-
When Thomas Middleton turned his attention to city comedy in the early
years of the seventeenth century, the genre was in the formative stages
of its development. It was not yet the streamlined vehicle for the display
of manners and wit that it was to become, and the dramatists experimenting
with the genre appropriated conventions from a wide range of sources: Roman
New Comedy, humours psychology, satire and the prodigal son play, to name
a few. Early instances of the type--Chapman's An Humourous Day’s Mirth
(1597), Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour (1599), and the anonymous
The London Prodigal (1604), for example--are characterized by an
overt moral intention: moral norms are reinforced through the ridicule of
contemporary misbehaviour presented in the form of the humours character
or the prodigal. As Middleton wrote didactic and satiric verse before turning
to drama, it is tempting to explain his attraction to the genre as a result
of its moral purposiveness. But this is not the case in any simplistic sense.
If Middleton was attracted by the morally and socially normative intentions
of city comedy, his own city comedies problematize those norms in a number
of ways, primarily by representing them as the outcomes and instruments
of conflict, the conventions of social dramas performed by the self-interested
actors who populate the theatrical London that constitutes the plays' fictional
worlds. The plays skeptically bracket the truth value of moral and social
norms to investigate their function in social conflict.
- The city comedy on which this paper focuses, Michaelmas Term (1605),
is concerned with the social dramas that blur or reinforce distinctions of
social status, distinctions underpinning the society in which Middleton lived.
Yachnin remarks that this early city comedy marks a turning point in the mode
of Middleton's dramatic representation of social order, a "crucial transition
from a sacramental to a scientific view of class differentiation. The sacramental
view seeks to wed the social order to a divinely established universal order
so that power and privilege can be presented as the natural and ordained concomitants
of rank. The scientific view undertakes to divorce society from the ordained
order of the universe" ("Social Competition" 87). Theatrical rather than scientific,
though, best characterizes Middleton's altered perspective. The sacramental
view joined social order to divine order through the notion of birth. A person's
social position at birth was divinely ordained and endowed that person with
an innate social essence that defined his or her social trajectory. By birth
one was a commoner, a member of the gentry or a peer, and consequently birth
determined one's position in the scheme of distribution of goods, power and
privilege. Departure from one's native place and prescribed vocation sinfully
disrupts the commonwealth's divinely sanctioned order. The sacramental view,
then, was fundamentally anti-theatrical, ideally eliminating slippage between
birth and the social roles an individual might play and consequently legitimating
the existing social order as natural and just. Social mobility has the potential
to disrupt this sacramental view of society, and Michaelmas Term breaks
the link between social order and its legitimating ontological ground by taking
the performativity implicit in social mobility as the norm for all social
status. For Middleton, even gentle birth, the crucial dividing line between
those fit to govern and those not, is a matter of appearances.
- Early modern England witnessed unprecedented social mobility. [1]
England's emerging capitalist economy pried people from their 'natural' places
in a number of ways, allowing people to create for themselves new social roles
and identities. London's rise as a hub of international and domestic trade
and a centre of manufacture was accompanied by the expansion of the number
of men of business whose 'trade' the traditional guild structure could define
only inadequately if at all, men whose wealth had little to do with the craft
of the guild to which they nominally belonged but was rather capital garnered
from and pumped back into the importing and exporting of commodities, developing
new industries outside guild regulations, and money-lending. [2]
A few of these men amassed spectacular fortunes, and merchant wealth in general
was on the rise. [3] Through the crown's dependence on
these wealthy Londoners for revenue in the form of loans, taxes and customs
duties, this wealth was translated into power and influence beyond the civic
sphere not easily accounted for in conceptions of the commonwealth in which
the lines of power were hierarchical and unidirectional. Some merchants took
advantage of a real-estate market quickened by the dissolution of the monasteries
to buy their way into the aristocracy. [4] The Tudor monarchs’
reliance on 'new men,' educated but less well-born public officials, to administer
the increasingly complex machinery of centralizing government provided other
opportunities for social mobility. James took this process several steps further
by selling knighthoods and peerages. [5] Birth, then, could
be seen not as a natural essence completely defining one's social trajectory
but as an acquired social position, a commodity to be gained or lost. In this
period the aristocracy in general was caught up in these ideologically disruptive
socio-economic changes, not only as victims through their heavy borrowing
but also as active participants through investments and their development
of capitalist agriculture. [6] And if as borrowers they
increased the market for and hence numbers of money-lenders, as capitalist
farmers, through contractual rent agreements and enclosure, they also increased
the number of vagrants, another group whose transgressive social mobility
was highly visible and disconcerting. [7]
- Parvenu, middleman, money-lender, 'new man,' vagrant: these socially mobile
and socially dislocated individuals traversed hierarchical boundaries of social
order or existed in their interstices. Such figures created ideologically
threatening disjunctions between birth and social role, disjunctions all the
more threatening for their visibility. Rogue literature expressed an anxiety
about the vagrant that focussed on the vagrant's rootlessness and the performative
existence it enabled (and necessitated.) A Caveat for Common Cursitors
Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1566), for example, written by Justice of the
Peace Thomas Harman, responds to the vagrant's disturbing social mobility
by locating points of origin for the vagrants with whom Harman comes into
contact and exposing their disguises as the sick, the poverty-stricken, or
even as respectable members of the commonwealth. [8] As
Paul Slack documents, Tudor and early Stuart policies were directed against
the vagrant's protean existence, attempting to fix the vagrant's identity
by judicial spectacle and by returning the vagrant to a determined point of
origin: "Vagabonds were now to be whipped... and then returned to the place
where they were born or where they last lived for at least three years. The
qualification for settlement was reduced to one year in 1598, but otherwise
this remained the usual medicine for vagrancy throughout the period" (Poverty
and Policy 118). Equally perplexing was the visible power and wealth of
the upper echelons of London's merchants, commercial capitalists and money-lenders
