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Printing pleasing profit: The crafting of capital selves and sales in early modern, English drama

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Printing pleasing profit: The crafting of capital selves and sales in early modern, English drama

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PRINTING PLEASING PROFIT: THE CRAFTING OF CAPITAL SELVES AND
SALES IN EARLY MODERN, ENGLISH DRAMA

by

Brooke Allan Carlson
________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Brooke Allan Carlson

ii

Dedication

I dedicate this effort to my wife and son, who have been a wonderful addition to my
life and the process of knowing. They have been, at many different points along the way,
the impetus, the obstacle, the entertainment, the reason, the joy and the structure, out
which my work has come. Thank you. I thank my parents for instilling in me the drive
to know and the confidence to pursue it.
Heather James suggested I should write a dissertation on the stage, capitalism, and
human imagination. I am grateful for her direct counsel. Along the way, Rebecca
Lemon has offered plenty of encouragement, as well as insightful and timely feedback.
Bruce Smith has been a supportive and tireless dissertation chair. Without him, this
project would not have been completed. Bruce is an exemplary teacher and critic, and an
inspiration to me. David Rollo and Antonia Szabari gave just the right amount of
assistance at a crucial time. Thank you. All of these people, and many more, have
offered their help in so many ways. Nevertheless, the mishaps, errors, and shortcomings
within the text are all my own.

iii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Abstract v

Introduction 1
Introduction Endnotes 37
Chapter 1: (Not) For Profit Playing 38
Old Profit and the Inns of Court 41
Old Profit and the School Comedy 47
New Profit and the School Comedy 53
Chapter 1 Endnotes 74
Chapter 2: Shakespeare and the Construction of a Feeling Self 75
Situating Settings 82
Romancing the Coins 89
Caskets to Coins 92
Wrestling for Chains 96
Shape-Shifting and the Purse 100
Circumcision and the Cutting Away of Men 108
Going Solo 113
Conclusion 118
Chapter 2 Endnotes 121

Chapter 3: Ben Jonson and the Performance of Pleasure 123
Space 127
Time 133
Commodification 138
The Subject 146
Conclusion 154
Chapter 3 Endnotes 158

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Chapter 4: For Profit Playing 160
Literary Criticism and the Integration of Aristotle into Horace 162
The Restoration Theater and Sir William Davenant 168
Margaret Cavendish and Closet Drama 179
John Milton and Closet Drama 193
Conclusion 205
Chapter 4 Endnotes 208
Bibliography 209

v

Abstract

This project brings together the histories of subjectivity, early modern drama and
economics. Moving across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I chart a significant
shift in subjectivity and social relations that connects the individual, art, and the market.
Indeed, as the commercial market takes off, poets begin writing to please (and edify) for
profit (financial gain). That is to say, the struggle between the Roman and Greek poetics
is complicated by the change in “profit;” the “old profit” means education and the “new
profit,” even as it demands pleasure for success, also entails financial gain. Recent
criticism focusing on economics emphasizes the materiality of the stage. Whereas the
mind is often secondary to the material in such critiques, the development of the mind
occurs alongside the development of the body. In fact, early modern poets get to the
mind through the body, and get to the body of the viewer or reader through the mind.
The fact that audience members see bodies acting out other bodies and persons on stage
furthers the distinction between bodies and selves. At the time, the very idea of the self
or even the soul as separate from the body was troubling. On the stage, then, and in early
modern play texts, I argue the expanding early modern subject is made visible as a body
in flux.
I begin my first chapter with the early modern theatre before the advent of the
commercial market. I study plays performed within schools and the inns of court –
Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1562-3), Gorboduc (1562), and Roister Doister (1562) which
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are highly invested in “old profit,” or profit in the sense of education. Nevertheless, the
bawdy bodily pleasure involved as a means of diversion in these texts highlights the
division between classes, genders, and even social concepts like love and marriage.
In my second chapter, I argue the commercial theater proffers a space and play of
"new profit" that, while still grounded in instruction, is ambiguous in its increase of
pleasure and subsequent criticism of itself and its audience. I argue that in Shakespeare’s
plays we can read through material objects and their constructed emotional power to
arrive at the individual and the staging of the self as disavowal and discourse.
Conceptually, I map my own discourse through Shakespeare’s plays The Merchant of
Venice (1596-7), As You Like It (1598-1600), and Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1600)
by first situating their physical settings and the recent critical reception. I then explore:
the commodification of characters and cultural concepts through coins; shapeshifting, as
represented with the purse; the recurrent imagery of circumcision and the cutting away of
men. In exchange for the coin passed to gain entry, the playing company provides the
viewer the experience of pleasure, of feeling. Market logic impacts early modern culture
in corporeal ways as an emerging discourse that rejects marriage solely along class lines.
The residual discourse of male-male love is being rejected and replaced with a romantic
love ground in instability and uncertainty. And finally, the emerging discourse of shape-
shifting bodies provides solutions to the problems of marriage against class lines, at the
same time that it re-affirms class division.
On the other hand, in my third chapter, on Jonson’s Volpone (1606), Epicene
(1609), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), instability creates room for
vii

pain, penetration, movement and liberation. The emerging discourse is the moving body,
a body that changes from one thing to another, in the name of profit and pleasure. For
Jonson, the space of drama is the social and interactive experience of the stage, and the
private, imaginary space of the play text. Time is a concept Jonson wields as an
exchange; in return for admission, Jonson asks not only that his audience stay and enjoy
his work, but also that they re-experience the play above and beyond its “two short
hours.” The plays and the people playing on stage, as well as the audience on occasion,
are thus commodified. Moreover, Jonson crafts subjects in the experience of the stage,
even as he critiques them. The animosity and excoriation we feel in Jonson's plays stems
from Jonson's ambivalence around the "new profit.” All of Jonson’s work, particularly
through the emerging discourse, demonstrates a newfound reliance upon individuals as
self-governing subjects seeking financial gain. Jonson’s use of meta-narration reflects his
own art, subjectivity, and the market as the struggle that persists to this day.
Parliament closed the theater in 1642, but the reopening of the commercial theater
and the return of the monarchy after the civil war, brought about important changes. At
the end of the early modern poetic market – from William Davenant’s The Man’s the
Master: A Comedy (1669) to Margaret Cavendish’s closet drama The Convent of
Pleasure (1668) and Milton’s closet drama Samson Agonistes (1671) – the problem of the
body becomes a subjective and internalized process of self discovery. Re-imagined off-
stage and through the process of reading, early modern subjects envision bodies in action.
Restoration theater, with its privileging of class in the audience, coupled with the
emphasis upon new profit and pleasure on stage, attempts to fix the body as
viii

demonstrative of class and worth, even as the new drama relies entirely upon adaptation
of foreign work and translation of earlier English plays.
Advancing the new economic criticism by employing my own sort of cultural
materialism grounded in the critical work of Raymond Williams, I flesh out the
dominant, emerging, and residual discourses developing amidst an early modern culture
in transition. Moving away from economic analysis invested in objectification, I argue
that gender as instability allows early modern subjects to negotiate class issues. Across
the period, the body itself is the site wherein cultural anxiety is performed. I draw on
early modern literary criticism to demonstrate the contemporary engagement with these
issues of market culture, material, and the changing early modern mind. The generic
manipulations at the end of the seventeenth century bring us to the long-eighteenth
century and eventually on to the appearance of the novel, a form particularly apt for
commodification. What makes the English early modern stage so important to us today,
above and beyond its function as the background of the Renaissance and humanist
movements, is its relevance to our continued struggle with art and capitalism, our
unceasing complication of human beings as both subjects and consumers.
1

Introduction

It is further agreed that every person here have his or their freewill of censure,
to like or dislike at their own charge, the author having now departed with his
right it shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen’orth, his twelve
pen’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of
his place, provided always his place not get above his wit (Jonson, Fair 76-
81).
1

Ben Jonson’s pairing of art, judgment, and money, in Bartholomew Fair (1614),
demonstrates an important cultural shift at work in the English early modern period. The
passage above is taken from Jonson’s “The Induction on the Stage,” in which the poet
crafts a contract between himself and the audience before the players present the play. It
is common for Jonson to engage his audience and metadramatic discourse such as this
demonstrates an emerging relationship between the poet and his (now paying) audience.
As the market for the stage develops, the relationship between the artist and the audience,
the producer and the buyer, changes. In my dissertation, I am reading the problem of art
under capitalism across the early modern English stage. Early modern poetics, building
on that of the medieval, is a Roman and Horation concept that privileges education and
morality, or profit, over pleasure. According to the Horation model, poets seek both to
“profit” and “delight” their audience, with the emphasis in profit on moral persuasion.
Aristotle’s Poetics, similar in its intended affect on the audience, differs in that catharsis,
the release of emotion generated by the play, makes the audience feel (pity and fear),
rather than judgment. The struggle between the Roman and Greek poetics is complicated
by the change in profit; the “old profit” means education and the ‘new profit’ entails
2

financial gain. Thus, as the commercial market takes off, poets begin writing to please
(and edify) for profit (financial gain). Pleasure, albeit part of the Horation model, grows
increasingly important to poets in search of success. Additionally, the reliance upon
profit, alone or in combination, pushes pleasure in new and challenging ways. Under the
rather specific focus upon profit and pleasure in drama, the problem of art, the market,
and the human imagination gets worked out through unstable and ever-changing bodies.
I would position the Marxist and cultural materialist critic Richard Halpern as a necessary
precursor to my work. As Halpern writes of his book, The Poetics of Primitive
Accumulation, “This book attempts to inscribe the English literary Renaissance within the
prehistory of capital” (Halpern 1). My aim is similar in that I am reading the inscription
of emerging capitalism within English early modern play texts.
We have today 700 surviving play texts, all of which come from London, dating
from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Contextualization of the period is
no easy chore, so further limiting the focus on London to geographic and economic
forums might help. I would like to use theater historian Andrew Gurr to situate the early
modern theatre historically. 1576, when James Burbage constructed the first public,
commercial theatre, the Theatre, would appear to be the beginning, but, in fact, playing
companies had been appearing regularly before the court in 1560 (Gurr 4). Moreover,
spaces for playing began to appear as early as 1567, when the Red Lion amphitheater
was built. The Paul’s Hall theater and the first of the Blackfriars hall theaters were made
in 1575 and 1576, with the Theatre and the Curtain in 1576 and 1577. The first stage
built exclusively for its own company was the Globe, constructed in 1599 for Lord
3

Chamberlain’s Men, followed by the Fortune in 1600. These last two were officially
approved by the Privy Council and their respective playing companies were protected by
the Court. While cities outside of London allowed for such playing on occasion, no other
cites outside of London allowed for the building of theaters for and the protection of that
area as solely play space. Gurr, from whose The Shakespearean Playing Companies I
summarize here, argues for a history of contexts then, rather than a history of texts. “So
this history must not be a story of texts, even of lost texts, but of the contexts for the
events which generated some of the texts, a battered Chinese box” (Gurr 12). While Gurr
is a theater historian, I am a literary critic, and thus my work is the reading of text.
However, like Gurr, I value the context out of which the text arrives, which brings me
back to economics.

A large part of the economics involves sheer size and numbers. Historians and
literary critics have long associated early modern art with the expanding British
economics. For example, as Gurr notes, “London doubled in size twice between 1550
and 1650, when its 400,000 people made it the largest and probably the richest city in
Europe...[and] biggest market in the world for playing” (Gurr 19). Douglas Bruster, a
cultural materialist invested in the combination of art and the market, and an important
part of the new economic criticism, argues in Drama and the Market in the Age of
Shakespeare, that“[...] London’s playhouses can best be understood in terms of
commerce, as centers for production and consumption of an aesthetic product” (Bruster
3). The performance and the surviving texts are products or commodities emerging in,
around, and with London’s emerging market economy. Keywords for Bruster are
4

“poetics of the market” and “materialist vision.” Gurr’s reminder of the importance of
contextualization, as well as Bruster’s point that the theater begins not outside of, but
within a market, suggests the play be best understood as market material.
2
To that end,
what renders the early modern stake a market is its buyer or audience. Returning to
Bruster, who claims early modern poets to be concerned with “linking the sexual and
economic, the urban and rural, and the ancient with the modern” (Bruster, Drama xii-
xiii), we can see examples of this in plays performed in schools and the inns of courts
before the commercial theatre, not to mention Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and
Jonson’s city comedies. As feminist and cultural materialist Jean Howard notes, the
problem of the stage is not merely playing, but in playing for money. Or, as she writes in
“Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and Paying Customers” about the 1574 Act of the
Common Council of London, which attempts to limit playing to private performances:
“In short, in this document public playing is presented as altering social relations by the
emergent material practices attendant upon play production and attendance, quite apart
from any consideration of the ideological import of the fictions enacted upon stage”
(Howard 69).

I analyze the play text as a space of subject building and consumer production. It is
in the space of the early modern stage that the early modern body is represented and
conceived as a subject. The space of the stage is thus the site of origin, linking the
material market to the bodily subject. The subject of the stage, moreover, contributes to
the building of its subjects. Subject is thus being read as self, as being under the
authority of another, and as the theme or main reason for the work. Or, the space of the
5

stage is the production of the early modern body and its subjects; both its subjectivity and
its simple subjects–what life is about. The early modern crisis in consciousness, also
grounded in the privileging of the material at the outset (and its building on Aristotle),
supports the idea of the theater as material. According to Bruster: “London’s drama
seized upon the cuckold myth as a dialectical metaphor capable of reconciling – however
uneasily – evolving tensions between country and city, production and reproduction,
female and male” (Bruster, Drama 61). The move from object to subject is thus
inscribed with economics and commodification. Sex and sexuality are problematic in the
market of plays, subjects, and selves. So much of what we read in the early modern stage
is an exploration of the lived experience as (a) being within a market. Critics like Bruster
are invested in analysis of theater’s move outward as a result of capitalism, or in the
commodification of the subject and then the transference of the subject into objects. But
others, like historian Jean-Christophe Agnew, argue for capitalism’s impact to be read in
the inward subject. As Agnew writes in his Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in
Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750: “On the one hand, linguistic usage indicates that
exchange had moved outward, as the expanded circulation of commodities; on the other,
it suggests that exchange had moved inward, as a subjective standard of
commensurability against which the world itself could be judged” (Agnew 53). Indeed,
the movement of the market and the stage is also inward, physically, but more
importantly, psychologically. As we shall see, the solution early modern poets proffer to
the problem of art in its emerging market is an unstable or variable body. As identity
moves inward and then out from the subject toward the object, the subject is no longer
6

held to be static. In response to changing people and expanding classes in early modern
England, the body on stage as a solution to cultural anxiety was rendered a body in
motion.

To recap, the space of this analysis is the early modern stage, read across the
period, from its conception in the schools and inns of court, on the commercial stage, and
on to the private space of the reader with “closet dramas.” The model for the stage, a
model in flux, is nonetheless grounded in the Horation terms: profit and delight. It will
be helpful to conceive of profit in two ways, the first being its original or older meaning–
“old profit” is thus education–and the second being the more contemporary or new–“new
profit” is financial. The model conceived along Horation lines privileges “old profit” and
subordinates pleasure. Delight can also be read as pleasure.
In addition to pleasure as part of the Horation model, early modern understandings
of Aristotle’s “catharsis” further the notion of emotional arousal as delight. Although
Aristotle wrote more specifically of tragedy, pity, and fear, the early modern reception of
Aristotle, in combination with Horace, effectively merged the two such that the goal of
poetry was the moving of the passions, or the rousing of emotion. Just what the emotions
were did not seem to matter so much. In conjunction with discourse, a term that in its
early modern sense privileges motion, I argue the effective power of the stage to be its
ability to excite feelings in its viewers, and later, its readers. Printing Pleasing Profit is
about the way money moves us, as much as it is about the way that the theater and
literature also move us. I will turn to the seventeenth century Dutch critic, Daniel
Heinsius in the fourth chapter, but suffice it to say here, by means of introduction, that I
7

am reading pleasure as the production of emotion in the viewer and reader, both early
modern and present.
The bodies on stage are the source of profit and delight for both audience and
reader. Bodies in their various manifestations in text, be they performed on stage in the
school plays, the commercial theater, or in the imagination of the closet drama, are the
focus of my analysis. Sixteenth century school plays render the bawdy body as a space
of humor and as something to be regulated. To be clear, the shapeshifting body on the
Elizabethen stage becomes an imagined body of metamorphosis in the late seventeenth
century reader.
These bodies are integral in the conception of self for the audience and therefore the
early modern subject. And how we read the early modern subject today is really about
how we perceive the subject, our subject, now. The subject matter of the plays is also
important and part of my analysis involves genre. The underlying principle of genre
theory is the idea that form matters. Clearly the stage as a social context in the early
modern period matters immensely. But the division of the genres within that same stage
also makes a difference and I’ll address those differences as they arise. The capitalism
that surrounds or is the space of the early modern stage also calls into question the notion
of a subject. While Marxist criticism tends to negate the subject as one already within the
system, I argue the subject to be in the process of formation and thus able to be beyond
the system, to be without being subject to it.

8

***
“I am no man, ladies (Jonson, Epicoene V.ii.39).”
-- Ben Jonson

“I am not that I play (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night I.v.164).”
3

-- William Shakespeare

Bodies are central as the art takes place within a newly emerging market. After his
new bride is revealed to be woman; or, after the boy playing a woman, doffs his wig to
reveal himself as a young man, Morose, in Ben Jonson’s Epicene, denounces his sex.
Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola dressed as Cesario professes to an
enamored Olivia that (s)he is not the very thing (sex) (s)he plays. But here it is a boy
playing a woman who disguises herself as a man. On the English stage, unlike that of the
Continent, there were no women. The problem of the female body, or the representation
of the body, on the early modern stage, is part of a larger struggle with both form and
matter. In the plays of the school and the inns of court, the body is a bawdy experience
intended to emphasize “old profit.” The body is rendered far more complicated with the
advent of the commercial theaters, where gender instability provides the seeming solution
to questions of economics and culture. Finally, with the “closet drama” at the end of the
seventeenth century, the bodily component of the stage shifts as the pleasure of the play
becomes an individual reading experience.
Part of the spectacle of the early modern English theater is the audience and the
interaction of people in bodies and guises that permit a wholly new type of integration.
People were dressing above and beyond their own class, and the market was rendering
9

the appearance of class a shifting and troublesome signifier. Employing my own sort of
cultural materialism grounded in the critical work of the cultural historian, critic, and
theorist Raymond Williams, I demarcate the dominant, emerging, and residual discourses
developing amidst an early modern culture in flux. More importantly, I want to use a
structure of feelings as a way to get beyond notions of ideology and discourse to real
bodies and the solutions provided in these plays. I use Williams in particular because of
his Marxist framework that, nonetheless, allows for a thinking and choosing subject. In
addition, I value the importance of feelings in Williams’s structural approach. The word
“discourse,” a word that comes to signify moving knowledge rather than solely
movement within the English early modern period, provides a bridge between play text
and criticism.
The theater, with its new tools of rhetoric and disguise and its emphasis upon
movement and language, is but one form of early modern discourse. While changing as
early as 1374, “discourse,” comes to mean, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
“the act of the understanding, by which it passes from premises to consequences;
reasoning, thought, ratiocination; the faculty of reasoning, reason, rationality” (OED 2).
Discourse is helpful both in its proximity in time and its signification of language as a
moving force of meaning. I’ll be using “discourse” to help explore culture and its
presence in stage texts. "Discourse" in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant an
"onward course; process or succession of time, events, actions, etc." (OED 1). At the
same time, "discourse" was also understood to be "the act of understanding…; reasoning,
thought, ratiocination; the faculty of reasoning, rationality" (OED 2). But discourse
10

brings with it notions of trans-action, too. “Course” or “corse” meant “to exchange, to
interchange; to barter; to deal in (a thing) by buying and selling again” (OED). “Dis-,” in
Latin and English can mean a variety of things, including a sense of intensification or
movement out and away (OED). The developing markets of early modern England are
creating new spaces in which objects are being linked to prices of exchange, to different
experiences, and to various emotions.
To discourse, then, is to move in, around, and amongst some things, to transact
along physical, temporal, and spatial lines. The discourse is both spatial and temporal.
Using discourse as a launching pad for my reading of the subject in the play produced
through the early modern market, I am including: a structural and temporal analysis of
varying levels – dominant, residual, and emerging – as suggested by Williams in
Marxism and Literature and a Foucauldian discourse, cited in Foucault’s History of
Sexuality “ [...] to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from
which they speak...” (Williams 11). I am vested in discourse as an analyzing system via
Williams and Foucault, both of whom also connect the varying levels of discourse to
emotion. The “displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire”
that Foucault explores in the seventeenth century, these same effects are also part of the
conflation of the market and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. Anti-
theatrical texts argued against the stage precisely because of its dangerous discourse.
What renders the stage so markedly powerful and unique is its emergence as a market,
within a market, and what takes center stage within that very market is the body.

11

The space on stage in which we can read the transformation of the artistic model is
an enlarged bodily confusion and manipulation, one that might be better understood
through a structure of feelings, expressed as subjective and lived experiences in the
written word. Marxist criticism tends to move toward the unveiling of ideology and its
incorporation of the subject. Williams, however, offers an exchange between art and
ideology in ways that do not preclude the subject. Williams’s notion of the dominant,
residual, and emerging discourses provides a way to get at the feelings in the art. Or, as
Williams writes in Marxism and Literature:
The effective formations of most actual art relate to already manifest social
formations, dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent formations
(though often in the form of modification or disturbance of older forms) that
the structure of feeling, as a solution, relates (Williams 134, italics his).

A “solution,” much like the market, is multifarious and contradictory, given the
awareness of concern over people and bodies that can (suddenly) be bought. New market
economics provides spaces in which the early modern subject might become someone
else in manner or appearance, all the while maintaining an inherent class. The solutions
referred to by Williams, while involving identification of various levels of discourse, also
include and arrive at feelings. Consequently, part of my analysis will explore the feelings
generated by these texts. Feelings will be generated by bodies and characters on stage
and in texts, yet these same bodies and texts are subject to their own audience and readers
who are in turn, the subjects of the feelings produced. Feelings lead us back to subjects.
To begin, however, is to return to the model for the poet and the contemporary discourse
surrounding the stage. Early modern poetry and drama, with its incorporation of the then
12

newly discovered “classics,” is built around a body of work and then reconfigured to
conform to technological and ideological change.

***

Early modern drama begins with Roman models and Roman thought. Horace, in
particular, establishes in his Ars Poetica a model for the stage that early modern critics
take up as their own poetics. Horace was read in the medieval period, so his appearance
in the early modern era is not surprising; early modern critics simply continued to build
on the Horation model as new writings, writers, and cultural practices emerged. Building
then, on the Horation rhetorical model, the appearance of Aristotle, and the development
of a market for the stage, their concurrent practice is what develops into what we for so
long referred to as the English Renaissance. Aristotle works well within a market, better
perhaps than Horace, because his emphasis upon feelings makes for more accessible,
consumer-driven drama; but, in the end, early modern poets generally blend the two. The
combination of Horace with Aristotle and the advent of capitalism means a privileging of
pleasure in the early modern stage. Pedantic or didactic art tends not to sell. Critical
works still sell poorly. Plays that generate emotions rather than moral judgment, plays
that are more Aristotelian than Horation, were generally more accessible to early modern
audiences. That is to say, the Horation model is changed irrevocably with the
incorporation of Aristotle’s Poetics. At the same time, as new markets develop for all
13

sorts of things but particularly for poets, profit comes to mean financial gain. The
conceptual movement from moral to market, while written and played out across the
early modern stage, is also revealed in early modern literary criticism.
In roughly 16 B.C., Horace wrote the Ars Poetica as part of the Epistles. First
printed in 1470, Horace arrives in the early modern period through the medieval. Badius
Ascensius wrote on Horace in 1500, and was often printed in translations of Horace
throughout the sixteenth century. Shakespearean T. W. Baldwin, demonstrating
Shakespeare’s firsthand knowledge of Horace, argues in Shakespere’s Small Latine and
Lesse Greek that Lambinus’s printing of Horace in 1576 was used in English grammar
schools; Thomas Drant published a translation of Ars Poetica in 1567 (also likely to have
been used in schools), and Jonson himself wrote a translation in 1604 that was printed in
1640 (Baldwin 497-520). In Horace in English, classicist D. S. Carne-Ross writes of
Jonson’s Horation influence: “Naturalizing Horace was the necessary prelude to
translating him. Jonson himself made only one translation that can be called successful,
of Ode IV.i, but he prepared the way for other translators” (Carne-Ross 7). That list of
translators, to name a few across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, includes: Sir
Philip Sidney, John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, Aphra
Behn, and Thomas Creech (Carne-Ross 5-23). In an effort to simplify, I am arguing for
the essential component of the Horation model as “profit” inside of “pleasure”. In
classicist Edward Henry Blakeney’s compilation of Jonson’s translation, in Horace on
the Art of Poetry, the Latin is reproduced as:

aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae,
aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae (Blakeney 333-4).
14

While prodesse is the conjugated prosum, which means to be useful or of use, to do good,
it also means to benefit or profit. Indeed, “profit” as a translation is used by Jonson, in
and many in his wake. In Timber or Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640,
Jonson writes, in lines 477-8:
Poets would either profit, or delight,
Or mixing sweet, and fit, teach life the right (Blakeney 477-8).

The purpose for the poet thus becomes to “profit” or “delight”, and drama, as the
expansion of the poet’s creative space in the early modern period, is understood to be a
rhetorical experience; the stage becomes a lesson, a pleasing pursuit, or some mixture of
the two.
Horace is essential in the construction of early modern drama as a rhetorical
experience within a noble context. Written to the noble Pisos brothers, the contextualized
history of the Ars is an erudite audience. Horace survives, precisely because scholars,
with the help of wealthy benefactors, were invested in the construction of knowledge
over time. The Renaissance emphasis on the humanities means that the classics, as they
were discovered and disseminated, offered man greater wisdom and power. Yet while
the good and noble Renaissance poet employed poetry to instruct and delight, to profit
and please, as taught by the Greeks and Romans before him, the changing Renaissance
culture exerted new and different forces upon him, forces that pushed the model in new
and varied ways. The Greek conception of the stage, for example, arrives considerably
late in the period, and is viewed at first in support of Horace.

15

Like Horace, the incorporation of Aristotle into contemporary criticism is a process,
but it is a process markedly more complicated. Although first interpreted along Horation
lines, it takes some roughly four hundred years for Aristotle to appear on his own in early
modern England. The problem of Aristotle’s Poetics is largely in part because of its
bibliographic history. As classicist Gerald F. Else relates in the introduction to his own
translation of the Poetics, the text originally existed as two parts, but one was lost in the
first and second centuries while Aristotle’s “published” works were studied (Else 10).
What we have of the Poetics was brought into the Middle Ages within a selection of
rhetorical material, but not as an Aristotelian piece. Moreover, the Poetics arrives to us
in manuscript form not as a finished Aristotelian piece, but as a compilation of Aristotle’s
lectures. The authority of the text is further diminished by its author, presumably a
student taking notes, but not Aristotle himself. In the thirteenth century, for example,
Thomas Aquinas had Aristotle’s Rhetoric translated into Latin, but not the Poetics. In the
middle of the fifteenth century, then, the text was taken to Italy as part of MS A (a
collection of Greek manuscripts arranged around the common theme of rhetoric), where
over thirty copies were made (Else 11). In the Poetics, Else writes:

A Latin translation by Giorgio Valla was published in 1498, the Greek text in
1508 (from a copy of A and characteristically enough, as part of the Aldine
Rhetores Graeeci). The commentaries by Robortello, Vettori (Victorius),
Castelvetro, and the rest, which established Aristotle as the dictator of
criticism, did not begin until well into the sixteenth century, and of course
French classicism reached its apogee only in the seventeenth (Else 11).

As a manuscript bound up with other manuscripts and grouped thematically around
rhetoric, Aristotle’s Poetics was thus relegated to the margins until the sixteenth century.
In Basel, Erasmus was involved in the translation of Aristotle from Greek to Latin in
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1536. Although Aristotle is referenced as early as the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon,
the Poetics specifically are not referenced by an English critic until 1555. Then in 1576,
at the same time that the Theatre is opening, Robert Paterson translated Giovanni della
Casa’s Galateo, which contained a definition of Aristotle’s “catharsis.” Having arrived
in the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s Poetics slowly begin to infiltrate the preexisting
Roman and Horation model.
We can see in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the repercussions of the
discovery of Aristotle. As Marvin Theodore Herrick, a specialist in Renaissance drama,
writes, in his The Poetics of Aristotle in England, Sidney's Defense of Poesie (1595) is a
“typical blend of Aristotle and Horace, with a good measure of Plato thrown in” (Herrick
24). In 1591, Sir John Harrington justifies Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso according to
Aristotle’s terms. Herrick claims, nonetheless, that the Elizabethan critic “seldom tries to
discriminate between Horace and Aristotle, and usually trusts the Italian critics for his
knowledge of the latter” (Herrick 31). Aristotle’s catharsis seems to be the element that
first bleeds into early modern English criticism, yet it still retains the Horation moral
stamp. Returning to Herrick, it’s also important to note that Aristotle comes to English
critics through the Horation foundation and through critics on the continent.
For nearly two centuries [seventeenth and eighteenth] English criticism was
to remain classical and Aristotelian. We must bear in mind, however, that
from the first of these English interpretations of Aristotle’s theories were
hopelessly adulterated with Horation maxims and Continental scholarship,
first with Italian, then with Dutch, and finally, and most of all, with French
(Herrick 34).

17

We can see the influence of Aristotle in Sidney, Jonson, and others because of the Italian
and Dutch critics. Classicist James Hutton outlines Aristotle’s renaissance in his
Aristotle’s Poetics, positing the Dutch critics Julius Caesar Scaliger and Daniel Heinsius
as Aristotelian authorities. Hutton claims Ben Jonson to have learned most of his
Aristotle from Heinsius and his De Tragoediae Constitutione, published in 1611 (31).
Theodore Goulston wrote the first translation (into Latin) of the Poetics in England in
1623 (Hutton 31). Translation into English soon followed, and the incorporation and
exploration of Aristotle’s Poetics within the Horation context. To further complicate the
matter, the meaning of “profit” changes.
The transition from medieval to renaissance involves modes of artistic production.
The space and place of art moves from religious and court settings, to a commercial
market, and consequently on to bodies and subjects. Along the way, it passes through
and remains even, in schools, court, and private contexts. Importantly, the emergence of
a market impacts the production of art, the way that people feel about the art they are
creating. The understanding of the newly formed market produces a new model for the
theater, one that emphasizes both profit as financial gain and pleasure as that which
produces greater financial gain or profit. Evidence of this growing consciousness is
demonstrated in the conflation of profit and pleasure as profit comes to mean economic
gain, as well as edification. In the late fifteenth century, profit means “the advantage or
benefit (of a person, community, or thing); use, interest; the gain, good, well-being,”
(OED 1.a.). Examples can be seen in Caxton and his The Myrrour of the Worlde in 1481,
“He doth it more for his owen prouffyt than he doth it for the other,” and Thomas
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Wilson’s The arte of rhetorique in 1553, “Where I spake of profit...vnder the same is
comprehended the getting of gaine, and eschuyng of harme.” Profit as “that which is to
the advantage or benefit of some one or something,” (OED 1.b.), can also be seen in
William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), or Othello (1604), “I thank you for
this profit” (III.iii.379). In 1600, Shakespeare employs profit as “progress, advance,
improvement” (OED 3) in As You Like It, “My brother Jacques he keepes at schoole, and
report speaks goldenly of his profit” (I.i.7). Although Shakespeare is using profit to
mean education here, he relies heavily upon and is very much an integral component of
the commercial theater and the new profit. However, in my first chapter I explore the
early modern theater prior to the arrival of the commercial market, reading several plays
performed in schools.
Sixteenth century poets, for example, before the opening of the commercial theater,
turned to classical models to craft drama to be performed in schools and at the inns of
court. In his Ancient Scripts & Modern Experience on the English Stage, Bruce Smith
writes: “It was not in the orchestrai of ancient theaters but in the refectories of schools
and colleges and in the great halls of princes’ palaces that the heroes of Greek and Roman
drama spoke again after a millennium of silence” (Smith, Ancient 103). Classical drama
was thus reincorporated as a means of “old profit” to teach school boys how to be
(noble), and nobles how to be. Smith makes clear that the employment of classical drama
in these locales was explicitly for etiquette and statesmanship (Smith, Ancient 105 and
115). Gorboduc, performed in a private hall before the Queen, serves to illustrate a pre-
commercial theater grounded in “old profit.” Here, under the patronage system, poets
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privilege “old profit.” Three plays performed in schools that take up these issues are
Ralph Roister Doister (1545-52), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1552-63) and Jack Juggler
(1553-58). While relying heavily upon the body for delight or pleasure, in both Gammer
and Roister Doister the narrative thrust is “old profit.” In conjunction with the “old
profit,” the pleasure of the play is the bawdy bodily confusion. To return to Raymond
Williams’s methodology, physical pleasure constitutes a residual discourse that furthers
the dominant discourse, the moral lesson and classical emulation. An emerging discourse
is the desire expressed across and in bawdy bodily delight. Or, before the advent of the
commercial theatre the emerging discourse of pleasure promulgates the dominant
discourse of education; in this same emerging discourse, however, we can see the early
modern instruction of desire and attempts to control emotion. The arrival of the
commercial market, coupled with “profit’s” change in meaning, reveals a new theatrical
model challenging the older, Horation example.

The market sense of profit, and it is here that we start to see the shift, while dated as
early as the thirteenth century, begins to change in the seventeenth century, and continues
on into the eighteenth century as what remains our contemporary usage: “that which is
derived from or produced by some sort of revenue” or “the pecuniary gain in any
transaction; the amount by which value acquired exceeds value expended; the excess of
returns over the outlay of capital; in commercial use chiefly” (OED 4 and 5). In 1560,
for example, John Daus, translating A famous cronicle of our time called Sleidanes,
writes, “The Duke of Saxon...shall kepe the town and Castel of Gothe, with al the profite”
(286). In 1610, Holland writes in Camden’s Britain, “The fines, perquisites,
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amercements, and other profites growing out of the trials of such causes” (366). And
finally, in 1697, Dryden, translating The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals,
Georgics, and Aeneis writes: “Nor is the Profit small, the Peasant makes, Who smooths
with Harrows, or who pounds with Rakes The crumbling Clods” (Dryden I.137). The
transition of the word “profit,” from a general good (to a person, place, or thing) to an
economic gain, suggests the larger cultural change(s) at play.
Part of my framing the period here is the larger shift toward capitalism as the
systemic base of English culture. The dominant system in England is feudalism, a system
that depends upon fixed classes and stable bodies. With the discovery of the new world,
mercantilism rises both in opposition to and in conjunction with feudalism. Merchants,
made rich by trade in the new products and the improved systems of travel, began to buy
into nobility. For some, marrying in was the option, a logical one that paired noble blood
with rich dowries. An economic and cultural shift from feudalism to capitalism is, much
like the slippery borders of historical periods or the fuzzy ends of genre, a slow and
labored process. I define capitalism broadly as a system ground in the trading of goods
for money. Capitalism is in contrast with the medieval feudalism that limited access to
goods and wealth, offering protection in return for service. The employment of a
shapeshifting body as a solution to the questions raised by early modern culture, is part of
the economic and historical movement.
The Roman model changes as the Greek model is understood to be different. Or, as
Aristotle’s Poetics began to reach England, something it did late in Europe, the Horation
model at first subsumed it. Critics at first thought Aristotle to be in accordance with
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Horace and thus used him to bolster the Horation rhetorical model. Literary critic Joan
C. Grace in her Tragic Theory in the Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, John Dennis, and
John Dryden, sees the central points of convergence as imitation, dramatic unity and
probability, characterization, and catharsis. I would further reduce these to catharsis,
hamartia, and unity (of time, setting, and character), but my point is that the combination
of the two produces a more material conception of the stage. For Aristotle, then, art is
mimesis (imitation of life), and in poetry and drama, mimesis is the making of plot.
Grace points out that for Aristotle, the imitation must make its own moral significance
clear, yet for early modern critics, the poet “must read his moral into his imitation”
(Grace 15). Aristotle’s claim concerning unity of time - one circle of the sun - is intended
to describe the time necessary for the experience, but not the sum time of the narrative.
The Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius reads the idea of unity across character and plot, and
the English seem to adopt his view. Catharsis, a purging or releasing of the passions, pity
and fear in particular, is an emotional process. Edification and moral instruction, on the
other hand, are intellectual experiences.
An emotional (re)presentation is more accessible to an audience-member (or
reader) than the intellectual. The early modern poetics of the market privileges the
emotional so as to draw crowds and sell tickets. On the same token, the new spaces,
bodies, and subject being presented on stage are also educational, or edifying. Old profit
is still very much a part of the rapidly developing new profit, but delight or pleasure is the
necessary intermediary. The materiality of the stage echoes the materialization of
emotion in early modern players. A secondary effect produced by the materialization is
22

the broadening of the receptive audience, an essential for the market. With more people
willing to accept and connect with the play, the players are more likely to sell an even
greater number of tickets. Within a market then, the subject of the play, much like its
bodies, is tailored to emulate its audience.
Another Aristotelian concept of importance is hamartia: the error a character
makes because of a lack of skill, which results in the tragedy of the play. The debate over
the nature of the character demonstrates the difference between the two models: the
Horation critic privileges a highly noble character to emphasize the fall and consequent
moral lesson; the Aristotelian critic understands the concept of unity to be important with
regard to character and hamartia, such that the character is of just nature, but not
exaggerated or excessive. The middling ground provides a space in which the audience
might too reside and associate, which, in the end, allows for the purging of similar, or
unified, emotions. The pairing of emotions with the play, rather than moral or
intellectual instruction, is, on the one hand, a result of the artistic models discussed, yet
on another, it is the result of economic exchange; for the play is purchased and set within
a market, the theater. Across the period–albeit not a uniform trajectory–poets, critics, and
audience members alike struggle with the transformation of artistic models. The need to
create characters in the middle ground or of the middle illustrates the very presence of
and rise of a middle being, a body and subject who can connect and associate with others.
In the English early modern period, albeit at multifarious levels, both the competing
models and the emerging market are happening at the same time. A poet is, to be more
specific, writing a play with Horation and Aristotelian concepts at odds; at the same time
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that same poet is conceiving of the play as a means to money within a market. While it
might be easy to posit moral judgment as the Horation mode and emotion as the
Aristotelian, each writer is in fact invested in both (morality and emotion). The resulting
blend in the English early modern seeks to reconcile Horace’s moralizing with Aristotle’s
emotions. Pleasure, like the impact of the “new profit,” troubles the production.
In chapter one, I use the school plays of the mid to late sixteenth century to prove
the dominant discourse of inns of court and school drama is old profit. Set in schools,
sometimes written by school masters and performed by students, the plays were
instructive. As the commercial theatre opened, however, critics began to attack the stage
for teaching the wrong things. Thomas Heywood, himself an actor, defends the stage
with his An Apology for Actors, written in 1608 and published in 1612. In the
introductory material, metaphors of the body abound. The use of the body, even in
metaphor, is apt as the theater places bodies on display, at the same time that people are
displaying themselves in the audience. The Apology is broken into three books, and
opens with the critique of the stage being that actors and theaters “[...]they [are] both
unpleasant and unprofitable, being too sower for food and too ranke for fodder [...]”
(Heywood 15).
4
Like Ovid, Heywood then turns to an invocation of the Muse with the
retelling of the stage and the muse. The use of the play in the academic setting is further
validation of the play’s merit. Moreover, Heywood defends the stage by claiming its
practice in schools to legitimize it. “Do not the Universities, the fountains and well-
springs of all good Arts, Learning and Documents, admit the like in their Colledges?”
(Heywood 12). I’ll refrain from citing at length, but the emphasis is upon the stage as a
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space of old profit, or education. Among others, Heywood cites Horace and Ciero for
support. In the Second Book, “Of Actors and their ancient Dignitie,” Heywood argues
that the theater keeps people busy and not plotting against the powers that be. He uses as
examples both Rome under Caesar and contemporary England (under James I).
Heywood also cites Horace to construct a history of the theater, claiming the great
theaters of the past prove the earlier culture’s respect for and love of the theatre and its
players. In the Third Book, “Of Actors and the true use of their quality,” Heywood
argues plays to be to our benefit, again emphasizing old profit, and cautions our taking
one negative aspect as a sign of the whole, so as to justify eradicating the entire thing.
Heywood also argues that the English stage renders the English culture more attractive to
others. Moreover, the crafting of the English language through the theater renders it a
more beautiful and effective language, one prior to, that had been disdained. Again,
alluding to Horace, Heywood argues that plays, in fact, teach people. Here, Heywood
includes three examples of the stage working upon its audience. The first is a woman’s
guilty conscience working upon her as she sees a woman on stage murder her husband.
In the second, an advancing group of Spanish invaders is scared off by the revelry of the
stage actors. And in the third, a woman cries out upon seeing a nail driven into the skull
of another, “My husband, my husband” (Heywood 58). What renders Heywood’s
defense central to my argument is his emphasis upon the body to start, but more
importantly, Heywood’s claims about the theater’s ability to teach or to instruct early
modern audiences depends less upon morality and more upon an emotional connection.
Old profit is thus being utilized as a continued discourse, perhaps now a residual rather
25

than the dominant, but one that depends upon a new materiality that allows for emotional
exchange. In “The Author to his Booke,” just before “An Apologie,” Heywood writes:

He that denyes then Theaters should be
He may as well deny a world to me (Heywood 13).

