Introduction: The Theater and Theory
In July of 1597 the Lord Mayor of London and the Aldermen sent an official letter to the Privy Council requesting the closure of "stage-plays" on the grounds that they contain
nothing but profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices, and scurrilous behaviours, which are so set forth as that they move wholly to imitation and not to the avoiding of those faults and vices which they represent. Among other inconveniences it is not the least that they give opportunity to the refuse sort of evil-disposed and ungodly people that are within and about this City to assemble themselves and to make their matches for all their lewd and ungodly practices. (Evens 5)
In short, the Mayor complains that plays provide the opportunity for "lewd" behavior and encourage "imitation" rather than avoidance of vice. The use of the word "imitation" has significant import: it implies both to ‘duplicate’ some behavior and to act ‘falsely’, to act in a manner other than one is. In Elizabethan and Jacobean society, and especially in relation to discussions of the theater, this second meaning is the more consequential. For in a society based upon social status and positions, on maintaining "rank" and "degree," people acting other than their "natural state" upsets the "normal" and divinely ordained order of the universe. It causes disorder in the official view of the world. Furthermore, the letter also continues on to elaborate upon the four main "inconveniences" that "stage-plays about the city of London" promote: corrupting youth in "unchaste matters"; providing meeting places for "idle and dangerous persons"; drawing people away from "Christian exercises"; and spreading the plague. In other words, the "proper" citizens of London were concerned that the theater would infect the city with all manner of unwanted and unlicensed behavior.
One of the more famous voices against the theater was that of Philip Stubbes, a Puritan who, like the Mayor and Aldermen, thought that the audience would learn to "play the hypocrite…to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives…to rebel against princes, to commit treasons" and to "contemn God and all his laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell" by visiting the theater (Anatomie of Abuses; Blakemore 12). Once again, the fear of imitation or of appearing differently than one really is—to "play the hypocrite"—is key to Stubbes’ attack against the theater. According to Stubbes, the theater, by its very nature, disrupts the social categories whereby identity is defined and maintained. Obviously, as many critics have shown, the theater threatened to erase or blur gender and class distinctions by its practice of using (common) boys and men to play women and kings; Stubbes also points out, however, that in portraying wicked deeds, the theater thus offers an immoral example for the audience to emulate. By ignoring the "natural" order—including gender and class status and moral behavior—the audience thus commits treason against "God and all his laws." Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, in other words, was attacked for being morally and politically subversive.
The theater, of course, had its proponents as well as its critics. Thomas Nashe, in Pierce Penilesse (1592), suggests that the purpose of the theater is to contain "mutinies at home"; by throwing the otherwise idle citizens "bones to gnaw upon," the state will not be troubled by "intermeddl[ers]" (Evens 13). The stage, in other words, is a necessary diversion to keep people from worse mischief, such as "felony or treason" (Evens 15). Additionally, Nashe speaks directly in opposition to the claim that theaters teach vice: "no play they have encourageth any man to tumults or rebellion, but lays before such the halter and the gallows" (14). Thus, while Stubbes and his like condemn the theater and its content for spreading corruption and immorality, Nashe sees the stage as "the sour pills of reprehension, wrapped in sweet words" (14). Eventually, of course, pressure on the Privy Council from various directions (including, among other reasons, the Puritans, another outbreak of the plague, a crop failure and prolonged famine) resulted in the closing of the playhouses in 1642 and the debate, much more complex and protracted than outlined here, ceased. In this essay, however, I am interested in both how the debate centers around—without actually acknowledging—the power of the stage (the power of spectacle, of representation to alter people’s behavior) and also in how ‘stage-plays’ responded to the world around them. Ultimately, Nashe and Stubbes and their contemporaries share a fundamental concern about the state of their society and the stage’s relationship to current social conditions.