rather than artisans and mere retailers. Rivalling the aristocracy in wealth,
having little in common with the rank and file of the companies to which they
belonged, but often of humble origins, these figures had no clear position
in the commonwealth. Their ambiguous position called forth a body of Elizabethan
imaginative literature--prose fiction and drama--that attempted to find a
place for them but could not pass beyond the invention of such paradoxical
figures as the merchant knight errant, figures that Jacobean dramatists found
absurd and burlesqued in plays like The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
[9] Similarly, the writers of tracts on gentility and the
ideal gentleman perceived the 'new men' to be a potentially destabilizing
force but in reply could only assert the basis of gentility to be birth while
paradoxically arguing that birth must be cultivated and supplemented by such
cultural attainments as education and manners. Ironically these tracts, which
could be treated as how-to manuals, only heightened the sense that gentility
was performative, a role that could be played by anyone and must be played
even by those whose natural birth might seem to exempt them from the consideration
of social appearances. [10]
- The developing capitalist forces reshaping England's economy, then, broadened
the possibilities for theatrical modes of existence, played out most visibly
on the nation's largest stage, London. As the nation’s political and economic
capital London was the ideal home or terminus for the socially mobile, and
as a developing centre of conspicuous consumption London did not merely accommodate
but positively encouraged theatrical existence [11]. Conspicuous
consumption privileges social appearance over innate social essence: being
seen to consume is what is important, and London provided the largest audience
available. Furthermore, the social mobility concentrated in London transformed
consumption, formerly the exclusive mark of those born into the upper reaches
of society, into a signifier subject to appropriation and manipulation by
anyone with enough money or enough wits to obtain the credit to finance his
or her social performances. London was the site in which a crisis in the category
of birth was most visible, the theatre of a crisis in social perception.
- Most perceptions of the problematic nature of birth did not result in the
kind of skepticism found in Michaelmas Term. As we have seen, more
often than not such perceptions resulted in calls for measures to restabilize
the category, to produce and enforce its central, socially determining position.
Nonetheless, the anxiety and urgency of these calls are matched by the difficulties
they encounter in restoring the category's essentiality and naturalness. Philip
Stubbes' discussion of clothing in Anatomie of Abuses (1583) nicely
illustrates this. In Stubbes' moral framework the abuses of dress occupy a
prominent position as the most egregious of those abuses that threaten to
plunge England into divinely sanctioned chaos: "The greatest abuse which both
offendeth god most, [and] is there not a little aduaunced, is the execrable
sinne of Pride, and excesse in apparell, which is there so ripe, as the filthie
fruits thereof have long since, presented themselves before the throne of
the maiestie of God, calling and crying for vengeance day and nighte incessantly"
(sig. B. v.). This is not merely a function of Stubbes' moral severity. For
Stubbes, dress as a mode of conspicuous consumption is the most visible register
of the disruptions and displacements afflicting birth and the modes of social
perception founded on it. Stubbes writes that
now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in Ailgna,
and such preposterous excesse therof... 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 Magistrat or Officer in the commonwealth, go daylie in silkes,
velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties and suchlike, notwithstanding that they
be both base by birth, meane by estate & servyle by calling. This is a
great confusion & general disorder, God be mercifull unto us. (sig. C.
iii.)
Behind Stubbes' complaint lies the vision of a society in which each individual's
social appearance is an unequivocal expression or sign of her or his social
position determined by birth. The "great confusion & general disorder"
that Stubbes describes is caused by the failure of this ideal social language.
The link between signifier and signified has been rendered uncertain and open
to manipulation. Stubbes indicates the seriousness of this semiotic rupture
by connecting birth and power: the inability to know who is noble and who
is base is also the inability to know who is master and who is servant, who
rules and who is ruled. Who, then, knows whom to obey and whom to command?
Power itself is at stake in the play of social signs. Stubbes, though, does
not doubt the adequacy of birth as a key social category but rather insists
that the current semiotic confusion be remedied. In this at least Stubbes
and the government concurred: according to Stone, "Elizabeth issued no less
than ten Proclamations during her reign enjoining the enforcement of the 1533
Sumptuary Act" (Crisis of the Aristocracy 29). Yet Stubbes' own discourse
reveals birth's inadequacy. On the one hand, if birth is to remain an essential
category in spite of the "confuse mingle mangle of apparell," then social
signifiers must be inessential, accidental to birth, ornamental. On the other
hand, appearances and signs are all social actors have to go on. Were birth
itself immediately visible, apparel would be trivial, generating neither anxiety
nor regulative legislation. Birth, then, vanishes behind or is overwhelmed
by the appearances that become its irreplaceable substitutes.
- If Anatomie is a conservative moral critique of a disorderly society,
then Michaelmas Term turns that disorder back into a skeptical critique
of the social epistemology underlying Stubbes's conservatism. The point at
which Stubbes' discourse unravels, the supplementarity of appearances, is
Middleton's play's point of departure. More precisely, it is the play's enabling
comic presupposition and the focus of the play's skeptical analysis of birth's
ideological inadequacy and illegitimacy. In Michaelmas Term, Middleton
deploys city comedy's doubleness (things are rarely what they seem to be),
its dramatic speed, and its emphasis on conflict and the contemporary--especially
merchant-gentry conflict--to produce a play that insistently queries birth's
status as an innate social essence. The play’s skepticism does not take sides:
as Theodore Leinwand argues, "Middleton's city comedies... are not directed
against status groups so much as they examine the effects of a status society
itself under pressure" (The City Staged 19). Broadly, Middleton transforms
the static oppositional conflict between merchants and gentry into a frenetic
circular motion that exposes the positionality of all birth. The play draws
two stereotypes of this conflict--citizen as cozener versus gentry as gull,
citizen as impotent hoarder versus gentry as fertile profligate--into cycles
of transience and illegitimacy, two cycles of accumulation and consumption
that transform birth, the boundary between citizen and gentry, those who rule
and those who do not, into an empty sign incapable of signifying as a natural
category within the ideology of aristocratic social formation.