More than yet another employment of the world’s a stage metaphor, Heywood’s claim is
literal in that the stage is his job. The early modern theater, moreover, is the convergence
of the market and poetics, of art and capital. The discourse surrounding the theater, its
dangers and its gifts, continues to this day (even extending into new technologies and
mediums), and we can certainly see the continued struggle over the poet’s purpose in
seventeenth century criticism.
In chapter two I read Shakespeare, hailed by Jonson as the poet/playwright “[...] not
of an age, but for all time!,” revels in the capital craft. Moving away from the Quintilian
vir bonus in favor of an all-inclusive audience, Shakespeare’s stage might also indicate
the Horation importance of contextualization. Greater diversity of character and theme
would be the result, and indeed we’ll see such diversity in my second chapter, an
exploration of three works: The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night,
or What You Will. The subjects of these plays are similar: the proper bodies are sought
and union is the end result, (re)establishing proper economic and cultural lines. At first
glance the difference between Jonson and Shakespeare might appear to be rather clear
cut: resistance and acceptance, negative and positive, failure and success. As the
negative emotions bought about in Merchant will reveal, both poets produce drama
spanning the emotional spectrum.
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Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598) opens with the merchant Antonio's
declaration of sadness. “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad” (Shakespeare, Merchant
I.i.1). The opening of the play thus sets the stage for sadness amidst the market. The
Merchant is also a transitional play in space, or a play that transitions from Venice to
Belmont, Belmont to Venice, and back again. And while the play is ostensibly about a
pound of flesh and the threat of trans-acting such a piece from the male body, it is also a
play about transcending bodies. We might read this play, then, about a creditor seeking
his payment on a loan in flesh as demonstrative of the Early Modern anxiety over the
body and consciousness within emerging capitalism. The space of exchange, the market,
is explored with reference to its the subjugation of its subjects. More simply, but also an
Early Modern concern, particularly in terms of health, how do things move from one
body to another? Portia’s father’s death means that Portia, the lovely daughter and
heiress, will gain a husband to replace him, her dead father, only upon his, the proper
suitor’s, choosing the appropriate casket. As decided by her father, Portia is to marry the
suitor who selects the casket (there are three: silver, gold, and lead) that has an image of
her hidden inside it. And the right selection means a tremendous financial transaction,
from Portia’s dead father to Portia and then on to her new/now-husband. Moreover, the
transfer of wealth from one to another allows the fortune-hunter, Bassanio, to return the
money the merchant, Antonio, lent him and thus for Antonio to guard his flesh intact, but
only after Portia secures the act via her transgendered machinations, including the
transfer of one ring to another. The process of transfer, I want to argue, perhaps like the
signifying rings that pass from one character to another, is also heavily invested in an
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emotional transaction. The market can thus be read as an emotional impetus maintained
by an emerging discourse of gender reversal or instability.
The instability of the profit inside pleasure model is demonstrated in both As You
Like It (1598-1600) and Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1600). Class is central to the
latter, but more importantly, concern over the need for bodies and minds to fit
(particularly when in love) can be seen in the privileging of the body in its altered form.
As You Like It, while in some ways the counter to Jonson’s Epicoene, with the unveiling
of a female body as the unraveling of the knot, emphasizes pleasure and the body even as
it profits. Rosalind embodies the continued pleasure of disguise and instability, while at
the same time she instructs the male lover. Not one but four marriages are made in the
end, all of which depend on the Rosalind’s reversal of gender. Matching, then, the proper
lovers, both in terms of passion and in terms of class, produces the pleasure of the play.
And in As You Like It, Shakespeare further engages his audience by having Rosalind
unmasked, as the (boy) actor address the audience in the Epilogue:
If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me,
complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as
many have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind
offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell (Shakespeare, As You 14-
9).

While stressing the pleasure of the body regardless of gender (or mind?), the (boy)actor/
Rosalind/Ganymede also seeks profit in applause, a profit grounded in gain. Of course,
both plays revel in the pleasure of profit on the sly. The former provides a slippery
Cesario/Viola to move between a loving couple, and the latter offers an equally adept
Ganymede/Rosalind as ‘profits’ of love, as teachers of the passion. And while the
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heterosexual pairings seem to emphasize the need to teach the male to love the female,
each play also works in and around single sex love. The genre of these two pieces is
central to the task - comedy set either in a time of revelry or freedom, and the pastoral.
The liberating qualities of such a space seem to allow for greater privileging of pleasure
while profit is wrapped up in both. And finally, the play itself opens with the staging of
inheritance fought out through a wrestling match. In this way, economic matters are once
again reduced to bodies, and the pleasure of the audience comes in the victory of the
morally sound over the avaricious and corrupt. The pleasure suggested by the pairing of
bodies in matrimony, is a pleasure forestalled. The real pleasure would come after the
play when the characters, were they to continue as real beings, consummate their love.
For the anti-theatricalists, the idea of pleasure forestalled is dangerous as it may
encourage or teach audience members to seek such pleasure after the play. With
Shakespeare, the suggested pleasure is positive, but with Jonson, tellingly, his suggested
pleasure is much more negative, or even punitive.
Read as an exploration of the soul and passion, Shakespeare begins Twelfth Night
with an impassioned Orsino, and goes on to explore passion via Viola, Olivia, Toby,
Andrew, Feste, Maria, Malvolio, Sebastian, and Antonio. I want to suggest a both/and
reading that is more inclusive of the play’s ambiguities and manipulations of spirit,
action, appetite, and desire. Thus, before Feste’s song closes the play, Orsino ends it by
commanding Cesario (Viola’s male [dis]guise):

29

Cesario, come–
For so shall you be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen (Shakespeare , Twelfth
V.i.372-5).

In refusing to re-garb Cesario in her natural state as Viola, Shakespeare privileges the
pleasure of the instability. Orsino prefers the unknown of unfixed over the knowable.
Unknown bodies are more pleasurable bodies. The instability in marriage is further
intensified by Olivia’s decision to marry Sebastian, a man she has no knowledge of
whatsoever, but to whom she proffers her body and state, an immense material gain for
Sebastian, solely because of his likeness, his proximity by appearance and blood, to her
object of desire, Cesario, Viola in male drag. In an economic sense, Shakespeare
provides two for the price of one: the appearance of the twin means not one but two
marriages. Orsino’s affirmation of Sebastian’s noble blood–“Be not amazed. Right
noble is his blood” (Shakespeare, Twelfth V.i.257)– ensures new profit for the twins
(who are bereft of fortune in a new land), and an old profit in the pairing of similar
classes (via blood). The anticipated pleasure of the marriages to come, ends the play in
an explosion of anticipated delight, primarily physical. Here and in the excitement of
Olivia’s promise to punish those who punished Malvolio, allowing him in fact, to be the
“plaintiff and the judge,” the pleasure is even further forestalled through the image of
delayed punishment. In these examples we see the prolonging of confusion in the bodily
sense, with promise of their righting in the word, speech, or text. The move from the
social space of the stage to the individual space of the reader will be addressed in the last
chapter, chapter four, but the idea of prolonged pleasure across a text alone with one’s
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own imagination is beginning to take shape. It may not take material shape and practice
until late in the seventeenth century, but it is being suggested early in that same century.
If Shakespeare wrote for us all, then Ben Jonson wrote specifically for the noble
and learned man. My third chapter is devoted entirely to Jonson and a reading of three of
his plays, all of which posit economics at the forefront and revolve around bodily
manipulation as the solution. For Jonson, the emerging material stage is troublesome.
Returning to the methodology of Raymond Williams, we might recast Jonson then in the
dominant discourse when in Horation mode, and when his audience “understands.” In
contrast, I am suggesting we read Jonson as a residual discourse when he attacks or
disregards his “vulgar” viewers. In Jonson’s satiric comedies we can see the instability
of the profit and pleasure paradigm and its dependency upon the body as both a site of
education and delight, and a space for pain, penetration, movement, and liberation. The
body as subject is rendered subject to capital in all of these plays, but certainly most
clearly so in Volpone. The pleasure Jonson so vividly and variously writes out, is also
ambiguously critical of its very audience, implicating them in responsibility, yet catering
explicitly to them all the while. Jonson’s staging of these bodily spectacles within a
market economy further problematizes the cost, delight, and lesson. In Volpone, or The
Fox (1606), for example, Jonson punishes the delightful Volpone only after he threatens
to exchange the possibility of his inheritance, with the fine flesh of the fair Celia. Even
then, at the moment the body is made available, Volpone spews Ovidian transformations
instead of bodily enacting his own upon Celia. And in the end, punishment is rendered
bodily upon both Volpone and Mosca, exerting a subjective and subjecting force upon
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audience members, depending on their alignment to the respective characters. Jonson’s
pleasure of the body is both the move toward union, and the destruction of bad bodies
and subjects.

Jonson’s Epicoene (1609), in like manner, posits a (fe)male body at the climax of
inheritance, at the very point of exchange. Having tricked Morose into marrying a
seemingly silent Epicene, Dauphine is able to undo the marriage by revealing her to be a
boy, but only at the price of Morose’s inheritance. The pleasure of the play comes then
in the exposure of Morose and his desire for a silent woman. The delight of exposure
then becomes, for Dauphine, capital gain, and for the audience, just reward and
heightened pleasure. Dauphine, in the end, encourages the audience to applaud for
Morose: “It may be the noise will cure him, at least please him” (Jonson, Epicene
V.iv.227). Dauphine, a rather unsavory figure in his quest for his uncle’s inheritance,
becomes the hero of the play through the deception of the stingy Morose. Applause at
this point is in some ways for his victory, Dauphine’s, muddling the old profit and
championing the new. The space of the stage and the space of the home, as was done in
Volpone, becomes subject to economic concerns. Bodies, generally female but played by
boys and sometimes reverting from one to the other in the play and on the stage, also
suggest a solution, but frequently not the solution expected. With the end of the staging
of the play and the pleasing of the actor who plays Morose, Jonson again reverts to a
direct address that breaks the boundaries of the stage, privileging pleasure in addition to
the new profit. It is difficult, however, not to read the ridicule of Morose as Jonson’s

32

holding on to the old profit, as his attempt to teach the audience not to be so dim, dumb,
rigid, or, ironically, old.
And in Bartholomew Fair (1614), we are presented with a market space that
confounds profit and pleasure at the expense of the body. The Prologues to all of these
plays are important, but it is here that Jonson explicitly invokes the voice of the critic as
commensurate with the price of her ticket. The set of a fair (a literal interpretation of the
world as stage) affords a different space and place, and here Jonson posits characters
seeking to traverse class at both ends of the spectrum: Justice Overdo dresses like a
madman while Zeal-of-the-land Busy, Winwife, and Quarlous all attempt to move up
through marriage. In the end, Jonson does provide a marriage, with Master Winwife and
Mistress Grace, but it’s Mistress Grace, as a ward of the state, who rises up in this union.
Justice also disguises himself so as to discover and unearth injustice, but is silenced in the
end by his own wife’s vomit and Quarlous, who orders the party to celebrate the marriage
at Justice Overdo’s house. These characters are then made subjects themselves as they
watch Littlewit’s puppet show. The end includes the puppet flashing Busy as he attempts
to denounce the theatre for its cross-dressing representations. The beauty here is the way
the flashing of the puppet calls into question gender entirely, suggesting that desire is but
what the desiring gaze wants it to be. The result is that the sin is in the eye of the
beholder (the audience), not the actor, nor the playwright. This is central to desire and
the self, and Busy is silenced by this unveiling: “Let it go on, for I am changed, and will
become a beholder/With you!” (Jonson, Fair V.v.105-6). Again, we have a space and
play of pleasure that, while grounded in instruction, in this case a challenging of the
33

contemporary critics of the stage, is explicitly linked to even greater pleasure. The
feelings Jonson slips into the audience are much like the fear and pity early modern
critics so ardently seek to align with Horace in teaching morality. The emerging
discourse of the body works in conjunction with a dominant discourse of old profit.
Jonson, as the poet who succeeded critically but failed at the market level, is emblematic
of the ways by which early modern poets struggled with a changing artistic system, one
coming to be a market. Although Jonson holds on to the morality of the rhetorical stage
he so ardently imitates, he also calls that space (and himself) into question.
And finally, at the end of the English early modern period, the nature of the art
changes profoundly with the closing of the theatre, their re-opening, and the emergence
of a new generic form, the “closet drama.” My fourth and final chapter attempts to come
to terms with these changing generic forms and the undoing of the artistic model at the
close of the seventeenth century, through writers like Sir William Davenant, Margaret
Cavendish, and John Milton. New genres like the “closet drama,” and the reopening of
the theatre, re-position the problem of the body from the social market of the theatre to a
purchased and individual reader’s imagination and experience. The problem of the body,
I argue, across the early modern poetic market, becomes a subjective and internalized
process of self-discovery. To go to the theater is a pleasurable education that far exceeds
the bounds of sanctified language and knowledge bound within the tethered body of a
book. Of course, the danger of books is also a source of concern in the early modern era
for the private reading experience offers, in addition to the obvious new profit,
tremendous possibility for old profit. And dangerous though it may be, the pleasure may
34

indeed surpass the profit, at both the monetary and the instructional levels. The body is
also less subject to external forces in these works, much like the subjects of the work are
much less uniform. The space of the art is also infinitely vast as it becomes no longer the
regulated, uniform, certain space of the theater, whichever it might be, but rather, the
place in which the purchaser elects to read and that reader’s imagination.
The theaters closed in 1642, but some small theaters did exist during the
Restoration. During the Interregnum, more importantly, the theaters were populated
primarily by the higher social order. Entering then into the long eighteenth century, new
generic forms appear as a result of capitalism and an increasingly subjective, both in the
individual and collective sense of the word, culture. Contemporary critics generally posit
the advent of the novel with the long eighteenth century. I open my fourth and final
chapter by returning to the question of how to write drama, and the ongoing critical
engagement of Horace’s “profit” and “pleasure.” John Dryden, Thomas Rymer, and John
Dennis choose to live as writers, to varying degrees of success. The option alone reveals
the growing importance of the written word, in contrast with the privileging of the stage,
and the tremendous changes brought about within the century.
An important part of the generic development is the “closet drama.” I start with a
play by William Davenant, who claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son and wrote
drama for private performance as rebellion. Davenant mines the poets of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean era to reconstruct a popular theatre at a higher price. I then turn to
Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1662) and Milton’s Samson Agonistes
(1671) for an exploration of a closet drama, or plays allegedly not intended for staging.
35

Cavendish dresses up her “old profit” in the guise of “new profit,” yet the two collapse
and overleap each other, in the same way her genders incessantly pop in and out of one
another. Milton’s Samson is most notable for the way by which it depends upon the
reader’s imagination to envision Samson’s vengeance enacted off-stage (and this stage
already set within the mind). The fracturing of the subject into many is a direct result of
capitalism, one that affords such an opportunity through one of the very processes that
has allowed its own multiplication and amplification–art. Notably, the imagination of the
reader and not the stage is the space in which the body explodes into so many others.
The changing nature of poetry in the context I have provided reveals the anxiety
and concern over an artistic model in flux. The Roman model shifts with the discovery
of the Greek and with the new market economy. While Douglas Bruster argues today for
a “poetics of the market,” it is important to understand that market as an emerging force,
one that grows out of, among other things, competing Roman and Greek artistic models.
Bruce Smith argues for Jonson’s (commercial or popular culture) failure as a result of his
Horation conception, and Shakespeare’s success, precisely because of his Aristotelian
and material sense. In addition, the emphasis placed upon catharsis and hamartia, as well
as the overarching concept of unity, terms culled from Aristotle, posits the result and
function of the play within, be it early modern or contemporary, the body. That is to say,
economics, rhetoric, and play converge upon the body. Or, the anxiety over pleasure,
success, and power, to name a few, can be seen in the instability of the body represented
on stage across the period. The theater develops from a make-shift playing spaces to
purposefully built amphitheaters, and on to indoor theaters adapted specifically for the
36

stage. The materiality of the emerging English early modern period parallels a culture
coming to terms with new capitalist frameworks, new conceptions of the self and being,
and a stage upon which to play. The move from opens space to a closed, indoor room,
also works in the opposite direction as the imagination grows. At the level of art and the
idea, the facile claim is that capitalism adulterates art. Marxist criticism, at a deeper
level, claims the ideological framework to supersede the subject. But on the contrary, as
we read capitalism in the art, we can see in the explosion of production in the early
modern period the very clear benefits. Moreover, it is through art that often the subject
finds herself, or the subjects find themselves; the framework of capitalism, while
rendering that subject at times unclear and devoid of self, is thus both productive and
limiting. The early modern stage affords us space, bodies, and subjects in, around, and
throughout emerging capitalist discourse: subjects stamping themselves as they see fit.
Moreover, as we can see across the period, capitalism in fact serves as the impetus for art
that survives to this very day. Indeed, reading these plays along structures of feeling
might allow new ways to re-conceive the subject as we search for ourselves amidst
myriad competing models.

37

Introduction Endnotes

1
This and all future citations of Jonson will be taken from Ben Jonson: The Alchemist
and Other Plays. Ed. Gordon Campbell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

2
I define capitalism broadly as a market-based commodity-producing economic system
controlled by capital.

3
This and all future citations of Jonson will be taken from The Norton Shakespeare. Eds.
Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

4
I am citing the Garland Series photo-facsimile of Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for
Actors. Further citation comes from the same source.

38

Chapter One

(Not) For Profit Playing

Before the opening of the commercial theater in 1576, plays were performed in
schools and the inns of court. How different were these plays? In the last decade, a
number of compilations devoted to early modern drama before the advent of the
commercial theater have appeared. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert for example,
ask similar questions in their compilation, Early Modern Academic Drama. Although we
still have seventy-one extant university plays, they are both read and performed far less
than the commercial plays that continue to fill theaters, academic syllabi, and (arguably)
bookstore shelves (Walker and Streufert, “Introduction” 14). Before English drama
exploded upon the commercial stage, poets revived classical poetry and drama as a means
of instruction. Art, based on and around Attic precursors, was used to teach. As Ursula
Potter argues in her “Performing Arts in the Tudor Classroom,” the development of
public schooling and the privileging of drama in early modern pedagogy set the stage of
the rise of the commercial theater with the Elizabethan and Stuart playwrights (Potter
162). Moreover, the rise of the public school and its emphasis upon drama contributes
significantly to the explosion of the stage as a commercial venture.
1
Returning to the pre-
commercial theater, I want to read particular moments within the plays as demonstrative
of the shifting Horation model. This opening chapter, then, serves as a starting point for
39

what will become a closer examination in the second and third chapters of the
convergence of the stage, the market, and human imagination in the Elizabethan period’s
two dominant poets: the widely successful and popular William Shakespeare, and the
critically successful Ben Jonson.
Because of its performance nature, our tracing and analyzing early modern
literature is bound to be perpetually delayed by certain logistical, temporal, and
intellectual obstacles. Theater for us thus begins in print, and the first question is why do
plays start getting printed in the sixteenth century? The early English printers were
William Caxton and Wynken de Worde, but Caxton chose not to print dramatic texts.
John Rastell printed the first dramatic text between 1512 and 1516, the interlude Fulgens
and Lucrece. By 1516, de Worde had printed Hick Scorner and Richard Pynson, who
normally printed legal or religious material, printed the first of his two editions of
Everyman. Across the early modern period, Ben Jonson’s folio printing of his Works in
1616 is often read as a benchmark for the publication of literary drama. Shakespeare’s
First Folio was printed seven years later in 1623 and across the seventeenth century we
see a steady increase in printing, selling, and reading play texts. Printing Pleasing Profit
looks at the shapeshifting body in play texts as a result of the Horation model, newly
emergent early modern capitalism, and the expanding human imagination.
The stage between 1485 and 1590 is often overlooked, which renders confusing
the leap from Greek tragedy, epic poems, religious cycles and Everyman to Shakespeare
and Marlowe. Lloyd Edward Kermode, Jason Scott-Warren, and Martine van Elk, who
edit another recent compilation, Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485-1590, New
40

Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy, aim to establish the plays themselves
as central in the understanding of literature and history, not in comparison with the
golden age of Elizabethan theater. What Kermode and others are asking is essentially
what do we do with these early plays? Although it has been the practice, ignoring them is
not the answer. Taking them on means expanding the canon. Moreover, engaging with
late fifteenth and early sixteenth century drama means locating it in terms of period and
genre. Is the material late medieval or early Renaissance? As Kermode writes in the
Introduction: “Or are these texts early modern, witnessing the birthpangs of phenomena
that would come to maturity in the modern world, such as science and secularization,
capitalism and colonialism?” (3). I would argue the attempt to secularize the work today
is a direct result of the problem of time and the distance, then and now, creation and
reception. Whether secularization is possible is a different topic, one that I forgo for the
most part here. Instead, I want to focus on the more common receptive practice
involving the distinctions between instruction and pleasure in newly emerging dramatic
form.
2
I will emphasize several school and college comedies, but will begin with a
tragedy performed before the court, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc
(1562). From there, I will turn to plays written for and performed in the schools and
colleges: Ralph Roister Doister (1545-52), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1552-63), and Jack
Juggler (1553-1558). Although these comedies tend to rely on “old profit,” they also
recognize the need for pleasure. Moreover, the striking dependence upon the body points
to personal and cultural concerns about being human in early modern England. Situating
sixteenth century pre-commercial drama between the medieval and early modern
41

commercial theater posits the human subject somewhere between selfless and errant
(medieval) and autonomous and expansive (liberal humanist).
3
The questions that drive
my analysis are questions concerning play texts, economics, and subjectivity. What sort
of solutions do these plays offer regarding the changing economic system? How does the
model for the play function within different contexts? The choice of instruction,
pleasure, and/or profit develops out of the market. Part of what is at stake in this project
is the representation of the subject in art as a market. How do we represent ourselves in
art that sells? This chapter is devoted to the academic context before the advent of the
commercial theater, but I still want to ask, in what manner might we see the early modern
human imagination at work or in process?

Old Profit and the Inns of Court

Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) and Thomas Norton (1530-84), was
first presented at the Inner Temple, and then performed before the Queen at Whitehall on
January 18, 1562. Alfred Harbage, in his seminal collection Annals of English Drama
975-1700, posits the earliest play text to be the 1565 Folio. An imitation of Senecan
tragic form, vestiges of the classics can be seen in the use of the chorus, the names of the
characters, and allusions. The chorus, for example, always ends each act with a
recapitulation of the action, and a dumbshow (a nod to the Italian stage as well as a
medieval influence) opens each act, indicating what is about to happen. Nevertheless,
42

Gorboduc is England’s earliest surviving five-act play in blank verse English.
6
Relying
heavily upon the classics, the “old profit” is about morality: timing and honor. Fraser
and Rabkin, the editors of Drama of the English Renaissance, claim the title page
attributes the first three acts to Norton and the remainder to Sackville, but they also note
the unlikeliness of such a clear split (81).
7
Norton was a Puritan and averse to absolute
monarchy, whereas Sackville was of noble birth and a royalist. Sackville was elected to
the House of Commons in 1558 and eventually became the Baron of Buckhurst and the
Earl of Dorset. To further illustrate his aristocratic background, Sir Richard Sackville.
Thomas Sackville’s father, was a first cousin of Ann Boleyn (Zim n. pag.). Thomas
Norton, on the hand, was born the son of a grocer in London. Norton, nonetheless
graduated from Cambridge and was later admitted to the Inner Temple, where he would
have met Sackville. In 1571, Norton became a member of the House of Commons after
being appointed remembrancer to the lord mayor of London. Norton was an active
member of Parliament and a pamphleteer. However, in a move that seems peculiarly out
of place for the co-author of a play about diplomacy and statesmanship, Norton appears
to have offended the Queen by speaking out about the Queen’s last marriage proposal and
consequently spent several months in the Tower (Axton, “Norton” n. pag.). The
questions then that the play asks at the broadest level about legitimacy, absolute rule, and
enforcement are very real questions for which in real life, not only the audience, but also
the poets sought answers. The tension between the playwrights and the struggle between
the throne and the people in the play foreshadows an England soon to be ensconced in a
revolution of its own.
43

Critics tend to agree that inns of court drama presents political counsel. More
specifically, the argument concerning the level of political involvement ranges from the
general notion of concern over succession to specifically who the Queen ought to marry.
Rather than reading the play text alone, Gorboduc has been analyzed as part of a
performance event at Whitehall and in the Inner Temple, including the masque, Beauty
and Desire. Early Modern critic Marie Caxton argues the play champions Sir Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Greg Walker goes a step further, arguing the play was an
attempt to persuade Elizabeth I to marry Robert Dudley over Eric XIV, king of Sweden.
Renaissance scholar Joel B. Altman argues the play to be a Protestant attempt to pressure
Elizabeth into naming Lady Catherine Grey as the successor. Pushing deeper, Norman
Jones and Paul Whitfield White argue the play not only urges Elizabeth to name Lady
Catherine Grey as heir, but also for Elizabeth to marry Robert Dudley. And finally,
literary criticTerry Reilly returns to the play as both performance and text, arguing that
the anachronistic inclusion of Parliament at the play’s end widens the discussion, asking
new questions about the broader subject of inheritance and legality.
8
I, too, read the
tragedy as didactic in nature. And while I agree with the claim that the play is an attempt
to sway Queen Elizabeth to solve the problem of succession, like Reilly, I find there to be
something more at stake. The fixity of the bodies, in addition to the emphasis on “old
profit” and the historical context situating the play’s performance amongst royalty and
nobility, suggests anxiety over a changing populace.
The delight here is really in the education. No violence is shown onstage, as
Horace would have it, so much of the action is counsel. In the first act, after Gorboduc
44

unveils his plan to pass off his kingdom to his sons, Arostos, Philander, and Eubulus each
off advice. Arostos begins:
And this is much and asketh great advice.
But for my part, my sovereign lord and king,
This do I think [...] (Fraser and Rabkin I.ii.76-9).
9

The advice that Arostos, Philander, and Eubulus offer takes into account differing points
of view on how to respond to the King’s idea. But even in responding, much like the way
the play has been read as a moot, or as a secularized example for inns of court men of law
and nobility, the characters and bodies remain static. I am forgoing the rather lengthy
advice proffered, simply to demonstrate the structure of the work. Philander then
follows:
In part I think as hath been said before;
In part, again, my mind is otherwise [...] (I.ii.148-9).

The play is thus constructed around action that takes betweens scenes, allowing for the
negotiation or education of central figures (and the audience) as the scene itself, and the
play. Not far removed from the morality play, Sackville and Norton are engaged with a
dominant discourse heavily reliant upon “old profit.” The dominant discourse is counsel
to the King, and even more important in its later printings and performances, counsel to
the Queen. Characters as counsel are fixed or static in their positions. How does one
address and discuss matters with royalty?
Of central importance to my argument is the elevated class of the inns of court
audience. The difference in the bawdy (and bodily) representation in this play, as
compared to Jacke Juggler, Udall’s Roister Doister and Mr. S.’s Gammer Gurton’s
45

Needle, is marked: the play’s narrative engine, as literary critic Peter Brooks would write
it, is the giving of advice, or “old profit.” Gorboduc, King of Britain, while still living,
decides to divide his kingdom between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Porrex, the
younger, kills the older Ferrex, only to have Videna, the Queen, kill him. She loved
Ferrex more. The people, enraged, kill both the King and Queen, and civil war ensues.
With an audience comprised of nobility, the central figures are not the royal family, but
rather, the noble men who give advice, both good and bad. Dordan, for example,
assigned by the King to Ferrex, and Philander, advising Porrex, gives honest and sage
advice the two brothers choose not to heed. The nobility in the audience would see these
two, Dordan and Philander, as like in kind to them, while the narrative also posits them in
the prized and wise position. The “old profit” is the lengthy description of the chaos at
the end of the play: “This, this ensues when noble men fail/In loyal troth, and subjects
will be kings” (V.ii.244-5). Primogeniture is repositioned within a broader framework in
the end: “[...] Yet must God in fine restore/This noble crown unto the lawful heir;/For
right will always live and rise at length,/But wrong can never take deep root to last”
(V.ii.276-9). For a noble audience, and certainly for the Queen, the concepts of birth,
royalty, inheritance and time make perfect sense. In both instances, the pleasure of art
was the process of edification, the “old profit.”
Sackville and Norton, who are also instructing the nobility of the audience how to
be, seem not to be concerned with the edification of desire, nor are they much interested
in pleasure. Historian Keith Wrightson breaks early modern society into four sorts of
people: gentlemen (including nobility and knights), citizens or burgesses (freemen and
46

elected officials), yeomen (who are free but generally speaking work the land in small
parcels), and laborers (tied to the landowners and farms for life). The biggest division is
between the last of the four sections and all the rest, with perhaps the most uncertain
barrier between the upper two. As it would be gentlemen, citizens, and burgesses
viewing Gorboduc, the play’s “profit” is loyalty, honesty, and diplomacy. For the
younger sons of aristocrats, and possibly the upwardly mobile sons of merchants and
yeomen, the inns of court provided further instruction in what we might today call
networking. Using Horace and Cicero, early modern critics like Francesco Robortello
recast the noble man as a moral man, therefore accommodating early modern inns of
court audiences, not all of whom came from nobility. As Bruce Smith writes in Ancient
Scripts: “Like school and colleges, the inns of court enacted plays as a ritual for
affirming the conservative moral and political values that undergirded society at large”
(Smith, Scripts 111). Gorboduc, a play about statesmanship, was presented in a space
specifically established for men who make up the court. At the end of the educational
process, plays such as this generalize and re-present life as it may well soon be. An
important part of offering the proper advice to someone like the king is a trustworthy and
stable disposition, or character. The men in the audience have thus travelled from
“school to college to inns of court to the court of the realm” (115). This is most
appropriately framed in triplicate when Gorboduc was performed at Whitehall before
Queen Elizabeth. We can see in Sackville and Norton the various routes by which these
young men made the journey. In such an environment, the old blood is clearly mixing
with a new blood, which pits the landed “old profit” against the moneyed “new profit.”
47

Although Gorboduc was first printed in 1565, it was printed again in 1570 as
Ferrex and Porrex, and then again in 1590 (perhaps with both titles). My version
includes the addition - “The Printer to the Reader” - in which the play is represented as a
raped and sullied woman who has been cleaned up and dressed up (in a black and white
gown or words) for the reader’s pleasure. The notion of the reader in contrast to the
audience member is an emerging discourse that can be seen as some sort of trajectory
toward the long eighteenth century (and increased individual readership, not to mention
the advent of the novel). I do not wish to posit here, however, a synchronic arc moving
from none to common practice, in terms of readership. Even then, as well as now, people
both go to the theatre, and they read books. While the practice is in flux, the feelings
about each practice, and the feelings that emerge from the art of different periods, may
offer some insight into a time and culture long gone.

Old Profit and the School Comedy

Returning to my focus on the Horation model and the transition from private to
commercial theater, I want to argue that the commercial theater’s emphasis upon the
shapeshifting body as a privileging of pleasure for financial profit has its roots in a pre-
commercial theater that similarly begins to focus upon the body even before the
commercial stage explodes upon the scene in 1576. Three comedies in school and college
48

settings are Ralph Roister Doister (1545-52), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1552-63), and
Jack Juggler (1553-1558). As previously mentioned, recent critics have challenged us to
expand the canon, and to read (and write) about early modern, pre-commercial drama on
it sown merit. The common reception of Ralph has been about sources, both for the play
and as a source for Shakespeare. Gammer has received all sorts of critical attention,
starting with form, but including analysis centered on sex, gender, economics, and even
scatology. Of the three, Jack has received the least attention. Tracey Sedinger makes an
insightful religious argument for the play as an investigation of the question of
transubstantiation. The exact location of Ralph’s early staging is uncertain. Nicholas
Udall, educated at Winchester and Oxford, was appointed Headmaster at Eton College in
1534, so it most likely saw its first staging there. Based upon performance history,
however, we do know that Ralph was performed at Windsor, before King Edward VI, in
1552. Although the Stationer’s Register indicates Gammer Gurton’s Needle to have been
printed in 1575, we generally agree upon William Stevenson as the author and the earliest
performances having been at Christ’s College, Cambridge (Sedinger 239-69). The date
and exact location of Jack Juggler is uncertain, but William Tydeman posits a school
setting and the source texts as the 1565-9 quartos (Tydeman 9-44). The play was printed
by Willam Copland and entered into the Stationer’s Register between 1562 and 1563, but
critics generally agree in composition around 1550 to 1552. Several notable critics
attribute the play to Nicholas Udall, including Frederick Boas, Marie Axton, and Paul
Whitfield White (Sedinger 239-69).
49

The school comedies build on the Classical tradition. The early modern
pedagogical tradition of emulation meant that Classical plays, as well as texts, were
revised (possibly rewritten) and, more importantly, re-presented in the schools. Nicholas
Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister is a school play based on Miles Gloriosus by Plautus and
Terence’s Eunuchus. In the Prologue, Udall grounds the play in a Latin context, alluding
to both Plautus and Terence, even as he emphasizes mirth.
For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, ad causeth health.
Mirth recreates our spirites and voydeth pensivenesse […] (Udall 8-9).

In this moment we can see Udall’s anxiety over having chosen to privilege mirth as a
means of education. At the same time, Udall is attempting to reconcile pleasure with
profit. Another example can be found near the end of the play, when Christian, alone on
stage, bemoans the difficulty in leading straight and proper lives: “[...] O Lorde, howe
necessarie it is nowe of dayes,/That eche bodie live uprightly all maner wayes” (Udall
1883). Christian Custance, a wealthy widow, is awaiting the return of her suitor, the
merchant, Gawyn Goodluck. Christian’s reputation is beginning to suffer because of
Ralph Roister Doister’s attempts to court her. Setting aside the importance of Christian’s
status of wealth as a widow, as well as Gawyn’s identification as a merchant, what Udall
is echoing is the Horation model, and I cite Ben Jonson’s seventeenth century translation:
Poets would either profit, or delight,
Or mixing sweet, and fit, teach life the right (Jonson, Timber 477-8).

Udall is teaching “life the right.” As Christian so aptly illustrates (as does the genre of
comedy), living properly is difficult and people tend to be much more interested in those
who do not live upright lives. The play as a means of edification suggests to its school-
50

boy audience that there is a proper way to live. Love and courtship trouble “life the
right,” for each is both dangerous and absurd.
10
In closing, Udall restores propriety along
class lines. Omnes states: “God graunt the nobilitie hir to serve and love,/With all the
whole commontie as doth them/behove” (Udall 2013). Omnes, the spokesman for all, is
directly addressing the Queen, thus the scene is classed and hierarchy reestablished. The
“commontie” is the commonwealth and the population of school boys. Part of the proper
life depends upon people remaining in their respective classes, and the school boy
audience in the 1550s and 1560s will come to see and probably be part of the more
diverse class and audience in seventeenth century London.
William Stevenson also seeks to blend pleasure with “old profit.” In Gammer
Gurton’s Needle, Diccon addresses the audience directly, preparing them for the
resolution. Stevenson connects the audience to the characters through direct address.
But loke what lieth in both their harts ye ar like
sure to have it (Stevenson II.iii.475).

