Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

RADICAL COMEDY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the “Shepherds’ Play,” Thomas Dekker’s pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. Farce, absurdity, excess, over-the-top characters, unremitting irony, black humor, toilet humor, and tricksters of all types such features and more combine to satirize medical, religious, and political authority and to implement necessary social change. Written with a narrative ease, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England shows how comic interventions both describe and reconfigure prevalent authority in its own time while arguing that, through early modern comedy, one can observe the changes in social behavior and understandings characteristic of the Renaissance. Rick Bowers is Professor of English in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada.

General Editor’s Preface Helen Ostovich, McMaster University Performance assumes a string of creative, analytical, and collaborative acts that, in defiance of theatrical ephemerality, live on through records, manuscripts, and printed books. The monographs and essay collections in this series offer original research which addresses theatre histories and performance histories in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century life. Of especial interest are studies in which women’s activities are a central feature of discussion as financial or technical supporters (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses, wigmakers, or ‘gatherers’), if not authors or performers per se. Welcome too are critiques of early modern drama that not only take into account the production values of the plays, but also speculate on how intellectual advances or popular culture affect the theatre. The series logo, selected by my colleague Mary V. Silcox, derives from Thomas Combe’s duodecimo volume, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1592), Emblem VI, sig. B. The emblem of four masks has a verse which makes claims for the increasing complexity of early modern experience, a complexity that makes interpretation difficult. Hence the corresponding perhaps uneasy rise in sophistication: Masks will be more hereafter in request, And grow more deare than they did heretofore. No longer simply signs of performance ‘in play and jest’, the mask has become the ‘double face’ worn ‘in earnest’ even by ‘the best’ of people, in order to manipulate or profit from the world around them. The books stamped with this design attempt to understand the complications of performance produced on stage and interpreted by the audience, whose experiences outside the theatre may reflect the emblem’s argument: Most men do use some colour’d shift For to conceal their craftie drift. Centuries after their first presentations, the possible performance choices and meanings they engender still stir the imaginations of actors, audiences, and readers of early plays. The products of scholarly creativity in this series, I hope, will also stir imaginations to new ways of thinking about performance.

Radical Comedy in Early Modern England Contexts, Cultures, Performances

RICK BOWERS University of Alberta, Canada

© Rick Bowers 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Rick Bowers has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bowers, Rick Radical comedy in early modern England: contexts, cultures, performances. – (Studies in performance and early modern drama) 1. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism 2. English drama (Comedy) – History and criticism 3. Satire – England – History and criticism 4. Theater – England – History – 16th century 5. Theater – England – History – 17th century 6. Comic, The, in literature 7. Radicalism in literature I. Title 822’.0523’0903 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowers, Rick. Radical comedy in early modern England: contexts, cultures, performances / Rick Bowers. p. cm.—(Studies in performance and early modern drama) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6380-5 (alk. paper) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. English drama (Comedy)—History and criticism. 3. Satire, English—History and criticism. 4. Theater—England—History—16th century. 5. Theater—England—History—17th century. 6. Comic, The, in literature. 7. Radicalism in literature. I. Title. PR658.C6B68 2007 822.009–dc22 2007031362

ISBN 978-0-7546-6380-5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents Acknowledgments Figures

vii ix

1

Introduction: Comic Performance

2

Enter the Comic Hero: The Performance of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play

11

3

Wrestling with Comic Villainy: Barabas and other “Heels”in The Jew of Malta

23

4

Grinning and Bearing it: A Plague of Storytelling in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603)

37

5

Humor in High (and low) Places: Toilet Tales and The Metamorphosis of Ajax

51

6

Marston’s Absurd Theater: The Antonio Plays

71

7

Sex, Lies, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

83

8

“Of What Bigness? / Huge”: Ben Jonson’s Supersized Comedy

95

Works Cited Index

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111 119

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Acknowledgments I am fortunate to know and work with colleagues who combine intellectual rigor with a rich and varied sense of humor, and to whom I would like to extend my thanks. Ronald Huebert at Dalhousie University introduced me to many of the texts treated in this book, becoming a friend as well as mentor. At the University of Alberta, Jim Mulvihill, Steve Reimer, and David Gay have graced me with friendship, wisdom, and renovating absurdity for many years. Former students with whom I have laughed and learned include especially Mathew Martin, Mark Irvine, Molly Foust, Scott Sharplin, Stephen King, Paul Dyck, and Dale Jacobs. Collaboration with good friend and fellow Harington fan, Paul S. Smith, consultant clinical psychologist at County Durham NHS Trust and Newcastle University, resulted in “Wit, Humor, and Elizabethan Coping: Sir John Harington and The Metamorphosis of Ajax,” HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 17.3 (July 2004): 93–112, my portion of which, cut and revised, appears within the argument of this book as Chapter 5. Other chapters have also appeared in earlier, differently argued forms: Chapter 2 as “Comedy, Carnival and Grace: The Performance of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play,” English Studies in Canada 28.4 (December 2002): 583–602; Chapter 3 as “The Jew of Malta and the World of Wrestling,” English Studies in Canada 25.2 (June 1999): 137–56; and Chapter 7 as “Comedy, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” Early Modern Literary Studies 8.3 (January 2003): 1–22. Finally and most importantly, I thank my wife Katherine Moore who continues, with much good humor, to laugh at my jokes sometimes and always to be my best critic.

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Figures 5.1

A Harington Toilet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) G.10364. By permission of The British Library.

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5.2

Cambridge Don and Devil, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) G.10364. By permission of The British Library.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Comic Performance In a moment of critical reflection Jerry Lewis once observed, “The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble” (197). His performance observation is as accurate as his unintentional sexism. A woman “in trouble” might not seem so comedic. Yet, as Audrey Bilger argues in Laughing Feminism, even the polite comedy of women authors in eighteenth-century England reveled in the subversion and surprise of “escaping from confinement, of breaking down barriers, and of turning the tables on those who attempt to suppress them” (15). In performance, comedy usually combines perceived distress with clever extrication and ironic reversal that is shared with others. As that twentieth-century performance diva Cher declared in her 1999 A&E Biography special: “I connect with my audience at a really deep superficial level.” Ben Jonson couldn’t have put it better. And John Marston wouldn’t have tried, allowing his characters instead to demonstrate that self-consciously ironic performance ensures complicated connections with audiences and authorities. In early modern comedy, women and men are mutually implicated in a social world where powerful institutions of authority and repression get reduced to “human” scale where personal freedom reigns and all the comic clichés are true: all’s well that ends well; the more the merrier; it’s just a joke; life goes on. Such seemingly facile perceptions, however, do not come without trouble in the performance culture of early modern England. This study focuses on comic representations that assert themselves in loud, sexist, messy, rude, tender, intimate, and disorienting conflicts of interaction, authority and, subversion. At its basics, such comedy represents a form of disagreement, a pre-institutional form of cultural and political opposition rooted in seeing things from the “other” perspective. Usually ironic and often triumphant, this oppositional perspective might be the “sudden glory” that Hobbes perceived as fundamental to laughter itself within human nature, “arising,” Hobbes insists, “from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (“Human Nature” 46 ). More generous in terms of self and other, Bakhtin declares laughter to be a precondition of human freedom, describing comedy as: “The right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available” (Dialogic Imagination 159). Like all rights, this radical comic right emerges out of conflict and must be actively claimed. While the situation of comic performance is basically social in terms of contacts, categories, and life possibilities, the assertion of comic performance twists and resists all impositions through a power rooted in resistance to authority, assertion of unprivileged culture, and insistence on the endurance of human discourse. Aristotle in his Poetics linked comedy to character: low characters, ridiculous characters, characters who sang “phallic songs.” The individualist characters who

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I study are relative latecomers who paradoxically vivify and recreate comic forms within, and in opposition to, early modern English culture. As comic heroes they unknowingly partake of the erotic, idiotic, and irrationally insistent assertions of early Greek satire. But they are all as politically oppositional as they are determinedly English. Mak, Moll, Barabas, Antonio, Subtle, Face—all perform their comic rages in terms of dismay, protest, and performance, and all are implicated in a newly emergent sense of professional theater. Socially dispossessed, these comic heroes maintain a clear sense of their own significance as personally special even unusual. Often painfully aware of class limitations to be destroyed, they also have a radically new idea, perspective, effect, or plan that may be crazy, or maybe not, but will definitely lead to change and restructuring within their society. Likewise in the alternative genres of Dekker’s jest book storytelling about plague and Harington’s extended metaphor of installing toilets—both trade on the grotesque complications of comic extrication and accommodation conveyed through popular print. As clowns, rogues, fools, jesters, and ludicrous commentators on the impossibilities of their times, these unwashed figures (literally in Dekker’s plague pamphlets and Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax) smear the pretentious cleanliness of upper class figures who would dominate them. Politically, these characters shock the complacent and puncture the pompous, reforming from below in the Bakhtinian sense of ironic reversal along with internally generated opposition against external restrictions. This book addresses the comedy of early modern England where role reversals abound, identity is fluid, unlikelihood insists on setting terms, and confusion enjoys license at the same time as it tests new senses of personal and political assertion. In this regard overstatement represents the usual mode of address, and any form of received authority represents a target. Within these comedies a “heroic” character protests, insists, cheats, ridicules, pummels, and energetically performs a modicum of comic freedom. Such actions are in some sense “licensed” as jest, but they also thrive on mental agility, moral flexibility, and a variety of perspectives open always to possibilities from the unusual to the bizarre. Herein, irony itself represents new political ascendancy and appropriation of power that is at once decentered from authority while central to performance. In fact the radical comedy of early modern England performs the “intellectual vandalism” (li) mentioned by Jonathan Dollimore in the “Introduction to the Second Edition” of his influential book Radical Tragedy. Radical comedy likewise pierces to the root of cultural authority by asserting meaningful and playable incoherence through forms of defiance to which the average person can aspire and with which the average person can triumph. I agree largely with Dollimore’s assertion that “the aesthetic has become an anaesthetic” (xxii), but I hope that my treatment of radical comedy will help in some small way to revivify and change things. My study begins with the incongruous comic grace of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play of the Wakefield mystery cycle. Mak’s emergence as comic hero represents surprise within its own context as well as deep significance for later English comedy. Above all, Mak is an actor, a masker, an improviser, a strongly defined oppositional other to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Moreover, Mak performs his “otherness” both as energetic comic variety and as fundamental

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plot necessity within the play. His interactive performance at once nourishes fellow actors involved in his contrivances as well external audiences involved in the deep epiphany of his comic realization. At all points Mak presents a ridiculous perspective, destabilizing acceptable terms of Christian behavior, and injecting the drama with ludicrous energy while providing vicarious thrills. Because the drama is a performance, no sheep will really be stolen, and no offense will really be taken. But opposition will exhibit itself as a distinct performance possibility and signal the necessity for change. Such comic empowerment energizes later English comedy in terms both of mythic proportion and irrational sense. The wise fool emerges with a license, a loose script, and a carnivalized occasion. As wise fool and radical “other,” the comic hero renegotiates the world in terms of freedom. The “World” itself—figured usually as the external authority of parents, politicians, politeness, and precedent—resists such challenges and complications in the name of stability and of received, realistic authority. However, confronted with the unleashed joy of carnivalized assertions—with all of its innovations, from simple reversal to chaotic destruction—authority must inevitably reconsider its own assurance. Comic freedom represents itself in overcoming limitations, attacking authority, and instigating reversals of fortune. Herein, the “rule” of misrule features a bloodless revolution that gives everyone a chance to see from the others’ perspective and perhaps learn something as a result—for example: empathy. Hobbes wouldn’t recognize empathy within the rigid social hierarchies of his own day; but he might recognize it now in terms of idealized democracy, a democracy of fearless interaction among people who laugh together. The freedom offered through comedy surpasses Freudian conceptions of psychic release, Bergsonian observations about the mechanized and the humane, even Hobbesian senses of overcoming our former inferiority. In each case, freely accepting ourselves liberates us to accept others. Comic heroes—relentlessly, shamelessly, and with reckless vigor—show the way. Touching on aspects of improvisation and self interest that are central to comedy in a serious world, Robert Torrance advances a loose definition of the comic hero that is informative for my study: He is too protean a character to be delimited by any prior definition, since he is forever extemporizing his essence. He does not conform to a single character type at all, be it fool or knave, eiron or alazon, but evades fixed categories of every kind by adopting whatever posture suits his imperious ends. What is constant is the potential or actual antagonism between his ways and those of the world. He is comic (in the root sense of komos, the “revels”) primarily by virtue of the festive values that he celebrates and embodies: values of biological life and imaginative freedom, of dogged humanity and belligerent selfhood. (The Comic Hero viii)

The heroes of early English comedy likewise assert festive protest at the same time as they assert their own selves. The truly comic hero asserts fundamental innocence, committed self certainty, and an unshakable belief that anything can be accomplished. Audiences and readers experience vicarious recognition, involvement, and even liberation. Of course Foucault’s shrewdly noted “repressive hypothesis” declares that authority actually licenses rather than liberates festivity, and it does so for its

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own repressive ends. But once the comic freedom of carnival has been permitted, subversion becomes a possibility and monologic authority can never be the same again. Indeed, through permission (perhaps involving a deep and misunderstood complicity) authority enters into dialogical relativity, which represents a form of subversion in itself. Things get out of control—dangerously, joyously, inevitably. Remember that first kiss? that first overnight party? that first solemn vow never to get drunk again? Even repressive hangovers get reconfigured through time. In her classic study, Susanne Langer argues for an irresistible life force replicated by comedy itself through a “deep cruelty” of assertion (Feeling and Form 349) that is perhaps more Hobbesian than Langer intended. As will be seen, control can shift radically within the state, as in The Jew of Malta, within the household, as in The Alchemist, and within personal relationships, as in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Previously unprivileged positions discover, and consequently declare, meaningful possibilities both within and without authoritative structure. Through sharp wit, high coloring, irrational defiance, and physical rudeness, comic heroes broadcast their innovations and unsentimentally assert life forms in a weltering variety of possibilities. Laughter itself, as Bakhtin affirms, suggests a form of freedom, a freedom that unifies people. Of course laughter is not always pleasant, but then comedy is not always safe. Cognitive theories of laughter usually bypass the fact that crying comes more naturally in this world. As a self-willed response to external situation, laughter is rooted deeply in social and cultural practice. In his classic essay on the topic, Henri Bergson observes that “laughter is always the laughter of a group” (“Laughter” 64). A powerful group laughs at the expense of subordinates; powerless groups laugh at the pretensions of their superiors; laughter always signals pleasure and consolidates relationships. In Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History, Barry Sanders links laughter etymologically to conspiracy where, in Latin, to conspire is to breathe together—as in shared laughter. By contrast, Hobbes’s intellectual perception about laughter as “sudden glory” linked to relative superiority—while deeply perceptive in its early modern context—operates in a somewhat personal vacuum. After all, laughter is most powerful and desirable when shared. Television laugh tracks mindlessly insist on it. Serious negotiations are deeply nourished by it. Laughter eases tension even as it facilitates change. Shared laughter both facilitates and suggests shared understanding. Bergson even referred to laughter as “a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary” (64), adding: “It must have a social signification” (65). To experience laughter is to experience a form of unity that is related to understanding and that suggests a kind of liberation. The radical comedy of early modern England asserts such reckless freedoms. Liberation of course comes in for much relativist treatment in a post-liberal, postmodernist context. Thinking of traditional comic theories in relation to postmodern concerns, philosopher H. Peter Steeves observes suggestively: Thomas Hobbes’s insistence that all humor stems from a sudden sense of superiority—that jokes bring pleasure precisely because someone is in pain and it is not me—might explain why it is funny to watch the Three Stooges, why it is funny (for some) to tell ethnic jokes, or why it is hilarious to note that Hobbes is dead and you and I are not. (262)

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But such an observation gets caught up in its own anachronistic determinism by collapsing emphasis with regard to the polymath author of Leviathan and contemporary theorists (“you and I”) who might disavow all contact with the Three Stooges, or ethnic jokes, or even teaching college subjects in North America. Similarly, when Steeves remonstrates against Bergson: Henri Bergson’s claim that humor arises from involuntary actions, that we expect to find adaptability and pliability in human beings but when met with a stumbling block—literally or metaphorically—we often still stumble, speaks to the human condition. But in a world where stumbling has become the norm and the possibility of a universal human condition is continually under question, tripping is not as funny as it used to be. (262)

However stumbling will always be the norm in the academy, that place of constant second-guessing where everything—especially such easy essentialism as human nature—is continually under question, automatically subject to reconsideration, and very Bergsonian in its constant questioning and reconfiguration. (It depends what you mean by is.) In fact, such perceptions shade into the embarrassed, selfconsciousness of political correctness and comedy of manners. No such manners are effective within the radical comedies of early modern England. Manners are for the “toffs,” kings, counselors, university dons—anyone in authority—and for those comic heroes who would adopt authoritative mannerisms to forward their alternative agendas. Losers cry; winners laugh. Losers find ways—creative, outrageous, unsentimental, and anti-essentialist—to become winners. Consider the “losers” that assert themselves within the radical comic texts treated in this book. Mak distinguishes himself both as a sheep stealer and as a conduit for Divine possibilities. Barabas appropriates his own stigmatization as a Jew and transgressively transforms his outrage into theatrical empowerment. Sir John Harington, lightly disguised aristocrat bereft of public office, finds authority along with surprising significance in the political possibilities of the public “office” of toilets. Antonio simultaneously plays the role of an anally fixated child and of a high class lover and revenger. Perhaps most radically of all Death, in the form of unremitting plague, discovers that people will develop the immunity of laughter. The grimy complexities of urban London are no match for the schemes of an inner city goldsmith. And finally London itself in Ben Jonson’s vision totters under the civic irresponsibility of carnival queens, working class poets, and confidence tricksters as diverse as Subtle, Face, and Justice Overdo. Contingency trumps morality. These radical comic heroes assert constant change, morphing from low to high and often back again, even as those “moral” antagonists who would curtail change find themselves grappling with misunderstood variety, losing contact with preconceived authority, and impotently wishing that things could return to the way they were. Comic reversals, complications, and debunkings of authority constantly suspend the usual rules of societal, moral, and sexual conduct. But gendered comic defiance in the early modern English sense does not involve the whispered, attenuated defiance of later middle class and sentimental comedy (especially in novels) where complacent femininity smiles in rebuttal of and collusion with confident masculine sneering.