Significantly, at the same time as the debate raged over the sanctity and position of the theater within society, on the stage itself a popular genre of plays developed that dealt predominately with the issues and conflicts arising from life in an increasingly commercialized London. These plays, known as Jacobean city comedy, began as satiric remarks upon the lack of moral behavior and, towards the later period of city comedy’s relatively short existence (c. 1600-1624), the hypocritical nature of capitalist society. City comedy, thus, dramatizes the effect to which changing economic conditions disrupt the social relations: as peoples’ relationship to the material world changed, the ways they thought about themselves, their idea of subjectivity, also changed. For as the social technologies, to use Michel Foucault’s terminology, and discursive practices by which ideas of identity had previously been constructed no longer met the needs/values of the current conditions, Jacobean society faced an ‘identity crisis’ in the broadest sense of the term. In this project I will be particularly concerned with the ways in which city comedy dramatizes this conflict, and resulting anxiety, in order to ‘recontain’ the body, to rebuild (or even just satirize) people’s morality and identity. Most directly, I am interested in the ways in which technologies of gender, class, and sexuality are, to cite Foucault again, "engraved" upon the body, the ways in which bodies are "produced" to meet the standards for "proper" behavior in the current social order.
City comedies such as The Honest Whore I and the Dutch Courtesan specifically deal with teaching citizens proper behavior: sexuality and the place of desire occupies Marston’s play while the subplot in Dekker’s is concerned with teaching the spineless and affable Candido to be a proper husband and man. These plays, then, take part in the "production" of bodies, bodies that are educated to a certain "habitus" or orientation—either proper sexual choice or masculine behavior: in both instances, what is at stake is the perceived and real disruption of masculine authority, a disruption stemming from changes in both economic and social conditions. Thus, in the first chapter of this project, I look at the early indications of capitalism’s effects on material and social thought, as played out in Merchant of Venice, arguing that as an example of a pre-city comedy, Shylock’s exclusion can be read as an anxious movement stemming from the conflict between city and country life. Then I move to later city comedies where the focus turns more and more towards a synecdoche between economic and sexual activity, and the "utopian vision" of reconcilement between capitalism and pastoral, aristocratic life is forgotten.
Thus, whereas Merchant reflects a society anxious about nascent capitalism and the desire for the continued stability of pastoral life, conversely, Chaste Maid attempts no such reconciliation and offers no such romantic ending. As Susan Wells states, Jacobean city comedies such as Chaste Maid dramatize the conflict between the "traditional ideology" of communal, "festal" markets and the ideology of the new ‘city’: "traditional ideology was refashioned dramatically; it was ‘let out at the seams’ to accommodate the ever-shifting relations of a market controlled by the demands of accumulation" (49). Thus, I end the project with a discussion of Chaste Maid and Honest Whore, arguing that the complete satirization of the "flesh trade" and Middleton’s use of the highly conventional (empty) comedy conclusion suggests a play about the limits of capitalist society. In other words, with the absolute ‘deterritorialization’ of social codes and morality nobody bothers or believes in acting according to some external, essential quality of "goodness" and, instead, tries to get rich. However, both Chaste Maid and Honest Whore participate in the ideology of their time—they are not simply "mere entertainment" as Marston claims in The Dutch Courtesan and, in fact, this claim is ideology at work. By ideology I mean not some ‘false’ veil that hides an underlying truth but, instead, the very thing which allows us to experience ‘reality’. In Jean Howard’s formulation, ideology "sutures" social reality together; it "places subjects into their proper places in the social order when its workings are invisible to those subjects, when, for example, ideology passes as common sense, objective truths, or ‘mere entertainment’" (Stage and Social Struggle 49). Ideology, like Foucault’s notion of discourse, thus defines and limits what is admissible or possible and what is impossible; it provides subjects with the rules for what can be talked and thought about. Thus, while city comedies might expose some ideologies, they also are defined by others. Middleton and Marston, for instance, can critique the degree to which the "market of accumulation" has interpolated their society by showing whores on stage at the same time that they are informed by the "social technologies" or the materialized ideologies that locate the "ills" of their society in women.
Arguably it is the specific position of the stage in Elizabethan-Jacobean society—one of ambiguity and contradiction—that allows for these playwrights to dramatize the contradictions of their society. The literal and symbolic place of the theater allows for a zone of greater leeway or freedom from constraint in representing the contradictions, conflicts, hopes, and anxieties of Jacobean culture. In his study The Place of the Stage, Steven Mullaney argues that the Liberties—the social and material space existing beyond the walls of London city proper and where the theaters were located—served as a "transitional zone" or "a culturally maintained domain of ideological ambivalence and contradiction, where established authority reached and manifested, in spectacular form, the limits of its power to control or contain what exceeded it" (ix). The drama thus performed on the Elizabethan and, I would add, Jacobean stage, was firmly situated within that space of "ideological ambivalence and contradiction," a marginal space which allowed for the theater’s privileged ability to stage the "incontinent hopes and fears" of its society.