The “old profit” of the play is that the thing you seek is right before your eyes.
Stevenson is thus presenting a pleasurable lesson, or moral, and relying upon the
Horation “old profit” for drama as a space of instruction. In a rare moment of reflexivity,
Stevenson presents a pedagogical moment in which Hodge pledges to follow Diccon and
“to kepe his consaile close/And always me to dispose/To worke that his pleasure is”
(II.i.354-6). In lieu of a book on which he might make the oath, Hodge kisses Diccon’s
“breeche,” or backside. I say reflexivity as this moment of oaths and repetition is likely
to have been repeated in a similar fashion within the classroom. As critics have discussed
elsewhere, in lieu of a kiss, early modern masters would more likely have employed a
51

paddle or switch. At the end of the play, a slap instead of a kiss will in fact reveal the
titular object in Hodge’s pants. But in this instance, delight is to be had in the emulation
of the early modern pedagogy.
11
Not only is Diccon amusing in his manipulation of the
less than sharp Hodge, but Stevenson also has Hodge, at this point, run out of the room
with diarrhea. The “old profit” is driven home, however solidly, by the weakness of the
bowels and the scatological delight of the schoolboy audience. It may well be a dirty
mix, but it’s also a successful one, because Hodge changes his pants back into the pair
that Gammer had been working on when she lost her needle.
And finally, the anonymous Jack Juggler begins with Latin from Cato. The Latin
offered in the Prologue as the very first words of the play reveals the early modern effort
to emulate Classsical models. Renaissance critic Tydeman translates the Latin as: “Now
and then introduce some enjoyment into your serious concerns/To ensure that you can
submit them to any toil willingly” (372). An allusion to Cato, the central idea echoes
Horace. Education and advancement requires, at the very least, a little bit of pleasure.
Ovid, Plutarch, Socrates, Cato, Cicero and Plautus, are also cited in the opening. The
notion of a double is taken from Plautus, but the interrogation of self in the early modern
signals the expanding human imagination. Although the idea of the double is certainly
not novel, and the double tale persists to this day, what is new is the focus on the subject
and the notion of an individual self. What we get to see in this example is the servant
losing his mind. In case early modern viewers miss it, the Epilogue takes the stage to
recount the servant’s plight.

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As you sawe right now by example playne,
Another felowe being a counterfeat page
Brought the gentylman’s servaunt out of his braine
And made hym graunt that himselfe was fallen in
dotage […] (Jack 1049-52).

The example played upon the stage is “counterfeat” in that his character is fraudulent.
The character, not the person, is not what he appears to be. In passing himself off as
another, he produces madness in the person he purports to be. The servant “out of his
braine” is insane, or in “dotage.” Just over half of the play involves the servant Jenkine
and Jacke, dressed alike. The second half has Jenkine speaking with his master,
Boungrace, and his mistress, Dame Coye. Jack calls into question possibility of
shapeshifting by presenting two characters playing the same role, at the same time.
Shakespeare and Jonson will also present characters who take on others roles, but not
usually two competing figures on stage at the same time. What strikes me nonetheless is
the attempt to show madness and a subject who is no longer sane. The Epilogue’s
explanation indicates that the poet is anxious about the performance of insanity and its
representation. Both Shakespeare and Jonson will use characters who present themselves
as others, albeit not another character in the same play, without the need for explanation.
More importantly, for them (and particularly for Shakespeare) the playing of others turns
out to be both pleasurable and profitable.

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New Profit and the School Comedy

As I demonstrate above, the Horation model for the school comedies tends to rely
upon “old profit.” At the same time and to a greater extant than had been done in the
past, playwrights are beginning to emphasize the “new profit,” namely in the sense of
pleasure. The “new profit” can be read across pleasure, commodities, print, and bodies.

Pleasure

The prologues to both Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton’s Needle
privilege pleasure. In the Prologue to Ralph, for example, Udall goes to great lengths in
defense of mirth. The “old profit” as the instructive nature of the play, both written for
and performed (by) school boys, mixes with the new meaning of the word “profit” as
financial gain. Coupled with the stress on economics, Udall privileges delight. The
prologue sets forth the need for mirth:
For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, and causeth health.
Mirth recreates our spirites and voydeth
pensiveness,
Mirth increaseth amitie, not hindring our wealth,
Mirth is to be used both of more and lesse,
Being mixed with vertue in decent comlynesse,
As we trust no good nature can gainsay the same;
Which Mirth we intended to use, avoidyng all blame (Udall 8-14).

The play is still concerned with old profit, even though Udall opens with this call to
pleasure. Mirth means “gaiety or lightness of mood or mind, esp. as manifested in
laughter; merriment, hilarity” (OED 4a). Mirth is read as central to health and virtue, but
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only in combination with the education and growth. Wealth, that which mirth does not
hinder, means “the condition of being happy and prosperous; well-being” (OED 1). This
is particularly true of wealth from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Much like
profit, wealth comes to mean something more material around this time: “prosperity
consisting in abundance of possessions; ‘worldly goods’, valuable possessions, esp. in
great abundance: riches, affluence” (OED 3a). In Gammer, Stevenson recounts the
narrative in the Prologue, ending with the applause and celebration that should arrive at
play’s end. The prologue is self-referential as it posits the characters celebrating in the
end with ale and applause. Applause suggests the theatricality, as well as closing the
narrative engine or drive.
Theyr hartes then at rest with perfect securytie,
With a pot of good nale they stroake up thyr
Plauditie (Stevenson 18-20).

The pronoun “theyr” refers to the characters described in the summary of the play. But
“theyr” may also include the audience, and the reader. “Plauditie,” or applause, is thus
instructed and possibly received before the action of the play begins. I imagine this
moment as an uncomfortable point at which the boys viewing the play, as the Prologue
exits and Diccon enters, may well begin clapping, are thinking about clapping as they are
instructed, or merely register that a play thus calls for applause at the conclusion. In this
way, Stevenson sets off the play as a space of exercise and performance wherein the
narrative arrives at a satisfactory conclusion, thus producing applause. Ben Jonson will
improve upon this technique in Bartholomew Fair by rendering the price paid for
admission as a contract.
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We can see the new profit as pleasure manifest in moments of reflexivity. In
Ralph, Matthew is, on the one hand, the Vice figure from the medieval tradition that
precedes him, but also a figure who, much like the author, manipulates and controls the
characters of the play to produce pleasure. As Tristram Trusty claims in the later part of
the play about Matthew: “He doth it for a jest; I knowe hym out of/doubte-“ (Udall
IV.v.1597). Everything that Matthew does is for delight. Indeed, when Tristram and
Christian confront Matthew, Tristram asks if he did it “For mirth”” (Udall IV.vi.1606).
Matthew counters: “Why, do ye thinke,/Dame Custance,/That in this wowying I have
ment ought but/pastance?” (Udall IV.vi.1609). “Pastance” means amusement or pastime.
If we to take Matthew as a representative of Udall, the figure who creates and controls
the plot, then the reason for the play is pleasure. But Matthew is not the only character
who claims mirth as his purpose. In fact, Christian herself will use the argument of
pleasure to prove herself to Gawyn. “Truly, most deare spouse, nought was done but
for/pastance” (Udall V.ii.1868). Christian is a widow, and soon to be Gawyn’s wife, so
her choice of pastance may prove unsettling. However, if we keep the early modern wife
and marriage in mind, and again, here I am thinking of Chaucer as a representative of
early modern marriage before the commercial theater opens, then cuckoldry is common.
Gawyn may well be the more fortunate husband precisely because Christian is fun. In the
last scene, Matthew, Christian and Tristram agree to forgive Ralph because his stupidity
and hubris has provided them with such pleasure. Tristram proclaims: “He woulde make
us al laugh!” (V.v.1945). Matthew claims: “Why, such a/foole it is/As no man for good
pastime would forgoe or misse” (V.v.1949). In this metatheatrical moment near the
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play’s end, Udall extends the performance space to include his schoolboy audience, for
whom the foolishness and amusement of Ralph Roister Doister cannot be missed.
A similar moment arrives in Gammer when Diccon pauses for a moment to declare he
should make a play. Alone, Diccon pledges to make mirth of the situation, “good sporte”
(Stevenson II.ii.409). After cursing Hodge, Diccon self-referentially claims: “A man I
thyncke myght make a playe” (Stevenson II.ii.401). Stevenson invites his audience to
make plays themselves. Diccon thus plays the role of the school teacher who states a
good idea out loud for his students. Rather than “write,” Diccon does say “make,” which
suggests that plays are conceived of as performances, not as texts. In the school setting,
this “makes” perfect sense. Diccon does it again as he prepares the scene for battle, the
battle between Gammer and Dame Chat. Diccon directly addresses the audience,
claiming the meeting of the two women will provide both delight and financial gain.
“Their chere (durst lay money) will prove scarsly/sweete” (Stevenson II.v.552). Diccon
anticipates money first, through a dare (durst) or gambling, and then pleasure. Pleasure
would be twofold in that it would arise out of the confrontation and out of the wager.
Stevenson is privileging the “new profit,” yet he is still using the old methods. But the
pleasure of the two women meeting and fighting is, unlike what is to come in the
commercial theater, straight forward. The pleasure Diccon is anticipating is that of an
oral and physical confrontation, which happens to be between two (or more) women
(and possibly men). Albeit manipulated and contrived, the pleasure in no way depends
upon shapeshifting or mutation. The uncertainty in the arousal is solely based on what
will happen. How will they settle the dispute? What will the resolution entail? Will there
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be blows? Meta-theatricality demonstrates an increasingly complicated audience. At the
same time, it also reflects the two-fold purpose of the school play, the Horation profit and
pleasure. To transition from this scene to the next, Stevenson has musicians play music.
The playing of music is a pleasurable experience that transcends the play.
The first act is devoted to a sexual education intent on linking the phallus with
pleasure. The problem though, is the loss of a woman’s instrument of labor, or pleasure.
As Gammer relays the information to Hodge, the connection between the needle, joy, and
pleasure is made clear.
For these and ill luck togather, as knoweth Cock, my
` boy,
Have stacke away my dear neele, and robd me of
my joye
[...] The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my
pleasure! (Stevenson I.iv.132-5).

Without her needle, Gammer Gurton is no longer able to work, and is consequently
robbed of her pleasure. Nor is she able to keep Hodge properly clothed, which will
ultimately curtail his ability to work, and thus deprive him of pleasure. Aside from the
performance of femininity indebted to labor and the phallus, the play impresses upon us
the metaphoric and moral lesson that the very thing we seek is, in fact, right in front of
us. Contextualized within the College, the moral instruction is apt; students should
connect work and productivity with pleasure. The bodies, however, give me pause, for
we get Cock, the neele, joy, sorrow, and pleasure nearly all at once. I have to forestall
the body and its pleasure for a moment here, as I want to examine the way the plays
highlight objects first.
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Commodification

The increasing presence of commodities reflects an expanding world. Along with
an increasing amount of material goods, money begins to figure prominently. In the first
scene of the first act, Stevenson’s Diccon refers to a variety of goods – a cup, a brochette,
and bacon – framing the emotional context within an economy of goods. Diccon,
moreover, steals a piece of bacon to enjoy later with “two pots of ale” (Stevenson I.i.44).
From the outset, as if its title were not enough, Gammer is a play about finding things. A
hungry Hodge lists the things he wishes he had to eat in the second act: “ […] butter,
cheese, mylke, onions, fleshe nor/fyshe/Save thys poor pece of barley bread” (Stevenson
II.i.292). Along the way, money is exchanged too. Hodge claims he would give a crown
for a needle so he could have Gammer put three stitches in his pants. “Gog’s soule, man,
chould give a crown chad/it but three stitches!” (Stevenson II.i.329). The use of the
crown, an early modern coin introduced by Henry VIII, coupled with the earlier use of a
noble (I.iii.108), which is a medieval coin, represents the material presence of money in
the shifting cultural landscape of sixteenth century England. On a number of different
occasions characters wager or claim they would bet money. Part of what I wish to show
here is simply how money is beginning to make its way into the text and performance of
early modern drama. With money, will come class, and we can start to see class
developing in the plays.
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As Diccon had wished, Gurton and Chat verbally assault each other before
resorting to physical violence. Amidst curses and derogatory terms, Chat screams: “A
bag and a wallet!” (Stevenson III.iii.627). She seems to be belittling Gurton as a beggar,
something she does shortly before this passage: “Give thee thy right, and hang thee up,
with al thy bagger’s broode!” (Stevenson III.iii.613). In this moment, we can see class
hierarchy solidifying as the possibility to move from poor to poverty is derided. Or,
being poor is clearly held up as better than beggary. What accounts for such a possibility
is that early modern English culture is in the middle of rapid cultural and physical
expansion. Gammer Gurton, to return to the insult, responds in kind: “A carte for a
callet!” (Stevenson III.iii.628). Prostitutes, or “callets,” were whipped in carts as a means
of punishment. Again, while money and sex are desired objects and experiences, for
women, they also come at a price. For a woman to have too much, or too little, is a
dangerous state. But the exchanges expressed here are clear and direct. Prostitution and
poverty are a far cry from the commercial theater’s genderbending romances, the kissing
of poisoned skulls in lieu of painted faces, and thrill of mis-matched mettle in duels.
New profit manifests very clearly as commodification in Roister. The Vice figure
here is Mathew Merrygreek, who lives off the charity of others:
My lyving lieth heere and there, of God’s grace,
Sometime wyth tis good man, sometyme in that
place...(Stevenson I.i.43-4).

Matthew thus sets upon Roister for not only financial gain, but also mirth, or merriment.
Udall is working off the classical model of a Vice figure who lives off of others, a social
parasite of sorts, but the increased economic vitality of the play points to a shifting “old
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profit.” The “old profit” as the instructive nature of the play, both written for and
performed (by) school boys, mixes with the new meaning of the word “profit” as
financial gain. More than merely living off of others, Matthew exploits Ralph, taking his
money and getting him to him goods, even as he makes fun of, humiliates, and shames
Ralph. For his lavish praise of Ralph, Matthew is given money.
I promise thou shalt not lake, while I
have a grote (Stevenson I.ii.255-56).

Matthew asks for a new coat after taking the money, and Ralph promises to get him one
the next day. Much like Gammer, the inclusion of the different forms of available
currency illustrates an increasing cultural shift toward money.
Coupled with the stress on economics, Udall privileges delight. Matthew asks if
Ralph loves a woman or a thing.
But is your love, tell me first, in any wise
In the way of marriage, or of merchandise? (Stevenson I.ii.155-56).

The marriage or merchandise question suggests the increasing commodification of early
modern English society. Appropriately, the question comes from Matthew, who does
nothing but steal, coerce, and parody. Ralph claims not having Christian Custance will
lead him to madness, but what increases his desire for her is her worth.
I heare she is worthe a thousande
pounde and more – (Stevenson I.ii.176-7).

Although wealthy himself, or at least wealthy enough to pay Matthew for company,
Ralph is most interested in Christian’s money. Matthew attributes her wealth to her
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being a widow, as early modern widows did indeed inherit money. In addition to her
wealth, however, Udall adds a suitor, Gawyn Goodlucke, who is also a merchant.
Christian, I am arguing, loves Gawyn because of his merchant status. As noble families
struggled financially, wealthy merchants making money in the newly expanding world of
trade, became advantageous suitors to noble brides. Marriage and money are not new,
but love complicates things. With the expansion of class, the possibility of love becomes
troubling as it rivals marriage for money.
One of the problems with commodifcation is the emotional connection to things.
While lots of things may make one seem more attractive (and I am reminded here of
Bassanio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, who borrows money from Antonio
so he can present himself well to Portia) those same things may also make another feel
badly. Sym Suresby meets with Gawyn Goodlucke, who asks if Chistian Custance has
been true. Sym has doubts, and asks Gawyn to “examine the matter.” Sim claims the
things Christian has are the very reason he is beginning to doubt her.
It may be well enough, and I wyshe it so to be;
She may hirselfe discharge and trie hir honestie,
Yet their claim to hir methought was very large,
For with letters, rings, and tokens, they dyd hir
charge.
Which when I hearde and sawe I would none to/you bring (Stevenson
V.i.1830-2).

Letters, rings, and tokens will get reworked by Shakespeare in, not only Merchant, but
also The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. Ben Jonson will also
explore commodities, (love), marriage, and money in Epicene. In Ralph, however,
Gawyn’s friend begins to doubt the fidelity of Christian precisely because she is
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amassing things from another suitor. As viewers and readers, we know Christian did not
want the letter, nor did she herself accept the ring, nor the token. Nevertheless, to Sym,
these objects signify acceptance and interest. Commodities can be slippery in that the
(relative) constant price required for them is in no way correlative to the vast array of
emotions that they may or may not produce.
One last example highlights the pleasure Udall mines and raises the complicated
issues of the body. In the third act, Ralph enters after Christian leaves and Matthew, in
high histrionics, relates how Christian despises Ralph and will not marry him. Ralph
claims he will die. Matthew starts performing his eulogy. Matthew makes fun of Ralph
as a dead man, and will revive Ralph with slaps for only “twentie pounde” (III.iii.1007).
Death is the negation of feeling, to oversimplify for a moment. Matthew’s immediate
response is to contribute physical feeling via violence in exchange for money. The
schoolboy audience would be experiencing this slapstick comedy free of charge. Later
readers or audience members have to have to pay in some way, to see Matthew slap a
miserable Ralph while demanding money. Matthew then encourages Ralph to be
arrogant and showy in an effort to woo Christian. Adding emotion to emotion, so it
seems, will somehow make one feel better. Finally, Matthew urges Ralph to go and
court her with song outside her window. Dobinet and Harpax, as well as Ralph’s other
servants, play instruments to support him and the scene ends with his singing outside
Christian’s home. His song includes her as “A wydowe worthe a thousande pounde”
(III.iii.1074). Music is more than likely part of the older tradition of the emerging
theater, but its use is important for two reasons. In a scene about wanting to die because
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of how love makes one feel, music makes sense in that it invariably makes the listener
feel differently, and hopefully no longer wanting to die. Shakespeare will present the
same scenario with Orsino’s first scene in Twelfth Night. More importantly, Ralph’s
song, “I mun be married a Sunday” (Stevenson III.iii.1065) describes Christian as “A
wydowe worth a thousand pounde” (Stevenson III.iii.1074). The music thus, even as it
produces different feelings, brings us back to material matters, which brings me back to
the body.

Print

Knowing through reading is an important part of the “old profit,” and moral
instruction. Knowing through experience, on the other hand, is part of the “new profit,”
or pleasure. One of the framing questions that this project attempts to answer is what
happens as drama moves from the stage to the printed page? There are moments when
that same question appears in the plays. In Gammer, for example, there are a number of
stage directions that suggest a reading audience even for a school play. The stage
direction in the second act states, “Which bacon Diccon stole, as is declared before”
(Stevenson II.i.). Amidst a student population the reading makes sense as the students
would have read in preparation for the performance. The reminder at this point brings the
reader back to the material objects in the play and reinforces the “old profit.” A written
reminder is read, and the reader is thus instructed. The play illustrates the increasing
literacy of its early modern audience.
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In Ralph Roister Doister, the conflict between Ralph and the Scrivener points to
the emergence of the printing press as a technological advancement at odds with the poet.
The pleasure of the ensuing confrontation is the play’s “new profit.” The division of
labor between printing and writing is most problematic for contemporary editors, but the
problem in the early modern period, as Ralph’s letter scenes reveal, was one of meaning.
Matthew deliberately misreads the letter, and then brings the Scrivener to Ralph. Ralph
starts to accost the Scrivener, who attacks him in return. Just before he strikes Ralph, the
Scrivener says:
Pay the like hire, I will make you such
another (Ralph 1263).

What I like here is the way by which we see the Scrivener as a merchant of words. For
pay, he will write Ralph another letter. Another letter will not solve the problem, but the
Scrivener is a merchant and printing is a new market. Payment for a letter, much like the
printing process, is still detached from the meaning and interpretation. The Scrivener
indeed goes on to say:
Then was it as ye prayed to have it, I wote,
But in reading and pointying there was made some
faulte (Ralph 1278-9).

The pointing the Scrivener mentions is punctuation. Early modern printers, much to the
dismay of contemporary editors, were not poets and were not concerned with grammar,
punctuation, and syntax. Pointing may also allude to rhetoric and rhetoric and drama are
converging arts. In fact, the Scrivener then produces the letter and reads it properly on
stage. He goes on to claim:

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Then was the fault in readyng, and not
in writying,
No, nor I dare say in the fourme of enditying,
But who read this letter, that it sounded so nought? (Ralph 1325-28).

Matthew admits to reading it, Ralph calls him a “wretched villiane,” and Matthew attacks
him. The Scrivener’s ablility to read and make meaning of the text he has printed may be
anachronistic, but it allows the question of interpretation and meaning to be rendered as
pleasure: the comedy in the beatings and the ridiculousness of Matthew attacking Ralph
after butchering his letter. The commodification of the letter is brought back literally to
the body via Matthew’s punches.

Bodies

The school plays focus on the body as a source of pleasure. Early modern poets
and teachers wield the body in a fairly straightforward manner. The body is represented
as a space of enjoyment through physical action, like eating, violence, defecation, or sex.
While I have already discussed some pleasurable bodily moments in Ralph, two more
examples from Udall will serve to start. Just before the fight between Ralph and
Christian, along with all of their servants, Matthew bolsters Ralph’s ego by praising his
ability to eat. The pleasure in this scene begins with Matthew joking with Ralph about
how much Ralph can eat. “By this crosse, I have seene you eate your/meate as well/As
any that ere I have seene of or heard tell” (Ralph IV.vii.1659). Ralph thinks he is talking
about how strong he is. Matthew continues: “Ten men can scarce match you with
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a/spoone in a pie!” (Ralph IV.vii.1662). Or, Ralph takes his ability to eat as something
that will make him superior to Christian. There is a schoolboy fierceness in consumption.
Weight does mean something in fight. And while a fight between a man and woman may
be more absurd comical today than it may have been in the early modern era, what Udall
is doing is equating eating and fighting as bodily acts as a source of mirth. Christian runs
in and then runs out, as she and Matthew planned, leading Ralph to thinking he is even
more fierce. Ralph forgets a helmet. Matthew has Dobinet Doughty fetch a kitchen pail
as a substitute, and the fight erupts. Much to our delight, Christian will knock Ralph
down and Matthew will strike him when he’s down. Ralph will fear for his life, and
Christian will leave victorious.
Udall also offers delight in the sexual body. Earlier in the play, Ralph offers
Christian’s maids kisses. While Madge Mumblecrust is eager to have Ralph’s kisses,
Tibet Talkapace will not accept them. When Ralph claims to kiss all that he loves, Tibet
asks: “Yea, sir? I pray you, when dyd you last/Kisse your cowe” (Ralph I.iii.389).
While commodities can be passed between suitors and servants, kisses do not transmit as
easily. Or, perhaps they work too well. In the same way that Ralph does not kiss other
men, it is highly unlikely that the maids of the pursued would pass on a kiss to their
mistress. On the other hand, being kissed by the suitor may well render them more
enamored to him and thus better champions of his love. With old profit in mind, part of
what appears to be at play is the instruction of how and whom to kiss. Pleasure as an
experience, while much desired, can be difficult to share, let alone teach. For even in the
play, Ralph is a bad kisser and bad in kissing the wrong woman.
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The body also figures prominently in Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Building on
Tibet’s kissing cow question, bodily pleasure in the early modern era can be rather
bawdy. After fixing his pants with a thong he gets from Sym Glover, Hodge declares:
“Thart even as good a fellow as ever kyste a cowe!” (Stevenson III.i.564). Sym, it
seems, is a better fellow than most, particularly the average early modern, cow-kissing
man. Bestiality was a very real early modern problem, for people feared the unnatural
offspring that might result from a inter-species sex. The fantasy, as is often the case, is
greater than the actual physical representation. To sum up, the needle as Gammer’s
treasure allows her the true pleasure of repairing Hodge’s pants so that he might impress
Kirstian Clack (Tom Simson’s maid), the impetus for the discovery of the needle at the
end of the play; further, Kirstian’s smiling at Hodge and his fixed trousers might lead to
her using his penis for pleasure (if nowhere else than in the realm of Hodge’s fantasy
world). The needle to fix the pants, also lodged in the pants in the end, is indeed, much
like the thing in the pants, the object of desire. When Diccon asks Hodge why his torn
pants are such a problem, Hodge replies:

Kirstian Clack, Tom Simson’s maid, bi the
Masse, coms hether tomorrow;
Chamnot able to say betweene what may hap;
She smyled on me the last Sonday when ich put of
my cap (Stevenson II.i.340).

This moment demonstrates the way by which the body becomes is used to transmit
desire. Kirstian’s smiling at Hodge upon his doffing his cap might be read with deeper
signification if we follow the metonymic employment of head and penis (and needle).
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The play then is constructed around Hodge’s desire for Kirstian and his need for properly
sewn pants at their next meeting. Desire gets transmitted through the play by metonymy
and touch. Diccon goes on to make Hodge swear on Diccon’s pants (and backside) that
he will not share their exchange. Stevenson also has Diccon conjure up spirits,
something Marlowe will do more of in Doctor Faustus. In the process of the conjuring,
Hodge has diarrhea, and dashes off stage. Critics are quick to posit this point in the play
as the time when Hodge would have changed pants, back in to the pants Gammer had
been sewing when she lost the needle.
At the end of the play, Dame Chat thinks, because of Diccon, that she hit Hodge
on the head. Chat thus refuses to accept that she hit Rat. Chat tells Bailey that Diccon
told her Hodge was going to try and take or kill her hens. Gammer Gurton arrives,
followed by Hodge. Gurton has yet to say what it is that Chat stole from her, and Chat
thinks that Gurton thinks she stole her rooster. Bayley asks Hodge if he treid to sneak in
through the hole in the back and Kill Cat’s hen out of revenge. Hodge protests:
Take there? No, master, chold not do’t for a
houseful of gold! (Stevenson V.ii.1035).

Gold, or money, is not enough to make Hodge steal. Gold would be more important to
the mid-sixteenth century poet and audience, as the commercial market has yet to explode
upon the scene. Precious metals, moreover, are more important in the medieval and
mercantile economies. Dame Chat, angry at Hodge’s refusal to acknowledge what she
thinks to be the truth, yells out:
Thou shitten knave; I trow thou knowest the
ful weight of my first;
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I am fowly deceived onles thy head and my doore
bar kyste! (Stevenson V.ii.1043-4).

The scatological remark plays upon the transference of pleasure, in this case a pleasure in
anger and violence, played out across the body. Going through the hole in the back gives
Dame Chat license to beat Hodge’s head, which seems to stand in for the needle, the
object of Gammer Gurton’s delight, and thus the head of his penis. We might read in this
moment then, the rejection of a deceitful attempt at anal sex. Hodge, the incontinent, is
here placed against Dame Chat’s backside for a defacatory kiss. Hence Dame Chat’s
“Thou shitten knave.” Performed before adolescent boys, by adolescent boys, the focus
on anal and genital pleasure suggests Paster’s aforementioned argument that the
anal/genital pleasure reflects the psychological composition of the play’s audience.
Metaphorically chastising anal pleasure and anal sex, the ‘profit’ of the play would be
mature, heterosexual vaginal intercourse. But the author, a man, is also employing the
stage for “old profit,” or, to teach, among other things, this very anal/genital pleasure.
And while we might read the play as demonstrative of an “old profit” for that school
house theatre, I would proffer that the learned desire, with its impact on adult teachers
and other adults present, is less a psychological stage of development and more indicative
of early modern sexual desire as a (w)hole. Sexual categories and identities, far more
modern concepts than early modern, are only just beginning to be expressed.
Hodge and his penchant for defecation adulterate the rather simple relationship of
head to behind, but the needle (needed for the reparation of the pants; that which Rat
hopes to see in Chat’s hands, and the very thing that brings Gammer such pleasure) and
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its phallic connotations, also inserts the penis in the string of signifiers. McFadyen
argues that the gender of the actors in the school play is central to the play’s comedy, and
that the need for women to want male genitalia for pleasure in the play is indicative of the
lesson intended for its young (and growing) audience. Returning to Kirstian, her smiling
then at Hodge’s head-read penis-teaches boys how to be in the early modern.
While the play teaches a bawdy pleasure, the notion of gender is, like beauty,
subjective. Unlike Dame Chat, however, Master Bailey seems to think such an unwanted
attempt to be pleasurable and fun.
By Our Lady, here is no harme!
Hodge’s head is hole ynough for al Dame Chat’s
charme (Stevenson V.ii.1055).

The physical matter of space and fit, in terms of body parts and placement, is less of an
issue. At stake is the desire of the participants, and what each is expecting. Hodge is
convinced that pleasure is to be found in Dame Chat’s lap, as he follows up:
Geve my Gammer again her washical thou stole
away in thy lap! (Stevenson V.ii.1061).

The “washical” is the unpronounced needle, and the concealment of the needle up until
this point has been the source of conflict. Diccon manipulates the two women with false
claims. The falsehood or uncertainty in the school play, the very thing that lies at the
center of the play, will become an uncertain and shapeshifting body in the commercial
theater. In the school play, with its fixed focus upon an old profit and its young,
schoolboy audience, not only is the human imagination bound to more concrete and static
terms, but also, the model for the stage depends upon instruction (old profit) as the
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dominant discourse. Once the needle is revealed to be the missing object, Dame Chat can
honestly refute Gammer Gurton, who then reveals Diccon to be behind the entire scheme.
Chat affirms Diccon’s role be sharing how he told her that Gurton believed her Rooster to
have been stolen and eaten by Dame Chat. Rat goes on to reveal how Diccon set him up
to go through the back door, and Bailey sends for Diccon to be held acountable.
Bailey makes Diccon pay by making oaths upon Hodge’s backside. The oaths, in
much the same way that Jonson’s avvocati render Mosca’s punishment social and
emotional, both shame and humiliate Diccon. Moeover, in slapping Hodge’s behind,
Diccon pricks Hodge, not with his needle, but with the needle. The discovery of the
needle accounts for the ending of the play and pleasure.

He thrust me into the buttock with a bodkin
or a pin!
[He draws out the needle.]
I say, gammer! gammer! (Stevenson V.ii.86-9).

The object sought, the needle, has been in Hodge’s pants all along. The moral of the tale,
and drawn from it with a slap, is that the very thing sought is indeed right there, before
one’s eyes. Heavy in “old profit,” the play also relies upon delight and pleasure as a
means of reinforcement. Physical pleasure constitutes a residual discourse that furthers
the dominant discourse, the moral lesson and classical emulation. An emerging discourse
is the desire expressed as bawdy bodily delight. Unlike the drama of the public theatre,
this early piece, performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge, proffers fairly clear
edification with the help of some bodily delight. Does the old profit trump the pleasure
here? The dominant discourse can be read as the investment in what we now refer to as
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heterosexual desire, but I want to suggest that the anality and the slippery signifying
chain from head, to bottom, to penis, along the path of male to female to male, render an
emerging discourse in the pleasure of the body regardless of gender. Or, more precisely,
the emerging discourse posits pleasure in male to male relations along similar bawdy
(bodily) lines. A residual discourse can be seen in the use of the body as an authoritative
site, particularly for schoolchildren and their masters.
12

The instruction of desire is both enjoyable and difficult. In closing the play,
Stevenson urges an expression of joy and approval for an object that can be read as an
instrument of pleasure. The last words in the play are addressed to the audience:

For Gammer Gurton’s nedle [‘s] sake, let us have a
Plaudytie.
[They all go into the ale-house.]

With the advent of the commercial theater, Ben Jonson will come to demand applause at
the end of the play even before the play begins. In this school play, some thirteen to
twenty-six years before the opening of the first commercial theater in England,
Stevenson’s emphasis upon pleasure, commodities, and the body signals the subjective
leap soon to come.
In closing, the pre-commercial theater starts to emphasize the body and pleasure
over old profit. The use of the body, however, is less abstract and more direct. That is to
say, this is not the shapeshifting body wielded so well by Shakespeare and Jonson. What
we are beginning to see is the way by which “old profit” is challenged by “new profit.”
Pleasure is pushing the education of the stage in new and interesting ways. Bodies are
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being used to capitalize on bawdy delight. Even in school and inns of court drama,
reading and watching are at odds.

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Chapter One Endnotes

1
For more, see Potter’s “performing Arts in the Tudor Classsroom.” Poter make her
argument across dramatic methods, more specifically, memorization, voice training, role-
playing, personation, or prospoeia, and action or chironomia. Much has been written on
early modern pedagogy and the body as of late, and further reading on this topic would
include Frederick S. Boas, G.C. Moore Smith, T.H. Vail Motter, Bruce Smith, Rebecca
Bushnell, and Kent Cartwright. For more on early modern pedagogy in schools, see
Lynne Enterline and Lisa Jardine.

2
For more on drama from 1485 to 1590 see Howard B. Norland’s Drama in Early Tudor
Britain, Kent Cartwright’s Theatre and Humanism, Bruce Smith’s Ancient Scripts, and
Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert’s 2008 compilation Early Modern Academic
Drama, and Kermode, Scott-Warren, and van Elk’s Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare,
1485-1590, New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy.

3
For more on the theater and humanism, see Kent Cartwright’s “Introduction” to his
Theatre and Humanism.

4
Howard B. Norland offers three English tragedies as precursors, even though they were
not written or published in English: Thomas Watson’s Latin Absalom, John
Christopherson’s Greek Jephthah, and Nicholas Grimwald’s Latin Archipropheta.
Grimwald’s tragedy was published in Cologne in 1548, but “the academic drama of
Watson and Christopherson remained in manuscript until the twentieth century” (xxvi).

5
See Fraser and Rabkin (81) for more. On the subject of collaboration, see Jeffrey
Masten’s Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in
Renaissance Drama.

6
I am summarizing the arguments of several key critics here: Marie Caxton, Greg
Walker, Joel B. Altman, Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White, and Terry Reilly.

7
This and all citations are taken from Fraser and Rabkin’s edition in Drama of the
English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period.

8
Another seminal text that signals both a cultural and intellectual shift as well as
emphasizing the body is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Literary periods, like the
culture out of which they appear, are temporal, but not always regular. I see the early
modern period as a time of transition between the medieval era and modern times.

9
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus works with similar ideas and representations of
knowledge, magic, and self-centered characters in the commercial theater.

10
See Paster and Schoenfeldt for opposing arguments on the body and regulation.
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Chapter Two

Pleasing Subjects: Shakespeare and the Construction of a Feeling Self

Shakespeare sells; yesterday, even more so today, and also way back when. In
fact, what separates Shakespeare from his early modern contemporaries is his
profitability. Writing for a diverse audience within an emerging market, Shakespeare
created a popular space for play and pay. Shakespeare’s play texts serve as
representations of the very culture in which they exist, highlighting early modern
anxieties and concerns. People came to the theaters to learn from the plays presented
before them and others for the pleasure of watching. In addition to the play, however,
people watched people. Thus watching people perform new and different persons, as
well as watching other people in the act of watching the stage, proved to be a space for
people to construct not only others, but more importantly, themselves. The resulting
subjectivity is thus a product of the market. The early modern subject, in other words,
grows out of an explosion of art staged as a marketable product. Using three of
Shakespeare’s plays – Merchant of Venice (1596-7), As You Like It (1598-1600), and
Twelfth Night (1600) – I argue that an early modern poetic model of profit and pleasure is
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a model in flux, and one that requires, much like the market in which it is being played, a
subjective and imaginative leap.
Shakespeare’s model for the stage privileges pleasure and “new profit,” or
financial gain and pleasure, over “old profit,” or instruction. Shakespeare’s plays posit
the importance of class in marriage as a dominant discourse: before trying for Portia’s
hand in The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio renews his “so mannerly” retinue by
borrowing money from his merchant friend, Antonio; Rosalind’s marriage to Orlando in
As You Like It is agreed upon only after Oliver has properly passed his father’s title and
property down to Orlando; and finally, in Twelfth Night, the Duchess Olivia can marry
Sebastian only after the Duke Orsino confirms Sebastian’s “right royal” blood. At odds
with the dominant discourse, the residual discourse hearkens back to the Greek and
Roman model, and in this case, the ways by which gender and love trouble intimacy.
The Attic model of male-male intimacy, free of the female presence, which serves as the
early modern exemplar, is directly challenged by the emergence of the theatre market, a
space in which both men and women are engaged in playing and observation.
Shakespeare capitalizes on the male-male model by inserting a female figure disguised as
a male. To illustrate, Antonio and Bassanio move farther apart after Antonio lends him
money to help him procure a wife. Profit in the play, Antonio’s power as a merchant,
works against the “old profit” of a male intimacy that supersedes women. Rosalind as
Ganymede is profitable in an instructional sense, the “old profit,” as she (re)teaches
Orlando how to court his love. “New profit” is the pleasure derived from the tension
between an unknowing character on stage and the in-the-know audience or reader.
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Shakespeare troubles the Attic model again with Sebastian’s refusal of Antonio’s love
and the ensuing “new profit” that arises out of Antonio’s confusing Viola/Cesario for his
love. As the impact of the stage moves through early modern culture, it moves back and
forth, I argue, from stage to audience, and back again. The sixteenth and seventeenth
century notion of “discourse” as the moment of “passing” into understanding, as
suggested in my Introduction, is essential to my analysis. The result is the emerging
discourse, the discourse of the present, which challenges the dominant by (re)presenting
an unstable and ever–shifting (fe)male body as a solution to the play. Portia, like the
woman in the early modern audience, disrupts the male-male intimacy of Antonio and
Bassanio, even as she affirms the bond, in the end, by releasing Antonio from the
delivery of his pound of flesh to Shylock. The unstable and ever-changing
Rosalind/Ganymede allows for not one, but four couples to marry, all of whom champion
love as the grounds for marriage. And Viola/Cesario produces two for the price of one,
or rather, three, as Sir Toby and Maria also wed, prolonging the pleasure for the Twelfth
Night audience even as it ensures “new profit” for its twins, who are bereft of fortune in a
new land, and firms up “old profit” in pairing royal blood together.
Each discourse also presents different emotions, and part of the power of the early
modern stage is this rich emotional valence. Central to my reading of the play is an
understanding of its form; equally important, especially for the solutions offered by the
play, is feeling. In fact, both form and feeling unveil solutions specific to the moment in
emerging discourses. The sadness and melancholy of The Merchant of Venice may well
be connected to the residual discourse and the rupture of male-male bonding. For the
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dominant discourse concerning marriage along class lines, the emotions elicited include
bewilderment, shock, and outrage, as well as relief and joy. An example in As You Like
It is the joy Hymen delivers at the play’s climax coupled with Jaques’ rejection of the
celebration. And finally, the excitement in Twelfth Night that comes with the anticipated
conjugal visit Orsino will pay Viola/Cesario when she is “in other habits [...] seen”
(V.i.374) is linked with the emerging discourse. Each of these plays begins by
materializing the market, wherein Shakespeare complicates the plot by arousing emotion.
Conceptually, I map my own discourse through the plays using coins and the
materializations of love; purses in response to male-male love; rings, trees, and trunks;
circumcision and lone figures. I argue that Shakespeare’s plays can be read through
material objects and their constructed emotional power to arrive at the individual and the
staging of the self as disavowal and discourse. The actual transaction of the art in a
market experience, be it in the early modern theatre or the book store today, includes
transference. The audience, like the readers, is taken away to another place and time,
both different and akin to that of the present. Paying for the stage and the experience of
playing, the audience and reader desire to be taken to another space and place. The
consumer is thus provided the chance to come to know something, depending upon the
particular play, and to know it in or around the stage and an imagined locale. In
exchange for the coin passed to gain entry, the playing company provides the viewer the
experience of pleasure, of feeling. Market logic impacts early modern culture in
corporeal ways as an emerging discourse that rejects marriage solely along class lines.
The residual discourse of male-male love is being rejected and replaced with a romantic
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love ground in instability and uncertainty. And finally, the emerging discourse of shape-
shifting bodies provides solutions to the problems of marriage against class lines, at the
same time that it re-affirms class division.
For Shakespeare, and many poets of the early modern period, reworking the
Horation model of profit and pleasure to emphasize pleasure was increasingly profitable.
The importance of education and the “old profit” remained, but the market increased the
space for delight, and in so doing, produced greater “new profit” for the playing
companies. Although pleasure signifies positively, I argue that pleasure actually
manifests as a variety of emotions and feelings in and around delight. Indeed, I would
argue the early modern conception of “pleasure” as “the condition of consciousness or
sensation induced by the enjoyment or anticipation of what is felt or viewed as good or
desirable” (OED 1.a.) is an important launching point for contemporary analysis.
Pleasure, then, is the experience of consciousness brought about by the enjoyment of, or
even the anticipation of, what is felt. Invoking the last part of the early modern
definition, “as good or desirable,” imparts the positive connotation we so readily
associate today with pleasure. If the sensation is indeed “anticipated” or even “viewed”
as “desirable,” such a description necessarily involves a post-experiential judgment, a
reflective turn backward in order to evaluate that which has already been felt as positive.
The positive signification comes after the event. The meaning of “good or desirable” is
therefore an after-thought descriptor with positive connotations, which may well happen
even when the process itself invokes negative responses. Pleasure for the early modern
audience or the contemporary reader, I am arguing, may well mean anger, sadness, and
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delight. The increase in emotion that accompanies the experience is central to the
experience of drama and the market entwined.
Recent criticism centered around economics emphasizes the materiality of the
stage. Douglas Bruster, one of a number of insightful new economic critics, argues for a
materialist and economic understanding of the early modern theatre; a product or
commodity emerging in, around, and with London’s emerging market economy.
Keywords for Bruster are “poetics of the market” and “the ‘materialist vision’ of the
English Renaissance” (Bruster, Drama 38). I use the material as a launching pad to
arrive at the representation of the self. Historian Jean-Christophe Agnew builds on
Shakespearean Jonas Barish’s work to address the changing metaphor of the theatre -
theatrum mundi - alongside the emergence of a similar abstraction, the market (Agnew
16). Agnew claims early modern writers turn to myth and magic to explain and/or re-
present the emerging market. I, too, argue that the changing metaphor of the theatre
develops alongside and through the emerging market, but I hesitate to call the solution
early modern poets offer up in the protean shape of human form magical. Marxist critic
Richard Halpern “[...]attempts to inscribe the English literary Renaissance within the
prehistory of capital” (Halpern 1). Halpern connects the humanist ideals of the schools to
the class struggle and change, much of which happens alongside and amidst people who
care not at all. These people, I would argue, were in the audience of the early modern
stage. This was the lived experience read in the play text as the solution posited by the
emerging discourse. Another new economic critic, Lars Engle grounds his reading of
Shakespeare in economics, claiming “Shakespeare’s literary economism is pragmatism,
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and that pragmatism is a kind of generalization of economism” (Engle 3). Building on
the work of critics like Fernand Braudel and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Engle reads the
market in the plays. Or, “Shakespeare brings opposed forces into play in a complex
arena of multiple contingencies; in his marketlike theater there are no noncontingent
outcomes and few opposites that remain uncontaminated by each other” (Engle 22).
Whereas the mind is often left behind the material in such critiques, the development of
the mind occurs alongside the development of the body. In fact, early modern poets get
to the mind through the body, and get to the body of the viewer or reader through the
mind. Audience members seeing bodies act out other bodies and persons on stage
furthers the distinction between bodies and selves. At the time, the very idea of the self
or even the soul as separate from the body was troubling. On the stage, then, and in the
early modern play texts, the early modern subject as a body in flux is made visible. An
important part of the experiential process, of buying and experiencing art, includes the
sharing of common emotions. I want to stress the importance of empathy within the arts.
In addition to my inclusion of emotion, my linking the body to the market, and the
unstable body in particular, separates me from a number of economic critics. Like the
winding path that circumnavigates the early modern audience to arrive at the stage, my
argument asks contemporary readers to re-examine the layers available in the excavation
of the play.
The dominant discourse in each of the three Shakespeare plays I explore here is
the importance of class in marriage and the preservation of nobility. The residual
discourse hearkens back to the Greek and Roman model, and the ways by which gender
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and love trouble intimacy. The Attic model of male-male intimacy, free of the female
presence, which serves as the early modern exemplar, is directly challenged by the
emergence of the theatre market, a space in which both men and women are engaged in
playing and observation.
1
I argue for an emerging discourse of protean bodies (arising
out of the dominant and residual discourses) that provides solutions to the problems
posed by the market, class, marriage, and love. Even though there are few and rare
glimpses of people in the theatre, the proof is already in the play texts.

