Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England 9780812202519

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Shakespeare's Domestic Economies

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Shakespeare's Domestic Economies Gender and Property in Early Modern England Natasha Korda

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on add-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare's domestic economies : gender and property in early modern England I Natasha Korda. p. cm. Contents: Housekeeping and household stuff—Household Kates : domesticating commodities in The taming of the shrew—Judicious oeillades : supervising marital property in The merry wives of Windsor—The tragedy of the handkerchief: female paraphernalia and the properties of jealousy of Othello—Isabella's rule : singlewomen and the properties of poverty in Measure for measure. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3663-7 (alk. paper) i. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Views on sex role. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564—1616—Characters—Women. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564—1616—Views on property. 4. House furnishings in literature. 5. Housekeeping in literature. 6. Property in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Women in literature. I. Title. PR3069.S45 K6j 2002 822.3*3—dc2i

2002019425

For Reva Korda

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Contents

Note on Spelling and Editions Introduction

ix

i

1

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

2

Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew 52

3

Judicious Oeillades: Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor 76

4

The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello 111

5

Isabella's Rule: Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure 159

15

Conclusion: Household Property/Stage Property Notes

213

Index

263

Acknowledgments

273

192

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Note on Spelling and Editions

While I have used early modern editions of the texts cited in this book wherever possible, I have slightly modified spelling, orthography, and punctuation to make these citations more legible to a wide audience of readers. Thus I have silently expanded contractions, given the modern equivalents of obsolete letters, and transliterated i/j and u/v where necessary.

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Introduction

The theater of property which we have inherited is particularly limited in women s parts. —Donna Dickensony Property, Women, and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (1997)

The history of the word household reflects early modern England's growing preoccupation with "stuff" with the goods required to maintain a proper domicile in a nascent consumer society. In addition to the more familiar and still contemporary definition of a household as "The inmates of a house collectively; an organized family, including servants or attendants, dwelling in a house," the Oxford English Dictionary lists the following obsolete definition, which refers not to domestic subjects (husbands, wives, children, servants, etc.), but to domestic objects: "The contents or appurtenances of a house collectively; household goods, chattels, or furniture." To illustrate this usage, the OED cites Caxton's 1484 phrase, "Dysshes, pottes, pannes, and suche other houshold." The early modern conception of what constituted a household was thus defined as much by objects as it was by subjects. In the sixteenth century, the English language gave birth to a new term to designate "The goods, utensils, vessels, etc. belonging to a household": household stuff. One might wonder why such a term was needed. It was, after all, synonymous with the latter definition of households the suffixed stuff appears merely redundant, reiterating the act of possession, of keeping or holding, already latent in the latter term. An answer presents itself if we consider the increasing value and proliferation of household moveables during the period, which rendered it necessary to distinguish the household-as-container from the stuff it contained. Such a distinction helped to avoid confusion, among other things, in the transfer of property. Thus, whereas an early fifteenth-century will states simply, "Also I will that my wyffe have all my housholde [wjholy" (indicating a bequest not of the

2

Introduction

house itself but of its moveables), two centuries later Henry Swinburne's A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes, the first standard English guide to ecclesiastical probate procedure, specifies that the proper term to be used in bequests of moveables (such as "Tables, Stooles ... Chaires, Carpets, Hangings, Beds, Bedding, Basons with Ewers, Candlesticks; all sorts of vessell serving for meate and drincke, being either of earth, wood, glasse, brasse, or Pewter, Pots, Pans, Spits," etc.) is "Housholdstuffe.'n If Swinburne's enumeration of the variety of things classifiable as household stuff points to the increasingly diverse supply of household goods during the period,2 the tremendous popularity of his treatise points to the increasingly diverse demand for them. Addressed to "every Subject of this realme, though hee bee but of meane capacity" and written "in our vulgar tongue" so that it "may be understood of all,"3 his treatise went through two editions before Swinburne's death in 1623, and another eight posthumously. The growing need for clarification of the laws governing the disposition and bequest of household stuff is likewise visible in Swinburne's emendations to the second edition of his treatise: claiming to be "Newly Corrected and augmented," the 1611 edition incorporates "sundry principall Additions" to the 1590 edition, including some twenty-one pages classifying at length the various species of moveable property, such as household stuff. The lexical emergence and increasing currency of this term during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would thus seem to answer to a historical exigency to specify as a distinct category of property the material things held by the household and kept by the housekeeper, an exigency linked to England's rapidly expanding market of consumer goods. The material emphasis of the term household stuff is one that this book shares; this is a book about stuff, about the material objects that came to redefine the household in early modern England.4 Yet the literary analyses elaborated herein are equally concerned with the stuff of language, with the material signifiers through which this redefinition of the household took linguistic shape. The term household stuffprovides an exemplary example of the inseparability of these two registers of analysis, for it materially reproduces (through its superfluous, superadded stuff) the material redundancy of things that transformed domestic life and domestic relations during the period. This book thus aims to illuminate both the symbolic dimension of household things and the historical dimension of household words. The inseparability of the symbolic and material economies that redefined the household is likewise evident in Swinburne's treatise, which seeks, through a specification of terms, to avoid "uncertaintie respecting the thing

Introduction

3

bequeathed." Dispositions or bequests of household property, he warns, are often "overthrowne ... when anything is bequeathed under such generall words, that the meaning of the testator is unknowne." In the interest of "clearing doubts and avoiding suites, which otherwise might ensue about the meaning of the testator by those generall words," he maintains, "I have thought good to deliver the[ir] severall signification[s]."5 Swinburne's classification of moveable property includes no less than nine categories and subcategories: goods, chattels, moveables (including the subcategories moventia and mobilia), fruits (both industrial and natural), and household stuff. Far from delineating clear and fixed boundaries between these categories, however, his definitions reveal how unstable and subject to dispute they in fact were.6 It becomes clear that the linguistic instability he aims to fix arises from a material excess, from the increasing volume, value, and variety of goods available for domestic consumption. In attempting to define the precise parameters of the term household stuff, for example, Swinburne acknowledges the material instability of its referent: "Writers are at variance," he admits, as to whether plate (a category of household object that had undergone a dramatic material transformation in households of the lower and middling sort in the period immediately preceding his treatise) should be included, "Some setting it downe for law, that nothing which is made of silver, or golde, is to be accounted houshold stuffe, and some the contrarie."7 Swinburne ascribes this discrepancy to the increasing refinement of household stuff: "for such was the severity and frugality of olde times," he says, that vessels of gold or of silver being then very rare, were not comprehended under the name of household stuffe. But afterwards in latter times, when men began not to be contented with the simplicitie of their Grandsires, but ... did furnish their houses with vessels of gold and silver and precious stones Upon this change of mens manners, did the law also begin to change, and to reckon these vessels of silver, gold and precious stones, as Bason and Ewer, Bowles, Cups, Candlesticks, &c. for part and parcell of houshold stuffe, yet not indistinctly or absolutely, but with this moderation, so that it were agreeable to the testators meaning, otherwise not. That is, if the testator in his lifetime, did use to reckon them amongst his houshold stuffe, in which case they are due to the legatarie, by the name of household stuffe. But if the testator did esteeme them, as ornaments rather then utensills, and did use them for pompe or delicacie, rather then for daily or ordinarie service for his house. In this case they doe not passe under the legacie of houshold stuffe.8

Swinburne's effort to fix the proper signification of household stuff is thwarted by the category's material and linguistic superfluity: by the increasing diversity and sumptuousness of goods that were coming to shape what

4

Introduction

constituted a "proper" household, and by the term's unstable and multiple referents (one testator's "utensill" is another's "ornament"). Swinburne acknowledges, while at the same time attempting to contain, the "uncertaintie" that this linguistic and material flux introduces into the testator's meaning: "Superfluitie is to be avoided," he warns, "especially in a testament," for "it stretcheth the word ... to the comprehension of whatsoever is thereby signified, not only properly, but also improperly."9 Yet Swinburne acknowledges that it is neither possible nor desirable to extirpate rhetorical "superfluitie" from property relations entirely. For while such "superfluitie" introduces error, fraud, conflict, struggle, and dispute into property relations, it also introduces desire, social aspiration, and affective bonds among household subjects. The rhetorical dimension of property relations, he recognizes, is as much a part of domestic concord as it is of domestic discord. In his section on "Testaments made by flatterie," Swinburne thus argues that "it is not unlawful! for a man by honest intercessions and modest perswasions . . . even with faire and flattering speeches, to move the testator to make him his executor, or to give him his goods," although it is "impudent ... not to be content with the first or second deniall."10 The rhetorical dimension of language ("faire and flattering speeches"), he contends, even when it "stretcheth the word" beyond the bounds of honesty and modesty, forms an integral part of domestic property relations, and is perfectly acceptable as such, so long as it serves to cement, rather than to sever, those relations. It is not easy, however, for Swinburne to have it both ways, to simultaneously embrace the "superfluitie" of "faire and flattering speeches," and eschew the "uncertaintie" that it introduces into property relations. For, as Carol M. Rose argues in Property and Persuasion^ once one accepts the rhetorical dimension of property claims (the notion that "the claim of ownership [i]s a kind of assertion or story, told within a culture that shapes the story's content and meaning"), such claims or stories are thereby rendered unstable, open to interpretation, and therefore subject to dispute.11 These instabilities, and the disputes over household property that they occasioned, are crucial to the present study, insofar as they often became the grounds upon which women (whose property rights were severely restricted by law) asserted property claims, and insofar as they make, as Shakespeare demonstrates, great drama. A visual representation of the copia or superfluity of household stuff in early modern England, and of the desire to bring order to that superfluity through systems of classification, appears in the chart of household goods included in Randle Holme's nine-volume, encyclopedic compendium of

Introduction

5

heraldic iconography, An Academy ofArmoryy or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon of 1649 (see Figure i).12 Holme's grid, Lena Orlin observes, stuffs one hundred and twenty items into its ninety-five squares, as if testifying to a "superabundance" that "strain[s] the clearly articulated borders and bel[ies] the numbering system" of his chart.13 Not satisfied with depicting one of each type of household object, Holme includes multiple subspecies of each type; there are, for example, no less than six different kinds of stools (see nos. 71-76) and baskets (see nos. 59, 83-87) and seven different kinds of cooking pans (see nos. 11, 34, 35, 45, 54).14 The descriptions that accompany the chart likewise testify to the new variety of household stuff available to early modern householders, repeatedly drawing attention to changes in the materials out of which such goods were made, and in the form of their fashioning. Thus, no. 20 depicts a simple "Low footed candlestick," which Holme describes as "the old way of making the candle holder," whereas no. 21 depicts "the candle stick as are now in use," which is adorned "to sett it the more splendidly forth: whithere by raised worke, corded, or Twist worke, or by making the bottome and flower part round, square, Hexagon, or octagon like, with chased worke, &c."15 This material superfluity gives rise to a semantic superfluity in Holme's text; the diversification of things requires a diversification of terms that renders his system of classification inherently unstable. The temporal flux of fashions produces semantic slippages in terminology, as in the description of item no. 6 ("a viall, or viniger bottle ... being a Glasse bottle But in our dayes, it is generally called a cruet, or cruce It may be also termed an ewre, or ewer"), or of the "Sorts of combs" accompanying nos. 63 and 64 ("Horse or Mane comb ... Wiske combe ... Back tooth comb ... Beard comb ... double comb ... Merkin comb ... Peruwick comb ... smal tooth comb ... Wood combs ... Box combs ... Horn combs ... Ivory combs ... Bone combs ... Tortois combs ... Cocus combs ... Lead combs").16 The linguistic and material economies of words and things in these texts are clearly inextricably intertwined. My approach to the topic of household stuff in this study thus weaves back and forth between linguistic and material economies and the transformations of household words and things they produced. At once textual and contextual, my methodology is in this sense deeply indebted to insights of the new historicism. Yet the matter of household stuff at times eludes the kinds of contextualizing texts traditionally regarded by new historicist critics; I have thus found it necessary to pursue sources of evidence that are concerned with accounting, as well as with anecdotal recounting. What gets lost when we read contexts

Figure i. Chart of household stuff, from the second (unpublished) volume of Randle Holme's Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (1649), British Museum Harl. MSS 2026-35. This illustration from the Roxburghe Club facsimile edited by I. H. Jeayes. By permission of the British Library.

Introduction

7

solely as texts, histories as stories, is often quite literally "the matter." Such matter matters. For without taking it into account, it becomes impossible to distinguish ideological from material change, much less to try to grasp the relationship between them. This is not to suggest that there is some real, graspable, "thing" that exists beyond, and untouched by, the textuality of history and ideology. The shape of things is itself historical, molded in and through discourse. What we grasp of the matter at hand is neither immanent nor immediate, but informed in and by the questions we ask, the stories we tell. As its locution suggests, however, the "matter at hand" may also resist or evade the grasp of ideology, remaining at hand, though never quite in hand. Indeed, it is because matter is not entirely malleable, because its movements do not always obey prescribed paradigms of ownership and exchange, that it does matter. For it is often the forms of resistance or agency to which these movements point that produce ideological change. The importance of interrogating the rift between ideology and material practice is particularly clear within the field of women's history. For without such interrogation, as feminist scholarship has demonstrated, the story of history is too often simply his story. It is therefore crucial, in attempting to comprehend the significance of women's changing historical relations to household stuff, to reach beyond such contextualizing texts as domestic manuals, conduct books, legal treatises, and so on, and consider as well sources of evidence that register the traces of material practice. Because such practices are notoriously scarce and difficult to recover, Joan Thirsk maintains, "every kind of ingenuity is needed to reconstruct" them.17 It may be, however, that our willingness to embrace what Penelope Johnson terms "documents of theory" has dulled our ingenuity in searching out "documents of practice."18 Thus, for example, acceptance of the purported hegemony of the common law doctrines of coverture in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance has long perpetuated the assumption that women had no property rights to speak of in early modern England. Recent feminist scholarship, however, drawing on records of actual property ownership, has demonstrated that the forms of female control over household property during the period were far more varied and complex than the common law suggests, as I discuss at length in Chapter i. Similarly, the long dominant image of the Elizabethan theater as an "all male stage" has begun to crumble under the weight of evidence suggesting women's active participation in a broad range of performance and production practices.19 These revisionist histories of women's roles within the household economy, on the one hand, and the playhouse economy, on the other, provide the framework for my

8

Introduction

analysis of Shakespeare's domestic economies. Each of the chapters that follow foregrounds in various ways the complex convergences and divergences of domestic ideology and material practice with respect to early modern women's property relations. While a study of the early modern household cannot ignore household subjects, it is a central claim of this book that, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relations between subjects within the home became increasingly centered around and mediated by objects. This claim is supported by a growing corpus of scholarship on early modern material culture that has documented, if not celebrated, the period's "new access to a superfluity of material possessions," offering a "new history of the Renaissance" as a "world crowded with desirable consumer objects."20 Such scholarship has begun to consider what role this brave new world of goods might have played in the fashioning of subjectivity. Thus, the editors of the anthology Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture ask: "What new configurations emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?"21 The identification of the Renaissance with the emergence of the modern subject, or what Jacob Burckhardt famously termed "the development of the individual," they maintain, has hitherto resulted in a slighting of objects.22 The field of Shakespeare studies has followed a similar trajectory, crediting Shakespeare in particular with the invention of modern subjectivity. Within this critical tradition, as its most recent avatar, Harold Bloom, argues, "the representation of human character or personality remains always the supreme literary value" and is "a Shakespearean invention."23 This privileging of character or subjectivity as "the supreme literary value" within Shakespeare scholarship has likewise resulted in relative inattention to the role that objects perform in his plays, an inattention contemporary criticism has only recently begun to redress.24 While I hope to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on early modern material culture, my more particular aim in this book is to situate the "stuff" of material culture in relation to broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations that have had profound and lasting effects on the social and economic status of women. My concern is thus less with household objects in their status as aesthetic artifacts than with the social, juridical, and economic structures that worked to define female subjectivity in relationship to them. I take seriously Jean-Christophe Agnew's caution that the celebratory aspect of material-culture studies, drawn in by the sumptuous allure of the early modern world of goods, risks eclipsing the ways in which subjects are differentially positioned within this

Introduction

9

world in accordance with their gender, social status, race, religion, and so forth. "The very richness of that work—the thickness of its description and the detail of its maps," Agnew maintains, "has at times submerged important questions ... of power."25 With respect to gender differentiation, such questions might include the following: How did the transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production impact upon the role of the housewife? In what ways did the expanding market economy and influx of newly available consumer goods within the home affect the social and economic valuation of housework? How did the increasing value of moveable property with respect to real property affect the laws governing women's property rights? What disciplinary regimes were instituted to regulate female production, consumption, exchange and ownership of consumer goods? What discrepancies existed between women's de facto and de jure control over household property? When did female consumption threaten, and when did it serve to buttress, patriarchal power? How did the contradictions inherent in women's property relations form or deform female subjectivity? How did early modern conceptions of property shape representations of male and female desire? How did marital status affect women's property rights and relations? What kinds of property did single women possess? How was female poverty and propertylessness managed by the state? This line of questioning guides the readings that follow. The early modern theater, Agnew argues, "furnished a laboratory of representational possibilities for a society perplexed by the cultural consequences" of nascent capitalism.26 The particular consequences with which this study is concerned are those surrounding women's domestic property relations. The theater had good reason to be preoccupied with such relations, in that the dilemma posed by women's ad hoc economic activities and informal property arrangements was not unlike that posed by the theatrical "housekeepers" themselves. Not only did such activities and arrangements provide playing companies with thematic content, they also lent them material support; for women figured prominently in the cloth and clothing trades on which the theaters depended. When their economic activity was hampered by the licensed trades, they turned to London's "shadow" economy to earn a living as second-hand clothing dealers, pawnbrokers, peddlers or hawkers, servicing the theaters in this capacity. Through such avenues of commerce, goods circulated between household and playhouse; housewives thus not only served as metatheatrical emblems of theatrical housekeeping, but were themselves participants in the work it entailed.27 Why focus on Shakespeare's domestic economies in particular? This