Precisely, then, because of its vantage point outside the walls of the city, on the "threshold" or "limen" of society, Elizabethan-Jacobean drama is better able to show those ideological fissures which emerge and exist wherever the culture experiences change. For as the conditions of society shift, the ideas about ‘reality’—that naturalized ideology which predisposes and organizes our relation to the world—no longer hold true. And city comedy works within that liminal zone the theater provides, the zone where the limit of authority is felt, where the ‘chinks’ in the fabric of society are most visible: in other words, where the "horizons of community" are "made visible" (Mullaney 22). The power of the theater, then, lies in its marginal position, its ‘liminality’, to the city (and ideology) proper.
Returning to the Mayor’s letter again, the theater is seen as subversive, politically and socially, because it provides a chance for the "ungodly people" from "about the city" (the Liberties) to mingle with the proper citizens. The official ideology or discourse of the city, then, is threatened by the "ambivalent zones of transition between one realm of authority and another" (Mullaney 21)—including, as Mullaney shows, the transitional zones between the living and the dead, the zone beyond the city walls to which lepers were (ritually) banished. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the "grotesque body" is similarly concerned with the ambivalent or uncontained. Bakhtin’s grotesque body stems from the tradition of carnival, that which escapes the official ideology and life of the dominant culture and refuses to "acknowledge any distinction between actor and spectators" (Rabelais and His World 7). Grounded in the physical, material life, carnival accepts—indeed celebrates—the unfinished, the ambiguous body and manifests itself through the collective expression of the people as an all-encompassing and distinction-erasing spectacle.
Bakhtin’s work on theater as the popular expression of the people, often undermining ‘official’ authority, however, no longer serves to explain Jacobean drama—and especially city comedy—for, by this time, the stage is a formalized "spectacle," a money-making enterprise, not an expression of the folk culture. Despite its marginal, liminal status city comedy is a commodity, written for an audience’s entertainment and thus greatly dependent upon the audience’s taste and desires for success: as one of Dekker’s characters says, "O the pollicy of women, and Tradesmen; theile bite at anything" (Westward Ho; I.i.170). And in his Gull’s Hornbook, Dekker devotes one chapter to satirical advice on how a gallant should behave at the theater: "By sitting on the stage you have signed patent to engross the whole commodity of censure; may lawfully presume to be a girder; and stand helm to steer the passage of scenes" (99). In fact, in the city comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), Beaumont explicitly capitalizes on the position of playwrights as caterers to a paying audience: the citizen gets up on stage and rewrites the play. Taken together with Dekker’s comment that "the theatre is your poets’ Royal Exchange" and "their Muses" are "now turned to merchants" (A Gull’s Hornbook 98), these plays reveal one of the central concerns of Jacobean city comedy: namely, the "practical social issues" arising from an increasingly urbanized and commercial life.
Obviously, economic conditions did not change overnight, producing in response an overwhelming flood of the "complaint genre" or plays satirically (conservatively) addressing moral lack in society. But Jacobean society was more commercialized than previously and its plays reveal what was of interest—or specifically, the desires and anxieties—for the citizens of London. Thus, I shall focus on how the theater addresses the anxiety of capitalism, the form that anxiety takes—or, rather, the ways in which anxiety is dramatized and either recontained or exploited (as, for example, in The Merchant of Venice and The Chaste Maid of Cheapside respectively). In this sense I am employing Alan Sinfield’s conception of "faultlines," or the sites of struggle between subversive and conservative forces; this (materialist) method of reading provides a particularly useful approach to city comedy since it enables me to explore the ideologies at work to patch up social reality.
Jacobean city comedy predominantly deals with the city (as opposed to the country) and city life—including problems in gender, class, and sexual relations. In particular, I’m interested in Jacobean city comedy precisely because it is about issues of everyday life—issues and anxieties made possible by capitalist conditions; thus, they are early modern concerns, for city comedy dramatizes the contradictions and anxieties and hopes of a culture in flux. My discussion of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice argues that, read through the lens of a city comedy, the play provides an example of the fears of early capitalism. Shylock represents the "evil" of capitalist society and Portia the traditional, pastoral system threatened by capitalism (both historically and within the play). Shylock’s marginalization and Portia’s marriage to Bassanio (the good merchant) by the end of the play thus works to restore the (illusion of) stability and continued pre-capitalist life.