Situating Settings

Although none of these plays is set in contemporary London, or England, each
resonates with its London crowd, particularly in ways that suggest contemporary cultural
concerns. The settings include Venice and Belmont (or Italy) in Merchant of Venice, the
court of Duke Frederick and the Forest of Ardenne (or France) in As You Like It, and the
coast and court of Illyria in Twelfth Night. Situating the plays generically, C. L. Barber
argues that, “Satirical comedy tends to deal with relations between social classes and
aberrations in movements between them” (Barber 8). Emerging out of a new market
space, these early modern plays thus transplant their early modern audiences to different
settings in order to understand and move through problems arising within their very own
expanding culture. Inheritance figures prominently in each of these plays, and all three
include persons seeking to transcend class.
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Merchant of Venice presents the most obvious market comparison with Venice as
a diverse and varied, market-driven population. While the play is ostensibly about a
pound of flesh and the threat of transacting such a piece from the male body, Merchant is
also a play about transcending bodies, and demonstrates the early modern anxiety over
the body and consciousness within an emerging capitalist economy. More simply, but
also an early modern concern, particularly in terms of health, how do things move from
one body to another? I read in Shakespeare’s providing a bit of male flesh in lieu of
female, and a small bit for a great deal of money, a critique of the market. Critiquing
early modern marriage, Shakespeare uses male flesh to secure several marriages.
Shakespeare offers the cutting of the male body as dowry during a period when male-
male relationships were being challenged by male-female relationships, even as marriage
itself was troubled by financial and emotional concerns.
Critics like Katherine Eisaman Maus and Stephen Greenblatt read Merchant as a
play about kind or similarity. Maus, in The Norton introduction claims: “In The
Merchant of Venice Shakespeare juxtaposes social relations based on similarity with
social relations based on economic self-interest” (Maus 1083). Greenblatt, on the other
hand, sees Shakespeare’s task as persuasion based on difference. “For if Shakespeare
subtly suggests obscure links between Jew and Gentile, he compels the audience to
transform its disturbing perception of sameness into a perception of difference”
(Greenblatt 295). With discourse in mind, first in the manner of a “process or succession
of time, events, actions, etc." and second as a space “to exchange, [or] to interchange,” I
argue that Shakespeare’s play seeks similarity and correlation between overtly unlike
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matters and things. The end result, rather than differentiation, is amalgamation. Venice
is situated within early modern London and the play inculcates early modern Londoners
about market mechanics. Indeed, the play’s cast travels back and forth between Venice
and Belmont with the goal of uniting lovers. Venice, with its market-driven governance
and varied cultures, is generally read as the residual discourse. Belmont, on the other
hand, is where traditional cultural practices persist, even in the absence of the father,
leading critics to position Belmont as the dominant discourse. However, much like the
physical discourse of characters bringing Venice to Belmont and Belmont to Venice, and
just as do the actors and characters (on stage or off the page), each one interacts with and
upon the other. Consequently, while I see the (emerging ) capitalism in Venice as the
dominant discourse, the city includes the residual discourse, too. Barber posits that
residual discourse in Shylock: “[...] he embodies the evil side of the power of money, its
ridiculousness and pernicious consequences in anxiety and destructiveness” (Barber 167).
I argue that Portia, devoid of one particular space but serving as a transition between the
two, manifests the emerging discourse. In Belmont, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, and
Antonio’s friend, Lorenzo, threaten the older, feudal patronage, rendering it residual
(amidst the dominant). By dressing up the female body as a man to escape during
Carnival, Shakespeare allows for social mobility and marriage. Additionally, with a boy
dressed as a young woman dressing up as a man to protect her new husband’s friend and
benefactor, Shakespeare reinforces the law (of the father) and punishes Shylock (an
errant father) before Balthazar/Portia’s (errant and unknowing) husband, Bassanio. The
enactment of inversion and rebellion is set within the similar market of the theatre, a
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space in which women (and men) are dressing themselves up (and even across) both class
and gender. As Barber suggests, the saturnalian release of the play is troubling. And
while revelry is clearly an inherent part, the capital within the community (and who has
it) makes the play decidedly darker.
As You Like It discourses in a much more spatial sense. Seemingly removed from
the city and its market, the forest of Ardenne nevertheless becomes a palimpsest of
competing geographic, temporal, and ideological schemes. The wrestler Charles situates
the setting precisely when he tells Oliver about the banished Duke’s new life.
They say he is already in the forest of Ardenne, and a
many merry men with him: and there they live like the old
Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen
flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did
in the golden world (Shakespeare, As You I.i.99-103).
2

The geographical setting, as indicated above, is thus France, in the court and in the forest
of Ardenne. At the same time, Shakespeare alludes to Robin Hood, placing England
within France. Furthermore, as Richard Wilson points out, there is a Forest of Arden in
Warwickshire, England, not far from Shakespeare’s birthplace. Although the Robin
Hood myth signifies an earlier England than the early modern England in which the play
was first performed, Shakespeare takes his early modern audience (and contemporary
readers) back even farther in time when he references the “golden world” and through it
Ovid The plot involving primogeniture, on the other hand, returns the subject matter to
the contemporaneous. Shakespeare thus conflates England and France, the Attic past and
the early modern present. Wilson links the play text to cultural exchange – the “breakup
of the feudal household and extended family through the capitalization of English
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farming” (Wilson 5) and the rioting over the enclosure acts to the Robin Hood myth. The
play, as he notes, was performed for James I, at the Wilton House on Christmas, in 1603,
after a day of hunting in Gillingham Forest, a production in which Shakespeare was
believed to have acted the role of Adam. Charles’ claim that he will “give [Orlando] his
payment” if he has the opportunity to wrestle with him, along with Orlando’s opening
dialogue, repositions economic or market concerns inside this early modern/Attic,
French/English palimpsest. Finally, as Jean Howard notes in The Norton Shakespeare
introduction, the pastoral setting:
[...] thus participates in the rich tradition of Renaissance pastoral literature
in which the rustic world of forest and field offers and alternative to and a
sanctuary from the urban or courtly milieu to which it was contrasted
(Howard, As You 1591).

The pastoral, in addition to its alternative tradition and, as Barber suggests, is also a space
particularly rife for social criticism, and it is both close to and distant from early modern
culture. Shakespeare’s use of Charles to relay this information, as well as the wrestling
that sets the play in motion, makes clear the connection between the body and ideology.
Charles’ lifeless body forces Orlando into the “forest of Ardenne,” just as Shakespeare
pushes the body to get at a rapidly expanding subject.
Distance figures prominently in the setting of Twelfth Night, as well, for Illyria is
the farthest location from London. While As You Like It calls into question the very act
of being in one's body, Shakespeare uses Twelfth Night to ask different questions about
the gendered body and how bodies work in love and the market. Before the action on
stage actually starts, the twins, Sebastian and Viola, victims of a shipwreck, wash up on
the Illyrian shore. For some time now, Shakespearean criticism has taken Illyria to be an
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imaginary setting. The Norton Shakespeare, for example, describes the locale in a
footnote as a “Greek and Roman name for the Eastern Adriatic coast; probably not
suggesting a real country to Shakespeare’s audience” (Norton 1768). In contrast, as
feminist critic Patricia Parker argues, Illyria was a very real space in the sixteenth
century, located on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, next to Macedonia, across from
Italy.
3
Shakespeare’s Illyria is a discourse of sorts in that he alludes to Illyria in a number
of plays – A Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline – not to mention its
presence in a number of important texts that would have been known and well-read in the
period: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the
Great, Part Two, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Illyria is thus a real place to contemporary
audiences, and also a context for a wide array of cultural practices and concerns. That is
to say, the allusion participates in an early modern discourse around things like gender,
knowledge, rule, trade, and economics.
Parker’s insightful work on Illyria reveals several important points about the
setting. In sixteenth century texts, Illyria was associated with language and female rule.
While several critics have noted how domestic space is important in Twelfth Night, I want
to push the Illyrian context further to emphasize Shakespeare’s interest in women as
figures of power and control. In the play’s first scene, fro instance, Orsino’s plea for
Olivia’s love posits her in the role of Diana and himself as Acteon.
That instant was I turned in to a hart
And in my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me (Shakespeare, Twelfth I.i.20-3).

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Ovidian allusion in this instance plays into male fears of powerful women. Shakespeare
presents powerful women who place the (male) body center stage, even as the destruction
done to the body is solely imagined and not enacted. Manipulation of the female body on
stage, on the contrary, seems to ensure the male body remains whole.
In addition, Illyria was famous for its renegades; with piracy and rebellion come
notions of circumcision and castration. As I will argue later, castration and circumcision
figure prominently in a pirate’s context, markedly so in the characters of Sir Andrew
Aguecheek and Malvolio, the two lone figures at the end of the play.
4
Large numbers of
trading vessels made it a popular place for piracy and at the end of the play, Orsino hails
Antonio as “Notable pirate, thou salt-water thief” (Shakespeare, Twelfth V.i.63). More
importantly, Illyria was a go between for Christians and Turks, for the Old World and the
New. Trade brought these different cultures into direct contact in this setting. Viola, in
the second scene, decides to present herself to the Duke as an eunuch:
[...] I’ll serve this Duke.
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him (Shakespeare, Twelfth
I.ii.51-2).

Shakespeare places the play in a very real space of trade and travel, and a context
recognizable to early modern audience, a setting that both mirrors its contemporary
environment and calls it into question. As the play begins the problems of profit, love,
and rank are wrapped up in a knot of human flesh that the human imagination alone can
(and cannot) undo.

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Romancing the Coins

Traveling to the theatre, the object one gets in exchange for money is the
production of the play. Money allows one access (in)to a material experience and
exchange. An important part of the playgoing experience is thus about the transformation
of coin into feeling. Music figured prominently as a part of the early modern theatre
experience, and in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, music opens the play. The
materialization of the idea of love, as the thing the play is about, is twofold: first as
music and then as food. Orsino, the duke, goes on to materialize his love for the duchess
Olivia, as music, appetite, and ultimately, coin. As feminist critic Valerie Foreman
argues, using “investment” to link money and clothes, characters use money to make
“disguise” or “rematerialize” themselves; money then means mistake and mis-recognition
(117).
5
Love is thus manifest as a discourse of sorts, one that requires material form,
encompassing the abstract (love in this instance), before manifesting as money.
Shakespeare rapidly moves beyond the question of who or whom to love, and on to
matters of material and quantity. Loving the correct person seems less important than
having the experience of love, as a corporeal sense, and then having it again and again.
As Orsino discourses:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die (Shakespeare, Twelfth I.i.1-3).

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Orsino begins the play by calling for more (and more) love. Shakespeare employs
metaphor in this instance to substitute music for love: “If music be the food of love.”
6

After music comes food, that which is consumed; yet the music, like the food, is to be
played again, is to be consumed again. What Orsino wants is an “excess” of love, an
“appetite” excited and then fulfilled so that he might satisfy himself yet again, or an
excessive (as in dis-) exchange. Orsino tires of the music moments later to see the
embodiment of love, then we too, as viewers (and readers), establish material
expectations for the play. Coming to know love means materializing the emotion, and
love as a material discourse demands more.
The problem Shakespeare presents is not only the very real early modern anxiety
of whom to love, but also how to love. Part of the problem is money, the very thing that
figures so prominently in The Merchant and As You Like It. Love and marriage require
money and the proper class. Having opened Twelfth Night by linking love to the material
appetite, Shakespeare ends the first scene by establishing Orsino’s desire for a woman,
the duchess Olivia. These two are, from the outset, of the proper class; both are of noble
blood. But the play, because it has to go on, becomes about not just the proper class, but
also the right person; which means, the other part of the problem of love is coming to be
the person one loves. In the representation of love as an early modern problem, what I
want to suggest is a culture in flux. Love emerges across a variety of contexts within a
culture that has hitherto kept love en-classed. Intertwined with personal desire, however,
are the economic terms Shakespeare injects into familial obligation. Orsino, discoursing
further on love and his desire, proclaims:
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O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame
To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
How will she love when the rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her–when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled
Her sweet perfections with one self king! (Shakespeare, Twelfth I.i.32-
48).

Shakespeare thus ends the opening scene with Orsino envisioning himself fulfilling
Olivia. “Love” is materialized in her body (her “liver, brain, and heart” more
specifically), reconfigured as payment and “debt” (“this debt of love”), and then finally
consummated with the penetration. Shakespeare contrasts familial love with romantic
love in Orsino’s fascination with the mourning Olivia – Orsino hopes to “kill” Olivia’s
“love” for her brother by sticking her with his “rich golden shaft” – reconfiguring the two
within economic or financial terms. Orsino perceives Olivia’s mourning as “this debt of
love,” and more importantly, appraises that “debt of love” as worthy of his “love.” If
substituting familial love with romance via penetration seems questionable, then
Shakespeare’s suggestion of coin in the last two lines should clarify: even when the
“lovers” share the proper class, this “love” is about exchanging and keeping the proper
goods.
The discourse of currency, much like the preservation of noble blood, is also one
of empire. “These sovereign thrones” is an allusion to the sovereign, a coin introduced in
1489 by Henry VII, with the image of the king on one side and the royal arms on the
other. As Orsino notes, upon consummation, with marriage, Olivia will be filled (or
fulfilled) “[...] with one self king!” One can almost see Orsino flipping a coin as he
expounds upon his love. She will become the duchess in the duke’s realm, with access to
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all his gold sovereigns, even as Orsino will become her sole king. As historian C. E.
Challis argues, Henry VII’s employment of the sovereign with the king’s likeness on it
was “a deliberate attempt to bring England into line with continental practice and was in
effect a small yet brilliant addition to the trappings of the new dynasty” (Challis, Coinage
49). Even more than the idea of coins being offered as payment for a debt, Shakespeare's
employment of "sovereign" and "one self king" contribute to the notion of coinage and
commodification. Coins provide familial access through a more complicated
concatenation of commodities in a play about loans and love.

Caskets to Coins

In The Merchant of Venice, the emerging discourse of a gender-bending Portia
affords Antonio and Bassanio a solution to problems of money, rank, and love.
Shakespeare posits a love that moves from caskets to coin, from a dead father to a
beautiful bride. Contrary to the joy that should come with the concluding marriages,
sadness pervades the play. Antonio's equivocation about the cause of his sadness
heightens its importance, but also suggests the underlying sadness is less about money
and more about love. While Venice is markedly more invested in capital than love,
Belmont, while representative of the older system of nobility and class difference, is also
the space wherein love is embodied.
7
Yet the freedom purchased in either place comes
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with a price; similar to the conflict between similarity and difference, the caskets in
Portia's courtship function through inversion. To return for a moment to the critical
context, Barber claims Bassanio's choosing correct to be merely fortuitous, and Maus
argues that the test itself is a solution to the problem of economics in competition with
spirituality.
Another way to read the play is to consider the concern over consciousness a
result of the new market economy's rupturing the social classes. As the market
economies impact friendship and love, marriage itself changes. Just as Bassanio is about
to choose a casket for a wife, Shakespeare has Portia and her retinue sing a song that, in
addition to encouraging Bassanio, also reveals the complexities of this emerging
discourse. One member of Portia's train sings out:
Tell me where fancy is bred
Or in the heart, or in the head? (Shakespeare, Merchant III.ii.64-4).

Fancy's location, be it in the heart or heard, echoes the early modern philosophical
debates over consciousness and imagination. The location of the soul and the hierarchy
of the imagination with regard to instinct, these concerns, already important issues of the
time, became even more important with the dissemination of Aristotle in the English
early modern. Another woman sings out:
It is engendered in the eyes
With gazing, fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies (Shakespeare, Merchant III.ii.67-9).

Gender, sight, and fancy are reconfigured via death and birth, and are central to marriage.
But the passage also implies an inversion of consumption and production. Bassanio, ever
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the quick-witted fortune-hunter, replies in an aside: "So may the outward shows be least
themselves" (Shakespeare, Merchant III.ii.73). Portia is re-inscribed into a casket, the
lead casket, that which "shows" the least, but with her inside, or with her image inside,
the casket that gives birth to "themselves" – a bride, their subsequent children, and coin.
The move from object to subject is thus inscribed with economics and
commodification. Making goods available for market price also involves human
emotions and bodies, as they, too, get wrapped up in the experience of consumption. The
emotions involved can be found in the newly appearing objects, as well as (in all sorts of
ways), the bodies of the buyers (and sellers) Bruster writes:
Shifting its attention from semiosis to subjectivity, the drama began to
explore the reified basis of personal relations even as it tended, with
more and more frequency, to personify commodities, according them a life
of their own. Identity thus came to be inscribed in, instead of by, these
objects (Bruster, Drama, 65).

In Merchant, Shakespeare conflates Portia into caskets of varying degrees of value, a
picture “Fair Portia’s counterfeit” (Shakespeare, Merchant III.ii.115), a scroll
representing her fortune, a kiss, coin (perhaps from the outset), and finally, a ring,
provided by Portia herself. The lead casket is that which "shows" the least, and is
subsequently that which Bassanio selects (with help). The pleasure in Bassanio's gaining
a wealthy wife by picking the lead casket is adulterated in some sense by this
questionable assistance. Pleasure, I argue, is diluted by any number of feelings that arise
out of special treatment: shock, surprise, dismay, anger, repulsion.
Sight is also a material issue that changes as material and medical discourse
change. Moreover, Shakespeare highlights the importance of gender-bending as a
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solution by emphasizing the importance of seeing. The feelings onstage are further
problematized in that what the audience sees is different from the seeing that the
characters do on stage. Bassanio makes the link between his own sight – caskets of
silver, lead, and gold – and death as birth. The casket that appears the least profitable is
indeed the most likely to yield success (marriage and money). For, in the end, the
marriage he is about to choose is, more than love, a marriage born out of economic
necessity. What is seen in watching the scene, in contrast, is Bassanio being seen by the
Nerissa onstage and by the audience, as the proper match and consequently aided in his
selection. Bassanio’s employment of Antonio is an exchange of principal for principle;
money to buy a retinue (in hopes of gaining a wife) for the love of friendship (Antonio’s),
bound up in complicated and contradictory emotions. Bassanio wins his love and her
hefty fortune, but Antonio waits patiently in Venice to exchange his pound of flesh for
Shylock’s three thousand ducats:
Well, jailer, on. Pray God Bassanio come out
To see me pay his debt, and then care not I (Shakespeare, Merchant
III.iii.35-6).

“To see me pay his debt.” Seeing makes sense in a world where sight figures so
prominently.
8
Bassanio needs money because he has borrowed too much money from his
friend, Antonio. Friendship can no longer support Bassanio's livelihood.
Greater diversity of class and the increasing presence of women in the market of
the theatre reflect a changing early modern culture, one in which the merchant Antonio's
love for the noble Bassanio, already diverse in the two men being of different class,
cannot sustain the now outdated model of, for lack of a better word, patronage. I am
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speaking here of a system in which men gave their favorites, other men, very real and
material gifts and advantages, a relationship based on Greek and Roman models in a
period of Classic revitalization. Bassanio's choosing the proper casket is likely met with
relief and pleasure; if not by the audience, clearly by Portia and her circle. Of all the
suitors, Portia finds Bassanio the most attractive. Informed of Bassanio's wealthy
appearance and arrival, she exclaims to her waiting gentlewoman, Nerissa:
Come, come, Nerissa, for I long to see
Quick Cupid's post that comes so mannerly (Shakespeare, Merchant
II.ix.98-9).

Shakespeare rewrites Bassanio as Cupid's messenger, but he dresses him with Antonio's
money. Portia is excited “to see” love embodied as Cupid and re-dressed “so mannerly.”
But what does it mean for Bassanio to receive so much help along the way? The
discourse of love, be it a classical male-male or an early modern romantic male-female, is
about the transaction of coin from one beloved to another: Antonio to Bassanio to Portia,
to Bassanio, and back to Antonio (in the altered shape of his own intact flesh). I would
suggest, depending on one's own position in relation to and alignment with the characters,
shame, repugnance, and guilt to be part of those feelings.

Wrestling for Chains

Love is repositioned in As You Like It as the very material body, but the discourse
starts with love as a familial project. From the outset, Shakespeare materializes love as
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“wills” and “crowns,” or coins. After the death of his father, Orlando is angry with his
brother for neglecting his (Orlando’s) proper education or upbringing. The play begins
with the conflicting emotions of sadness and anger, which also serve as the launching
point for the problem of money and family. Orlando’s rebellion is emblematic of a larger
early modern concern families had over money, inheritance, and future prosperity.
Orlando, who much like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, sets the play in motion with
emotion:
As I remember. Adam, it was upon this fashion
bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as
thou sayest, charged my brother on his blessing to breed me
well–and there begins my sadness... (Shakespeare, As You I.i.1-4).

In addition to a specific sum, a “thousand crowns,” Shakespeare includes “bequeathed,”
as was the cultural “fashion” or practice, and “charged” before arriving at “sadness.” I
suggest that the terms employed – “fashion,” “bequeathed,” “will,” “a thousand crowns”,
“charged,” and “to breed” – offer a sense of the dominant discourse at play. The play is
about families and how they maintain nobility across generations. Shakespeare’s
explaining familial relations and obligations with “To breed me well” brings us back to
“old profit” and education. Part of the sadness at the outset is the way that familial love
in this instance does not in fact benefit the family. “To breed” also means to produce
offspring and Orlando may well be decrying his poor “breeding” precisely because it
decreases his chances of breeding. Returning briefly again to the passage at hand, we
might read in the “poor,” “blessing,” and “sadness” Shakespeare‘s critique of a familial
love anchored in inheritance. Rather than the education accorded a “gentleman of
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[Orlando’s] birth” (Shakespeare, As You I.i.8), Oliver offers merely the “stalling of an
ox” (Shakespeare, As You I.i.9). Meanwhile:
[...] My brother Jacques he
keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit (Shakespeare,
As You I.i.4-5).

“Profit” is education. Shakespeare links profit with gold, or “goldenly,” and the material
context of the passage gives way then to the emotional or spiritual charge that moves
Orlando to action.
Inspired by his father, Sir Roland de Bois, Orlando looks for a way out.
Shakespeare will use the father as impetus for the son’s actions again in Hamlet, a play
written shortly after As You Like It.
9
The idea of the father moving through the son
makes sense at a time when the humoral, or Galenic model was understood to account for
the body and one’s feelings.
10
Orlando claims his father to be moving through him:
This is it, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father,
which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against the servi-
tude. I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise
remedy how to avoid it (Shakespeare, As You I.i.18-21).

Much like yellow bile or choler, which renders the subject angry and ill-tempered,
Orlando feels his father within him, thus making him “mutiny against his servitude.”
Contemporary understandings of anger and irritation would posit the negative arousal in
thoughts the subject has about the other person. On the contrary, early modern discourse
involves a far more material and visceral experience, with Orlando’s father actually
moving through or “within” him. Shakespeare’s “knowing remedy” is the play that
follows as the solution to this discourse.
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Further confounding the solution of the play, Shakespeare uses the lifeless body
of Charles as the impetus for the action, calling into question love as a familial project
concerned with the maintenance of wealth. While the action of the wrestling match
leaves everything to the players and those involved in the production, Shakespeare
imbues Charles with economic connotations before the match. Moreover, like the
paterfamilias that moves through Orlando and inspires him to action, the spirit of the
father moves through Rosalind, leading her to gift Orlando with a chain and bind their
spirits together. Speaking to Oliver, Orlando’s brother, Charles professes, “Tomorrow,
sir, I wrestle for my credit” (Shakespeare, As You I.i.108). When Orlando asks Charles to
“break his neck” (Shakespeare, As You I.i.124-5), Charles assures him, “[...] I’ll give him
his payment” (Shakespeare, As You I.i.135). “Credit” and “payment” situate the fixed
wrestling match in the discourse of a market, one meant to solve economic and familial
problems. With Orlando out of the picture, Oliver would save whatever money he would
have been spending on him and no longer feel guilty at having treated his younger
brother poorly. After Orlando and Charles wrestle, Duke Frederick asks: “How dost
thou, Charles?” (Shakespeare, As You I.ii.184), and Le Beau responds for him: “He
cannot speak, my lord” (Shakespeare, As You I.ii.185). The lifeless and unresponsive
body of Charles represents the excess of Orlando’s sadness and rage over and around the
play’s discourse on love. The fallen body, however it be represented on stage, sets in
motion the resolution to the changing family form. Shakespeare presents love within the
family as a matter of “profit” and education, of birth and breeding. Rosalind’s father
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moves her to give Orlando one of her chains, and the spirit of the father unites the two
across the play.

Shape-Shifting and the Purse

While a chain can be bought and then worn, as in the gift that Rosalind offers
Orlando, the coin to procure that gift would have been kept in a purse. The purse, often
worn on or attached to the body, is a container of money, or a space for coins (and
modern day dollars or credit cards). But "purse" is also an early modern slang for
genitals, be they male or female. Shakespeare capitalizes on the heightened erotics of the
purse in that the bawdy play increases the pleasure of the process, for both viewers and
readers. Moving beyond the emotionally-charged object to the erotics of the body
emphasizes the subjects at hand, as hands attached to bodies. The Merchant of Venice
asks the questions: What does it mean to transact? Where do we put things? The
transcendence of coin that comes with transcending flesh is only available to and after
Bassanio has guessed or chosen the appropriate casket. I want to suggest that the process
of transfer tied up in the setting(s) of the play, like the signifying rings that pass from one
character to another, is also heavily invested in an emotional transaction. While objects
can easily be held in things, humans holding on to feelings is a far more complicated
problem. The sadness with which Shakespeare begins the play encapsulates the
emotional tone of the piece. Shakespeare posits sadness from the outset, with first
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Antonio’s declaration, “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad” (Shakespeare, Merchant
I.i.1), and then Portia’s echo in the second scene,
By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this
great world (Shakespeare, Merchant I.ii.1-2).

The first two scenes then begin with characters professing their dismay, first Antonio and
then Portia, “sad” and “aweary.” Antonio’s sadness reveals how male-male love and the
market are at odds with the conflicting problems of love and hereditary rank. Portia, on
the other hand, may well be aweary because of the elaborate courting process her
deceased father has left her, a tiresome and difficult experience intended to protect
familial wealth and nobility. Knowing and the body are also a part of these similarly
negative emotions, and I raise Portia’s lament to link Antonio and Portia as two figures
both in pursuit of the same object - Bassanio. The space of their connection, or the
desired space, is, with all its connotations, the purse. Using Antonio’s purse, Bassanio
dresses himself up so as to take Portia’s “purse.” But before he can have her, she gives
him her purse so that he can purchase Antonio’s flesh and freedom. With each purse
Shakespeare produces new feelings; yet the residual sadness persists, all the way to the
play’s end.
Antonio lies about his sadness in the first scene however. Male-male love and the
market are in fact at odds with the conflicting problems of love and hereditary rank;
sadness is the result. His (merchant) friends connect Antonio’s sadness with his
“merchandise” at sea, and then to love itself, but it is Antonio himself that reveals his role
is to play “a sad one.” The discourse of his love, along spatial lines, moves from his
“purse” to his friend Antonio, on to clothes and material objects that might re-dress
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Bassanio’s body, arriving then at Bassanio’s newly acquired wife, Portia. Shakespeare’s
meta-theatrics in this instance are important. Antonio states:
I hold the world but as the world, Graziano –
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one (Shakespeare, Merchant I.i.77-9).

As an actor on the stage, the man playing Antonio claims the world around him to be a
stage in which each “man” plays his “part.” For early modern audiences, such a claim
calls into question the very roles of those watching the play. Shedding light on the self as
a part to be played, Shakespeare uses the space of the market to interrogate the matter of
being. In front of the other merchants Antonio refutes their claim that he is sad because
he has not heard back from his ships at sea. To which, Solanio retorts: "Why then, you
are in love" (Shakespeare, Merchant I.i.45). Antonio's inarticulate, "Fie, fie," refutes the
statement, albeit poorly. Solanio, and shortly thereafter Graziano, attempt to lighten
Antonio's mood by aping and "playing the fool."
11
But more importantly, love quickly
gets wrapped up in Antonio and Bassanio, and in Bassanio's love for Portia.
Shakespeare envelops sadness in misplaced love. Antonio, I would suggest, is sad
because his male love is about to be replaced by a female lover. When Bassanio starts to
tell Antonio how he plans to repay the debt he owes him, Antonio responds:
…My purse, my person, my extremest means
Lie all unlocked to your occasions (Shakespeare, Merchant I.i.138-9).

An open purse, person, and insides (be it one's money or heart), indicate the depths of
Antonio's feelings for Bassanio. The source of sadness, at first attributed to the loss of
Antonio’s ships (and merchandise), is then posited in love (for Bassanio, which leads to
Bassanio’s love for Portia), and finally manifest as the material and metaphorical “purse.”
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I read purse, then, as “a money bag or receptacle for money, and its contents” (OED I),
and as the metaphorical and early modern slang for genitals, or a space for bodily
pleasure. The idea of male-male love being replaced by male-female love brings with it
negative emotions: deception, sadness, rejection, and even anger. In this instance,
Antonio has to disguise his sadness and he ends up doing so in the name of service, by
backing Bassanio financially. A merchant, Antonio is, in effect, buying the attention of a
nobleman. But the noble Bassanio seeks his equal in the female body of Portia. Bassanio
is more invested in a common class than a similar gender. At the end of the first scene,
Antonio admits that his ships are at sea and that he has no value or worth without them.
He remains unhappy, however, not because he has yet to learn the news about his ships,
but because he is in the process of losing his best friend. The purchase of his purse is
coming up empty. Alas, Antonio is not the only Antonio in Shakespeare’s work to have
his purse rejected by another man. Indeed, in Twelfth Night, a similar Antonio offers his
“purse” to a man only to be rejected for a woman (and in a memorable scene, by a
woman he thinks is a man).
In Twelfth Night, with Antonio and Sebastian, Shakespeare inverts the classes to
underscore the economic significance. The pleasure the audience (reader) gets out of the
play (text) is “new profit.” After befriending Sebastian, Antonio winds up leaving him to
wander the city alone. Before they part, however, Antonio offers Sebastian his purse:
“Hold, sir, here’s my purse” (Shakespeare, Twelfth III.iii.38). With the "purse" standing
in for genitalia and possible fixed sites of pleasure, Antonio’s offering, much like the
Antonio of Merchant, reveals desire and feeling. What stops Antonio from continuing on
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with Sebastian is the threat of incarceration. A pirate, Antonio, chooses not to enter the
city for fear of prosecution or imprisonment. Yet later in the play, Antonio will still enter
the city and protect whom he perceives to be Sebastian. In this scene, however, he
suggests they meet later at an inn, the Elephant, and encourages Sebastian to treat himself
to something to he might enjoy:
Haply your eye shall light upon some toy
You have desire to purchase; and your store
I think is not for idle markets, sir (Shakespeare, Twelfth III.iii.44-6).

The Elephant is a provocative image, especially when coupled with the purse. The trunk
would fit well inside the purse. More importantly, Shakespeare's choice of "toy,"
"purchase," "store," and "idle markets," all in three lines, brings to the forefront the early
modern anxiety about and around the emerging market. "Idle" is also a weighted term for
early modern viewers who knew well that the players before them had to avoid the public
appearance of being "idle" because of vagrancy laws. “Market,” again, highlights the
staging of the play within a market. Antonio reconfigures Sebastian as a consumer so
that he, Antonio, can provide Sebastian with the material means to satisfy his desire:
Sebastian’s delving into Antonio’s purse for pleasure, or, returning to Shakespeare’s
imagery, the trunk feeling in and around the purse. Consummation of love is thus re-
imagined for Antonio as the supplier of the means to satisfy Sebastian's desire.
Consummation, in other words, is recapitulated as an imagined, visceral consumption.
The relationship between Antonio and Sebastian, much like the relationship
between Merchant’s major men (Antonio and Bassanio) and Twelfth Night's central
characters (Orsino, Viola/Cesario, Olivia) is configured in terms of corporeal and
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financial transactions. Stephen Greenblatt, in The Norton Shakespeare introduction to
Twelfth Night, rightly introduces the topic of intimacy between men as " a recurrent
theme in Shakespeare's culture" (Greenblatt, Norton 1765). The very notion of inequality
or impropriety at the level of matter, precisely because matter is not easily substituted, is
also revealed in Sebastian's refusal to take Antonio on as his servant. That is to say, in
the residual discourse, when the pairs are improperly matched, not even money can make
them right. Antonio first asks where Sebastian is going. Sebastian's response is
illuminating in that he bases his response upon the "modesty," or politeness, he sees in
Antonio. Sebastian is able to "perceive" in Antonio qualities that allow him to believe
Antonio and to tell him the truth. How the truth is relayed, however, is telling:
[…] But I perceive in you so excellent a touch of
modesty that you will not extort from me what I am willing to
keep in. Therefore it charges me in manners the rather to
express myself. (Shakespeare, Merchant II.i.10-13)

Not only does Sebastian see into Antonio to detect in the essence of his being the
courtesy that demands Sebastian's honesty, but he also articulates the exchange in
economic language. Antonio will not have to "extort" the truth from Sebastian because
his good nature, his inner being read properly by Sebastian, merits the equal payment or
"charge" of Sebastian's honesty. In addition to its financial connotations, "extort" brings
with it corporeal suggestions, as in "to obtain from a reluctant person by violence, torture,
intimidation, or abuse of legal authority" (OED 1). Moving from "extort" to "charge,"
again there are both corporeal and economic ideas at play. Charge would have meant "to
load; to cause to bear, hold, or receive" (OED 1), but it also means "to burden with
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expense, tribute, actions, etc.; to put to expense; to be burdensome to" (OED 12). To
charge, as in "a sum or price" (OED 18) is a nineteenth century development. Money in
relationships, particularly between men in Shakespeare’s theatre, matters; not even coins
can keep them together.
Confusing class and gender provides Shakespeare a great deal of purchase and
pleasure. Shakespeare disavows the Attic model again with Sebastian’s refusal of
Antonio’s love and the ensuing “new profit” that arises out of Antonio’s confusing
Viola/Cesario for his love. While the residual discourse about love between men is not
necessarily troubled by Sir Andrew's pursuit of Olivia, Shakespeare's positioning Antonio
between Sir Andrew and Viola/Cesario juxtaposes the problems of both gender and class.
For in the problematic pairing of Antonio and Sebastian, it is, in addition to his gender,
Antonio’s class that helps keep the two of them apart. Antonio saves Viola/Cesario only
to be denied his "purse" and then arrested. Returning to the role of provider, Antonio
asks the beffudled Viola/Cesario:
Is't possible that my deserts to you
Can lack persuasion? (Shakespeare, Twelfth III.iv.313)

The Norton glosses the passage as the following: “Is it possible my past kindness can fail
to persuade you?” (Norton 1806). The early modern meaning of past kindness also has
economic valences: “An action or quality that deserves its appropriate recompense; that
in conduct or character which claims reward or deserves punishment. Usually in pl.”
(OED 2). Antonio encouraged Sebastian to buy material goods, which would bring about
affection and love in the consumer. But Antonio is asking if his kindness is ineffectual.
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Or, is it possible for Sebastian to forget Antonio after spending his money? What
Shakespeare seems to be suggesting here is part of the process of commodification and
consumption. Buying may well mean that the object bought replaces the person or means
by which the consumer came into the money.
When Viola/Cesario professes not to know Antonio, Antonio's chastisement
brings us back to issues of bodies and being.
But O, how vile an idol proves this god!
Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.
In nature there's no blemish but the mind.
None can be called deformed but the unkind.
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil,
Are empty trunks o'er flourished by the devil (Shakespeare, Twelfth
III.iv.330-35).

