Paola Pugliatti. Beggary and Theatre
in Early Modern England. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003. 233pp. ISBN
0 7546 0344 X.
Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare's
Works: Volume 1, the Tragedies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 491pp. ISBN
0 631 22632 X.
Chris Fitter
Rutgers University at Camden
fitter@camden.rutgers.edu
Fitter, Chris. "Review of Paola Pugliatti.
Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England, and Richard Dutton
and Jean E. Howard, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: Volume
1, the Tragedies." Early Modern Literary Studies 12.2
(September, 2006) 16.1-11 <URL:http://purl.oclc.org/emls/12-2/revpugli.htm>.
- Around 1512, Erasmus and John Colet visited the shrine of Thomas
Becket at Canterbury. Horrified by the vast accumulation of treasure
on display, they suggested that it should all be sold to feed the poor.
But encountering, just outside the town, a beggar who offered them St
Thomas's shoe to be kissed, they responded with equal ire: "Do these
fools expect us to kiss the shoe of every good man who ever lived? Why
not bring us their spittle or their dung to be kissed?" (Johnson 267).
Such ambivalence typified Tudor responses to poverty, since even reform-minded
leaders, denouncing the social system, nonetheless blamed the victim,
usually construing individual vagrants primarily as duplicitous idlers.
(Thomas More was a rare exception.) Self-contradictory contempt of poverty
is familiar enough, of course, in the USA, where national self-celebration
as the noble home of refugees has for centuries gone hand in hand with
hostility to actual immigrants.
- Historical attitudes to pauperism are highly important for students
of early modern drama, not only because Shakespeare and Dekker, among
others, prominently portrayed vagrants and masterless men, but because
actors per se were classified with vagabonds in Tudor statutes. Players,
jibed antitheatricalist John Greene, "like brave and noble beggars .
. . stand to take money of every one that comes to see them loyter and
play" (55). "Are they not taken by the Lawes of the Realme, for roages
and vacaboundes?" jeered Puritan Philip Stubbes in 1583 (fol. 92) .
In 1996 William Carroll surveyed Tudor constructions of indigence in
Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare
(Cornell), a substantial work followed in 2001 by Linda Woodbridge with
Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (University
of Illinois). Paola Pugliatti has now expanded our understanding with
Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England. All three embed
literary representations in sixteenth-century economic and legislative
contexts, and all venture brief engagement of Shakespeare in their light.
- Medieval attitudes, schooled by the Church Fathers, had favoured
unconditional almsgiving to paupers. In the early Middle Ages it had
been the Church's mission to help the poor, and a third or a fourth
part of Church income was to be allocated to them on a regular basis.
Fat King detailed the sharply contrastive Tudor vision of polluting,
thieving hordes of work-shy rabble, violent and godless, whom penal
legislation needed to suppress. For as Karl Marx wrote of capitalism's
transmutation of peasantry into proletariat, in "the historical movement
which changes the producers into workers . . . these new freedmen became
sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own
means of production, and of all the guarantees afforded by the old feudal
arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written
in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." Tudor statutes
-- in an economy of widespread illegal enclosures, engrossment, depopulated
villages, soaring unemployment, and hyper-inflation -- criminalized
per se wandering commoners without work (even if seasonal migrants
in search of employment), and decreed for them branding and ear-boring,
bloody floggings across country to houses of correction, and even (in
two statutes) condemnation to slavery. Fat King further surveyed
contemporary English stereotypes of the vagrant, construed either as
hardened professional trickster, deploying virtuoso acting in the mere
role-playing of suffering, hunger and disease, or as merry beggar, whistling
through pastoral landscapes of daffodils and doxies, in a soft primitivist
fantasy of permanent escape from all work and responsibility. Both versions
assumed, like statutes and proclamations, that itinerant destitution
was a lifestyle choice, elected by loafers. Rogue literature, with its
gallery of cheerily cunning parasites, is thus found widely in works
such as Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566; rpt. 1573
and 1592) and in later cony-catching pamphlets, as well as drama, from
the 1590s. "Rarely has any culture fashioned so wily and powerful an
enemy out of such degraded and pathetic materials", Carroll comments
(47).