- One of the play's fundamental comic principles is that birth and inheritance
are no match for the instability of social position across generations. Even
in Elizabeth's reign, the pace of social mobility, especially gentrification,
was enough to render it disturbingly visible. Thomas Smith in De Republica
Anglorum (1586) notes that "as for gentlemen, they be made good cheape
in England" (27). In James' reign they had become much cheaper. Stone argues
that during this period "families were moving up and down in social and economic
scale at a faster rate than at any time before the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries" (Crisis of the Aristocracy 36), pinpointing the decade between
1610 and 1620 as the decade in which the rate of social mobility peaked. Social
mobility in itself need not pose a threat to hierarchical societies. As Bacon
in "Of Nobility" comments, time in this context can be a great conservative
force: "For new nobility is but the act of power, but ancient nobility is
the act of time. Those that are first raised to nobility are commonly more
virtuous but less innocent than their descendants, for there is rarely any
rising but by a commixture of good and evil arts. But it is reason the memory
of their virtues remain to their posterity, and their faults die with themselves"
(78). For Bacon as much as for Andrew Lethe, forgetfulness, Time's less famous
daughter, is essential to complete gentrification. But time is precisely what
Middleton does not allow his socially ambitious characters, removing gentrification's
cloak of naturalness with the speed at which his characters acquire gentrification's
material trappings. The Induction presents to us
A fellow
Shrugging for life's kind benefits, shift and heat,
Crept up in three Terms, wrapt in silk and silver,
So well appointed too with page and pander. (32-35).
This "fellow" becomes one of the play's main characters, Andrew Lethe, who
has transformed himself from the son of a toothdrawer into "Master Andrew
Lethe,/ A gentleman of most received parts" (1.1.157-8). The Country Wench
is allowed even less time, a mere three acts to Lethe's three terms. Her rapid
transformation from a "Northamptonshire lass" (1.2.12) into a "Lady" (4.1.40)
is more unsettling than Lethe's metamorphosis because it occurs entirely within
the play's fast-paced dramatic time. The Country Wench makes the leap from
commoner to gentlewoman in the first half of what is at most two hours’ traffic
upon the stage, and the play thus foregrounds the performativity of her gentrification.
- The play's critical use of accelerated time is not limited to the acquisition
of gentry status. The play dramatizes the equally rapid consumption of the
accoutrements of gentrification, locking accumulation and consumption into
a vicious (not virtuous, as Bacon would have it) circle of social rise and
fall motivated by citizen-gentry conflict. Throughout his oeuvre Middleton
delights in the circular futility of his comic worlds. [12]
In Michaelmas Term, however, the circularity is particularly devastating:
what one generation accumulates in wealth, land and status, the next consumes,
forcing the third to begin the cycle once again. In the play there is no time
to naturalize gentry status, which is thus exposed as raw and transient positionality.
Thus, the Country Wench must enter a trade, "wholesale" (4.2.15), to regain
the "name and state" (2.2.23) that her father has rioted away. Middleton develops
the cycle in more complex directions in the play's main conflict, the struggle
between Quomodo the citizen cozener and Easy the gentry gull for Easy's Essex
lands. Here the play not only works to demystify gentry status but also provides
a strongly ironic reading of Bacon's already ambiguous contention that "virtue"
as opposed to "innocence" is the means of status acquisition. The only virtue
by which Quomodo gains, albeit momentarily, Easy's land is a debased Machiavellian
virtu, the con artist's ability to cheat successfully. But despite
his virtue Quomodo cannot break the cycle, even though he is the character
in the play most aware of it. He cheats Easy of his lands not only for sport
and his own gain but also eventually to elevate his son Sim to gentry status.
What we learn of Sim's education indicates that Quomodo has been fashioning
his son for his new social position: Quomodo declares Easy's Essex lands are
"an excellent place for a student, fit for my son that lately commenced at
Cambridge, whom now I have placed at Inns of Court" (2.3.84-86). Yet, as Quomodo
prophetically muses and perversely takes steps to confirm, the "cozenage in
the father" by which the citizen obtains land from the gentry "wheels about
to folly in the son, our posterity commonly foiled at the same weapon at which
we played rarely" (4.1.82-84). In order to "break destiny of her custom" (4.1.87),
Quomodo feigns death, intending to nip in the bud his son's riotous, profligate
tendencies. With typical Middletonian irony, the death trick precipitates
the event it was designed to forestall, and almost immediately after the bells
announcing Quomodo's death have rung Sim is cheated out of the Essex lands
by Quomodo's servant Shortyard. By regaining his lands Easy may seem to break
the cycle--but only for now. Rowe points out that "We watch the prodigals
being engulfed in a hellish London, but we never see any of them make a symbolic
journey 'home' to the countryside" ("Prodigal Sons" 101). Easy may not have
been hooked this time, and he may have taken Quomodo's lectures about bonds
to heart, but the play offers no assurance that he will leave the gallant's
life of consumption and waste. In Michaelmas Term, then, gentle birth
is transitory, and gentle inheritance is more likely to be consumed than passed
down through the generations. "Oh, worse than consumption of the liver!/ Consumption
of the patrimony!" (2.1.116-117), Rearage exclaims between tosses of the dice.