Shakespeare already used an auditory “idol” in describing Sebastian as not being "for idle
markets." I wholly acknowledge the linguistic turn required to note the difference
between the two terms, but I want to suggest, nonetheless, that the similarity of the two
words and the context reveal the poet’s critical stance. To extend my read into the
present moment, I believe the replication of idle by idol, expressed within this context of
markets, is Shakespeare's critique of the market exchange. For what exactly is the “god”
Shakespeare describes as being so “vile an idol”? And “empty trunks o’erflourished by
the devil” (III.iv.35) sounds much like early modern concerns expressed over usury.
Antonio's shock, surprise, and dismay are a result of "Sebastian" not acting as he should,
or not even as he appears. In terms of the body, Sebastian is Viola/Cesario, as the
audience knows but Antonio does not. Yet Antonio is also criticizing the "good features"
for failing to meet his expectations; or, the "beautiful" for being "evil." What Antonio
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sees and claims to be evil is the "empty trunk," and the body itself. With relation to the
emerging discourse and the unstable body allowing for the proper alignment of bodies
along class lines, the unstable body in this instance must be and is the wrong one.
Antonio sees not Sebastian and his "purse," but Viola/Cesario, whose "purse", albeit of a
different shape and sort, is entirely her own. Shakespeare's employment of an "empty
trunk" furthers the erotic imagery that highlights the problem of gender in the pairing.
Viiola/Cesario’s trunk would have to be “empty," for her trunk is in fact imaginary. The
feelings of betrayal and shame that come with the comedy of mistaken identity in
Antonio's arrest are part of the residual discourse involving love and gender.
Shakespeare posits the problem of class at precisely the moment when the appropriate
lover with relation to nobility presents himself. Sir Andrew, like Orsino, is arguably a
better match for Olivia because both are noble. But Sir Andrew, like Bassanio in
Merchant, needs money. Orsino, on the other hand, is not who Olivia desires. Indeed,
not every boy gets the girl, or the desired girl; or the boy, or even the desired boy.

Circumcision and the Cutting Away of Men

As women began to enter the more public and male space, and in the market of
the theatre they would have done so as equals, they could vie for positions among and
amidst men, the positions earlier afforded solely men. Focusing on body parts as a
launching point, I argue the proliferation of circumcision in the play highlights
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Shakespeare's critique of male-male intimacy.
12
Shakespeare's cutting out intimate
moments between men is reflected in the numerous references to circumcision. Antonio
and Bassanio, to illustrate, move farther apart after Antonio lends him money to help him
procure a wife. Having borrowed the money needed to dress himself up, Bassanio leaves
Venice for Belmont, where he selects the proper casket and thus takes Portia's hand.
Back in Venice, however, Antonio awaits sentencing.
Well jailer, on. Pray God Bassanio come
To see me pay his debt, then I care not (Shakespeare, Merchant III.iii.35-
6).

What would it mean for Bassanio to see Antonio lose his pound of flesh? I am thinking
in this instance of another cultural site that presents people gathered around a male body
to see if not the lopping off of a pound, at least a bit of flesh.
Coupled with the setting, Shakespeare's employment of Lancelot (in addition to
the ever-present threat of piracy and the loss of the ships at sea) suggests circumcision.
Lancelot's name in early modern texts is sometimes spelled with an -ette. A lancelette is
the knife used in blood-letting and circumcision. In conjunction, Salerio's meeting with
Bassanio provides for an interesting metaphor, one that highlights the bloodiness of
masculinity. Upon receipt of the letter from Antonio, delivered by Salerio, Bassanio tells
Portia:
… Here is a letter, lady,
The paper as the body of my friend
And every word in it a gaping wound
Issuing life-blood (Shakespeare, Merchant III.ii.262-5).

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Context is important because Antonio’s letter follows upon Bassanio’s “marriage” to
Portia. I say marriage as is it more explicitly, Bassanio’s choosing the right casket, which
provides the representation of Portia via painting, the scroll revealing the fortune and
instructing the kiss, culminating in Portia’s giving of the ring. Moreover, Nerissa and
Graziano articulate their marriage desires after the giving of the ring. Antonio’s money
(in exchange for his flesh) has thus produced not one but two marriages. What normally
follows the marriage is the first conjugal night, but what follows in the play is the
Antonio’s “bloody” letter.
The allusions to circumcision that reverberate throughout the play, primarily
employed at points of anxiety or pressure in the relationships between men, reveal a
residual discourse that slips between the dominant discourse of marriage to perpetuate
class division and the emerging discourse of gender-bending as a solution. Returning to
the residual discourse, what Shakespeare provides across The Merchant is a troubling
rupture between men and their intimate relationships. Profit in the play, Antonio’s power
as a merchant, works against the “old profit” of a male intimacy that supersedes women.
Money allows Antonio access to the noble Bassanio, but a wealthy merchant is not what
the poor nobleman needs to fill his reserves. Only Portia, a woman with money, can do
that.
The importance of letters, renegades, circumcision, and castration, concepts raised
by the setting of Twelfth Night, are manifest in the subplots of both Sir Andrew and
Malvolio, each of whom is in search of class betterment through marriage. While Sir
Toby urges Sir Andrew to challenge Viols as Cesario to a duel for Olivia's hand in
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"martial hand" (III.ii.35), Sir Toby, Maria, and the rest also craft the infamous false letter
to trap Malvolio. Letters become a sort of currency, a discourse of meaning (or mistaken
meaning) and pleasure (as well as displeasure) through consumption. It is in the letter
that Malvolio mistakes "her very c's, her u's, and her t's" (II.v.78), for Olivia's hand. "C-
U-T" is also slang for genitalia, but I want to suggest that part of the valence involved in
the allusions to letter, genitalia, and (mistaken) hands also involves circumcision.
13

Certainly, the duel that Sir Toby and Fabian craft for Sir Andrew and Viola/Cesario plays
on the idea of Illyria as a place for renegades and pirates. Viola/Cesario is by her own
choice, "C-U-T": she presents herself to the Duke "as an eunuch" (Shakespeare, Twelfth
I.ii.53). Shakespeare’s engagement with circumcision via persons in the play, along with
the connotations in the topical allusion of the play’s setting, are heightened by the near
enactment of castration, an excess of circumcision.
To return to Sir Andrew and the duel, when Sir Toby lays the challenge upon
Cesario/Viola, Shakespeare writes:
[…] There-
fore on, or strip your sword stark naked, for meddle you must,
that's certain, or forswear to wear iron about you (Shakespeare,
Twelfth III.iv.222-4).

At first glance, Sir Toby commands Cesario as Viola to unsheath her sword to do battle,
or to prepare herself for her own coffin. At a deeper level, Sir Toby (un)wittingly enacts
or articulates a gendering of Viola as Cesario. Stripped naked, as she appears to Sir Toby
as a man, she should have Sir Toby's metal. Again, Shakespeare puns on words of
similar sound but different meanings. However, as a woman with a vagina, her iron
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would be that of a different sort, a chastity belt. The meeting of true metal and the
chastity belt requires some undoing, and that is precisely what Sir Andrew proposes:
Let him the matter slip and I'll give him
My horse, grey Capulet (Shakespeare, Twelfth III.iv.254-5).

Sir Andrew's material solution to the problem of the duel echoes Antonio's attempt to win
Sebastian over via his "purse," not to mention the "empty trunk." Nonetheless, these
invitations fail. Sir Andrew's letting the "matter slip" and passing his "horse" suggests
castration, but without the duel or cutting actually taking place. The "slip" of the "cut"
that gives her/him his "horse," is a sort of circumcision. Circumcision and castration
relate to the imagination and the shift necessary in the play's solution: a young girl
playing a castrated boy page becomes a female bride (when s/he dresses as such in the
imagined wedding after the play ends). The Illyrian setting of the play, as it was
understood and experience in the early modern period, contributes to these matters,
revealing the ways by which the residual and emerging discourses grow out of the
dominant discourse. While Shakespeare's staging of the residual discourse via Sir
Andrew is comedic, the staging of the residual discourse with relation to class and
Antonio is tragic. Love outside of class lines, the dominant discourse, demands an
unstable body.

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Going Solo

Much of what I have discussed thus far involves selves in relation to others; in
fact, one of the most important elements of the stage is its interactive discourse, its work
within and around the one amongst the many. But the endings of these three plays
provide a unique representation of self standing apart from the group. At a time when
social classes were increasing, the representation of an individual outside of the collective
whole makes sense. Generically speaking, the celebrations that close these “comedies”
are tainted by lone figures: for instance, in The Merchant Antonio; in Twelfth Night not
only Antonio, but also Malvolio. Yet Shakespeare calls even greater attention to lone
characters in As You Like It.
The ambivalence of The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It is also present in
Twelfth Night. On stage with the Sebastian and Viola, Orsino and Olivia, Antonio is left
without a partner. His leaving with the pairs so that Feste can sing calls attention to the
rapid assembly of the proper bodies and their respective partners. Further confounding
the feelings in the end, elation is paired with vengeance that comes with Malvolio's
return. Shakespeare leaves us with the anticipated joy of marriage, as well as Malvolio's
certain punishment, or opportunity for judgment and sentencing against his captors.
14

Just before exiting the stage, Malvolio warns the others: “I’ll be revenged on the whole
pack of you” (Shakespeare, Twelfth V.i.365). The anticipated clarification and release
promised by the early modern comedy is revealed to be far more complex. The feelings
are both, to be reductive for a moment, positive and negative.
15
More importantly,
moving from feelings to bodies, as human beings tend to do, the imagining of bodies is
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the early modern subject in flux. Shakespeare’s play ends with the imagined revenge as
Malvolio would have it.
Out of this emerging discourse of gender-bending, feelings such as shame,
compassion, guilt, disgust, and joy make for complicated comedy. While waiting to
celebrate the nuptials with the return of Portia and company, the lovers Jessica and
Lorenzo recount tragic tales of love and separation. Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and
Thisby, Dido, and Medea, are all figures whose love ends, to put it mildly, badly. The
similarities lie in their love and violent ends, but the difference is in Portia and Bassanio's
victory, as well as that of Jessica and Lorenzo. Jessica, left, amidst the revelry in Venice,
the similar but different Shylock to wed the gentile Lorenzo. And she made her escape
under the guise of a boy. Moreover, according to a letter delivered by Nerrisa, Shylock is
dead and what remains of his estate now belongs to Jessica, and her new husband
Lorenzo. Although Shylock is mocked in his misery, there is also room in his loss for
empathy. Indeed the final scene, albeit very much about coupling up its multiple partners
and marriages, includes a single Antonio, solo. Possibly in contrast to his staged
separation and distance from the others, Antonio’s last words are positive. To Portia (and
not Bassanio), who hands him a letter,
16
he states:
Sweet lady, you have given me life and
living
For here I read for certain that my ships are
Are safely come to road (Shakespeare, Merchant V.i.284-7).

The safe arrival of his ships brings us back to the opening scene of sadness. The pleasure
at being spared his life for a pound of flesh, Antonio’s presence in Belmont is
celebratory. But beyond that, Shakespeare provides material gain in the form of “ships”
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(and commodities for trade), “life” (his own and the marriage of Portia and Bassanio,
which will surely produce new life in the form of children), and the new “living” that
may include a friendship of sorts with a noble family in Belmont. Shakespeare’s use of
women dressed as men to win their grooms and the play on ring, is demonstrative of the
early modern anxiety around marriage and social mobility.
Of As You Like It, literary critic David Schalwyk claims the play demonstrates “a
decline in the old, settled relations of service based on reciprocity and the rise of an
unstable world of individualist interests and ambitions” (Schalwyk, “Love and Service”
79). The individual will over and against the collective would seem to be a direct result
of the rise of the subject. Literary critic Leah S. Marcus reads the end of As You Like It
as a socially regulating force, which comes out of Hymen and her lines:
Then there is mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together” (Shakespeare, As You V.iv.97-99).

For Marcus, “‘Made even’ in the sense of ‘brought into accord,’ but also in the sense of
‘socially levelled,’ at least for the duration of their time amidst the liberty of the forest;
‘atone’ in the sense of ‘make amends,’ but also in the sense of forming a community ‘at
one’ in good neighborhood” (Marcus 63). In closing, Marcus posits contrary emotion as
the power and product of Shakespeare’s stage - “its benevolence, charm, volatility, and
menace” (Marcus 66). Much like my own discursive methodology, Mary Thomas Crane
employs cognitive theory to unveil dissonant and competing ideas, as well as the “central
role of feelings – of regret, anger, envy” (Crane, Shakespeare’s Brian 71). Crane’s astute
analysis reveals the complexities of a play that challenges the dominant discourse of class
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and family inheritance, along with love, and the emotional effects such questioning
necessarily entails – loss, anger, surprise, pleasure, regret, and confusion. In these critics
we can see the play as a changing force, but one in which the self is both released and
tethered at the same time. Jaques is also ambivalent. Rather than disappear in some
fashion along with the others, Jaques disrupts the scene deliberately to step out of it.
17

The return of Jaques De Bois in the final scene of the play is troubling for a variety of
reasons. In terms of the text, assignment of the lines in V.iv. at 140 and 172 is
complicated, necessitating editorial interruption. The textual question points to the
problematic nature of the ending. Why would the elder brother return home and then
venture out into the forest to find his younger brothers at this particular moment? The
narrative discourse offers little reason for his entrance. But the exclusive nature of the
clown, Jaques, throughout the play, demonstrates what I would argue to be Shakespeare’s
staging of separation.
The vice figure and the clown, generically speaking, are afforded liberties far
greater than most other characters. And while Jaques’ melancholy is stronger here than
in other figures, he is not unlike Malvolio in what purports to be a dark disposition. After
relaying his desire to the old Duke in a religious life, Jaques salutes the others and
declares his desire not to partake in merriment.
[…] – So, to your pleasures;
I am for other than for dancing measures (Shakespeare, As You
V.iv.181-2).

Staging his own rejection of the mirth, Shakespeare provides a critique of love by any
and all means. When Duke Senior asks him to stay, Jaques persists:
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To see no pastime, I. What would you have
I’ll stay to know at your abandoned cave (Shakespeare, As You V.i.184-
5).

Indeed, not even the audience will “see” the “pastime” to come, for it will have to be
imagined, or celebrated after the play. Even still, Shakespeare chooses to have Jaques
wait alone in the abandoned cave for word from the Duke. Jaques' rejection affords a
model for reception, something made all the more clear by Shakespeare's rare use of an
Epilogue.
Shakespeare further engages his audience by having Rosalind unmasked, as the
(boy) actor addresses the audience in the Epilogue:
[…] If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that
pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And
I am sure, as many have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will
for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell (Shakespeare, As
You 14-19).

While stressing the pleasure of the body regardless of gender (or mind?), the (boy)
actor/Rosalind/Ganymede also seeks to profit in applause, a profit ground in gain. Lots
of applause indicates pleasure, which should mean continued profit in sales. The play
also revels in the pleasure of profit on the sly: Rosalind/Ganymede as the adept 'profit' of
love. Rosalind/Ganymede is profitable in an instructional sense, the “old profit,” as she
(re)teaches Orlando how to court his love. Shakespeare criticizes the male-male model
by inserting a female figure disguised as a male. “New profit” is the pleasure derived
from the tension between an unknowing character on stage and the in-the-know audience
or reader. The pastoral setting of the genre is an important part of the task, for the
liberating quality of the forest allows for a greater experience of pleasure while profit is
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wrapped up in both. And finally the play itself opens with the staging of inheritance
fought out through a wrestling match. In this way, economic matters are once again
reduced to bodies and "new profit," and the pleasure of the audience comes in the victory
of the morally sound ("old profit") over the avaricious and corrupt.

Conclusion

The imagination of the early modern audience was a mind capable of attaching
and detaching genders and classes like costumes and actors, of substituting Sebastian for
Cesario/Viola; or Portia returning her ring to Bassanio only to have him tell the Doctor
Balthasar that he alone can sleep with Portia in Bassanio's absence; or Phoebe's taking
William for a husband when her beloved Ganymede is suddenly Rosalind marrying
Orlando. Having the cognitive or imaginative abilities to accept these sorts of
transmutations allowed for a loving of the most proper sort. Both within and amidst the
early modern theatre, people playing roles sought pleasure and profit, or profit and
pleasure. The rapidly changing commercial context, one in which different sorts of
people are afforded discourse, grows out of material exchange. Buying pleasure, much to
the dismay of some, means purchasing possibility. But the possibility of pleasure
requires subjects, subjects willing to let their minds go as much as their coins. So how
one loves, much like one is learning in the early modern commercial stage, depends on
shifting, if not shifty, notions of class and gender.
119

In reading three of Shakespeare’s plays, all comedies that contain something
darker, I have argued for a growing awareness and representation of the subject in
motion. The experience of the market, I contend, includes representations of itself as
currency. In fact, we go to the theatre and to the market to be a part of the community, to
see ourselves so that our selves might be seen. For it is a transaction that depends on the
trans–: something is imparted to the audience even as the audience gives something
back. Coins are fitting in that although they are the things being shuffled back and forth,
they are also the very things by which we all exist, by which we are allowed to see the
stage and undergo the experience of playing and for which the experience of the stage is
crafted. Usury, and the discourses around usury as an unnatural practice, contribute to
early modern representations of the market as a space for death and rebirth. Portia’s birth
into the bridal realm across her father’s casket merely confirms the importance of the
market as a space for early modern marriage. Noble families sought to bolster their
family coffers through marriage to the daughters of newly-wealthy merchants invested in
rapidly expanding trades and commerce. Similarly, increasingly wealthy merchants
began to interact and engage with nobles hitherto inaccessible. As the options grew,
connections between noble families assumed to be solid, turned out to be weak. Loving
is a staged enactment of being that requires teaching. The pleasure of the stage is
romantic pedagogy: gifting chains, practicing kisses, and crafting love poems on trunks.
In so many ways, the gender both does and does not matter. Queer it will certainly be,
but it’s not who you do, it’s how you do it. And some, as all of these plays suggest, are
better suited to doing it alone.
120

As we can see in the emergence of the Jaques who chooses to go it alone, all these
choices come with a price. In a market, the shop is filled with treasures, but each one
comes with at a cost to the consumer. “Printing Pleasing Profit,” from Horace to the
present, seeks to meld the thinking with the visceral, the mind with the body, through art.
The production of art, ensconced within a market, be it early modern or contemporary,
continues to waffle on the balance, yet the balance includes, along with knowledge and
delight, money. Be it spent or earned, to make or to partake, the self gets wrapped up in
the market of art. Being the self includes the feeling self, the emotional being.
As contemporary scholarship struggles with competing ways to read English early
modern literature, it is my hope that the convergence of art, the market, and the subject
might allow us continued insight into both the the plays and our own play. Moving in
and around cultural materialism, close reading, intertextuality, cognitive theory, and
rhetorical practice, we might see our own work on plays constructed out of various parts
and persons even already years behind, next to, and beyond our own. For in today’s
media-driven world market, so much of being our selves depends on what self we show,
what we buy, do, and where we do it. Art and the market are increasingly bound up
together, putting even greater strain on the model of profit and pleasure.

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Chapter Two Endnotes
1
I am particularly indebted to Jean Howard's work on the early modern stage as a space
in which women challenged patriarchal power. I am thinking of The Stage and Social
Struggle in Early Modern England, as well as her "Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and
Paying Customers."

2
This and all future citations of Shakespeare’s plays will be taken from The Norton
Shakespeare.

3
This paragraph borrows heavily from Patricia Parker and a presentation she delivered at
The Huntington Library in the spring of 2006.

4
For more on the importance of setting in relation to castration and the eunuch, see Kier
Elam. “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of
Castration.” Shakespeare Quarterly. v. 47, n. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1 - 36.

5
Forman touches upon two key elements often overlooked in the play’s conclusion: the
Captain’s imprisonment by Malvolio and the lack of resolution with Antonio’s purse. Of
course, neither of these problems gets solved, and that is part of the larger claim Foreman
is making about capitalism’s investment in counterfeit and transformation.

6
As the stage directions in The Norton indicate, and as we know early modern stage
practice to frequently include music and song, the materialization of the music thus
establishes discourse. Bruce R. Smith’s analysis of broadsides strengthens my idea
concerning music, materialization, commodification, and discourse. For more, see
“Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in Cultural Memory.”
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture. eds. Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes.
London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006; 193-217.

7
Karen Newman’s analysis has been very helpful to me in this process. Newman reads
the play as a structure of exchange, too, but aligns Belmont with love and Venice with
economics, only to affirm that both are equal parts of the established system of exchange.
She argues Bassanio’s political and gendered re-inscription both affirms and questions
the dominant sex/gender system. Newman’s reading of epic simile in Jessica and
Lorenzo brilliantly furthers the notion of inversion and contestation that I argue through
the body in flux.

8
For more on the importance of sight in the English early modern, see Arthur F. Kinney
and his Shakespeare and Cognition, particularly the chapters on Aristotle’s Legacy and
Shakespeare’s Rings.

122

9
For more on Hamlet and the discursive practice, see Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of
Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.

10
See Gail Kern Paster for more on the material body and its correlation to the inner,
emotional being. For a reading on the body against Paster, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt.
Exploring masculinity, see Smith and his analysis of the early modern Galenic body in
Shakespeare and Masculinity.

11
Shakespeare uses the body as a testing ground of sorts, with Solanio alluding to Janus
and Graziano playing the "fool." These bawdy bodily attempts to divert Antonio are
reminiscent of Mercutio's similar efforts in Romeo and Juliet.

12
In an insightful reading of the The Merchant of Venice, Frank Whigham argues that the
male interests of James I led to a proliferation of cross-class courtly sexuality and a
privileging of terms of invasion and contamination. Whigham argues that in the play
what he calls anality appears as a result of a strong woman and in addition to social class
usurpation. I am building on Whigham's use of the body in relation to class and gender.

13
In The Body Embarrassed, Gail Kern Paster debunks for the construction of women as
leaky vessels of the lower class: “What is at stake here is a semiology of excretion in
which an ostensibly natural behavior becomes thoroughly implicated in a complex
structure of class and gender differences” (35-5). Malvolio’s positing Olivia in the great
pissing figure of her c’s u’s and t’s, renders her both female genitalia and ashamed
woman caught in the act of peeing. Another reading of the letters and genitalia can be
found in Valerie Foreman.

14
In a similar vein to what I am trying to argue about excess throughout this paper, Leah
S. Marcus makes an insightful case for the end of the play as a cautionary tale in her
“Shakespeare and Popular Festivity.”

15
For important arguments about the pleasure of instability and un-knowing, see
Catherine Belsey, Valerie Foreman, and Lisa Jardine.

16
Alan Stewart brought my attention to the three letters in this final scene in a lecture at
The Huntington Library in the fall of 2007. As he argued in his presentation, these letters
reveal a complex early modern economic discourse in paper.

17
See Cynthia Marshall for more on Jaques. While I am skeptical that Jaques is, as
Marshall argues, Jaques De Bois, Marshall’s argument is provocative.

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Chapter Three

Ben Jonson and the Performance of Pleasure

In Ben Jonson’s satiric city comedies we can see the instability of the profit and
pleasure paradigm and its dependency upon the body as both a site of education and
delight, and a space for pain, penetration, movement, and liberation. The pleasure Jonson
so vividly and variously writes out, is also ambiguously critical of its very audience,
implicating them in responsibility, yet catering explicitly to them all the while. Jonson’s
staging of these bodily spectacles within a market economy further problematizes the
cost, delight, and lesson.
As we recall from the Introduction, fifteenth and sixteenth century connotations of
“discourse” included both “time” and “understanding.” But discourse brings with it
notions of trans-action, too. “Course” or “corse” meant “to exchange, to interchange; to
barter; to deal in (a thing) by buying and selling again” (OED). “Dis-,” means a sense of
intensification or movement out and away (OED). The developing markets of early
modern England are creating new spaces in which objects are being linked to prices of
exchange, to different experiences, and to various emotions. Along similar lines, I want
to build on what Jonathan Haynes, in his “Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of
Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” calls a three-part “dramatic economy.” Economy becomes
a handling of resources along a hierarchy with: the commercial economy within the
context of the play’s imagined locale; the economy of dramatic relations within the play;
and finally, the economy of relations with the audience.
124

Drama needs a clearly defined space in which the actors, viewed by the audience,
put on the play. The space of the stage, however, is both literal and metaphoric. I want to
use the space of the play as that which includes both the social experience of the theater
and the private experience of the play text. In that space, competing discourses create a
complicated weave of experiences and emotions threaded through text and engagement
with the viewer or reader. As cognitive theorist Mary Thomas Crane writes in “What
Was Performance?”, “The relationship between the performed and the real was much
more complex and uncertain, with at least a possibility that the act of performing itself
constituted an ‘exercise’ that effected material change in the world” (Crane,
“Performance” 184). Crane, a phenomenological and cognitive science critic, wants to
put pressure on the privileging of subversion and containment that accompanies the
favoring of the written word over performance. Crane is one of a number of materialist
critics who bridges the gap between the material body, via cognitive science, and the
bodily experience, through phenomenology. Indeed, many critics find in Ben Jonson’s
dramatic space chaos, disorder, and anger. Marxist cultural materialist/new historicist
Jonas Barish, for example, reads the subplot of Jonson’s Volpone (1606) as demonstrative
of the play’s over-arching theme of disorder. In addition, Barish, analyzing Volpone’s
children, links monstrosity, folly, and mimicry to the play’s central theme of disorder
(Barish, “Volpone” 9-21). New historicist, Marxist, feminist critic Peggy Knapp argues
that Jonson uses his city comedies to castigate the world around him, a world in flux. In
Epicene (1609), Knapp links semen and money in the practice of inheritance and
125

primogeniture, the very means by which Morose attempts to save his inheritance from
being passed down to his nephew (Knapp, Jonson 164-80). Knapp is right to link the
anger and hostility in Jonson’s plays to his reaction to the changing early modern world,
but what about the pleasure upon which Jonson is capitalizing by using the new tools of
rhetoric and disguise? And finally, Marxist critic and narrative theorist Jonathan Haynes
argues the central theme of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) is folly. Haynes argues
that the play reveals the economic and cultural changes in early modern culture, changes
that ultimately transform the early modern notion of festivity (Haynes, “Festivity” 141-
62). And while Haynes alludes to the pleasure postponed at the play’s end, I will argue
that Jonson is demarcating a space for the printed word as text and the subjectivity of the
personalized reading experience in contrast with that of the “collective” play. The time
of these experiences varies, all the more so in the reading process.
Indeed, time is an important part of my argument for time includes both the time
involved in the production (or the reading of the play) and the time the viewer and reader
spend thinking about the piece above and beyond its interactive engagement. In each of
these plays, Jonson depends upon a time that transcends both the present, the past, and
the future. That is to say, from the outset, the experience of time in the plays is
intertwined with the art as a commodity.
Some critics use Jonson and his texts to explore the impact of an increasingly
commodity-driven early modern world. From folly to the subject and on to materiality, I
argue that Jonson uses shape-shifting bodies to solve the new problems of being human
in a classed and commodified world. Much like money, something both anchored in a
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material state and, at the same time, open to any and all possibilities of transformation,
Jonson uses the unstable body as the solution. For Karen Newman, increasing
consumption leads to a gendered critique of women as voracious consumers and, at the
same time, commodities (Newman, “City Talk” 181-95). Taking the notion of the body
as a commodity even further, Mary Bly argues that Jonson uses the Whitefriars liberty,
the setting for and in which his Epicene was written and performed, to eroticize the play
(Bly, “Playing” 61-71). Mimi Yiu, connecting commodified space to emerging female
bodies, uses the setting of Whitefriars to reinforce the socio-spatial-ecomomi-sexual
significance of the play (Yiu, “Sounding” 72-88).
Space, time, and commodification lead to and are a part of being in the world. And
while it may be fairly obvious that the subject is limited by space and time, wrapping
(early modern) selves in commodification is far more contentious. Part of my analysis of
Ben Jonson is thus centered around the very notion of not only the subject as a character
in a play represented on a stage in front of early modern people, but also the expansion of
the idea of a subject as demonstrated by an emerging public self as a player and author.
There are a number of critics invested in using Jonson to argue for the emergence of the
early modern subject, and even the author. Thomas M. Greene, to start, argues for what
he terms the “gathered self,” a construct of the early modern self in crisis as a direct result
of the changing early modern culture (Greene, “Jonson” 325-48). In response to a
shifting culture, Gail Kern Paster focuses on anger and quarrelsomeness as integral
components of Jonson’s construction of male subjects. I am referring here to Paster’s
extended work on the humors, bodies, and early modern drama, including Humoring the
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Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage and “Parasites and Sub-parasites: The
City as Predator in Jonson and Middleton.” Keeping in mind that the female roles on
stage were played by men, I would like to suggest that Paster’s angry male subjects are
further complicated by the fact that men are playing both genders in a space newly
created for the viewing pleasure of both men and women. Moving beyond the
construction of angry (fe)male subjects on the stage, Joseph Loewenstein argues for
Jonson as the emergence of the author and for the text as property in early modern
England.
1

Space
“Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine that I may see my saint”
(Jonson, Volpone I.i.1-2).

For Jonson, the space of drama is the social and interactive experience of the stage,
and the private, imaginary space of the play text. The physical space of the play is an
imagined space that is staged by the persons who perform the play. We might refer to
this space as imaginary, yet it has very real and material groundings, the set of which
includes the people gathered around as spectators. In both contexts, the play becomes a
space to unveil the dangers of the expanding market for its degenerative and destructive
effects upon the consumer, room to lampoon and provoke the emerging early modern
subject, and to revel in the joy of artistry and ideology.
Jonson sets Volpone in Venice, but it is a Venice that stands in easily for London.
If not overtly so to readers today, the employment of English tourists, Sir Politic Would-
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Be and Fine Lady Would-Be, repositions the English within the Venetian landscape.
Within the Venetian setting, the play moves in and around Volpone’s room, rendering the
private public. Volpone opens in the titular’s character’s inner chambers, where most of
the play happens, but is also set in the Venetian streets, the merchant Corvino’s home,
and the Venetian court.
2

If we begin then with the commercial economy of the play’s Venetian setting,
Jonson infuses the privacy of the home with the economy of materiality. At the same
time, Jonson complicates the setting by stamping the past upon the present. In sum,
Jonson dis-orders in a temporal sense and then makes the scene chaotic by inverting the
spiritual and the material. Jonson invokes the poets of the past, “wise poets, by thy
glorious name” (Jonson, Volpone I.i.14), to assert his Classical lineage. Infusing the
material present with the Attic past, the “glorious” history of poetry is distilled into the
“best of things.” Volpone’s room is a collection of material objects both set up as a
display of wealth that, at the same time, entices his suitors. The suitors, more
importantly, bring even more objects of wealth to add to Volpone’ s collection as they try
to win his affections. Ultimately, each visitor seeks to become the sole inheritor of
Volpone’s fortune, something they all anticipate happening soon, as Volpone plays the
sick and dying man.
Within the commercial realm of the play, before a character sets foot into the
street or the market, Jonson establishes the fantasy of profit by dint of no real labor
within the private space of the home. Volpone begins the play with the salutation:
“Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!” (Jonson, Volpone I.i.1). Gold in this
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moment replaces god, or religion, and from the outset, Jonson invests the private room of
Volpone with a fantastic and scientific energy, one in which Volpone attempts to create
more and more gold or wealth out of his own material. In the same way, Volpone seeks
to augment his earnings without effort on his behalf, ridiculing the idea of “purchasing”
wealth as though it were a “possession.” Of course, Volpone enjoys wealthy possessions.
He will gain more commercial goods not from labor, nor from usury, but by deceiving
and manipulating those around him, “gain[ing in]/No common way” (Jonson, Volpone
I.i.33-4).. Giving something to the aging Volpone, Jonson would have his characters
believe, will ensure the position of beneficiary in his will and consequently, great fortune
upon Volpone’s death. Volpone’s desire to make wealth out of nothing is both literally
carried by him out into the streets, and further manifest in the court of law. Challenging
early modern ways of being human, Jonson offers his viewers and readers, depending on
the space of consumption, not spiritual, but rather immediate material gratification.
The construction of the mountebank as show is echoed by Sir Politic Would-Be
and his conversation with Peregrine, and then deconstructed yet again by Corvino after he
catches Celia at the window. The space in which this would happen, Celia’s body, is
further demarcated as both “city” and “public,” a space then much like that of the theater,
a newly emerging market space that includes not only the exchange of material goods,
but also morals and ideas, along with the public. Jonson works the dramatic space of the
market through the (fe)male body, blending profit and pleasure, along with rage and
ridicule. Merging the market, the body, and the public, Jonson’s theater is chaotic, angry,
and vengeful. What Corvino then threatens to do to his wife – rendering her an
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“anatomy,” dissecting and “reading” her as a “lecture Jonson does to his audience.
Jonson directly links Celia to profit via “prosper” and prostitution. Fittingly, Jonson will
soon have Corvino eagerly selling Celia off to Volpone, not for money, but for the hope
of inheriting all of Volpone’s wealth. In the dramatic economy of that transaction, Celia
would be giving up the goods for free, at it were, for as the audience knows, Volpone has
no intention of passing on his inheritance to Corvino. To return to Corvino’s attack upon
his wife, Corvino threatens to render her body a corpse for dissection and public
consumption, a prostitution of a different sort, but still keeping within the idea of bodies
for sale. In the process, Corvino threatens to “read a lecture,” thereby inserting a moral
education in the sale. Jonson extends the space of his stage to the audience and the
(early) modern world around him, a world in which chaos, disorder, and anger run
rampant. Indeed, Jonson sets Epicene, or The Silent Woman in London.
First performed by the “Children of Her Majesty’s Revels,” in their newly
fashioned private playhouse, the Whitefriars, Epicene appears to be, at first glance, the
most comedic and light-hearted. Nonetheless, Jonson fills the space of the play with an
underlying chaos and disorder, crafting an erotics of consumption ground in the material
space of the Whitefriars stage. With its re-appeareance after an 18-month theater closing
because of the plague, its meta-setting and self-referrentiality, and its procession of small
rooms leading up to the audience-directed clapping a “noise that will cure [Morose, or] at
least please him” (Jonson, Epicene V.iv.226-7), the play relies upon the erotically-
charged Whitefriars setting, a space early modern inhabitants of London would associate
with non-normative sexual practices.
3
Employing the metaphor of the stage as food to be
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consumed over time, Jonson extends the space of the stage to the material of the body
and the mind.
Nor is it only while you keep your seat
Here, that this feast will last; but you shall eat
A week at ord’naries, on his broken meat:
If his Muse be true,
Who commends her to you (Jonson, Prologue 25-9).

Invoking the Muse is a Classical allusion, linking Jonson and the Attic poets.
4
Jonson
thus reaches back into the past at the same time that he stretches forward, claiming his
poetry to provide viewers and readers leftovers for the forthcoming week. Similarly, the
employment of food as metaphor for art and the experience of art is a common Jonsonian
trope, particularly in his poetry. Although the food metaphor seems overtly friendly,
there is underneath, ambivalence and criticism. Implicating his audience and distancing
himself from them at the same time, Jonson crafts a challenging and ambivalent theatrical
space. I would argue that we can see the same sort of ambivalence in Jonson’s poems,
many of which both chastise and castigate, even as they praise. Indeed, Jonson collapses
the stage within the market as a place of delightful and disastrous consumption.
Jonson’s The Alchemist, although performed some four years before Bartholomew
Fair, mirrors early modern London. Offering a number of allusions to real shops and
areas of business, Jonson sprinkles the emerging market in and about his play. A
commercial marketplace as a desired space suggests the increasing importance of and the
power of the market in early modern England. Over the course of the play, Jonson asks
his audience to imagine setting up a shop, to remember specific shopping areas, and even
specific goods in London and the world abroad. “Our scene is London...” Jonson declares
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in the Prologue. Crafting a meta-theatrical space in which the players on stage represent
the Londoners in the audience, Jonson challenges his viewers to think about how buying
and selling are an integral part of life. Abel Drugger, for example, seeks out the help of
the alchemist to arrange his new store. –
And I would know by art, sir, of your worship,
Which way I should make my door, by necromancy (Jonson, Alchemist
I.iii.10-11).

In addition to money, Drugger will offer gifts of damask and tobacco in exchange for
how to arrange his new shop: where to put the “door,” where to hang the “shelves,” and
how to arrange the merchandise for sale (“boxes,“pots,” and so forth). Jonson’s offering
of a merchant seeking the assistance of a necromancer to set up his shop reveals the
market in formation. The importance of commercial areas is also made clear when
Jonson alludes to known commercial markets. In the first Act, Subtle, Face, and Doll
insult and berate each other as they drum up schemes to cheat people out of their money.
Face, who holds the upper hand if for no other reason than that the house through which
they might orchestrate all of these machinations belongs to Face’s boss, reminds Subtle
of his humble beginnings, back “[...] at Pie Corner,/Taking your meal of steam in from
cooks’ stalls [...]” (Jonson, Alchemist I.i.25-6). Pie Corner is an area in Smithfield,
known for its cheap food. Albeit cheap, Subtle is too poor even to buy food. Instead he
dines on the “steam” from “cooks’ stalls.” One’s worth or value, or even power, as we
will see with Doll, is being made dependant upon one’s ability to spend. Doll insults
Face, claiming his word to be worthless:

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[...] Who shall take your word?
A whoreson, upstart, apocryphal captain
Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust
So much as for a feather! (Jonson, Alchemist I.i.126-9).