- Woodbridge tackled at book-length the question of why the Tudors
so thoroughly demonized 'vagabonds', and fantasized their organization
into fraternities of criminal specialization, replete with their own
jargon, terrorizing the countryside, and threatening the very state:
a picture that modern historians have proven from court records to have
been wholly false. I would suggest, in general Freudian terms, that
the obsession was literally a national hysteria, deriving its obsessiveness,
intensity and restless creative energy from guilt over the desanctification
of poverty, and the brutality dealt the victims of destitution on the
pretense of their villainy. Even the sadistic Harman makes occasional
ritual profession of almsgiving to the deserving poor. Woodbridge, however,
supplies an ingenious variety of explanations on the discursive level.
Humanism's emphasis on educational self-improvement and civic responsibility
precluded substantial empathy with the down and out. The total dependency
of beggars on the benevolence of givers parodied the Protestant theology
of unearned grace. The emergent Tudor ethos of family values, idealizing
the happy home and domestic stability, inevitably constructed vagrancy
as its Other. National volatility in matters of religion projected onto
vagrant wanderings the horror of directionlessness, and traumatic loss
of familiar landmarks. England's alarming involvement in wars in many
countries stimulated Tudor fears of boundary violation, and thus phobias
of pollution, which in turn intensified fear of vagrants as bearers
of disease. Above all, Reformation anti-clericalism associated itinerant
begging with the Catholic mendicant orders, long mocked in medieval
folk tales; and indeed, following a suggestion from Stephen Greenblatt,
Woodbridge argues that rogue literature, in its high spirits and perverse
ambivalence towards underclass cunning, derives from the genre of the
jestbook, beloved even of Humanists. "The period's preoccupation with
vagrancy was overdetermined in the extreme" concludes Woodbridge: "they
were everybody's bogeymen" (175).
- Paola Pugliatti's study of Tudor attitudes to beggary thus enters
a scholarly field already ably studied; yet in examining the beggar/actor
nexus, and in widening the focus to establish regular European, particularly
Italian, comparisons, she makes a genuine contribution. Correcting,
for example, the standard view that in English legislation, players
were first classed with vagabonds in the proclamation of 1545 (or even
the statute of 1572), Pugliatti points out (like Marx before her) that
such statutory conflation dates in fact to Edward I in 1284, and also
notes it recurring in 1401 and 1534. In each case, with idlers and vagrants
were listed bards and rhymers (42). Although Pugliatti does not suggest
this, it would appear that in each case these anti-bardic initiatives
followed in the wake of spectacular monarchic self-aggrandizement -
the annexation of Wales, cold-blooded murder of Richard II (and perhaps
Chaucer with him), and dissolution of the monasteries - so that the
statutes seem essentially projects of censorship, suppressing public
performances of dissidence. Precisely such cause and effect seems at
work in the climactic Tudor expansions of royal prerogative, with their
correlative abolition of strolling players and amateur theatre for replacement
by a censored and centrally controlled production of drama. 'Poor Laws',
however, directed at suppressing vagrancy and relieving paupers, constitute
a quite different legislative stream, Pugliatti argues; so that the
Henrician and Elizabethan laws regularly cited by literary critics,
which classify players with beggars and also provide for poor relief,
are notable only for converging these normally separate concerns. England's
statutes were, however, Pugliatti adds, "probably the most aggressive
and virulent" in Europe (18).
- The middle chapters of Beggary and Theatre chronicle the thematic
linkages made by contemporaries between actors and vagrants: the culpabilities
of idleness, self-disguise and medico-moral pollution. These connections
all were noted by Carroll and Woodbridge, but Pugliatti documents them
more extensively. The charge of idleness, she adds, may owe something
to the monastic concept of acedia, which associated sloth with
chattering, desire for roaming, and impatience with religious discipline:
a nexus echoed in the Homily against Idleness of 1563. Self-disguise,
of course, struck against God's providential establishment of identity,
and was condemned by the Bible, the Church Fathers, and, repeatedly,
by Tudor antitheatrical polemic. Players and beggars both spread disease
-- as London's City Fathers protested -- and both groups were themselves
construed as human parasites, living off the money, and indeed the simulated
behaviour, of others. Itinerance itself, of course, the condition of
sinful abandonment of hereditary 'place', vividly figured for satisfying
excoriation the numerous cultural transgressions against traditional
decency of early modern society.