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Instead, the early modern female comic (especially onstage) really is a male in disguise, capable of giving as good as s/he gets and laughing unselfconsciously at and with others. Realities go under erasure and possibilities write themselves into rude being as forms of comic improvisation. Things loosen up. Incongruities make sense. Whether in terms of family, marriage, religion, sex, politics, or business, (any one of which usually influences the others), comic complications move life in new and unprecedented directions where change is at once liberating and necessary. Bakhtin is insistent on the flexible comic integrity involved: “Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically” (Dialogic Imagination 23). Moreover, to be realistic about things in Bakhtin’s comic sense involves nonjudgmental entertainment of alternatives. Relax. Don’t get offended. Yes, things are crazy, but everything will be all right. Even the book of Ecclesiastes says as much in its wisdom. Such is the promise of comedy for the religious, the nonreligious, and the literary alike. As will be seen, commentators overstate the “death” of comedy in modern absurdist drama. Absurdity has been there all along, not in terms of transhistoric truth, but nourishing and reflecting forms of behavioral improvisation. If absurdity indeed represented the death knell of comedy, then Marston, Middleton, Harington—even Marlowe and the Ecclesiastes author—would have rung it long ago. My book focuses itself on the radical comedy of early modern England. That complicated European cultural experience known formerly and as the Renaissance occurred over time and within different contexts, but it signaled massive change in social behaviors and understandings. Historically through art, science, astronomy, agronomy, navigation, personal travel and military adventurism, medical discovery and social reorganization, the Renaissance changed much about the way people aligned themselves to each other and to their own consciousnesses. If, according to Descartes, doubt was the new first principle, and “all coherence gone” was to be observed (as John Donne did famously observe), then a new world of dangerous but joyous possibility certainly presented itself. Cultural elites might well be nervous about doubt and incoherence, but the great silent unwashed majority of people might not be so worried. Doubt and incoherence are only too well known in the world. The dispossessed common folk usually take comfort when their “betters” get nervous about uncertainty. They might even experience that usually forbidden “sudden glory” that Hobbes mentioned. As will be apparent by now, Bakhtin’s various theories of laughter, heteroglossia of voices, reform from below, and carnivalesque renewal relate suggestively to my argument for the prevalence and necessity of early modern radical comedy. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin links massive change in consciousness with comic possibility and creativity in Renaissance-specific cultural terms: In the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal, and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture; it emerged but once in the course of history, over a period of some fifty or sixty years (in various countries and at various times) and entered with its popular (vulgar) language the sphere of great literature and high ideology. It appeared to play an essential role in the creation of such masterpieces of world literature

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as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare’s dramas and comedies, and others. (72)

Bakhtin’s powerfully metaphorical and unsystematic thinking is suggestive for any response to early modern culture. Shakespeare has enjoyed Bakhtinian treatment in critical works such as Siemon’s Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance and Knowles’s Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. Earlier book-length studies such as Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and Bristol’s Carnival and Theater considered Bakhtin’s work more generally in relation to English theater and culture. My project relates Bakhtin loosely to the oppositional comedy of early modern England, a radical comedy that registers itself against delusions of social harmony and order that are promulgated by received authority and against which the spirit of Carnival asserts itself. Herein, to take Bakhtin literally or reject his work as historically incorrect is an academic mistake. Carnival can indeed turn bitter; laughter did indeed exist in the medieval church—but to assert such literal specifics as counter to Bakhtin’s cultural generalism is to make the same mistake as correcting Harington on Rabelais. In the first case one misses the insight; in the second case (and it’s a worse failing), one misses the joke. Bakhtin’s observations range synoptically across cultural and national boundaries, but my study is closer focused on comic genre and effect within English experience. I focus on those “others” mentioned but not identified by Bakhtin—the English writers and dramatists other than Shakespeare, and the strongly defined “other” figures who assert new comic possibilities within their works. Marlowe, Marston, Harington, Dekker, Jonson, and Middleton—these writers produce comical satires of great variety that radically distort and reconfigure their world. Shakespeare’s more romantic comedies are also more conservative. In terms of the well-worn cliché, Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule about the power of satire in this period. His romantic comedies stand out as timeless classics and are playing onstage tonight somewhere for a paying audience. His more satirical ventures, notably Troilus and Cressida, and perhaps Titus Andronicus, do not enjoy similarly popular success, but even they appear regularly on university booklists. The same can not be said for A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Antonio and Mellida, the plague pamphlets of Dekker, Harington’s Ajax, or even Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. And yet, as I will argue, these works represent a new radical comedy in England that is indexed to change through powerfully unconventional accommodations, alternatives, and creativity. This book is not a study of “New” comedy in terms of teleological and romantic plot lines any more than it is a study of “Old” comedy with its phallic satire and dialectical contests. Early modern English satire certainly has deep roots in European classicism along the lines especially of Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and Horace, and Jonson especially insists upon this connection with all of its fluency and moral force. But classicism in itself is most usually a target for deflation within early English comedy. The works studied herein, including Jonson’s, undercut much in the way of classical poise to foreground irrational assertion, kinetic effect, and riotous novelty in language and action. I plan to foreground strongly defined comic performances that accentuate the absurd and irrational within the context of social possibility in England. The figures I study are capable of—and insist upon—change in their

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life circumstances. This might not seem to be a compelling assertion, but for early modern comedy it is fundamental. The comic hero fundamentally and rudely disagrees with circumstances. Through unusual mental agility and cognitive adaptability the comic hero attempts to innovate and improve on these bewildering circumstances with a vision for future success. It takes a special creativity to absorb and counter the various complications offered to the comic hero. An unfeeling “world” of authority stands directly in opposition to everything the comic hero wishes to change. Therefore, the world itself must be changed, and the comic hero sets out against all odds to change that world. For the comic hero, orientation manifests itself as bewilderingly outward and extroverted as opposed to the splendid isolation of the tragic hero. The tragic hero turns ever inward at the unfathomable differences of other people to grapple with the overwhelming question: Who am I? More socially involved and messily uncertain, the comic hero looks outward at the unfathomable differences of other people and asks critically: Who are you? The strongly defined comic figures that I focus on in this book contain radical possibilities for personal and political change. They operate within a social context of competition and sexuality, a new market of post-feudal money, classinterested aggressions, gender-specific protests, and alarming social complications. Shakespeare’s comic heroes are social too, but they draw on a spirit of antique romance and traditional gender roles rather than confront a spirit of bewilderingly politicized festivity and ludicrously contrived performance. Robert Ornstein’s generalities of comparison are suggestive in terms of gender: In the comedies of Jonson and Middleton as in most Roman and Italian comedies, wit is often cynical and almost always masculine and contriving; it is the province of cunning servants, con men, and ingenious manipulators of others. In Shakespearean comedy wit is more often feminine than masculine, and it is gentle and understanding of folly and frailty. (Shakespeare’s Comedies: from Roman farce to Romantic Mystery 16)

As stated previously, my analysis contains no single chapter on Shakespeare but his influence will be felt and sometimes neutralized by the scope, power, and technique of his competitors in comedy. The mythical allegory of the Second Shepherds’ Play confounds Mak, that ingenious manipulator of credulous shepherds, who discovers his calling as father and comic hero. Barabas, in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, is not usually thought of as a comic figure, but his devious manipulations combine with ludicrous physical comedy as in professional wrestling, that most suggestive and showy of popular agonistic contest. Herein, purposeful anachronism is as permitted as comedy itself is various and farfetched. The comedic reaches of Marston’s Antonio plays certainly antedate twentieth-century theater of the absurd, just as the contrived textual pastiche of Dekker’s plague pamphlets and Harington’s reports on sanitation reach toward postmodern ironies in their own time. Even the irrationally complex ironies of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside reflect on the tensions inherent in Jonson’s work between a single faceted comic humorist and a comic hero named Face who can—as Mak discovered—“do it all.”

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One sees immediately that the trajectory of this study is neither diachronically nor even generically stable. But, as emphasized throughout, comedy inflects itself against such stability. Linked always to the authority of parents, politicians, and employers, authority on stage gets upstaged by comic energies of absurdity and noncompliance, of parody and role-play, of imagination and possibility linked to extra-textual contexts. As in the self-conscious irony of representation onstage, comedy can go beyond its mundane context of acceptable behaviors to experiment with and suggest alternative behaviors. In such a context, an Elizabethan aristocrat can indeed politically plan and install toilets as in Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax. Likewise, a medical disaster such as the plague in London can be linked with other wonders of 1603 to be characterized as laugh-out-loud funny. What might be considered impossible can, through irrational characteristics, alternative behaviors, zany improbabilities, linguistic excesses, and performative outrages, be brazenly asserted. Throughout, the comic hero leads the way by performing a self in terms of oppositional effect where laughter abolishes shame, fear, and death—but only through a struggle of consciousness. The comic self performs a separate meaning where tendencies and affiliations are always complex, often surprising, and usually unpredictable. A psychological study by Seymour and Rhoda Fisher suggests the primary character note in the imperative of its very title: Pretend The World is Funny and Forever. Pretend. Imagine. Improvise. Comedy, together with responses to comedy, do not rely on models and conventions of behavior, on critical, literary, or philosophical insight—except insofar as it can puncture, parody, or reverse such models. Rather, comedy relies on action, reaction, timing, sharing, social life and role play. In comedy, all forms of behavior—friendship, sexuality, work, play, combat—are presented as performative rather than regulatory, as irrational rather than reasoned, as contingent rather than contained. Through such complicated behaviors, comedy attains its various identities. Often perceived as momentary, time specific, and rather light in its affirmations (as opposed to the eternal wisdom of tragedy), comedy is forever an attitude and a (mis)understanding. As will be argued in the chapters that follow, the radical comedy of early modern England asserts itself always in terms of energy, aggression, and a refusal to comply. Such creative tension refuses to indulge in retrospective certainties and polite acceptance of inevitability. Instead, through their moments of improvisation, irony, absurdity, and laughter, these comic texts work with a sense of the ever-forming, ever-changing future. Hereby, they register participation in and formation of that radically human future. Moreover, the future oriented heroes of early modern comedy perform necessary, dangerous, and radical innovations by constantly breaking away from the past, and just as constantly disrupting the present. In doing so, they convey both comic freedom and comic distress wherein—deep down—the most radical comic attribute is hope.

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Chapter 2

Enter the Comic Hero: The Performance of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play An open-ended grasp of histrionics is deeply implicated in comedy. Like tragic heroes, comic heroes refuse to comply. But they laugh first—and not always nicely. Furthermore, unlike the appalling indignation, ethical protest, and intolerable frustration of the tragic hero, a comic hero interacts from the first, faking it, complicating it, confusing it, and moving authority in directions in which it usually refuses to go. The wise fool plays along, the joke teller interferes with and illuminates situations, while the zany conveys an incredible, impractical alternative—and it works! In trouble, out of trouble, and back in trouble again, the comic hero absorbs the complicated and ludicrous profundity of the world. Then, through flexibly complicated interactions with the world, the comic hero actively changes it. Such radical energy and variety is illustrated by Mak, perhaps the earliest English comic hero. In Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485–1558, Howard B. Norland singles out Mak from the Second Shepherds’ Play as a particularly effective and individualizing comic character. But he allows Mak merely conventional status as “trickster” in the oral folk tradition: The Wakefield Master uses Mak to infuse comedy into a biblical event, but again he forms a functional character; the plot determines Mak’s role, which is memorable because of the realistic details used to flesh out his character type (32).

I believe, however, that Mak’s character and actions go beyond the merely “functional”. Indeed, the play itself goes beyond the mere dramatizing of a biblical event. Mak animates farcical carnivalesque energies within the play, radical energies that assert the popularizing comic power of Carnival. In this process Mak mediates both human and divine through a performed sense of grace that is at once deeply ironic, theatrically unprecedented, carnivalized, and comic. Parody within the play does not ridicule the Nativity, but paradoxically emphasizes Mak as a virtuoso of farcical energy and role reversal to stress the power and sacrifice of the Incarnation. Hitherto, medieval vices and devils provided functional comic relief, but Mak performs a profoundly double role as comic hero and divine facilitator, a role at once radically ironic and radically generous. Through Mak the incarnational power of comedy fuses with the power of Incarnation in the Second Shepherds’ Play. Popular festive forms such as the Corpus Christi play assert comic freedom as located in irony, reversal, and paradox. As in the Feast of Fools or, especially in

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England, the Feast of the Boy Bishop, authority undergoes parodic interrogation, and a modicum of comic freedom supervenes. Mak, through a variety of ironic postures, produces the effect of an identity that thrives as comic agent and facilitator for such freedom. As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, laughter represents a precondition to human freedom, and more: Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. (Rabelais 66)

To see the world anew is to see the world through fresh eyes, unclouded by fear and uncowed by authority, with a view toward the future. As a character of adaptable possibilities and comic variety, Mak directs audience hope, expectation, and subversive glee. He shamelessly enacts, even personifies, reversal of hierarchical forms as reiterated in the Christian paradox, “many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Matt. 19:30). Bakhtin identifies such riddling prophecy as basic to carnivalesque reversal not in philosophical terms, but in cultural terms of performance as an expression of the artistic and ideological tendency of the time, seeking to hear the sounds of the world in a new key, to approach it not as a somber mystery play but as a satyrical drama (Rabelais 233).

Irreverently, Mak bursts social restraints through satirical performance that at once heightens and dismantles the Christmas hierarchy. He performs in a new key of comedy that conflates oppositions of rigidified class and spiritual possibility. Such is the curious emphasis of Mak and his shepherd associates in the comic drama of the Nativity in the Second Shepherds’ Play. There can be no overstating the class frustration and oppositional stance of this play. Distressed, cold, tired, and subjugated, the first shepherd, Coll, opens the play with a monologue condemning the oppression of “gentlery-men” (26)1 while clearly summing up his personal and political position: “These men that ar lord-fest, / Thay cause the ploghe tary; / That, men say, is for the best / We fynde it contrary. / Thus ar husbandys opprest, / In ponte to myscary / On lyfe” (29–35). “Husbandys” refers to husbandry in the agrarian sense, but it is also linked to the tedium and petty dissatisfactions of married life, as complained of by the second shepherd upon his entrance. Gyb’s caricature of his wife—“browyd lyke a brystyll” (148); “greatt as a whall” (153)—represents his only form of ascendancy. When oppressed, oppress someone else—someone close. Both Coll and Gyb exercise such bullying force on Daw, the third shepherd and their hired boy. They call him a liar, a knave, and a lazy hireling, and they are totally insensitive to his expressions of poverty and hunger. Collectively the three shepherds live in brutalized dissatisfaction, their impotence expressed in Gyb’s frustrated rant, “Why fares this warld thus?” (81). This is a world 1 Throughout, I quote the Second Shepherds’ Play from Stevens and Cawley, referencing by line numbers and silently regularizing u/v spellings.

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that is desperate for an intervention of comic grace. Aware of injustice, the shepherds are yet incapable of mobilizing force against the life of personal and political bad faith in which they live.2 It seems fitting, then, that in this play of paradoxes the boy Daw should compress and relate significant expository information at his unprepossessing entrance: “Crystys crosse me spede, / And Sant Nycholas!” (170–71). Powerless and without influence, Daw yet seems alive to renewing spiritual possibility. In her essay Regula Meyer Evitt claims that “Daw presents Christ’s cross and St. Nicholas in a single frame of reference, providing us with a marvelous conflation of the Nativity and the Passion” (313). First and last come together in carnivalesque anachronism. Combining his subordinate position with suggested social alternatives, Daw effectively reforms from beneath. Mak will do the same in terms of flamboyant performance of alternative identities. In this world of exploitation, Daw directs audience perceptions to political and spiritual possibilities wherein the oppressed see their oppression not as a dead world devoid of change but as a living situation that they can transform in their own favor. Hard-working, he alone of the three shepherds knows where the sheep are pastured. He takes deepest responsibility for the lost sheep. And, unlike his masters in their midnight blundering, Daw’s perceptions are both emotionally receptive and personally insightful: “We that walk on the nyghtys, / Oure catell to kepe, / We se sodan syghtys / When othere men slepe” (196–99). The shepherds, furthermore, in opposition to the relative comfort of “When master-men wynkys” (227), are often “weytt and wery” (226). Self-aware but also disenchanted, Daw is actively looking for something better. A “sodan syght” that will radically redirect both Daw and audience perceptions in general enters within this theatrical beat of hierarchical bickering and shepherds’ song. Polyphonic singing deflects the distress of the shepherds and, thus, robs them of pertinent social action, but it also acts as musical introduction for Mak. His entrance is dramatically significant. He has a name that is officially, textually, and theatrically inscribed: “Tunc intrat Mak” (274 sd). Mak will take social action. Mak will play many parts. The audience will hear Mak’s name often and connect with his personality, his ludic energy, and his special creativity. Mak’s very name suggests something beyond local context, something northern, Scots, wild, and perhaps a little barbaric.3 Certainly Mak performs as other to the shepherds and to everything else in this play. But he performs as a crucially defining comic other around which the energies of the play and its Nativity themes cohere. He breaks down barriers through paradox and locates in physical action what, in “Carnival and Incarnation: Bakhtin and Orthodox Theology,” Charles Lock observes in Christian theoretical terms: 2 The Second Shepherds’ Play is dated between 1475 and 1500 strictly on scribal evidence (Stevens and Cawley xv). Yet, in tone and temper, the play seems relatively close to the concerns of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and its unsettled aftermath. Of the grumbling shepherds, Woolf notes parenthetically, “they have a slightly archaic air in that they would fit the social conditions of the late fourteenth century more appositely than those of the mid-fifteenth” (193). On the Peasant’s Revolt, including class tensions, disorder, and lawlessness in Yorkshire, see Dobson. See also Wickham, who notes contemporary social pressures on the Festival of Corpus Christi in general, including the Black Death, Lollardy, and the Peasants’ Revolt. 3 On Mak’s name and historicized Scottish associations, see Stevens and Cawley.

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RADICAL COMEDY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND As a destroyer of boundaries the Incarnation renders paradoxical the discourse that retains Neoplatonic terminology: there is nothing elevated that has not been abased, nothing eternal that has not entered time, nothing divine that has not become human (287).

The foregoing could serve effectively as part of Mak’s character note. As will be seen, Mak constantly reverses received terminologies and radically performs within himself both the elevated and the abased. Mak’s entrance itself signals the birth of comic situation. For the oppressed, liberation represents a form of childbirth—an often painful struggle for humanization. Full of distress and complications, Mak is physically and emotionally all-toohuman. His comic actions create and mimic instability at the same time as they assure future possibilities within the dialogical life of the play. And Mak is, above all else, a virtuoso performer. Gary D. Schmidt defines him thematically in relation to the shepherds as “a conglomeration” (298) of all their opening complaints. But Mak is much more. As Maynard Mack, Jr. puts it: “The suffering world without hope depicted at the beginning is shattered by Mak and all he implies” (81). Mak consciously plays roles. He takes and gives histrionic pleasure. Roguish, unserious, and unemployed—at once shiftless and shiftfull—Mak is artful in his ability to affect southern English accents and strike a fatuous pose as he reacts to the shepherds’ rough handling: “What! ich be a yoman, / I tell you, of the kyng, / The self and the some, / Sond from a greatt lordyng,/ And sich (291–95). Mak represents Protean humanity in opposition to rigidified class. The shepherds, of course, are not taken in. But they are vaguely amused. Mak’s ridiculousness makes them feel superior, but it also makes them feel a bit uneasy. Irony always destabilizes received categories. One is unsure about status. The shepherds know that Mak is good for a laugh, but they also know that he might just as easily rob them of what few goods they possess. The shepherds identify Mak in terms of local peasant culture. They know Mak personally and by reputation as a vagabond and petty criminal. And they are right. But Mak knows something that they do not: he can imagine himself as other than what he really is. He can act. His ability goes far beyond being “qwaynt” (300) or doing “wrang” (301), or affecting a “Sothren tothe” (311), as Coll alleges. Ever suspicious of late-night rambling, Gyb accuses Mak of having “an yll noys / Of stelyng of shepe” (324–25). And Mak immediately responds punning: “I am trew as steyll” (326). Playfully insolent, Mak cannot resist putting his audience on edge. He cannot resist a joke. One can never be sure whether Mak is serious or not. He seems to be fundamentally doubled. And such uncertainty is fundamental to comic energies. As Bakhtin puts it, “The comic, in general, is based upon the contrast between the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. All types of the comic have this common ground” (Rabelais 305). Devils and vices in medieval drama characteristically represent such static contrasts. But Mak performs contrasts of pleasure and displeasure in terms of kinetic innovation, imaginative variety, and self-conscious glee. Recklessly twofaced, he produces the effect of an unstable and comical performative identity. Somewhat daunted by his energy, the shepherds predictably associate Mak with the Devil. Anything outside their limited experience is evil or suspect. They even associate each other with the Devil as well. Gyb’s first words to Coll—“Yee, the dewill in thi maw” (159)—and Coll’s first words to Daw—“Crystys curs, my

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knave” (213)—are examples of the aggressively impersonal bluster that represents their usual form of address as well as their only form of protection. In relation to Mak, such bluster is intensified. They simply do not understand him. And they do not trust him. Distinctly other to the shepherds and to their realm of monotonous experience, Mak is as various as he is odd. He even declares himself divergent at the first as he mutters to himself, “I am all uneven” (278). But he is neither Satan, nor the Devil, nor Anti-Christ. Such overdetermined attributions unbalance the exquisitely theatrical comedy of the play, as Jeffrey Helterman does in his allegorical characterization when he argues: “Only by casting out the Mak in themselves can the shepherds expel the spiritual winter” (104). Through inclusive comic farce, however, the play dramatizes quite the opposite. The shepherds get enlisted oppositionally in Mak’s deception where they learn to play along in order to complicate Mak’s self-incrimination. As a character Mak initiates action, creates suspense, and ensures dramatic complication. In classical terms of comedy, Mak combines basic characteristics of the alazon-imposter and the eiron-buffoon. But while the imposter typically is exposed by the buffoon, Mak plays both parts within himself and further complicates his identity through a variety of ventriloquized roles such as masterless man, shepherd’s pal, sheep stealer, worried-abusive-abused husband, proud father, and indignant householder. These conflicting, ironic, and overlapping roles perhaps explain something about his self-perception as “uneven” (278). At odds, even bogus, Mak will yet triumph over himself as absurd facilitator for the comic truth of salvation. He is a problematic agent, a blundering maker of comedy, and the perfect fall guy for the Nativity farce-parody, a parody that actively reconfigures audience conceptions. The central sheep-stealing episode combines marvelously with the character of Mak to enlarge the comic action. As comic hero, Mak arises from the torpor of sleep actively to engage with the audience. That he sleeps with the shepherds represents important associations of collective warmth, peasant survival, and shared experience. But he rises alone in order to demonstrate his singularity, to activate his plot, and to improvise with audience-directed gag lines such as “Lord, what thay slepe hard! / That may ye all here” (413–14). Mak shines comically with his marred Latin as bedtime prayer, phony charms over the sleeping shepherds, and humorous redefinition of shepherding: “Was I never a shepard, / Bot now wyll I lere” (415–16). To Mak, sheep-stealing is real shepherding. There’s nothing to this job. “[N]yp[ping]” (418) a lamb, he winks at the audience as he declares his action to be merely a loan, “this will I borow” (425). Antedating the attribution in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang by some four hundred years,4 his clever usage represents the first use of “borrow” as English slang for steal. But his usage also reaches back in deep irony to the double sense of “borrow” as security and as loan. As the OED explains, The essential notion of borrowing originally was the security given for the safety of the thing so taken: the essential notion now is that the thing is the property of another and liable to be returned.