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Introduction

question leads me back to the question of the subject, and to the unquestionably powerful and distinctive "subjectivity effects" found in Shakespeare's plays.28 Whether or not we grant the novelty of these effects, or their status as a Shakespearean invention, they have had an abiding after-life driven, at least in part, by their association with modernity.29 Yet this association, as mentioned above, has been surprisingly disassociated from the world of objects and, more broadly, from the processes of commodification that are one of the defining features of modernity. If "the exploding availability of consumer goods in the early modern period" represented a thoroughgoing "cultural preoccupation," Shakespeare is too often seen as standing aloof from this preoccupation.30 For after all, it is argued, Shakespeare, unlike his contemporaries, wrote no city comedies—the genre most often associated with nascent consumer culture and the market. Shakespeare's preoccupation, centuries of critics have maintained, is with the interior life of the subject, not with the world of goods; his play-worlds are constructed of words, not things, and the subjects who inhabit them populate an otherwise empty stage. The conception of the Shakespearean stage as a bare, "wooden O," as Jonathan Gil Harris and I have argued, however, founders under the weight of historical evidence.31 Contemporary theatrical spectators like Simon Forman took note of objects, as well as subjects, on the Shakespearean stage: a chair in Macbeth, the bracelet and chest in Cymbeline, and Autolycus's "peddlers packe" in The Winter's Tale?2 The seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer excoriated what he termed the "clutter" of Othello: "we have heard of Fortunatus his Purse, and of the Invisible Cloak, long ago worn threadbare, and stow'd up in the Wardrobe of obsolete Romances: one might think, that were a fitter place for this Handkerchief, than that it, at this time of day, be worn on the Stage, to raise every where all this clutter and turmoil."33 In the Romantic period, critics responded to such stage-clutter by attempting to distill from its dross a "pure," literary Shakespeare, whose work was best enjoyed on the page, not the stage. For the clutter of the stage, in the view of Romantic critics like Charles Lamb, rendered the Shakespearean sublime ridiculous: "The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the reading," Lamb maintained in his discussion of King Lear, which he famously proclaimed to be unperformable; "to see Lear acted" was in his mind "to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick."34 The animus of Lamb's critique is clearly aimed at the stage-property, the walking-stick, which props up the tottering actor and, in so doing, seems to suck the sublimity

Introduction

11

out of Shakespeare's character. Henceforth, the Shakespearean sublime would be located firmly in a subjectivity removed from the world of objects and the clutter of the stage to the pristine sanctity of the page. The textuality of Shakespearean subjectivity has been increasingly sublimated—literally raised aloft from the world of substance or stuff—during the twentieth century, culminating, perhaps, in Joel Fineman's notion of Shakespearean "subjectivity effects" as constituted in a sublimely empty world of words or hollowed-out (yet nonetheless hallowed) signifiers, such as "the sound of O in Othello?35 My intention here is not to deny the textuality of Shakespeare's subjectivity effects, but rather to link the symbolic economies out of which these effects are fashioned to the material economies in which they are embedded; for as I have argued above, these two economies are inextricably intertwined.36 Far from remaining aloof from material objects, these subjectivity effects, as Simon Forman recognized, are defined in relationship to them. My more particular focus in this study is on the ways in which Shakespeare configures female subjectivity effects in relationship to objects of property (including, though not limited to, stage-properties). A crucial conceptual framework for my drawing together of the topics of gender, rhetoric, and property is provided by Patricia Parker's analysis of the "intimate and ideologically motivated link between the need to control the movement of tropes and ... [early modern] exigencies of social control, including, though not limited to, the governance of the household or ozTcos."37 Parker's analysis of gender and property differs from that found in this study, however, insofar as her focus is on the configuration of women as objects of male exchange. In her essay on "Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon," for example, woman is configured as a feminized territory, discovered or opened to view by the male poet/blazoner; the woman's body becomes "a passive commodity in a homosocial discourse or male exchange in which the woman herself, traditionally absent, does not speak."38 By contrast, this book explores the configuration of female subjectivity primarily in relationship to moveable, rather than real, property; for moveables were the form of property most often owned and inherited by women in early modern England.39 In focusing on women's relations to moveables, I am intentionally moving away from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been "trafficked," as passive objects of exchange, between men.40 For this observation does little to explain the specific historical forms that women's subjection assumes with the rise of capitalism and development of

12

Introduction

the commodity form. The notion of objedification does not, for example, adequately account for the housewife's emerging role as a keeper and caretaker of household stuff. Structural shifts in domestic economy instituted by the rise of capitalism operated not simply through the obj edification of women, but more subtly, through modes of subjection that ostensibly afforded women increasing control over the domestic sphere. At the same time, I argue, women's de facto and de jure control over household property became important sites of struggle and resistance to England's patrilineal property regime. My aim is thus to unfold the complex history and dramatic representation of women as subjects, as well as objects, of property. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that the theater of property we have inherited is not so limited in women's parts. The focus and methodology of this book are distinctly different from that of previous scholarship on early modern English domestic drama.41 While I share Frances Dolan's interest in the home "as a locus of conflict, an arena in which the most fundamental ideas about social order, identity, and intimacy were contested," my focus is on the subtle, coercive forms of power and resistance, discipline and self-discipline, that shaped female subjectivity during the period, rather than on the more "extreme, violent instances" and representations of domestic crime, such as "petty treason," studied by Dolan.42 As its title suggests, Dolan's Dangerous Familiars reveals the dangers posed to the household by "the familiar rather than the strange ... the intimate rather than the invader,"43 a formulation that has been very useful in my thinking about the potential threats arising from the housewife's role as keeper of household stuff. Yet I am equally interested in the domestic dangers posed by that which was perceived as unfamiliar or unfamilial; thus, in the second half of this book I examine the figure of the Moor, Othello, and the way in which Africans' supposed propensity to excessive jealousy was attributed to their purportedly skewed property relations in travel narratives of the period. I then turn to the figure of the impoverished singlewoman in Measure for Measure, who functions as a kind of antitype to the figure of the housewife as keeper. Through this shift in perspective, I seek to put critical pressure on the category of the domestic in early modern scholarship, rather than taking it as an a priori point of departure, as do genre studies such as Viviana Comensoli's Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England. The main concern of such studies is to trace the formal and temporal contours of a literary genre (here the "domestic play"). In so doing, however, they risk a certain self-serving circularity, since the definitional attributes

Introduction

13

employed to delineate the genre necessarily determine the texts that are included in or excluded from it. More problematically, in the case of a politically charged topic such as domesticity, the orthodoxy of genre studies also risks ideological conformity, since one's definition of the genre necessarily depends upon one's conception of what constitutes a "proper" household. To her credit, Comensoli not only resists reinforcing the strictures of early modern domestic ideology but argues that such resistance is in fact characteristic of the genre itself (an assertion with which I entirely agree, although with the proviso that this resistance takes different forms in domestic comedies than it does in domestic tragedies). I certainly do not mean to suggest that we should ignore questions of genre, but rather that we need to ask ourselves what is at stake in our generic categories and whether such categories as the "domestic play" in the end serve to stabilize exclusionary and anachronistic norms. To this end, I conclude the present study with a "problem play," Measure for Measure, which is not ordinarily considered in studies of domestic drama. Yet it is precisely because Measure for Measure is so devoid of familiar, familial forms of domesticity, and because the domestic dangers it explores dissipate the household so completely, I argue, that it throws the social and economic forces that shaped domestic ideology during the period into such sharp relief. The materialist emphasis of this book is shared in many respects by Lena Cowen Orlin's Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, which has strongly influenced my thinking about the ways in which "the history of property is linked with the history of privacy" and with whose arguments I engage throughout this book.44 Yet the form of materialist analysis I employ differs from that of Orlin, in its dual focus on symbolic and material economies. Orlin asserts that she considers the play-texts she studies to be "vehicles merely, mechanisms of expediency," which function as "witnesses to the struggle of early modern English men and women" within the household; "my first interest," she insists, "remains cultural history."45 Orlin's methodology is thus in a sense the inverse of Comensoli's; the latter privileges literary (or more specifically, generic) form over material history, the former material history over literary form. In seeking, by contrast, to elucidate the matrices or interconnections between symbolic and material economies in Shakespearean drama, I follow a line of inquiry first initiated by William Empson's unfolding of poetic ambiguity and the structure of complex words. Empson's analyses of the social, historical, and material dimension of words such as "choir" in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (to cite perhaps his most famous example) indicates the

14

Introduction

way in which symbolic and material economies may become imbricated in a literary text. For the term, as Empson unloads it, bears the weight of wooden monastery pews carved into knots, of religious houses "colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves," but "now abandoned by all but the gray walls colored like the skies of winter" for "various sociological and historical reasons," which, he maintains, "would be hard now to trace out in their proportions."46 Empson tantalizingly points toward, while stopping just short of, a full-scale analysis of the profound reshaping of material culture effected during the dissolution of the monasteries. It is precisely the "proportions" of Empson's implied reading, however, that fascinate me, linking as they do the linguistic and material minutiae of the microhistorical to the momentous transformations of the macrohistorical. Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, a book deeply influenced by Empson, brings us further down the path of what Williams terms historical—or more properly, historical materialist— semantics.47 This mode of analysis, as Williams defines it, is not limited to the formal system of language itself, but rather "extends to the users of language and to the objects and relationships about which language speaks"; these speaking subjects, material objects, and the historical relationships between them, he argues, should be studied together so that the interconnections between them may be better elucidated.48 William's methodology thereby extends Empson's analysis of complex words by linking poetic ambiguity to ideological contradiction and material change, and by attempting to trace out the "proportions" between them. My own methodology in the readings that follow traces the historical proportions of such complex words as "cates" in The Taming of the Shrew, "discretion" in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and "extravagant" in Othello. In Measure for Measure, I take a somewhat different approach, focusing on key-silences in the text, silences that point, I argue, to absent things or missing properties. My aim in this study is modest in that I do not intend to offer an exhaustive survey of Shakespeare's "domestic economies"; such an endeavor would require a very much longer book. Instead, what I offer here is the nucleus of an argument and a method. Because this method resists "substituting thematic reaction for reading," the argument it produces is necessarily limited in scope.49 It is my hope, however, that the cluster of plays I examine, and the at times startlingly new light cast on them by the prism of women's property relations, will offer a template for future research.

Chapter i

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

Recent historical research on domestic industry and patterns of consumption in early modern England has largely substantiated the account found in William Harrison's Description of England (1587) of the newly available consumer goods that were infiltrating households at every level of society: The furniture of our houses also exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy; and herein I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only but likewise of the lowest sort— Certes in noblemen's houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, silver vessel, and so much plate as may furnish sundry cupboards, to the sum oftentimes of £1,000 or £2,000 at the least, whereby the value of this and the rest of their stuff doth grow to be almost inestimable. Likewise in the houses of knights, gentlemen, merchantmen, and some other wealthy citizens, it is not geason [uncommon] to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and therto costly cupboards of plate, worth £500 or £600 or £1,000, to be deemed by estimation. But as herein all these sorts do far exceed their elders and predecessors, and in neatness and curiosity the merchant all other, so in time past the costly furniture stayed there, whereas now it is descended yet lower, even unto the inferior artificers and many farmers, who ... have for the most part learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joint beds with tapestry and silk hangings, and their tables with carpets and fine napery, whereby the wealth of our country (God be praised therfor and give us grace to employ it well) doth infinitely appear.1 By the late sixteenth century, according to Joan Thirsk, England's expanding consumer culture "embraced not only the nobility and gentry and substantial English yeomen, but included humble peasants, laborers and servants as well," who for the first time had "cash and something to spend the cash on."2 The growth of consumerism among the lower and middling ranks, she maintains, "is readily demonstrated in any random comparison between the standard household goods of husbandmen living in the first half of the sixteenth century and those living in the later seventeenth century." Before

16

Chapter i

1550, "their houses contained the basic furniture, benches, a table, stools, and beds, a small amount of domestic linen and essential cooking and eating vessels." By the latter half of the seventeenth century, however, "people had a choice of so many different qualities of linen for domestic use and personal wear that it is impossible to count them; many more iron, brass, and copper pots lined the shelves of kitchen, buttery, and dairy," and for apparel, "people could choose between a host of different colors, designs, and weights of knitted stockings,... lace, fine and course, in several colors, tape, ribbon, inkle."3 Lena Orlin likewise maintains, "Household inventories support even the most radical of Harrison's observations concerning the descent' of provision."4 She compares the inventories of two generations of Oxfordshire husbandmen with farms of equal size; the mid-sixteenthcentury inventories list "only the barest cooking equipment and tableware," while those at the end of the century list chairs, joined tables, painted cloths, beds, several sets of bed linens, tablecloths, bolsters, pillows, and large amounts of pewterware and silverware.5 John E. Crowley, in his study The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and America, likewise maintains, "From the yeomanry up, there [was] a redefinition of physical standards of living" during the sixteenth century, mostly in the area of bedding and tableware.6 Recent local studies of four Shropshire parishes, four Warwickshire parishes, thirteen parishes in different farming regions of Cambridgeshire, and the whole of Suffolk likewise demonstrate "quite conclusively," in Margaret Spufford's view, "that the standard of comfort amongst the occupants of the humbler cottage, measured in terms of their linen cupboards, their clothing and their 'luxuries,' which were not strictly necessary to survival, like cushions and bed and window-cur tains," continued to rise dramatically during the seventeenth century.7 Christopher Husbands's Warwickshire study finds that the percentage of wealth in consumer goods rose sharply in this period, constituting 27 percent of wealth early in the century and 48 percent at the end. The rise in spending among peasant laborers was smaller but still impressive (a 10 percent rise between 1560 and i64o).8 Rachel Garrard's study of consumption patterns in Suffolk in the periods 1570-1599 and 1680-1700 documents an astonishing rise in spending on linens among the lower ranks of society (those with median wealth of £7 for the earlier period and £13 for the later); while the personal wealth of this group rose in value by 85 percent, the value of their linens rose 271 percent.9 Similar figures are cited in Victor Skipp's study of the Arden region, where wealth in household goods among the wealthy increased

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

17

by over 289 percent, among the middling sort by 310 percent, and among peasants by 247 percent.10 Carole Shammas, who has studied consumer spending patterns in England and America between 1550 and 1800, agrees that "there appears to have been a considerable increase in the real amount spent on consumer goods between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth century."11 While it has long been recognized that London, as a hub of foreign trade, served as a center of conspicuous consumption,12 Thirsk details the expansion of domestic industries or "projects" across England between 1560 and 1630, which "set the wheels of domestic trade turning faster, encouraging the making of yet more consumer goods, spinning an ever more elaborate web of inland commerce."13 These projects spurred expanded domestic production and consumption of a "bewildering variety" of commodities beyond the staple necessities of life, including glass, iron, copper, and brass wares, stockings (of worsted, jersey, and silk), buttons, pins, starch, soap, fine knives and knife handles, liquorice, tobacco, tobacco pipes, pottery, ribbons, gold and silver thread, lace, linen, toys, new lighter "draperies" (bays, tufted taffeties, cloth of tissue, wrought velvets, braunched satins, silks, etc.), and "innumerable fashion goods for women," including ruffs, masks, busks, muffs, fans, periwigs, bodkins, and gloves.14 Spufford has documented the distribution of such wares throughout England through an intricate network of (male and female) petty chapmen, peddlars, trowmen, hawkers, and higglers and credits this network with bringing about "a revolution in soft furnishings [such as window and bedcurtains, sheets, tablecloths, napery, wall hangings, etc.] among the poor."15 William Harrison's Description takes particular note of the latter change, which is claimed to be among the most significant "things to be marvelously altered in England" by the "old men" dwelling in his village: "for (said they) our fathers, yea, and we ourselves also, have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hapharlots [coarse, shaggy material] ... and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster or pillow."16 The men go on to express bemusement that they were once "so well... contented ... with such base kind of furniture." Another aspect of the "amendment of lodging" they consider remarkable is "the exchange of vessel, as of treen [wooden] platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. For so common were all sorts of treen stuff in old time that a man should hardly find four pieces of pewter ... in a good farmer's house," whereas a present day farmer owns "a fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much

i8

Chapter i

more in odd vessel going about the house, three or four feather beds, so many coverlets and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowl for wine (if not an whole nest), and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit [set]."17 While such furnishings will undoubtedly seem sparse to modern consumers, they clearly appeared quite copious to these early modern consumers, who emphasize the quantity ("so much more ... three or four ... so many ... a dozen") as well as the quality ("treen platters into pewter ... wooden spoons into silver or tin") of newly available household stuff. The nesting of multiple bowls in the above description metonymically suggests the household's transformation into a nest in which objects, as well as subjects, nestle. Changing standards of comfort in tableware and bedding, and the increasing availability of such comforts to non- and would-be elite householders, rendered distinctions between "useful" or "necessary" goods and "superfluous" or luxury goods increasingly unstable and difficult to fix. Randle Holme's Academy of Armory (1649) thus lists the following as "Things necessary for and belonging to a dineing Rome": The Rome well wainscoted about, either with ... panels or carved as the old fashion was; or else in larg square panel. / The Rome hung with pictures of all sorts, as History, Landskips, Fancyes, &c. / Larg Table in the middle, either square to draw out in Leaves, or Long, or Round or oval with falling leaves. / Side tables, or court cubberts, for cups and Glasses to drink in, Spoons, Sugar Box, Viall and Cruces for Vinger, Oyle and Mustard pot. / Cistern of Brass, Pewter, or Lead to set flagons of Beer, and Bottles of win[e] in. / A Turky table cover, or carpet of cloth or Leather printed. Chaires and stooles of Turky work, Russia or calves Leather, clothe or stuffe, or of needlework. Or els made all of Joynt work or cane chaires. / Fire grate, fire shovel, Tongs, and Land Irons all adorned with Brass Bobbs and Buttons. / Flower potts, or Allabaster figures to adorn the windows, and glass well painted and a Larg seeing Glass at the higher end of the Rome. / A Faire with-drawing Rome at the other end of the dineing Rome well furnished with a Table, Chaires and stooles &c.18

His description of "Things usefull about a Bed, and bed-chamber," likewise redefines luxury or superfluity as necessity: Bed stocks, as Bed posts, sides, ends, Head and Tester. / Mat or sack-cloth Bottom. / Cord, Bed staves, and stay or the feet. / Curtain Rods and hookes, and rings, either Brass or Horn. / Beds, of chaffe, Wool or flocks, Feathers, and down in Ticks or Bed Tick. / Bolster, pillows. / Blankets, Ruggs, Quilts, Counterpan, caddows. / Curtaines, Valens, Tester Head cloth; all either fringed, Laced or plaine alike. / Inner curtaines and Valens, which are generally White silk or Linen. / Tester Bobbs of Wood gilt, or