- Pugliatti's study, in addition to welcome consolidation of familiar,
but normally fleeting, scholarly perceptions on the associations of
beggary and theatre, offers fresh generic thinking on rogue literature.
She introduces to English-language scholarship the discovery that the
grandfather text of rogue literature is not, as often stated, the German
Liber Vagatorum of 1509, but may be Teseo Pini's Speculum Cerretanorum
of the 1480s, whose structure was widely reproduced in the Liber and
thence in English and German rogue books. That the Speculum enjoyed,
however, very limited circulation only confirms, I think, the thesis
of Linda Woodbridge (whose book appeared too late for Pugliatti to read)
that rogue writings were essentially the sprawling, promiscuous progeny
of medieval jestbooks. Pugliatti also distinguishes sensibly between
three generic forms: the early sixteenth-century rogue literature (Awdeley
and Harman), with its rural settings and underclass villains; the later
cony-catching works, written mainly by professional writers, set in
urban locations, and featuring well-apparelled tricksters of uncertain
class; and the picaresque novel, mostly French and Spanish in provenance,
which, by reshaping narratives of errancy into spicy autobiographic
form, shook off the dour moralization of rogue literature.
- Beggary and Theatre also offers rewarding digressions into
related topics. Addressing the issue of whether Protestant countries,
with their trumpeted work ethic, were harsher on vagrancy than were
Catholics, its pan-European investigation concludes that there was little
difference. Statutes on compulsory wage labour are found in France and
England as early as the fourteenth century, in the wake of the Black
Death; and penal legislation criminalizing beggars as disorderly, and
mandating low-paid forced work, are common to Catholic and Protestant
countries alike in the sixteenth century. Pugliatti concludes that in
the historiographic debate between sociology's founding fathers, Marx
and Weber, as to whether economic conditions or human beliefs constitute
the primary long-term historical determinant of social history, the
former thinker is vindicated: "provisions for the poor and the repressive
and compulsive measures which accompanied them were a matter of economic
policy long before becoming a matter of Protestant ethics" (21). Another
discussion questions the recent critical current that argues, on the
basis of antitheatrical polemic, that cross-dressing in early modern
theatre sought to capitalize on widespread homoerotic proclivities,
stimulating 'sodomitical' frisson and subversively 'effeminating' males.
Pugliatti answers that antitheatricalism's accusations here indicate
not Tudor pleasure in homosexuality but merely wider anxiety about pernicious
self-disguisings.
- Pugliatti's final chapters engage in literary critical readings,
mainly of Harman, Dekker and Greene. To my mind these are the least
successful portions of this valuable, meditative and erudite work, since
they draw, often ponderously, upon bodies of theory (Bakhtin, Roman
Jacobson, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette and others) to make pedestrian
points needless of theoretic foundation. The one arresting suggestion
is that in Alexander Iden, who slays Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI,
Shakespeare is presenting that nemesis to vagrancy and celebrated rogue
litterateur, Thomas Harman. Both Harman and Iden claim to be happy on
a modest income, and to give to the poor, and each represents "the just
man who reestablishes order", thinks Pugliatti (152). Yet Shakespeare
is at pains to show us that Cade's murder is followed in fact by the
dwarfing outbreak of aristocratic mayhem; and no one would argue that
Harman's works or alleged actions stemmed the rising tides of miserable,
tormented vagrants. Further, Shakespeare's depiction of Cade versus
Iden looks weighted to the former's advantage: Iden encircles funny,
solitary, starving Cade with five henchmen, and his own physical bulk
so towers over the little man that the effect of cruelty seems inescapable,
even before he concludes the scene by plunging his sword repeatedly
into the small man's corpse.