In speaking of anxiety in Merchant, an anxiety produced by the rise of capitalism and, therefore, the destablization of traditional social systems, I employ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of "territorialization." This theory provides an explanation for the process of cultural "de-coding" or the destabilizing of the official vision of the world, a process that the citizens of Venice work to suppress. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they argue that the "prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated" (33). This coding of the ‘flows of desires’ structures society for it determines acceptable behaviors. Thus, Deleuze views society as a "body" of codifying and codified desires, or, in other words, through the process of "territorializing" (coding) flows of desire, our vision of reality emerges for society exists as an arrangement of shared codes. For instance, then, Antonio and Bassanio’s use of Christian rhetoric—the Jew should have "mercy"—depends upon a shared or internalized view of mercy as an essential, universal quality. Likewise, the gendered discourse in which women are seen as avid economic and sexual "consumers" is another shared assumption—one that has lasted to the current day even, as evinced in the generally held view that all women "love to shop."
However, at the same time as these codes are perpetuated in order to support the status quo, other forces escape and resist containment. Moreover, capitalism is a massive "decoding" force; it deliberately "unleashes" flows of desire for "capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production…and the decoded flows of labor" (Deleuze 33). Capitalism thus mobilizes forces which undermine the already-established codes, those which inform our sense of reality and thereby our sense of identity, in order to maximize the flow of consumption and production. Of course, this radical or centrifugal tendency—in the sense that codes and the symbolic material of a culture are deliberately decentralized, non-unified—creates anxiety. Once again, Merchant of Venice provides an excellent example of a society experiencing deterritorialization.
Jacobean drama, situated within an emerging capitalist society, participates in this decoding or deterritorialization: in fact, its very status as marginal bespeaks its deterritorializing force. Not only because it disrupts the "stable" hierarchy literally by existing in the Liberties, the "no man’s land," but also because it represents or shows the "horizons" of the society. Thus, as I argue in essay two, Malheureux in The Dutch Courtesan exists (at least temporarily) as a decoding force. For Malheureux, in essence, transgresses the "Law" of capitalist society by attempting to conflate the dichotomy between abject and symbolic, pure and impure: his desire for the courtesan Francischina is, within the bounds of the play, impure, yet he still "must enjoy" her. Malheureux thus nearly threatens to show the distinction between impure and pure—a distinction that underpins the whole discourse of sexuality in Jacobean society—as simply social constructions.
City comedy, then, because of its liminal position, its space or ‘critical distance’ to the official and dominant ideology, critiques the gaps in society—it participates in social decoding. But because the theater is never (and can never be) separate from the material conditions in which it is produced, it also participates in recoding. For deterritorialization produces anxiety and a conservative desire for new social codes in order to counter-balance the uncertainty of unstable and ‘stripped of meaning’ signs. Thus, Malheureux’s final disposal of Francischina indicates his return to the dichotomy of abject and pure (women): The Dutch Courtesan, in other words, participates in re-coding—or to borrow an image from Nashe, in "utterly" squashing any disruptive, threatening forces.
This desire to repress the disruptive forces, seen especially in other Jacobean tracts like Hic Mulier or Swetnam’s Araignment against lewde, idle, froward and unconstant women, rests upon the formulation that all the "ills attendant" to capitalism are "excess, abuses, or even subversions of the system" rather than inherent to the system (Moisan 196). Whores or women dressed in men’s clothing are thus what Slavoj Zizek might call "spectres." As Zizek explains, what we experience as ‘reality’ depends upon symbolization or representation—as, for instance, we depend upon language to explain something that happens to us, to explain our material and immediate experiences—but in the process of symbolization something is always left over. This non-symbolized material, that which escapes the symbolic order (Zizek calls it the ‘big Other’), remains to "stain" the fabric of reality—it is what does not fit into the "normal" world and thus threatens to show the stitching of reality. Hic Mulier’s vehement attack on "mannish women" can, in this way, be explained as a reaction against the "gap" opened up "between the supposed reality of one’s social status and sexual kind, and the clothes that were to display that reality to the world" (Howard 96): in other words, women in men’s clothes escape and then threaten the distinction between "men" and "women."