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

19

covered sutable to the curtaines. / Tester top either flatt, or Raised, or canopy like, or half Testered. / Basis, or the lower Valens at the seat of the Bed, which reacheth to the ground, and fringed for state as the upper Valens, either with Inch fring, caul fring, Tufted fring, snailing fring, Gimpe fring with Tufts and Buttons, Vellem fring, &c / Hangings about the Rome, of all sorts, as Arras, Tapestry, damask, silk, cloth or stuffe: in paines or with Rods, or gilt Leather, or plaine, else Pictures of Friends and Relations to Adorne the Rome. / Table, stands, dressing Box with drawers, a larg Myrour, or Looking glass. Couch chaire, stoles, and chaires, a closs-stole. / Window curtaines, Flower potts, / Fire grate, and a good Fire in the winter, Fire shovel, Tongs, Fork and Bellowes.19

While Holme's treatise is aimed at the nobility and middling sort (those who could afford to purchase coats of arms), the comforts he describes differed not in kind, but only in quantity and quality, from those increasingly found in the homes of substantial yeomen as well. "A relatively wealthy household used the same items as its less well off neighbors to furnish its more numerous rooms," according to Crowley, "it just had more of them and they were of better quality."20 This continuity in the types of available "comforts," Crowley contends, spurred "social emulation" among the lower and middling sorts. Judging by Holme's enumeration of "necessities," it would also seem to have spurred elite householders to display ever greater quantities, and an ever more refined quality, of stuff in order to distinguish themselves from those beneath them in status. As householders of lower social status began to fill their homes with stuff, the function of objects, and the relationship of subjects to them, profoundly changed. For the role of objects within a household economy based on domestic production is to serve as use-values within and for the home. With the transition to a market economy, however, the value and significance of household objects was determined outside the home, by the market and by the culture at large. One of the effects of this shift is that household objects took on what Norbert Elias calls a "civilizing function"; they came to serve as what Pierre Bourdieu terms "signs of social distinction."21 Household objects thereby functioned to signify the subject's place within the social order. Yet the mobility of objects or "moveables," which are not tied down to a fixed site but are open to purchase, sale, borrowing, exchange, inheritance, or theft, renders their function as status markers highly unstable. For status-objects not only fix social boundaries, they also breach them. Early modern scholars have rightly focused a great deal of attention on the way in which clothing served in the period both to make and to unmake

20

Chapter i

the social identity of the subject and on the sumptuary laws that attempted, with little success, to fix or stabilize once and for all the proper place of such sartorial status-markers within the social hierarchy.22 Philip Stubbs's indictment of the "abuse" of "sumptuous attyre" in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) is frequently cited as evidence of the importance of clothing as a tool of social mobility: now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in Ailgna [read Anglia, or England] , and such preposterous excesse therof, as every one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparell he lust himselfe, or can get by anie meanes. So that it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall have those, which are neither of the nobylitie, gentilitie, nor yeomanry, no, nor yet anie Magistral or Officer in the common welth, go daylie in silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties, and such like, notwithstanding that they be both base by byrthe, meane by estate, & servyle by calling. This is a great confusion & a general disorder.23 Clothing, however, was but one form of moveable property used to signify social distinction. Less attention has been focused on the ways in which moveables generally, and household stuff more particularly, worked to place subjects within status, gender, racial, and other hierarchies during the period, or the ways in which such objects worked to destabilize those hierarchies. Stubbs himself importantly turns his attention to the status-function of household stuff in the passage immediately following the discussion of sartorial extravagance cited above. In response to Spudeus's reasoned rebuttal, "If it be not lawfull for every one, to weare, silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties, gold, silver, preciouse stones, & what not, wherfore did the Lord make & ordein them?" Philoponus replies: I denie not, but they may be worne ... of [i.e., by] the nobility, gentilytie, or magistracy, ... but not of every proud fixnet [i.e., swaggerer] indifferently.... And yet did not the Lord ordeane these riche ornaments and gorgiouse vestments to be worne of all men, or of anie, so muche as to garnish, bewtifie, and set forth, the majesty & glorie of this his earthly kingdome: For, as cloth of gold, Arase [i.e., arras], tapestrie, & such other riche ornaments, pendices and hangings in a house of estate, serve not onely to manuall uses and servyle occupations, but also to decorate, to bewtifie & become the house, and to shewe the riche estate and glorie of the owner: so these riche ornaments and sumptuouse vestments ... do not onelie serve to be worn of them to whome it doth appertaine ... but also to shew forth the power, welth, dignity, riches, and glorie of the Lord, the Author of all goodnesse.24 Stubbes clearly invokes the "rich ornaments" that adorn "house[s] of estate" in order to secure a divinely ordained hierarchy of "power, welth, dignity,

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

21

riches, and glorie" against the "mingle mangle" brought about by upstart consumers; as we have seen, however, "Arase, tapestrie, & suche other riche ornaments, pendices and hangings" were no longer confined to the estates of the "nobility, gentilytie, or magistracy," but had begun to appear in the households of those whom Stubbs disparagingly terms "base by byrthe, meane by estate, & servyle by calling." Like "sumptuouse vestments," household stuff had come to "serve not onely manuall uses and servyle occupations, but also to decorate, to bewtifie, & become the house, and to shewe the riche estate and glorie of the owner"—as outward signs, that is, not only of inherited, but of acquired, social distinction. The dressing up of the household, like the dressing up of the subject, was clearly a source of ambivalence in the early modern period, an ambivalence tied to the sense of confusion brought about by both the social ubiquity and mobility of status objects. The power of luxury goods in particular to breach previously entrenched social boundaries (e.g., between high and low) and conceptual categories (e.g., between the necessary and the merely superfluous) made them the focus of controversy.25 The midsixteenth-century A Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England, attributed to Sir Thomas Smith,26 develops a system of classification that seeks to redefine the distinction between necessary and superfluous goods; yet this distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of changing standards of living. For as Harrison's Description makes clear, yesterday's luxuries had become today's necessities. Smith divides commodity production of the day into four categories. The first are "substaunciall and necessarie" wares produced in England, such as "cloth, lether, tallow, beare, butter, [and] cheise" (67). The second are imported goods essential to the nation's economy, such as "yron, salt, tar, rosin, pitch, oile, [and] steile" (61-62). The third are imported luxury goods considered necessary for a "civilized" life, such as "wynes, spices, linnen cloth, silkes, and collers" (62). Lastly, there are the luxurious, imported "trifles," which, Smith claims, are "more to serve pleasure then necessitie" and might well be "clean spared." Among these items he enumerates "glasses, as well lookinge as drinckinge,... glasse windowes, Dialles, tables, cardes, balles, puppetes, penhornes, Inckehornes, toothepikes, gloves,... pouches, broches, agletes, buttons of silke and silver,... pinnes, poyntes, haukes belles,... and a thowsand like thinges" (63, 6j).27 Smith's taxonomy of goods reflects his ambivalence towards luxury commodities, an ambivalence that initially appears to center on the disparity

22

Chapter i

between their exchange-value and their use-value within the home. His treatise voices a nostalgic desire to return to an economy in which substantial home-grown wares were produced to satisfy the immediate needs of the household, and goods were exchanged "ware for ware, without coine" (72).28 Yet, despite his wish that men might "devise a waie howe to live withowt" these superfluous "trifles" of the market, Smith concedes that such a thing is "impossible," holding certain luxury goods to be necessary for the maintenance of a "civilized" household (47-48).29 "Withowt sume therof of the said commodities," he allows, the English nation "wold live but grosslie and barbarously" (42). The latter category reveals the ideological work being done by the former: by classifying certain commodities as superfluous, as lacking in substance and utility, Smith may deem others necessary, substantial, and inherently valuable.30 Accepting the consumption of certain unnecessary wares as a necessary evil, Smith goes on to promote their expanded production within the realm. It becomes clear that the prejudice he harbors is not toward luxury goods per se, but rather toward their importation from abroad. Complaining that "Nowe the porest yonge man in a countrey can not be contented either with a lether girdle, or lether pointes, gloves, knyves, or daggers made nighe home," but must "have theire geare" from "beyonde the sea," Smith asks: Were it not better for us that our owne people should be sett aworke with suche thinges then straungers?... I thinke these thinges might be wrought here ... as all kinde of clothe, Carseyes, worsted and coverletes and carpetes of tapestrie, knitte sieves, hosen and peticotes, hattes, cappes; then paper, both white and browne, parchmentes, vellam, and all kind of lether ware; as gloves, pointes, girdells, skinnes for Jerkins; and so of our tinne, all manner of vessell; and also all kinde of glasses, earthen potes, tennis balles, tables, cardes, chestes, sins we will nedes have such kinde of thinges Might not we be ashamed to take all these thinges at straungers hands, and set suche a multitude of worke of other people ... wher all this might be saved with in the Realme? (125-27)

What "roused burning indignation" in Smith and his contemporaries, according to Thirsk, was the fact that such wares were made from materials cheaply bought in their country of origin and cost their producers almost nothing but their labor. A deep prejudice lurked, she maintains, against goods that held value only "by virtue of the labor applied to them."31 This prejudice was particularly acute when that labor was executed on foreign soil with materials or "stuff" of English origin, as is apparent in Smith's

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

23

description of the foreign manufactured wares that were flooding London's shops and mesmerizing its shoppers: I have sene within these xxtie yeres, when th[e]re weare not of these haberdashers that sell french or millan cappes, glasses, Daggers, swerdes, g[ir]dles and such thinges, not a dossen in all London. And now from the towere to Westminster alonge, everie streat is full of them; and theire shoppes glisters and shine of glasses, aswell lookinge as drinckinge, yea all manor vesselles of the same stuffe; painted cruses, gay daggers, knives, swords, and g[ir]dles, that is able to make anie temporate man to ga[z]e on them, and to bie sumwhat, thoughe it serve to no purpose necessarie.... What grossnes be we of, that se it, and suffer such a continuall spoile to be made of oure goodes and treasure by such meanes. And speciallie, that will suffer oure owne commodities to goe and set straungers on worke, and then to bye them againe at their handes; as of oure woll, they make and die carsies, fresadowes, brodeclothes, and cappess, beyond the seaze, and bringe them hether to be sold againe; whearin note, I praie youe, what they doe make us paye at the end for owre sturfe againe; for the stranger custome, for the workmanshippe, and coullers ... whearas, with workinge the same with in oure Realme, oure owne men should be set on worke at the chardges of straungers. (64) As we have seen, such xenophobic arguments about the foreign origin and manufacture of many fripperies, the money spent on them, and the perceived loss of domestic employment were deployed by projectors to promote the expanded production of these luxury commodities within the realm. Awareness of the increasing refinement of the goods necessary to maintain a "civilized" household also surfaces in travel literature of the period, which excoriated "barbarous" cultures for the rude simplicity of their household stuff. Pieter de Marees thus comments of the inhabitants of Guinea: "Their Houses are not very curiously made, but altogether slight, much like to a number of Hogsties, and I am of opinion, that in many Countreys, there are better Hog-sties then their Houses are Their houses are not very full of House-hold stuffe"32 The importance of household stuff as a sign of civility likewise features prominently in Leo Africanus's Geographical Historie of Africa. Of the people of Hea in Morocco, Leo remarks: With them tables and table-cloathes are quite out of use, in stead whereof they spread a certaine round mat upon the ground, which serveth among this rude people both for table, cloth, and all— The seats whereon they sit, are nought else but certaine mats made of hayre and rushes. For beds they use a certaine kinde of hairie flockbed or mattresse [O]ne part of these mattresses they lye upon insteed of a couch, and with the residue they cover their bodies as it were with blankets and

24

Chapter i

coverlets Likewise of such base and harsh stuffe they make their cushions The women ... us[e] for their huswifery turned vessels and cups of wood: their platters, dishes, and other their kitchin-vessels be for the most part of earth.33

The rudimentary materials, forms, and functions of their "base and harsh [household] stuffe" is viewed by Leo as a self-evident sign that the inhabitants of Hea are a "rude people." Of the people of Fez, he similarly comments: The table whereat they sit is lowe, uncovered, and filthie: seats they have none but the bare ground, neither knives or spoones but only their ten talons. The said Cuscusu [couscous] is set before them all in one only platter, whereout as well gentlemen as other take it not with spoones, but with their clawes five. The meat & pottage is put al in one dish; out of which every one raketh with his greasie fists what he thinkes good: you shall never see knife upon the table, but they teare and greedily devoure their meate like hungrie dogs [T]o tell you the very truth, in all Italic there is no gentleman so meane, which for fine diet and stately furniture excelleth not the greatest potentates and lords of all Africa.34

Their dirth of household stuff has the effect of transforming the Moroccan diners, first into birds of prey (their fingers become "ten talons"), and then into a pack of "hungrie dogs." Their devolution, by negative example, makes clear the civilizing function household stuff had assumed with respect to the body; in its absence, men rake and claw their meat like beasts. The refinement of material objects does not simply offer an occasion for the exercise of civilized manners; rather, it is the objects themselves that bring this bodily civility into being. When tables are "lowe, uncovered, and filthie," those who eat at them, even if they are "gentlemen," become vile and "greasie" and are forced to stoop down and lower themselves. Without knives, they must "teare" their meat. Without separate, apportioning dishes, they must "greedily devoure" what is laid out for all indiscriminately. The description makes clear the way in which material objects served to create and maintain status hierarchies: the communal nature of the couscous platter blurs the social distinctions of those who partake of it. Household stuff had become a means of measuring European civility against the relative refinement of other cultures: the meanest Italian gentleman is greater than the "greatest potentates of all Africa" because he has more "stately furniture." In Leo's eyes the "civilizing process" clearly begins with the refinement of objects and ends with the refinement of subjects, and not vice versa. Such descriptions of the dearth of household stuff that characterized "barbarous" cultures aimed to make European readers grateful for their own commodious customs and goods.

Housekeeping and Household Stuff

25

I

[Concerning the] keeping of a house ... you have now seene howe it turneth and returneth to the wife. — Juan Luis Vivesy The Office and Duetie of an Husband (1553)

With the expanding market of consumer goods appeared an expanding market of domestic literature designed to educate household subjects in "domesticall duties" that increasingly centered on the acquisition, maintenance, display, and safekeeping of household stuff. The ideas expressed in these treatises were not in themselves new; the concept of household management as an activity that involved the governance of objects, as well as subjects, may be traced back to Xenophon and Aristotle, whose writings on the subject of oikonomia—or "oeconomy" as the term was Englished—were recycled again and again in early modern treatises, where they were merged with Biblical sources, in particular the Pauline Epistles on marriage.35 It was not the ideas themselves that were new; rather, the market into which they were received imbued them with new significance. As Louis B. Wright has argued, such treatises responded to the interests of a "middle-class culture" that had come to recognize "the positive service rendered by so important a functional unit as the home to the organization of that society which made [their] goods safe and gave [their] accumulated possessions continuity."36 The enormous popularity of the genre, Kathleen M. Davies argues, was tied to "the publishing explosion of the sixteenth century and the growth of a middle-class lay reading public."37 As householders of the middling sort began to furnish their houses with the new luxuries described above, they found new significance in the trope of the household as a hold, not simply in the sense of a "property held; a possession, holding " but of "a thing that [itself] holds something ... a receptacle" or repository of goods, analogous to a "ship's hold" (OED). An early instance of this trope may be found in Xenophons Treatise of Householde^ translated into English by Gentian Hervet in 1532, in which Socrates's interlocutor, Isomachus, likens the household to a merchant "shyppe" that is "laded" with "great abundance of implimentes ... stouffe and goodes [oikia]? all "well sette in good order."38 In discussing the "settyng in order of the householde stouffe," Isomachus states: Fyrste me thought best to shewe ... what a house properly was ordeyned fore. For ... it is builded for this purpose & consideration, that it shulde be a profitable

26

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vessel for those thi[n]ges, that shulde be in it [alia ta oikemata okodometai pros auto touto eskemmena, opos aggeia os sumphorotata e tois mellousin en autois esesthai]. Wherfore in a maner it byddeth the dwellers, to lay up every thyng, where it is most mete to put it. The inner privey chambre, bicause it standeth strongest of all loketh for to have the jewels, plate, and all suche thynnges as be moste precious. The drye places loke for the wheate, the colde for the wyne. And bryght places do desyre ... thynges, as require lightsomnes.39

The house is here figured as an empty vessel whose purpose or end is to be filled with household stuff. Its spaces are shaped and organized around the needs of its objects. The role of household subjects is to fill the empty vessel, to ensure that each space receives what it "wants," in the sense not only of what it "lacks," but of what it actively "desyre [s]." Each room yearns for the distinctive objects that will satisfy its peculiar craving. The redefinition of the household as a receptacle or repository of goods had a profound impact on the gendered division of labor within the home. This shift is reflected in the history of the term housekeeper, originally synonymous with householder (one "who holds or occupies a house as his [sic] own dwelling" [OED])y the term came in the sixteenth century to refer not only to the possession or holding of a house, but to the maintenance and management of household stuff. This shift in emphasis from the possession or ownership of real property to the maintenance or management of moveable property was accompanied by another, specifically gendered shift: the term came to refer specifically to "a woman who manages or superintends the affairs of a household" (OED). Domestic treatises played an important role in defining the precise parameters of this gendered division of labor, in which the husband's duty or "calling" (in Protestant terminology) became that of getting, and the wife's that of keeping, household stuff. In its classical form, this division of labor derives from Xenophon's Oeconomicus and from the later, pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, Oeconomica (itself largely based on Xenophon and on the first book of Aristotle's Politics). Both treatises seek to naturalize the gendered division of labor by grounding it in analogies both to the natural world, and to the "natural" dispositions of men and women. In Xenophon, Isomachus thus naturalizes the distinction between husband and wife, as "getter" and "keeper" respectively, through the following apiarian analogy: Me thynketh also that the maistres [i.e., queen] bee that kepeth the hyve, do the like wyse that that god hath ordeyned her [the wife] unto ... for bicause, sayde he, hit bydeth alwaye in the hyve And what so ever any of them [the bees] bryngeth home she marketh, receyveth, and saveth it And whan the tyme cometh, that it

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muste be occupied than she distributeth every thing accordyng as equite requireth— And that that is brought in ye must receive it. And that, whiche muste be spente of it, ye muste parte and devide it. And that that remaineth, ye muste ley it up and kepe it safe tyl tyme of nede.40