- The other fundamental comic principle of Michaelmas Term's fictional
world is what Chakravorty calls the "sex-money calculus. What a merchant gains
in money, he loses in virility; what the prodigal heir loses in estates, he
gains in sex" (Society and Politics 46). In the play's induction, Michaelmas
Term presents one version of this calculus: "Where bags are fruitful'st there
the womb's most barren;/ The poor has all our children, we their wealth" (24-25).
Quomodo revises Michaelmas Term's equation by aligning money and sex, "Revenue"
and "Pleasure" (The Phoenix 1.5.12, 13), not with the wealthy
and the poor but with the (wealthy) citizen and the (poor) gentry and by expressing
the equation as part of the class conflict between these two groups:
There are means and ways enow to hook in gentry,
Besides our deadly emnity, which thus stands:
They're busy 'bout our wives, we 'bout their lands. (1.1.107-109).
It would be misleading, however, to maintain that Middleton's alignment of
revenue with citizens and pleasure with the gentry is an absolute disjunction
of sexual and economic forces. The matches between Thomasine and Easy and
Susan and Rearage can perhaps be seen as unions of revenue and pleasure: Easy
and Rearage are certainly after wealth, and Thomasine and Susan are quite
obviously not (although it is not clear whether they are motivated by pleasure
or by the desire to acquire status.) For the most part, however, sexuality
and economics are merely different modes of the cycle of accumulation and
consumption. Quomodo does not lack sexual desire but channels it into his
economic operations. Land, the goal of his economic activity, becomes the
fetishized object of his sexual fantasies: "Oh, that sweet, neat, comely,
proper, delicate parcel of land, like a fine gentlewoman in the i'th'waist"
(2.3.81-82). Quomodo's fraudulent acquisition of Easy's lands is, then, a
lucrative form of cuckolding, a reversal of the ostensibly unidirectional
sexual dynamics of citizen-gentry conflict. On the other side of the cycle,
Rearage and the other gallants are engaged in the "consumption of the patrimony"
(2.1.117) in both economic and sexual senses. They waste their economic patrimony
on "feasts" and their sexual patrimony on "drabs" and begetting the citizens'
illegitimate children.
- Of course, in Middleton sexuality is almost always an economic affair, with
large economic and social implications. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,
for example, Middleton manipulates the sexual economics that both maintain
and undermine the socio-economic status quo. Parodying New Comedy romance's
sublimation of socially threatening sexual desires into socially acceptable
forms, the play charts the progress of Touchwood Senior, a gentleman whose
amazingly potent "fatal finger" (2.1.59) has beggared him, separated him from
his wife because of his poverty, and has disrupted the rural economy by impregnating
and so disabling a significant portion of the work force during harvest. His
fortunes are restored when he is offered four hundred pounds (3.3.137-139)
by Lord and Lady Kix to dispense a 'fertility drug' to Lady Kix to remedy
the couple's childlessness and so to prevent Sir Walter Whorehound from inheriting
their estates. This arrangement renews the community, providing the Kixes
with heirs and Touchstone Senior with a permanent and productive outlet for
his sexuality and an opportunity to reestablish his marriage:
Sir Oliver: "Master Touchwood, hear'st thou this news?
I am so endear'd to thee for my wife's fruitfulness
That I charge you both, your wife and thee,
To live no more asunder for the world's frowns:
I have purse, and bed, and board for you;
Be not afraid to go to your business roundly;
Get children, and I'll keep them. (5.4.76-82)
The wink and nudge of innuendo and the shared gentry status of the Kixes
and the Touchwoods work to tame the subversiveness of the play's sexual economics,
but the play nonetheless shows how much, both economically and socially, depends
on birth, while simultaneously exposing as a convenient fiction the purity
which it is necessary to attribute to birth in order to render it so important.
If the formula of Shakespeare's festive, romantic comedy is, as Barber puts
it, "through release to clarification" (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
4), then A Chaste Maid In Cheapside moves through ejaculation to skeptical
clarification, demystification.
- The sexual economics of Michaelmas Term have equally disturbing and,
because expressed in generalized terms, more widespread implications. Disguised
as a wealthy citizen, Shortyard declares to Quomodo that "I am of those citizen's
minds that say, let our wives make shift for children, an they will, they
get none of us; and I cannot think but he that has both much wealth and many
children has had more helps coming in than himself" (4.1.34-38). If this is
the case then the consequence is that the bastard children of the gentry will
inherit the land and gentry status that the citizens have fraudulently gained
from the children’s profligate fathers. This cycle of illegitimacy as much
as the "destiny" (4.1.87) Quomodo fears undermines Quomodo's utopian fantasy
of the reconciliation of revenue and pleasure, capital and land. After gaining
Easy's lands, Quomodo dreams of
A fine journey in the Whitsun holidays, i'faith, to ride down with
a number of citizens and their wives, some upon pillions, some upon sidesaddles,
I and little Thomasine i'th'middle, our son and heir, Sim Quomodo, in a peach-color
taffeta jacket, some horse-length or long yard before us; there will be a
fine show on's, I can tell you; where we citizens will laugh, and lie down,
get all our wives with child against a bank and get up again" (4.1.70-76).
Quomodo dreams of gentrification underwritten by merchant capital and of
legitimate heirs to inherit this reconfigured social order. "Destiny"--the
comic law of biter bit projected across generations and modulated by class
conflict--ensures that this utopian vision remains a dream, but questions
of legitimacy create the suspicion that this dream, even were Quomodo to keep
Easy's lands, is a delusion. Like Jonson's Volpone, Quomodo thinks that everyone
is self-deluded and ripe for gulling--except himself. Having himself articulated
the sexual dynamic of citizen-gentry competition, he does not suspect that
this dynamic may apply to him personally. "What a wife hast thou, Ephestian
Quomodo! So loving, so mindful of her duty" (5.1.58-59), Quomodo exclaims
after having caught glimpses of Thomasine's behaviour after his faked death.