Doll links Face’s reputation to not only the people around him, but also, more
importantly, to a specific commodity, the feathers made by the Puritans of Blackfriars.
Demonstrating the complexity of the capitalist shift at hand, Face is not to be trusted for
any value, not least of which is the amount of a Puritan feather from Blackfriars. Early
modern audiences would have known precisely how much, or, more precisely, how little
Face’s credit is worth. And finally, as he cozens Sir Epicure Mammon, Face references
Bantam, a trading post in Java, run by the East India Company.
And that you’ll make her royal with the stone,
An empress; and yourself king of Bantam” (Jonson, Alchemist II.iii.325-
6).

Alluding to England’s colonization efforts in an expanding world, Jonson posits his early
modern player in a market system that builds from his London stage out.

Time
“Fortune, that favours fools, these two short hours
We wish away, both for your sakes, and ours,
Judging spectators; and desire in place
To th’ author justice, to ourselves but grace
Our scene is London, ‘cause we would make known
No country’s mirth is better than our own” (The Alchemist Prologue 1-6).

Although the time is now, so often the thinking human mind invokes not only the
past, and the present, but also the future. The theater in particular, is a place wherein the
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artistic commodity of experience is presented in opposition to the present. Viewers,
much like readers, both yesterday and today (as well as tomorrow), agree, more or less, to
forgo the present for the time of the production. Not only are the “two short hours”
agreed upon in place of two hours experience in the “real world,” but also the time of the
play’s setting becomes the present for the play’s narrative. Part of what makes
commodification so difficult is its conflicting parts: “desire,” “judging,” “justice,” and
“grace.” Jonson is particularly adept and overt about manipulating time as an integral
component of the artistic experience.
Jonson intended for The Alchemist to open in the Blackfriars playhouse in the fall
of 1610, but had to move the production to Oxford (and the Globe), where he could avoid
theater restrictions imposed by the plague. While time is something above and beyond
the market, an experience is something Jonson offers for a price. The “two short hours”
have been commodified and recast as something to be enjoyed repeatedly. Jonson is thus
attempting to wield a new comnmodity as “old profit,” or as something that teaches
“justice” over “fortune.” Capitalizing on the notion of an experience as a commodity,
Jonson addresses the audience in both the opening and closing. In the Prologue, Jonson
describes the playgoing experience as “two short hours...we wish away” (Jonson,
Alchemist Prologue 1-2). “Two short hours” is often used as an indicator of early modern
production timing.
5
Set in London, Jonson’s play challenges early modern audiences in
that it is a play about people putting on a play. Moreover, The Alchemist is a play in
which the thing to be seen, much like alchemy and the highly anticipated production of
gold, is never produced. Jonson accepts his audience as “judging spectators” now, but in
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Bartholomew Fair, four years later, he will invite judgment according to ticket price.
Nevertheless, the time of the play is to be exercised in teaching or constructing “justice”
over “fortune.” On the contrary, Jonson asks something of his audience, that they re-
experience the play above and beyond those two hours. Face, addressing the audience as
“gentleman and kind spectators” (Jonson, Alchemist V.v.153-4), offers up to “you,” his
audience, and his “country,” “this pelf [...]To feast you often, and invite new guests”
(Jonson, Alchemist V.v.164-6). In closing he refers explicitly to “my country,” lending
an English weight to his “pelf,” or wealth, which he then offers yet again to his audience.
Not content to leave his already paying customers with an object they can re-experience,
he asks them to “invite new guests.” Sharing his “wealth” with new customers, from a
material standpoint, does not reduce Jonson’s coffer, as the play, or the play text, has
already been produced. But new guests, for either mode, would be paying, which means
even greater wealth for the poet and playwright. The emerging discourse of the poet as
author stands in contrast, embodied by Face in stage, to the dominant discourse of art
under the Horation model.
In Epicene, Jonson closes the play with a solicitation of the actor who plays the
titillating titular figure. Jonson expands the theatrical time of the play’s closing and thus
posits the play in, along with the present, the future. For the performance of the play,
particularly as a commodity, the real-time revelation of the character’s gender by the
unveiling of the actor underneath the costume disrupts the time of the play. Or, play time
and real time collide. In this and in nearly all of Jonson’s plays, time is stretched and

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pulled in an attempt to make the experience of the play long-lasting. The commodity
offered up in closing is the play, but Truewit also offers up Epicene in closing.
Madams, you are mute upon this new metamorphosis! But here stands she
that has vindicated your fames. Take heed of such insectae hereafter. And let
it not trouble you that you have discovered any mysteries to this young
gentleman. He is almost of years, and will make a good visitant within this
twelve month (Jonson, Epicene V.iv. 219-25, italics his).

The time of the play is extended into the present and the near future: “and will make a
good visitant within this twelve month.” If he is almost “of years” and if the audience
were to visit him within that twelve month, the economy of the play would have been
expanded considerably. That is, if and only if people pay the actor. While Jonson may
well be encouraging prostitution, a practice that appears with regularity in Jonson’s plays,
I would argue that he is also soliciting future viewing of his plays; a prostitution of a
different sort. Speaking of which, for a particularly good deed, Dauphine is rewarded
with Morose’s inheritance. “Then here is your release, sir (he takes off Epicene’s
peruke)–you have married a boy” (Jonson, Epicene V.iv.182-3, italics his). Revoking the
deed by changing the gender of Morose’s wife undoes Morose’s earlier claim, “I am no
man, ladies” (Jonson, Epicene V.iv.39), a claim by which Morose hoped to exit the
marriage. When Morose makes the claim that he is impotent, “Utterly unabled in nature,
by reason of frigidity, to perform the duties or any the least office of a husband,” (Jonson,
Epicene V.iv.41-2), he has already spent at least a night with his new bride. The act of
consummation should thus have already taken place. With Dauphine’s inversion of
gender, time, too, gets reworked in confusing ways. How might have Morose tried to
fulfill his manly duties? Were Morose impotent, the fact that his bride is no longer a
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woman would seem to render impotency irrelevant. Is Jonson thus capitalizing on the
pleasing possibilities a boy bride might provide?
In Bartholomew Fair, a space rife with prostitution and other exchanges of bawdy
bodily pleasure, including picking pockets, playing the vapours, and eating pork, Jonson
again refers to time in the play’s opening. Jonson makes clear that Bartholomew Fair is
longer then The Alchemist, which is but “two short hours.” But in both plays, the time of
the experience purchased by early modern consumers becomes a time that Jonson
attempts to render repetitive and expansive. Moreover, Jonson demands an approval of
the play before the play occurs. The Scrivener, hashing out a contract with the audience,
instructs the audience “to remain in the places their money or friends have put them
in...for the space of two hours and an half, and somewhat more” (Jonson, Fair 67-71).
Money is moving people in this instance, or “putting them” in their place. Jonson is also
increasing the amount of time people will be spending in their bodies, and as payment in
advance, asks for a bodily affirmation. “In witness whereof, as you have preposterously
put to your seals already (which is your money) you will now add the other part of
suffrage, your hands” (Jonson, Fair Induction, 135-7). The timing of the contract is
condensed so as to allow for agreement, payment, and approval before the play actually
begins.
6

Much like The Alchemist, which depends upon a very real disruption of time,
Volpone, too, asks its readers to extend time above and beyond the length of the play.
Volpone’s sentence becomes a death to be imagined. In the same way that Volpone has
pretended to be old, sick, and dying, and in the same way that he has alluded to ingesting
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wealth throughout the play, the audience is left to imagine Volpone consumed by disease.
Of course, time is troubling from the outset. The characters in the play give Volpone
material goods now, in the present of the play-time, so that they might receive his
inheritance upon his death. A play might certainly represent death on stage, and many
early modern plays do, but the death of Volpone is not something to ever be enacted.
[...] but our judgment on thee
Is that thy substance all be straight confiscate
To the hospital of the Incurabili:
And since the most was gotten by imposture
By feigning lame, gout, palsy, and such diseases,
Thou art to lie in prison cramped with irons,
Till thou be’st sick and lame indeed (Jonson, Volpone V.xii.118-24).

The time of the play in which Volpone played at being infirm is now, at the play’s
conclusion, being made into the present. Yet the becoming ill will only happen when the
play is done. Inverting and compressing time, as I hope to have made clear in all four of
these plays, is an integral part of Jonson’s exploration of the market. For time is
something that both cannot be and is nevertheless an essential part of commodification.

Commodification
“Why, did you think you had married a statue? Or a motion only? One of the French
puppets with eyes turned with a wire?”
(Epicene III.iv.34-6).

With the golden age of the English theater in the early seventeenth century, we can
see the emergence of objects for sale and the ways by which the notion of a commodity
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effects early modern poets and people. Writing a Treatise of Commerce in 1601, John
Wheeler declares: “All the world chopppeth and changeth, runneth & raveth after Marts,
Markets, and Merchandising, so that all things come in to commerce” (cited in Harkness,
137-60). Wheeler’s proclamation makes sense in a rapidly expanding early modern
London. Figures vary, but the population explosion alone indicates a London teeming
with people. Maurice Ashley, for example, in England in the Seventeenth Century, 1603-
1714, claims the city of London grows from 200,000 to 500,000 in the seventeenth
century alone (Ashley 12). Increases in population also produce new problems in:
housing, food consumption, noise pollution, waste, credit, and so on and so forth.
Commodity, even from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, relates to the person: or,
“as a property of the person, etc., affected” (OED 2). However, across the early modern
period, commodity comes to mean “a thing of ‘commodity’, a thing of use or advantage
to mankind; esp. in pl. useful products, material advantages, elements of wealth” (OED
5). In particular, as the markets emerge with the discoveries of the New World,
commodity becomes “a kind of thing produced for use or sale, an article of commerce, an
object of trade; in pl. goods, merchandise, wares, produce. Now esp. food or raw
materials, as objects of trade” (OED 6a.). As early modern selves develop in the market,
Ben Jonson both promotes and challenges the emerging subject as a consumer.
I want to begin with the loaning and spending of money. In Epicene, Jonson
commodifies women, rendering them powerless as material goods, even as he crafts them
as voracious consumers. Jonson’s depictions of women depend upon their insides being
faulty. At the play’s end, Epicene will be revealed as what she is, a boy made a girl by a
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man, but Mistress Otter will remain across the space of the stage (the book), and time
(beyond the length of the play and over the time that the text remains as something to be
both read and played). Blending masculine traits with feminine, Jonson constructs
Mistress Otter as a wealthy consumer, a chastiser of her husband, and a sexual object.
She is a confusing blend of masculine and feminine traits, crafted by Jonson in the same
way that he constructs Epicene. Fittingly, Jonson has Otter compare his wife to a
German clock. “She takes herself asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty
boxes, and about next day noon is put together again, like a great German clock” (Jonson,
Epicene IV.ii.87-9). The German allusion implies that she is a bad clock, or a clock that
does not work well. Such a description makes sense, in that man’s construction of
woman is both fearful and derogatory, something we see often in Jonson. What is
suggestively incorrect, moreover, is a woman’s private parts, or her genitalia. Early
modern biology explained the female genitalia as an inverted male system. Early modern
men struggle with women as newly emerging social and sexual objects: note the use of
apricots, cherries, and bad clocks as ways to describe the body of a woman. Otter
continues: “[...] and so comes forth and rings a tedious larum to the whole house, and
then it is quiet again for an hour, but for her quarters” (Jonson, Epicene V.ii.89-91).
Building on the notion of the female body and genitalia, the use of quarters also refers to
the quarters or hind-parts, and private parts, of Mistress Otter.
7
Otter is thus degrading
Mistress Otter via her bodily consumption and defecation, as well as her sexuality. The
“larum” to the whole house may well be her calling Otter to her, resulting in the “quiet

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again for an hour, but for her quarters.”
8
Jonson’s female form is thus a source of disgust
and horror, as well as attraction.
While Epicene presents early modern man’s female ideal as a silent commodity to
be dressed and re-dressed, Mistress Otter represents the newly emerging early modern
female who subjects her husband to her own demands and commands of
commodification. Changing modes of early modern marriage are thus acted out in
conflicting ways. To her husband, Mistress Otter states:
Do I allow you your half-crown a day to spend where you will [...]? Who
gives you your maintenance [...] Your three suits of apparel a year? Your
four pair of stockings, one silk, three worsted? Your clean linen, your
bands and cuffs when I can get you to wear ‘em? (Jonson, Epicene
III.i.33–6).

In the same way that Morose looks eagerly forward to buying his bride clothes and
dressing her, Mistress Otter doles out money and clothes to her husband. Indeed, we later
learn that Otter married Mistress Otter for her money. “I married with six thousand
pound, I. I was in love with that. I ha’ not kissed my Fury these forty weeks” (Jonson,
Epicene IV.ii.71-2). Jonson’s duplicity, evident in so much of his work, problematizes
the notion of gender and commodification. For both men and women take pleasure in the
process of buying, dressing, and constructing their other halves, their partners. Within a
changing early modern economy, women were becoming more visible and more active.
A woman with income, often as a result of the husband’s death, divorce, or through
family inheritance, would be particularly attractive to a gentleman whose family funds
were decreasing.

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Alluding to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Jonson infuses a classical discourse on love with
early modern market anxieties. Both parties of the wedding transaction, both men and
women, become constructs for sale.
9
Loving is thus recast as the process of giving
material goods, imagining and delivering praise, and playing a doting and subservient
part to the loved one. The purchased experience of watching Epicene is thus meta-
theatrical. The audience has paid to learn from, and or delight in, the lesson of the early
modern stage. On display then, love is stripped bare of its classical origins and recast as
a mode of consumption. The players in the play, the same now as those of the audience,
are commodities ensconced within the shifting market. Reversing Morose’s earlier
commodification of Epicene before she speaks, Jonson then commodifies Morose when
his newly-acquired wife’s becomes unruly. The art of loving between men and women,
under the (early) modern framework of heterosexuality, shifts from principle to principal,
from ideas to things, from freedom and action to fixity and consumption. Dauphine
relates how Morose has retreated to his rooftop in an effort to escape Epicene. Jonson
writes: “I peeped in at a cranny and saw him sitting over a cross-beam o’ the roof, like
him o’ the saddler’s horse in Fleet Street, upright; and he will sleep there” (Jonson,
Epicene IV.i.21-3). Marriage makes Morose a symbol of the market. Straddling the
beams of the roof like a man riding a horse, Dauphine compares him to the image used by
the saddler on Fleet Street, London’s early modern market, to signify his merchandise.
Dauphine’s comedic interjection of the commodity leads to Truewit and Clerimont’s
reworking of Ovid’s discourse on love. Truewit, true to his name, expounds:

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Let your gifts be slight and dainty rather than precious. Let cunning be above
cost. Give cherries at time of year, or apricots; and say they were sent you
out o’ the country, though you bought ‘em in Cheapside. Admire her tires;
like her in all fashions; invent excellent dreams to flatter her, and riddles; or,
if she be a great one, perform always the second parts to her... (Jonson,
Epicene IV.i.99-107).

From the outset, scarcity is to be redressed as largesse. “Let your gifts be slight and
dainty rather than precious.” Truewit mentions cherries and apricots, suggestive fruits, as
things to purchased at Cheapside. To cover up the buying of a commodity when it is
abundant and likely cheap, Truewit encourages the lover to say the fruit comes from
outside the country, thus rendering it foreign, exotic, and more expensive. In addition,
the art of loving according to Truewit requires flattery and deception. The lover is to
love his beloved in “all her fashions,” no matter what she wears. And finally, the old
profit of Jonson’s reworking of Ovid’s discourse of love hinges on lovers playing
“second parts” to the other.
In Bartholomew Fair then, there are buyers and sellers. More importantly, what
Jonson provides is a play filled with bad buyers. Putting the question of judgment back
on the viewer and audience, Jonson makes the play a commodity in both The Prologue to
the King’s Majesty, and The Induction on the Stage. Furthermore, a greater reading and
buying public suggests an expanding early modern subjectivity. The theater bridges the
two markets as books and plays mentioned on stage become desired objects and
experiences for the (buying) public. The individual can not only experience people
playing different people on stage, but also read and imagine those people playing others
on the page. The Prologue ends with the couplet:

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The maker doth present, and hopes tonight
To give you for a fairing, true delight (Jonson, Fair Prologue, 11-12).

The “maker” is Ben Jonson, who, for money, hopes to bring his audience “delight.”
In this couplet, Jonson privileges pleasure over instruction, or old profit, to gain money,
or new profit. Jonson worked in so many different forms; as an actor on the stage; a
writer for the stage, the masque, poetry, etc. Moreover, Jonson sold work to printers,
relied on patronage, and wrote for the king. On stage at the Hope, before the King at
Whitehall in 1614, and then again as long as the play remains in print, Jonson
commodifies himself via imitation with a difference. Cokes asks Leatherhead of
Littlewit’s play. “But do you play it according to the printed book? I have read that”
(Jonson, Fair V.iii.93-4). Cokes is referring to Hero and Leander, but the play in which
Cokes exists is Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the play he introduces in The Induction, via
the Scrivener. The Scrivener goes on to establish a contract between the audience and the
“author.”
It is further agreed that every person here have his or their freewill of censure,
to like or dislike at their own charge, the author having now departed with his
right it shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen’orth, his twelve
pen’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of
his place, provided always his place not get above his wit (Jonson, Fair
Induction 75-81).

Playing “according to the printed book” is a problem that arises in the early modern
period as the commercial market for the stage explodes. Contemporary editors continue
to struggle with the problem of various play books in printing today’s version of early
modern play texts. Jonson’s desire to censure the viewer’s opinion of the work based on
her ticket price harkens back to Jonson’s early modern Horation model. Before the
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arrival of the market and preceding art as an object or commodity, the Horation model
insists upon education and pleasure as a noble endeavor. The acknowledgment of the
book by an actor playing a role on the stage signals the arrival of the book as another
commodity in competition with the theater. More people are now beginning to read,
increasing the market for printed books. The stage, as a sort of visual book, imparts
pleasure even as it teaches early modern subjects how to be in the world.
The Alchemist also makes reference to its readers. The equality of the market
challenges notions of early modern class and culture. “To The Reader” would suggest
that Jonson is referring specifically to his “reading” audience, one that may well have
expanded by the time Jonson publishes his Workes. But we can see in so much of
Jonson’s writing a struggle between the noble Horation reader and his early modern,
ever-expanding, increasingly diverse, and ignoble audience. In “To The Reader,” Jonson
warns his audience:
If thou art one that tak’st up, and but a pretender, beware at what hands thou
receiv’st thy commodity; for thou wert never more fair in the way to be
cozened than in this age of poetry, especially in plays [...] (Jonson, Alchemist
To The Reader 2-4).

In this example, Jonson cautions the reader who already “tak’st up,” she who is already a
“pretender.” Rather than assume his audience to be noble and honest, in this moment,
Jonson assumes the opposite. Would the theatre audience and the literary audience have
changed that much? More importantly, for those who are “pretenders,” Jonson claims the
new “commodity,” the very book his reader is just now reading (perhaps after having
seen the plays included in the book), to be a dangerously deceptive object. The danger in
“pretending,” as Subtle, Surly, Mammon, Kestrel, Dapper, Drugger, Tribulation, and
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Ananias learn, can be costly. At the same time, Jonson’s warning at the beginning of the
play, stands in contrast to Face’s apparent victory at the play’s conclusion, not to mention
the didactic nature of the play and book as a whole.

The Subject
“Yes, and my main argument against you is that you are an abomination; for the male
among you putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male”
(Bartholomew Fair V.v.86-8).

Bartholomew Fair was a very real fair, held around the Saint Bartholomew
monastery, which was dissolved early in the sixteenth century. Although the fair would
endure until the mid-eighteenth century, in the new market economy of Jonson’s time, it
was being usurped by private shops. Over time, then, the fair becomes less a space of
trade, and more a market of pleasure. Unlike the festival space (before capitalism)
suggested by Bakhtin, the market creates inequality and re-orders class. Authority
weighs on these people, but as this is in some ways still a space of festivity and carnival,
it weighs less. More importantly, they mock it; authority becomes the object of satire as
part of the festival. Market circumstances render the fair (both the real and Jonson’s) a
site in which pleasure means business. Jonson’s representation of the fair embodies the
shift in the Horation model which which Jonson struggled. In the fair then, there are
buyers and sellers and the market adulterates the space of festivity. Adulteration is a
product of the shift from old profit to new, from business to the business of pleasure.

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The characters are made subjects themselves as they watch Littlewit’s puppet show.
Again, we have a space and play of pleasure that, while grounded in instruction, in this
case a challenging of the contemporary critics of the stage, is explicitly linked to even
greater pleasure. Busy’s conversion is both religious and secular.
10
Religion is reworked
onstage in art as part of the market. Choice depends on the individual, and the idea of an
individual who can choose. The end includes the puppet flashing Busy as he attempts to
denounce the theatre for its cross-dressing representations. The beauty here is the way
the flashing of the puppet calls into question gender entirely, suggesting that desire is but
what the desiring gaze wants it to be. The result is that the sin is in the eye of the
beholder (the audience), not the actor, nor the playwright. The Puppet Dionysius, after
referencing the “feather-makers i’ the Friars,” in response to Busy’s critique of vanity,
challenges Busy: “You’d have all the sin within yourselves, would you not? Would you
not? (Jonson, Fair V.v.82-3, italics his). Busy’s response, “No, Dagon” (Jonson, Fair
V.v.84), reveals the religious nature of the argument. Dagon is a god of the Philistines,
and both Busy and Dionysius are in the business of converting people. The place of God
in the world is an important part of the Protestant challenge to Catholicism. Dionysius,
as the god of wine and the god of theatre, believes in putting things in and around people.
Taking God out of the Church and putting Him in the people, as Puppet Dionysius would
have it, is the same as putting the sin within. With the sin within, the self desires, as so
many of the characters in the fair do. The puppet theater, or the play within the play,
converts Busy. Busy is silenced by this unveiling: “Let it go on, for I am changed, and

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will become a beholder/With you!” (Jonson, Fair V.v.105-6). Conversion, or change in a
more secular way, allows the subject new choices.
Of all the characters in the Fair, Quarlous makes the best choices. Nevertheless,
attempts to supersede one’s class can be undone by some sort of inherent weakness, and
the flesh, like the merchandise that adorns it, is somehow related directly to one’s class
and being. In the end of the play, Quarlous chooses guardianship of Mistress Grace,
compensation for her marriage to Master Winwife, Dame Purecraft as his own wife, and
her “six thousand pound” (Jonson, Fair V.ii.46). At the same time, Quarlous is himself
an individual seeking advancement. Ursula, the pig-woman, a vendor in the Fair, attacks
Quarlous for trying to represent himself as something he is not. “Marry look off, with a
patch o’ your face and a dozen i’ your breech, though they be o’ scarlet, sir. I ha’ seen as
outsides as either o’ yours bring lousy linings to the brokers ere now, twice a week”
(Jonson, Fair II.v.101-5). The patch on the face suggests syphilis, while the scarlet pants
are said to cover up even more syphilitic sores underneath. Jonson suggests Quarlous
transmits the disease to the prostitutes, whose “linings” will soon become “lousy.”
Disease moves across the body in the process of a bawdy market. As discussed earlier
with Volpone, Jonson has used the notion of disease as a direct result of the market and
subjectivity. At Quarlous’s laughter, Ursula strikes again:
Do you sneer, you dog’s head, you trendle-tail! [...]
Go, snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity; that’s the livery
you wear; ‘twill be out at the elbows shortly. It’s time you went to’t, for the
t’other remnant (Jonson, Fair II.v.111-15).

Animal imagery aside, Ursula classes Quarlous with livery and his urgent desire to better
himself through the display of commodities. Like all other commodities that are bought
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and used up, Ursula points out that his will, too. Quarlous is but an assembling of various
goods worn to represent something more than the sum of one’s parts.
The market that requires its subjects to choose, works on both the outside and the
inside. The stage offers up individuals dressed in different clothing, playing different
parts. Those in the audience, learning from the players, may well dress and re-dress
themselves, much like Quarlous, Bartholmew Cokes, and the others do. But within the
market, there is also the matter of voice. The rise of the subject is dependant upon that
voice, no matter how the choice that comes with being a subject is rendered. The game
of love, for example, that Mistress Grace crafts, has the suitors choose a word. The
proper word, written down mind you, parlays into a wife. When Leatherhead threatens to
have Busy put in the stocks for disrupting the fair, Busy proclaims: “The sin of the fair
provokes me; I cannot be silent” (Jonson, Fair III.vi.71). Sin forces Busy to speak; to
speak is to represent what is within, so within the body is the subject. Some time later,
Busy, narrowly avoiding the stocks, asserts his own freedom and subjectivity as a voice.
“No, minister of darkness, no, thou canst not rule my tongue, my tongue it is mine own,
and with it I will both knock and mock down your Bartholomew abominations, till you be
made a hissing to the neighbour parishes round about” (Jonson, Fair IV.1.80-3). A
tongue is one’s own, and will not be made subject to another. Moreover, with his tongue,
Busy intends to “knock and mock down” the “abominations” in the Fair until they “be
made hissing” to others. Busy’s use of his tongue is what seems to make him a subject.
Epicene, to cite another example, comes into being when she finally speaks. Her
emerging subjectivity destroys Morose, who is eventually silenced.
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Bartholomew Fair represents a market space that confounds profit and pleasure at
the expense of the body. The Prologues to all of Jonson’s plays are important, but it is
here that Jonson explicitly invokes the voice of the critic as commensurate with the price
of her ticket. While all of Jonson’s plays discussed here invoke meta-theatrical
components, Bartholomew Fair makes the most direct connection between the stage and
the present. In other words, Jonson gets payment for his promise to entertain, but then he
demands applause (“by hand”) to further seal the contract. More than commodification,
albeit obviously within the framework of the market, the Induction establishes the subject
as an individual who chooses to attend and participate in the early modern theater.
Jonson did not include the Induction when the play was performed before the King at
Whitehall. Which is to say, Jonson did not feel comfortable leveling the King to one of
many subjects within his audience, demanding payment (twice), and censuring his tongue
according to ticket-price. Instead, he offered the King and his audience The Prologue to
The King’s Majesty. A much shorter welcome and far less demanding, here Jonson
returns to the ideological grounding that drives his work:
The maker doth present, and hopes tonight
To give you for a fairing , true delight (Jonson, Fair Prologue, 11-12).

Jonson, offering up his play for “true delight,” alludes to Horace, with an (early) modern
twist: “for a fairing.” In Jonson’s plays we can see the emerging individual, a subject
paying for, learning from, and reveling in, performance and the stage.
As I have argued across Jonson’s drama, the staging of the subject as a person to
play a part signifies a greater early modern cultural shift in process. Jonson’s Volpone
has at its center a struggle between the noble gentleman and the cunning upstart servant.
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With Mosca and Volpone, Jonson represents the spectacle of the noble self as
transformative and all-knowing, even as he undermines the hither-to rigid class division
through Mosca’s flannery, deception, and social transgression. In Mosca’s scene, III.i.,
Mosca appears alone on the stage to soliloquize his own designs on change and the
acquisition of Volpone’s inheritance.
I fear I shall begin to grow in love
With my dear self, and my most pros’prous parts,
They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel
A whimsy i’ my blood (Jonson, Volpone III.i.1-4).

The growing feeling in the self and his most “pros’prous parts,” with his “blood” that
“burgeons” and “springs,” is suggestive of sexual and phallic arousal. “Fear” would be
the result of new feelings and ideas centered around growing class transgressions, for not
only Mosca, but also the audience. That is to say, challenging the nobility is a scary
process, but an extremely rewarding opportunity.
11
Jonson is very clearly exploring
subjects re-shaping themselves as they struggle for financial and class gain in a time of
increasing social flux and possibility. Pleasing another may well mean more than it
meant when the serving class was always already relegated only to service. As Mosca
relates, the pleasure of his own delightful masquerades and charades is also turning into a
financial profit of sorts. Or, Mosca’s ability to deceive the other characters in the play,
his most “prosp’rous part,” becomes the play’s driving force, and thus the reason for the
play’s new profit, or money. Along the way, Mosca profits (in the old profit or
educational sense) as he goes, both through the instruction of Volpone and through his
own art, or talent, at impersonation and deception. Mosca’s claim that the art is “born
with him” (Jonson, Volpone III.i.30) challenges his position of service. On the early
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modern stage and in the early modern play text, Jonson crafts a servant “[...] of most
excellent nature” (Jonson, Volpone III.i.32) coming to believe in his own excellence,
articulating his own transformation as a “practise.” Mosca’s success in navigating
between and beyond the classes is confirmed by Volpone, the gentleman, who claims:
““Pity thou wert not born one” (Jonson, Volpone V.v.3 – 4). The play is thus partly about
the old profit of class advancement and self-improvement. The noble Volpone confirms
Mosca’s “becoming” a patrician even as he disallows the attainment of such a state:
“thou wert not born one.” In this way, Jonson is himself validating, confirming, and
exploiting, for his own pleasure and new profit, the possibility of class transgression.
Although movement across class is impossible in the end, it is briefly available to
those who can, like Mosca, shape-shift, play, and transform themselves.
12
Moral
constancy has thus not been abandonded, but resituated within a market, unhinging it
from its rigidly classed history. Affirming his own noble stature, won by the
manipulation of greedy patricians, Mosca pledges to rob Volpone of all his wealth.
[...] I’m his heir,
And so will keep me, till he share at least.
To cozen him of all were but a cheat
Well placed; no man would construe it as a sin:
Let his sport pay for’t; this is called the Fox-trap (Jonson, Volpone V.v.14 –
18).

Throughout the play, various noblemen have been vying for Volpone’s inheritance and
now, Mosca chooses to insert himself in the position. As though he were indeed of noble
blood, Mosca defends his decision as devoid of sin precisely because Volpone’s own
ignoble “sport pays for it.” Moral guidelines and frameworks are thus recapitulated
within the newly emerging capitalist system of the market, one in which all things and
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beings come at a price. In fact, the price may well determine the content inside. The
intimacy shared between Volpone and Mosca, as they swindle the characters about them,
is both a pleasurable narrative engine, and a critique of changing times. Punishing both
Mosca and Volpone, Jonson adulterates the pleasure of the play with pain – a physical
and perpetual whipping and the passing on of real disease in the hospital of the Incurabili.
Jonson’s play offers insight into early modern concerns about people changing
themselves in an attempt to scale the social hierarchy. In addition, as we can see in
Volpone, the appearance of women in public and market spaces troubles intimate
relations between men. Anger, punishment, and vengeance are an important part of
Jonson’s engagement with the subject in progress.
In Epicene, we can see the subject appear in one very real and surprising moment,
the moment when Dauphine takes off Epicene’s wig to reveal her to be the young man
playing the young man (playing a young woman). The opportunity to play at people (and
for people) and get paid in so doing is the beauty of the newly emerging artistic market.
Art as a commodity within a market rests heavily on these “new” individuals. Jonson
offers up a moment in the play when the individual playing the part is both made clear
and clearly not the only part. The plot of Epicene depends upon an escape, a deus ex
machina that will allow Dauphine to acquire his uncle’s inheritance. While much has
been written about the pleasure of the early modern gender-bending on the early modern
stage,
13
what strikes me here is the way that in addition to such pleasure, a very clear
individual identity, regardless of the uncertain gender, both is and is not exposed. Jonson
writes:
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Then here is your release, sir (he takes off Epicene’s peruke)–you have
married a boy: a gentleman’s son that I have brought up this half year, at my
great charges, and for this composition which I have now made with you.
What say you, master doctor? This is iustum impedimentum, I hope, error
personae? (Jonson, Epicene V.iv.182-6, italics his).

As if Morose’s having married a boy (the wrong person), were not enough (a just and
proper impediment), Dauphine has also employed the “son of a gentleman,” whom he has
“brought up this half year, at [his] great charges.” Noble blood seems to function
laterally, across people, to help Dauphine procure the funds that belong to someone of his
status. Jonson writes the situation as a transaction, one that somehow legitimizes
Dauphine’s “great charges.” Morose’s inheritance is recompense for Dauphine’s
extended duping, a stage trick that extends far beyond the space and time of the stage.
The wrong person revealed is the “wrong” gender at the same time that he is also the
right gender for the early modern English theater. The wrong person, moreover, is the
wrong “person” in that the player is not the son of a gentleman, but rather, more than
likely a young boy of a certain craft or guild, working in the theater in hopes of doing or
making something more of himself.

Conclusion

If we think about the plays in terms of Williams’ discourse, the dominant discourse
is the need for marriage to maintain class lines and inheritance. Jonson complicates the
dominant discourse in Volpone through the play’s titular figure, who attempts to augment
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and preserve his fortune even as he mocks and ridicules the practice of inheritance.
Jonson satirizes marriage via the merchant, Corvino, and his plot to exchange his wife for
Volpone’s fortune. Volpone’s fantastical children also call marriage in to question,
raising castration and circumcision, topics Jonson explores in all three plays. In Epicene,
Jonson critiques and celebrates inheritance: on the one hand offering up Morose as a
stingy and recalcitrant old man unable to come to terms with the changing times, and thus
supporting the passing on of his inheritance to young nephew, Dauphine; at the same
time, Jonson celebrates the practice of inheritance through the clever Dauphine’s thrilling
manipulation and fantastical duping of Morose. Read against Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice, Jonson inverts the idea of manipulation for social gain, recasting the
deception as a way to keep money within the family. Bartholomew Fair, while more
complicated than the first two, nevertheless, also posits inheritance and the maintenance
of class at its center. Often criticized for its lack of plot, Jonson’s Fair begins with the
pressing issue of marriage, as Master Bartholomew Cokes enters the play and the fair
with a license to marry his own ward, Mistress Grace Wellborn. Grace challenges the
dominant discourse as she attempts to marry not for money, but for love. In the second
scene, however, Jonson introduces a widow, Dame Purecraft. and her suitors, Winwife
and Quarlous. Quarlous, through theft and manipulation, procures the compensation for
Grace’s marriage to Winwife, even as he acquires, through even greater deception, Dame
Purecraft’s hand in marriage. Not content to leave Quarlous with solely Grace’s money,
and thus depriving Justice Overdo of his, Jonson gives Dame Purecraft a dowry of six
thousand pound, which passes on to Quarlous upon consummation of their act. Although
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The Alchemist seems to lack the dominant discourse of marriage for class maintenance,
Face and Subtle continually barter and trade, scheme and cozen each other in an attempt
to acquire Mistress Doll and Dame Pliant. In fact, Kestrel’s function is to marry his
sister, the aforementioned Dame Pliant, to the best man. In addition to the issue of class
preservation through marriage, Jonson explores social interaction at its broadest level,
within the market.
The residual discourse is the rupturing of the male bond, as evidenced in the meta-
theatrics of Jack Daw and La Foole in Epicene. Jonson’s representation of the thieves,
Edgeworth and Nightingale, in the Fair, reveals male bonding arising not out of like
kind, but common purpose. The common bond is money, and we can see examples of
the nobility mingling with the rising merchant class in an effort for each to bolster his
own cause: money for the former and nobility for the latter. Shakespeare himself was
able to buy a noble heritage without the incumbent noble bride through dint of his art.
And in Shakespeare’s plays, The Merchant of Venice, for example, we can see characters
scheming and succeeding in such cross-purpose prosperous matches. With Volpone,
Jonson offers male – male competition for money. At first, love is first capitulated as
service, but then, once the servant has learned the trade of the master, Jonson inverts their
roles.
14
Even the master – servant bond between men is thus shattered under the
adulterating strain of the market. Face and Subtle from The Alchemist provide a more
equal representation of male-male intimacy, as upstarts who cheat whomever they can
out of whatever they can, yet in the end, Face turns out to be in collusion with his noble
employer, Lovewit.
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The emerging discourse, on the contrary, is the moving body, a body that changes
from one thing to another, in the name of profit and pleasure. In Bartholomew Fair,
Jonson crafts moving bodies that confound authority, not to mention lovers and their
pursuers. Set within a market, nearly all of these moving bodies seek to move their
bodies, be it within themselves or in and out of others, for or a price. Consumption is
thus bodily manifest as a struggle for and against pleasure, even as Jonson attempts to
out-pleasure his viewer or reader with education. In the end, Jonson’s flashing puppets
call the body into question entirely. Moreover, with Volpone, at the moment of sexual
consummation and bodily consumption, Jonson reduces Volpone to recycled tropes of
Ovidian rape and metamorphoses. Volpone ends, fittingly, with the body laid open for
disease and destruction. Moving bodies, circulating in and around Volpone’s ever-
changing representation of illness, seek to maintain or circumvent their own class. If the
market and the art are not profitable enough, nature’s disease surely is. In another play
very much about inheritance, Epicene, Jonson wields a male – female body to solve the
problem of inheritance even as he confounds the institution of marriage through Otter and
Mistress Otter. The Alchemist offers up a turning body in Face, much in the same way
the play itself turns upon it audience. All of Jonson’s work, particularly through the
emerging discourse, demonstrates a newfound reliance upon individuals as self-
governing subjects seeking financial gain. Jonson’s use of meta-narration reflects his
own art, subjectivity, and the market as the struggle that persists to this day.

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Chapter Three Endnotes

1
Joseph Loewenstein has written extensively on Jonson and authorship, including his
book, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship and “The Script in the Marketplace.”

2
Jonah Barish insightfully argues that the Would-be subplot contrasts English folly with
Italian vice, providing mimicry and metamorphoses to add depth to the central figure of
Volpone. For more, see Barish and “The Double Plot in Volpone.”

3
Both Mary Bly and James D. Mardock offer insightful arguments concerning the space
and time of Jonson’s performance of Epicene. For more see James D. Mardock, in his
Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson's City and the Space of the Author, and Mary Bly’s
“Playing the Tourist...”.

4
Although steeped in Classical tradition, Jonson nevertheless worked across a variety of
genres. For more on Jonson as an emerging author, see Joseph Loewenstein’s Ben
Jonson and Possessive Authorship, Gregory Chaplin’s “'Divided Amongst Themselves:’
Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson’s Volpone.”, and Anthony Ouellette’s “The
Alchemist and the Emerging Adult Private Playhouse.”