The housewife's role in managing the household economy, her oversight of its stuff and provisions, is clearly not a passive one, as the term keeper might suggest; for her responsibilities include not only saving, storing, and maintaining, but marking, ordering, accounting, dividing, distributing, spending, and disposing of household property, including both durable and perishable goods. These varied responsibilities are likewise reflected in the early modern term "oeconomy" which derives from the Greek oikonomia, from oikos + nomos. The term oikos, usually translated as "house," itself derives from the verb oikeo, meaning "to inhabit, occupy," but also "to manage, direct, govern."41 The term nomos, usually translated as "law" or "rule," derives from the verb nemo, which may also mean "to dwell in, inhabit," and "to hold sway, manage," but carries the further meanings of "to deal out, distribute, dispense," and "to have as one's portion,... to hold, possess."42 The housewife's oeconomy, her duty as keeper, thus positioned her in an active, managerial role that required her not only to keep or hold goods, but to deal out, distribute and dispense them, and thereby to "govern" the household economy. The troublesome issue of authority raised by the wife's domestic governance or oeconomy, and by the metaphor of the queen bee deployed to describe it, is never directly acknowledged in Xenophon's treatise—at least not by the husband. Isomachus's wife, however, responds to the responsibility of governing the household that her husband has delegated to her with incredulity: "I do greatlye marvayle," she says, "whether suche thynges, as ye saye the maistres bee dothe, do not belonge moche more to you than me."43 Later, Isomachus invokes a different metaphor to describe the housewife's duty as "keeper," and the problem of authority resurfaces: I taught her also howe in comon welthes, & in good cites that were wel ruled & ordred, it was not inough for the citezins and dwellers, to have good laws made unto them, except that they beside chose men to have the oversighte of the same lawes And so I bad my wife that she shuld thi[n]ke her selfe to be, as if it were the overseer of the lawes within our house: and that she shulde ... overse the stuffe, vessell & implementes of our house none other wise than the capitaine of a garison overseeth and proveth the soudiers.44

When the husband worries that this may prove to be too burdensome or masculine a responsibility for his wife, she seeks to quell his concern by

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providing her own metaphor for her new responsibility, one that both feminizes and naturalizes it: "me thinketh," she says, that "as it is naturally given to a good woman, rather to be diligent aboute her owne chyldren than not to care for them, Lyke wyse it is more pleasure for an honest woman to take hede to her owne goodes, than to set noughte by them."45 In likening the task of caring for her household stuff to that of caring for her children, she suggests that her precious household objects demand equal attention, if not love, and that her affective attachment to and concern for them is entirely natural. The early modern housewife, it would seem, was expected not merely to watch over the growing litter of objects placed under her care, but quite literally to mother them (and to take "pleasure" in doing so).46 A residual trace of gendered anxiety remains, however, in Socrates's response: he dryly (and ironically) remarks that her analogy suggests that she has a "manlye stomach."47 The "masculine" responsibilities inherent in the housewife's oeconomic role as described in Xenophon's hive-metaphor are likewise tamed in its subsequent appearances in domestic literature, where the housewife is no longer likened to the queen bee presiding over her honeycombe (or compartmentalized store of precious objects), but to a bird presiding over its nest. In Miles Coverdale's The Christian State of Matrimony (1543), for example, it appears as follows: What so ever is to be done without the house that belongeth to the man, & the woman to study for thynges wythein to be done, and to se saved or spent conveniently what so ever he bryngeth in. As the byrde flyeth to and fro to brynge to the nest, so becommeth it the man to applye his outward busynes. And as the dame kepeth the nest, hatcheth the egges, and bryng[eth] forth the frute, so let them bothe learne to do from the unreasonable fowles or beastes created of God naturally to observe theyr sondry properties.48

The housewife's role as "keeper" of household stuff no longer seems to involve actively ordering, counting, dividing, distributing, spending, and disposing household stuff, but is here likened to that of the hen who sits passively on the eggs in her nest, waiting for them to hatch. The analogy is closer to that offered by Isomachus's wife, for the implication is once again that the housewife must care for her goods as if they were her offspring. The metaphor appears again in Henry Smith's A Preparative to Marriage of 1591: they must think that they are like two birds, the one is the Cock, and the other is the Dam: the Cocke flieth abroad to bring in, the Dam sitteth upon the nest to keepe al at home. So God hath made the man to travaile abroade, and the woman to keepe

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home: and so their nature, and their wit, and their strength are fitted accordingly; for the mans pleasure is most abroade, and the womans within.49

The afterlife of Xenophon's metaphor suggests that the gendered division of labor within the home was gradually coming to be defined as a division between male activity and female inactivity. The husband in Smith's treatise "travaile[s] abroade" (that is, both travels and travails or works outside the home), while the wife "sitteth" idly "upon the nest." The phrase "keepe home" no longer suggests the active, managerial role in the household economy described by Xenophon, but conveys simple, passive confinement within the domestic sphere. With the increasing value and proliferation of household stuff within the home, it would seem, the housewife's role as "keeper" underwent an ideological devaluation; in Smith's version, the wife's nest-sitting no longer produces any profit, no longer "hatcheth the eggs" or "bryng[eth] forth the frute" as in Coverdale. Rather, her housekeeping is cast as the passive reception, conservation, and consumption of what the husband "bring[sj in." While the expectation that the housewife should "mother" her goods works to naturalize her role as housekeeper, and thereby to disassociate it from the realm of productive labor, however, it also establishes a powerful and abiding affective bond between women and material objects that was potentially threatening to the husband's absolute, proprietary rights. For under the English common law doctrine of coverture, all moveable goods, even those that the wife brought into the marriage, became the exclusive property of the husband. This threat appears in the proprietary tone of Xenophon's housewife—within the context of the text's English reception— when she tells her husband in the passage cited above: it shuld have ben more grevous unto me a great dele, said she, if ye had hade me to take no hede to my goodes than to bydde me to be dilygent aboute that that is my owne. For me thinketh, that like wyse, as it is naturally given to a good woman, rather to be diligent aboute her owne chyldren than not to care for them, Lyke wyse it is more pleasure for an honest woman to take hede to her owne goodes, than to set noughte by them," etc.

In caring for her goods as she would her children, she has clearly come to take a proprietary interest in them. In exhorting the housewife to "mother" her household stuff, English domestic manuals were in a sense asking women to treat the moveables they were charged with "keeping" as if they were their "owne goodes," in spite of the law of coverture. In response, perhaps, to the potential danger posed by the housewife's

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affective bond with "her" household stuff, Isomachus proposes a far less threatening (though no less naturalizing) characterization of it: "me thynkethe," he says, "that god hathe caused nature to shewe playnlye, that a woman is borne to take hede of all suche thinges, as muste be done at home," and having "ordeyned, that the woman shulde kepe those thynges, that the man getteth and bringeth home to her, and ... knowynge verye well, that for to kepe a thynge surely, hit is not the worste poynte to be doubtful and fearefull, he dealed to her a greatte deale more feare, than he dyd to the man."50 Here, the housewife's affective attachment to her goods becomes an indication of her "doubtful and fearefull" disposition, which, it is implied, is an essentially feminine rather than a masculine trait. The wife's role as "keeper" is thereby construed as a sign of women's "natural" weakness, rather than of their "manlye stomach" or strength. A roughly contemporaneous version of this notion appears in Richard Hyrd's 1529 translation of Juan Luis Vives's The Instruction of a Christen Woman, which cites Aristotle (or the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica, which itself borrows heavily from Xenophon) as its authority: Aristotle sayth that in house kepynge the mannes duetie is to get and the womans to kepe. Wherfore nature semeth to have made them fearfull for the same purpose lest they shulde be wasters and hath gyven them continual thought and care for lackyng. For if the woman be over free the man shall never gette so moche as she wyll waste in shorte tyme: & so their house muste nedes sone decaye. Hit is nat becommynge for an honeste wyfe to be a great spender. Nor they be lyghtly no great sparers of theyr honesty that be so large of theyr money.... Therefore let her use her householde to sobrenes and measure. For that is more the womans duerye than the mannes.51

The woman's duty to keep what the man gets is again linked to her naturally "fearfull" disposition, which is here described more specifically as a "continual thought and care for lackyng." Female subjectivity is defined not so much in relation to household objects, but rather the perpetual fear of their loss. This anxious subjectivity centers not on possession, on caring for what is one's own, or even on caring for what, by virtue of that care, is treated as if it were one's own, but rather on the ever-present possibility of loss, lack, or dispossession. While the fear of dispossession is attributed to women, however, it seems clear from the consequences it is designed to ward off that this attribution may be a projection. For the danger posed by the unfearful or "over free" wife is one that the husband has good reason to fear himself: his goods and income "wyll waste in shorte tyme," his "house muste nedes sone

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decaye," and his wife's "honesty" or chastity will be "lyghtly" undone. Underlying the anxious subjectivity attributed to the wife lies the acknowledgment that the "womans duetye" of keeping the house affords her a measure of control over the household economy; the specter of her unsupervised spending and disposing of property haunts the mind of the husband with the "continual thought" that he does not have complete control over his wife's consumption and domestic management. The passage reappears in Thomas Paynell's 1553 translation of Vives's The Office and Duetie of an Husband in a slightly modified form: Nature ... hath geven unto man a noble, a high, & a diligent minde to be busye and occupied abroade, to gayne & to bring home to their wives & familie, to rule them & their children, & also all their houshold. And to the woman nature hath geven a feareful, a covetous, & an humble mind to be subject unto man, & to kepe that he doeth gayne.52

In the latter treatise, directed to husbands rather than wives, the wife's role as "keeper" is not surprisingly taken to be a sign not only of her "feareful" and "covetous" feminine disposition, but of her natural "subjection] unto man." Any suggestion that her active, managerial role within the household economy may pose a threat to her husband's authority, much less to his property, has been entirely effaced. We have come a long way indeed from the "manlye stomach" of the housewife who "overse[es] the stuffe, vessell & implementes of [her] house none other wise than the capitaine of a garison overseeth and proveth the soudiers." While it seems clear that the woman's role as keeper of household stuff had become central to conceptualizations of female subjectivity in domestic treatises of the period, it is equally clear that these conceptualizations were highly contradictory, suggesting first activity then passivity, labor then leisure, spending then receiving, profligacy then frugality, courage then fearfulness, lusty assertiveness then timid humility, sexual largesse then chary chastity, "manlye" forms of governance and then "subjection] unto man."53 To better grasp the contradictions inherent in early modern women's role as keepers of household stuff, it may be useful to consider the complex and divergent notions of what it meant to keep during the period. The word keep, according to the OED, derives from the Old English cepan ("'to lay hold' with the hands, and hence with the attention, 'to keep an eye upon, watch'"). While keep is not related to any other known words in cognate languages, it was used to translate the Latin observare ("to watch, keep an eye

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upon, take note of"), and its subsequent development appears strongly influenced by the senses of the latter term, and the related conservare, praeservare, and reservare. The word keep also bears a close affinity to hold; indeed, the two were sometimes used interchangeably, although keep, we are told, "implies the exercise of stronger effort to retain." The strength of this "effort to retain" is apparent in the earliest senses of keep, current from the eleventh to the late thirteenth century: "To seize, lay hold of; to snatch, take,. .. catch or get." In contrast to this notion of active seizing or snatching, however, the early senses of keep also included a more passive or receptive notion: "To take in, receive, contain, hold." In the sixteenth century, these divergent strands became still more complex. The former, more active, strand evolves to mean: "Actively to hold in possession; to retain in one's power or control; to continue to have, hold, or possess," and even more assertively: "To withold (from); implying exertion or effort to prevent a thing from going or getting to another." The witholding of the thing possessed might also involve concealment, as in the sense: "To hide, conceal; not to divulge." The active "exertion or effort" (in a word, the labor) involved in keeping is likewise apparent in the related senses: "To guard, defend, protect, preserve, save," "To be on one's guard against," "To take care of," "To pay attention or regard to," "to look after, watch over," "To maintain accounts of money received and paid," "To provide for the sustenance of; to provide with food and clothing and other requisites of life," "to reserve: to lay up, to store up," "To keep in repair," "To keep from deteriorating or disappearing." By contrast, the more passive conception of what it means to keep evolves as: "To have regard," "To have care," "to observe ... or dutifully abide by (an ordinance, law, custom,... promise,... a thing prescribed ...)," "To stay or remain in, on, or at (a place); not to leave," "To reside, dwell, live, lodge." In addition, there were conceptions of keeping that lay somewhere between these opposing poles. Thus, for example, there was the reflexive notion: "To restrain oneself, refrain, hold back; to abstain (from)," a notion requiring active effort or exertion to be achieved, but whose achievement is signaled by a lack of activity. The notion of keeping as custodianship likewise lay somewhere between active possession (of one's own property) and passive preservation (of another's property). The care and attention required to keep an object could be construed both actively and passively as "to take care" versus "to have care," or "to pay attention, keep watch, look to" versus "to attend, watch, look." The ambiguity of the term keep worked to mask the ideological tensions and contradictions inherent in the wife's role as "keeper"; for the word

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could "stretch" (to borrow Swinburne's term) to signify either activity or passivity, labor or leisure, production or consumption, possession or mere custody. These conflicting significations could be marshaled in the service of residual, dominant, and emergent ideologies that were competing to make sense of changes brought about by the nascent market economy and to position household subjects (differentially) in relation to it.54 The task of unraveling these contradictions is crucial, however, if we are to understand their shaping influence on female subjectivity. In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to unravel what I consider to be the three main contradictions that the trope of the wife as keeper presents in the following ways: (i) the contradictions posed by keeping as both active and passive, labor and leisure, production and consumption, will be examined within the broad context of the transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production, with particular attention to changes in both the material form and the ideological function of housework; (2) the contradiction of keeping as custodianship versus possession will be examined in relation to women's formal and informal (de jure and de facto) property relations; and (3) the contradictions of keeping as at once supervising, being supervised, and self-supervision will be situated in relation to the disciplinary apparatuses through which female subjectivity was constituted, including both state apparatuses (political, legal, religious, etc.) and more subtle or coercive modes of discipline, including self-discipline.

II [T]he Hus-wife hath finisht her labour ... —Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (1615)

The ideological redefinition of the home as a sphere of consumption rather than production, and of the husband and housewife as getter and keeper respectively, clearly did not correspond to the lived reality of every English housewife; most women continued to work productively, both within and outside the home, throughout the early modern period. Housework did not simply disappear with the rise of capitalism; rather, it was devalued in ways and for reasons that I shall discuss in the following chapter. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that both the material form and cultural function of housework were profoundly transformed with the development of the commodity form. This process of transformation, and the contradictions to

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which it gave rise, may be glimpsed in Gervase Markham's The English Huswife (1615),55 which seeks to offer a comprehensive account of the material practices of huswifery. Markham's treatise is of interest in that, unlike the treatises discussed in the previous section, it is more concerned with the housewife's practical than with her theoretical role. Addressed to the "gentle and general reader," it is designed to instruct wives of the country gentry, yeomanry, and perhaps of agricultural wage-earners,56 in all "the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate Woman: as her Physicke, Cookery, Banquetingstuffe, Distillation, Perfumes, Wooll, Hemp, Flax, Dairies, Brewing, Baking, and all other things belonging to an Houshold." Its focus, it would seem, is thus on production, rather than consumption. Yet the first chapter of Markham's treatise, which aims to describe the housewife's character or subjectivity ("the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate Woman"), introduces the term "consumption," if only as something to be shunned. The housewife's corpus of domestic skills is organized around the chief virtue of temperance, which is defined first "inwardly," covering "her behaviour and cariage towards her Husband," and then "outwardly," charting "her apparrell and dyet" (3). The inwardly temperate wife, we are told, is able to govern her own temper, shunning "all violence of rage, passion and humour" and "appearing ... pleasant, amiable and delightfull" to her husband, even in the face of his own "misgovernment" (3). If his bad behavior induces her "to contrarie thoughts," she is instructed "vertuously to suppresse them" (3). Opposed to this image of contained choler is the figure of the intemperate wife or shrew, who gives in to the temptation to express her violent, "contrarie" thoughts in words. The shrew's "evill and uncomely language," Markham warns, is "deformed though uttered even to servants, but most monstrous and ugly when it appeares before the presence of a husband" (3). The housewife's inward temperance would thus appear to be primarily a matter of outward show. If the good housewife's inward temperance concerns what comes out of her mouth, her outward temperance centers on what goes into it—on what and how she consumes. She is instructed to "proportion" her "apparrell and dyet ... according to the competency of her husbands estate and calling, making her circle rather straight then large, for it is a rule if we extend to the uttermost we take awaie increase, if we goe a hayre breadth beyond we enter into consumption" (3). The intemperate housewife's "consumption" is here implicitly linked, through the figure of the enlarged circle, at once to the shrew's big mouth, to the wantonness or "want" of female

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sexuality ("circle" being a cant term for the female genitals), and to the threat of an unbridled, unproductive expenditure that is cast at once in sexual and economic terms. Her domestic "circle" likewise evokes her role as keeper; it functions as a container or vessel which saves, preserves, and nourishes whatever her husband puts into it. The prodigal wife who spends beyond her husband's means, whose "circle" is enlarged beyond the scope of his "competency," usurps his position as phallic extender/expender within the gendered economy of the household. Female "consumption," like female sexual incontinence, threatens the integrity of the home. The intemperate wife's "lavish prodigality" is excoriated as "brutish," and her "miserable covetousnes" as "hellish" (3). Markham casts the shrew's appetite for strange and rare commodities as an insatiable, denaturing craving that threatens to spoil her "natural" inclination for familiar and familial, home-grown goods. To counter this craving, Markham exhorts the housewife to dress "altogether without toiish garnishes" and "farre from the vanity of new and fantastique fashions" and to temper her appetite for costly, edible "garnishes" (3): let her dyet... be rather to satisfie nature than our affections, and apter to kill hunger than revive new appetites, let it proceede more from the provision of her owne yarde, then the furniture of the markets; and let it be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance shee hath with it, then for the strangenesse and raritie it bringeth from other Countries. (4)

Markham exhorts the housewife to make do with the "provision of her own yard," to feed only wholesome, natural appetites that are produced by, and therefore satiable within, the domestic economy of the household. The market commodity is figured as that which introduces, lack into domestic economy; its consumption produces not satiety, but only renewed want— making a famine where abundance lies. Markham's ideal, domestic economy is portrayed as a closed circle that knows no lack because its bounds extend no farther than what is produced within the home; the "strangenesse and raritie" of market goods, and especially those brought "from other Countries," open the housewife's circle, inciting "new appetites" that extend beyond the bounds of the domestic sphere and her husband's sexual and economic "competency." This portrait of a totally self-sufficient household economy is curiously contradicted, however, by the practical advice Markham gives in his own manual.57 In the chapter on weaving, for example, we find that the housewife's skill is put to use not as a producer, but rather as a consumer of goods:

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Now as touching the warping of cloth, which is both the skill and action of the Weaver, yet must not our English Housewife be ignorant therein, but though the doing of the thing be not proper unto her, yet what is done must not be beyond her knowledge, both to bridle the falshood of unconscionable workemen, and for her owne satisfaction when shee is rid of the doubt of anothers evill doing. (89-90)

During this period, in which household production was gradually being replaced by nascent capitalist industry, it was becoming more economical for the housewife to purchase what she had once produced. By the early seventeenth century, textile production had begun to shift outside the home, becoming the province of dyers, weavers, fullers, and shearmen. This shift away from home-industry transformed the domestic know-how imparted by manuals such as Markham's into advice that the housewife would thenceforth take with her to the marketplace: "Now after your cloth is thus warped and delivered up into the hands of the Weaver," Markham instructs, the Hus-wife hath finisht her labour: for in the weaving, walking, and dressing thereof shee can challenge no propertie more then to intreate them severallie to discharge their duties with a good conscience; that is to say that the Weaver weave it close, strong and true, that the Walker or Fuller Mill it carefullie,... and that the Clothworker or Shereman burle and dresse it sufficientlie, whereby the cloth may weare rough, nor two low least it appeare thrid bare ere it come out of the hands of the Tailor. (90)

Notwithstanding Markham's agoraphobic injunction to abjure the "furniture of the markets," his treatise clearly caters not only to the gentry's growing dependence on nascent capitalist industry, but its appetite for "strangenesse and raritie" as well. This appetite is apparent in Markham's chapter on cookery, which displays a marked preference for small, delicate, and costly dishes. Almost all of the recipes he records require exotic, imported spices and seasonings. Indeed, the ingredients of some of the dishes seem almost to have been chosen for their expense and rarity alone, such as the "strange Sallats," which, Markham instructs, "are both good and daintie" and serve to satisfy the "curiositie," and for "the finer adorning of the table" (42).58 Other sallats are described as "for shewe only" (42), and are designed not to "satisfie nature" or "kill hunger," but rather to satiate the "new appetites" for rarities he had earlier warned the housewife to shun; such dishes, we are told, are "of great request and estimation in Frounce, Spaine, and Italy, and the most curious Nations" (43). The early modern break with medieval cookery was itself linked to the growing commercial economy and expansion of trade.