The dramatic irony of Quomodo's exclamation is almost painful. Unlike Quomodo,
the audience has witnessed Thomasine rush to marry Easy even as the coffin
supposedly carrying Quomodo's corpse is being carried to the grave. Earlier
on the play hints that the citizen-gentry sexual dynamic may in fact apply
to Quomodo. Thomasine is disgusted by Lethe's sexual advances not because
they are immoral but because "'tis for his betters to have opportunity of
me" (2.3.7-8). We have only Quomodo's word for it that Sim, on whom Quomodo
pins his utopian hopes, is his legitimate "son and heir" (4.1.72-73).
- For citizen and gentry alike, then, birth proves to be a problematic category,
lacking the real, 'natural' referent it needs in order to function as the
anchoring link between a hierarchical social configuration and the sacramental
ideology invoked to justify the distribution of power and privilege in that
configuration. Approaching the play from a slightly different perspective,
Paster reaches a similar conclusion. She writes that "the traditional social
hierarchy so much a part of the characters' thinking has little real value
or substantiality except as a specious justification for appetitive behavior
and mutually self-destructive rivalry" ("Triangular Desire" 170). Yet in some
ways Paster's conclusion misses the point. The circular futility of citizen-gentry
conflict delegitimates birth and the social hierarchy of which it it is the
central category, but birth is not therefore rendered valueless. In the play,
the social distinctions based on birth are not just "mental furniture" (168)
or the coordinates of an antiquated, purely subjective world view. As we shall
see, 'birth' continues to have value--not a natural, inherent value but the
value of an exchangeable commodity, a value based on appearances but with
material efficacy. This commodity is not so much the justification of appetitive
behaviour as its cause. At the least, the commodification of status incites
the desire to acquire it, a desire structured by the cycles of accumulation
and consumption governing London's exchange economy. As Slights puts it, Middleton
"casts the concept of the fashioned self into a commercial context" ("Unfashioning
the Man" 87), specifically London. But the issue concerning self-fashioning
in the play is not, as Slights argues, Middleton's moral evaluation of the
process but rather his examination of the ideological consequences of the
increasing underwriting of status by capital which enables his characters
to fashion themselves. As the theatre of conspicuous consumption, Middleton's
London is both the site of birth's delegitimation and the mechanism of its
revaluation, both a "man-devouring city" (2.2.21) and the womb or mint of
strange, new births.
- On its stage London practises a black magic of commercial transformation
or, more precisely, performs the illusionist's art of reducing substance to
appearance. The practice of law reduces the fruits of the earth to a "silver
harvest" (Induction 10), a crop of coins whose value is a function of appearance--as
rare and attractive metal, as authorized token--signifying in the context
of commercial exchange. London's other acts and venues work a similar alchemy
on the social self. London not only supplies the gentry with the means to
express their birth through performance, with modes of and spectators for
extravagant expenditure, but also creates an environment in which such performance
becomes a necessity. In De Republica Anglorum, Thomas Smith's discussion
of the gentleman charts this slide into the necessary supplementarity of appearances:
Smith begins by defining gentlemen as "those whom their blood and race doth
make known" (26) but concludes by stating that "a gentleman (if he will be
so accompted) must go like a gentleman" (28). Smith's conclusion summarizes
the lesson Easy learns from his London adventures. Arriving in London a "pure,
fresh gull" (2.1.171), Easy must learn to go like a gentleman, must learn
the manners of a London gallant, the defining characteristic of which is conspicuous
consumption. Shortyard (alias Blastfield) is his willing tutor. During his
first stint of gambling, Easy threatens to "forswear dicing" (2.1.105) after
he loses. Shortyard corrects him: "What? Peace, I am ashamed to hear you.
Will you cease in the first loss? Show me one gentleman that e'er did it!
Fie upon't, I must use you to company, I perceive; you'd be spoil'd else.
Forswear dice?" (2.1.106-109).
- As expensive as Easy's education proves to be, however, its expense does
not represent the limit of consumption. The supplementarity of appearances
is never satisfied. Even two cynical gallants such as Rearage and Salewood
need to be instructed about their inadequate standards of consumption. "Are
you not knights yet, gentlemen?" (1.1.188), Lethe asks them. To Salewood's
"Not yet" Lethe replies "No? That must be looked into, 'tis your own fault"
(1.1.190). Lethe's question has a pointed topicality. Writing in Elizabeth's
reign, Thomas Smith could still remark that knighthoods, which were non-hereditary
titles, were bestowed as royal recognition of deserving public virtue: "Knightes
therefore be not borne but made, either before the battle to encourage them
the more to adventure their lives, or after the conflict, as advauncement
for their hardinesse and manhood alreadie shewed: or out of the warre for
some great service done, or some good hope through the vertues which do appeare
in them" (21-22). For Smith, knighthoods function much as Stubbes thought
clothing should function, as true signs of the qualities of their bearers,
signs that significantly are not mere markers of wealth: "No more are all
made knightes in Englande that may dispende a knightes land or fee, but they
onely whom the king will so honour" (22). In James' reign, however, Smith's
description must have seemed antiquated at best. James created more knights
in 1604 alone than Elizabeth had created during her entire reign. More unsettling
was the manner of their creation: James bestowed knighthoods whimsically and
destabilized the unambiguous significance Smith attributed to them by treating
them as commodities. Hard up for cash, James used knighthoods as an indirect
means of raising crown revenue by granting to courtiers as rewards the privilege
of recommending candidates for knighthoods; the courtiers could then charge
what they wanted for their nominations, and they often sold their privileges
to others, who would then attempt to make a profit by selling the knighthoods
at an even higher rate. In 1606, for example, Lionel Cranfield purchased the
making of six knights for three-hundred and seventy-three pounds, one shilling
and eightpence. [13] Honour was there for the buying,
and Lethe's question to Salewood and Rearage, whose only means of gaining
knighthoods is surely by purchasing them, has all the anxiety-raising casualness
of the luxury goods salesperson for whom the latest high-priced fashionable
commodity is a necessity. Even the gentle-born are subject to the inflationary
pressures of the traffic in titles.