5
Contemporary dramatists building their productions out of modern editions thus
struggle to pare down plays to a manageable presentation time.

6
This is, for Luke Wilson, ultimately a crowding of action and time that comes “[...] at
the cost of a sort of structural compression amounting to inversion” (299). For more, see
his “Ben Jonson and the Law of Contract.”

7
For more on women as voracious consumer, see Karen Newman’s “City Talk: Women
and Commodification.”

8
With the long eighteenth century and the emergence of the novel, Laurence Sterne, in
Tristram Shandy, uses the clock as an explicit connection to sexual intercourse and as the
basis for the existence of his pre-born narrator – Tristram.

9
In “Sounding the Space between Men,” Mimi Yiu argues the changing urban landscape
represents a shifting female form, a neutral or epicene space that in fact, albeit
“unencloseable yet alienated,” exists “at [our] very hearts” (85). Yiu’s insightful work
focuses on exciting new ways to read sex and gender.

10
For more on the impact of the conversion, see Richard Burt’s "'Licensed by Authority':
Ben Jonson and the Politics of Early Stuart Theater.” On Busy’s conversion by the
puppets, Burt writes: "Rather than mark a return to social order based on clear gender
distinctions, Busy's conversion marks the continuation of the Fair's social disorder" (536).
Within the emerging market, not even religion provides and answer.
159

11
For more on Horace, Jonson see Gregory Chaplin’s “’Divided Amongst Themselves:’
Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson’s Volpone.” I would argue that the homosocial
component Chaplin touches upon is demonstrative of, much like Masten argues, the
collaborative authorial process, is indeed further critiquing a residual discourse of attic
male intimacy.

12
For Thomas M. Greene, the early modern self is thus imagined as a circle with a center,
as imagined perfection, which brings with it Classical connotations. "This intuition of the
gathered self, whatever its antecedents in the Roman moralists, is profoundly Jonsonian,
more personal and more spontaneous than the inclusive ideals of cosmos and realm"
(331). The classical grounding Greene alludes to here makes clear the division between
Jonson and Shakespeare. Of Volpone, specifically, Greene claims the play "[…] asks us
to consider the infinite, exhilarating, and vicious freedom to alter the self at will once the
idea of moral constancy has been abandoned" (337).

13
See Catherine Belsey, Valerie Forman, Lisa Jardine, Laura Levine, Jeffrey Masten,
David Schalkwyk, Bruce Smith, Peter Stallybrass, Valerie Traub, Frank Whigham, and
others.

14
David Schalkwyk argues for the decline of service and reciprocity and the rise of the
unstable and individualist culture as seen in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. I would
extend Schalkwyk’s claim, arguing we might see the disruption as a cultural phenomena
throughout the early modern stage.

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Chapter Four

For Profit Playing

Change came quickly in England. The book market expanded considerably in the
seventeenth century and the Restoration stage was different from the Elizabethan. By the
end of the sixteenth century, books were already beginning to reach and influence people
beyond the elite. The number of books printed in London between 1550 and 1560 was
1,321; there were 2,552 books printed between 1591 and 1600; between 1601 and 1610,
3,298 books were printed; and finally,7,846 books were printed between 1661 and 1670
(Cambridge 779-84). When the theater reopened in 1660, both the settings and the
experiences shifted. There were fewer theaters in the Restoration. While the exiled court
and the war may have provided some players opportunities to play and live in Europe
between 1642 and 48, during the Interregnum, 1649-60, players in London (and England)
would have had to revert to their old guild trades or something else for livelihood.
Restoration theater was a more confined, as there were only three court-licensed
dramatists: Thomas Killigrew, Sir William Davenant, and George Jolly. As John H.
Astington writes: “[..] the Restoration arrangement was far nearer a fixed monopoly,
worked out by the courtiers Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant in their own
interests, and sustaining a considerably narrower entertainment sector” (Astington 11).
That more narrow audience is of a nobler sort, one to whom the Horation model
emphasizing “old profit” makes sense. Bruce Smith, in Ancient Texts claims these
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viewers “ […] came to the theater because they shared the aspirations of the theater’s
noble patrons” (Smith, Ancient 130). The Restoration stage, with its new proscenium
arch, is both an advancement and a decline at the same time. Again, I turn to Smith, who
describes the Restoration as “delimiting. The result was the same kind of one-
dimensional view of comic plotters and tragic sufferers in which sixteenth-century
viewers took refuge” (Smith, Ancient 132). The public stage was moving backward,
then, with less accessibility, increased homogeneity, and a flattening of source material.
In Sir William Davenant’s The Man’s the Master (1668), we can see class and
character in static subjects. The shapeshifting figures of Elizabethan city comedy gave
way to more rigid roles, as well as a more marked interest in teaching or instruction.
Unlike the humanist ethics in the school plays and Elizabethan drama, the Restoration
stage taught polite, fashionable, social behavior in accord with its higher and more rigidly
classed audience. In addition to the tightening up of the theater, the greater employment
of closet drama, or, drama meant to be read instead of performed, led to a greater reliance
upon human imagination. The possibilities for the representation of the human subject
increased exponentially. The latter portion of the seventeenth century thus involves a
marked contrast between highly focused sociality of Restoration theater and the intense
individuality of solitary reading. In the work of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of
Newcastle, the female subject is presented as a spectacular, ever-changing being. While
Cavendish challenges subjectivity along gendered lines, the work of John Milton pushes
the reader’s imagination in different ways. Milton is less concerned with gender and sex
in Samson Agonistes (1671), but very much invested in the pleasure of the thinking and
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reading subject. With Milton, I want to stress the expansion of subjectivity. While we
often read Milton along religious and/or political lines, I am proposing that Milton be
read as representative of the expanding human imagination. Before delving into the
drama, I want to start with the ongoing Horation and Aristotelian struggle as seen in
seventeenth century literary criticism.

Literary Criticism and the Integration of Aristotle into Horace

In the seventeenth century, writing as a means of living became a viable option. I
offer here a quick glance at writers coming to terms with Horace and Aristotle. I start
with the impact of the Dutch critic Daniel Heinsius, and then move on to John Dryden,
Thomas Rymer, and John Dennis.
Continuing along a chronological spectrum, the work of Dutch critic Daniel
Heinsius is illuminating. Linking Aristotle to Horace and on to emotion, Heinsius’s
move demonstrates the early modern shift toward profit (in both forms - education and
financial gain) and its resulting emotional impact. The play as a material object, as
goods, means greater opportunity for financial success, or the new profit. Published in
1611, Heinsius’ De Tragoediae Constitutione is Aristotelian criticism in which the
function or goal of poetry is held to be: the purging of passions, pity and fear, (or
horrors); the arousal of emotion, pity and fear; imitation, or to imitate human felicity or
misfortune; a special pleasure; tragedy offers instruction; and finally, the achievement of
beauty. Citing Heinsius at some length, Paul R. Sellin, in his Daniel Heinsius and Stuart
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England With a Short-title Checklist of the Works of Daniel Heinsius, claims, “like most
Renaissance critics, he [Heinsius] regards catharsis not as an aesthetic effect but as the
moral utility of tragedy” (Sellin 127). Heinsius also reads Aristotle as invested in the
moderation of the passions through poetry. Tragic poetry, then, is necessary for
maintaining the passions; like moves like, pity and fear arouse and purge pity and fear.
Sellin writes that the proper object of tragic imitation is human action rather than human
mores. “Tragedy imitates not for the sake of imitating, but in order to produce pity and
fear ultimately destined to advance moral benefit” (Sellin 129). Delight comes out of the
process, but is not the goal, which is catharsis, the purging of pity and fear. What we
have then is an emphasis in Heinsius’ understanding of Aristotle as grounded in
imitating -> moving -> purging; out of which and in the process of, pleasure and profit
or profit and pleasure are produced. According to Sellin, Heinsius elevates the
importance of the object that tragedy imitates above Aristotle’s equal instrument, modus,
and subjectum. The essence of tragedy is thus in the subject imitated, not the manner and
representation. Heinsius also claims the matter, subjectum, to be the means by which the
passions are aroused. The subject for the early modern subjects is the experience of the
play, provided only at material cost, the price of admission. Additionally, the experience
of the stage is made more material by its publication as text, and further consumption
through reading. Poetry imitates the actions of men and their qualities. We might remind
ourselves of Heywood’s warning that the theater and world are one. The tragic hero must
be a man of middling moral virtue, whose error is unintentional, and his position should
be high so that his fall is great. “Heinsius’ contribution may lie in that very reduction of
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complex rhetorical approaches to the simpler exploration of work and emotional effect”
(Sellin 146). Rendering the play more broad, while reductive on the one hand, also
allows for a larger audience base and thus greater possibility of emotional connection or
catharsis. The Dutch influence of Daniel Heinsius on the English is significant and
parallels an art responding to its own developing market.

That is to say, the increasingly
materialist critical reception of the stage mirrors its transformation into a (material)
market. Ben Jonson, for example, writing both poetry and criticism,

was also well-versed
in Heinsius’s Aristotelian theory.

In Sellin’s chapter on Jonson and his Discoveries, it appears that nearly half of
Jonson’s Timber is a translation or summary of Heinsius’ De Tragoediae Constitutione,
De Satyra or other writings of Horace. But Jonson’s work also contains similar
borrowing from Seneca, Plutarch, Quintilian, Vives, Lipsius, Buchler, Scalinger,
Hoskyns, and others. While oddly arranged, scholars have long struggled to try and
revise and order such that Jonson’s text will proffer a synthesis of theory into an
argument - to no avail. As for poetry’s purpose, Sellin writes: “Prominent among them
[Jonson and Heinsius] are the dual Horation end of profit and delight” (Selin 154).
Heinsius seems to read moving and teaching as prodere, delectare, docere, and movere.
What’s missing for Jonson is catharsis, and in forgoing catharsis, I would argue, we can
see Jonson holding on to the Horation mode of art, and holding on to art within the
market of poetics, which renders the goods less effective and less desirable. Returning to
the differences between the two, Jonson’s need for poetry to delight and profit is unlike
Heinsius’ construction of delight as a result of imitation. Sellin sees imitation, profit and
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delight as three troubling links or points of focus. Moving, teaching, and imitating, in
relation to profit and delight, are problematic. Part of the problem with imitation is the
transfer of information, the “old profit.” In the market of the stage, and the expanding
market of the seventeenth century, the emphasis upon pleasure and the “new profit” as
financial gain, places the lesson and the value in the viewer/reader/consumer’s hands.
For a poet like Jonson, relinquishing control is painful. For Shakespeare, delightful.
The exploration of the Horation poetic model in conjunction with Aristotle
continues into the seventeenth century. John Dryden (1631-1700), for example, is
rational, Aristotelian, influenced by French Aristotelian thought. Dryden hailed the
Restoration as the return to Art, and a large part of the production of Restoration art was a
re-printing of the previous age: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher were quickly
established as the ideal pre-war dramatists (Cambridge 390). The role of criticism is to
establish standards for judging. Poetry is an imitation of nature, but Dryden questions
what the notion of age or time might do to that concept. Writing in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, Dryden wavered between the two because he was trying to reconcile
two conflicting designs: Elizabethan drama and the Neoclassical. Shakespeare’s
mimesis was not only external, but also internal (and Aristotelian). Dryden valued genius
above all else: Shakespeare, who broke the rules, was thus held above Jonson, who
followed them. In Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, published in 1668, Crites (a
voice in the Greek tradition) claims, and I cite from Grace: “[...a]ll rules of drama
regarding plot, narration, and ornament are derived from Aristotle [but that...]Horace’s
Ars Poetica [is] an excellent commentary on Aristotle” (Grace 100). We can see here the
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way that even Dryden is still attempting to conflate the two. Dryden expands the unity of
time and action notion as the audience is clearly able to employ their imagination for one
scene, they must, in turn, be able to do so beyond that. In the same text, Dryden extols
the English stage for its generic bleeding of tragedy and comedy and the ensuing use of
passions at multiple levels for catharsis. Dryden is less rigidly adhering to Aristotle than
Thomas Rymer, and was more influenced by Horace. His Of Dramatick Poesie makes
the purpose of the play to delight and teach, and expresses respect for the principle of
poetic justice. More than Aristotle, Dryden posits social purpose (achieved via catharsis)
as the function of tragedy. Dryden holds imagination to be the part of the mind that
offers invention, but believed the imagination must be used in accordance with judgment.
This was, I believe, because of the crisis of consciousness in the early modern. John
Dennis, relying more on Italian criticism, placed passion at the center of poetics. Dryden,
perhaps influenced by the French, sought to establish criticism as a science.
Again, the trajectory across the period chronologically is not perfect or unilateral.
Writing near the end of the century, Thomas Rymer (1642/3-1713) sees the function of
tragedy as moralistic (Horation); as Grace writes, for Rymer, pleasure comes from seeing
the “operation of poetic justice in the play” (Grace 26). Rymer held pleasure to be the
purpose of poetry and the profit (instruction) as a means to pleasure (which is very
Horation). A rational approach like Rymer’s follows seventeenth century reasoning.
Descartes held the arousing of passion to be pleasurable (as do the critics here). For
Hobbes, the realization of the difference between the safety of the audience member and
his perception of the suffering protagonist produces pleasure. Rymer believed the Greeks
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were imitating nature, thus imitating the Greeks in the early modern would also be
imitating nature. English criticism was dominated by the Horation model, but the
influence of the Italians and the French grew over time.

In fact, the Italian and the French
critics, who had already gained access to the Poetics, are part of the filter through which
the English come to terms with Aristotle. A rather staunch neoclassicist in the end, we
can see Rymer’s rigidity in his critical reading of Shakespeare’s Othello, published in A
Short View of Tragedy; it’s Original, Excellency and Corruption, with Some Reflections
on Shakspear, and Other Practitioners for the Stage (1692), which he argues is a
violation of poetic justice and lacking in moral edification. The notion of unity as a
governing force, taken from Aristotle, is also clear in Rymer’s castigation of the plot: a
Venetian senator’s daughter, for example, would not fall in love with a Moor soldier.
Romance is, in addition, not a proper subject for tragedy, and the standards of probability,
the external decorum, and moral utility are all out of balance. Rymer is often ridiculed
for his dismissal of the play. Of course, before Rymer, Robert Greene denounced
Shakespeare for attempting to imitate and be something he was not: a scholar and learned
poet. When cultures shift, those capable solely of imitation are often left behind. John
Dennis, in contrast, was far more positive in his assessment of Shakespeare.

Dennis’s theory of tragedy is however, closer to Aristotle than Rymer’s: again we
see the principle components reduced to tragic hero, unity of action, primary importance
of plot. Although privileging Shakespeare because of his passion, Dennis (1658-1734) is
reluctant to let go of the moral Horation framework. Dennis is heavily invested in
passion and emotion, suggesting a heightened materiality, yet he still retains the morality.
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Passion is, according to Dennis, the cause of genius, but great work still needs structure.
Dennis can be aligned with Hobbes (and others invested in consciousness) in the need to
control the passions via rational judgment. Dennis divides passion into two: ordinary
and vulgar, or the enthusiastic. Vulgar passion, Dennis argues, is the passion of tragedy,
and the reason for Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic poetry. Dennis then reverts
to Horace in claiming that the preponderance of vulgar passion in tragedy, more than epic
poetry, will please and instruct. Dennis defines poetry as something that in the end is
pleasure and instruction. Grace writes, “Poetry contributes to a harmony between reason
and passion, thus helping us to act out freely and virtuously” (Grace 69). Shakespeare,
Dennis would argue, is about process, and not the product, which is similar to Longinus.
For Dennis, “The purgation of pity and fear contributes to moral utility” (Grace 78).
Dennis, in his The Impartial Critic (1693), assigns two purposes to tragedy: an
Aristotelian goal of arousing and purging emotions through pity and contrast, and the
conveyance of a moral lesson along Horation lines (Grace 79). Thus Dennis, while closer
to Aristotle perhaps than Rymer, still relies heavily upon Horace.

The Restoration Theater and Sir William Davenant

Plenty of drama surrounds Sir William Davenant. From claims of being
Shakespeare’s offspring to ransacking Shakespeare’s plays for Restoration rewrites.
Reading a later play of French origin, I want to prove Davenant’s emphasis upon “old
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profit.” Moreover, Restoration theater, a new development of the English stage, is a
higher classed experience that struggles to reconcile its wealthier audience with its
Elizabethan ghost. Davenant crafts stable characters rather than genderbenders,
reasserting a static sense of early modern subjectivity. Sex as new pleasure is part of
Davenant’s fixing of nobility and character, but this sort of static sex has lost the
excitement and delight of the turn of the century’s shapeshifting genders.
In The Man’s the Master, Jodlet refuses to become his master at his master’s
request, and he struggles in his place throughout the play. Jodlet actually plays the role
of Don John badly, and thus forecloses on the possibility of class elevation. At Don
John’s suggestion that they switch places, Jodlet responds:
These kind of disguises smell too much of the Cudgel. I’ld rather
proceeed to reasoning again. For what will the world say? Don John is
grown the man, and Jodlet the Master, and by ill fortune too; for perhaps,
at last, your Mistress may love me, and I her (Davenant I.i.336).
1

A cudgel is is a short stick used as a weapon, but the term can also be used (generally
when in the plural, although not the case here) to indicate a contest with cudgels, or a
struggle. As we will see later, Jodlet has no interest in fighting. More importantly,
Jodlet’s concern when offered the chance to take on his master’s role is for the
community: what will the world say? A servant supplanting his master is inconceivable
and unacceptable. The title, The Man’s the Master, refers to this very case of Jodlet the
man taking the place of Don John the master. In addition, Isabella, the object of Don
John’s affection and the woman betrothed to him, may, because of the switch, fall in love
with the wrong man. While this may seem like an exciting and enticing moment for the
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characters (and audiences) of the Elizabethan stage (and I am thinking here of
Shakespeare’s Malvolio and Jonson’s Mosca), Jodlet’s fear and reluctance render it a
rather flat Restoration moment. The Restoration theater audience, made up of more
gentleman than the Elizabethan theater, would also find such a substitution unlikely.
Throughout the play, Jodlet resists his role as Master. Before the conflict between Don
Jon and Don Lewis leads to a duel, Jodlet tries in earnest to get Don John to assert his
real identity so that he, Jodlet, can avoid the fight.
I am the son of a Sow if he has not remov’d my patience so far from me
that I can hardly reach it again; yet I’m as unwilling to be angry as
another. Sir, you must disguise yourself no longer. These false habits
may grow to be Fools Coats, and Don Lewis will turn all into laughter
(Davenant IV.i.370).

Jodlet wants to avoid people making a mockery of Don John. He cannot, in his master’s
place, do him justice. His inherent weakness or deficiencies, exchanged with Don John
like clothing, are growing into Fools Coats. During the duel in Act V, Jodlet wounds
Don Lewis, but then complains: “Would I had two in my right hand that I might get an
excuse to let my sword fall” (Davenant V.i.377). The only way out, for Jodlet, would be
a hand wound, which would disallow him to fight. Jodlet fails to see the duel as a test of
honor and courage because he is not of noble blood, nor culture.
The play is less about shapeshifting and more about the soon-to-be surprise of
putting people in their proper place. The privileging of old profit reflects the more noble
audience of the Restoration theater. Indeed what strikes me about the play is the way by
which the narrative attempts to benefit from great moments or events from the
Elizabethan theater, even as it repositions those same happenings within a more
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structured, teaching experience. The privileging of old profit accommodates the more
noble audience of the Restoration stage. In the end, for example, the multiple marriages
suggest the generic end to comedy, as seen in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and As You
Like It: Don John (unveiled in the darkness of the duel between the terrified Jodlet as
Don John and Don Lewis) marries Isabella; Don Lewis, in reparation to Don John for
having murdered his brother and deceived his sister, agrees to marry Don John’s sister,
Lucilla. The servants Jodlet and Bettris appear also to marry. Jodlet boldly claims:
“Bettris, you have a great mind to take my hand too” (Davenant V.i.381). Davenant is
relying upon the same matching of proper lovers that Shakespeare presented with Duke
Orsino and Viola, and Olivia and Sebastian. Similarly, Davenant slips in the servants,
much like Audrey and Touchstone. But the surprise is less about the changing body of
Don John, and more about the revelation that Don John’s brother is indeed not dead. And
this news, moreover, merely sets in stone the noble alignment that seems to be already
etched upon the play. Don Ferdinand, the elder nobleman in whose home the action
takes place, states:
My dear Don John, since you perceive your Brother on-
ly wounded by mistake, and that wound cur’d: Don Lewis and your
Sister ready to be join’d by Hymen’s hand, and I prepar’d to make
my Isabella yours; let me behold a knot of Friendship ty’d between
two Enemies. Come both, and cheerfully embrace (Davenant V.i.380)

The brother who is not dead, the male body changed only in that, albeit significantly, the
heart still beats, allows for the tying of a “knot of Friendship.” Marriage and the living
body allow for the maintenance of “Friendship.” That knot comes through the joining of
“Hymen’s hand,” or the rupturing of the hymen in sexual intercourse between Don Lewis
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and Lucilla (for the second time), Don John and Isabelle (as well as Jodlet and Bettris).
The pleasure of sex, its own profit certainly, also maintains familial and economic lines,
furthering the sense of profit. Even Don Ferdinand’s choosing sides based upon honor is
an attempt to teach noble principles and actions. Don John’s language just before the
reconciliation is also revealing.
I may, without dishonor, crave for that your pardon:
and when you shall resent my change of shape, you then forget
Love’s ancient Histories; for my disguise is not the first that love has
Worn. But I conjure you by my Father’s friendship, to forgive the
Foolish Arts of Jealousie (Davenant V.i.379).

To what “ancient Histories” is Davenant alluding? And what might those changes of
shape be? Davenant is well-known today for attempting to pull the best bits of the
Elizabethan stage into his own bulging and misshapen narratives. Were he to be
hearkening back even further to Ovid, however, the metamorphoses would be far beyond
those of which Don John speaks. We are a long way from Jonson and Volpone’s wild
invoking of Ovid as he descends upon Celia. Don John’s language, even more
importantly, is not the language of the emerging discourse of love enacted in the golden
age of the English stage. Rather, “dishonor,” “pardon,” “father”, and “friendship” are
terms of merit in the noble discourse of a more entrenched, late seventeenth century
aristocracy.
It is easy to see Jodlet as the servant Davenant so painstakingly creates to serve as
the foil to the noble Don John. However, there are two moments in which Davenant
confounds the character of Jodlet. In the opening, Jodlet comments upon what might
happen were he and Don John to be the painters of their own portraits. A servant, we
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would expect to hear him further his representation as less than his master’s. Jodlet does
just that and more when he asserts:
Alas, Sir, she will not think you very handsom, I mean in my
Picture; but if we were both our own painters we should not want
Beauty (Davenant I.i.334).

Jodlet is self-deprecating, as we would expect him to be, in positing his “Picture” as less
“handsom” than Don John. “[B]ut if we were both our own painters we should not want
Beauty.” In this addendum, Jodlet suggests that every individual, regardless of class, has
a sense of beauty. Not wanting beauty means having more than enough, or being
beautiful. The master who sees and paints himself as beautiful as he might imagine
would be no different from the servant who sees and paints himself as beautiful as he,
too, could imagine. Or would they? As class multiplies and further develops in the early
modern period, I am and have been arguing that the use of a shapeshifting body points to
the possibility of people being inherently equal. As Davenant appears to be implying in
this moment, people may not be what they are determined to be in the early modern
English culture by birth and by blood. The Man’s the Master reasserts a more noble and
classed early modern English society. But in a moment like this we can see the anxiety
of that emerging discourse paraded about the commercial stage to great effect some sixty
and seventy years earlier.
Perhaps in an effort to make certain his audience has no doubts about Jodlet’s
servant character (and class), Davenant closes the action of the play with Jodlet
professing revenge upon Isabella for having not returned his portrait. Jodlet, like
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Malvolio in Twelfth Night, has the play’s (next to) last word, and employs it to threaten
his master’s noble new bride.
[…]You keep the Picture, yet are well content
To lose th’ Original. That’s fine i’faith,
Sweet Lady! But ‘twill not do. Restore
It to me or be sure you never walk
Abroad alone after the Sun is set.
Don Jodelet is such a furious spark
As will have satisfaction in the dark (Davenant V.i.382).

The “Picture” the now Don Jodlet has of himself is important. He wants it back, and, out
of character entirely, threatens Isabella for it. What does the picture reveal about Jodlet?
The “Picture” is the “Original,” and Isabella, not only did not care for it, but also got the
“Original” through marriage to Don John. Why the heated response? Is Jodlet’s lesser
self made clear in the portrait? Is this what he detests? As we already saw, in the
attempted duel, Jodlet is not a “furious spark…in the dark.” While he did manage to
lightly wound Don Lewis’ hand after snuffing out the candle, he was terrified to brandish
a sword. I would find it difficult for either the viewer or the reader to imagine Jodlet
stealing around in the dark after Isabella. Is the closing couplet then a comedic thrust
upon the already reduced Jodlet? Were we to compare Jodlet’s duel in Twelfth Night to
Viola as Cesario’s far more comedic near-duel with Sir Andrew Aguecheek and
Malvolio’s closing threat, Davenant’s play lacks the same mirth. Much of that delight, or
the lack thereof, is in the inability for Jodlet to really be a threat, or to really be anything
more than the rather dim and daft servant he has been cut out to be. Even in Jonson, the
servant Mosca is a magnificently transformative figure. As a caricature of Shakespeare
and Jonson’s figures, Davenant upholds the inherent nobility of Don John and the other
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gentleman of the play, asserting their prominence to a more noble audience. Davenant
does offer “The Epilogue” in song, and this, too, is critical of gallants who attempt to
pass as wealthy nobility.
In closing, Davenant critiques the market for its role in the perpetuation of
inauthenticity and the adulteration of matter. In the fourth verse Davenant criticizes the
“Town-Gallants” and their feathers three years’ out of fashion.
Ev’n you whom we Town-Gallants call;
Who with your found Feathers make a great show;
We mean you did wear such three years agoe […]” (Davenant, The
Epilogue, 383).

If sartorial woes are not explicit enough, Davenant further critiques the fake who pays
with “Half-Crowns of Brass” and then claims “That [his] hearing is thick […]”
(Davenant, The Epilogue, 383) and thus “[he] pass[es] through our scenes up to the
Balcony” (Davenant, The Epilogue, 383). Having paid for entrance, the Gallant claims to
be hard of hearing and thus takes a closer and better seat in the Balcony without paying
for it. More expensive seating changes the audience of the Restoration theater, but not
everybody could pay so easily for those expensive seats. Or, ability aside, people start
dressing up and acting above and beyond their means. In the last verse, Davenant asks
those “Gallants” using counterfeit money to “repent.”
For your so foul, nay, bad intent
Of paying us Brass instead if true Coyn […] (Davenant, The Epilogue,
383).

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Coins will only be made in greater and greater quantities from this point on out.
However, the counterfeiting of coins will grow in kind.
2
Davenant twists the use of
counterfeit or false coins into a moral agreement to
[…] borrow a Guinny;
Which in our Box you may carelessly throw,
And pay him who lends it to morrow to mow” (The Epilogue, 383).

A guinea is “an old English coin […] first struck in 1663 with the nominal value of 20
shillings (OED, 3a). On the stage then Davenant is teaching usury to attend the theater.
Davenant had his plays performed by the King’s Men; he wrote masques for Queen
Henrietta Maria and collaborated on them with Inigo Jones (Edmond n. pag.). But
Davenant also spent time in exile with the King and Queen, and was imprisoned by the
Protectorate. Moreover, Davenant married three times, and although he married well,
was often in debt. In 1653, Davenant was arrested for debt, so his suggestion fifteen
years later that people lend money freely so as to go to the theater is not surprising
(Edmond n. pag.). Davenant made himself and his livelihood through the theater. His
life is about payment for show. The show is artifice, which calls into question the very
notion of authenticity.
A song is more clearly artifice than speech. Davenant’s commodification of his
play and critique of kind also parlays into genre. The Epilogue is sung, rather than
spoken, by two unnamed players.
[…] But because in all Plays
You still look for new ways
We mean now to sing what ought to be spoken” (Davenant, The Epilogue,
382).

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The direct address here is intended for an audience looking for something new. At the
same time, Davenant is eager to please, and offers up a singing Epilogue. We can see the
influence of the market in the poet’s changing the work to appease the audience. In the
second verse, Davenant echoes the poet’s attempt to satisfy his audience in the first line.
Since now those Poets get the Vogue
Who Still, with a bold Epilogue,
Dare rattle Spectators […]” (Davenant, The Epilogue, 382).

The “rattle” suggested here would arise out of the pleasure of a sung, rather than spoken,
epilogue. The “new profit” illustrates the new ways by which Restoration dramatists
understand Horace, Aristotle, the stage, and the audience (both in person and on the
page). More often than not, early modern English poets and playwrights allude to readers
and a newly emerging readership that is changing the kinds of literature produced. Here,
however, Davenant works specifically to accommodate his audience, further
commodifying the play to produce a more satisfying epilogue and increase his audience.
Genre proliferates in new forms precisely when poets begin to shape their work based
explicitly on the market. Davenant, for example, before The Man’s the Master,
championed a new form of opera and performance he called simply “entertainment”
(Edmond n. pag.) The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House was more an
exchange of debates or recitations and song than a play or an opera (Edmond n. pag.).
But Davenant followed that with the more successful The Siege of Rhodes, part I, what
we now call the first English opera. Moreover, in 1661, Davenant opened The Dukes
Theatre for his company, The Duke’s Men (Edmond n. pag.). In 1639, Davenant had
secured a warrant from King Charles I, allowing him to manage an acting troupe and put
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on plays. In 1660, Davenant updated that warrant, effectively monopolizing the early
modern London stage, along with Thomas Killigrew and George Jolly (Astington 11).
The “narrower entertainment sector” is the more expensive Restoration theater.
Davenant’s The Duke’s Theatre was different from the Elizabethan theater. What sold in
this more expensive theater was the work of the Elizabethan stage reworked to re-present
the nobility in its audience.
3
Even as Davenant increased the profit, he did so more
through “old profit” than “pleasure.” Davenant employed women and he changed the
physical staging, adding the proscenium arch and movable wings that travelled along
grooves in the floor to change the scenery. While the additions made for a new and more
pleasant and profitable experience, Davenant was also relying a great deal on the history
and practice before him. The Duke’s Company, for example, was able to secure the
rights to perform a significant number of Elizabethan plays, in addition to Davenant’s
own material. The Shakespeare plays included The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth
Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Even The Man’s the Master came
from someone else: the French dramatist Scarron’s Jodelet, ou le Maitre Valet.
Davenant was also fortunate enough to write for and work with Thomas Betterton and
Mary Saunderson, the best actor and actress of the Restoration stage. Taking genre and
gender as my cue, I’ll turn now to Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth century female
poet who worked very hard to please her audience.

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Margaret Cavendish and Closet Drama

To go to the theatre is a pleasurable education that far exceeds the bounds of
sanctified language and knowledge bound within the tethered body of a book. With the
rise in popularity and use of the printing press, the danger of books becomes a source of
concern in early modern England. And dangerous though it may be, the pleasure may
indeed surpass the profit, at both the monetary and the instructional levels. An
embodiment of just such pleasure is Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). Although
Cavendish did not begin to write until somewhere around 1651, she wrote prolifically for
the remaining twenty years of her life. Unlike a number of seventeenth century women
writers brought to the surface in modern times via literary criticism, Cavendish was
indeed read and recognized both in her day and up to the present. The danger of reading
Cavendish is illustrated by the comments of her contemporaries.
4
Dorothy Osbourne,
writing to her soon-to-be-husband in 1653, asks about and then rejects Cavendish’s first
book, Poems and Fancies. After asking if he has seen the book, Osbourne goes on to
judge: “Sure the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never bee soe rediculous
else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, If I should not sleep this fortnight I
should not come to that” (cited in Shaver, 4). Part of what Osbourne is critiquing is
certainly Cavendish’s audacity to write for public consumption, something only men then
did. But, in so doing, Osbourne is also touching upon the danger of doing the
exceptional. Rebellion is scary. Osbourne thus places Cavendish’s writing in the realm
of the maddening, later claiming, “[…] that there are many soberer People in Bedlam”
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(Shaver 4). Male responses often make mention of Cavendish’s physical appearance,
usually in positive light, but Osbourne also links her looks to her book, which she writes
“[…] is ten times more extravagant than her dresse” (Shaver 4). I am uncomfortable
writing about the pleasure that we might derive from the way Margaret Cavendish
looked, but Cavendish’s physical appearance was important in her lifetime. It seems
clear to me here, albeit awkward, that the “extravagance” of her book is also pleasurable.
Writing plays, romance narratives, philosophy, and history, to name a few,
Cavendish pushes generic boundaries, all the while challenging notions of gender. In so
doing, old profit gets mixed with her “reason,” but the new profit is part of her “fancy,”
or her imagination. We see in her work lots of cross-dressing and shapeshifting heroines,
including herself, at times in triplicate. The treatise of Margaret Cavendish, Observations
Upon Experimental Philosophy, To which is added, The Description of a New Blazing
World (1666) reveals anxiety over an increasingly male and rational response to the
changing world around her. Cavendish thus posits a corporeal subjectivity in her
Observations, and pairing it with a fictional The Blazing World, she offers another
material realm in which to further elucidate the theoretical. While the feelings produced
in such a radical move are more than likely to include shock, bafflement, surprise, and the
like, a more important component is the way in which Cavendish relies upon multiple
times and spaces, both of which conflate into one (even across genders). The new world
is near, next to, touching, just as souls can exist three to a body. The written world then
conflates its author and her imagined self, not to mention her husband and her imagined
fictional friends. Arguably a precursor to the long eighteenth century and the advent of
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the novel, Cavendish’s generic mutations suggest a larger cultural move from the social
experience of the word at the theater, to the more private experience of the individual
reader.
To turn to the stage, or, at least the stage as it is suggested by Cavendish in her The
Convent of Pleasure (1668), Cavendish reworks subjectivity along highly material and
contradictory lines, equating happiness with material wealth. Cavendish printed Plays,
never before printed (1668), in which The Convent of Pleasure appears, as a folio edition,
which was becoming the format of fashion for aristocratic amateurs at this time
(Cambridge 402). While the title page of The Convent of Pleasure indicates it to be a
comedy, Cavendish’s heroine is the appropriately titled Lady Happy, the play is really
about a world written as pleasure free of male thought and presence, for as Lady Happy
declares, “Men are the only troublers of Women” (Shaver I.ii.220).
5
The problem with
men, or rather, the problem of men, is not one that Cavendish seems to be able to answer.
The opening scene of the play bears the Lady Happy out of death across the words and
voices of men. Before seeing Lady Happy, we hear of her through this group of men
discussing her father’s death, which has left her rich. According to one of the men, what
makes Lady Happy so beautiful includes, but is not limited to, her inheritance. 2
Gentleman affirms: “Yes, she is extream handsome, young, rich, and virtuous” (Shaver
I.i.117). A second gentleman declares her attributes to be “[…] too much for one Woman
to possess.” (Shaver I.i.117). But that same second gentlemen adds, “Not, if you were to
have her” (Shaver I.i.117). Both Cavendish and Davenant borrow from Shakespeare, and
here Lady Happy is reminiscent of Portia. However, Shakespeare uses the shapeshifting
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Portia to spare Antonio’s flesh, redistribute Shylock’s wealth across marital lines, uphold
the nobility in marriage, and trouble Classical models of male – male intimacy.
Cavendish, in contrast, presents a delightful but contradictory lesson. The narrative
becomes the process of acquisition, on the one hand, and the instruction of male and
female being, but is also a sort of cataloguing of and exploration of pleasure along
specifically gendered lines.
From the outset, Cavendish privileges what critic Kate Lilley terms hybridity or the
hermaphroditic.
6
Cavendish employs both the male and female, juxtaposed and in
contradiction, to create a pleasing space of (female) subjectivity. An essential part of the
subjective space is the contradictory matter of money. In the second scene, Lady Happy
is yet again spoken for, before speaking herself. Lady Happy’s attendant uses exactly the
same language as the men who described the daughter of the now deceased Lord
Fortunate in the opening scene: “young, handsome, rich, and virtuous” (Shaver I.ii.218).
Although we tend to think of “handsome” today as masculine, the term then would not
have carried the same gendered connotations. But what does young, handsome, rich, and
virtuous mean? And why is “rich” included here? One can do very little about her age,
not to mention aesthetics. And in the seventeenth century, after the turmoil of the Civil
Wars and the Restoration, virtue is now, more than ever before, something not to be born
with, but rather, learned. Lady Happy, however, the sum of all those adjectives, very
quickly becomes a vehicle for Cavendish’s materialism. Madam Mediator attempts to
talk Happy out of entering the convent by suggesting there is more in the world than in
the cloister. On the one hand, Happy critiques marriage and men as troublesome and
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painful, on the other she challenges the notion of piety and worship as immaterial.
Cavendish writes:
It cannot be good, if it be neither pleasure, nor profit to the gods;
neither do Men any thing for the gods but their own sake (Shaver I.ii.219).

The religious life, as Happy explains, is only good when pleasurable, or when morally
right according to the gods. Moreover, she argues, men only do things for the gods when
they get something out of it. Happy’s choosing to do the same thing is contradictory.
The convent of pleasure is a space separate from the material world, in opposition
to the material world, and also, very much of the material world. Happy plans to take
only those
[…] whose Births are greater then their
Fortunes, and are resolv’d to live a single life, and vow Virginity” (Shaver
I.ii.220).