- Curiously, although Pugliatti, Woodbridge and Carroll note the frequent
allegation that vagrants spread sedition - a charge laid, inter alia,
at the door of drama - none of them thinks to provide this theme with
the substantial contextualization they accord the other motifs. No doubt
this is partly because historical evidence suggests the fear to be incorrect:
the destitute were too sick, exhausted, solitary and desperate, not
to mention too firmly outcast, to engage in political analysis and agitation.
But vagrants were not merry pastoral wanderers either, and yet that
perspective is lovingly documented. And the historical reality of a
supine vagrancy makes all the more remarkable England's obsessive, lurid
fantasy that starving tramps were trouble-making commies. It is perhaps
the inhibiting tradition of Cold War anticommunism that has rendered
modern literary criticism so averse to pursuing systematically the subversive
egalitarian thematic that haunts Tudor literature and popular consciousness,
from Utopia to Jack Strawe, and from Humanist treatises
on poverty to justifications of the gentlemanly savagery following Kett's
Rebellion. Allied to this institutionalized aversiveness is the relative
rarity of criticism relating Shakespeare to poverty and its discontents,
and connecting his dramas to voices heard from below. For every book
discussing Shakespeare - even briefly, like the three discussed above
- in the context of underclass conditions, there are scores relating
him instead to voices from above: the court, the aristocracy, the formal
history of ideas (Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Augustine, Descartes,
Montaigne, etc), or to the intertextuality of canonical literature.
It is symptomatic that none of the three authors discussed in this review,
despite occasional quotations of Robert Crowley, appear to know of the
existence and philosophy of the powerful mid-sixteenth century movement
of the Commonwealth Men; nor do any of them acknowledge the underground
peasant tradition, running from at least 1381 through to the Levellers
and Diggers, of skeptical egalitarianism. Tudor men of property were
not wholly fantasizing when they beheld in the tattered grimness of
the ultra-poor the spectre of radical distributivist notions.
- The same political asymmetry is found, perhaps inevitably, in Howard
and Dutton's Companion to Shakespeare's Works: the Tragedies,
whose essays conspicuously lack concrete engagement of the politically
turbulent levels of economic suffering of the lower classes in the 1590s
and early Jacobean period. Naomi Conn Liebler on 'The City in Romeo
and Juliet', for instance, conceives Shakespeare's critique of urban
crisis in the merely aristocratic terms of lenient prince and feuding
ruling families: but what of the class struggle presented by the drama,
in the form of angry commoners seeking to arrest haughty Montagues and
Capulets, or of the juxtaposition of banqueting patricians to starving
apothecary: a virtual diagram of inequity deeply embedded in the great
hunger of 1594-97? Likewise, Jyotsna Singh's essay on 'The politics
of empathy in Anthony and Cleopatra' seeks "a sustained class
analysis of the tragic experience of the play"(428), exhibiting the
Brechtian alienations of audience sympathy from the militarily incompetent
and romantically self-aggrandizing tragic rulers, produced by the words
and victimization of a host of servants and subalterns. Yet Singh at
no points connects this design to lower-class sufferings due to years
of warfare: catastrophically failed expeditions, military impressment,
officer-footsoldier hostility, troop desertions, etc. These essays,
nonetheless, are refreshingly free of both the old Christian pietism
and the new obscurantism, and, largely comprising authoritative summations
of traditional and current thinking in the field, they offer perhaps
the best single-volume introduction to the subject available. There
are notably illuminating essays by David Scott Kastan on the idea of
tragedy, by Rebecca Bushnell on sixteenth-century meanings of 'liberty',
'tyranny' and 'the commons' floated in Julius Caesar, and by
Michael Neill on professions of friendship in Hamlet. Kiernan
Ryan's essay on the mysterious sense of momentous otherness in King
Lear, of "implications for which no adequate language is yet available"
(386), is a haunting instance of his call for a criticism simultaneously
historicist, and cognizant that Shakespeare, humanely repelled by both
feudal and capitalist inhumanity, is "way out ahead of us, waiting for
us to catch up" (390).
Works Cited
- Awdeley, John. The Fraternitie of Vacabondes. 1561.
- Carroll, William. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of
Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.
- Greene, John. A Refutation of the Apology for Actors.
1615.
- Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980.
- Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. 1583.
- Woodbridge, Linda. Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance
Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.