- As in Stubbes' discourse, necessary supplementarity soon becomes irreplaceable
substitute. 'Birth' is emptied out into appearances and becomes wholly a product
of commodified self-fashioning or, in Bruster's terms, "the commercial inscription
of identity" (Drama and the Market 69). The Country Wench and Andrew
Lethe are the play's most obvious examples of this, and the transformations
they undergo concretely dramatize the relations between the body and commercial
transactions that were, according to Jean-Christophe Agnew, beginning to be
theorized in the writings of Bacon, Thomas Wright, William Scott and others:
"As a locus of representation and misrepresentation, the body had become,
in effect, a commodity--a double-stitched garment the social value of which
fluctuated according the mysterious movements of a placeless market. In its
own, albeit figurative way, the human body had become the newest of England’s
new draperies" (Worlds Apart 85-86). Hellgill the pander brings the
Country Wench to the city from "a poor thrummed house i'th'country" (1.2.5-6)
with the promise to make her "pass for a gentlewoman i’th’city" (1.2.6-7)
in exchange for her virginity. London's market supplies the material of her
rebirth: "Why, Northamptonshire lass, dost dream of virginity now? Remember
a loose-bodied gown, wench, and let it go; wires and tires, bents and bums,
felts and falls, thou shalt deceive the world that gentlewomen indeed shall
not be known from others" (1.2.12-15). At this point in the play, Hellgill
still distinguishes between those who are gentlewomen and those who merely
pass as such. However, once he sees the end result of the Country Wench's
retailoring, he declares this distinction untenable: "You talk of an alteration;
here's the thing itself. What base birth does not raiment make glorious? And
what glorious births do not rags make infamous? Why should not a woman confess
what she is now, since the finest are but deluding shadows begot between tirewomen
and tailors?" (3.1.1-5). The Country Wench's natural birth is superseded and
rendered irrelevant by her sartorial self-fashioning. "Now," the self that
the Country Wench has purchased, is all that counts. The Country Wench's self-fashioning
is verbal as well as sartorial, and her use of "the true phrase and style
of a strumpet" (3.1.27) also works to erase signs of her origins: "Out, you
saucy, pestiferious pander! I scorn that i'faith" (3.1.25-26), she exclaims
in reply to Hellgill's assertion that "this fine sophisticated squall came
out of the bosom of a barn and the loins of a hay-tosser" (3.1.23-24). The
Country Wench's and her father's failure to recognize each other indicates
the thoroughness of this rebirth. London replaces kinship ties with commercial
relations, natural parents with "tirewomen and tailors." Furthermore, the
Country Wench fashions herself not only through commodities but also as a
commodity, Lethe's "underput" (3.1.72). She is not merely Lethe's mistress
but also his prostitute, from whom he expects to reap profit by selling her
services to other gallants. Her gentle appearance is essential to her trade.
Lethe uses the Country Wench's bought status as gentlewoman to increase both
her marketability and his own social capital: she is, Lethe tells Salewood
and Rearage, "a gentlewoman of a great house, noble parentage, unmatchable
education, my plain pung" (3.1.73-74). The Country Wench herself embraces
this peculiar combination of ennoblement and degradation: "Though it may be
a hard fortune to have my keeper there a coward," she tells Shortyard, "the
thing that’s kept is a gentlewoman born" (3.1.169-170).
- Like the Country Wench, Lethe has also been begotten "between tirewomen
and tailors." Son of Walter Gruel, "an honest upright tooth-drawer" (1.1.255-256),
London has rechristened him "Master Andrew Lethe" (1.1.157). Lethe, whose
transformation the induction prefigured, has
crept to a little warmth,
And now so proud that he forgets all storms;
One that ne'er wore apparel but, like ditches,
'Twas cast before he had it, now shines bright
In rich embroideries. (1.1.61-65).