Cavendish is inverting birth and fortune, taking only those of no wealth or fortune to
indulge in the senses. The meaning of the word “fortune,” like “profit,” changes during
the early modern period. Fortune, from the fourteenth century, means “chance, hap, pr
luck, regarded as a cause of events and changes in men’s affair” (OED 1.a.). Yet from
the late sixteenth century on, fortune also means “position as determined by wealth;
amount of wealth” (OED 6). In the same way that the word shifts, Cavendish is
underwriting pleasure, or the “new profit,” in financial or material terms. The
ambivalence or contradiction in Cavendish’s play is also manifest in the acceptance and
rejection of sensuality. Although the focus is on the senses, only those female beings
who abstain from sex are to be allowed entry (and indulgence). The poem or song that
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Cavendish uses to close the first act catalogues the pleasures to be found inside. Material
pleasure and the physical senses would rationally include sexuality. Yet Happy plans to
delight in “[…] every Sense shall pleasure take” (Shaver I.ii.220) save sex. Such sensual
experiences and lives will include “Caterers” so they may “please [their] taste” (Shaver
I.ii.221). Cloth like “Silk” and “Linnen;” “Pictures rare;” for their noses, “perfumed
Air;” “sweet melodious sound” for the ear; and “sweet delicious Meat, And savory
sauces” for them to eat.
Variety each Sense shall feed,
And Change in them new Appetites breed.
Thus will in Pleasure’s Convent I
Live with delight, and with it die (Shaver I.ii.221)

Cavendish inverts gender in such a way here that the female who gives birth is now the
sexless body solely in consumption. Pleasure’s Convent becomes an inversion of the
sexual experience culminating in a little death, or orgasm. Instead it becomes an
experience of never-ending, sexless, sensual consumption giving birth to “new
Appetites,” leading to the biological death of the (neuter) body. The couplets in this
poem or song (and there is no indication of which it might be, save the italics, the rhyme,
and the spacing, to further distinguish it from the prose that precedes it) contribute to a
lyrical cadence and rhythm that heightens the senses even in the reading.
The Convent of Pleasure, after being introduced in the first act, is reconstructed in
by Lady Happy in the second. A catalogue of the Convent, Happy’s listing of the
material goods, takes up the entire scene. Pleasure, it seems, means the best in
commodities. Wrapped up within the pleasure of consumption is the contradiction of
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fabrication, its labor and its un-natural construction. As Happy notes, everything in the
Convent Pleasure is for “Ease,” “Conveniency,” “Pleasure,” and “Delight.” For that very
reason, all of the things change according to the season. Summer, for example, involves
[…] all our Chambers hung with Taffety, and all other things suitable to it,
and of Plate, and all the Floore strew’d every day with green Rush or Leaves,
and Cisternes placed neer our Beds-heads, wherein Water may run out of
small Pipes made for that purpose; (Shaver II.ii.224).

The use of foliage changes with each season, as does everything else. Making the space
inside the Convent natural, through nature, is also un-natural in that everything is made
up and manipulated. The “Floore strew’d with sweet Flowers” in the Spring must be
cleaned and the now dead flowers thrown out to make way for the “fine Mats” in
Autumn. The fabrics used over the course of the year include: “Velvet,” “Sattin,” “Silk,
or fine Holland,” “Linnen,” “pure fine Diaper, and Damask.” Cavendish includes a the
gardens from which these objects inside the Convent so that it can maintain its self-
sufficiency and single-sex inhabitants.

[…] and my Gardens to be kept curiously, and flourish, in every Season of all
sorts of Flowers, sweet Herbs and Fruits, and kept so as not to have a Weed in
it, and all the Groves, Wildernesses, Bowers and Arbours pruned, and kept
free from dead Boughs Branches or Leaves (Shaver II.ii.225).

The garden kept “curiously” is a kept meticulously. Like all gardens, the contradiction
lies in the attempt at control. Happy orchestrates amazing control over nature to maintain
the Convent in “natural” splendor. The garden creates beauty and pleasure by itself,
naturally. The flower is already an hermaphroditic living being, able to procreate by
itself. Things like the bees, wind, and the rain help, but the flower functions as both male
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and female in the reproductive process. The bisexual flower has both male and female
reproductive parts, including stamens, carpels, and an ovary. Like the garden, Happy
attempts to maintain control of the female body in a solitary and “natural” state. “Change
of Garments are also provided, of the newest fashions for every Season, and rich
Trimming; so we may be accoutred properly, and according to our several pastimes […]”
(Shaver II.ii.225). As the seasons change, the clothes change. But what might the proper
dress be for female pastimes? What are the female pastimes to which Happy is referring?
What might the female being, groomed for the greatest of appetites, naturally do? When
word of the Convent of Pleasure gets out, a “great Foreign Princess” arrives to “be one of
Nature’s Devotes” (Shaver II.iii.225). The gifts of nature, seduce the gentleman into
cross-dressing, an unnatural act.
Only women who are not married are allowed entrance to the Convent of Pleasure.
Lady Mediator is permitted inside because she is a widow. In conversation with two
married women outside the Convent, Mediator claims life in side the Convent to be better
then being “Emperess of the whole World” (Shaver II.iii.226). Mediator is already a sort
of hybrid or contradiction in that she has been married, but is now a widow. Her
admittance into the Convent is an adulteration of sorts, yet the real contamination or
rupture occurs when Cavendish brings the reader inside. The identity of the “Foreign
Princess” is not revealed until the end, although the men plotting to get in foreshadow the
cross-dressing disguise. Inside the Convent, the women take to dressing up as men, or as
both men and women. Happy’s attempt to be natural and whole becomes a transgressive
effort to be both female and male. What sort of pastimes might be involved with such
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cross-dressed “men” and women is left to our imagination. Married women and men are
not allowed the opportunity to become both, which means that the thing that separates
women from wealth and pleasure is the male genitalia.
The second act begins, like the first, with men. The transformative and
hermaphroditic pleasure in the play is partly the way by which female becomes male, and
male female. What we think is female, turns out be male. As Cavendish is want to do,
this gendered inversion occurs at two levels: a female figure will turn out to be male
within the convent; but also, the play that is purported to be written by a women, in the
end, looks to be written by her husband. The play on Take-Pleasure, Dick, wealth, and
Happy is revealing. Offering up his plans to marry Lady Happy, Cavendish writes:
“Monsieur Take-Pleasure: Faith, Dick, if I had her wealth I should be Happy” (Shaver
II.i.221, italics hers). Monsieur Take-Pleasure’s Man is named Dick. Dick as slang for
the penis is a nineteenth century connotation, and the meaning in the seventeenth century
is still an abbreviated version of Richard, as well as a clever or smart person, but it is one
rarely applied to a female (OED 1.b.). Dick and Happy are both in italics, and wealth is
evenly spaced between the two. Moreover, the if…should function as a linking verb,
connecting the subject with wealth and Happy. Cavendish uses “Faith, Dick, if I” as the
subject, and “Faith” is used interjectionally as in “In good faith…”. The play was read
and not performed, which means the reader reads Monsieur Take-Pleasure and then the
words (read and imagined perhaps as speech). If we slow the reading process down, I
find it hard not to get: Take-Pleasure – In faith – Dick – wealth – Happy. Taking into
account the gender of Take-Pleasure, Dick, and Happy would produce the following:
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man – In faith – man – wealth – woman. In faith is a spiritual or religious invocation,
which only makes the equation all the more curious. It may well be too simplistic to
render words numbers and then combine them for meaning, but there is at the very least,
an invitation to try. Having Lady Happy would ultimately mean marriage and sexual
intercourse with her, so within the context of the play and the play on male genitalia, I
find this passage rife with suggestion.
In addition to the unveiling of the inside of the convent as a space of
hermaphroditic transformation, with women cross-dressed and dancing, Cavendish offers
a play within a play. In contrast to the pleasure of playing both male and female chastely,
the Convent of Pleasure re-presents the horrors of being a real woman in the seventeenth
century. Cavendish is deftly skirting both the fictive world of her play and the
contemporary world around her. The horrors of married women include: being left by
their husbands for other women; abusive husbands; a women dying in childbirth (and
losing the child); women impoverished by their husbands; a woman driven to madness by
the loss of her only child; another woman who suffers because her son is to be hanged for
killing another man; a woman whose daughters have done her wrong through childbirth
outside of wedlock and marrying below her class; and an unchaste woman who chooses
to enter a convent after breaking up a marriage (Shaver III.iii-x.229-33). As stated in the
Epilogue to the play (within the play): “Marriage is a Curse we find,/Especially to
Women kind:/From the Cobler’s Wife we see,/To Ladies, they unhappie be” (Shaver
III.x.233, italics hers). In couplets, the Epilogue affirms the cross-class pain of marriage.
The pleasure of rhyme wraps up reality in play.
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Back inside the Convent and the narrative within the play, Happy falls in love with
the (man dressed up as) the great Foreign Princess. The convent of pleasure is the
embodiment of the aforementioned collapse of “fortune” from chance to wealth.
Cavendish moves from pleasure back to profit. Love becomes an affliction, which seems
at odds with the problem as laid out prior to his point. A large part of the drama here
seems to be about teaching, or the “old profit.” At the same time, Cavendish is openly
invested in pleasure and the “new profit” arising out of pleasure. Cavendish uses the soul
to join the couple in spontaneous union. Happy opens Act IV in Melancholy,
proclaiming: “[…] I am like to be the most unhappy Maid alive; But why may not I love
a Woman with the same affection I could a man?” (Shaver IV.i.234). Instead of sex, or
the conjoining of the couple in marriage, Cavendish critiques heterosexual love. The
problem has moved from the penis, as playfully suggested early in the play, to the idea of
love. The transition from one thing to another, the switch from the material to the
immaterial, from a concrete object to an abstract principle, characterizes Cavendish’s
poetry and pleasure. When the Princess (Take-Pleasure in disguise) “in Masculine
Shepherd’s Clothes” enters, s/he seeks a kiss, as “harmless Lovers please themselves
[…]” (Shaver IV.i.234). Although reluctant, Happy assents, they kiss, the Princess says:
“These my Imbraces though of Femal kind,/May be as fervent as a Masculine mind”
(Shaver IV.i.234), and the Scene morphs into a May-Pole dance. The move from the
melancholy female emotional state, to a man dressed as a prince dressed as a man, a kiss,
the masculine mind, and a May-Pole reflects the narrative vacillation between pain and
pleasure, object and moral, female and male, profit and delight. The masculine mind
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triggers a change of scenery centered around the phallic May-Pole. Dancing around the
pole, Happy and (Take-Pleasure as) the Princess decide to marry, and then are “ […]
crown’d King and Queen of all Shepherds and Shepherdesses this year” (Shaver
IV.i.236). Cavendish offers the soul as Happy’s reason for marrying, claiming the soul is
located at the center of the mind.
Your Wit doth Reason find,
The Centre of the Mind,
Wherein the Rational Soul
Doth govern and controul,
There doth she sit in State,
Predestined by Fate,
And by the Gods Decree,
That Sovereign She should be (Shaver IV.i.237).

Much has been made of Cavendish’s time in exile during the civil war. It was as a lady-
in-waiting in Queen Henrietta Maria’s exiled court that she met William Cavendish, who
was then the marquis of Newcastle and who had been in charge of the King’s forces until
their defeat at Marston Moor near York in 1644. Cavendish’s Observations upon
Experimental Philosophy (reissued separately from Blazing World in 1668 but with it
first in 1666) is an anti-Aristotelian response to what she held to be a male rationalization
of nature. In response to atomism and materialism, Cavendish argued for a mixture of
the animate with the inanimate in a continuous realm. Her spirited and continuous flow
was a rejection of the mechanical philosophy developing in the seventeenth century
around her. Cavendish’s brother in-law, Charles Cavendish, had studied under Thomas
Hobbes. Both William and Charles encouraged Margaret’s interests in philosophy
(O’Neil ix-xiv). While the Cavendish family was in exile in Paris, from 1645 to 1648,
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they were involved with a group of mechanical philosophers known as the “Newcastle
Circle, which included Hobbes, Digby, and Charleton. This group was also connected to
the continental mechanical philosophers Descartes, Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne.
Although Cavendish did not speak French, she was clearly excited by and interested in
the philosophical debates and studies of the time. In fact, as Eileen O’Neil writes,
regarding Hobbes and matters of the soul, “She would be one of the few seventeenth-
century thinkers to dare to side with Hobbes in espousing a materialist philosophy that
denied the existence of incorporeal souls in nature” (Observations, xiii). Happy’s
positioning of the soul in the “Centre of the mind” speaks to Cavendish’s own interests in
the soul; however, in terms of the Convent, Happy uses the Soul to explain her marriage
to the Princess dressed up as a Shepherd. The dance around the May-Pole and the
consequent crowning as King and Queen function as a nuptials for the two. The Prince
confers: “We shall agree, for we true Love inherit,/Join as one Body and Soul, or
Heav’nly Spirit” (Shaver IV.i.238). Cavendish falls back on teaching her philosophies
through the pleasure of the scene collapsing onto the May-Pole, the ensuing dance, and
the declaration of love.
As Cavendish so often does, she transgresses the division between artist and fictive
world, here in the epilogue, or “He Speaks the Epilogue.” As is noted by Shaver, and this
is taken up in Act IV scene i, “Newcastle is credited with his contributions on printed
strips into the text of both Playes (1662) and Plays, Never Before Printed (1668). Here,
since no terminus is given, it seems that he is the author of the final two scenes and the
epilogue” (Shaver 238). A world free of men, written by a woman, then becomes both in
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the literal text and in its writing, a space of intrusion, male entering female. In the final
scene, the male mimic, and keep in mind that the author is the Duke of Newcastle rather
than Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, claims his very being to depend
solely upon the pen of his creator, “our Poetess.” He, at first, bumbles about trying to
find or recall the Epilogue that the Prince has offered him in return showing “Charity, and
to keep [his] wife’s Chastity” (Shaver V.iii.246). Chastity in this instance means that the
Mimic’s wife will be chaste to him, and not have sex outside of the marriage. Mimic,
unable to find the Epilogue, declares: “Then nothing be my speech” (Shaver V.iii.246).
What nothing will do for the charity and chastity is left to the reader’s imagination. But
Cavendish, or rather, the Duke of Newcastle, then offers an Epilogue, which starts with
“He speaks the Epilogue” (Shaver 247). Mimic is still the speaker, and he begins by
addressing his “Noble Spectators.” Spectators works both in the text, to those assembled,
and outside the text, to those readers, imagining the play with an audience, performed.
Cavendish sought recognition and fame in her own lifetime. He many prologues offer
insight into her fears and desires concerning writing. Similarly, in this moment, as the
close of the play that is read, The Duke of Newcastle, or Margaret Cavendish, writes: “I
dare not beg Applause, our Poetess then/Will be enrag’d, and kill me with her oen;/For
she is careless, and is void of fear;/If you dislike her Play she doth not care” (Shaver
247). She (the Poetess Margaret Cavendish) will kill him (either the Duke of Newcastle
or the character Mimic) if he begs applause, yet she cares not whether the audience likes
her play. In this instant, the contradictory applause and death highlight the
hermaphroditic tension throughout the play. While Cavendish clearly lends herself to the
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reader’s imagination and the reading process, she does so through abstraction. She uses
scenes within scenes that depend upon the imagination of the reader. But more
importantly, she conflates profit and delight in equally mixed sex and gender. John
Milton, in his dramatic poem, Samson Agonistes (1671) challenges his reader in a similar
fashion.

John Milton and Closet Drama

Reading contextually across Milton’s representations of motion, money and the
body, Milton presents us with the convergence of (early modern) human subjectivity in a
moving body that both buys into and rebukes the world around it challenges. Critics are
quick to raise Milton (and Samson) as a proponent of violence. How we read Milton
tends to produce two camps: critics like Mary Ann Radzinowicz and Stanley Fish read
Samson as justified morally and spiritually in violence and demonstrative of humanist
growth; on the other side, critics like Joseph Wittreich, see in Milton subversion of
Samson.
7
Wittreich claims “Milton’s aim in Samson Agonistes, no less than Paradise
Regained, is to stretch biblical stories beyond their existing parameters, in the process
authorizing no single interpretation of a scriptural tale, but, instead, privileging
hermeneutical suspicion over complacent exegesis” (Wittreich 3). “Hermeneutical
suspicion” is indeed what we need when reading out of (his)story. Wittreich builds on
the idea of “hermeneutical suspicion” in arguing for the ambiguity of Milton’s poem as
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read through the centuries of Samson revision (and included here are Andrew Marvell,
Samuel Johnson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others, up to the present). Wittreich writes:
Samson Agonistes is a reminder that we must refuse easy answers even as
he resists uncomplicated allegiances; that poetry repeals traditions and
voids conventions; and that the truths of poetry are plural not singular and,
in Milton’s tragedy, so resistant to easy ideological unravelings that they
are not encapsulated by Samson, or Manoa, or the Chorus (Wittreich 8).

What I like about Wittreich is his acknowledgement of complexity and plurality.
Similarly, I argue that we can see in Milton’s Samson Agonistes a plurality of
subjectivity, an invitation to read textually and contextually. I am not reading Paradise
Regained here, but many critics read them together. Moreover, I would like to suggest
that not only the English Civil War, the Protectorate, and the Restoration are impactful in
the poem, but also the emerging capitalism and the opening of the New World, an
increasingly classed society with greater human subjectivity, and the continued
reworking of art as representations of the human body.
Before the narrative, Milton provides an explanation of sorts in “Of that sort of
Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy.” In this defense of sorts, Milton encapsulates
Western literary criticism from the Classics to the end of the seventeenth century.
8
In so
doing, Milton notes Aristotle, Horace, and Daniel Heinsius, as well as Cicero, Plutarch,
and the three Tragic poets: Aeschulus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We can see in Milton’s
concentrated summation and in the poem, the impact of Aristotle on the Horation model.
I limited my study to comedy, save for two exceptions: Gorboduc and Samson
Agonistes. Gorboduc illustrates the complexity of the stage before its commercial
expansion. In the history of the theater and its beginnings, tragedy overshadows comedy.
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With Samson Agonistes, as the English early modern period comes to a close, Milton is a
transitional figure. Often read because of his religious and political impact with the
Restoration (among the many reasons), I include him here because, as his preface reveals,
he is synthesizing literary criticism up to this point, and integrating the Horation and
Aristotelian models into a poem, that is a tragedy, which would be staged, but is read.
Milton, in this regard, is the perfect example of the culmination of early modern artistic
thought and action. I’ll start then, with movement in Samson.
Milton’s drama depends on the reader’s making pleasure and “new profit” on her
own. Milton published Samson Agonistes in 1671, in a double volume bound with
Paradise Regain’d. A poem. In IV books. To which is added Samson Agonistes. The
book was printed by Macock, and published by John Starkey, with whom Milton had
worked before. Print runs for sixteenth century books were around 500 copies. In 1667,
Milton’s Paradise lost in quarto volume printed by Samuel Simmons was printed and
sold out of three editions, at 1,500 volumes per edition (Cambridge #). Clearly Milton is
writing for an eager and consumptive audience. As I mentioned in my introduction to
this project, “discourse” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries means “the act of the
understanding, by which it passes from premises to consequences; reasoning, thought,
ratiocination; the faculty of reasoning, reason, rationality” (OED 2). I want to stress the
“by which it passes from” as the movement in discourse. Milton offers a text about
discourse, between God and Samson, even as he discourses with his reader. Samson’s
justification for his first marriage is divine intervention. A Nazarite, as Samson’s mother
was instructed in raising him, Samson believes he is set out to do God’s will. To do
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God’s will, Samson must communicate with God. As Samson himself states to the
Chorus, regarding his first marriage: “I knew/From intimate impulse, and therefore
urg’d/The marriage on” (Milton 222-4).
9
An “intimate impulse” is a pulse, or motion of
sorts, delivered only to him, from God. The message Samson hears in the “impulse” is
“that by occasion hence/I might begin Israel’s Deliverance” (Milton 224-5). Samson’s
service to God, as he interprets God, is to free the Israelites from the Philistines. Samson
reasons through his discourse with God, initiated by the “intimate impulse,” that he is to
marry the woman from Timna and then free Israel. How might the marriage lead to
Deliverance? More importantly, how might the reader view, or read, or imagine that
“impulse”?
Milton’s “old profit,” the Horation moral instruction, happens in the reader’s
engagement with the text, in the envisioning of the body in action - the pleasure of the
body destroying a temple. Along the way, Samson has faith that God will discourse with
him. In Samson’s second marriage, he is not moved by God, but he himself reasons that
the first discourse also justifies a second marriage to a Philistine, Dalila. But it is not
until much later in the poem that we get another movement read by Samson as divine
discourse. When asked by the Public Officer to attend the Philistines’ Feast to Dagon,
Samson initially refuses, claiming that as an “Ebrew” his “Law forbids” his presence at
“thir Religious Rites” (Milton 1319-20). At the Officer’s second request, something
moves Samson to agreement. “I begin to feel/Some rouzing motions in me which
dispose/To something extraordinary my thoughts” (Milton 1381-83). Samson, moved by
God, or whatever it is that the reader imagines, agrees to attend the Feast and put himself
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on display. He is moved to attend, and “To appear as fits before th’illustrious lords”
(Milton 1318). The demonstrations of physical might that are expected of him are left to
the imagination of the reader. But Samson is also moved to some “extraordinary
thoughts,” which may well lead the reader to even “greater” thoughts of what is to come.
If, that is, the reader can think quickly and read slowly; or, read slowly, and think
quickly. For Milton omits what Samson does at the Feast. We “hear” of it from the
Chorus, Manoa, and the Messenger, but we have to imagine the “extraordinary” thoughts
and action on our own first.
When Milton does recount what happened, it comes from someone else. We
cannot hear of Samson’s actions from him, but we do get them from the Messenger. We
hear Samson’s voice through the Messenger, even as we envision Samson’s body in
action through the Messenger’s eyes and ears. As the messenger relays, Samson, before
pulling down the Temple, “with head erect thus cryed aloud […]Now of my own accord
such other tryal/I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater;/As with amaze shall
strike all who behold” (Milton 1643-45). “Amaze” will move in the sense of astound and
bewilder, even as strike is used both physically and metaphorically. Immediately after
crying out, Samson pulls down the two pillars holding up the temple or theater, bringing
down those in attendance upon him and the roof following after upon them. There is,
even in that action, a repetition of movement, the floor collapsing onto Samson and then
the roof collapsing onto the “Lords, Ladies, Captains, Councellors, or Priests” (Milton
1653). Moreover, as the Semichorus explains, into those very people, the nobility
assembled, “Among them he a spirit of phrenzie sent” (Milton 1675). The “spirit of
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phrenzie” that Samson sends out into and among the Philistines is his, Samson’s God.
Milton echoes Samson’s “rousing” with the Semichorus. The lengthy metaphor Milton
employs is the phoenix, but I want solely to address the repetition of “rouze” in this
instance. Samson, the Semichorus explains: “though blind […] With inward eyes
illuminated/His fierie vertue rouz’d” (Milton 1687-90). This is the culminating moment
of motion and the confirmation of Samson’s Nazarite mission. The “rousing” force, like
the “spirit of phrenzie,” is the impetus of God. But how Milton moves the reader, early
modern or contemporary, depends entirely on her human imagination.
Money is used in transacting, a process by which one gets something else in
exchange for coin, or currency. Marxist critics ground this process in the inequality and
falsehood it passes on through exchange to the laborer. In the context of Samson
Agonistes, money furthers the inadequate and disproportionate of human relationships
and exchange. When the Chorus approaches the enslaved Samson to offer “Counsel or
Consolation” (Milton 183), Samson shares what he has learned about people: “I
learn/Now of my own experience, not by talk,/How counterfeit a coin they are” (Milton
187-89). Learning by “experience” is vastly different, and usually much more effective
than learning “by talk.” A play teaches by talk and by experience, but Milton’s “play” is
imagined; which is to say, the only experience the reader might have in the process of
reading the poem is her own. Is that “counterfeit”? More to the point, however, the
friends, supporters, and admirers who are not present, are, like “counterfeit coins,” not
good for the actual exchange. They are not showing up when they are needed. The idea
that people are fickle and that they can be bought, is furthered by Samson’s wives. His
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first wife was “false,” and Samson uses the language of economics and currency to
defend his actions against her. “I us’d hostility, and took this spoil/To pay my
underminers in thir coin” (Milton 1203-4). The “coin” is coercion and deceit. The
Philistines threatened Samson’s wife and forced her to share the secret of his riddle with
them. Samson, in return, killed thirty men and used their clothes as gifts to give those
who “answered” his riddle correctly. The value of Samson’s coin is difficult to ascertain,
and while his retribution may seem costly, or expensive in this instance, Dalila’s
purchase is more dear. Samson claims Dalila was corrupted by the offer of gold:
“vitiated with Gold,/Though offr’d only” (Milton 389-90). In direct address to her,
Samson states: “weakness is thy excuse,/And I believe it, weakness to resists/Philistian
gold” (Milton 829-31). Milton chooses precious metals instead of a specific economic
currency, but it is the material about which Samson is so adamant. Milton emphasizes
the senses in Samson, particularly sight, as I will discuss shortly, but in this moment, he
claims Dalila to have been overpowered by the scent of gold: “by the s[c]ent
conceiv’d/Her spurious first-born” (Milton 390-91, brackets Revard’s). Samson is the
first-born of their marriage, but it is the scent of gold that convinces Dalila to betray
Samson. To the Giant Harapha of Gath, he claims defeat only when: “they had hir’d a
woman with their gold/Breaking her Marriage Faith to circumvent me” (Milton 1114-5).
Dalila’s betrayal is her revealing of Samson’s pledge of loyalty and strength in his hair.
For gold then, the body of Samson is unveiled and destroyed. He is shorn of his strength,
enslaved, and blinded. Equivalency in these transactions of betrayal is not only
inadequate, but also adulterating.
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In the discourse of currency, money also functions as a means of freedom or
release. For example, Samson asks Manoa not to bargain for his release so he can “pay”
for his crime. Milton writes, “let me here,/As I deserve, pay on my punishment;/And
expiate, if possible, my crime” (Milton 488-90). Samson is asking Manoa to forgo
bargaining for his release so that he can pay the debt through slavery and confinement.
Samson’s father, Manoa, refers to slavery and death as “God’s debt,” but he does so with
the idea that God alone can judge and redeem. Manoa tries to convince Samson that if he
is penitent for his own faults, that God may in return “relent, and quit thee all his debt”
(Milton 509). Yet Samson blames himself, not God, for succumbing to Dalila’s
“lascivious lap” (Milton 536). As a result, he is unwilling to “repent the sin” (Milton
504) and remains a slave. When returns to Samson to share the news of his unsuccessful
attempts at bargaining for Samson’s release, he hears Samson destroy the temple, or
theater off-stage. In this moment, Manoa laments: “but death who sets all free/Hath paid
his ransom now and full discharge” (Milton 1572-3). Samson pays for freedom with his
body, an unfathomable exchange. The Chorus, upon hearing the news, interprets the
transaction differently: “O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!” (Milton 1660).
Revenge becomes the complicating factor here, as Samson loses his life at the same time
that he takes the lives of so many Philistines. In so doing, as the Chorus notes, Samson
has “Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d/The work for which thou wast foretold/to Israel,
and now ly’st victorious/Among thy slain self-kill’d” (Milton 1661-64). How many
Philistines does it take to equal one Samson? Does the religious service to which Samson
has devoted his life somehow render this exchange more “glorious, “ or, better yet,
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“victorious”? We continue to this day to struggle with answers to these questions, as the
division between the two critical camps reveals. As critics who argue for Samson and
against contend, the context out of which Milton writes matters. But what we most often
go to with Milton is politics and religion. Capitalism and the emergence of trade with
New World was shifting the world order in Milton’s time. Classes were expanding and
diversifying even as they became more rigid. Money as currency was becoming more
standard. Art as a commodity was challenging cultural thought and practice. We can
best see the struggle between the emerging market and the human imagination in the
representations of the body in the text.
Milton works the action of the poem out through the body. The primary body is
Samson’s, which is where Milton puts the text into motion. In the beginning for instance,
Samson is not only tethered, shaven, and enslaved, but also blinded. Milton opens the
poem with Samson retiring, as best he can, to a spot where he can feel a breeze, hear less
of the noise around him, and seek some refuge from his mind, “a deadly swarm/Of
Hornets arm’d” (Milton 19-20). He goes on to share “both my eyes put out” (Milton 33)
and then bemoans his loss of sight, “O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!” (Milton
67), “Blind among enemies, O worse than chains” (Milton 68). Being blind represents, in
addition to the problem of being in one’s body, but not being able to see, the metaphor of
faith. “Light the prime work of God to me is extinct” (Milton 70). As I discussed with
reference to motion and money, what seems to be at stake with Milton is the discourse of
knowledge, or the transmission of meaning. The Chorus, coming close to Samson and
engaging him in discussion, is uncertain which is worse, his being bound or his blindness.
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“Which shall I first bewail,/Thy bondage or lost Sight, Prison within Prison/Inseparably
dark?” (Milton 152-54). Sight means so much to Samson as he is left without God as a
result of his mistakes. Milton does not relate the events that lead up to Samson’s
blinding, but, in their meeting, the body figures prominently.
In the discussion between Samson and Dalila, Milton moves from the body as a
whole to specific parts, notably the ear. Although Dalila was able to share her body with
Samson and eventually lead him to share his secret with her, this time, Milton stops the
intermingling of the flesh, or the sharing of parts. Samson’s response to Dalila’s entreaty
is telling: “Out, out, Hyena” (Milton 748). Milton compares Dalila to an animal believed
to have been bisexual, but more importantly, to an animal known to counterfeit the
human voice. Her body is thus made to be unnatural and not her own. In response,
Dalila claims her body and sex, or gender, to both be and not be her problem. Or, she
claims because she is a woman and the weaker sex, she should not be held accountable.
“First granting, as I do, it was a weakness/In me, but incident to all our sex” (Milton 774-
75). Separate from Samson, Dalila is unable to make headway. As she attempts to
reason with him, she argues: “at length that grounded maxim/So rife and celebrated in
the mouths/Of wisest men; that to the public good/Private respects must yield; with grave
authority/Took full possession of me and prevail’d” (Milton 865-69). Throwing off her
sex to be like men, Dalila reasons that she gave in to the Philistine demands to act for the
public good instead of her own desires. Dalila puts herself in the “mouths of wisest
men” in this act of unsexing. In so doing, she is “yielding” and taken “possession” of,
but the only in attempting to repossess Samson. Milton offers up specific body parts in
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this exchange as Dalila tries to get closer and closer to Samson. She asserts: “I to the
Lords will intercede, not doubting/Thir favourable ear” (Milton 920-21). The ear would
become a site of entry, were it not for Samson’s diligence. Samson responds in part: “So
much of Adders wisdom have I learn’t/To fence my ear against thy sorceries” (Milton
936-7). The adder that stops its ears is an allusion to the Bible and the Psalms, but Milton
is also alluding to literary women who ensnare men through the ear by song and magic.
10

Samson has learned from his experiences with women, and thus “fences” his ears. When
Samson refuses Dalila, she boldly asks: “Let me approach and touch thy hand” (Milton
951). Samson’s response obliterates any chance of the two reconciling and their bodies
joining again. Samson asserts: “Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake/My
sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint” (Milton 952-3). A body torn “joint by joint” is a
body dismembered. Samson has already torn apart a lion, and he will do tremendous
damage to lots of bodies by the end of the text. Rather than the union of two bodies,
Milton offers an imagined explosion of body parts. Before leaving, Dalila reminds
Samson how she will live on in fame and fortune. Milton rewrites Virgil’s Fama in male
form, who “if not doubl-fac’t is double-mouth’d” (Milton 971). Milton grants Dalila
success of a different sort. “I shall be nam’d among the famousest […]sung at solemn
festivals” (Milton 982-83). Returning to the body, Dalila gloats that she will live in and
on not through the body of Samson, but through the bodies of others.
Once Samson departs, Milton relays the action of the narrative through what the
Chorus and Manoa are able to hear, and then provides the reader with a witness, who
recounts what he saw. At first, the uproar the Chorus and Manoa hear is mistaken for
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delight at Samson’s demonstrations of strength. But then Milton has the Chorus
proclaim: “Thy son is rather slaying them, that outcry/From slaughter of one foe could
not ascend” (Milton 1517-18). The explosion of the body that Milton suggested in the
context of Samson and Dalila becomes real in the context of the Hebrew amidst the
Philistines. Of the senses, however, it is first through the ears that the violence is
comprehended. Milton expands the bodily experience with the Messenger, who explains
what he saw: “The sight of this horrid spectacle/Which earst my eyes beheld and yet
behold” (Milton 1542-3). The effect is that of arrival and delay. The Messenger sees
what Samson has done and continues to see what Samson has done. And although
Milton refrains from explicit detail, the freezing of the moment, the enacted stasis, if you
will, has profound effects. If nothing else, what is suggested is the act of re-telling or
passing on the story. Repeating the narrative is very much an experience made into
action by the human imagination. In the ending, Milton uses the metaphor of the
phoenix: “And though her body dies, her fame survives” (Milton 1706). Over and with
Dalila, Samson too will move bodies in fame.
11
Manoa’s last words before Milton has
the Chorus finish in sonnet, hearken back to the problem of the eyes. I read in the
father’s focus on his son’s (lost) eyes Milton’s privileging of the subjectivity. Manoa,
after bathing Samson’s body in the blood of his foes, will bury Samson properly at home.
Over time, he envisions virgins celebrating at Samson’s tomb with flowers
“bewailing/His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,/From whence captivity and loss of eyes”
(Milton 1742-44). Reading seems to be contrasted with the knowledge of history or
experience. I would be remiss were I not to remind the reader of Milton’s loss of
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eyesight and the dictation of poems to a scribe, including Samson. While I do not read in
this moment a suppressed desire for the poem to be staged, although there are plenty of
critics who make arguments for staging, I do want to suggest that for Milton, the
experience of poetry was very much about the expansion of the human capacity. If
Milton did indeed read all that was to be read up until his loss of sight, and then write the
dense work that survives even to this day, then it seems clear to me that he would
champion an engagement of all these texts not on the page but in our heads.

Conclusion

Across the early modern English stage and page, I have argued for a
representation of the human subject as a shapeshifting, transformative body. Poets
working and reworking the Horation model of profit and pleasure capitalize on the
expanding human imagination of their audience. The written (and/or performed)
genderbending and mutating body is an extension of the privileging of pleasure over
profit. Stephen Greenblatt argued for the Renaissance as a shaky space for selves to
construct and re-present themselves. I argue that art, the Horation model, and capitalism
in the early modern period produce competing tensions that lead to the manipulation and
transformation of the body as a metaphor for the human subject.
In this concluding chapter, I have gone from the Restoration stage to the page,
from drama produced in a space of greater class division and rigidity, at a more expensive
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price, to drama written and published by a female writer who went from a lady-in-waiting
to a Duchess, publishing her own work, and on to a poet rewriting epic poetry out of the
Bible. In addition, I offer brief summations of three seventeenth century writers who
made their living, for better of for worse, by writing. In their ongoing engagement with
Horace and Aristotle as poets, playwrights, and critics, we can see the early modern
struggle with its Classical precedents.
The choice of instruction, pleasure, and/or profit grows out the market. Part of
the greater project at stake is the representation of the subject in art and the market. How
do we represent ourselves in art that sells? In an increasingly complicated market space
that grows ever more media-based, how and what do we to be ourselves?
In The Man’s the Master, Davenant sought to build on the heyday of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean stage even as he wrote explicitly to please a court in exile and
then the Caroline audience. With Cavendish, another writer who spent time with an
exiled court, the notion of space and subjectivity gets radically reworked. Cavendish is at
ease with multiplicity and conflation, of both subjectivity and setting, in strikingly
modern ways. Her representations of expanding female subjectivity speak to the rising
place of women in a rapidly changing world. Who Samson is, or how we read Samson, a
question with which we continue to struggle today, demonstrates the way by which, at the
end of the early modern period, the human imagination is being stretched through the
body and the mind of not just a spectator, but more importantly, an (envisioning) reader.
Both Cavendish and Milton ask much more of their audience, as the pleasure of their
subjects is born out of the movement of their minds. The seventeenth century writers
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John Dryden, Thomas Rymer and John Dennis illustrate the proliferation of thinking
subjects as writers. Moreover, they reveal the ongoing struggle with artistic models.
Printing Pleasing Profit attempts to get at the early modern human
imagination as the world transitions from a feudal to a capitalist economy. In opposition
to the new economic criticism of late that tends to focus on material goods, I can only
hope to have shown the ways by which the shape-shifting body becomes the site of
exploration and contestation, the convergence of human creativity, drama, and coin.

208

Chapter Four Endnotes

1
This and all future citations are taken from Davenant’s The Works of Sir William
Davenant.

2
For more on coins, counterfeits, and sexuality see Marc Shell and Will Fisher.

3
Ben Jonson also worked across a variety of different media in an effort to differentiate
himself as an “author.” The changing nature of the market leads Davenant to alter the
shape of his art. With the advent of new markets and new genres, as a result of cultural
changes and science and technological discoveries, the art and artists change. I am
expanding my argument concerning the emphasis upon the body as the site of
manipulation in play texts, to argue for the reading of the body of work as metaphor.

4
I am quoting Osbourne in Shaver here, but Osbourne is often quoted by critics. Shaver
claims Osbourne not to have read Cavendish, and thus to be judging solely her writing as
a woman. I wonder about Osbourne’s remarks and the way she references both Bedlam
and not sleeping for two weeks in connection with the book. Could it be that beyond
Cavendish’s sex, Osbourne is critiquing what she read?

5
This and all future citations of The Convent of Pleasure will be taken from Anne
Shaver’s edition. The Convent of Pleasure first appeared in print in 1668, in Plays, Never
Before Printed.

6
I am citing Kate Lilley’s introduction to Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World and
Other Writings, but for more on Cavendish and gender, see the aforementioned Shaver,
as well as Joyce Devlin Mosher.

7
In addition to Fish, Radzinowicz, and Wittreich, I encourage reading Sanford Budick on
the phoenix simile, Annette C. Flower on the preface, and Feisal G. Mohamed on Milton
and religion today, and Timothy J. Burbery on staging the poem.

8
For a more focused reading of this section, see Flower’s "The Critical Context of the
Preface to Samson Agonistes."

9
This and all future citations taken from “Samson Agonitses,” in John Milton: Complete
Shorter Poems With Original Spelling and Punctuation. Ed. Stella P. Revard. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; 459-512.

10
These are the women of Homer, Tasso, and Ariosto (Circe, Armida, and Alcina).

11
For more on the employment of the phoenix metaphor, see Budick, Sanford. “Milton’s
Joban Phoenix in Samson Agonistes.” Early Modern Literary Studes. 11.2 (September,
2005); 1-15.
209

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This project brings together the histories of subjectivity, early modern drama and economics. Moving across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I chart a significant shift in subjectivity and social relations that connects the individual, art, and the market. Indeed, as the commercial market takes off, poets begin writing to please (and edify) for profit (financial gain). That is to say, the struggle between the Roman and Greek poetics is complicated by the change in “profit

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'This object kills me': the intersection of gender and violence in performance of Shakespearean tragedy

Asset Metadata

Creator Carlson, Brooke Allan (author)

Core Title Printing pleasing profit: The crafting of capital selves and sales in early modern, English drama

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 08/17/2010

Defense Date 05/14/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ben Jonson,capitalism, subjectivity, and art,early modern drama,OAI-PMH Harvest,Shakespeare

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Smith, Bruce R. (committee chair), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Rollo, David (committee member), Szabari, Antonia (committee member)

Creator Email bac@usc.edu,brooke.carlson@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3404

Unique identifier UC1102388

Identifier etd-Carlson-3579 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-390891 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3404 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Carlson-3579.pdf

Dmrecord 390891

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Carlson, Brooke Allan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu