4.6.2–3. 12 4.2.60–1. 13 Heywood, 2.68–71. 14 Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebel-

lion,” Representations 1(1983), 23; Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (Methuen, 1985), 88.

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level the class distinctions that inhere in the unequal distribution of goods; they fight for the privilege of physical comfort and satiated appetites. The rebels also level sexual threats against the elite women of the city, who are, to some extent, also positioned as goods to be seized and consumed. But while women are conflated with pillaged goods in verbal threats, the logic of the sexual threats made by the rebels operates with a distinct difference. Henry VI Part 2 makes clear that rape is more about seizing elite power than the satisfaction of a corporeal appetite. When a London sergeant complains to Jack Cade that Dick the butcher has raped his wife, Dick’s justification is that the sergeant “would have ‘rested [arrested] me,” so he “went and entered [his] action in his wife’s proper house.”15 The rape of the sergeant’s wife is figured here as an appropriation of judicial authority, the act of a low-born man seizing the sergeant’s authority to arrest and turning it back onto the sergeant himself. Cade maintains the language of legal action as he encourages the butcher: “Dicke follow thy suit in her common place.”16 Cade himself uses sexual violence as a way to wield power over the highest elites of the kingdom, announcing that “The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me tribute. There shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they have it; men shall hold of me in capite.”17 Cade’s proclamation is, of course, the seizing of droit de seigneur, and his claim, along with his targeting of the “proudest peer[s],” suggests the reversal of an existing hierarchy that not only allows sexual predation as a privilege of elite birth, but also authorizes its use as a mark of one’s place in the hierarchy of men. That Cade perceives his own sexual violence and that of his rebels as part of a correction of the existing class-based oppressions they suffer is made even clearer shortly afterward. Just after the commons have forsaken Cade and the rebel cause, Cade complains to his former followers: I thought ye would never have given out these arms till you had recovered 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,

15 The First Part of the Contention, 4.7.123–4. 16 4.7.124. 17 4.7.110–14.

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take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces.18

For Cade, raping elite women is payback for living “in slavery to the nobility,” who “ravish [their] wives and daughters before [their] faces”; it is a tool of revenge that functions to demonstrate incontrovertibly to the former authorities which class of men now hold power. The rebellion scenes in the first part of Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV are similar in what they demonstrate about sexual violence against women as an assertion of power by one faction of men over another. In urging the London citizens to battle against the poorer, rural artisan rebels, the Lord Mayor articulates what is at stake: “Preserve our goods, our children, and our wives.”19 That he conflates the goods of the city with the bodies of citizen wives renders all the more ominous the extensive, anticipatory pre-raid chatter of the artisan rebels who anticipate looting “silks and satins,” “chains of gold and plate,” and tanks full of “Hippocras”20 when they break past the city walls. That wives and maids will be spoils of battle alongside material goods is made perfectly clear when the rebel Spicing calls for a proclamation as they enter London “That maidenheads be valued at just nothing! And sack be sold by the sallet!”21 Spicing sounds much like Cade here; to the rebels, female bodies are part of the wealth of the city, and they will seize them freely. But the wealth that is female bodies has a greater degree of symbolic value than the material goods of the city, which offer largely (though not entirely) use value. Ravaged city wives and maids demonstrate the rebels’ dominance over the defenders of London and King Edward IV; they testify to the disruption of male citizen control over the most intimate and valuable aspects of their privilege within the sex/gender system. This is underscored when their leader, Lord Falconbridge, announces to Matthew Shore, goldsmith, that he will have his wife, Jane, in his bed that night: “Shore, listen me. Thy wife is mine, that’s flat. / This night, in thine own house, she sleeps

18 4.7.168–73. 19 Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV , ed. Richard

Rowland (Manchester UP, 2005), 4.95. 20 2.68–71. 21 5.70–1.

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with me.”22 Matthew and Jane Shore are an esteemed and exemplary citizen couple, and Jane has a reputation for beauty and goodness—as Falconbridge comments, “Shore’s wife [is] the flower of London for her beauty”23 —so Falconbridge’s sexual possession of her would symbolically signify the triumph of the rebels over the citizenry. Notably, Falconbridge declares that Jane will sleep with him in Shore’s “own house”; what matters here is the insult to and degradation of Matthew Shore in the very place where he should be master. As in Henry VI Part 2, Edward IV makes it clear that the threat of low-born men to more elite women operates within an existing social context wherein elite men are already a sexual threat to women below them on the status hierarchy. While the rebels are a rout of rural artisans and laborers, Falconbridge, their leader, is a lord. On the one hand, his claim over Jane Shore reflects the rebels’ assertion of mastery over the defenders of the city. However, given that Falconbridge’s social status is considerably higher than Jane’s, the logic of his claim to her follows the social logic we saw Cade and his men directly seeking to upturn— the privilege of elite men to assert their social superiority by demanding sexual access to women below them hierarchically. Falconbridge’s claim reinforces the very hierarchy that the low-born rebels in both Henry VI Part 2 and Edward IV attempt to upturn when they threaten to rape women who are their social betters. The logic of elite male privilege is writ even larger in the main plot of the play following the scenes of rebellion, which tells the tragic story of Jane and Matthew Shore’s downfall after Jane Shore’s abduction by King Edward, who coerces her to leave her husband and become his mistress. King Edward’s seizure of sexual privilege, even more so than that attempted by Lord Falconbridge, acts as a counterpoint to the play’s earlier deployment of the trope of the rapacious low-born men who threaten the elite women of their betters. King Edward’s act of sexual sovereignty is a reflection of the ultimate masculine authority he possesses, a degree of power low-born men have no access to unless they rebel and seize it by force. That sexual violence against women could be a tool of class rebellion by low-born men is also evident in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is fraught with acts and threats

22 4.46–7. 23 4.41.