Lethe's rags-to-riches story is just that, a story not of hard work or divine
blessing, valour or loyalty, but rather of a change of clothes. As Thomasine
informs us, Lethe's rise began in Quomodo's drapery shop where he "brought
two of his countrymen to give their words to my husband for a suit of green
kersy" (2.3.9-10). London's market supplies Lethe not only with his rich embroideries,
the clothes necessary to establish him as a gallant, but also with the opportunity
to acquire and display the manners necessary to establish him as a "gentleman
of most received parts" (1.1.158). Lethe acquires his status as gallant through
his conspicuous consumption, through his dicing, whoring and feasting. And
Rearage, whose dislike of Lethe is generated as much by the fact that Lethe
is his rival for the rich draper's daughter's seven hundred pounds as by social
snobbery, fully participates in Lethe's acquisition. When they "taste," "waste,"
and "cast" (1.1.1.197) venison at the Horn with Lethe, are gambling away their
money to him, or are courting Lethe's "plain pung," Rearage and Salewood,
even though they may may despise Lethe behind his back, publicly accept Lethe
in their fraternity so long as his mode of consumption matches or even outgoes
theirs. Lethe's retailoring, like the Country Wench's, works to efface the
signs of his origns. "Know you not me, good woman?" (1.1.267-8), Lethe asks
Mother Gruel in the play's first scene; "Alas, an't please your worship, I
never saw such a glorious suit since the hour I was kersened" (1.1.269-70)
she replies. For the rest of the play, employed as Lethe's drudge, she fails
to see through his "glorious suit," and even at the play's end she acknowledges
him as her son only because she is forced to do so. Albeit less explicitly
than the Country Wench's, Lethe's remaking of himself is also verbal. Some
critics have assumed that Lethe is Scottish, a plausible inference from Lethe's
connection with debased knighthood. Actually, the play only vaguely indicates
Lethe’s point of origin: according to Rearage, his father "brought him up
below" (1.1.154), outside of London, but the play is not more specific than
this. But if Lethe is Scottish, his speech does not betray him. Middleton
does not use differences in dialect or level of speech to distinguish between
(base) Lethe and the (naturally gentle) gallants, although speech differences
quite clearly do separate the humble Mother Gruel from her son. Lethe has
acquired the language as well as the clothes of a London gallant. Furthermore,
like the Country Wench, Lethe has remade himself as a marketable commodity.
He has parleyed his bought status as gallant into a lucrative position as
courtier, gaining "Acquaintance, dear society, suits and things" (1.1.176),
influence, wealth and an opportunity to marry Susan Quomodo for her money.
- The Country Wench and Lethe are relatively simple examples of commodified
refashioning. In a dramatic context in which innate qualities of birth find
ways to assert themselves, these two characters' refashionings might be considered
merely disguise or play-acting. Leinwand argues that "The comic spirit informing
city comedy does not despair over a world of endlessly shifting roles that
are nothing but roles; it locates a secure self in the gentleman, the sponsor
of prevailing ideologies" (The City Staged 91). But this is not the
case, at least not for Michaelmas Term. The play's world is pure theatre,
in which to be is to be seen, even for the finest. Easy provides the play's
most complex and powerful example of this irreplaceability of appearance.
Having learned that naturally gentle birth is not enough in London, he soon
discovers it threatening to become nothing at all. Under Shortyard's tutelage,
Easy establishes himself as a gallant through consumption; shortly, however,
"the continuing of this gentleman's credit in town" (2.3.155-156) brings Easy
into debt and leads him to alienate that which established his natural gentle
birth, his land. This, of course, has been Quomodo's and Shortyard's plot
all along. Significantly, Easy's father is dead (1.1.43) and his mother completely
absent from the play. Shortyard states that he and Easy are "man and wife"
(2.3.152), but Shortyard is more Easy's parent or creator than his spouse.
"Methinks I have no being without his ["Blastfield"'s] company" (3.2.6), Easy
comments, and Shortyard has ensured that Easy's new "being," his "credit"
as a gentleman, is a product for which he will pay dearly and from which Quomodo
will profit. Shortyard creates Easy as a London gentleman, and Easy's rebirth,
entirely a function of London's economy of accumulation and consumption, threatens
to supplant and even eradicate his natural parentage. After Quomodo has pulled
together the last strands of the plot to cheat Easy of his land, Shortyard
taunts Easy with his rootlessness: "I should seek my fortunes far enough,
if I were you, and neither return to Essex to be a shame to my predecessors,
nor remain about London to be a mock to my successors" (4.1.14-17).
- Like Witgood in A Trick to Catch the Old One Easy regains his land,
but not because he has any natural right to it and not through the exercise
of qualities inherent in his natural birth. Easy finally succeeds because
he behaves as the typical amoral gallant into which he has been fashioned,
seizing and exploiting the opportunities that present themselves. In short,
he beats Quomodo at his own game and merely reinforces the power of that game
as arbiter of destiny and identity. When Witgood declaims "Thou soul of my
estate, I kiss thee, /I miss life's comfort when I miss thee" (4.2.88-89),
he kisses the mortgage not his lands; likewise, Easy's redemption is mediated
by contracts:
Here's good deeds and bad deeds, the writings that keep my
Lands to me, and the bonds that gave it away from me.
These, my good deeds, shall to more safety turn,
And these, my bad, have their deserts and burn. (5.1.52-55).
Witgood and Easy regain their birthright in commodified form, as extensions
of London's exchange economy and through the manipulation of that economy's
dynamics.
- Michaelmas Term's London, then, is a microcosm of Stubbes' Ailgna.
Its ontological preposterousness, like Ailgna's, reconfigures modes of knowing
and their intersections with power. Knowing becomes a form of accounting,
an apprehension not of the being of a person or thing (in the play persons
and things are interchangeable) but of how they are "accompted," to borrow
Thomas Smith's term. This is most obviously the case in an exterior sense,
in the sense of knowing or not knowing others by their exteriors. But interior
knowledge, self-knowledge, is also reconfigured. The commonplace Renaissance
injunction, "nosce teipsum," implies a distinction between the social
self and a private, personal remainder, Hamlet's "that within which passeth
show" (Hamlet 1.2.85), but in Michaelmas Term nothing passes
show. Knowing as accounting dissolves the division between interior and exterior,
and self-knowledge becomes merely a reflexive form of the social account others
take of the self. Thus, the Country Wench's refashioning has the same effect
on her knowledge of herself as it does on others', specifically her father's,
knowledge of her: "How can he [her father] know me when I scarce know myself?"
(3.1.31-2).
- Even such apparently interior dimensions of the self as memory are flattened
into the surface of commodified appearances. As Lethe's name implies, a fashioned
memory is as essential an accessory of his social self as a fashionable physical
appearance. He comments that
I have received of many, gifts o'er night
Whom I have forgot ere morning; meeting the men,
I wished 'em to remember me again;
They do so, then if I forget again
I know what helped before, that will help then.
This is my course, for memory I have been told
Twenty preserves, the best I find is gold.
Ay, truly! Are you not knights yet, gentlemen?. (1.1.181-188)
Memory, like cloth, can be bought and sold. Its integration into Jacobean
London's exchange economy creates a new commodity compounded of knowledge
and power: recognition, the knowledge or taking into account of oneself by
a powerful social other. Moreover, as the last line of the above quotation
suggests, the commodification of memory extends beyond the individual social
self. Thomas Smith acidly remarks that those who purchased knighthoods and
other honours also purchased fabricated but authorized genealogies from the
College of Heralds: to one who "will bear the port, charge and countenance
of a gentleman" (27), "a king of Heraulds shal also give him for mony, armes
newly made and invented, the title thereof shall pretende to have been found
by the said Herauld in perusing and viewing of olde registers" (28). [14]
The play provides one example of this in Quomodo, who desires not only to
reconfigure the future but also to rewrite the past: at his funeral is a "herald
richly hired to lend him arms/ Feigned from his ancestors" (5.3.6-7). Time,
like the social self, collapses into the now of commodified appearances; 'history,'
like 'birth,' becomes a simulacrum, a fashionable and refashionable, sellable
and resellable product of the present. [15] "Had I not
the better memory,/ 'Twould be a wonder I should know myself" (1.1.178-179),
Lethe states, but in fact only the possibility of the dispersal of Lethe's
memory, his ability to sell pieces of it, allows him to buy the "better memory"
by which he knows himself as Master Andrew Lethe. In London's market, one
knows oneself by the birth and memories one buys and sells.
- Much of the play's humour is generated by Lethe's only partially successful
attempts to forget completely his natural birth--or, more precisely, to have
others forget his natural birth--and to know himself by his better memory.
The public humiliation that Lethe suffers at the play's end, as his base birth
is announced in court, hovers pigeon-like over all of Lethe's strenuous efforts
of self-fashioning, threatening to "drop my staining birth upon my raiment"
(1.1.277) at any moment. It may seem that this strain of humour, taken with
the play's end, ultimately affirms birth as a natural category, at least in
Lethe's case. Several aspects of the play's conclusion, though, mitigate against
this unproblematic interpretation. Just as Easy does not regain his lands
because he is naturally gentle, so too Lethe's parentage is exposed not through
any workings of his birth itself. Lethe's actions throughout the play are
no more (and no less) base and churlish than Rearage's and Salewood's. Lethe
is exposed because Rearage finds it profitable to do so. Rearage writes a
letter in which "Andrew Lethe is well whipped" (3.5.3) and entertains the
Country Wench's father's "device" (4.3.43) to have Lethe and the Country Wench
arrested on the morning of Lethe's planned wedding to Susan not out of any
sense of honour or moral duty (Rearage is hardly in a position to serve as
a mouthpiece for moral sentiments) but out of purely economic motivation:
with Lethe out of the way, he is free to marry Susan for her money. Watching
as Lethe is "taken with his Harlot" (stage directions to 5.2), Susan exclaims
to Rearage that "now the difference appears too plain/ Betwixt a base slave
and a true gentleman" (5.3.9-10). The emphasis here should be on "appears,"
for Rearage, the play’s witty playwright figure, has scripted the whole event,
casting Susan as the audience, himself as satiric presenter and moral scourge,
and Lethe as the vicious humours character in need of purging. The script
provides Susan with only a partial perspective, one that allows Rearage to
construct a difference between himself and Lethe far more decisive than the
play itself has constructed for its audience, which knows that there is little
to differentiate the two companions in dicing, feasting and whoring (Rearage
himself aggressively courts the Country Wench earlier in the play.) Taking
no chances, Rearage uses force--the officers--to stage, for Susan's benefit
but primarily his own, the first scene of the concluding judical spectacle
that puts a halt to Lethe's performance of the gentleman and compels him to
play another, equally contrived role: "the "villain" (5.3.153). The play's
end reveals not that natural birth is inescapable but that self-fashioning
is not entirely within the individual's control.
- The concluding court scene's public proclamation of Lethe's parentage continues
the judicial drama begun by Rearage. The scene dramatizes not the Stubbesian
fantasy of authority effectively intervening in the world of appearances and
restoring it to an order guaranteed by birth’s self-evident social essentiality
but rather authority's failure to transcend appearances even as it gives them
a kind of fixity through the exercise of power. Throughout the play Mother
Gruel has failed to recognize her son, and even when Lethe to avoid corporal
punishment appeals to her as his mother, she replies "Call'st me mother? Out,/
I defy thee, slave" (5.3.144-145). Only through the intervention of the judge
are Lethe and Mother Gruel restored to their natural mother-son relationship:
"Wilt thou believe me, woman?" (5.3.152), the Judge asks; after Mother Gruel's
assent, the judge commands her to "know him for a villain; 'tis thy son" (5.3.153).
The judge offers no reasons why Mother Gruel should believe him, and the audience
similarly does not know how, within the fictional world of the play, this
judge came about his knowledge of both Andrew Lethe's humble origins and the
relationship between Lethe and the old woman standing somewhere on the peripheries
of the stage. Such knowledge in itself is irrelevant in Michaelmas Term's
world of theatre; only the possibilities and limits of performance matter.
The judge's intervention is effected entirely through the authority of his
voice, the speaking of power, through which he has fashioned for Lethe a birth
and identity that Lethe is now powerless to deny. The play's ending shows
birth to be not a stable category with a real, 'natural' referent but a moulding
of appearances and a site of social and economic contestation.