Thus, in both my first and second essays, I suggest that the source of anxiety produced by deterritorialization becomes misrecognized as an external, alien force rather than a condition of that society. For the citizens of Venice/Belmont, Shylock embodies the destructive force of abstract legality (a capitalist condition) and his downfall serves to (symbolically) rid society of its stain or "spectre," and therefore as a reterritorializing movement. Similarly, in The Dutch Courtesan Francischina serves as the spectre who interrupts the attempt to create a complete-unified reality—she is the externalization of commodification in a society that depends upon misrecognizing its foundation (that commodification is at the heart of capitalism).
In Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Middleton appears to accept and, even, promote commodification of flesh: Allwit himself admits that he, like a butcher, depends on "selling flesh" (IV.i.254). When first considering Chaste Maid, I wondered whether to view it as a "heteroglossic" text—Bakhtin’s terms for the multiple-layered, complex text in which the characters "speak their own language"—or simply farce: the plot of Sir Touchwood (so fertile he has to separate from his wife in order to not starve), Allwit (farms out his wife to Sir. Walter Whorehound in order to save money), and the Yellowhammers (greedy merchants who nearly pander their daughter to Walter Whorehound and do marry their son to Whorehound’s ex-whore) seems too outrageous to be taken seriously.
However, using Deleuze’s theory of decoding opens the play to another possible interpretation: Chaste Maid shows the limits of a deterritorialized society, a society where there is no central code that subjects believe in (or at least subscribe to). Chaste Maid differs most dramatically from other city comedies where order is (to some degree) reinstated—or as Nashe writes, where "pride, lust, whoredom, prodigality, or drunkeness" are "beat down utterly" (14)—for it, in the end, does not bring in "the halter and the gallows" (Nashe 14). In comparison, Honest Whore I is more conservative, for the comedy formula attempts to re-instate order: the plot revolves around teaching the whore and the wimpy husband proper behavior. Or as Bakhtin might explain it, the centripetal forces in Honest Whore are stronger than in Chaste Maid where the centrifugal force of language contributes to its deterritorialization.
Of course, both plays participate in the process of (re)inscribing cultural norms: specifically, in the discourse whereby all that is seen as dangerous and excess to the capitalist mode of relation is gendered female. Viola in Honest Whore, for instance, is presented as a sexually desiring wife who browbeats her husband in order to make him angry and thus "prick" her with "quills." And the gossips in Chaste Maid who come to the christening of the new Allwit baby are rendered grotesque—at least in the eyes of the men present and, presumably the audience—through their consumption of (phallically charged) "sweetmeats" and drink. Furthermore, they pee, talk, give wet kisses and fart with their "hot bums"; these are all stereotypical images of women, images with a historical precedence that Middleton exploits. In fact, this anxiety about women’s consuming was so strong that in 1533 a law was passed to "protect the commonwealth against women’s extravagance" by forbidding food and wine to be brought to the "new mother in childbed" (Mary Wack 40). In light of this law, Allwit’s grumbling about the cost of his wife’s "laying in" would be commonplace. Between Honest Whore and Chaste Maid, then, the result is an image of the "mannish" woman as sexual and economically devouring—"the open door and the open mouth" (Howard, Social Struggle 101)—and thus a threat to the patriarchal stability. Women’s bodies become, in this way, the site of struggle between competing discourses.
Thus, in the three sections of this project, I generally focus on how ideas of identity—gender, race, sexuality—are ‘engraved’ on the body. In particular, using Jacobean city comedy to explore these technologies of definition allows me to examine how the body is defined, limited and/or contained by social forces. "The body is the site of incorporated history" (12) writes Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, then, I come to my title, "A ‘most odious spectacle’: Capitalism, Sexuality and the Other(s) in Jacobean City Comedy." In choosing this title I mean to look at the circulation of images—specifically about the body, or described in terms of the body—that surrounded the rise of capitalism. In other words, I want to look at how this material mode of existence has influenced living subjects, as well as fictional ones. For ultimately, unlike other drama concerned about issues of race or nationalism, such as Shakespeare’s Othello or The Tempest, Jacobean city comedy is concerned with money, sex, and gender: in other words, with the proper ways to behave in a commercialized world.
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