4

“To steal: jocularly coll.: from ca. 1800” (Partridge 82).

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Mak has incurred a profound debt to the shepherds on both accounts. And they will collect the lamb just as certainly as Mak will protect and defend it. The hilarious kicker of this immediate episode of theft occurs, however, when Mak arrives home and nonchalantly reveals the crime to his wife in terms of divine intervention: “Thus it fell to my lott. / Gyll, I had sich grace” (452–53). Stevens and Cawley note the specialized theological implications of Mak’s “grace” at the same time that they relate his words to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Like the late-hired laborers in Matthew’s gospel, Mak receives perhour recompense, as he puts it, “More then thay that swynke and swette / All the long day” (450–51). Parody hereby heightens but also curiously reverses the sense of salvation by grace. Paradoxically, Mak’s intervention is as graceless as it is graceful. But it is also delightfully and theatrically carnivalesque in its fearless sense of irony, parody, and reversal. These official terms of “grace” and “salvation” get reconfigured through Mak’s comically exuberant performance. He performs the paradox of the “last” becoming “first,” as in the parable, but, as always, in a way beyond his own understanding. Warren Edminster, otherwise so perceptive in terms of such carnivalesque inversion, simply literalizes Mak in terms of anti-clerical polemic: He is “devilish” and tricky. He evokes the supernatural forces of witchcraft to separate the sheep from the shepherds. In the context of the metaphor of the spiritual pastor, Mak is anti-shepherd and hence, Antichrist. (140)

However, here and throughout, Mak represents pro-performance theatrical force rather than anti-shepherd metaphor. Through tricks, and jests, and improvised role play, Mak carnivalizes the situation recklessly because he is made of performance. He resembles a professional jester dropped into the middle of a Christian parable or a medieval mystery play. He is fearlessly parodic because he embodies comic energy. He has nothing else. Certainly he has no property, status, or legitimate occupation. Like every comic, he has been told a thousand times to “get a job.” He has of course many demanding children, but the audience never gets to see them. Basically, Mak has nothing more to lose but continues to play on the way to salvation. His unremitting performance represents his grace. Indeed, as will be seen, Mak never knows when to stop playing. As always, Mak’s wife Gyll is not happy to see him. She is never happy to see him. They live the standard life of comic married resentment as a kind of bickering everycouple. In this case, however, Gyll somewhat grudgingly spares Mak because he has actually provided for his family. And yet Mak’s despondent family receives no dramatic treatment whatsoever. Instead, attention is focused on the stolen sheep. Gyll recognizes Mak’s theft as a hanging offense, a crime most egregious in a medieval agrarian economy based on sheep and their byproducts. Ironically, Mak recognizes it too albeit in the form of a sore neck when he re-awakes among the shepherds and complains, “A! my nek has lygen wrang” (550). But Mak and Gyll’s poverty and desperation combine to make them complicit in the offense of sheep-stealing. It is a matter of survival, of life and death. Besides, they know that the shepherds will search exhaustively for the missing member of the flock. Such extreme circumstances lead to extreme measures, as Gyll hatches a plan for hiding the sheep that is hair-raising

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in its inescapable sacred parallel: “Here shall we hym hyde, / To thay be gone, / In my credyll. Abyde! / Lett me alone, / And I shall lyg besyde / In chylbed, and grone” (480–85). Emphasis is placed on concealment, upon deception and obstruction, yet paradoxically Mak and Gyll begin immediately to reveal their situation. With Gyll’s blessing, Mak, part devious thief and part homespun bungler, returns earnestly to the scene of his crime in a ludicrous attempt to deflect attention away from his crime. Audience attention is drawn to theatrical movement between the scene of the shepherds’ pasture and the location of Mak and Gyll’s cottage. But attention is also drawn towards a sense of here and beyond, as dreams intercede. Coll, awaking disoriented, claims, “I thoght that we layd us / Full nere Yngland” (510–11) and, thus, not only accentuates local immediacy but also anticipates a spiritual “otherwhere”. Daw’s dream is more pertinent in practical terms as he imagines Mak “lapt / In a wolfeskyn” (530–31). In doing so, he references a popular figure of danger and indicates social and religious predation as warned of in Matthew’s gospel (7:15). Daw’s dream also sounds as though he witnessed the event: “When we had long napt, / Me thoght with a gyn / A fatt shepe he trapt; / Bot he mayde no dyn” (534–37). Mak quickly deflects, but also pointedly focuses, attention with a dream of his own: “I thoght Gyll began to crok / And travell full sad, / Wel-ner at the fyrst cok, / Of a yong lad / For to mend oure flok” (556–60). Swearing “by Sant Stevyn” (553), he further associates the feast time of Christ’s birth with the literal feast of roasted lamb waiting for him at home with Gyll. Here, Mak’s claims of innocence, expression of distress, and quick departure combine theatrically—but also somewhat suspiciously—to get him back to his own cottage. He goes from the scene of the crime to the scene of the cover up and, thus, comically associates both without realizing that his humble abode will also be a scene of paradoxical revelation. And paradoxes assert themselves swiftly. Sarcastically dubbed “Syr Gyle!” (590) by his wife, Mak elevates his comic performance of deception through transcendent mis-representation. Herein Gyll is fully complicit with her self-proclaimed “good gyse” (491) about to be put into significant action. They slip into their usual procreative roles of mother and father. But this time there is an artful difference. She pretends to experience the pain of childbirth in mock groan; he pretends to be pleased at the new addition by singing “‘lullay’” (643). Operating within a parodic economy of sacred theft and sacred restitution, their roles take them beyond the physically immediate to the transcendent. As William W. E. Slights observed, in terms of divine comedy Mak’s literal theft pokes “a dead metaphor—the Lamb of God—into new life” (24). Together, Mak and Gyll play mother and father of the child who is a lamb. They move representationally within the Christian belief system based on the sacred symbol of the Lamb of God. By taking away “that which taketh away the sin of the world” (in the traditional wording of the liturgy), Mak has struck at the root of social and spiritual reality. And the overwhelmingly obvious extent of the sheep-stealing deception is milked for comic pleasure as the truth is revealed. The shepherds seek their lost sheep in terms of desperation and necessity. Mak and Gyll enact their cover up in identical terms, but within a new register of the histrionic and ridiculous. Mak moves himself through a virtuoso range of performance: from hushed hospitality toward the shepherds to wearied acceptance of a new mouth to feed, shocked dismay at the shepherds’ loss, indignant assertion

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of his own noninvolvement, and beseeching understanding for his wife’s pain. He even challenges the shepherds, “Now if ye have suspowse / To Gill or to me, / Come and rype oure howse, / And then may ye se” (742–5), at the same time that Gyll pointedly intensifies her show of distress: “A, my medyll! / I pray to God so mylde, / If ever I you begyld, / That I ete this chylde / That lygys in this credyll” (772–6). Her words bring together a powerfully conjunctive trinity of parodic representation: the Eucharist, the Incarnation, and the Nativity—all three fuse together at the theatrical conjunction of false birth, fake child, and real hunger. Mak’s response, “Peasse, woman, for Godys payn, / And cry not so!” (777–8) represents at once a desperate theatrical injunction: DON’T MENTION THE CRADLE! as well as acknowledgement of a paradoxical pain in which he will be more and more implicated. Mak’s heightened discomfort animates comic farce at the same time as it paradoxically reveals salvational wonder. Theatrically, the scene bristles with lively comic action as well as the rollicking parody of sacred rite and story. Carnival, reigning wildly, creates delectable parodic effects. And yet, Maris G. Fiondella complains, “Disconcertingly, the farce’s contours have come to resemble a Nativity-scene” (448). Granted, the irony is disconcerting; it signals joyful carnival abandon in its collision of the sacred and the shameless. Mak asserts comic possibilities and presents radical reformulations ever more farfetched that go beyond Fiondella’s deconstructive reading of the play as enslaved to a logocentric system denying its own semiosis. Instead, a historicized sacred system gets liberated through surprisingly bold and energetic topical play. Why deconstruct along the lines of unstable and shifting semiotic codes when the play actively constructs itself through theatrical parody? Herein seriousness is inadequate at best; at worst it is paradoxically misguided. And yet Fiondella opts for literalist moral critique in the case of the shepherds’ investigation when she argues confidently: The play’s comedy flows, of course, from the shepherds’ mistake when they take Mak’s and Gyll’s childbirth performance for an episode in reality; its difficulty flows from the odd likeness of the scene to the Nativity segment (442).

But both comedy and difficulty flow from the outset in this radically comic play. Midwinter discomfort impinging on shepherds who unsuccessfully watch over their flock by night suggests Nativity possibilities from the beginning. Mak, who enters as a ludicrous figure of Incarnation, theatrically renders ridiculous the serious things of this world. A wise fool in the Bakhtinian sense, Mak, like Christ’s followers, is in but “not of this world” (John 17:14, 16). Bakhtin even quotes this Christian injunction in The Dialogic Imagination and, thus, subtly links Jesus with the revolutionary power of comedy and the rights conferred upon the clown through masks. These masks, and the rights they grant, effectively characterize Mak in terms of comic performance: They grant the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right not to be taken literally, not “to be oneself”; the right to live a life in the chronotope of the entr’acte, the chronotope of theatrical space, the right to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors, the right to rip off masks, the

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right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage—and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets. (163)

Mak’s character localizes and asserts all these comic initiatives. He enacts a graceful “chronotope of theatrical space” and ensures change through his own deeply performative and radical comic energies. In her article “‘Sacral Parody’ in the Secunda Pastorum,” Linda E. Marshall, however, deemphasizes theater in favor of abstract religious “conceptions” (720). She detects a lowering of tone in the mock nativity to reinforce the splendor of the real Nativity. But the lowering of tone in the play works paradoxically and powerfully to elevate comic perceptions, as Mak responds to the shepherd’s innocent question, “Is youre chyld a knave?” (800) with a mixture of class-interested assertion, bogus fatherly pride, and Godly understanding of sacrifice: “Any lord myght hym have, / This chyld, to his son” (801–802). Besides—as argued by Peggy Thompson—class incongruity is suggested from the very first, as Christ is of the Royal House of David attended by Magi, but “also born in a stable to dispossessed peasants and attended by poor shepherds” (64). Further, the alleged godparents of the alleged child in Mak and Gyll’s cradle are average but important peasant folk with names: “Parkyn and Gybon Waller” (812) and “gentill Iohn Horne” (813).5 Like everyone else on this crucial day of birth, the anonymous peasantry of north England gains a modicum of significance. By this point, even the shepherds are making fun of Mak. They have yet to find their sheep, but they have found another sufferer in straits as dire as their own. The audience relishes the irony of Mak’s pathetic deception even as his lies become more and more outrageous. The Devil, of course, is forever an ass. As Jeffrey Helterman observes, however, “Mak is not a sinister figure disguised as a clown, but rather a hopeless clown trying to borrow some dignity anywhere, even from Satan” (109). Helterman continually compares Mak to Satan, but I would hesitate to ascribe such diabolical power to one whose tricks constantly fail. Besides, Mak’s thoroughgoing failures are also comic successes. The most significant comic moment of the play might well involve the tacit generosity of line 825, as Coll asks, “Gaf ye the chyld any thyng?” Edgar Schell considers the line to be the turning point of the play as it parallels God’s gift with the gift of the shepherds and leads on to the joyful comic discovery. Fiondella, by contrast, locates the climax of the play in Daw’s observation: “Wyll ye se how thay swedyll / His foure feytt in the medyll?” (864–65); she paraphrases the lines: “‘Look! This is how we were tricked!’” and points “to a deceptive use of the vestimentary code” (444). Rather, Daw’s lines extend and exemplify the absurdity of Mak’s deception as it grows ever more desperate. Noting the “long snowte” (845) and “eere-marke” (881) of “Makys ayre” (873), the shepherds delight in their comic wit at Mak’s expense. They enjoy making him squirm. Fiondella’s semiotic reading only robs the

5 Stevens and Cawley presume that a contemporary audience would recognize Gyb[on Waller] and Iohn Horn as shepherds from the First Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley Cycle. This is possible, but the three full names here seem more generally denotative.

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comedy of its effect at this point, an effect crucial to the meaning of the play in terms of farcical interaction, carnivalesque theatrics, and spiritual hope. The shepherds combine farcical exposure with Christian generosity. They discover their authentic consciousness in terms of the Christmas story, a consciousness only hinted at before in anachronistic New Testament references. To this point, they have expressed exclusively fatalistic attitudes and engaged in horizontal resentment towards each other and towards Mak. They now express actions as refreshingly lifeaffirming as they are comically lenient. Daw declares the nature of their redress against Mak: “We will nawther ban ne flyte, / Fyght nor chyte, / Bot have done as tyte, / And cast hym in canvas” (903–906). All three roll up their sleeves purposely and pleasurably to get physical with Mak. Helterman claims, “Only by casting out the Mak in themselves can the shepherds expel the spiritual winter” (104). But in casting Mak aloft, they do not cast him out. Instead, they set him free. Their action is indexed to Christian mercy as rough but merciful justice, what Thomas J. Jambeck historicized in “The Canvas-tossing Allusion” as a contemporary punishment meant to ridicule a rascal rather than administer corporeal pain. In theatrical terms, the action of tossing Mak is visibly kinetic and excitingly acrobatic. It emphasizes him, furthermore, as always at the center of activity while it asserts physical risk and burly joy as well as defiance of gravity. Other suggestive metaphors register themselves within this curious action, including associations of winnowing the corn from the chaff and forced inducing of childbirth.6 In consideration of the canvas-tossing action and its place in the Second Shepherds’ Play, Jambeck is tellingly suggestive: Poised between the farce of the false nativity and the sublimity of Christ’s birth, the shepherds’ action transforms the apparently secular episode into a convenient gloss upon the role of the Incarnation in the economy of salvation (53).

Mak’s role, however, is over. That is, it is over in the character of Mak. I agree with Schell’s general conception of the play as a “continuous action” (4), with the sudden arrival of the Angel as a dramatic device rather than logical or historical consequence. Theatrical parody lifts off into the epiphanic realm as the Angel sings “Gloria in excelsis” (919 sd). What becomes of Mak in practical terms is considered by Miceal Vaughan in terms of blocking possibilities. It seems a bit theatrically excessive, however, to suggest, as Vaughan does, that Mak—to balance his former action during the shepherds’ slumber and to signal his unregenerate spirituality— should “remain asleep” (149) through the Nativity tableau at a location distinct from his own cottage and the shepherds’ pasture. Instead, as always, Mak is centrally, comically, and profoundly involved. His cottage doubles as the Nativity stable in line with Jeffrey Helterman’s theatrically shrewd observation that “it is almost impossible to see the Mak episode as parody or burlesque of the Nativity until one gets to the end of the play” (111). Helterman details the parallel staging of Mak’s cottage and the Nativity scene, but excludes Mak. Leah Sinanoglou does likewise:

6 On cultural associations of winnowing, see Jambeck. On inducing childbirth, see Chidamian.

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The parallels between the two nativities were doubtless emphasized through staging—by using the same setting for both scenes, by placing Mary in roughly the same position as Gyll, and by employing the cradle so recently vacated by the sheep as the crib of the Christ Child (507).

Only one place is left for Mak: an appropriate epiphanic place for one who complains so often about fatherhood and who pretends to be the father of the lamb. Mak doubles—shockingly but appropriately—as Joseph. Maynard Mack, Jr., however, argues that Mak doubles as the heralding Angel when he claims that “An angel who had earlier played Mak would embody our cumulative impressions of Mak as a precursor of events, energies, and challenges to accepted orders of authority” (82–3). Angels are traditionally seen as messengers. But Mak operates as something more, as something paradoxically, profoundly ridiculous. Instead of “cumulative impressions,” Mak embodies powerful theatrical energies and theological ironies. These ironies are as spectacularly performative as they are spectacularly disjunctive. And they are deeply comical. As someone who is gracefully located at the center of action yet unaware of the profound significance of that action, Mak’s character performs as ironic facilitator for the impossible. A MakJoseph doubling presents the final comic inversion of the play, an inversion that is specifically subversive in theatrical terms. Such action does not convey doubling in a comfortable literary sense, but is more radically disjunctive in terms of theatrical effects of irony, parody, reversal, and comic verve. From the very first, Mak, looking for a role, declares in blissful human ignorance, “Thi will, Lorde, of me tharnys” (277). His role now as everyfather is clear, and it clarifies his initial distress in the play: “Now wold God I were in heven, / For the[r] wepe no barnes” (280–1). Like the shepherds with their anachronistic apostrophes, Mak discovers that he has been there all along. He is no longer Mak but Joseph; she is no longer Gyll but Mary. Such realization suggests a divine level to comedy that profoundly balances the parodic farce of this play. In arguing such comic typology, Woolf notes that “Mak in his cottage is obviously a debased version of St. Joseph, and like St. Joseph he sees himself in the role of the unhappily married man” (191). V.A Kolve is explicit on the ironic “dual role” (247) of Joseph as natural man and godly servant throughout the cycle plays and within popular medieval iconography. Theatrical doubling powerfully conveys the effect of such irony as Mak the mouthy prevaricator becomes the silently awed Joseph, and Mak the complaining father becomes Joseph the servant father of the Divine. In his mostly quantitative study of “doubling” (359) in the early theater, John W. Sider notes the ironic push-and-pull of numerous moral doublings such as Mercy-Titivillus in Mankind and InnocencyShame, Wrath-Patience, or Pride-Meekness in Nature. Theatrically, Mak-Joseph too conveys powerful visual and verbal irony while pointing to the performed virtuosity of this powerfully ironic play. Mak’s “discovery” conveys a thematic collision of discontented fatherhood with the incarnation of the Son of God. Mak’s double self asserts its ironies with cosmic comic resonances and, thus, provides for the new-andbetter, future-oriented social “structure” (73) that Northrop Frye argued was basic to comedy.