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With the shift from sheer quantitative display at the medieval banqueting table to the qualitative refinement of "conceited" dishes, Stephen Mennell argues, "knowledgeability and a sense of delicacy in matters of food" had come to function as markers of elite status.59 It was precisely this new emphasis on styles of cooking and serving that created a demand for domestic manuals such as Markham's.60 Created to furnish the demand for such delicacies, The English Huswife is in a sense itself a kind of conceited dish or newfangled commodity, engendered by and for the marketplace; it teaches the housewife not only how to produce goods, but how to be a good consumer, redefining her role within a household economy that was itself being redefined by an expanding market of consumer goods. A downwardly mobile member of the nobility, Markham had himself sought unsuccessfully for much of his life to make a living off the land.61 Unable to eke out an existence through husbandry, he decided to gain extra income by writing books on the subject. His dependence on the book-trade to prop up his own domestic economy seems to have extended, however, beyond the scope of his "competency," for it appears that he flooded the market with such books, and in 1617 was required to sign a memorandum by the Stationers, stating, "I Gervase Markham of London, gent., do promise hereafter never to write any more book or books to be printed of the diseases or cures of any cattle, as horse, ox, cow, sheep, swine, goats, etc."62 Markham himself was thus not immune to the attractions of the marketplace. While his book yearns nostalgically for a simple past or future perfect world of land-based values, it also bears testimony to the market's infiltration of the ideally self-sufficient domestic economy of the country estate. In promoting itself as a newfangled commodity that no good housewife could do without, moreover, The English Huswife introduces into domestic economy the very lack or "want" it eschews. In the 1615 edition of Countrey Contentments, a volume containing The English Huswife and a companion treatise on husbandry, Markham tries to persuade his prospective readers of the necessity of purchasing his latest book, arguing that it contains neither epitomy, relation, extraction, nor repetition either of mine owne, or any other Author whatsoever, but a plaine forme of doing things by a neerer and more easie and safer way then ever hath hitherto beene discovered, drawne from our latest experiments in true Art, and finding a neerer way to our ends by many degrees: for what before could not be done in divers yeeres, here you shall see how to effect... in few weekes. (sig. Aiv)

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Markham's product clearly answered to a considerable demand for such books: Countrey Contentments went through five editions by 1633, and was included in a collection of Markham's most popular works, brashly entitled A Way to Get Wealth. This collection also contained Markham's purported Farewell to Husbandry, a book that itself went through some five editions. The "farewell" to books on husbandry Markham promised in 1617, it would seem, was not to be, for the market in books of husbandry, rather than husbandry itself, had become his livelihood, his "way to get wealth." During the long period of transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production, the residual ideal of the self-sufficient housewife who produces what she consumes competed with the emergent ideal of the passive and obedient keeper who mothers the goods her husband provides. The former was frequently deployed in an effort to resolve the contradictions posed by the latter through a nostalgic return to the past. The latter presented an image of the wife as idle consumer that certainly contradicted the reality of ordinary women's lives; yet this image exerted an influence even on ordinary women, insofar as its acceptance became for them the "price of upward social mobility."63

Ill The "marriage" of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. —Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism" (1981)

My study of the housewife's role as keeper within the context of nascent capitalism and emergent forms of commodification utilizes both materialist and feminist modes of analysis. Yet it is important to acknowledge that these two modes of analysis have not always been considered entirely compatible.64 While the reasons attested for what Heidi Hartmann famously termed the "unhappy marriage" between them are many,65 one aspect that has received insufficient scrutiny is the governing trope of the "traffic in women" that has come to stand as a kind of emblem of materialist feminist analysis.66 Materialist feminist criticism of Shakespeare is no exception; indeed, early modern England's patrilineal property regime is often cited as a particularly egregious example of women's status as objects, rather than subjects, of property. Significantly, Hartmann's own explanation of the "unhappy marriage"

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invokes this governing trope through its reference to the English common law doctrine of coverture,67 under which a woman's legal identity and right to own property were "veiled ... clouded and overshadowed" by her husband during marriage.68 So too, Hartmann argues, has marxism "subsume [d] the feminist struggle into the 'larger' struggle against capital."69 While I agree wholeheartedly with Hartmann's assertion that materialist feminist criticism must account for both "the development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of women within them,"701 would suggest that as a crucial first step in this process, we need to subject the alltoo-familiar trope of women as objects of property to historical and theoretical scrutiny. The law of coverture, an exemplary example of this trope, is perhaps a good place to begin. Coverture's looming yet adumbrated presence within feminist discourse is problematic in that it uncritically reflects the rhetoric of the doctrine itself: that of a monolithic, all-encompassing, obscuring, legal entity. Hartmann's evocation of the term is no exception; it conceives of the law as a totalizing, unified system that mirrors and serves to protect the interests of the dominant class—here, ironically, represented by the totalizing tendencies of marxism itself, which in Hartmann's view leaves feminism in its shadow.71 In defense of the former, one might point out that marxist legal theorists have themselves abandoned this instrumentalist view of law in favor of more complex analyses of legal systems as (in Louis Althusser's terms) "relatively autonomous," or determined by relations of production "in the last instance."72 Thus, Maureen Cain and Alan Hunt suggest that the law, far from being a mere reflection of dominant ideology, may incorporate "contradictory features and effects," and thus function as "both an active agency in historical processes" and one that "records and encapsulates the balance between social forces at particular historical moments and the ideological forms in which these struggles are fought out."73 This notion of law as a dynamic site of struggle has recently been taken up by feminist legal theorists and historians, who emphasize the heterogeneity of legal systems as including not only "the rules that constitute the formal body of law" but "the discourses in which those rules are situated, and through which they are articulated and elaborated; the institutions by means of which they are constantly subverted and modified in their implementation and administration ... and the various actors whose participation ... sustains the enterprise."74 This new emphasis on the discourses, institutions, and actors who variously support or subvert the law's application has led in turn to a far more nuanced account of the history of women's property relations under capitalism.

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Recent scholarship on women's property rights in early modern England, for example, has demonstrated that there was far greater complexity and less rigidity in the legal systems governing marital property, and a wider discrepancy between legal theory and actual practice, than was previously imagined. Analyses of documents such as conveyancing manuals, probate accounts, and legal records of litigation over marriage settlements have begun to reveal faultlines in the purported hegemony of coverture.75 Such scholarship has been instrumental in documenting what property actually passed through the hands of both elite and ordinary women in the period. We now know, for example, that in spite of the legal fiction of coverture, many wives retained various forms of separate property, secured through marriage settlements that were defensible in equity courts.76 Though it is difficult to say how widespread the practice of "separate estate" was, Amy Erickson has found evidence of women at all social levels establishing various forms of separate property during coverture, whether through formal settlements, simple bonds, or more informal arrangements between spouses. While the origins of "separate estate" remain obscure, it is generally agreed that it was a well-established practice by the end of the sixteenth century, when the feudal doctrine of coverture began to conflict with the shifting exigencies of a rapidly expanding market economy.77 Legal historians have suggested that the increasing value and importance of personal property or "moveables"— the form of capital most often owned and inherited by women—relative to real property, may have contributed to the rise of separate estate.78 It would be a mistake, Erickson cautions, however, to read the emergence of married women's separate property in the period as straightforward evidence of women's increasing independence or economic emancipation, for the institution of separate estate did not "improve women's economic position steadily or consistently."79 Nonetheless, her study of long neglected aspects of women's property rights highlights the disjuncture between legal theory and actual practice in ways that make visible "the ingenuity of many ordinary women in working within a massively restrictive system."80 A variety of factors—none of them aimed at promoting women's economic independence per se—probably contributed to the increasing popularity of marriage settlements, such as the desire of the bride's natal family to secure property descent through her to her children, or to relieve themselves of financial responsibility for her in the event she should be widowed or separated, or her husband prove a spendthrift or gold-digger.81 Moreover, most settlements dealt only with women's rights to certain property in their widowhood, and not during coverture.

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Nevertheless, Erickson provides compelling evidence that women with such settlements generally took out of their marriages what they brought in and thus, she argues, were unlikely to have "stopped thinking of certain property as theirs simply for the duration of the marriage."82 She provides poignant anecdotal evidence of this in the cases of certain women who actually inscribed their personal property, prior to marriage, with an identifying signature or mark. Such was the case with Janevive Deane, who, before her second marriage to one Charles Pressye of Wiltshire, esq. in 1600, demarcated her personalty "that soe shee might still keep hir owne stock and goods whole, in apparancie to the worlde."83 Deane's demarcation of her moveables, which insists upon maintaining the visibility or "apparancie" of her proprietary interest in them during marriage, may be read as a small act of resistance to the legal shroud of coverture. It suggests, moreover, as Garthine Walker has claimed, that "although in legal terms the ownership of property was weighted towards men, popular perceptions of ownership did not strictly adhere to legal definitions."84 Citing evidence of disputes over inheritance in which women "physically fought bailiffs and constables who attempted to serve warrants on their goods and chattels," Walker maintains that women "felt uninhibited in claiming the right to protect goods and chattels which they deemed to be theirs."85 Walker recounts the case of Margaret Dod of Cheshire, who was indicted, together with her servant Mary Catharall, "for stealing an iron mortar and pestle, a kettle, and a pewter dish from the house of her deceased husband's brother, William Brocke, in what appears to have been a dispute over inheritance.... Margaret cswore [the goods] were her own and she would have them, and that she would go through the house and take what was her own.'" When Margaret and Mary came to retrieve the goods, they had to fight Brocke's servant, Elizabeth Parsonage, for them: "Elizabeth deposed that Margaret returned after taking the kettle out of the house, and ctooke up a greate Iron Morter with a Pessell, [Elizabeth] taking hold of one eare of it, and she [with] the Black Bagge [Margaret] holding the other eare, [both] striving to get the morter.'" Such instances, Walker maintains, demonstrate that "neither the ideology of household ownership nor the legal framework of the common law precluded a popular understanding that some property belonged to women."86 Such disputes over marital property, according to Laura Gowing, were a frequent occurrence between husbands and wives during marriage as well. "Violent disputes often centered on material goods," she maintains, "and particularly the goods which women kept locked away, in their own

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chests."87 Margaret and William Phillips fell into such a dispute, Gowing recounts, when Margaret refused to open her locked chest and William took an axe to it. According to William, in the same chest [he] found bras[s] and pewter which she had stolen from him and previously sworne that she had ... soulde and given ... away... she with her accustomed terms rascall, roge etc rann to him and scratched the skin of his face ... and struck his shinnes with her foote ... [and] threatened to kill him with a knife.88

It is clear in this context how the housewife's role as keeper could become threatening to patriarchal authority; for her exertion of "effort to retain" the object in her "possession or control"—if not to "withold" or "conceal" it— could easily be used to keep goods from rather than for her husband. The chest is used to secrete, rather than to safeguard, household stuff that she has evidently come to consider her "owne goodes," in spite of the law of coverture. The rift between legal theory and actual practice with respect to married women's property rights did not go unnoticed in legal treatises of the period. The Lowes Resolutions of Women's Rights thus noted that while it could offer "no remedy" to the law of coverture, nevertheless "some women can shift it well enough."89 Contemporary domestic treatises likewise registered the disparity between legal theory and material practice. William Gouge's Of Domestkall Duties (1622) first presents the doctrine of coverture as fairly cut and dried: "By the common law," he says, "mariage is a gift of all the goods and chattels personall of the wife to her husband, so that no kinde of propertie in the same remaineth in her So that by our law she is so farre from gaining any property by her mariage in her husbands goods, as she loseth all the property she formerly had in her owne goods."90 In the dedicatory epistle of Gouge's treatise, however, we find that his attempt to restrain the housewife "from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husband's consent" was not overly popular with his parishioners: I remember that when these Domestkall Duties were first uttered out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wives subjection to the restraining of her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husbands consent. But surely they that made those exceptions did not well thinke of the Cautions and Limitations which were then delivered, and are now againe expresly noted: which are, that the foresaid restraint be not extended to the proper goods of a wife, no nor overstrictly to such goods as are set apart for the use of the family, nor to extraordinary cases, nor alwaies to an expresse consent, nor to the consent of such husbands as are impotent, or farre and long absent. If any other

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warrantable caution shall be shewed me, I will be as willing to admit it, as any of these. Now that my meaning may not still be perverted, I pray you, in reading the restraint of wives power in disposing the goods of the family, ever beare in minde those Cautions, (sig. Jjv)

The many mitigating exceptions Gouge proffers to the rule established by coverture that a wife may not alienate property without or against her husband's consent suggests that this rule may have been as honored in the breach as in the observance. Gouge's admonition to "ever beare in minde those Cautions," indicates that he himself finds them as important as the rule itself, a claim that is further supported by the fact that he goes on to devote some fifteen chapters of his treatise to a detailed examination of these exceptions.91 As if this weren't enough, he rather obsequiously promises that he "will be as willing to admit" "any other warrantable caution [that] shall be shewed [him]." It is worth noting that Gouge recognizes the existence of certain "proper goods of a wife" even during coverture. Under this category, Gouge includes goods termed paraphernalia, usually restricted to a wife's clothes and personal ornaments, which the common law itself recognized as "proper" to wives.92 Also included in this category are goods set aside as "separate estate" ("Goods proper to the wife are such as before mariage she her selfe, or her friends except from the husband to her sole and proper use and disposing, whereunto he also yeeldeth"), or as a jointure ("such as after mariage he giveth unto her to dispose as she please"). More contentiously, he broadens the category of a wife's "proper goods" still further to include "such as some friend of hers, suppose father, mother, brother, or any other, observing her husband to be a very hard man, not allowing sufficient for her selfe ... shall give unto her to dispose as she please, charging her not to let her husband know thereof" (291). Gouge here astonishingly condones, under certain circumstances, a wife's keeping or concealing goods from her husband. While goods given to a wife became the property of the husband, according to the law of coverture, Gouge appears to base this exception on the notion that coverture was, as Amy Erickson puts it, "an economic exchange" in which the "bride's portion was exchanged for her maintenance during marriage."93 By "not allowing sufficient" funds for his wife's maintenance, Gouge suggests, he has reneged on his side of the bargain, thereby forfeiting his control over goods given to the wife by her family and friends to make up for his "hard" treatment of her. Margaret Phillips seems to have shared Gouge's view on this matter; for she defends her concealment of

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goods in her chest by arguing that her husband had not "allowed unto her sufficient maintenance."94 The notion of coverture as an economic exchange may well have been one of the "popular understanding[s]" of female property rights described by Walker above. An early seventeenth-century engraving suggests as much, further associating wives' economic dissatisfaction with the threat of cuckoldry: "My dotard Husband, gives not mee / those halfe of dues, w°h needfull be:" the motto reads, "And therefor since I shuch things lack, / Thus home I him behind his back" (see Figure 2). Beyond her de jure rights to certain property during coverture, Gouge recognizes the quite considerable extent of the wife's de facto managerial control over what he terms the "common goods ... set forth by the husband to be spent about the family." Of these, he says, "I doubt not but the wife hath power to dispose them; neither is she bound to aske any further consent of her husband. For it is the wives place and dutie to guide or governe the house' (291). Gouge goes so far as to extend this dutie to "such goods as

Figure 2. Engraving sold by Hugh Perry, "at the signe of the Harrow, in Brittains Bursse" in 1628. The motto reads: "My dotard Husband, gives not mee / those halfe of dues, w°h needfull be: / And therefor since I shuch things lack, / Thus home I him behind his back." By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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the husband hath not set apart, but reserved to his owne disposing," under what he terms "extraordinary" circumstances, "whereby the wife by disposing the goods without or against the consent of her husband may bring a great good to the family, or prevent and keepe a great mischiefe from it" (292). Given the examples he attests, however, one wonders just how unusual or "extraordinary" such circumstances in fact were; for he claims that a wife may substitute her own judgment for that of her husband when the latter spends excessively on such common activities as "carding, dicing, and drinking" (292). There is a certain pragmatism in Gouge's recognition of the numerous circumstances that made the stricture of the common law untenable in practice. He maintains, for example, that a husband may be "very blockish, and stupid" and therefore "unfit to manage his affaires," in which case "the whole government lieth upon the wife, so as her husbands consent [to dispose of property] is not to be expected" (287-88). So too, husbands may be "a long time farre off absent from the house ... and in his absence ha[ve] left no order for the ordering of things at home: in this case also there is no question, but that the wife hath power to dispose matters without her husbands consent" (288). The notion of "consent" is itself a highly complex matter, according to Gouge, for a "generall consent" may be "given ... without distinct respect to this or that particular," so that "libertie is granted to a wife by her husband to doe all things as seemeth good in her owne eyes" (288). Particular consent may be either "expressed or implied? the former by "word, writing, message, or signe" (all of which, of course, are open to interpretation and thus misinterpretation), and the latter "when by any probable conjecture it may be gathered that the husbands will is not against such a thing, though he have not manifested his minde concerning that very particular" (289). The convoluted syntax of Gouge's final formulation of the law of coverture's restrictions on women's rights concerning marital property indicates just how unstraightforward this law could be in practice. A wife, he says, may not "privily and simply without, or openly and directly against her husbands consent distribute such common goods of the family as her husband reserveth to his owne disposing, there being no extraordinary necessity" (293). As if this weren't diluted enough, he acknowledges that "the question [is] in controversie" and characterizes his formulation as one "whereunto I for my part subscribe"—suggesting that it is but his own opinion. Gouge's many mitigating exceptions to the law of coverture capitulate to the daily exigencies of household management, which necessitated

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flexibility and autonomy in the decision-making process. The degree to which wives were indeed making such decisions regarding the disposition of household property is reflected in pawnbroking records of the period. The majority of customers listed in the pawnbroking records of Philip Henslowe were women, many of them housewives, as is clear from the designation "goody," "goodwife" and "Mrs."95 Judging from the frequency with which these women pawned and redeemed their goods, the pawnshop appears to have been an indispensable tool in the often difficult task of making ends meet. Several of the wives listed in Henslowe's accounts were reduced to pawning their wedding rings (the sine qua non of marital property). The lighthearted posies engraved in these rings belie the desperation that their expropriation would appear to represent: "hope helpeth hevenes [heaviness]" reads one; "god hath A poynted I ame content" reads another.96 While it may have been difficult for a wife to pawn her wedding ring without her husband's knowledge or consent, other goods pawned by wives in Henslowe's records may have gone undetected, as in the following entry: "lent... the 2 of June 1593 upon A lockinge glasse & iiij dieper napkins & i face cloth of cambricke & i bande of lanne of mrs ffloodes."97 It seems probable that the social stigma attached to pawning may have led some wives to hide their pledges from their husbands. So much is suggested in Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, where Mistress Gallipot says: "My childbed linen? / Shall I pawn that for him? Then if my mark / Be known, I am undone! It may be thought / My husband's bankrupt" (3. 2. 71-74) ,98 Insofar as the "him" in question is Mistress Gallipot's would-be lover, Laxton, and not her husband, her remark embodies men's worst fears about women's managerial control over household stuff. It seems likely, however, that most wives pawned their household stuff not to support their adulterous liaisons, but simply to make ends meet within the household economy. While domestic ideology charged wives with maintaining the propriety of the household by keeping or safeguarding its property, it would seem that this task paradoxically required that they routinely expropriate or deposit household stuff with the local pawnbroker. Such discrepancies between legal theory and material practice are occluded by the black-and-white conception of women's objectification under coverture, and suggest that we need to rethink women's historical relation to and control over property in ways that will allow us to account for the gray areas of ownership, while being careful not to romanticize them. "It is not enough," Carol Rose has argued, for a "property claimant to say simply, 'It's mine," through some act or gesture; in order for the

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statement to have any force, some relevant world must understand the claim it makes and take that claim seriously."99 The variety of claims that have been taken seriously by traditional jurisprudence, however, indicate just how complex and ambiguous the legal concept of ownership in fact is. The jurist A. M. Honore outlines eleven different rights and incidents of ownership, each representing the ground of a potential claim and also a different type of ambiguity inherent in the concept of "owning."100 Even the right or claim to outright possession, he points out, may not entitle an owner to exclude everyone from her property. Another common incident of ownership, the claim to "use," contains its own ambiguities as well: it may include the right to management and income or, in a narrower interpretation, only the right to personal use and enjoyment. Ownership may or may not also include or be limited to the right to manage, which itself confers the power to determine access and use. While managerial control and the right to use is certainly not always tied to legal ownership, Honore points out that sometimes an owner's rights are even more restricted than those of a manager or tenant.101 The ambiguities inherent in the legal concept of ownership, and in particular those surrounding the right to management or use, may help to clarify the predicament of wives living under coverture. For while the law of coverture ostensibly relegates the housewife to the status of a merely "vicarious" owner, or nonproprietary, custodial manager, formal and informal agreements and disagreements between spouses over property suggest that the woman's role as keeper could become a site of negotiation and contestation as well. Early modern domestic ideology, in positioning the housewife as a nonproprietary manager or keeper of marital property, clearly worked to buttress a political economy based on patrilineal property relations and the gendered division of labor that lent it support. Yet the relationship between discipline, law, and political economy is perhaps not as straightforward as the preceding claim implies. For disciplinary regimes, according to Foucault, "do not merely reproduce ... the general form of the law or government... they are not univocal," but rather "define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations." Unlike juridical regimes, he argues, they do not "obey the law of all or nothing."102 Taking the contradiction between the housewife's keeping of household property and the law of coverture as an example, we can see these instabilities and points of confrontation begin to surface. For the housewife's contrafactual ("as if") proprietorship over marital property resides

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in a gray area of ownership somewhere between coverture's purported "all or nothing" and, as such, harbors innumerable potential sites of conflict. The implications of female oeconomy, and of the potential disputes that arose from it, extend beyond the bounds of the domestic sphere. For the early modern household, as has often been noted, was considered to be a microcosm of the state; the good order and governance of the former was seen to be necessary to the good order and governance of the latter. The analogy between the household and the state, Foucault argues in his work on the sixteenth-century "art of government," established a crucial continuity between domestic discipline and political governance.103 This continuity was reinforced by the etymology of the early modern term oeconomy, which centers on the notions of management and governance: The art of government ... is essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy—that is to say, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family ... how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state.... To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.104

Particularly pertinent here is Foucault's acknowledgment in this essay that the history of disciplinary regimes, including the early modern notion of oeconomy, concerns not only the body, as he had argued in Discipline and Punish™5 but rather a "complex" composed of subjects and objects: The fact that government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things, is I believe readily confirmed by the metaphor which is inevitably invoked in these treatises on government, namely that of a ship. What does it mean to govern a ship? It means to take charge of the sailors, but also of the boat and its cargo The same goes for the running of a household [W]hat concerns it is the individuals that compose the family, their wealth and prosperity. ... To govern, then, means to govern things.106

The significance of this line of argument, for our purposes, is that it locates the early modern notion of oeconomy at the nexus of domestic discipline, statecraft, and political economy. Yet Foucault's account curiously eclipses the crucial division of labor upon which this notion was grounded. His description of "oeconomy" as a "complex of men and things" makes no mention of women's role within it; he thereby implicitly suggests that women were but one in the series of "things" that the domestic patriarch

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governed. The housewife's role as keeper within this oeconomy, as we have seen, however, became a central focus of disciplinary attention in domestic manuals of the period precisely because it gave women increasing managerial control over the things that entered and (more disturbingly) exited the home. The gendered division of labor within the home, in creating separate duties for husband and wife, however, necessarily removed the wife from spousal supervision, giving her increasing autonomy over the domestic sphere. Along these lines, Gouge argues: "it is a charge laid upon wives to guide the house: whereby it appeareth that the businesse of the house appertaine, and are most proper to the wife: in which respect she is called the hous-wife: so as therein husbands ought to referre matters to their ordering" (367). As part of the process of redefining the household as a feminine sphere of labor, domestic manuals themselves functioned to supplement the supervisory role they encouraged husbands to renounce. They did so by encouraging wives to supervise or discipline themselves; the husband, Gouge maintains, "ought to be sparing in exacting too much of [his wife], as that obedience which she performeth, may rather come from her owne voluntary disposition, from a free conscience to God-wards, even because god hath placed her in a place of subjection, and from a wive-like love, then from any exaction on her husbands part, and as it were by force" (366). In answering the "many exceptions which were taken" to his sermons by his female parishioners, Gouge mounts a similar argument, asserting that a wife "can have no just cause to complaine of her subjection," insofar as her duty is voluntary and should be carried out "whether her husband exact it or no" (sigs. ?3v-f4r). If we turn this argument on its head, however, it becomes clear that in defining female subjection as a form of freedom, Gouge effectively renders her freedom (at least in theory) a form of subjection, her autonomy a form of obedience. For the wife's self-discipline as keeper of household stuff is defined as an internalization of her husband's discipline. Gouge's role as author is that of ordering the disciplinary regime with which a husband rules his wife in such a way that she may internalize it, and thereby rule herself. The wife's disciplined ordering of the household thus becomes both a model for, and a reflection of, her disciplined ordering of her own mind. The faculty that enables her to execute this task in the absence of spousal supervision, according to Gouge, is memory; he therefore orders his domestic treatise in such a way as to facilitate the wife's internalization, via memorization, of this disciplinary regime:

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My method and manner of proceeding brought many things to my minde, which otherwise might have slipped by. For by method sundry and severall points appertaining to one matter are drawne forth, as in a chaine one linke draweth up another.... As method is an helpe to Invention, so also to retention. It is as the thread or wier whereon pearles are put, which keepeth them from scattering ... In which respects method is fitly stiled the Mother of the Minde, and Mistresse ofMemorie. If you well marke the order and dependence of points one upon another, you will finde as great an helpe in conceiving and remembring them, as I did in inventing and disposing them. (sigs. f4v-Air)

Just as the husband brings in goods, which the wife is charged to keep, so too Gouge here imparts the pearls of knowledge to be internalized by the wife. Female subjectivity itself becomes a form of internalized oeconomy. To be a good housekeeper, she must re-collect or internalize via memory the objects she is charged with keeping, and the places in which they are kept, so that she always knows where they are and has them ready to hand. The woman who orders her household goods, and thereby "keep[s] them from scattering," must become the "Mistresse of Memorie," who keeps her disciplined thoughts from scattering.107 Yet the threat of the household's goods "slipping" away or "scattering" through the wife's inattention or disobedience lurks just at the threshold of Gouge's doctrine of domestic discipline and begins to surface in his description of the vices that correspond to the virtues of wifely self-discipline. In such cases, he says, a wife "take[s] on her to doe what she list, whether her husband will or no, either not willing that he should know what she doth, or not caring though it be against his minde and will" (312); as an example, he offers the following: Such as privily take money out of their husbands closets, counters, or other like places where he laieth it, never telling him of it, nor willing that he should know it: likewise such as after the like manner take ware out of the shop, corne out of the garner, sheepe out of the stocke, or any other goods to sell and make money of: or to give away, or otherwise to use so as their husbands shall never know.... Such wives herein sinne heinously.... They shew themselves no better then pilfering theeves thereby. All that can be justly and truly said for their right in the common goods, cannot defend them from the guilt of theft: they are the more dangerous by how much the more they are trusted, and lesse suspected. (312)

Insofar as female subjectivity was defined as a mode of self-discipline, or self-oeconomy, it carried the threat of a "more dangerous" form of keeping. The mind of the housewife is likened to the privy places or locked chests in which wives like Margaret Phillips keep or withhold goods from their

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husbands. The housewife's role as keeper of household stuff, in instituting a new mode of female subjection, likewise gave rise to new modes of resistance as well. My analysis here of the shifting relations between disciplinary regimes, legal systems, political economy, and female subjectivity and subjection is predicated on the belief that Foucaultian, materialist, and feminist frameworks may profitably supplement one another in a relation of "mutually critical complementarity."108 It is my hope that the wedding of these theoretical paradigms will help to account for the complex forms of coercive , self-discipline governing women's property relations with the rise of capitalism, while at the same time allowing for diverse forms of female agency, appropriation, and resistance, and thereby, perhaps, provide a historical and theoretical ground on which to rewrite the "unhappy marriage" of historical materialist and feminist criticism.

Chapter 2

Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew

Commentary on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has frequently noted that the play's novel taming strategy marks a departure from traditional shrew-taming tales. Unlike his predecessors, Petruchio does not use force to tame Kate; he does not simply beat his wife into submission.1 Little attention has been paid, however, to the historical implications of the play's unorthodox methodology, which is conceived in specifically economic terms: "I am he am born to tame you, Kate," Petruchio summarily declares, "And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates" (2. i. 269-71). Petruchio likens Kate's planned domestication to a domestication of the emergent commodity form itself, whose name within the play is identical to the naming of the shrew. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cotes are "provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production)." The term is an aphetic form of acate, which derives from the Old French achat, meaning "purchase." Gates are thus by definition exchange-values— commodities properly speaking—as opposed to mere use-values, or objects of home production.2 In order to grasp the historical implications of The Shrew's unorthodox methodology, and of the economic terms Shakespeare employs to shape its novel taming strategy, we must first situate more precisely the form of its departure from previous shrew-taming tales. For what differentiates The Taming of the Shrew from its precursors is not so much a concern with domestic economy—which has always been a central preoccupation of shrew-taming literature—but rather a shift in modes of production and thus in the very terms through which domestic economy is conceived. The coordinates of this shift are contained within the term cates itself, which, in distinguishing goods that are purchased from those that are produced within

Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew

53

and for the home, may be said to map the historical shift from domestic use-value production to production for the market.

I Prior to Shakespeare's play, shrews were typically portrayed as reluctant producers within the household economy, high-born wives who refused to engage in the forms of domestic labor expected of them by their humble, tradesmen husbands. In the ballad "The Wife Wrapped in a Wether's Skin," for example, the shrew refuses to brew, bake, wash, card, or spin on account of her "gentle kin" and delicate complexion: There was a wee cooper who lived in Fife, Nickety, nackity, noo, noo, noo And he has gotten a gentle wife ... Alane, quo Rushety, roue, roue, roue She wadna bake, nor she wadna brew, For the spoiling o her comely hue. She wadna card, nor she wadna spin, For the shaming o her gentle kin. She wadna wash, nor she wadna wring, For the spoiling o her gouden ring.3 The object of the tale was simply to put the shrew to work, to restore her (frequently through some gruesome form of punishment)4 to her proper, productive place within the household economy. When the cooper from Fife, who cannot beat his ungentle wife on account of her gentle kin, cleverly wraps her in a wether's skin and tames her by beating the hide instead, the shrew promises: "Oh, I will bake, and I will brew, / And never mair think on my comely hue. / Oh, I will card, and I will, spin, / And never mair think on my gentle kin."5 Within the tradition of shrew-taming literature prior to Shakespeare's play, the housewife's domestic responsibilities are broadly defined by a feudal economy based on household production, on the production of use-values for domestic consumption.6 As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, with the decline of the family as an economic unit of production the role of the housewife was beginning to shift in late sixteenth-century England from that of skilled

54

Chapter 2

producer to savvy consumer. Household production was gradually being replaced by nascent capitalist industries, making it more economical for the housewife to purchase what she had once produced. Brewing and baking, for example, once a routine part of the housewife's activity, had begun to move outside the home to the market, becoming the province of "skilled" (male) professionals.7 Washing and spinning, while still considered "women's work," were becoming unsuitable activities for middling-sort housewives, and were increasingly being performed by servants, paid laundresses, or spinsters.8 The housewife's duties were thus gradually moving away from the production of use-values within and for the home and toward the consumption of market goods or "cates," commodities produced outside the home. The available range of commodities, as discussed in the previous chapters, was also greatly increased in the period, so that goods once considered luxuries, available only to the wealthiest elites, were now being found in households at every level of society.9 The Taming of the Shrew may be said both to reflect and to participate in this cultural shift by portraying Kate not as a reluctant producer, but rather as an avid and sophisticated consumer of market goods. When she is shown shopping in 4. 3 (a scene I will discuss at greater length below), she displays both her knowledge of and preference for the latest fashions in apparel. Petruchio's taming strategy is accordingly aimed not at his wife's productive capacity— not once does he ask Kate to brew, bake, wash, card, or spin—but at her consumption. He seeks to educate Kate in her new role as a consumer of "household cates." While the ideological redefinition of the home as a sphere of consumption rather than production in sixteenth-century England did not, of course, correspond to the lived reality of every English housewife in the period, the acceptance of this ideology, as Susan Cahn points out, became the "price of upward social mobility" in the period and, as such, exerted a powerful influence on all social classes.10 The early modern period marked a crucial change in the cultural valuation of housework, a change that is historically linked—as the body of feminist-materialist scholarship that Christine Delphy has termed "housework theory"11 reminds us—to the rise of capitalism and development of the commodity form.12 According to housework theory, domestic work under capitalism is not considered "real" work because "women's productive labor is confined to use-values while men produce for exchange."13 It is not that housework disappears with the rise of capitalism; rather, it becomes economically devalued. Because the

Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew

55

housewife's labor has no exchange-value, it remains unremunerated and thus, economically, "invisible."14 Read within this paradigm, The Taming of the Shrew would seem to participate in the ideological erasure of housework by not representing it on the stage, by rendering it, quite literally, invisible. The weakness of this account of the play, however, is that, while it explains what Kate does not do onstage, it can provide no explanation for what she actually does. In continuing to define the housewife's domestic activity solely within a matrix of use-value production, housework theory—in spite of its claim to offer an historicized account of women's subjection under capitalism— treats housework as if it were itself, materially speaking, an unchanging, transhistorical entity, which is not, as we have seen, the historical case. For while the market commodity's infiltration of the home did not suddenly and magically absolve the housewife of the duty of housework, it did profoundly alter both the material form and the cultural function of such work, insofar as it became an activity increasingly centered around the proper order, maintenance, and display of household cates—objects having, by definition, little or no use-value. Privileging delicacy of form over domestic function, cates threaten to sever completely the bond linking exchange-value to any utilitarian end; they are commodities that unabashedly assert their own superfluousness. It is not simply that cates, as objects of exchange, are to be "distinguished from" objects of home production, however, as the OED asserts. Rather, their very purpose is to signify this distinction, to signify their own distance from utility and economic necessity. What replaces the utilitarian value of cates is a symbolic or cultural value: cates are, above all, signifiers of social distinction or differentiation.15 Housework theory cannot explain The Shrew's departure from the traditional shrew-taming narrative, because it can find no place in its strictly economic analysis for the housewife's role within a symbolic economy based on the circulation, accumulation, and display of status objects, or what Pierre Bourdieu terms "symbolic" (as distinct from "economic") capital.16 In the previous chapter, I examined some of the ways in which the presence of status objects, or cates, within the nonaristocratic household transformed, both materially and ideologically, the "domesticall duties" of the housewife. In this chapter, I shall argue that it is precisely the cultural anxiety surrounding the housewife's new role as a keeper of household cates that prompted Shakespeare to write a new kind of shrew-taming narrative.

5 79> 98-100, i5i-55> 188 Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Baudrillard), 56 Crowley, John E., 16,19 Cymbeline, 10 Dangerous Familiars (Dolan), 12 Davies, Kathleen M., 25 Dawes, Robert, 211 De Contemptu Mundi (Erasmus), 254n6o Deane, Janevive, 41, 95 Delia Casa, John, 127, 24onn56, 62 Delphy, Christine, 54, 226nn Description of England (Harrison), 15,16, 17-18, 21 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 48, 223nio2, 224nio5 A Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England (Smith), 21, 22, 23 Dolan, Frances, 12, 232-33^4 Dollimore, Jonathan, 159—60, 248m8 domestic literature on household management, 25—31; and cookery, 36-37, 22on6o; and discipline, 49—50, 74; expressing anxiety over wives' managerial control, 67,145; and gendered division of labor, 26-31, 49-50, 93; on husbands' roles, 93, 101; instruction on housewifery, 34-38, 49-50; on visual dimension of wife's role, 77 dowries: in Measure for Measure, 162-64, 165,189, 248ni9; in Merry Wives of Windsor, 101; nuns, 163-66,175, 2491124; in Taming of the Shrew, 59, 71. See also coverture Drayton, Michael, 116 Dunbar, William, 23on68 Earl of Pembroke's Men, 205, 207 Edward 1,166 Edward III, 103,166 Edward VI, 246n6

Index Elias, Norbert, 19, 84, 85, 87,127,146, 2401162 Eliot, T. S., 236m Elizabeth 1,102—10; as "Fairy Queen," 102, 107-8,109; governance of, 102-10; image of, 105,106-7, 235nn63, 75; and oeconomy, 105-7 Elizabethan Poor Laws, 161,178,179, 257n82 Empson, William, 13-14 England: demographic shifts and familial organization in, 161; domestic arrangements, 116; feminization of poverty in, 177-78; foreign trade, 17,119; postReformation era singlewomen, 176—77. See also consumer culture; theater The English Huswife (Markham), 34-38, 22on6o The English Myrror (Whetstone), 135 Erasmus, Desiderius, 127,173-75, 254nn59-6o, 256n66 Erickson, Amy, 40—41, 43,101—2,177, 222n75, 2591199 "Fairy Queen," 102,107—9,157,175 families: demographic shifts and familial organization, 160-61,176, 246n6; postReformation nuns reinscribed into, 189-91. See also singlewomen Fanon, Frantz, 2421178 Farewell to Husbandry (Markham), 38 Fenner, Dudley, 78-79 fetishism, 114,117-24; commodity, 70, 74; and cross-cultural context, 117, 237n2o; and curiosity, 123—24,129,130; European ambivalence about, 116,119,123-24,128, 130; and female extravagance, 146; "fetish" as term, 114,124,130, 24in7o; handkerchief as fetish, 125-26,127-29,145-46,148, 239n52, 24on53; and idealization of colonized peoples, 120—22, 2391141; and incommensurate notions of value, 117-19, 121-24,129-34; and jealousy, 129-32, 24in7o; similarity to European fascination with novelties, 119-24; and trade relations, 117-19; in travel literature, 114, 116-24,127-28,129—32, 24in7o; use-value, 2i8n3o Fineman, Joel, 11, 57, 58,155, 2i6n49 The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Knox), 103 Flandrin, Jean-Louis, 229*150

265

Fly, Henry, 166 food: and commercial economy, 36-37; and cookery, 36-37, 22onn58, 60, 229nn5O, 51; and social distinction, 68, 229nn5O—51 foreign importation and production: ambivalence over, 22-23,123-24; expansion of trade and importing of goods, 17, 22-23, 36-37,119, 22on58. See also household goods/household stuff Forman, Simon, 10,11 Foucault, Michel, 47-49,102, 223niO2, 224nni03,104 Franciscans, 169, 25onn38, 45, 2521147 Froide, Amy M., 177,187, 256n67 "The Fruits of Jealousy" (Varchi), 141 Fumerton, Patricia, 69, 2291151 Funus (Erasmus), 173, 254^159-60, 2561166 Galateo (Delia Casa), 127 Garrard, Rachel, 16 gendered division of labor: and housework, 26—33, 56—57> 72; and domestic literature, 26-31, 49-50, 93; and household as feminine sphere, 26-27, 72> 93, 2321124; and Merry Wives of Windsor, 92—93, 2321124; and Taming of the Shrew, 72-73; and wives' managerial control, 44—48, 49—50, 93 Geographical Historic of Africa (Leo Africanus), 23-24,129, 24in7O Giles, Thomas, 203-4, 26mn3o-3i "The Girl with No Interest in Marriage" (Erasmus), 174-75 Gless, Darryl J., 173 A Godlie Forme ofHouseholde Government (Cleaver), 77, 93,101 Gouge, William, 42-46, 49-50, 67, 74,152, 207 Cowing, Laura, 41-42 Greenblatt, Stephen, 198,199, 202 Greville, Fulke, 104 "The Handsome Lazy Lass" (folktale), 225n5 An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes (Aylmer), 104 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 10 Harrison, William, 15,16,17-18, 21, 63 Hartmann, Heidi, 38—39 Hecatommithi (Cinthio), 124 Heilman, Robert B., 23on67, 239^2 Henry IV, 108-9 Henry V, 109

266

Index

Henslowe, Philip, 46,152, 201, 205-6, 208, 2231195 Herbert, Thomas, 119 Hervet, Gentian, 25 Heywood, John, 225nn4~5 The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare (Wadding), 169-71, 25on45 Holderness, B. A., 259^9 Holme, Randle, 4-5, 6,18-19 Honigmann, E. A. J., 132 Honore, A. M., 47, 223nioo hooks, bell, 22in66 household: definition of as feminine sphere, 93; "household" as term, i, 2i3n4; household production, 17, 52, 53-55; household stuff as defining, 116; as microcosm of state, 48, 72-73, 73,102-3, 224niO3, 229n6i; as receptacle for goods, 25—27; symbolic and economic capital in, 66—67 Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Comensoli), 12 household goods/stuff: categories and rhetorical dimensions of, 3-4, 2i3n6; civilizing function of, 23-24,116,126-28, 148, 24onn56, 62; consumption of, 17, 35-36, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60-63; and cookery, 36—37, 22on58; and coverture, 29, 40; critical methodology focused on, 11-12; distinctions between necessary goods and luxuries, 18—22, 63—64; exchange-values, 52, 54, 55, 60, 65, 228n42; and gendered division of labor, 26; Holme's compendium of, 4-5, 6; household as receptacle for, 25-27; household cates, 60, 63-65, 66-67, 69-70, 228n4o; and inventories, 15-18; increasing value and proliferation of, 1-2,15-18, 2i3n2; linens and bedding, 16,18-19; luxury goods, 21, 63, 228n4o; as moveables, 1-4,11-12,19, 20, 26, 29, 40, 2i3nn2, 6; production of, 15-18, 22-23, 36-37, 52, 53-55,119; and stageprops, 194-212; and status, 15-22, 23-24, 63, 85,148, 2i3n2, 228n4o; tableware, 16,18; as term, 1—2, 2i3n4; trade and importation of, 17, 22—23,36—37,119, 22on58; in travel literature, 23—24; and use-values, 52, 53—55, 65. See also cates; clothing; commodities household production, 17, 52, 53-55 housekeeping: contradictions and ambiguities in, 31-33; and fear of dispossession, 30-31; in gendered division of labor,

26—33; and household oeconomy, 27-31; as term, 26, 31-33; and "keeping," 26-33; materialist feminist criticism, 38-51; and memory, 50, 77, 224niO7; as mothering of goods, 28-29, 2i9n46; and perception of women's strength, 30, 219^0; and selfdiscipline, 49-50; visual dimension of role, 77-83. See also household; housewifery houses of correction, 161,177,178, 257n82 housewifery: authority and responsibility in, 2 7~3i> 42; balance between symbolic and economic capital, 66—67; and consumption, 34-37, 54—55, 60—61; devaluation of, 93; and discipline, 49-50, 76-83; and domestic literature, 25-31, 34-38, 49-50; economic values of domestic work, 53-55, 72-73; and gendered division of labor, 26-31, 44-48, 49-50, 93; and household oeconomy, 44-48, 49-50, 61, 72-73; housework, 54-55, 56-57, 72; and marketplace, 36-37; obligatory leisure and, 56, 71-72; and shrews, 34-35, 53; symbolic labor of, 56-57; and symbolic ordering of cates, 57, 66—67; temperance of housewife, 34—37; threats posed by, 79—83, 86—87; and vicarious consumption, 56, 60-61, 227ni9; visual dimension/differentiating gaze of, 77-83. See also housekeeping; housewifery and managerial control of property housewifery and managerial control of property: balance between symbolic and economic capital, 66-67; and coverture, 44—48, 49, 78, 98—99; and devaluation of feminine sphere, 93; and domestic theft, 78-79; and domestic discipline, public, 76-83; and domestic discipline, selfreflexive, 49-50, 76-79, 88-89,192-93; domestic literature and anxiety over, 67, 145; and economic values of domestic work, 53-55, 72-73; and gendered division of labor in the home, 44-48, 49-50, 93; in household oeconomy, 44-48, 49-50, 61, 72-73; and issue of authority and responsibility, 27—31, 42; and Merry Wives of Windsor, 76, 83-95, 96, 98-99,102-10, 192-93; Othello and anxieties surrounding, 112,145,150; stage property and, 208—12; and Taming of the Shrew, 72-73; threats posed by, 79-83, 86-87,192, 208; and visual dimension/differentiating gaze, 77-83, 84-85

Index housework theory, 54-55, 56, 65, 72, 226nnn-i3 Howard, Jean E., 108-9, *94 Howell, Martha C., 225116 Hunt, Alan, 39 Hunter, G. K., 173 husbandry, domestic literature on, 37-38 Husbands, Christopher, 16 Hyrd, Richard, 30, 77 Ingram, Martin, 180, 258nn89, 93 Ingram, William, 202 The Instruction of a Christen Woman (Vives), 30, 77,103 The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and America (Crowley), 16 Isabella, wife of Edward II, 166 Isabella, sister of Lewis, king of France, 172 Isabella of Gloucester, granddaughter of Edward III, 166 Isabella Rule, 172-73 jealousy: Africans and women thought susceptible to, 114; and The Blazon of Jealousie, 136-42, 243n86; definitions of, 114,130-31,132, 242nn72, 75; and envy, 135-36; and female desire, 138-43,155,157, 243n86; and fetishism, 129-32, 24in7o; and male anxiety over property, 145,157,193; in Othello, 112,114,129-36,145, 24in68; and passion, 137-39,141-435 and property/ownership, 114,129-33,136-43,145, 157,193, 242n77, 243n86; and "savagery," 129-30,133, 24inn68, 70; and shrews, 139, 141, 243n86; tied to notions of valuation, 114,129-36; travel literature on, 129-32, 24in7O Johan Johan the Husband (Heywood), 225nn4~5 Johnson, Penelope D., 7,165 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 199, 2i5n27, 26onn Jones, Eldred, 238n2i, 239^1 Jordan, Constance, 103-4 Jordan, Winthrop, 238n2i Julius, Philip, 89 Karras, Ruth, 177 "keeping," 26-33. See also housekeeping Kegl, Rosemary, 83 Kenny, Courtney Stanhope, 151,152

267

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams), 14 King Lear, 10-11,198 Kliman, Bernice, 163, 248ni9 Knox, John, 103,104 Kuhn, Annette, 226ni2 The Ladies Dictionary, 85, 93,131,132 Lady Elizabeth's Men, 211 Lamb, Charles, 10 The Lowes Resolutions of Women's Rights, 42, 150 Lechter-Siegel, Amy, 247ni3 leisure, domestic, 56, 71-72 Leo Africanus, 23-24,129,133, 24in7O Lever, J. W, 159 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 58, 22in66 Levine, David, 180, 258nn92-93 Life of Sidney (Greville), 104 London, 17,119,161. See also England London house of Minoresses, 166,169,172, 175>191 Macbeth, 10,196-97 MacCaffrey, Wallace, 105-6 MacPherson, C. B., 113 Malone, Edmond, 153 manners, 127, 24onn56, 62 Marees, Pieter de, 23,122-23,130,146-48, 24in70 Markham, Gervase, 34-38, 65, 22on6o Marquis of Halifax, 66,115 marriage negotiations: economic and legal barriers impeding, 180, 258n89; and Measure for Measure, 162-63,180, 248ni7, 258n89; and premarital sexual activity, 180, 258nn92-93; property issues and Merry Wives, 100—102,108; and spousal laws, 162-63,180, 248ni7. See also coverture Married Women's Property Acts, 100, 222n77 Marx, Karl, 39, 65,160, 228n42, 229^4 Mary 1,103-4 materialist feminist criticism, 5, 7-14; of coverture, 39-47; of housekeeping, 38-51; and Measure for Measure, 159-60,162,175; and notion of law, 39; of stage production and female spectatorship, 194; and stageprops, 195-200; and trope of women as property, 38-39, 22in66 McFeely, Maureen Connolly, 163-64,165, 249n2i

268

Index

Measure for Measure, 159-91; broken nuptials and marriage contracts, 162-63,180, 248nij, 258n89; Erasmian influences on writing of, 172-75, 254nn59-6o; extramarital and premarital sexual activity, 162-63, 180—81,183, 248nni7-i8; and Isabella Rule, 172—73; Isabella's dowry, 162-64,165,189, 248ni9; Isabella's self-discipline, 175-76; Isabella's silence, 162-64, i74> 189-91, 247nni2-i3; materialist methodological approach to, 159-60,162,175; Poor Clares in, 159,162,164,165-66,172,174-76, 189-90; poor relief and social control in, 178-79; and prostitutes, 181-82,183-84, 187; and Sermon on the Mount, 250^5; silences of, 160,162-64,191; singlewomen and, 160,161,176-89,193 Mennell, Stephen, 37 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 76—110; buckbaskets in, 83, 92, 94, 208-9, 210; "buck" in, 87, 23ini4; civility and gaze in, 84-85, 87; "cotquean" in, 2321124; disciplinary gaze and wives' self-reflexive subjectivity, 76-77, 84-89, 91-95,149,192-93; discretion in, 91-92, 94-95, 232n23; "Fairy Queen" in, 107-9, !57> V5; FalstafFs public shaming, 95—97,100; Ford's supervision of his wife, 89-91, 23in2i; legal language and coverture, 97-100; marriage negotiations, 100-102,108; and masculine and feminine spheres, 92-93, 2321124; and oeillades, 85; and Othello, 111-12, 236n4; privacy and privatization, 89, 90-91, 92; public shaming rituals, 89, 90, 94, 95-97,100; relationship between female domestic and political oeconomy, 107-10; wives as players, 211; wives' managerial control of property, 76, 83-95, 96, 98-99,192-93; and women's property rights, 98-100 Miller, Jonathan, 162 Minoresses, London house of, 166,169,172, 175.191 Montaigne, Michel de, 120-21,122,131-32, 2421177 Moorman, John, 172, 252^7 Morris, Brian, 60, 205 moveables, 1-4,19, 20; and coverture, 29, 40; and gendered division of labor, 26; laws governing and rhetorical dimension of, 2-4, 2i3n6; as signifying status, 19, 20, 2i3n2. See also household goods/stuff

Muir, Kenneth, 173, 254^9 Nashe, Thomas, 116 Neill, Michael, 2411168 Newman, Karen, 57-58, 61,144, 2271130 nuns: and nunneries as cloistered gardens, 164, 249n2i; post-Reformation reinscribing within families, 189—91, 259nmoi—3, 108; property of, 163-66,169-72,175, 249n24; social status of, 164-66,172,190, 249nn22, 24. See also Poor Clares; poverty, pious Oeconomica (pseudo-Aristotle), 26, 30, 2i9n5o Oeconomicus (Xenophon), 26 oeconomy, household, 48. See also household; housewifery Of Domesticall Duties (Gouge), 42-45, 67, 74 "Of the Caniballes" (Montaigne), 120-21,132 The Office and Duetie of an Husband (Vives), 31 oikonomia, 25, 27,105, 2i8n28 oikos, 11 Oliva, Marilyn, 165,190, 249nn22, 24, 259nmoi-3 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 5,13,16, 58, 72-73, 89, 90,145, 244n92 ownership, legal concept of, 47, 223nioo. See also coverture; property Parker, Patricia, 11 Pateman, Carol, 113 pawning: and coverture, 46,152, 223nn95, 97; stage costumes, 205-6, 207, 208 Paynell, Thomas, 31 Perry, Hugh, engravings of, 44, 79-80, 82,182 Pietz, William, 117, 237n2O, 24in7O Pinchbeck, Ivy, 210 Poor Clares, 165-72; church opposition to, 171,175, 25in46, 252n47, 253^9; and Isabella Rule, 172-73; and London Minoresses, 166,169,172,175,191; in Measure for Measure, 159,162,164,165—66, 172,174-76,189-90; noble patrons and property of, 165-66; and pious poverty, 165,169-72,175,189, 25in46, 252n47, 2531149; and Saint Clare, 169-72, 25in46. See also nuns Poor Laws, 161,178,179, 257n82 Pound, John, 190,191

Index poverty: feminization of, 177-78; and illegitimacy, 180, 2581193; and poor-relief, 161, 177—79,191, 257n82; singlewomen's susceptibility to, 161,177-78,184,190-91, 259nmo2,108 poverty, pious: church opposition to rule of, 171,175, 25in46, 252n47, 253^9; Erasmian critique and Shakespeare's knowledge of, 173-75, 254nn59-6o; of Franciscans, 169, 25onn38, 45, 252^7; of Poor Clares, 165, 169-72,175,189, 25in46, 252n47, 253^9 Power, Eileen, 249^4 The Practical Counsellor in the Law (Sheppard), 99 The Praise ofMusicke (1586), 227^3 A Preparative to Marriage (Smith), 28-29, 207, 211 privacy and privatization, 89, 90-91, 92 Private Matters and Public Culture in PostReformation England (Orlin), 13 property: and commodification of female desire, 141-43,155; and female governance, 102-10; fetishism and valuation of, 121-22; and jealousy, 114,129-33,136-43,145,157, 193, 242n77, 243n86; legalistic language of Merry Wives, 97-100; marital, 41-42,102; and ownership, legal concept of, 47, 223moo; and pious poverty, 169, 25onn38, 45; of singlewomen, 160,161,188,189,193; as "subjectivity effects," 10-12; women's personal property, 39—47, 98—100; women's property rights, 39-47, 79, 98—100,151—55,188. See also coverture; moveables Property and Persuasion (Rose), 4 queens and female governance, 102-10 Rackin, Phyllis, 108-9 Radin, Margaret Jane, 113 Reformation, 190 Renaissance scholarship, 8 "The Repentant Girl" (Erasmus), 174-75 Revels Office, 201-3, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209-10, 26m3i, 262n50 The Rewle of the Sustris Menouresses Enclosid (Isabella Rule), 173 Riefer, Marcia, 247ni2 The Roaring Girl (Middleton and Dekker), 46 Romeo and Juliet, 232*124 Roper, Lyndal, 189—90

269

Rose, Carol M., 4, 46 Ross, Lawrence J., 125 Ryan, Kiernan, 185 Rymer, Thomas, 10,111-12,133, 236nm, 6 Sanders, Norman, 24in68 Shakespeare scholarship, 8,10-11. See also specific plays shaming, public: as discipline for threat posed by wives' managerial control, 76-83; household objects used in, 94; in Merry Wives, 95—97; and privacy, 89, 90; rituals of, 94, 233^8; for sexual impropriety, 79-83; women's participation in, 96, 2331132 Shammas, Carole, 17 Sheppard, William, 99 shrews: and female jealousy, 139,141, 243n86; as intemperate housewives, 34-35, 53; linguistic threat of, 57-58; shrew-taming tales, violence of, 53, 76, 225nn4~5; shrewtaming tales prior to The Taming of the Shrew, 52-55, 225nn4-6, 23on68 singlewomen: as anomalous, 176-77; and capitalism, 161; and feminization of poverty, 177-78; and Measure for Measure, 160,175,176-88; and Merry Wives of Windsor, 108-9; oeconomy of, 175,190; and poor-relief, 161,177—79,19^ 257n82; postReformation rates of, 176-77,178; poverty of, 161,177-78,184,190—91, 259nniO2,108; property of, 160,161,188,189,193; and prostitution, 177,181—82,183—84,187; selfdiscipline of, 175-76,184-86; "singlewomen" as term, 176, 256^7; state modes of discipline and punishment, 161,178-79, 183, 257n8o; as threat to paternalistic state, 171,175,176,180-81,183-88,189,193; as unwed mothers, 180-83, 258^3; as widows, 176,177-78,187-88, 259n99. See also nuns Skipp, Victor, 16 Slack, Paul, 178,179, 257n8o Smith, Henry, 28-29, 207, 211 Smith, Sir Thomas, 21-23,119 Smith, William, 128 Snell, K. D. M., 210 Somerset, Anne, 105, 235nn63, 75 Spufford, Margaret, 16,17 stage properties, 194,195-212; buck-baskets as, 208-9, 210; costumes, 199-200, 201—7,

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208, 211, 261111130-31; "cultural biographies" of, 198-200; as embodying threats of wives' managerial control, 208—12; female labor and manufacture of, 209-10; forms of exchange between domestic and theatrical economies, 199-212; and handkerchief in Othello, 210; household objects as, 207; joint-stools as, 195—97; as material artifacts, 194,197-98, 210; and material conditions of stage production, 194; and metatheatricality, 195-97,199, 201; pawning of, 205-6, 207, 208; of Taming of the Shrew, 200-201, 204—7, 208; "translating" of masque costumes, 201-7, 261111130-31; transubstantiation of, 196-98. See also theater in early modern England Stallybrass, Peter, 199, 2441192 Starkey, David, 106 Steevens, George, 153 Stockholder, Katherine S., 240^3 Stone, Jeanne Fawtier, 63, 228n36 Stone, Lawrence, 63, 228n36 Stubbs, Philip, 20-21 Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (De Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass), 8 Swinburne, Henry, 2-4, 247ni5 "symbolic" capital, 55, 62, 66, 71 The Taming of the Shrew, 52-75; cates, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60-65, 67-7i> 73,139,192, 204, 228n40, 229nn50-5i; "chat" in, 60-61, 64-65, 70, 74; "chattel," 64-65, 73, 228n43; and Christopher Sly, 200, 204, 212; class grammar of, 61-67, 228nn36, 40; and cultural shift to commodities and market goods, 54; "daintiness," 59, 67; economic values of domestic work, 53-55, 72-73; forms of exchange in, 58; and gendered division of labor, 72—73; and housework theory, 54—55; induction scenes, 200; Kate as unvendible commodity, 58, 62; Kate as consumer, 54, 58-65, 71, 73-74,139,192, 204; Kate's final speech, 70-74,149,192, 23on68; Kate's gown as masquing costume, 69—70, 200-201, 204-8; Kate's linguistic excess, 57-63; and metadrama, 200, 204-5, 206-7; Patient Grissel and, 74, 23on68; Petruchio's mercenary motives, 62—64, 65—66; punning in, 58—60; revisionist readings, 74, 23onn67-69; symbolic dimension of cates, 55, 63, 66-67, 68-71,

228n40, 229nn50-5i; and symbolic order, 57, 58-59, 60-62, 66-67, 68-71, 229nn50-5i; and traditional shrew-taming tales, 52-55, 62, 74-75, 23on68 The Tempest^ 120,121 theater: costumes, 199-200, 201-7, 211, 26inn30-3i; economic similarities of players and housewives, 211-12; female labor in, 9, 209—10, 2i5n27; and female spectatorship, 194; and metatheatricality, 195—97, 199, 201; and pawnbroking, 205-6, 207, 208; stage production, 194; suspicion of private domestic sphere, 89; and translating of masquing costumes, 201—7, 26inn30—31; and women's property relations, 9. See also stage property The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 56 Thirsk, Joan, 7,15,17, 22 Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 190 Tilney, Edmund, 114,131 Tofte, Richard, 136-42,155, 243nn84, 86 Towerson, William, 117-18,146 The Tragedy of Othello, 111-16,124-36, 143-58; and African travel narratives, 116-24; anxieties surrounding wife's managerial role, 112,145,150; coverture issues, 150-55; Desdemona's beshrewing, 148-49, 156,157,158,187, 244n99, 245nioo; Desdemona's desire, 114-15,145-48,154,155-56; Emilia in, 156-57, 245nioo; extravagance, 114-15,145-48,154; lago's envy, 134~355 jealousy in, 112,114,129-36,145,157,193, 24in68; and Merry Wives, 111-12, 236n4; Othello as Moor, 112,144, 236n6, 238n2i; Othello's jealousy, 112,114,129,132-34,145, 24in68; Othello's possession of Desdemona, 143-46; on paraphernalia and women's property, 153-58; possession of property, 150—58,193; and racializing discourses, 112-14; stage-clutter in, 10; valuation of objects and property, 112—16, 124—29,132-34; and the "Willow Song," 141-43,155,156; women and Africans linked in relations to objects, 113—16,149, 158 The Tragedy of Othello, handkerchief in: as both civilizing and fetish, 125-26,128-29, 145-46, 24in65; civilizing function, 126-28, 148, 24onn56, 62; domestic function, 125-26; as fetish, 125-26,127-29,145-46, 148, 239n52, 24on53; "handkerchief" as

Index term, 126; as marital property, and coverture issues, 150-51; Othello's overvaluation of, 112,125—26,128—29, 24on53; ownership of, 150-51,153-55; as paraphernalia, 153-55; provenance of, 125-26,128,154-55; and sotilissimamentey 124-25; as stage property, 210; and strawberry-motif, 124-26 travel literature: African narratives, 23-24, 114,115-24,127,128,129-32,146-48; and civilizing influence of household stuff, 23-24; classical narratives, 120, 2391141; and England's comparisons of itself with other cultures, 116; and European fetishism, 119-20; fact and fiction in, 239n4i; on fetishism, 114,116—24,127-28, 129—32, 24in7o; on fetishism and jealousy, 129-32, 24in7o; gendered and racialized discourses of valuation, 146-48; systems of valuation and property in, 114-24, 146-48 trifles, 114,116,117,128. See also fetishism Tudor government, 176, 256n66 Vagabond Acts, 257n8o Varchi, Benedetto, 136-41, 243^4

271

Veblen, Thorstein, 56, 57, 60-61 Vives, Juan Luis, 30,31, 77,103 Wadding, Luke, 169-71, 25on45, 25in46 Walker, Garthine, 41 A Way to Get Wealth (Markham), 38 Weatherill, Lorna, 228n4O Whetstone, George, 135, 248ni9 Whitney, Geffrey, 80, 81 Widmayer, Martha, 248ni9 "The Wife Wrapped in a Wether's Skin" (ballad), 53 Williams, Raymond, 14 "Willow Song," 141-43,155,156 The Winter's Tale, 10 Wolpe, Ann Marie, 226ni2 Wood, Jeryldene M., 170, 253^9 Wright, Louis B., 25 Wrightson, Keith, 161,180, 258nn92-93 Xenophon, 25-30,77, 93 Xenophons Treatise of Householde (Xenophon), 25-26, 27-28, 29-30, 77, 93, 2191153

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Acknowledgments

Looking back, I am surprised that someone who grew up in a household in which status-objects were regarded with a certain haughty derision should have written a book about household stuff. My mother, Reva Korda, to whom this book is dedicated, dismissively relegated such stuff to the category of tchotchkes. She had no interest in fashion, loathed shopping, and positively detested housework. Having grown up very poor in the Bronx during the Depression, she read voraciously and dreamed of becoming a writer and an English professor. She loved the theater, and Shakespeare in particular. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College in 1947, she answered an ad for "Phi Beta Kappa English Majors" placed by Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, who ran the ad department at Gimbels. There, my mother found quite accidentally and much to her own surprise that she had a particular genius for writing advertising copy. Discovered by advertising legend David Ogilvy, she went on to become a legend in her own right as the first female creative head of Ogilvy & Mather. Her pioneering campaigns for Maxwell House Coffee ("Good to the Last Drop" and the "Percolator"), Imperial Margarine ("Fit for a King"), Schweppes ("Schweppervescence"), and many others helped form the cultural imaginary of her time. My mother always maintained an ironic detachment and skeptical wit about the commodity culture that she herself had helped shape. She would never have used the word "culture" to describe this world of goods. That word was reserved for "high" art, in which she was deeply invested (she married an artist), and in which she was determined to immerse her children, reading us nightly the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. My mother viewed high and low culture as entirely separate spheres and, sadly, looked down upon her own achievements in the latter from the lofty vantage of the former. Perhaps, then, this unlikely book on Shakespearean "stuff" emerges from my desire to explore the connections between these two spheres, and thereby, to pay tribute to my mother's achievements as significant cultural contributions. Tragically, since I began this book, this brilliant, articulate,

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Acknowledgments

and erudite woman has succumbed to the devastating and incurable disease of multiple sclerosis, which has robbed her of the ability to speak, write, or read. I can only hope that the opaque, unreachable interior world she now inhabits will be able to grasp the spirit of this tribute, and pledge that any royalties I may receive from this book will be donated to the Multiple Sclerosis Society of America. My work has benefited from the insight of many generous readers, interlocutors, and mentors. In the latter category, I am especially indebted to the work of Joel Fineman, my late, dear friend, to John Guillory, my teacher, advisor, and friend, to Harris Friedberg and Christina Crosby, my tremendously supportive and brilliant colleagues, and to Jean Howard, whose intellectual generosity seems to know no bounds. Other mentors whose work in the field of early modern studies has been particularly influential on my own and who have been supportive of my work include Catherine Belsey, Judith Brown, Dympna Callaghan, Walter Cohen, Frances Dolan, Lynn Enterline, Margaret Ferguson, Patricia Fumerton, Stephen Greenblatt, Kim Hall, Richard Halpern, Ann Rosalind Jones, Coppelia Kahn, Naomi Liebler, Karen Newman, Michael Neill, Susan O'Malley, Lena Cowen Orlin, Gail Kern Paster, Scott Shershow, Peter Stallybrass, Wendy Wall, and Linda Woodbridge. Friends, colleagues, and students who have read all or parts of this book, and whose ideas have helped shape my thinking on its subject matter, include Rebecca Bach, Mary Bly, Pam Brown, Julie Crawford, Krystian Czerniecki, Mario DiGangi, Will Fisher, Juana Green, Dave Hawkes, Genevieve Love, Tina Malcolmson, Sharon Marcus, Fiona McNeill, Simon Morgan-Russell, Laurie Nussdorfer, Peter Parolin, Gary Shaw, Gay Smith, Betsy Traub, Ramie Targoff, Elliott Trice, Richard Vann, Michael Wyatt, and Paul Yachnin. I am above all immeasurably grateful for the intellectual generosity, love and support of my brilliant friend and collaborator on another project, Jonathan Gil Harris. My editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Jerome Singerman, has been unceasingly supportive, as has his wonderful assistant, Samantha Foster. I would also like to thank managing editor Alison Anderson for her patient guidance through the editorial process. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my readers at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Jean Howard and John Michael Archer, and to anonymous readers at Shakespeare Quarterly and at Palgrave, for their generous comments. I am grateful to Shakespeare Quarterly for permission to reprint Chapter 2, which appeared in slightly different form in 1996 (47, 2), and to Routledge, for permission to reprint

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275

sections of Chapters i and 3, which appeared in slightly different form in the collection Marxist Shakespeares, edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001). Wesleyan University has been tremendously supportive of my research through numerous grants and through a Faculty Fellowship at its Center for the Humanities. Special thanks are due to its then Director Betsy Traube and to my fellow CHUM fellows, in particular Cameron Anderson, Cameron McFarlane, Claire Potter, and Gay Smith, who provided daily inspiration during my semester in their delightful company. My debt to Wesleyan goes well beyond financial support; rarely have I encountered the kind of intellectual community I have enjoyed during my six years at this exceptional institution. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues in the English Department, whose intellectual insight, support and encouragement helped me to shape this project and bring it to completion, including Henry Abelove, Christina Crosby, Tony Connor, George Creeger, Annie Dillard, Ann duCille, Harris Friedberg, Anne Greene, Gertrude Hughes, Indira Karamcheti, Stephanie Kuduk, Sean McCann, Gayle Pemberton, Joel Pfister, Kit and Joe Reed, Phyllis Rose, Ashraf Rushdy, Richard Slotkin, Bill Stowe, Kachig Tololyan, Al Turco, David Weisberg and Katherine Zieman. I am likewise indebted to the English Department's Administrative Assistant, Janice Guarino, and Secretary, Sheila Kelleher, for their daily support, intelligence, and unfailing good humor. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Women's Studies Program at Wesleyan for their hard work and support of my teaching and scholarship, including Sue Hirsch, Marilyn Katz, Lily Milroy, Jill Morawski, Ann-Lou Shapiro, Jennifer Tucker, Ellen Widmer, and the Program's linchpin and Administrative Assistant, Noreen Baris. Other Wesleyan colleagues who have been particularly supportive include Tom Huhn, Noah Isenberg, Ron Jenkins, Ron Kuivila, Liza McAlister, Joyce Lowrie, John Paoletti, Michael Armstrong Roche, Kate Rushin, Jeffrey Schiff, Dan Schnaidt, David Schorr, Mark and Greta Slobin, Sonia Sultan, Diana Sorenson, Mike Roy, and Magda Teter. The bulk of my research for this book was conducted at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which during the past six summers has become my home away from home. I am particularly indebted to its Director, Richard J. Kuhta, and to Dr. Georgianna Ziegler, Head of Reference, and Betsy Walsh, Head of Reader Services, for their assistance in gathering materials. My thanks as well to Dr. Erin Blake, Curator of Art, and Julie Ainsworth in the Photography department, for assistance with finding and reproducing the illustrations, to the wonderful Reading Room

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Acknowledgments

Staff, Harold Batie, LuEllen DeHaven, Rosalind Larry, Camille Seerattan, and Andy Tennant, and to numerous teatime interlocutors. I would also like to thank Suzy Taraba, Head of Special Collections at Olin Library at Wesleyan, Whitney Bagnall, Special Collections Librarian at the Columbia University Law Library, and librarians at the British Museum Library, and the New York Public Library. The insightful questions and comments of auditors too numerous to mention by name at the many conferences and invited lectures where I have presented material from this book were invaluable, including those I received at the Princeton University Renaissance Seminar, the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance, the Harvard University Shakespearean Studies Seminar and Renaissance Seminar, the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar, and the Wesleyan University Renaissance Colloquium and Center for the Humanities, the Shakespeare Association of America annual conventions, the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies annual conventions, and the Modern Language Association annual conventions. Friends who have provided invaluable emotional and spiritual support include Maria Farland, Leah Gardiner, Alec Gershberg, Maxine Groffsky, John Hawkins, Sarah Katherman, Joan and Frank Keenan, Win Knowlton, Pamela Lawton, Sharon Marcus, Ellen Nerenberg, Marco Sbona, Stuart Schneiderman, Greta Seacat, Lisa Servon, Rachel Speltz, Anthony Valerio, Lois Wilson, Caroline Wingolf, and Brigitte Young. Above all, I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family, Joshua Korda, Reva Korda, and William Korda, and my extended family, Sheila Gray and Jason Bagdade, Kathy Cherry, Natasha Gray, Pat and John Thackray, Harriet Meyers, and the late Ora Henry. I conclude with my deep gratitude to my beloved dog Beauregard. A source of endless delight and never far from my side, he courageously clung to life until this book reached completion. Let his love and dedication be an inspiration to us all.