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of sexual violence, largely from elite men toward elite women,24 but social fear of violence toward elite women by rebellious low-born men lurks below the surface within the rude mechanicals subplot, where it is largely played for comic purposes. The artisan laborers’ anxiety about offending the aristocratic audience with their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe obliquely references class tensions among rural artisans during the 1590s, a period of economic hardship, especially in the cloth-making regions (Bottom is a weaver). As Theodore Leinwand has argued, the rehearsal scenes register the oppressive necessity for the artisans to defuse any suggestion of threat and to pay deference to their superiors.25 When Bottom argues that “ladies cannot abide” the sight of a raised sword and finds a solution by having “the prologue say that we will do no harm with our swords,”26 the play echoes and undoes the threat of the violent, rebellious working man who would sexually threaten elite women; the amateur actors rewrite the script of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in order to avoid the merest suggestion of sexual aggression. Swords, of course, are phallic, and part of the humor of the moment is in the penis joke. As well, the right to carry a sword was the traditional entitlement of the gentleman—when Bottom and his men insist that their swords are harmless, they demonstrate that they are not in any way trying to seize elite male privilege, sexual or otherwise. I’d like to shift away from representations of sexual violence as a tool of class conflict within artisan rebellions to sexual violence within the household. Elite male sexual privilege was most commonly practiced in the household, where young female servants were vulnerable to predatory masters or the male relatives of the master.27 While such elite sexual predation reflects the well-acknowledged dual class and gender privilege 24 See Laura Levine, “Rape, Repetition, and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callahan, 210–28 (Cambridge UP, 1996). 25 “I Believe We Must Leave the Killing Out: Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler, 145–64 (Garland, 1998). 26 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks. The Arden Shakespeare (Methuen, 1979), 3.1.11; 3.1.15. See also Ronda Arab, “What Kind of Man is Bottom?” in Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (Susquehanna UP, 2011) for a discussion of how the mechanicals undo the violence of elite men, such as Theseus, who “woo’d [Hyppolyta] with [his] sword.” 27 See R.C. Richardson, “A Maidservant’s Lot,” History Today 60.2 (2010), 25–31.

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male household heads held, less attention has been given to sexual threats made by workingmen toward women who were their social betters and held authority over them, either directly in day-to-day operations of the household or workplace, or simply by means of their higher social status. These less-observed literary representations allow us a broader picture of how sexual violence against women in early modern England operated as a means by which men of different classes asserted or attempted to assert power over each other. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus provides a telling example. When Robin, a hostler at an inn, steals one of Dr. Faustus’s magic books, he plans to use it not only to make all the maidens in the parish dance naked in front of him but also, significantly, to cuckold his master: “Yes, my master and mistress shall find that I can read—he for his forehead, she for her private study. She’s born to bear with me, or else my art fails.”28 As Eve Sedgwick has cogently theorized, “‘to cuckold’ is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man”; the relationship between the cuckold and the cuckolder is “necessarily hierarchical in structure, with an ‘active’ participant who is clearly in the ascendancy over the ‘passive’ one.”29 Cuckolding his master reverses the power differential in Robin’s master-servant relationship, granting him supremacy. Notably, Robin’s comment that “my master and mistress shall find that I can read” underscores the hostler’s sense that the master and mistress do not think as highly of him as he feels is his due; he believes they assume he is illiterate, a widespread class distinguisher between the low-born and those of higher status. The remark hints at Robin’s class resentment, which he will enact by assaulting the mistress and cuckolding the master. Robin’s desire for sexual access to his master’s wife mirrors Faustus’s use of his magic to bring forth Helen of Troy as his paramour. Allegedly the most beautiful woman in history and the ultimate trophy of male competition and war, Helen of Troy appeases Faustus’s desire for mastery over all men, his desire to be a “mighty god” and “great emperor of the world.”30 On a smaller scale, when Robin offers to use his magic to give his fellow hostler Rafe sexual access to Nan Spit, the kitchen maid, his

28 Dr. Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New Mermaids, 1989), 6.16–18. 29 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia UP, 1985),

49, 50, original italics. 30 Dr. Faustus, 1.62, 4.105.

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presumed ability to do so gives him authority over a fellow who should be his peer; this is solidified by the differential in the social value of Robin’s conquest—the master’s wife—and Rafe’s—a lower-class servant woman. These acts of sexual supremacy are not about sexual satisfaction; they are about the hierarchical authority of men over men within a society ruled by men. They are about competition between men, with women functioning as prizes and collateral damage. In the household workshop featured in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, threats of sexual violence toward the master’s wife function differently. Women in the work sphere, particularly the wives of master craftsmen and shopkeepers, who frequently shared authority with their husbands, often had positions of authority over subordinate male workers in the shop. Rather than as a form of power reversal between men of different classes, master and working man, the threats in The Shoemaker’s Holiday function to reverse the power a master’s wife potentially held over male workers in the household shop, so in this sense, the intentionality of the act is one of power by a man over a woman. Its purpose, however, is to level the hierarchical distinctions between master and workmen. The master shoemaker’s wife in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Margery Eyre, demonstrates throughout the play her knowledge of the business affairs of the shop, but when she attempts to assert authority over the journeymen in the shop, the journeymen object, and the protest of one, Firk, takes the barely veiled form of a threat of sexual violence: “If she take me down, I’ll take her up—yea, and take her down, too, a buttonhole lower.”31 “Down” references a “woman’s supine coital position,”32 and Firk’s threat overtly articulates that taking the master’s wife down sexually functions as a means of putting her in her place, “a buttonhole lower.” Firk’s name, as well, means “beat” with the innuendo of “copulate with” or “fuck,” as is particularly apparent when he sees off a fellow shoemaker to war with the French by encouraging him to “firk the basa mon cues.”33 The logic of sexual domination toward the master’s wife is similar to that toward the French, England’s longstanding, traditional enemy, with the sexualizing of violence a means of asserting the “rightfulness” of a relationship of supremacy. Transferring the logic of such

31 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr (W.W. Norton, 1990), 7.31–2. 32 Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (Athlone Press, 1997). 33 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 1.219.

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sexual economies to the gender relations within the household workshop helped keep gender hierarchies intact; 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 often stuck in their occupational positions, without the opportunity to become masters.34 A good part of the appeal of The Shoemaker’s Holiday is its offer of a fantasy of a horizontal community between masters and journeymen,35 and Firk’s sexually aggressive hostility toward the master’s wife reflects the workman’s desire to instantiate the fantasy of equal relations between men of different class interests. His aggression comes at moments when the master shoemaker leans toward taking the advice of his wife rather than that of his journeymen, and its function is to insist that it is not the wife but the journeyman who shares authority with the master.36 As Sedgwick writes, “men’s bonds with women are meant to be in a subordinate, complementary, and instrumental relation to bonds with other men.”37 Firk must take down the master’s wife because her authority in the household workshop competes with his relationship with his master; that the master’s wife has authority over him belies the fantasy that he is his master’s equal, or near equal. The journeyman’s threat toward the master’s wife is a compensatory act meant to assert male superiority during an instance within which contradictions in the sex/gender system are made obvious by the mistress’s authority over the male workers in the household production unit she shares responsibility for with her husband. A final example of a low-born man threatening violence toward a highborn woman in order to challenge the class hierarchies that oppress him is found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest . Prospero presents his enslavement

34 In early modern England, it was becoming increasingly difficult for journeymen to achieve the status and relative autonomy of an independent master craftsmen as the traditional guild structure weakened. See George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Frank and Cass, 1963), and Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion (Columbia UP, 1987). 35 See David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)” in Staging the Renaissance, ed. Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (Routledge, 1991). 36 See Ronda Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001), 182–212. 37 51.

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of Caliban in simple cause-and-effect terms: after Caliban attempts to rape Miranda, Prospero concludes that Caliban is irredeemably savage and must be denied freedom. To Prospero, Caliban’s attempted assault is an act of violation against the honor of his child by one who is “capable of all ill” and on whom “any print of goodness wilt not take”: “thy vile race / … had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou / Deservedly confined into this rock, / Who hadst deserved more than a prison.”38 Prospero separates himself and Miranda as the “good natures” who can “not abide to be with [Caliban]” and casts Caliban as a savage beast who is incapable of understanding and enacting the European values that they embody. Caliban’s account of the rape, however, presents it in very different terms. To Caliban, the attempt to have sexual relations with Miranda is a violent bid to seize back control of the island by populating it with his offspring: “Oh ho! Oh ho! Would’t had been done! / … I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans.”39 Caliban, it seems, has learned European principles of powerholding from Prospero, alongside his language lessons; he recognizes that according to those principles, the island is his (“This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me”40 ), and producing heirs is an effective way to solidify his claim and legacy. Caliban’s desire to use Miranda’s reproductive capacity is very much like Prospero’s dynastic plans for her with Ferdinand, the son and heir of the King of Naples, with, of course, the important distinction that Prospero finds a way to get Miranda’s consent for what Caliban would take possession of through force. Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda has more to do with his relationship with Prospero than his relationship with Miranda. After Caliban’s attempt to copulate with Miranda, the relationship between Caliban and Prospero shifts for Prospero, and he casts Caliban in the position of absolute Other; however, it is clear that prior to this shift, theirs was

38 The Tempest, ed. J.F. Bernard and Paul Yachnin (Broadview Press, 2021), 1.2.355–6; 1.2.361–5. 39 1.2.356–8. 40 1.2.334–5.

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by no means an equal or horizontal relationship. Caliban was a member of Prospero’s household and was treated kindly, but he appears to have been like a servant or apprentice, subordinate to a patriarchal master who acted as both teacher and father-like authority figure. Caliban’s assault on Miranda is an act of class violence that serves his ambition for self-mastery and challenges Prospero’s sovereignty on the island. He never denies the attempted rape nor tries to present it as anything other than an effort to mix his blood with that of Prospero and Miranda, an act that would reverse or eradicate the power differential between himself and Prospero. His attempted rape is an attempt to seize the privilege of using the reproductive capacities of an elite woman to facilitate and solidify the type of social power that Prospero owns and which Caliban wants for himself. When Caliban attempts to forcibly procreate with Miranda, he acts to level the class hierarchy that situates Miranda and Prospero above him.41 As an act of power by men over women, rape has largely been theorized through the analytic lens of gender. The analytics of gender, however, are insufficient for fully understanding the violence of all sexual assaults; an intersectional analysis is often necessary, one that includes class, as I have shown here, or other analytic lenses, such as race, as Peter Lewis’s essay in this collection demonstrates. When a class analysis is applied, it becomes clear that sexual assault in early modern England could be an act of power by men over other men, as well as an act of power over women. Since not all men in early modern England had equal access to masculine privilege, male supremacy over women in these societies was never complete and contradiction free: in highly class-stratified societies, certain elite women will have status, privilege, and authority that some men do not have. The gap for lower-class men between their privilege as men and their lack of privilege due to their social status is significant for understanding the relationship between sexual violence and class. In early modern England, sexual assault could be a violent tool used by lower-class men against their social superiors, an act of class competition or class revolt aimed both at leveling or reversing hierarchies between men and at asserting gender superiority over elite women. The plays I’ve examined here reveal lowerclass men using sexual threats, boasts, or outright violence toward women who are their social superiors in order to assert a degree of authority or 41 Given that Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, was from Algiers, Prospero’s assignment of Caliban to a lower-class position is also, arguably, influenced by his non-European ethnicity.

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superiority that was not granted to them by the hegemonic social order. Patriarchal conflict between men of different social strata is imagined in these plays to be fought out in triangulated and often violent relationships with women.

Index

Note: The page numbers followed by ‘n’ represent footnotes. A address terms. See Witch of Edmonton, The affect, 149, 150, 152 definition of, 152 disjunction of emotion and affect, 154–163 Africans, 21, 22, 25, 26, 33, 34, 67, 78. See also Moors Akhimie, Patricia, 9, 11, 20, 21, 31, 33 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare, 1623), 160 American Repertory Theater (Harvard), 62 anti-capitalist, 137, 142 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare, 1607), 154 Appel, Sara, 55 apprentices, 21, 24, 38, 39, 206, 209, 263

Arab, Ronda, 5, 10, 17, 223n11, 258n26 Archer, Ian W., 202 Aristoteles Master-Piece (Anon., 1684), 190 As You Like It (Shakespeare, 1599), 20n3, 28 B Bach, Rebecca Ann, 31n53 Baer, William C., 230–232 Bamford, Karen, 251 Banerjee, Rita, 242 Bannon, Steve, 64 Banton, Michael, 36 Barlow, Edward, 136 Barton, Anne, 240–241 Bashar, Nazife, 251n8 Beaumont, Francis, Masque of Flowers (Gray’s Inn, 1613), 33n55 beggar-nigglers. See whiteness, eroticization of

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Arab and L. Ellinghausen (eds.), Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6

265

266

INDEX

beggars anxieties about, 28 depiction of in Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars , 75, 76, 79, 81, 85, 87, 90, 91 in rogue literature, 6 social invisibility of, 23–25 Bennett, Jane, 130, 134, 140 Best, George, 26 blackened face, 20 blackface, 11, 23, 28, 32, 33, 82 blackness, 3, 9, 22–26, 27, 32–34, 104. See also blackface; whiteness association between chimney sweeps and, 20–24, 26, 27, 29, 32–34 in The Merchant of Venice, 35, 41, 44 Blake, Marsha Stephanie, 62 blood, 87 ancestral bloodline vs. bloodshed in Henry V , 233–237, 237–240, 241–248 and class structures, 1, 2, 184, 185, 196 and filiation, 76, 79, 91 in mixed-estate marriages, 183–185, 189, 197, 198 Bloodline, 185–187, 189, 190, 196, 197, 235, 238, 239, 242–245, 247 Bloom, Harold, 53 Bovilsky, Lara, 81n14 Brantley, Ben, 62 Brayton, Dan, 138, 139 Brenner, Robert, 77 Brexit, 112, 121, 123 Bristol, Michael, 4, 254 Brome, Richard, A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars (1641/42), 75–91 Browne, Thomas, 25

Brownmiller, Susan, 250, 251 Brown, Roger, 172 Burnett, Mark, 5 C California Shakespeare Theater, 61 Camus, Renaud, 66, 67 capitalism, 133. See also colonialism; Marxist analysis anxieties about effects of, 6 and climate change, 131, 133, 135–137, 142 emergence of, 7–10, 49, 79, 136, 142 and oppression, 55, 66, 125 racialized, 64, 72, 79, 132 representation of in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat , 60 capitalist, 138 capitalist society, 126 Carlson, Tucker, 67 Carnes, Nicholas, 70 Carpenter, James, 61 Carroll, William C., 6 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 115–117 Chakravarty, Urvashi, 8 Chapman, George, May Day (1604), 19–34 Charles II, 95, 105, 109 Chimney-sweepers Sad Complaint, and Humble Petition to the City of London, The (1663), 30 chimney sweeps. See May Day (Chapman, 1604) Chitty, Christopher, 94 Churchyard, Thomas, in TheMirror for Magistrates (1559), 207, 209, 211 citizen values, 208, 210, 214, 215 City of London, 29, 30, 201. See also Heywood, Thomas, Edward IV (1613)

INDEX

class, definition of, v–2 Cleland, Katharine, 195n26 Cleminson, Richard, 102 climate apocalypse, 141 climate change, 112, 121, 126 capitalism and, 130–133, 136, 139, 140, 142, 147 colonial expansion, 136 colonialism, 31 Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and, 94–105, 109, 110 emergence of, 7–8, 38, 46 and land use, 76, 77 and racism, 35–37, 41–45, 47, 49 and The Tempest , 131–134, 137–142 colonialist, 140 coloniality, 132, 133 colonial projects, 140 colonization, 140 colonizer, 139, 142 Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare, 1594), 21 Comins, Danforth, 62 Corredera, Vanessa, 36 Correll, Barbara, 191 Counsel, paradigm of centrality to stable government, 234 and the just war tradition in Henry V , 233–236, 238–240, 247–248 plebian counsel in Henry V , 240–247, 248 coverture, 184, 187, 188, 188, 189, 191, 194, 198 Cowell, John, The Interpreter (1607), 82 Craig, Daniel, 61, 64 Craik, Katherine A., 235 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 3 Cressy, David, 81n15, 186

267

Crown and City, relationship between. See Heywood, Thomas, Edward IV (1613) cuckoldry, 32, 69, 259–260 Cullingford, Benita, 27, 29, 29, 30 Cull, Marissa, 68 D Dadabhoy, Ambereen, 71, 72 Davidson, Jenny, 90 Dekker, Thomas Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600), 31 The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), 223, 260–261 The Witch of Edmonton (Dekker with John Ford and William Rowley, 1621), 165–181 Delahunty, Robert J., 234 De Pizan, Christine, The Fayt of Armes and of Chyvalry (1489), 239 Derrida, Jacques, 123n57 Dionne, Craig, 133, 133 Dowd, Michelle, 6, 10 Drakakis, John, 44 Dr. Faustus (Marlowe, c. 1592), 154, 259–261 Duane, Anna Mae, 27 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster, 1612–13), 185, 191, 195, 196 Duckert, Lowell, 139 Dutch Church Libel (1593), 38, 39 E ecocide, 129, 131, 133, 147. See also eco-socialism eco-socialism, 131, 131, 133, 147 Edward IV (Heywood, 1613), 199, 200, 202, 204, 206, 211–214 rebels as sexual threats in, 253–254, 255, 257–259

268

INDEX

Egan, Gabriel, 7 Elam, Keir, 157 Eliot, John, The Parlement of Pratlers (1593), 218, 225, 226 elite sexual predation, 258 Elizabeth I, 3, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46 orders for the expulsion of immigrants, 39 Elkins, Amy E., 121 Ellinghausen, Laurie, 6, 7 English Civil War, 95, 105, 108, 247 Erasmus, Desiderius, On War against the Turks (1530), 245 Erauso, Catalina/Antonio de, 94–98, 98–105, 109, 110 and transgender capacity, 97–98 Erickson, Amy Louise, 188 Eriksen, Peter, 71 Erondell, Peter, The French Garden (1605), 218, 227–228 Espinosa, Ruben, 71 ethnicity, 21, 36, 55, 263n41. See also religion; Romani Eustis, Oskar, 60

F Fair Maid of the Exchange, The (Anon., 1601–2), 218, 221–224 fairness. See whiteness Fanon, Frantz, 132 Fauconnier, Gilles, 27 Feerick, Jean, 27 femininity. See also reproduction, theories of; shop women blackness and, 25 Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and, 99, 102 Findlay, Polly, 36, 37, 41 Finn, Kavita, 213 Fitter, Chris, 4, 150, 151 Fleming, Juliet, 228, 230

Fletcher, John Henry VIII (with Shakespeare, 1613), 169 Women Pleased (c. 1620), 24 Foucault, Michel, 107, 151 Francisco, Timothy, 9, 12 Freedman, Paul, 79n11 Freidman, Spike, 54 Frith, Mary/Jack, 94, 105–110 and transgender capacity, 97–98

G Galston, William L., 71 Gamble, Joseph, 93n1 García, Francisco Vázquez, 102 Gardner, Lance, 62 Gaudet, Paul, 50 gender. See femininity; intersex; masculinity; reproduction, theories of; transgender Gentili, Alberico, 242 Gest, Justin, 59, 65 Getsy, David, 97 Gilman, Albert, 172 Giuliani, Rudy, 64, 65 Gold, Sam, 61–63 Gordon, Colin, 151 Gossett, Suzanne, 113, 114n10, 115n22, 118n30 Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 183n1, 184, 191, 191 Gowing, Laura, 220n7 Greenblatt, Stephen, 62, 63, 254 Greenfeld, Liah, 49 Green, Jesse, 62, 63 Green, Juana, 219 Grier, Miles P., 33 Grotius, Hugo, Mare Liberum (1609), 136 Guillory, John, 2 gypsies. See Romani

INDEX

H Habib, Imtiaz, 22, 34, 44, 45, 78n7 Hacket’s Rebellion (1591), 150 Haddon, Mark, The Porpoise (2019), 111 Hall, Kim F., 25n23, 43, 44, 46, 49–51, 55, 70, 71, 78, 79, 86n22, 100 on race in The Merchant of Venice, 35, 41, 44 Hall, Stuart, 72 Halpern, Richard, 7 Hamlet (Shakespeare, 1599–1601), 154 Hamlet (Shakespeare, 1599–1601), 58, 62, 63 Harding, Vanessa, 220–221 Harman, Graham, 134 Harris, Barbara J., 188n13 Harrison, William, The Description of England (1577), 150n3, 185–187 Harvey, William, Anatomical Exercitations, Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653), 190 Hendricks, Margo, 10, 80, 80, 91n25 Heng, Geraldine, 78n8 Henry III, 108 Henry VIII (Fletcher and Shakespeare, 1613), 169 Henry VI Part 2 (Shakespeare, 1594), rebels as sexual threats in, 253, 254–255, 255–257 Henry V (Shakespeare, c. 1599), counsel and just war in, 233–239, 240–248 sexual assault as a weapon of war in, 252–253 Herbert, Thomas, Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique, 26

269

hermaphroditism. See Frith, Mary/ Jack Heymont, George, 62 Heywood, Thomas, Edward IV (1613), 199–204, 206–213, 215, 253–254, 256, 257–260 History of King Richard the Third (More, 1513), 199, 206 history plays, 5, 15, 200–202, 204, 206, 211–213, 213, 214 Hogue, Jason C., 141 Hornback, Robert, 27 Howard, Jean E., 5, 7, 10, 23, 135, 219, 219, 226 on history plays, 200, 213n30 on shop women, 219 Hurst, Alison L., 72 I immigrants. See also Replacement Theory expulsion of, 39 violence against, 24, 38 imperial-capitalist economy, 137 imperial expansion, 137 indigeneity, 132 Indigenous colonized subject, 132 Indigenous peoples, 90, 95, 98, 100–104 intersectionality, definition of, 2–4 intersex, 99, 100 Iyengar, Sujata, 10, 24 J Jameson, Frederic, 133 Jones, Van, 65 Jordan, Constance, 10 Joubin, Alexa Alice, 38, 52 A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars (Brome, 1641/42) eroticization of Whiteness in, 84–89

270

INDEX

intersections of race and class in, 79–84 use of romance to structure plot of, 89–91 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare, 1599), 153, 162 Just war theory, 247 Just war tradition, in Henry V , 233–238, 238–248 K Kastan, David, 2, 8 Keene, Derek, 218 Kermode, Lloyd Edward, 24n21, 38, 39, 46 Kett’s Rebellion (1549), 150 King Lear (Shakespeare, 1606), 28, 133 the Fool in, 160, 161 Knight of Malta, The (John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger, 1618), 45 Korda, Natasha, 6, 10, 228 Korhonen, Anu, 80n12 Kynaston, Francis, Corona Minervae (1635), 33n55 L Lachmann, Richard, 104 Lake, Peter, 240–241 land use, 76, 77. See also beggars; colonialism; masterlessness; vagrants Latour, Bruno, 130, 133, 134, 136–138 Ledent, Bénédict, 48 Leggatt, Alexander, 4, 5 Leinwand, Theodore, 4, 5, 258 Levellers, 150 lieutenant nun, the. See Erauso, Catalina/Antonio de

Life and Death of Jack Straw,The (Peele, c. 1593), 150 Linkon, Sherry Lee, 55 Linton, Joan Pong, 5 Little, Arthur, 46 logic-chopping, 152–155, 158, 160, 162, 163 Loomba, Ania, 10, 36, 40, 43–46, 49 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare, 1597), 26 Lupton, Donald, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quartred into Severall Characters (1632), 218n4 Lupu, Noam, 70

M Madison, Ira, III, 63 Magnusson, Lynne, 166 Makkai, Rebecca, 119 Malcolmson, Cristina, 192 Mantel, Hilary, 48 maritime labor, 8, 135–137 Markham, Gervase, 20n3 Marks, Peter, 60 Marlowe, Christopher, Dr. Faustus (c. 1592), 154, 259–261 marriage arranged, 50, 168 Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and, 101, 102 clandestine, 171, 194–196 companionate, 5, 15, 208 early modern writing about, 191 and filiation in Brome’s A Jovial Crew, 76, 91 forced, 187n7, 209, 210 lottery, 35 mixed-estate, 183–198 Marston, John, The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606), 45

INDEX

Martínez, Miguel, 98n12 Marxist analysis, 2, 7, 97, 133 and eco-socialism, 131, 133, 147 masculinity. See also cuckoldry Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and, 100, 102, 110 and sexual violence, 251–252 in the Trump era, 65 masterlessness, 6, 13, 94–96, 105–107 Mathur, Maya, 155 May Day (Chapman, 1604) association between chimney sweeps and blackness, 19–22, 23, 24, 27–30, 33 role of the sweep in, 28–33 McGhee, Heather, 66 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, 1603–4), 169 medical discourses, 185 Mentz, Steve, 134, 135, 135, 136–138 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare, 1596–98), 35, 41, 44 blackness in, 48–50 construction of whiteness in, 37, 38, 46, 47, 52 novelization in Phillips, The Nature of Blood (1997), 37, 47 novelization in Tiffany, The Turquoise Ring (2006), 37, 41 slavery in, 44 Meron, Theodore, 239 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare, c. 1595–96), sexual violence in, 257–258 migration. See immigrants Minor, Benjamin, 28, 30 Mirror for Magistrates, The (1559), 206–208 Mirrour for English Soldiers, The (Anon., 1595), 235 Moisan, Thomas, 153, 154

271

Moll Cutpurse. See Frith, Mary/Jack Moors, depiction of association between chimney sweeps and, 21, 22, 25, 27, 33 in Brome, A Jovial Crew, 82 conflation with Islam, 82 in Lust’s Dominion, 31 order for deportation of, 39, 42 in Othello, 12, 54–56, 58, 60–63, 65–71, 73 in The Merchant of Venice, 35 in Phillips, The Nature of Blood, 37, 47 in Titus Andronicus , 11, 31 in Tiffany’s The Turquoise Ring , 37, 41 More, Thomas, History of King Richard the Third (1513), 199, 206–208, 211 Morton, Timothy, 134 Mowry, Melissa, 105 Munro, Lucy, 19, 165, 181n39 N Nardizzi, Vin, 140, 141 Netzloff, Mark, 7, 23 new materialism, 130, 130, 131–136, 138–142, 144–147 New York Public Theater, 58, 60, 61 New York Theater Workshop, 61 Norman, Robert, The Safeguard of Sailors (1584), 135 Nottage, Lynn, 57–62 O Oates, Joyce Carol, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61 O’Connell, Laura Stevenson, 203 O’Dair, Sharon, 9, 13 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 58 Orkin, Martin, 38, 52 Orlin, Lena, 211

272

INDEX

Othello (Shakespeare, 1604) adaptation of in Phillips, The Nature of Blood, 47 Joyce Carol Oates’ tweets about, 54, 56 racial cross-dressing in, 21 and the Trumpian zeitgeist, 56 P Parker, Patricia, 10 Parlement of Pratlers, The (Eliot, 1593), 226, 227, 230–232 Patterson, Annabel, 4 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 203 Peele, George, The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1593), 150 Pericles (Shakespeare and Wilkins, 1609), 8, 13, 111–113, 113, 124n61, 126 Philip IV (France), 238, 238 Philip IV (Spain), 95, 98 Phillips, Caryl, The Nature of Blood (1997), 37, 47, 48, 52 Phillips, George L., 30 Phythian-Adams, Charles, 21 plantations. See slavery Porter, Roy, 250, 251 primogeniture, 188n13, 189 R Raber, Karen, 10 race. See blackface; blackness; religion; Replacement Theory; whiteness Rackin, Phyllis, 200, 213n30 Rancière, Jacques, 133 rape, 249, 250, 252 Rappaport, Steve, 203 Rauch, Bill, 62, 63 Rebhorn, Wayne, 246 religion. See also Dutch Church Libel; Replacement Theory

the church in Henry V , 237 and intellectual change, 10 and the language of marriage, 189 Jews, 41, 45, 47, 48, 50–52, 68 Muslims, 82 Protestants, 204, 210, 246 and race, 12, 22, 35–52 and transgender people, 99, 108 Replacement Theory, 56, 67 reproduction, theories of, 189 Rhydgren, Jens, 68 Roediger, David, 72 rogue literature, 6, 7, 83n17. See also beggars; masterlessness; vagrants romance genre, 89–91. See also Pericles; Tempest, The Romani, 81, 82 Rosenfeld, Colleen, 25 Ross, Janell, 65 Royal Exchange, 225–227 depiction in Erondell, The French Garden, 227–230 depiction in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (Anon., 1601–2), 221–225 history of, 218 women’s intersectional shop labor in, 218–220, 230–232 Rubin, Jennifer, 64 Rubright, Marjorie, 97, 108 Rüff, Jakob, The Expert Midwife (1637), 190 Russo, John, 55 Rutter, Tom, 6

S sailors. See maritime labor Salkeld, Duncan, 45 Saunders, Ann, 220 Sawday, Jonathan, 95, 105 Schama, Simon, 46

INDEX

Schaub, Michael, 54 Schutte, Kimberly, 189 Schwartz, Dana, 69 Scott, James C., 151 Sedgwick, Eve, 259, 261 Segar, William, Honor Military, and Ciuill (1602), 243 sempsters. See shop women sexual assault, 250, 263 sexual violence, 249, 251, 252, 256–258, 263 in Brome, A Jovial Crew (1641/ 42), 87 in Henry VI Part 2 (Shakespeare, 1594), 253, 254–255, 257–259 in Henry V (Shakespeare, c. 1599), 252–254 in Heywood, Edward IV (1613), 253–254, 256–258 in The Tempest , 261–262 Shakespeare, William 2 Henry 6, 150 All’s Well That Ends Well (1623), 160 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), 257 Antony and Cleopatra (1607), 154 As You Like It (1599), 20n3, 28 Comedy of Errors (1594), 21 Hamlet (1599–1601), 58, 62, 63, 154 Henry V (c. 1599), 233–238, 239–248 Henry VIII (Fletcher and Shakespeare, 1613), 169 Julius Caesar (1599), 153, 162 King Lear (1606), 28, 133, 160, 161 Love’s Labour’s Lost (1597), 26 Measure for Measure (1603–4), 169

273

Othello (1604), 21, 47, 54–56, 58, 60–63, 65–71, 73 Pericles (Shakespeare and Wilkins, 1609), 8, 111–113, 124n61, 126 sexual assault as a weapon of war in, 252–253 The Merchant of Venice (1596–98), 35–52 The Tempest (1611), 21, 33, 131–134, 135n11, 137–142, 261 Titus Andronicus (1594), 31 Twelfth Night (1601–2), 32, 58, 156, 157, 185, 191, 192, 194–196 Shapiro, James, 48, 63 Shaw, Tamsin, 64 Shershow, Scott Cutler, 7 Shihipar, Abdullah, 71 shop women depiction in Erondell, The French Garden, 227–230 depiction in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (Anon., 1601–2), 221–225 and intersectional shop labor, 218–220, 232 The Parlement of Pratlers (1593), 225–227 Sidney, Philip, An Apology for Poetry (1595), 124 Sir Thomas More (William Shakespeare, Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, c. 1591–1600), 38 Slack, Paul, 77 Slagle, Thomas J., 63, 69 slave, 142 slaveholder, 139 slavery, 33, 90, 98, 132, 137, 140

274

INDEX

bond-slaves, 69 in The Merchant of Venice, 44 slave as an address term, 166–168, 170, 172 in The Tempest , 131–134, 137–142, 261 in The Turquoise Ring , 47 Smith, Ali, Spring (2019), 111, 112, 112n4, 113, 117, 121–126, 126 Smith, Cassander, 78 Smith, Ian, 10, 21, 25, 29, 37, 67, 71 Smyth, Adam, 111, 112 Spearing, Elizabeth, 98n12 Spelman, Elizabeth, 175 Stern, Tiffany, 82n16 Stevenson, Laura, 5, 204 Stockard, Emily, 197 Stone, Lawrence, 187 Stott, Andrew, 157 Stow, John, 24 Sullivan, Garrett A., 76, 91

T Teachout, Terry, 64 Tempest, The (Shakespeare, 1611) and emergent capitalism, 131n3, 136, 141, 142, 147 and racialization, 21, 33 ecocritical interpretations of, 133 nature/culture boundaries in, 131, 138 sexual violence in, 263–264 slavery in, 132, 137, 140, 261 terms of address. See Witch of Edmonton, The Thompson, Ayanna, 22, 28, 30, 58, 62 Thomson, Leslie, 219, 221 Tiffany, Grace, The Turquoise Ring (2006), 37, 41, 42, 45, 47, 51 Ting, Eric, 61, 62

Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare, 1594), 31 Tragedy of Sophonisba, The (Marston, 1606), 45 transgender. See Erauso, Catalina/ Antonio de; Frith, Mary/Jack Trump, Donald, 54, 126 election of, 60, 61, 65 and the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, 56, 66 and white working-class identity, 55, 56, 64, 70, 72 Turner, Mark, 27 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, 1601–2), 32, 58 jesters in, 156, 157 mixed-estate marriage in, 185, 191, 192, 194–196

U ultimate subjection of women, 195 Unite the Right Rally, Charlottesville, 56, 66, 71 Upper Pawn, 217 Urban VIII (Pope), 98

V vagrants, 6, 7, 12, 116n25 Vanessa Harding, 220 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 30 Vitale, Alfred, 72 Vitkus, Daniel, 7, 8, 13, 14, 68

W Wade, Erik, 31 Wagner, Sydnee, 100 Walker, Garthine, 251 Wall, Wendy, 201, 212 Ward, Edward, 26 War of the Roses, 244

INDEX

War of the Vicuñas and Basques, 103 Wars of the Roses, 247 Webster, John The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13), 185, 191, 195, 196 The White Devil (1611), 45 Welsford, Enid, 161, 163 Whigham, Frank, 8 White Devil, The (Webster, 1611), 45 whiteness. See also blackface; blackness associations of nobility with, 9 Elizabeth I and, 40 eroticization of, 84–89 fairness and, 26, 42, 49, 50, 89 positioning in relation to other identities and classes, 10, 35, 52, 101, 102 racialized Whiteness, 37, 79–84, 78n8, 89–91 and white working-class identity in the US, 55, 70, 72 Wiles, David, 159 Williams, Gordon, 30n50 Williams, Raymond, 201 Williams, Thomas Chatterton, 67

275

Wilson, Robert, The Three Ladies of London (1581), 38 Wilson, Thomas, 29, 186 Wingfield, Adia Harvey, 56n10 Witch of Edmonton, The (Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, 1621) address terms in, 165–168 wench, 169–172 wife, widow, 177–181 witch, 173–176 Wood, Andy, 155 Woodbridge, Linda, 7, 76 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 103 Woodstock (c. 1591–94), 150 Woolley, Hannah, The Gentlewomans Companion (1675), 187, 188, 188 working-class studies, 55, 57 Wrightson, Keith, 22, 96 Wyatt, Thomas, 203 Y Yachnin, Paul, 8 Young, Damon, 69 Yussoff, Kathryn, 104