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In this play, comic revelation suggests itself as gospel news in the concluding imperatives of the shepherds as magi. They too have been changed, even transformed, from the local distress of searching “Horbery shrogys” (657) to the universal peace of the birth of Christ. But they tone down their prophetic observations in order to accentuate the comedy of the play and make the transition from rollicking farce to spiritual realization. Moreover, they do so in the homely terms of simple but symbolic gifts of a bird, a tennis ball, and a “bob of cherys” (1036). Sustenance, aristocratic sport, and midwinter fertility suggest themselves. As argued by Lawrence J. Ross, this suggestive trinity also bears symbolic associations concerning Christ’s divinity in the bird (especially as a dove), the “symbolic orb” (127) of his kingship, and the cherry of his sacrificial manhood. Further incongruity is suggested in Thompson’s astute observation: “Christ is the beloved child of an eternal God and a short-lived, ineffectual rabble-rouser, whose incongruous identity is repeated in the mixed nature of every human being” (64–5). Generosity meets sacrifice in the spiritual forever of the Christmas story. To see the Second Shepherds’ Play as a continuous, epiphanic action is to see it in terms at once theatrical and divine. Herein, anything is truly possible. God makes ridiculous the things of this world, and parody interanimates the divine blunders of Mak in human terms as well as the sacred mysteries of God in human realization. Mak’s ludicrous/sacrosanct act of thievery and concealment becomes a paradoxical act of generosity and revelation through dialogical parody. Enter the comic hero with whom anyone can identify. Through Mak, carnivalized theater is asserted; authoritarian shame is abolished. He doubles as human facilitator, but his energies suggest the graceful intervention, carnivalized subversion, and radical reform that is conveyed through the gospels of the New Testament. Anyone who can accept the story of the virgin birth, the remarkable star, and the wise men can accept Mak’s ironic performance. The shepherds find grace just as surely as Mak does. And while I hesitate to press anachronism, I must draw attention to their wonderfully revealing line near the conclusion: “What grace we have fun!” (1085). Certainly they have had “fun,” and certainly they have been “won” (1086) as the significant rhyme suggests. They have found (fun) grace and had “fun” doing it. Of course the pun is impossible in historical and etymological terms. But it is irresistible in terms of comic grace and carnivalized performance. And Mak performs as ironic inspirational hero in both areas. That is why Mak is such a deeply sympathetic character in this play. He paradoxically and shamelessly wakes his audience up to life possibilities of faith, hope, and accomplishment. Like Mak, one needs to be innovative as an agent of change, as a radical reformer of existing categories, and as a consciously performing actor in one’s own life drama. In his desperate ludicrousness, in his comic energy, and ultimately in his place in the divine calculus of Nativity, Mak discovers that he belongs. Moreover, for the faithful, Mak unknowingly enacts a central Christian truth: There is no limit to the extent that God will go—lovingly, ludicrously—to extend Salvation.

Chapter 3

Wrestling with Comic Villainy: Barabas and other “Heels” in The Jew of Malta Through performance, Mak found his role as comic hero and discovered a quirky form of grace that complicated his relationship to vice and worldliness. Equally quirky, through utter worldliness and devious malevolence, Marlowe’s Barabas defies any form of grace other than performance itself, making of his villainy a constant paradox that complicates the ostensibly tragic nature of his play. In fact, Barabas’s character so dominates the play and directs the other characters that he overwhelms the plot and tilts the drama wildly in the direction of improvised comedy. Of course most of the other characters are individualized villains too, and their malevolent imperatives—lacking any psychological dimension that might elicit sympathy, or even Jonson’s rigorous humoral schemes—ensure both satirical variety and surprise through constantly overstated performance. This chapter will argue that Marlowe’s characters in The Jew of Malta are wonderfully, wackily, obnoxiously theatrical. “Over the top,” “in your face,” crudely stereotypical, poetically unsubtle, excessive, absurd, even somewhat mad, The Jew of Malta presents character ridicule that easily surpasses problems of genre. As J.B. Steane once put it: Few plays have been given more names: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, tragicalcomical, farcical-satirical, ‘terribly serious’ or ‘tediously trivial’; ‘terrifying’, it seems, cannot be too heavy a term, nor ‘absurd’ too light (166).

Comedy thrives on excess, and it is within its radical excessiveness that The Jew of Malta registers itself as an especially slippery type of comedy. But problems of embarrassed generic category, as voiced above by Steane, are strictly academic. The theater has never had any problem with the play. However, an overwhelmingly obvious ambiguity about the play usually sends academics bookward in search of hidden grace notes, structural (dis)unity, historical and political special pleading. Recently, Shawn Smith, while well aware of the play’s comic ironies, rationalizes them through literalist cultural theory to declare the play “an economic tragedy, grounded in the social marginalization experienced by Barabas” (450). My reading is more literally (and figuratively) involved with the physically theatrical. Some forty years ago Nicholas Brooke shrewdly observed a basic, ludicrous theatricality within the play as follows: It is a curiously ambiguous sort of drama, in which some scenes are simply funny, some simply painful, but many more exist in a sort of limbo where you may laugh, or may not, but you will be pained, as well, either way. It is, in fact, in these respects very like the ambiguous plays of Ionesco or Pinter. … Such plays do not lose their force when you

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RADICAL COMEDY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND laugh—indeed the more you laugh, the more the play bites. To grasp the form of plays like The Jew of Malta we have to forget the idea of “unintended laughter”. (95)

Herein, laughter does not occur as “audience error” within a tragedy, nor does it signal agreeable moral pleasure within a comedy. Rather, laughter here is linked to surprise, deviousness, excessiveness, swift disjunctions, and bewildered reactions. Performance itself provides basic irony, making The Jew of Malta a rigorously contrived spectacle of disproportion. Throughout, radical comical overstatement renders extra-theatrical judgments of the play invalid and makes moral schemas absurd. In an essay titled “Innocent Barabas,” Alfred Harbage suggests that interpretation of The Jew of Malta be worked out less in terms of moral philosophy and more along the lines of crudely spectacular native blood sports such as bear- and bullbaiting. Professional wrestling, however, provides a better metaphor through which to grapple with the extreme theatrics and risible contrivances of the play. Like that intensely emotional and most showy popular agon known today as “professional” wrestling, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta intensifies audience distress through absurdly manipulated outrages, as in the overwhelming obviousness of pernicious cultural types—types immediately recognizable to an Elizabethan audience: Barabas, the grasping and treacherous Jew; Ferneze, Catholic knight and governor; Calymath and Ithamore, dreaded Turks; Pilia-Borza, pimp extortionist; and perhaps most obnoxious of all in the wake of the Great Armada, Martin del Bosco, Vice-Admiral of Spain. “Vice”-Admiral indeed; vice is both the animating feature of this calculatedly ridiculous play and of the characters who struggle to create meaning within it. Herein the farcical tussles of the medieval Vice continue to rage. Overwhelmingly theatrical and theatrically overwhelming, conflict in The Jew of Malta is calculated to intensify the collective bile and suffering of the audience and divest it of its pain. “Collective,” as opposed to “subjective” is the key word for this comically cathartic process. And comparison with the theatrically manipulative nature of professional wrestling is not totally gratuitous. The Geneva Bible (Berry ed.) rendered Paul’s advice to the Ephesians (6:12) in terms of worldly authority and collective struggle: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, and against the worldlie governours, the princes of the darknes of this worlde, against spiritual wickednesses, which are in the hie places”.1 “Wrestling,” for St. Paul, represents conflict as a basic tenet of existence wherein the basics of a people is described in terms of conflict. Life struggles of good and evil, of conscience and commitment, are played out and everyone participates especially in response to authority. A play-reader of The Jew of Malta, alone with the text, struggles with the excessiveness of the play just as, alone at home, the viewer of televised wrestling scoffs at the utter inanity of the event. But when affected by the social reactions of the crowd, the viewer experiences the power of emotional moral struggle, its confusions, denunciations, and ridicule enacted publicly and

1 Quoted from the Geneva Bible. Here and henceforward, whenever I quote from oldspelling texts, I silently expand archaic contractions and regularize all i/j and u/v reversals as well as the use of long s.

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without shame. As in wrestling, Marlowe’s play involves a semiology of conflict that, above all, stresses performance. In Renaissance Europe, wrestling involved complicated associations of sportive exercise and tactics along with potentially disruptive social forces. Both Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) and Elyot’s The Boke Named The Gouernour (1531) endorse wrestling as an exercise in strength as well as military preparation for handto-hand combat. But Elyot also notes a disturbingly democratic feature of wrestling in terms of tactical possibility: “it hath ben sene that the waiker persone, by the sleight of wrastlyng, hath overthrowen the strenger” (1.173–4). Albrecht Dürer illustrated such “sleights” in a series of one hundred and twenty numbered drawings commissioned by Emperor Maximillian I, each depicting a hold, throw, or reversal in wrestling. Undressed, two fighting men demonstrate each move (Koschatzky and Strobl 214–5). Official attention seemed drawn toward this basic pastime as a channel for physical aggression as well as a performative display of tactics and strength stripped down to essentials. Dismounted and unarmed, the aristocrat wrestles handto-hand on a level playing field where niceties of class do not obtain, and where the nominally weaker person can overthrow the presumably stronger one. The implicit metaphorical resonances would be disconcerting to the nobility for whom athletic competition usually intersects with public display. And yet, in performance terms, any form of public display is disconcertingly unstable. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton, class-cautionary, refers to wrestling, along with hurling, leaping, and running as “the common recreations of the country folk” (443). John Stow, too, is less than enthusiastic about wrestling and its social effects. After linking the sport directly to riots in London and Middlesex in his Survey of London (1603), he states: “of old time the exercising of wrestling, and such like, hath been much more used than of later years,” adding “now of late years the wrestling is only practiced on Bartholomew’s day in the afternoon” (87, 97). Stow seems to describe public displays of bravado that have gotten out of hand, a crossing of boundaries from athletic contest to violent free-for-all. But he also notes the containment of potentially destructive energies within an approved festival time. As in Bakhtin’s famous formulation of carnivalized grotesque, wrestling involves creative rule-breaking and the assertion of oppositional energies. Above all, wrestling involves contending forces in the process of demarcating preeminence. Elizabethan antiquary Richard Carew grasped the deeply performative nature of wrestling as reported in his Survey of Cornwall (1602). To Carew, wrestling represents both contained physical conflict and performative struggle, a struggle that he describes through metaphors of theater: For performing this play, the beholders cast themselves in a ring, which they call, Making a place: into the empty middle space whereof the two champion wrastlers step forth stripped into their dublets and hosen and untrussed, that they may so the better commaund the use of their lymmes, and first shaking hands in token of friendship, they fall presently to the effects of anger: for each striveth how to take hold of other, with his best advantage, and to bear his adverse party downe. (75v–76r)

Herein, as grasped by Carew, wrestling displays the basics of interpersonal conflict. Moreover, the adversarial contest plays itself out physically within a demarcated

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“space” for an interested audience. In Carew’s description, the “champion wrastlers” compete, but they also clearly perform. Always on the fringe of respectable society, Elizabethan wrestling involves physical competition with overtones of theatrical display. In present-day wrestling, the terms are reversed. But they still interpenetrate one another. Roland Barthes, more that three centuries after Carew, likewise perceives the performative nature of wrestling in terms of theater and conflict. In his explanation of wrestling as a system of cultural display, Barthes insists on wrestling’s meaningful gestures of Good, Evil, Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Through their physical clarity, such theatrical gestures convey conflict as “the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity.” Barthes expands suggestively on this fundamental aspect of wrestling’s pathos: The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one’s suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears. (16)2

Thus the mimetic nature of wrestling—so often scoffed and derided—represents its most profound ritualistic feature. The wrestlers themselves are obvious and exaggerated caricatures who perform mimetic acts of suffering and violence within an unjust world that is subject to impotent authority. Official moral referees are powerless at best; at worst, they aid and abet the powers of evil. The audience responds through the agony it both experiences and exorcises, through collective outrage, hostility, hilarity, and pain. Such primitive transmutation of feeling is best effected in The Jew of Malta, as in professional wrestling, through disproportionate and excessive effects, effects comprising loosely-connected moments of local intelligibility and surprising moral reversal. An image of passionate outrage—a hateful father, a corrupt governor, a detested cultural stereotype—is demonstrated to the audience by an exaggeratedly vile action with little concern for overall narrative structure or continuity. The audience is consequently enlisted into creating the moment-by-moment meaning of the play. Herein meaning asserts itself in terms of vicarious experiences of deceit, violation, pain, frustration, and hostility—a weltering code of elementary moral positions. Binary signifiers of Good-or-Evil, Right-or-Wrong, are made immediately intelligible only to be made theatrically complicated and unstable. The world of professional wrestling asserts itself vicariously too as a moral battleground of treachery and display where—in the physical language of wrestling itself—trusting “baby faces” contend with duplicitous “heels.”3 Likewise in The Jew of Malta, overstated moral categories render morality irrelevant. What remains crucially relevant in both worlds is struggle. The gestures, outrage, suffering, reversals, and treacherousness of The Jew of Malta—all are on a large scale, overstated, obvious, spectacular, and comical. 2 On the curious nexus of professional wrestling, popular culture and performance, see also Webley, May, and Morton and O’Brien. 3 On the origins of these and other wrestling usages see Beekman, 64–6; see also Freedman.

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Barabas’s speeches of conflict and suffering (at least when overheard) adopt the rhythms and even the very words of Job in the Old Testament. Having proved disloyal to her father, Abigail must be murdered along with the whole nunnery that harbors her. (As Stephen Greenblatt observed: “The audience of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s brilliant 1964 production roared with delight when the poisoned nuns came tumbling out of the house” [“Marlowe, Marx” 44].) Ferneze must demean Barabas before the entire Jewish community in Malta, cheating him out of not only half but of all his assets. The greedy friars who fight over Barabas’s bequest do not stop at murder. Barabas himself comes back from the dead to lead the Turks against Malta and then to double cross them. Even the very Prologue of the play is spoken by an obvious villain: “Machevil,” a focus for Elizabethan opprobrium and the renaissance counterpart (in England at least) of the medieval Vice.4 But in Marlowe’s play, the traditionally sportive local Vice has become international. Like a villain wrestler, a salaud or bastard in Barthes’s terminology, Machevil’s obvious baseness is an overwhelming feature of his character. His facetious opening comments both inform and incite, reporting the demise of hated contemporary, Henri of Lorraine the French Duke of Guise, anti-Protestant zealot and international terrorist, assassinated on December 23 1588: “Albeit the world think Machevil is dead, / Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps; / And now the Guise is dead is come from France, / To view this land and frolic with his friends” (Prol. 1–4). 5 Such reassurance is as mocking as it is duplicitous. A spirit of amoral realism located in Machevil (the standard quarto spelling catches the homonymic irony) represents “much evil” to the popular audience. He is snide, contemptuous, and totally devoid of subjective distress—a recipe for stage villainy. Moreover, the audience is patronized as “friends.” Barabas too is characterized as a villain, but with the added feature of obtaining what every effective villain wrestler seeks to obtain: a league of superior contempt with the audience. Thus the audience mingles and exercises scorn, outrage, contempt, and a frisson of nervous allegiance with the play’s deracinated villain. In drama as in professional wrestling, the villain in the midst typically comes from somewhere else, somewhere terrible, accentuating the irresolvable, irresponsible, and continually threatening Otherness of his character. Like Machevil, Barabas is a suspicious world traveler steeped in contempt. He says that he learned to handle anti-Semitism in Florence (significantly Machiavelli’s hometown), claims to have had a lover elsewhere, and knows by sight the trade routes of which he speaks with such urgency in scene one. No doubt his cultural status as “wandering Jew” represents him as an amorphous evil that is present in the title of the play and which appeals directly to English xenophobia. Malta itself, as a pluralistic international center, is a figure of political instability and cultural incoherence, unlike England which is still far removed from the encroaching Turk and which had long since officially expelled its Jewish population. But Malta has masters (as did England in the days of the Danes and Romans and more recently with Rome in the persons of Mary I and her husband Philip of Spain). And the current masters of Malta are warlike Catholic knights, ever-threatened by Turkish takeover, 4 5

On the relationship of Machiavelli to the play, see Bawcutt. I quote Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta from the Revels Plays edition.

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Spanish influence, or economic decline. In an article titled “Malta of Gold,” Lisa Hopkins historicizes the clash of values and representative ironies enacted within the play. While, to his own question, “Who ruled in Malta?” historian Dennis Austin states, “The answer is simple: everyone except on rare occasions of crisis and interregnum the Maltese themselves” (4–5). Marlowe’s play puts the following question: Who rules in the struggles of theatrical outrage? The answer is even simpler: The Villains. It is clear that a crude villain must be matched with a sympathetic character. A villain wrestler, likewise, in garish costume and grotesquely contemptuous attitude must be matched with a good clean sportsman of athletic build and regulation tights. Such contrast serves the purposes of romantic comedy, as in As You Like It where Shakespeare uses such figures in Charles, the Duke’s wrestler and enforcer, against Orlando, the play’s youthful lover-hero. Accentuating moral and physical inequality, Charles’s barely contained threats of personal violence—of wrestling for “credit” and “for prize” (As You Like It, I, i, 120, 150)—point to the slippery and tactical nature of wrestling in performance.6 Wrestling involves, as always, opposed physical forces, but it also stresses contest between opposed personal and moral forces, calculated along vigorously masculine lines. As Touchstone, objecting to Le Beau’s wrestling commentary, states: “It is the first time that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies” (As You Like It, I, ii, 123–5). But the young ladies themselves eagerly take up the metaphor as Celia urges Rosalind, “Come, come, wrestle with thy affections” (As You Like It, I, iii, 20). And Le Beau announces the specific venue for wrestling in immediate theatrical terms: “here, where you are, they are coming to perform it” (As You Like It, I, ii,104). The burly sport of wrestling acts as metaphor for the actions and reactions of romantic involvement and moral conflict. For Shakespeare, wrestling effectively dramatizes a romantic episode in As You Like It; for Marlowe, unlikely conjunctions, and ironic reversals suffuse The Jew of Malta. Although he does not dramatize actual wrestling, Marlowe presents aggressive conflicts, dastardly interactions, and surprise reversals in The Jew of Malta, performative activities familiar in present-day professional wrestling where two despicable villains wrestle each other as they compete for advantage by any and all hateful means, and incite the audience to nonparticular howls of disgust, execration, and hilarity. Professional wrestlers themselves refer to their incitement of audience response as “drawing heat,” as emotional and sometimes physical reaction. And audience reaction is paramount. What must never occur—in the wrestling ring or on Marlowe’s stage—is the match up of two virtuous opponents. Fair play is not credible. It does not “draw heat.” This, Marlowe understands directly as he fuses all contenders within his play into nondiscriminate villainy and purposely orients them toward their audience.

6 The editorial note at I, ii, 150 of the Oxford edition of As You Like It does not cite Stow, but it certainly takes his impression of wrestling to heart: “By 1600 the once-popular sport of wrestling had declined in England and was seen mainly at country fairs and celebrations and in London on St. Bartholomew’s day” (104). On wrestling in As You Like It, see the essay by Cynthia Marshall.

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The title character, however, still impels the action with all the recklessness and manipulation of a standup comic. Barabas projects angry truths about his character as, alone onstage, he opens the second act in a soliloquy of aggrieved contempt: Thus, like the sad presaging raven that tolls / The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak, / And in the shadow of the silent night / Doth shake contagion from her sable wings, / Vexed and tormented runs poor Barabas / With fatal curses towards these Christians (Act II, scene 1, 106).

Overwhelmingly distressed and oriented directly toward the audience, he is never more truthful or even more touching. However, in an article titled “Lies and Lying in The Jew of Malta,” Coburn Freer claims that “Barabas has been granted a contemptible appearance that makes his heroic self-assertion a visual and conceptual lie” (150). And yet, just as betting on the outcome of a wrestling match would be inappropriate, such an observation misses the point of what is being represented. Barabas’s clearly costumed “otherness”—his out-of-fashion black gaberdine, his hat from the Great Cham, even his nose worshipped by a detestable henchman—intensifies his grotesque self-assertion of pathos and makes him immediately recognizable as a villain of heroic proportions. He is a product of the culture in which he occurs, a theatrical culture that both creates and excoriates villains. However, Shawn Smith, while observing that the audience alone is capable of detecting Barabas’s massive falsehoods, uncouples audience from audience awareness through untheatrical elision: “Barabas recognizes but does not acknowledge the presence of the audience” (441). Rather, Barabas and the audience never stop communicating, mutually willing each other into theatrical existence. Greenblatt memorably illustrated the effect as follows: Years ago, in Naples, I watched a deft pickpocket lifting a camera from a tourist’s shoulder-bag and replacing it instantaneously with a rock of equal weight. The thief spotted me watching but did not run away—instead he winked, and I was frozen in mute complicity. The audience’s conventional silence becomes in The Jew of Malta the silence of the passive accomplice, winked at by his fellow criminal. (Self-Fashioning 216)

My theatrical reading, however, accommodates audience loudness as well, an amoral loudness that does not cry, “stop!” but rather “more!” As Greenblatt shrewdly observes of Marlowe’s technique in directing audience sympathy towards Barabas: “to lie and to know that one is lying seems more attractive, more aesthetically pleasing, and more moral even, than to lie and believe that one is telling the truth” (SelfFashioning 215). As with the self distortions of Mak, or later in The Alchemist with Subtle and Face, Barabas radically, obnoxiously, truthfully, and self-consciously, performs himself. Every comic knows: It’s not a lie if you believe it. And to Marlowe, obnoxiousness is never a lie. After all, who can blame Barabas, maddeningly “vexed and tormented,” for his contempt? Within the play, contempt fuses with shamelessly aggressive displays of moral and immoral character. Brutally obvious characterization is signaled through the theme of slavery in the marketplace where “Every one’s price is written on his back” (Act II, scene 3, 3). This might be said of the play in general, where Barabas’s

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price is the weight of involvement he carries as “the Jew of Malta”; Malta itself has a price of ten-year’s tribute; Lodowick and Mathias both carry the price of Abigail on their backs; Abigail is metaphorically listed as a “diamond” by her father with a price to be negotiated by young Lodowick; the price on Ferneze’s back is a distinct yellow streak. But all are enslaved by their overwhelming characterizations, characterizations that animate the action and deemphasize conventional laws of cause and effect when circumstances become twisted. And manipulation of twisted circumstances is the forte of The Jew of Malta. Swiftly energetic, threatening, devious, and illicit, Barabas and Ithamore together negotiate the deals, falls, interactions, and reversals that animate the rest of the play in all its absurd vitality. Related to the slave-market “oneupmanship” of the play is what Stallybrass and White identify as displaced abjection: “the process whereby ‘low’ social groups turn their figurative and actual power, not against those in authority, but against those who are even ‘lower’” (53). Jew, Turk, Spaniard, pimp, prostitute, slave, and various disguised configurations thereof—all are activated within The Jew of Malta, as in professional wrestling, by theatrical interorientation across the board for an audience who both applauds and excoriates the procedures. Herein villainy, distress, mimetic violence, outrageous rants, and tragic outcomes are reinflected through theatrical indulgence into cathartic laughter and scorn. As Barthes observes, “A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him” (24). The same can be said of Barabas and Ithamore: they perform. Their first “deal” involves an exchange of atrocity gossip that builds a sense of perverse trust between them as each tries to outdo the other in terms of bad-boy anecdote. Barabas’s rehearsal of poisoning wells, entrapping petty thieves, dispatching medical patients, and generally cheating on all sides in love, war, and finance is a standard list of antiSemitic horrors. Ithamore counters with the stereotypically Turkish bloodthirstiness of burning Christian villages and enslaving the inhabitants, crippling Christian pilgrims, and murdering travelers. Their introductions in the ring as villain wrestlers could be no more thorough. They are a team looking for a conflict. In response to Barabas’s acquiescent cynicism, Ithamore blurts, “O brave, master, I worship your nose for this!” (Act II, scene 3, 175), and such vacuous glee is just the type of unrestrained and over-the-top comment that the play has been aching for in the face of the hypocrisy displayed thus far by the executive powers of Malta: the knights, the church, and the citizenry. I agree with Steane (187) that Ithamore’s exclamation preserves rather than violates the unity of the play, but it goes even further to set the tone of the play in all its obvious absurdity. The audience expects, indeed demands, no less. T.S. Eliot was the first to isolate the nature of the exuberant farce that animates so much of this play, as he termed it in his essay on “Christopher Marlowe”: “the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour” of late medieval moral drama (123). Much of this farcical action is in fact contrived confusion, confusion, furthermore, meant to emphasize and enhance the obvious villainy of the play. Consider Barabas’s enunciated allegiance with Ithamore: “Why, this is something! Make account of me / As of thy fellow; we are villains both: / Both circumsizèd, we hate Christians both” (Act II, scene 3, 215–7). The substantial “something”

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that inspires Barabas’s sense of fellow feeling is represented by their previously rehearsed series of bully-boy ripostes. Their solidarity, conveyed through gleeful and unrestrained nastiness, goes well beyond any “parody of normal human behaviour,” as suspected by N.W. Bawcutt in his introduction to the Revels Plays edition of The Jew of Malta (37), to suggest that their villainy is a basic feature of their character, a feature upon which they thrive and which marks them as clearly as the physical mark of circumcision. Audience response is derived exclusively through their villainy. And as villains, Barabas and Ithamore are creative, unpredictable, wicked, humorous, and mimetic—they draw audience heat. Like accomplished villain wrestlers, the two are predictable only in the treachery in which they constantly indulge to fan the flames of audience reaction for the purposes of emotive catharsis. To be morally offended is to miss the point. Hatred and violence are theatricalized through calculated transgressions of authority and performance. As in professional wrestling, existential actualities are deemphasized in favor of performance actualities. Obvious, devious, and self-assured, the villains reveal themselves against the fecklessness and confusions of a moral authority that insists upon consistency. To comic villains, however, consistency is a joke, as accented in The Jew of Malta by the contrived set-up of Mathias and Lodowick against each other over Abigail. “Baby faces” in wrestling parlance, the confused lovers Abigail, Mathias, and Lodowick represent moral, and vaguely normative characters and are thus most noted for their deromanticized expendability. Barthes reads such a moment in terms of an audience that is “suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling” (23). Marlowe’s villains move in the same direction to make good theater. Contrivance meets improvisation—what professional wrestlers call “working”—as the dastardly duo Barabas and Ithamore gleefully create distress, conflict, and animosity. Such interaction operates at a performance level beyond Jeremy Tambling’s materialist feminist reading of Abigail’s character. Tambling alleges that much post-Eliot criticism elides differences and dismisses competing power groups merely to “spot the Machiavel at every stage” (95). But performative villainy within the play—machiavellian, male, female, Turk, Jew, Christian, Maltese, and other—is as overwhelmingly obvious, outsized, unremitting, and unsubtle as it is nefariously creative. Moreover, in The Jew of Malta, the villainy constantly and comically draws attention to itself. Examining Barabas’s fake letter of challenge written to inflame Mathias and Lodowick, Ithamore inquires, “’Tis poisoned, is it not?” To which Barabas replies, “No, no; and yet it might be done that way” (Act II, scene 3, 374–5), reinforcing himself as a thoughtful connoisseur in homicide and as a witty respondent ever one step ahead of his fellow “heel.” Likewise, having murdered all the nuns, Barabas cynically luxuriates: “There is no music to a Christian’s knell: / How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead, / That sound at other times like tinker’s pans!”(Act IV, scene 1, 1–3). Even the pot of poisoned rice pudding for the nunnery is displayed onstage along with a large ladle to accent Ithamore’s rehearsal of the proverb: “He that eats with the devil had need of a long spoon” (Act III, scene 4, 58–9). Outrageously literalistic and morally blank, the villains thrive through oversized theatrical demonstration and emphasis.

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Barabas and Ithamore turn their villainous animosities loose on Bernadine and Jacomo, a pair of caricatured Catholic friars. These two “religious caterpillars” (Act IV, scene, 1, 21), as Ithamore calls them, provide perfect foils for advancing absurd conflict and allowing the villains to intensify mimetic “heat” with the audience. In the first scene of Act IV Bernadine and Jacomo carry on in ludicrous repartee based on mindless agreement, agreement constantly corrected by Barabas, their obvious intellectual superior. In fact, the friars vie for Barabas’s wealth as shamelessly—if less openly—as Ferneze had. Of course, their incompetence makes their greedy desires as apparent to Barabas as they are to the audience. By the time Bernadine is maneuvered into striking down Jacomo, already strangled “snickle hand too fast” (Act IV, scene 4, 20), as Ithamore later terms it, both the audience and Barabas are in a league of superior moral perceptions and clever doublespeak. And as if the comic prop of Jacomo’s dead body were not enough to emphasize the excessiveness of the scene, Barabas, with one eye to his audience, emphatically declares: “I’ll remain a Jew. / Heaven bless me; what, a friar a murderer! / When shall you see a Jew commit the like?” (Act IV, scene 1, 194–6), as he revels in the shared understanding that he and Ithamore have teamed up just moments earlier to murder Bernadine. Such outrageous reversals move fast and move on. As in professional wrestling, the creation of extreme local effects with the audience is as important as overall narrative consistency. In addition to their stylized stupidity, the friars, in their desire for Abigail, present themselves as sniggering oversexed hypocrites, and this barely-concealed ribald edge to the play is blazoned forth in the characters of Bellamira and Pilia-Borza. Pimp and prostitute, these two are obvious destabilizing entities on any stage. They open Act III in a whole new key of garishness involving costume, color, and gesture. But no audience would protest their abrupt interjection. Like Ithamore, the audience instantly knows and embraces Bellamira by the externals of her gorgeous attire (Act III, scene 1, 26–7). Pilia-Borza is also instantly recognizable, and Barabas expands on his appearance as pimp-ruffian: …a shaggy tottered staring slave, That when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard, And winds it twice or thrice about his ear; Whose face has been a grindstone for men’s swords, His hands are hacked, some fingers cut quite off; Who, when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks Like one that is employed in catzerie And crossbiting. (Act IV, scene 3, 6–13)

In historical terms, this describes the threatening features of a demobbed soldier or career criminal in Elizabethan England. It also effectively describes a stage villain, a real “heel” in the parlance of professional wrestling. Of course the audience has already seen and heard Pilia-Borza, but the overstated delineation of his character must be emphasized and repeated along with all the other villainous aspects of the play to intensify a rhetorical range of brutality, physicality, and theatrical excess.

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Like all great comic villains, Barabas demonstrates incredible resiliency. In the first scene of Act V, he gets carried onstage “as dead” (53), “thrown down” (59) outside the city walls, and then pops up living two lines later with the laughable observation, “What, all alone? Well fare, sleepy drink!” (61). In a sense, he goes literally “over the top.” In The Place of the Stage, Steven Mullaney sensitively interprets the metadramatic import of this moment: “Rising from his double death, standing in a place twice-removed from the city—once in representation, again in actuality—Barabas stands before us as the master of an incontinent vitality” (58). Like a villain wrestler, Barabas’s physical excessiveness is exceeded only by his theatrical unpredictability. Both features constantly reconfirm his status as villain. And such an iterated comic villain is never bound by the usual limitations. Unstoppable both inside and outside the city walls, Barabas immediately teams up with enemy Turks to lead them back inside the city through the sewers. It’s about as low as even he can go. But he still maintains a massive international reputation, as indicated by Turk Calymath in slack-jawed wonder: “Art thou that Jew whose goods we heard were sold / For tribute money?” (Act V, scene 1, 73–4). The coincidence of Calymath’s arrival at this point is no more surprising than Barabas’s ingratiating allegiance. Concerning his deadly intelligence report, he even assures Calymath, “And if it be not true, then let me die” (Act V, scene 1, 96), reinforcing the ludicrous theatricality of the fact that he has already died earlier in the scene. Such glaring theatricality animates the swift and murderous reversals of the conclusion. Herein Barabas, newly pronounced governor of Malta, ridiculously shares his advantage with Ferneze, his former opposition. But neither can be trusted, even as Ferneze queries in extravagant transparency: “Will Barabas recover Malta’s loss? / Will Barabas be good to Christians?” (Act V, scene 2, 74–5). Not a chance. Both Barabas and Ferneze have demonstrated themselves to be figures from beyond the pale of decency, figures who purposely destroy any conception of fair play, honest work, equal opportunity, or clean living. The audience reviles them both, especially as the two villains shake hands on a sporting political arrangement and Barabas privately enunciates the mutual treachery of the situation: “And he from whom my most advantage comes / Shall be my friend. / This is the life we Jews are used to lead, / And reason, too, for Christians do the like” (Act V, scene 2, 113–6). Take any advantage; no holds barred—the entire aesthetic of the play inheres in these lines. Contempt and coincidence knock together throughout, asserting constant comic disjunction through Barabas’s acid commentary with the audience as well as through his vigorous conflict with every other character in the play. Alarmed at his daughter’s re-conversion, Barabas’s comment is guaranteed to get a laugh: “What, Abigail become a nun again?” (Act III, scene 6, 49). Likewise the overstated shock of Friar Jacomo, at intimations of Barabas’s misbehavior: “What, has he crucified a child?” (Act III, scene 6, 49). Indeed the actions of the final scenes both rehearse and recapitulate the play’s ludicrous and coercive extremes. Waiting for his payoff before explaining his rescue plan to Ferneze, Barabas muses as follows: “Then now are all things as my wish would have ‘em; / There wanteth nothing but the governor’s pelf— / Enter FERNEZE. / And see, he brings it” (Act V, scene 5, 17–19). Just as laughably coincidental was Calymath’s musing on the effortless fall of Malta, followed by a messenger with news “From Barabas, Malta’s governor” (Act V, scene 3, 13).

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To speak of a character or situation that then materializes or is otherwise made instantly apparent is a standard comic procedure, a procedure verbally exemplified in the most notorious riposte of the play as Bernadine makes accusation, “Thou has committed—” and Barabas dispassionately concludes, “Fornication? / But that was in another country: / And besides, the wench is dead” (Act IV, scene 1, 39–42). The audience accepts and applauds such ludicrous theatricality because the audience has been complicit throughout. And at this late point in the play, the terms of complicity receive comic emphasis through repetition. Barabas, blithely using nourishment as deceptive pretext, returns to mass murder. Just as the nuns were all poisoned at dinner in their new convent, so the entire Turkish army will be blown up during a banquet at the local monastery. As relentlessly innovative as he is energetic and contemptuous, Barabas opens the final scene of the play as follows: “Enter BARABAS with a hammer above, very busy” (Act V, scene 5, 1, sd). He literally constructs and, in the final notorious reversal of falling through the trap himself into the cauldron below, deconstructs the scene before us through misguided assertion. Entrusting Ferneze with the knife to cut the cord represents the final monstrous error of the comic villain. Of this crazy scene, Edward L. Rocklin writes: “the spectators are witnessing and, indeed, participating in a final instance of the ‘brave sport’ that they have been taught to enjoy” (136). Barthes is also suggestive on the interactive nature between audience and defeated contender: “Deprived of all resilience, the wrestler’s flesh is no longer anything but an unspeakable heap spread out on the floor, where it solicits relentless reviling and jubilation” (21). Finally immobilized but far from silenced, Barabas elicits the same joy as he goads and fuses audience perceptions with his aria of curses from within the boiling cauldron at the end. Unremittingly, self-consciously theatrical, The Jew of Malta is primarily a play for acting. As Rocklin puts it: “ironic reversal is the fundamental principle of the play’s universe” (135). Nothing is safe or polite or predictable or even “fair.” Always a slippery mechanism, irony defuses moral responsibility even as it asserts performance credibility. The villains constantly succeed, gloat, and dominate while the audience constantly reacts with delectable scorn, as in the following exchange: Ithamore begs, “Good master, let me poison all the monks,” and Barabas replies, “Thou shalt not need, for now the nuns are dead, / They’ll die with grief” (Act IV, scene 1, 14–16). Later, Barabas disguises himself as a French musician in Bellamira’s boudoir complete with a “twang, twang” (Act IV, scene 4, 30), a French accent, and a poisoned nosegay, intent on discovering evidence of his own betrayal. But his discoveries involve ludicrously personal apologetics with the audience, as Ithamore simplemindedly alleges, “’Tis a strange thing of that Jew, he lives upon pickled grasshoppers and sauced mushrooms” and Barabas remonstrates with the aside: “What a slave’s this! The governor feeds not as I do.” Again Ithamore: “He never put on clean shirt since he was circumcised.” And Barabas explodes with an aside of pettiness and outrage: “O rascal! I change myself twice a day” (Act IV, scene 4, 62–6). Throughout the play, actions and reactions assert themselves as ironic, excessive, ridiculous and grotesquely apparent—absurdities that represent conflict and through which the audience can expel its collective hostility. Vicarious relief is offered through mimetic representation. The violence and hatred is strictly

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cartoon. Real violence and hatred would disrupt the theatrical image so obviously presented. In The Jew of Malta, as in professional wrestling, comic overstatement combines with unremitting conflict for the sake of performance. Performance emphasizes the theatrical excessiveness of the play, its amoral creation of meaning through struggle, conscious manipulation of stereotypes, and dual engagement and alienation of audience. Beneath caricatured surfaces run deep veins of irony and distress that reconfigure themselves powerfully in the direction of reversal and change. Thus, far from suggesting that the play be dismissed as farce, I instead suggest that the play’s farcical villainy be taken very seriously. To do so is to realize that the play wrestles with itself to create moment-by-moment intelligibility. It bypasses generic categories to highlight theatrical effects, effects that suggest the provisional, contingent, and performative nature of reality. Likewise its obviously manipulated and overstated theatrical stereotypes are to be recognized, impugned, celebrated, scorned, and rejected. Such seriousness, directly related to comic perception, is as beyond farce as it is beyond sentiment, suggesting instead the possibility of ironic empowerment and cathartic escape through action. Vividly iconoclastic, The Jew of Malta both exercises and exorcises conventional morality within a climate of treacherous representations at once deplored and applauded. Under the sign of radical otherness, the audience constantly discovers and reconfigures meaning. And it does so in relation to a comic villain, an obvious, overstated and distressful “other” who we also ironically embrace. Herein theater represents a privileged space demarcated as clearly as the squared circle of the wrestling ring. Moreover, as in professional wrestling, the extravagant “acting” of The Jew of Malta both defines and redeems the radical comic action of the play.

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Chapter 4

Grinning and Bearing it: A Plague of Storytelling in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) If Marlowe ironically accents discomfort in The Jew of Malta for purposes of comic perception, then Thomas Dekker’s combination of jestbook jollity and horrid reportage asserts even more painful ironies with regard to that most devastating of contemporary social and medical fears: virulent plague. Times had changed in the ten years since Marlowe’s violent death, but comic irony—like the plague—lived on. Playhouses having closed as a result of the outbreak meant that Dekker turned from stage to page in pamphlet prose, gleefully describing the changeful outrages of that “Wonderfull Yeare (1603).” His gags still have edge too, as the few critics who have responded to Dekker’s plague pamphlets have never been comfortable with his carnivalesque jokes and stories. Years ago, E.D. Pendry, in his edition of Dekker’s non-dramatic works, tried to apologize for The Wonderfull Yeare and its author: This is not “sick” humour. . . .He knew the plague—it broke out in Whitechapel, where he may have been living at the time, and the death-roll was enormous. Around him stretched human devastation comparable to that from the fall-out of an atomic attack. But he could still reach for his pen and record not just horror and panic, but the foolish and ludicrous as well—all were “wonderful”. (Pendry 21–2)

Frederick O. Waage tried to get more literary-critical, observing incredulously that, “Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare ends with a long plague-jestbook, which has nothing to do formally with what has gone before” (Waage 8). Only later does Waage articulate his formal literary concern as “the rhetorical distance from reality created by laughter” (78). Dekker’s prose, however, does not distance itself from reality through laughter, nor does it present a sense of “wonder” in a moral/ biographical context. Instead, it elicits laughter in a complicated embrace of reality and regeneration through humor. Bakhtin summarizes the satirical technique as follows, where he is speaking of Rabelais but could just as easily be describing the variety within Dekker’s prose: We see the speech and mask of the medieval clown, folk and carnival gaiety, the defiance of the democratic cleric, the talk and gestures of the mountebank—all combined with humanist scholarship, with the physician’s science and practice, and with political experience (Rabelais 72).

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Indeed, Dekker’s wacky storytelling works within the pamphlet to contain and metaphorically spread the plague. It’s a risky, even somewhat hysterical, approach to a contemporary horror manifesting itself in a terrible democracy of extinction. Moreover, Dekker uses the plague rhetorically, with all its multiple and savage ironies, to induce laughter as topical antidote and, paradoxically, to inoculate against the plague. Although “inoculation” is a medical concept Dekker could not have known, he is clearly aware of the nature of his metaphorical strategy. He even stresses the therapeutic intervention of the pamphlet in his dedication to Mr. Cuthbert Thuresby, Water-bailiffe of London: If you read, you may happilie laugh; tis my desire you should, because mirth is both Phisicall, and wholesome against the Plague, with which sicknes, (to tell truth) this booke is, (though not sorely) yet somewhat infected (Dekker 3).1

He announces the “sick” nature of his volume with deviously mischievous purport, the effect of which is constantly to mediate between cognitive and physical apprehension. (One imagines Cuthbert Thuresby dropping his presentation copy in loathing horror.) In this regard, Dekker uses the disease to counteract the disease, and the irrational response of laughter will work with the metaphorical serum of narrative. This strategy is unprecedented. Contemporary plague pamphlets searched for an external cure through moral and medical authority. But, with their ostensibly rational approach to treatment and language, they completely missed the point. Thus I will also compare Dekker’s ironic narrative strategy with contemporary imperatives, including moral advice, theological authority, personal introspection, and medical speculation. Dekker, however, explodes all moral and medical diagnostics as powerless, opinionated guesswork. The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) alone presents no desperate moral guidance or medical assurance. Instead it presents the plague itself in the immediate, variously incongruous, context of its day-to-day experience, using constant overstatement and surprise as comic strategy. In so doing, the pamphlet (as Cuthbert Thuresby experienced it) presents the plague itself—with all its ruthless, unselective terror. As a result, the pamphlet stirs terribly ironic sensations at the same time as it provides paradoxical relief. The illogic of the pamphlet is as brilliantly therapeutic as it is metaphorical. In many respects, Dekker presents a reconsideration before-the-fact of Susan Sontag’s sense of illness as metaphor: Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. … Feelings about evil are projected onto a disease. And the disease (so enriched with meanings) is projected onto the world. (Illness 58)

1 Throughout, I quote The Wonderfull Yeare from the text established by F.P. Wilson in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (1–61).Wilson’s text scrupulously reproduces marginal notes and indicates pagination of the original quarto (London, 1603: STC 6535).

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Sontag decries such projection as especially untruthful to the experience of disease, arguing against illness as metaphor for ugliness, evil, self-consuming passion, or social corruption—like a cancer within society—and specifically condemning such rhetoric as “an encouragement to simplify what is complex and an invitation to selfrighteousness, if not to fanaticism” (85). Plenty of self-righteous fanatics had their say about plague and its metaphors in 1603 London, but Dekker is not one of them. Instead, he represents the disease as complicatedly irrational, as something beyond the solemn rhetoric of moral curse or spiritual punishment or social decline. Instead, Dekker’s stories dwell in the realities of shock, surprise, hilarity, kinetic movement, personal interaction, and radically uncontainable comic variety. Dekker’s innovation is to represent the plague as complicatedly anecdotal. He imposes the horror on his terrified characters and then explores personal and social instability in a “sick” time, a time of collective trauma and social dislocation when the usual rules are undermined for the purposes of personal survival, a time of lost agency when life can end within the week and escape is impossible. In fact thwarted escape represents a main theme of his stories. And his narrative method in The Wonderfull Yeare goes beyond mere record. He records numbers too, but his stories provide a paradoxical kind of vicarious relief through presenting what narrative critic Hayden White would call “a verbal image of ‘reality’” (22). This “reality” within the “Wonderfull Yeare” of 1603 is outrageously unstable, discontinuous, and savagely ironic, unremittingly amoral, and totally unsentimental. Dekker’s stories, as parallel result, encode, empower, and represent the plague, through narrative foregrounding of painful instability, dreadful irony, ludicrousness, irrationality, and total disregard. How else to respond to this inexplicable, epidemic outrage? Contemporary commentators in all seriousness tried to do so. In fact some twenty-eight books dealing ostensibly with plague were published in London in 1603–04, the year of Dekker’s tract.2 Most were of a spiritual nature, but the truly desperate advised nostrums ranging from the purgative to the costive to the bizarre. Those with alcohol or opiate content may have provided some temporary relief, just as the airing of bedding or burning of sulfuric incense may have had a measure of fumigant value. But such measures were strictly serendipitous. The notion of a bacillary microorganism transmitted through fleas from rats acting as host would be as far-fetched a story in Dekker’s time as any of the desperate contemporary explanations, or indeed any of Dekker’s own wildly contrived stories. (Indeed a scientific explanation was not completely derived until 1894.) Besides, to Londoners in 1603, the plague was not microscopic. The plague was everywhere—as visible (and as easy to grasp) as atmosphere. Mentally or physically, everyone was involved in the dislocation, 2 See Slack (22–50). Medical facts are derived from Slack’s broadly informed text. Bibliographical discussion of Dekker’s tract and its printing can be found in Pendry (311– 313), and Wilson (Plague Pamphlets xxix–xxxiv). Medical historian Stephen Greenberg considers the numbers within contemporary plague bills and the speed with which they were produced, and although he makes no mention of Dekker’s work, his relation of rogue printer Felix Kyngston—“a young man on the make, . . . ambitious and looking to cash in on the epidemic” (524)—might have made good copy for Dekker’s work.

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incongruity and utter terror of the contagion. As Ian Munro puts it in his analysis of plague as urban signifier: Although the plague’s only vector is fleas carrying yersina pestis, the multiple effects of the disease reverberate through all the pathways of the society, ‘infecting’ all with their messages (246).

Dekker’s form of “infection” involves a barrage of jokes that ironically accommodate and defuse the plague through laughter. Other messages involving the plague in 1603 were more serious. Consider the authoritative explanation of Thomas Lodge, literary adventurer now practicing in London as an MD: Hipocrates writeth thus, in his Booke Of Humane Nature: The cause (saith he) of the generall pestilence which indifferently attainteth all sortes of men, is the ayre which we sucke, that hath in it selfe a corrupt and venemous seede, which we draw with our inbreathing (B4r).

Lodge lists the causes of such polluted air as the corruption and stench of unburied bodies, “evill vapours” issuing “from the earth of certain Caves thereof,” “a loathsome steame of certain Marsh in plashie Fennes full of mudde and durt,” even the exhalations of “venomous beastes” (B4r). Physician Thomas Thayre goes beyond the physical to list three categorical causes: 1) The first and chiefest is sinne. 2) The second is the corruption of the aire. 3) The third and last cause, is the evill disposition of the body, bred by evill diet, and the abuse of things called Res non naturales, things not natural (B1v).

Thayre also extols the virtues of maintaining “a mediocritie in all things” (D2v), including the avoidance of baths, hot houses, and vehement exercise; of keeping northeast windows open on clear days; of bleeding people “in that arme on the side grieved” (G1v); of “eschewing all intemperate passions of choler and melancholy (the company of women to be kept with ‘great moderation’” [D3v]), while avoiding sleep during the day. All this in addition to a wide-ranging variety of pomanders, incenses, and plasters, including the direct intervention of “the use of a young cocke:” Pull away the feathers from about the fundament of the cocke, and place the fundament upon the sore, and hold his bill sometime to keepe in his breath, he shall the better draw the venome: and if he die, then take another, and do so againe (J2v).

Finally, Thayre advises leaving the city entirely—a strategy “good for those that can conveniently do so” (E2r), and a vector endorsed fully by James Godskall in his tract suggestively titled The Arke of Noah, For The Londoners that remaine in the Cittie: The whole Colledge of the bodily Physitians, and the prince of them, that wise and learned Galen, prescribe for the time of Plague, that of all remedies, to prevent the contagion, the best is, to flie and shunne the infected and corrupted ayre, and to depart unto a wholesome

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and purer ayre: and that with these three rules, Cito, longe, tarde. Depart speedily, farre offe, and returne slowly. (C3r)

Of course—and Godskall emphasizes this—the inward flight of prayer is better, but even the author himself demonstrated wise mobility by addressing his readers from well beyond the city walls in Springfield near Tottenham. So much for the faith of the physicians. Clearly the treatise approach does not work and Dekker will satirize it with burlesque relish. An inchoate medical empiricism suggests the effectiveness of physical removal, especially during warm weather, but the contagion continues unpredictably to move and thrive. Consequently, an external “miracle” cure is sought with the same desperation as internal spiritual protection. In all cases, the authority of the specific reporter appears to be preeminent. But “saying so won’t make it so,” and Dekker’s ludicrous stories delight in repeatedly confirming this trope. Power resides within the contagion itself and its attendant mass psychic dislocation from which there appears to be no escape or relief. Generalizations about Res non naturales—despite their Latinate authority—only distract attention from a terrible pathology even as they focus attention upon ever more contrived and fanciful explanations. Desperate and relentless, contemporary medical advice cannot proceed beyond mere trial and error. But, in 1603 London, medical advice and procedures deserved scorn in the first place, according to the purely spiritual reasoning of Henoch Clapham: Beloved, God having smitten our Citie with the Pestilence, Behold, booke upon booke, prescribing naturall meanes as for naturall maladies, but little said of spirituall meanes, for spirituall maladies, which should give life to the former. To speake and act in such cases, as sole Naturians, is of Christians to become Galenists, and of spiritual to become carnall. (A3r)

Betraying not a hint of irony, Clapham affirms that medicine is utterly powerless, that Galen was nothing more than a “Greek Heathen Physician” (A4r), and that faith in God is the only salvation in despite of natural phenomena. In fact, Clapham rejects as atheism any medical explanation or speculation concerning plague: Atheists, mere Naturians and other ignorant persons, do hold it to be a natural disease, proceeding from naturall causes onely: as from corruption of the ayre, caused by unseasonable Planets above, or else from carrionly stinking smelles here belowe (A3v).

To Clapham, the explanation of plague is pure and simple: spiritual disregard. He is supported in this view by Roger Fenton’s itemized list of specific misbehaviors leading directly to plague:

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

our prophanenesse and neglect of God’s service. our hipocriticall worship of God dissembling with him in our hearts. our light accoumpt of the sacrament, and the unworthy receiving thereof. our overmuch confidence in secondary causes. our stubbernesse in not making use of former visitations. the toleration of such uncleane and notorious harlots as keepe about this place, . . .whose gallant bushes of such curious and costlie haire doe hang out to testifie that their Wine is the Vine of Sodome, and Grapes of Gomorah, commonly solde at the signe of the Painted face and naked brest. 7. some treacherous conspiracie plotted and intended by some murmuring malecontents. 8. the blasphemies of affected Atheists. (A9r–A11r) The desperation and confusion, loud-mouthed scapegoating, even paranoia, of such tracts—all published in 1603—is almost palpable. When in doubt lay blame, especially on “notorious harlots” “murmuring male-contents,” and “affected Atheists.” This is the fundamental strategy of contemporary medical and moral plague pamphlets. They represent panic in the face of inscrutability. In their post hoc associations of causes, behaviors, and pathologies, they recklessly “spread” the plague through language even as they attempt to explain and contain it, reaching wildly for supporting details along with the rhetoric of logical expansion for their arguments. Fenton even tries semantics itself as explanation: “The word which commonly is used in Scripture for the pestilence, is derived from a verbe that signifieth to speake, as some thinke, because, where it is, every one speaketh of it” (A4v). Such reasoning unconsciously approaches the scholar’s bedlam of Menippean satire even as it eerily prefigures Antonin Artaud’s twentieth-century identification of plague as a self-communicating psychic, rather than viral, entity: “the direct instrument or materialization of an intelligent force in close contact with what we call fatality” (18). As will be seen, Dekker also insists on “plaguing” linguistic, psychic, and metaphorical possibilities in relation to plague itself—a paradoxical self-troping about which Ian Munro observes: “In reaching for appropriate terms in which to describe the persistence of the disease, Dekker’s uncanny language demonstrates both the inescapability and slipperiness of plague as an urban signifier” (242). However, pushed to extremes of hysteria and hilarity, plague becomes a comic signifier too. Dekker recognizes plague as deeply plural and bewilderingly self-replicating, like comedy itself realized through multiple strategies that materialize, mediate, and degrade the plague within ironic narratives. Dekker alone approached the plague of 1603 through the paradoxical linguistic possibilities of jest book reportage. Acutely aware of the failure of London physicians, he satirizes their procedures and pretensions with first-person directness: Never let any man aske me what became of our Phisitions in this Massacre, they hid their Synodicall heads aswell as the prowdest: and I cannot blame them, for their Phlebotomies, Losings, and Electuaries, with their Diacatholicons, Amulets, and Antidotes, had not so much strength to hold life and soule together, as a pot of Pinders Ale and a Nutmeg; their drugs turned to durt, their simples were simple things: Galen could do no more good, than Sir Giles Goosecap. (36)

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Likewise, the well-meaning ineffectuality of the church suffers Dekker’s irreverent ghastly punning: “This was a rare worlde for the Church, who had wont to complaine for want of living, and now had morre living thrust upon her, than she knew how to bestow” (34). Moralists, physicians, and mountebanks (often in good conscience), offered answers to a citizenry that was paralyzed by the very questions and terrified by the experience. Dekker offers the plague itself with all its misguided, inane, and hypocritical human reactions. He thus tones down moral explanation, refuses to presume medical explanation, and focuses on the savage ironies of his various and inventive story lines. Dekker also presents a broader social context for his reportage. The horrors of plague, although they serve as thematic link for his concluding “tales,” are also cause and symptom of Dekker’s overall topic: the year 1603, “the chances, changes, and strange shapes that this Protean Climactericall yeare hath metamorphosed himselfe into” (19). His complicated language represents irresolvable complexity in itself as he considers the cultural impact of social, medical, and political high anxiety. The plague did, after all, follow fast upon the death of Queen Elizabeth on 24 March 1603. Consequent social dread is related through a metaphor of infection as Dekker sums up his topic: As first, to begin with the Queenes death, then the Kingdomes falling into an Ague upon that. Next, followes the curing of that feaver by the wholesome receipt of a proclaymed King. … And last of all (if that wonder be the last and shut up the yeare) a most dreadful plague. (20)

Joys are expressed and thwarted; relief is forthcoming and deferred. The unstable, liminal period between proclaimed monarchs is full of unease and paradox in which the body politic sickens for a time. The past retains healthy associations of certainty. The future is faced with the dread of the unknown. Dekker’s comic imperative is to fill the future with pleasing and unpleasing ironies that defuse, even as they satirically narrate, an intolerable present. As consolation and therapy, Dekker focuses on changes in the political state that can be demonstrated as unchanging through the slipperiness of language: “The Queene lies now at White Hall dead, / And now at White Hall living, / To make this rough objection even, / Dead at White Hall in Westminster, / But living at White-Hall in Heaven” (18). Henry Petowe, in his poem titled “A few Aprill drops showred on the Hearse of dead Eliza,” compressed the paradox thus: “Sweet Eliza in Elizium lives” (Elizabeth A4r). But Dekker goes further on the topic of England’s dead political leader and cultural icon, reaching for linguistic continuity and balance through the circular impossibilities of paradox: Shee came in with the fall of the leafe, and went away in the Spring: her life (which was dedicated to Virginitie,) both beginning & closing up a miraculous Mayden circle: for she was borne upon a Lady Eve, and died upon a Lady Eve: Her Nativity & death being memorable by this wonder: the first and last yeares of her Raigne by this, that a Lee was Lorde Maior when she came to the Crowne, and a Lee Lorde Maior when she departed from it. (17)

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He meditates upon Elizabeth in terms of moral and political appropriateness, respecting both her personal celibacy and public constancy. Death may physically intervene but never break her cycle of life in which every living Londoner finds a metaphorical and vicarious germ of majesty. Even the lord mayors’ names at the beginning and end of Elizabeth’s reign contain a homonymic appropriateness.3 Compare Dekker’s deep rhetorical anatomy with the similar meditation of contemporary author Henry Chettle: Sweete Virgine, she was borne on the Eve of that blessed Virgines Nativitie, holy Mary Christs mother: shee died on the Eve of the Annunciation of the same most holy Virgin; a blessed note of her endlesse blessednesse, and her societie in heaven with those wise Virgines, that kept Oyle ever in their Lampes, to awayte the Bridegroome. (E2r–E2v)

Chettle’s romantic consolation partakes of the spiritual forever discerned by Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play where the end makes for a paradoxical beginning and comic circularity supervenes. Chettle’s terms also tend metaphorically toward the new political bridegroom of 1603, namely James Stuart of Scotland and his “wedding” to the English state. Royalist commentator Henry Petowe likewise caught this monarchical life/death paradox on the very title page of another contribution in 1603: Englands Caesar, including His Majesties most Royall Coronation and Eliza, her Coronation in Heaven. But Dekker undercuts such romantic associations through a more satirically material perception of the paradox involved in this dangerous time: “Upon Thurseday it was treason to cry God save king James king of England, and upon Friday hye treason not to cry so” (Dekker 20). As will be seen next chapter, fellow Elizabethan Sir John Harington zestfully perceived the comic paradoxes of “treason and not treason” as well. In a time of political, cultural, and pathological instability, language can both kill and cure, condemn and redress. One may glow with the dignity of perceiving eternal life or scramble to make sense of the lived here and now. In The Elizabethan Pamphleteers, Sandra Clark accurately describes the comic procedures and proportions of Dekker at this point in The Wonderfull Yeare: “Here Dekker is not a chronicler or reporter but a performer in language; he is practicing styles, and he wants his readers to appreciate his skill in each one before he moves on to the next” (112). Dekker clearly is “styling,” riffing on comic possibilities with improvisational and metaphorical abandon. But he also locates his stories in a specific context of personal pain, political anxiety, and social dread, a context within which the plague is especially and perversely appropriate. It provides overwhelming possibilities in terms of linguistic overstatement, comic disjunction, and life-anddeath extremes. Dekker’s thoroughgoing irony is thus prescribed in the very title of his tract: the pestilence is as “wonderfull” as is this dread time of monarchical transition and cultural uncertainty. As a consequence, Dekker’s stories will gleefully illustrate and administer the morbid ironies of this afflicted time. His linguistic virtuosity ensures readers that the treatment itself will be as unsettling and edgy as it is paradoxical. Moreover, having already rebuffed such authorities as churchmen, 3 Wilson notes that “In 1558–9 the Lord Mayor was Sir Thomas Leigh, Mercer, and in 1602–3 Robert Lee, Merchant-tailor” (Plague Pamphlets 220).

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physicians, and other “Empiricall madcaps” (37), he also refuses to deal in numbers. Everyone knows the outrageousness of the numbers. Instead, as Dekker puts it: “We will therefore play the Souldiers, who at the end of any notable battaile, with a kind of sad delight rehearse the memorable acts of their friends that lye mangled before them” (38), making clear that the stories have to do with extreme tension, extreme relief, and wild improbability. And it is through the ironies of thwarted desire, reversal of expectation, shocking incongruity, gross overreaction, inveterate punning, and internal authorial comment that his plague stories proceed. In the first one, a student who orders a coffin for his afflicted classmate to, as Dekker puts it, “see him goe handsomely attirde into the wild Irish countrey of wormes” (39) ends up dying before the sufferer and sharing the coffin with him. “He was cald into the colde company of his grave neighbors an houre before his infected friend, and had a long lease (even till doomes day) in the same lodging, which in the strength of health he went to prepare for the other” (39). Similarly “attirde,” the hopeful English university man takes up another interminable lease in that inscrutable “other” country. Next, a successful Dutch immigrant in the Bedlam district of London seeks to escape the plague by moving back to the Continent. But he cannot escape the glee of Dekker’s punchline: “O how pitifullie lookt my Burgomaister, when he understood that the sicknes could swim!” (40). This horrific understanding drives the Dutchman insane and Dekker provides amoral ironic commentary: “For the mad tricks he plaid to cosen our english wormes of his Dutch carcass (which had bin fatted here) sicknes and death clapt him up in Bedlem the second time” (40–1). Munro observes that, “In redirecting these twicetold tales, Dekker shifts his work from first-hand reporting to the circulatory realm of the jestbook, emphasizing again the commercial nature of the project” (252). However, commercial considerations are understood from the outset when dealing with a professional writer such as Dekker. The wildly circular nature of Dekker’s jests instead emphasize a crazy internationalism about plague that defies boundaries both of allegiance and escape in the name of amoral irony. Herein the story of the London Dutchman comically asserts and mediates tensions related to cultural anomaly and medical ambiguity in addition to social dread and fear. Two other stories can be compared on a wickedly ironic Good Samaritan theme. In one, a diseased Londoner hammers on the door of a country tavern seeking shelter. None, of course, is forthcoming. But a fellow Londoner happening by takes pity on the sufferer, defying the hands-off policy of local civic officials and helping the terminally ill man to a bed of straw in the fields where he buries him the next day. Back in London, the Good Samaritan delivers the bad news along with personal effects to the widow and family of the dead man. Dekker’s devious conclusion: But by the way note one thing, the bringer of these heavie tidings (as if he had liv’d long enough when so excellent a worke of pietie and pittie was by him finished) the very next day after his coming home, departed out of this world, to receive his reward in the Spirituall court of heaven (43–4).

So much for helping out. In the other story, a fund of forty shillings is raised by local authorities in a country village to bury another anonymous Londoner

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dead of the plague. Of course, no self-respecting individual will take on the job. Luckily, a traveling tinker comes through town and agrees to bury the body for a mere ten shillings. Dekker satirizes the smug formality and fastidiousness of the townspeople: thirtie shillings was saved by the bargaine, and the towne likely to be saved too, therefore ten shillings was levied out of hand, put into a rag, which was tyed to the end of a long pole and delivered (in sight of all the parish, who stoode aloofe stopping their noses) by the Headboroughs owne self in proper person, to the Tinker. (58)

But the tinker gains in more ways than one: not only does he suffer no ill effects from handling the body, he also robs it of a purse containing seven pounds. Joyfully immune and economically empowered, he then marches back through town, scattering the villagers with his mockingly celebratory street cry: “Have ye any more Londoners to bury, hey downe a downe dery, have ye any more Londoners to bury?” (59). In both stories, civic authority is shown up as inconsiderate, incompetent, and completely unequal to the task of dealing with the epidemic. As illustrated above by the tinker, the only happy outcome of the plague is demonstrated in the paradoxical happiness of funeral operators. But, coming out of the lower stratum as he does, the tinker enjoys unofficial status and celebrates a macabre reversal of fortune. Not so for official society. Dekker inveighs against the new lucrativeness of the sexton’s position, and is not above naming names: Sextons gave out, if they might (as they hoped) continue these doings but a twelvemoneth longer, they and their posteritie would all ryde upon foot-cloathes to the ende of the worlde. Amongst which worme-eaten generation, the three bald Sextons of limping Saint Gyles, Saint Sepulchres, and Saint Olaves, ruled the roaste more hotly, than ever did the Triumviri of Rome. Jehochanan, Symeon, and Eleazar, never kept such a plaguy coyle in Jerusalem among the hunger-starved Jews, as these three Sharkers did in their Parishes among naked Christians. (34)

Death is money to these three “sharkers,” but they might well attend to Dekker’s tale concerning the Sexton of Stepney and a “resurrected” corpse. The “corpse” in the story is actually a drunk who falls into an open grave in the middle of the night, and passes out thinking that “all his bedfellows (as they were indeede) were in their dead sleep” (52). Come morning, the acquisitive sexton arrives at the grave, “casting upon his fingers ends what he hopes the dead pay of that day will come to” (52). Consider his shock, as he throws a few scattered bones into the mass grave and is cursed by the awakening drunk! “The Sexton smelling a voice, (feare being stronger than his heart) believed verily, some of the coarses spake to him, upon which, feeling himselfe in a cold sweat, tooke his heeles, whilst the Goblin scrambled up and ranne after him” (53). This is poetic justice in one sense (the gag ends in affirming that the running sexton runs right out of his wits); in another, it illustrates the mad, maniacal, macabre, wildly mobile and ultimately ludicrous situation of the plague. Throughout these stories death itself comes in many metaphors: a cutter, a landlord, a highwayman, a hunter, a thief, a rapist. Dekker calls it a “Chameleon-like sicknes” (37), defying any attempt to identify or contain it. Small wonder then that,

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in dealing with the plague, civic authority and legal redress should betray themselves to be as totally and laughably impotent as medical advice and spiritual guidance. Hence the story of a London wedding removed to the country “because so many Coffins pestred London-Churches, that there was no roome left for weddings” (45). Dekker punningly fuses meanings, whereby coffins “pester” the church as a result of “pestilence.” The OED neglects citing Dekker’s early figurative use in this regard.4 However, pestilence even invades the very language of the wedding ceremony, as Dekker narrates: “The holie knot was a tying, but hee that should fasten it, coming to this, In sicknes and in health, there he stopt, for suddenly the bride took hold of, in sicknes, for in health all that stoode by were in feare she should never be kept” (45). The ceremony becomes a linguistic version of the bride’s worsening condition: “on went they againe so farre, till they met with For better, for worse, there was she worse than before, and had not the holy Officer made haste the ground on which she stoode to be maryed might easily have bin broken up for her burial” (46). Her expiration is reported through wickedly apposite metaphor: “Death rudely lay with her, & spoild her of a maydenhead in spite of her husband” (46). Through a prognostic of paradox ending in fatalistic—but also decidedly ironic—reconciliation, Dekker’s conclusion riffs on a commoner’s version of “dead Eliza” at the same time as it represents the remorseless power of plague in reordering relationships in the world: She was a wife, yet continued a mayd: he was a husband and a widower, yet never knew his wife: she was his owne, yet he had her not: she had him, yet never enjoyed him: here is a strange alteration, for the Rosemary that was washt in sweete water to set out the Bridall, is now wet in teares to furnish her burial: the Musick that was heard to sound forth dances cannot now be heard for the ringing of bels: all the comfort that happened to either side being this, that he lost her before she had time to be an ill wife, and she left him ere he was able to be a bad husband. (46)

True to form, Dekker quickly follows up with the story of the adulterous wife of a local cobbler who, falling sick, confesses her many affairs—replete with juicy detail—to her miserable husband at her death-bedside—and then recovers! This macabre inversion represents the climax of absurdity, subversion, discontinuity, and paradox in the pamphlet. The overall humor of The Wonderfull Yeare is purposely and unremittingly bleak. It aims at dissolving the morbid tensions of a diseased society through constantly adjusted repetition and variety of effects. In a scattering of jestbook stories, some mischief-makers are seen to be rewarded, some altruistic citizens suffer as a result of their good works, and no character can foresee outcomes. The only certainty here is unpredictability—and of course a multitude of deathly possibilities. Thus Frederick Waage’s reading of morality play absolutes wherein “the cobbler’s wife is Lechery, the drunkard is—drunkeness, and the tinker is Cupidity (if not Pride)” (97)—imposes a morality on these stories that the stories themselves constantly evade and even satirize. Waage also misreads the nature of the narrative voice by 4 As Munro notes in a different instance: “The OED suggests that ‘pester’ derives from a different root than ‘pest’ (as in plague), but by the sixteenth century the two terms had influenced each other” (251).

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ascribing it (with analogic literalism) to the soldiers who Dekker mentions for coarse effect: “the soldiers, one of the groups reacting to the plague, become by analogy those who will tell the following stories” (Waage 85–6). Rather, as mentioned previously, the narrative voice foregrounds the notion of soldiery to accentuate the effects of extreme conflict and edgy resolution, promising to relate the stories as soldiers do of battles: “making (by this meanes) the remembrance even of tragicall and mischievous events very delectable” (38). Like a soldier, the narrative voice “has been there,” and is therefore licensed to relate the plague ironically as theme against itself. Moreover, the situational variety of the stories purposely disallows moral application in favor of vivid, overstated, carnivalesque absurdity coupled with willfully perverse dissemination. Through the narrative use of plague as metaphor, this dissemination is also a kind of inoculation. Herein, humor works together with plague to manifest itself as beyond the reach of civic authority and beyond the comfort of moral understanding. An overlooked contemporary “moral play” on the topic of plague, however, does exist in James Balmford’s A Short Dialogue Concerning The Plagues Infection. Here, the characters Professor and Preacher debate the medical and spiritual ramifications of the contagion. Professor asserts, “I have lyen in bed with many that have had the plague sores . . . yet I (and a great number besides me, who have done as much) had never the plague” (44). Preacher decries this “adventurous argument,” and his moral response runs parallel to Dekker’s amoral story lines: Take heed how you obscure the providence of God, and draw many into daunger by denying the plague to be contagious; lest as he that feared not the day of the Lord, met with a Beare when he had escaped a Lion: so you meete with a judgement heavier to you, though you still escape the plague. (Balmford 46)

Dekker’s characters often escape the bear to meet the lion, but Judgment in his stories is constantly deferred. He uses the narrative formula, but refuses the narrative moral. Certainly, the narrative voice is willing to confer conventional plaudits on the Good Samaritan: who “departed out of this world, to receive his reward in the Spirituall court of heaven” (44). And the recovered cobbler’s wife receives a backhanded benefit of doubt: “Now whether this Recantation was true, or whether the steeme of infection fuming up (like wine) into her braines made her talk thus idly, I leave it to the Jury” (51). But the two dead scholars occasion only a rhetorical question: “What credit therefore is to be given to breath, which like a harlot will runnne away with evry minute?” (39). Of the acquisitive Sexton of Stepney, the narrative voice concludes: “hee ranne out of his wittes, which being left behinde him, he had like to have dyed presently after” (53). Likewise the hapless London Dutchman: “sicknes and death clapt him up in Bedlem the second time, and there he lyes, and there he shall lye till he rot before Ile medle any more with him” (41). Selfishly terrified, ridiculously disoriented, ignorant, idiotic, and overwhelmed—these are the attributes of the characters in Dekker’s pamphlet. But it is the plague that is to blame for their predicaments as well as for their specific existences as characters in fiction. Effectively de-mythicized from grand metaphorical narratives of good and evil, Dekker’s characters are more specifically and metaphorically quarantined

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within their own disparate stories. And it is within their specific narratives that they suffer their peculiar fates. Blanket moral judgment does not apply. The stories themselves are “sick” in their unrelenting pathological concern, but their humor replaces judgment just as their racily fictional quality takes the place of morality. A tone of arch uncaring allows the narrative voice to register familiar nudges and winks through parenthetical comment. Consider the stir behind the door of the country tavern at which the infected Londoner knocks: Mine Host and Hostesse ran over one another into the back-side, the maydes into the Orchard, quivering and quaking, and readie to hang themselves on the innocent Plomtrees, (for hanging to them would not be so sore a death as the Plague, & to dye maydes too! Oh horrible!) (42);

as well, the double entendres concerning the bedridden cobbler’s wife: “the bed that she laie upon (being as she thought, or rather feared) the last bed that ever should beare her, (for many other beds had borne her you must remember)” (47). These constant parenthetical intrusions both accentuate and personalize improvisational storytelling. And just when moral conclusion seems most apt, the voice provides further examples of misguided hope or possibility. Admittedly, the characters receive scorn for their moral shortsightedness—“they have no power to looke higher than their owne roofes, but seeme by their turkish and barbarous actions to believe that there is no felicitie after this life, and that (like beasts) their soules shall perish with their bodies” (59)—but no corrective follows. Who can blame them for their madcap panic? What follows instead is the ludicrous pathos of boatmen attempting to wash the plague off their fares: Even the Western Pugs receiving mony here, have tyed it in a bag at the end of their barge, and so trailed it through the Thames, least plague-sores sticking upon shillings, they should be naild up for counterfeits when they were brought home (59).

The reader may choose literalistic head-wagging condemnation, but the farcical concerns of the stories, combined with the eye-rolling incredulity with which they are related, are better served by the laughter of those not infected. The stories themselves seem to be as contagious as the plague. Instead of a moral summing up or a rhetorically structured conclusion, the pamphlet simply provides more stories. Jaggedly discontinuous in the first place, these stories portray, even as they convey, complications surrounding an inscrutable attack on civic security and public health. Paradoxically unable to sustain narrative, these stories seem also unable to stop replicating themselves as stories. A further tale concerning a country Justice of the Peace, prejudiced to the point of knee-jerk condemnation of Londoners, is followed by the non-relation of four more stories: a nurse “who kild all she kept” (60), a corrupt churchwarden in Thames Street, eventually “driven to hide his head in a hole” (61), a plague sufferer shunted from place to place until he dies “for want of succor” (61), a “poor wretch in the Parish of Saint Mary Overyes” mistaken for dead, and consequently thrown “upon a heape of carcases” (61). The plague spreads through illogical narrative transitions, further infecting basic plot lines even as the narrator promises to discontinue. But the stories, if only a clause or two long, are

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still told. And the possible story lines are virtually endless, as the narrator affirms: “I could fill a large volume, and call it the second part of the hundred mery tales” (60). In effect, he is in the process of doing so. Like sex or death or even breath, anxiety about the plague is not going away any time soon. Nor is Dekker about to curtail his efforts in comedy, citing that well known contemporary jestbook titled A Hundred Merry Tales and thus referencing a whole other register for comic variety that had been around a long time by 1603.5 Conclusion concedes inconclusion as the plague rages madly on. How else are these stories to stop? The narrative voice is still mounting the numbers, “imagining that many a thousand have been turned wrongfully off the ladder of life” (60), at the same time as it introduces Derick the Hangman, with all his dispassionate efficiency in providing the “good turns” (60) of execution reconsidered as euthanasia. Such grim, realist mimetic has been the narrative strategy of the pamphlet throughout. There is no physical cure; there is no appropriate moral consolation; personal shame is woefully beside the point—the only possible counteraction involves cultural coping wherein a “plague” of stories works paradoxically to inflect collective fears and irrational dread, unspeakable horrors and crisis mismanagement, toward ironic comic accommodation. Hereby Dekker renders the plague—with all its multifarious, hilarious complications—literary, fictional, ironic, ridiculous, and metaphorical. Where Sontag observed that, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one” (58), Dekker provides great variability that evades moralistic meanings through radical, ironic, and amoral comic satire. The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) metaphorically “contains” the plague as topic and “spreads” the plague as serum against itself through a variety of ludicrous story lines. The overall therapy of Dekker’s approach is to provide cultural resistance through the intervention of comic fiction—a metaphorical inoculation activated through the booster of macabre laughter.

5 Modern editor P.M. Zall identifies A Hundred Merry Tales, first printed in 1526, as “the closest thing we have to a distinctively native English jestbook” (8).

Chapter 5

Humor in High (and low) Places: Toilet Tales and The Metamorphosis of Ajax Unlike most of the other comic writers in this book, Sir John Harington had to fight his way to the bottom. His notorious career took flight as godson to Queen Elizabeth I, continued with a classical education at Eton and Cambridge after which he dabbled in light verse, country life, and Irish affairs, but he was never handed the political appointment for which he had been groomed. After all, from the time of Aristotle, humor, laughter, and quick wit have been seen as beneficial in personal and emotional terms, but rather subversive in moral and political ones. Aside from his personal brilliance, Harington was simply too funny, too bent on stretching the political directive to its ludicrous extremes. In this chapter I will engage with the political wit of Sir John Harington, especially in relation to his complicated satire on toilets and toileting known as The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), using a variety of local and historicized contexts to demonstrate his subversive energies as necessarily political, credibly oppositional, and continuously comic. My approach owes much to cultural literary critique in conceptual terms of “otherness,” the “wise fool,” social reversal, and assertion of the lower bodily stratum. Sir John Harington physically and satirically “played the fool” from a position of privilege at the Elizabethan court. He even says as much in Epigram 53, “A Poets Priviledge”: “Painters and Poets claim by old enroulment, /A charter to dare all without controulment” (L&E 168).1 Harington clearly cherished this stance, and he quoted it again in the work for which he is perhaps best known: that weird and satirical composition about toilets previously mentioned, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (190). At pains in this document to assert the pun “Ajax/A-jakes,”(“jakes” being a contemporary term for a toilet or privy)—even to the extent of the ludicrously phonetic rendering “age aches” (Ajax 78)—he becomes associated with scatological humor then and now as evidenced in the contemporary backlash to his book that banished him from court, a privy council notation (“privy” representing the irresistible pun) identifying him as “Sir

1 Here and throughout, whenever quoting from old-spelling texts I silently amend complicated punctuation, expand ampersands and archaic contractions, and modernize i/j, u/v, th, and long s. To date, no standard biography of Harington exists. The best biographical work includes Grimble (1957), Craig (1985), and the introductory material to primary texts (Harington 1930, Harington 1962).

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Ajax Harington,” (Green 306) and perhaps even Shakespeare’s droll clown Jacques (pronounced “jakes”) in As You Like It (Dusinberre 1994).2 Harington’s excellent education at Eton and Cambridge, prepared him fully for a career in foolery. Having rather ungentlemanly obtained the MA degree at King’s College in 1581, he went on further to degrade his aristocratic birth by actively displaying his learning in print with a translation of Orlando Furioso in 1591 and later with his notoriously avant garde composition Ajax. He clearly knew the contemporary academic sources concerning wit, as theorized in aristocratic cultural terms by Castiglione and in stylistic rhetorical terms by Wilson and Puttenham. In fact, Harington seems to have learned well from a subsection titled “Of Delighting the Hearers and Stirring Them to Laughter” in Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric: The witty and learned have used delightful sayings and quick sentences ever among their weighty causes, considering that not only goodwill is got thereby (for what is he that loveth not mirth?), but also men wonder at such a head as hath men’s hearts at his commandment, being able to make them merry when he list. (166)

In Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England, Chris Holcomb argues a newfound authority in such rhetorical stance, and Harington would certainly use this critical power of merriment often as a coping strategy for anxieties within his own political life at court. In the preface of his Orlando Furioso Harington alludes to the aforementioned rhetorical theorists with confidence, quoting and asserting the cutting-edge critical practice of Sidney’s Defense of Poesy—a work he obviously knew before its first publication in 1595 (OF 2). In literary, critical, and cultural matters, Harington was clearly an astute student of his times. And yet, in Ajax, he breezily refers to himself as a “truantly scholer in the noble University of Cambridge,” where, as he reductively puts it, “I hope I had as good a conscience as other of my pew-fellowes, to take but a little learning for my money” (Ajax 85–6). Throughout his career, he cultivates a posture of serious unseriousness. At this early point, however, the pain of factional politics must have seemed difficult for Harington to imagine. Young, healthy, wealthy, and connected, his privileged life at Cambridge was definitely good. And yet, consider the political proportions of one of Harington’s best-known and oft-quoted epigrams, “Of Treason”:“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason” (L&E 255). Such a suavely rationalized observation with its interior sentiment of amoral uncaring would seem lightweight and witty even sophomoric in its inception, but also monstrous—even grotesque—to the stern morality of a nationalist Elizabethan politics. The implicit relativism of treason and not-treason would stop the blood of courtiers, patriots, and Protestant preachers alike in early modern England. Yet Harington asserts his relativism in a spirit of gleeful irony that is postured and secure in its own political affiliations. In fact, as godson to the Queen of England, he was so secure that he refused to sign the official 1584 Bond of Association pledging himself against anything non-Elizabethan (Cressy 1982). In so doing, Harington

2 In fact Dusinberre goes beyond punning to read Harington generally as “frame of reference” (10) for Shakespeare’s play.

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placed himself in a distinct minority, even quite rare, position—a political blind spot usually reserved for professional jesters. Elizabeth I characteristically referred to Harington—when she had to refer to him at all—as “Our witty godson” or “Boy Jack.” Although she once sent the tenyear-old boy a copy of her speech to parliament, she saw to it that in later years he never gained political position at court. As McClure writes in his introduction to Harington’s Letters and Epigrams: A courtier and a politician by birth and opportunity, he lacked those qualities essential to success in Elizabeth’s court. … His candor, his loquacity, and his irrepressible spirits were impediments to one who aspired to hold positions of trust in the state. (L&E 18).

And yet an epigram such as the one on “Treason” wittily demonstrates a stance of polished performance from an insider’s position of political amorality or, perhaps, irrelevance. Moreover, Harington wouldn’t have it any other way. Indeed, he consistently insists on having it both ways in ironic suspension. He got into trouble at court for translating and circulating a salacious section of Orlando Furioso, for which he was banished. He was banished again after publication of The Metamorphosis of Ajax, and tried to redeem himself by joining the Irish campaign—for which he was again banished (after brief imprisonment) upon his return. Truth is that Harington was a political joker, a wise fool, a wild card, a reversible carnivalesque figure. His wit speaks constantly to inner tensions released by his calculated performances. Perceived as comically transgressive, these performances constantly absolve him of punishment. In the world of Elizabethan politics, into which he had been born and from which there was no complete escape, Harington also comes dangerously close to real punishment. Unsurprisingly, he gets saved by the power of the word in every instance. His secret journal kept while on expedition in Ireland with the Earl of Essex helped to save him from implication in Essex’s treason. A letter to Harington, from his cousin Robert Markham at Court, is as urgently cautionary as it is touching and revealing: High concerns deserve high attention; you are to take accounte of all that passes in your expedition, and keepe journal thereof, unknown to any in the company; this will be expected of you. I have reasons to give for this order: … Stifle your understandinge as muche as may be; mind your bookes, and make your jestes, but take heed who they light on. (L&E 19–20)

This represented good advice from a cousin close to the contemporary power of Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabethan Secretary of State. In fact, Markham’s caution seems to literalize what Harington had already jocularly asserted in Ajax: “a good friend in the Court, is worth a penie in the purse at all times” (230). But upon his return from Ireland, Harington found himself in a decidedly disadvantaged position. Scott-Warren accurately describes Harington’s predicament as “tarred with the same brush as Essex when he returned home, the queen’s wrath exacerbated by his new knighthood” (201). But Harington stepped lightly around the situation, indulging in a bit of characteristic wordplay in a letter of the time:

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He credits his punning wit with helping him to avoid prison. Indeed Harington relishes his “clean” status as metaphorically flushed from the Fleet—at once a London prison and a river through London then much in use as a common sewer. He enjoys multiple creative ironies involving service, disobedience, incarceration, and scatology. Having dodged the Fleet prison, he adds somewhat sardonically, “After three days every man wondered to see me at liberty.” Elizabeth herself wondered at his return, as Harington famously reports: “I enterd her chamber, but she frownede and saiede, ‘What, did the foole brynge you too?’” (L&E 108). To Elizabeth, the very sight of Harington brings the unstable position of “fool” to mind. Harington even reports a message from the Queen at court, commanding him to “get home: it is no season now to foole it here” (L&E 90). With great relief, Harington decamped immediately for his country estate at Kelston near Bath. Fools must be aware of seasonal change and bend official orders to advantage. They must also know strategically when to silence themselves. In that same letter wherein he joyfully described himself dodging the Fleet, he also specifically mentions his audience with the Queen at which point he gets uncharacteristically, but understandably, at a loss for words: “What should I say! I seemed to myself for the time like St. Paul, rapt up in the third heaven, where he heard wordes not to be uttered by men; for neither must I utter what I then heard” (L&E 80). Essex was a fool in Ireland and after—and he suffered for it. Harington played the part of a wise fool by keeping his own counsel—and it probably saved his life. This dangerous post-Ireland period of recrimination illustrates both Harington’s position of privilege as well as his ability to use humor as a coping strategy in a highly problematic—even potentially lethal—situation. Already incarcerated and drawing ever closer to his inevitable execution, the Earl of Essex was hardly a figure to joke about openly. In his above-quoted letter, however, Harington gets playfully coy in his descriptions, avoiding names and fashioning himself as a simple countryman: You wonder I write nothing of one:—believe me I hear nothing; but he is where he was, and I think must be till these great businesses be concluded. Let this suffice from a private country knight, that lives among clouted shoes, in his frize jacket and galloshes, and who envies not the great commanders of Ireland. (L&E 80)

Number “one” refers to Essex who would be executed on February 26, 1601, finally concluding “these great businesses.” Back at court later that same year, Harington felt less than sanguine and rather conflicted about his official possibilities, writing to his friend Sir Hugh Portman as follows: It is an ill hour for seeing the Queen. The madcaps are all in riot, and much evil threatened. In good soothe I feard her Majestie more than the rebel Tyrone, and wishd I had never received my Lord of Essex’s honor of knighthood (L&E 90).

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Harington’s knighthood, however, clearly meant a good deal to him, judging by his reaction at the possibility at having the honor revoked. In a letter to Cecil in June 1600, decrying “all the last years errors in Ierland [sic],” Harington focuses on the main issue: “Now thear ys a secret brute muttered amongst many, that all the knights knighted in Awgust and synce, shalbee published in her Majesties name to bee no knights” (L&E 81). He, of course, was knighted the day before August so speaks, as he blithely puts it, “free from passion for my selfe.” Yet he gets passionate quickly, comparing knighthood to baptism, and asserting his opposition to the dangerous precedent of withdrawing honors once granted. He cites two cases: a boy knighted in sport who merely asked how knights were made, and a man knighted in error through mistaken identity. Yet, declares Harington, “the Harrolds affyrmd them both to bee knights, soche vertue hath water and the word in the sacrament of owr sowls” (L&E 82). One can imagine the political amusement with which Cecil must have read Harington’s letter of concern. Such amusement may also explain his listing as “Sir Ajax Harington” in that privy council note of August 23, 1599, which includes other new-made knights of Essex and comments wryly: “I fear his huddling them together by half hundreds will bring the order into contempt” (Green 306). As historian Lawrence Stone notes, Essex’s brief administration accounted for twenty-five per cent of all the knighthoods created in Elizabeth’s long reign (74). Harington’s status as “carpet knight” would modify his reputation as Elizabeth’s “witty godson” from here on. But he was merely a post-Armada court gadfly in 1589 or 1590 when he reportedly circulated his translation of Ariosto’s lewd 28th canto among Elizabeth’s ladies-inwaiting. Harington had clearly adopted the pose of “bad boy” at court. Indignant, the queen supposedly banished him to Kelston until he had translated the entire work. In fact, Harington himself corroborates the story as “a penance by that saint, nay rather goddesse, whose service I am only devoted unto” (Ajax 256). According to Robert McNulty, the Orlando’s modern editor—who retraces the genesis of this famous anecdote—“if it is not true, it ought to be” and “nothing militates against it” (OF xxv). McNulty goes on to detail the contemporary care and expense of producing a massive book such as Harington’s translation in 1591. Harington himself, especially proud of the copper plate engravings, declares that he personally “gave direction for their making” and adds “I have not seene anie made in England better” (OF 17). The plate for that notorious Book 28 follows its Italian original closely but has been altered to include three separate, miniature, sexually explicit vignettes. As McNulty comments, “Harington is having his private joke with the Book that set him off on his long task” (OF xlvi). With salacious rascality, self-fashioned in a manner similar to that which he so clearly enjoyed with the court ladies, Harington intrudes on the graphics of the text. In addition to humorous interjection, he also takes social risks through publication of this beautiful costly book, risks linked to a proclivity for attention-getting and extroversion. Harington’s long task with Orlando Furioso produced a remarkable volume of English translation from the classics for which he has never been adequately praised. Colin Burrow, in Epic Romance: Homer to Milton, describes Harington’s contribution mainly in positive terms but lumps it under the heading “Inglorious Spensers” (147). Harington certainly knew of Spenser but was probably attempting something else,

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something that he devoted time, energy, and learning to, and something to which court gadflys do not usually commit themselves. Harington clearly enjoyed “being in the know,” gaining attention through contemporary reference and through ironic disjunction from the classics. Years later, in a letter to his wife after Elizabeth’s death, he would include private remembrance of his godmother the Queen, citing especially “her watchings over my youthe, her likinge to my free speech, and admiration of my little learninge and poesy, which I did so muche cultivate on her commande” (L&E 97). His sense of “free speech” within the persona of a joker is remarkable both for its déclassé positioning and for its serious assertion. In fact, for Harington extroversion meets book-learning to produce ironic public effects in the most personal terms. He cleverly customizes the title page of his Orlando text. As McNulty describes it: “the divine belaurelled Ariosto retains his medallion at the top; Harington has his with his watch and his coat of arms at the bottom along with his dog” (OF xlv). Unprecedented, Harington’s faithful dog Bungey is engraved as tied to the column of Venus, barking out the motto “Fin Che venga”—“untill he commeth”—from Book 41 of the poem. In his notes at the end of the same book, Harington explains Olivero’s device of the crouching spaniel, relating it in unreservedly jocular personal terms: My selfe have chosen this of Olivero for mine owne, partly liking the modestie thereof, partly (for I am not ashamed to confesse it) because I fancy the Spaniell so much whose picture is in the devise, and if anie make merie at it (as I doubt not but some will) I shall not be sorie for it, for one end of my travel in this worke is to make my frends merie. (OF 480)

In Book 43, canto 102, at mention of a talented dancing dog, Harington lightheartedly notes “Looke in the Allusion,” where he again expatiates personally: Marrie for the shagheard dogge that could daunce to please Ladies so well and had such pretie qualities, I dare undertake my servant Bungy (whose picture you may see in the first page of the book and is knowne to the best Ladies of England) may compare with any Pilgrims dogge that served such a saint this seven yeare. (OF 515)

Later, in recommending Bungey to the notice of the young Prince Henry at the court of James I, Harington expands significantly on the topic of just deserts: I doubt not but your Highnesse would love my dogge, if not myselfe. … Of all the dogges near your father’s courte, not one hathe more love, more diligence to please, or lesse pay for pleasinge, than him I write of; for verily a bone would contente my servante, when some expecte greater matters, or will knavishly find oute a bone of contention. (L&E 133–4)

Ever a self-fashioned and somewhat knavish prodigal, Harington seems never to have stopped “dogging it” at court. In fact, in his self-assertive courtly manipulations, Harington had no problem providing a massive “bone of contention” himself, to judge by the reception of his notorious Metamorphosis of Ajax, published anonymously in 1596. This complex and misunderstood document pitches itself, in a variety of voices and genres, at a variety of levels and meanings, ostensibly to describe the benefits and technical

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specifications of the flushable water closet. But it also provides a range of jokes and anecdotes covered by classical allusion and related satirically to Elizabethan life, manners, and politics. It accumulates a vast colloquy of observations and interactions, leashing them constantly into an argument for clean living—mentally, physically, intellectually, and politically. As such, it acquires something of the formless form of Menippean satire, similar to, but antedating such works as The Anatomy of Melancholy and Tristram Shandy. However, The Metamorphosis of Ajax goes well beyond the “mock encomium” in formal terms, as identified by Donno in her authoritative edition (Ajax 20). It also exceeds the proportions of “a learned treatise on a foolish topic,” (36) as noted by Blanchard in Scholars’ Bedlam, the most recent study of Menippean satire in the Renaissance. Such satire itself suggests a means of taking stock and coping with a complicated, contradictory, even somewhat mad (that is, Elizabethan) world. Within its polyphony of voices, constant digression and punning combined with an impromptu tone, and insistence on significance, Harington’s book punctures authority at the same time as it asserts itself in terms of vital information. The Metamorphosis of Ajax combines fantastic learning within a variety of textual forms, voiced throughout in a tone of unserious fun. No other comparable book in English had combined such literary and scientific scholarship. Even The Anatomy of Melancholy was still a quarter of a century away from its first publication. Fully alive to Ajax in terms of “its wit, scholarship, and impudence, its variety, moral rectitude and richness of language,” Harington’s most recent critic, Jason ScottWarren, identifies the text as “a tissue of broadly political statements” (59, 61).3 Herein, Harington pitches jokes and invites readers to participate in the irony. The voice “within” the work constantly jokes at its own expense in a tone of self-effacing irony that, literally, invites readers to join in the fun. This is not to join in the jolly frolic of A.L. Rowse’s reading of Harington in Eminent Elizabethans (107–152), but rather to credit Harington’s calculated persona as a political performance that effects ironic reversals. The first thing to realize about The Metamorphosis of Ajax is to locate its inspiration in the transformative waters in and around the Elizabethan market center of Bath. Famous for its hot springs daily gushing half a million gallons or so, Bath had always attracted attention—and Harington seemed determined to do so too. His estate at Kelston, with its huge courtyard fountain, lay a few miles west on the Avon flood plain.4 And he owned a home in the center of Bath in Stall Street, significantly just opposite the Queen’s bath.5 In the very center of his book, Harington inflects his voice, as he puts it “in this my pleasant imitation within such an honest limitation”

3 Throughout his study, Scott-Warren refers to the text of Ajax as “the New Discourse,” covering all three parts comprising the Metamorphosis, Anatomie, and Apologie. 4 For a description of this ornate fountain, see Trotter (1943: 614–16). The Georgian building now on the site of Harington’s house is world headquarters for the Hallmark Greeting Card Co. 5 On the civic, social, and architectural history of pre-Georgian Bath, see James (1938) and Little (1947).

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(Ajax 142) towards the emperor Trajan (thinly representing Essex) in the form of an official supplication: The Citie of Bath (my Lord) being both poore enough and proud enough, hath since her highnesse being there, wonderfully beautified it selfe in fine houses for victualling and lodging, but decayes as fast in their ancient and honest trades of merchandise and clothing: the faire Church her Highnes gave order should be reedified, stands at a stay, and their common sewer, which before stood in an ill place, stands now in no place, for they have not any at all. Which for a towne so plentifully served of water, in a countrey so well provided of stone, in a place resorted unto so greatly (being at two times of the yeare, as it were the pilgrimage of health to all Saints) me thinke seemeth an unworthie and dishonorable thing. (Ajax 142–3)

Granted the funds—and Harington was named by Privy Council edict of 29 May 1593 to be Steward of Bath (Ajax 143, n.203)—he promises “of a ruinate church to make a reverent church, and of an unsavorie town a most sweet town” (143). Public-spirited, and civically responsible, the lord of the manor in neighboring Kelston expresses his influence in the guise of irony for the purposes of serious infrastructural improvement. The whole of The Metamorphosis of Ajax is pitched similarly in ironic terms of sanitary improvement. Moreover, Harington’s obvious civic concern relates also to the immediately personal and the nationally political. As an Elizabethan gentleman, and therefore influential public person, he cannot do otherwise. So why the humor? It’s clearly part of a diffident pose calculated to appear disinterested at the same time as it argues a moral and political position. His dominant satirical metaphor is to clean things up, to subdue the stench, to provide disclosure however uncomfortable or shaming. In so doing, he politicizes the medieval moral concept of cleanliness or purity. But even the anonymous poet who penned the medieval alliterative poem Cleanness issued caution when dealing with the topic. As declared in the opening stanza: “Fayre formes might he fynde in furthering his speche, / And in the contrare kark and combraunce huge” (Anderson, ed. 12; “kark” is glossed as “trouble” [141]). In Ajax Harington certainly stirs the “contrare” to judge by contemporary disenchantment. His constant satirical irony represents coping mechanism as well as disarming preemption. At the same time, he comically asserts social, literary, and decidedly physical functions. All three functions operate within the insouciant variety of the text—and external to it as well: one can almost visualize Harington hugging himself with joy as he writes and laughing as he imagines the responses of his readers. Physical toileting represents obvious democracy in the sense that everyone is involved. Cramped and crowded in their houses and towns, Elizabethans were rudely social of necessity, and yet intimate taboos of toileting and sexuality also manifest themselves in the contemporary backlash against Harington’s text. Aware in advance, the author crafts a prefatory letter (ostensibly written by his cousin) protesting the idea of a book on the topic of “in plaine English a shyting place” (Ajax 56). Harington then responds by extolling the virtues of what he calls “the basest roome of my house” (58), playfully imagining that he might gain public office thereby: that a “pleasant witted Courtier of either sex would grace me so much …

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as to say, that I were worthy for my rare invention to be made one of the Privie (and after a good long parenthesis come out with) chamber” (61). He knows that he is treating of sensitive matter, that he is bending if not breaking intimate physical and social taboos. Indeed Harington abolishes shame through humor by comparing himself to another shameless advocate: “I will herein follow the example of that noble Lady, that to save the liberties of Coventry, rode naked at noone through the streets thereof, and is now thought to be greatly honored, and nothing shamed thereby” (Ajax 62). Like Lady Godiva, Harington is prepared shamelessly, albeit rhetorically, to bare all. Likewise, he is prepared to get familiar with his reader, entering rhetorically into the same time and space as his reader, and suggesting a mutual toilet break: We will therefore now (according to the phisicke we learned even now) rise and stretch our legges a little, and anon I will put on my boots, and go a peece of the way with you, and discourse of the rest: in the meane time my self wil go perhaps to the house we talk of. (159)

Close to godliness, cleanliness is likewise without shame and to be enjoyed by all in an amoral democracy of indistinction, as signaled in Harington’s epigram titled How the Bathe is like Purgatory: “There fire burnes Lords and Lowts without respect, / Our water for his force workes like effect” (L&E 169). Here, and throughout Ajax especially in ironic terms of language and morals, Harington puts the “phisicke” back in physical and the “purge” back in purgatory. Harington’s ironies of linguistic and moral effect are powered by a variety of comic approaches. From a Freudian perspective, one might observe that The Metamorphosis of Ajax allows Harington to express unconscious (or perhaps not so unconscious) aggressive and sexual impulses more usually repressed. His controversial topic is rescued through the defense mechanism of humor, a mechanism voiced in Freud’s asseveration as follows: “Look here! This is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to. Child’s play—the very thing to jest about” (“Humor” 220). Such an attitude suggests ironic reversal, an overturning of authority for the purposes of renovation, as Harington himself insists near the end of his book in answer to all hypothetical critics: Some surmised against me, that because the time is so toying, that wholesome meates cannot be digested without wanton sauce, and that even at wise mens tables fooles have most of the talke, therefore I came in with a bable to have my tale heard, I must needs confesse it. (Ajax 212)

That bauble of which he speaks licenses him as distinctly as a jester’s cap and bells. A courtier seeking such a position represents an unusual contemporary innovation. As Holcomb observes in his book on the rhetoric of jesting in early modern England: “unlike Skelton and More for whom popular legend played a considerable role in transforming them into buffoonish characters, Harington picked up the jester’s bauble himself” (148). In so doing, Harington intervenes like a Rabelaisian “wise fool,” having his “tale” heard and thereby challenging authority. His serious/foolish disjunctions constantly force the ironies endemic to comedy. As comic theorist

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Henri Bergson would argue, Harington’s constant irreverence makes him automatic and compulsive—cartoon-like, he cannot restrain himself. In Bergson’s Laughter, comedy involves repeated mechanism, “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (84), combined with subsequent disparagement. From Aristophanes to Hobbes to Bergson to Charlie Chaplin, comedy often results from apprehensions of superiority and irony. In the Book of the Courtier, however, Castiglione explicitly states that a courtier should exercise self control to maintain decorum and avoid the extremities of a buffoon. He declares that a courtier who jests “must bee wise, and have great respect to the place, to the time and to the persons with whom hee talketh, and not like a common jeaster passe his boundes” (Castiglione 142). Harington, however, passes just such boundaries with all of the social disregard with which he refused to sign that 1584 Bond of Association. In Ajax, his project is ahead of its time in terms of sanitation. In terms of social class, he is also anxiously aware of time blurring all distinctions. As a learned courtier without an appointment, he feels the incongruity himself. And he crosses the line between courtier and buffoon with impunity. Throughout, through comic overstatement, Harington shamelessly asserts incongruities such as classical learning and defecation, institutional status and dung heaps, court politics and joke telling along with reported actions and opinions of figures as diverse as Stercutius and Cloacina (the Roman gods of excrement), contemporary comic actor Richard Tarleton, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Sir Thomas More, Emperors Claudius, Vespasian, and Trajan, and a bewildering variety of recognizable court personalities including Harington’s own mother-in-law Lady Jane Rogers. This Menippean pile up suggests variety and incongruity as theoretical precondition both for the leveling discussion that ensues and for the uncomfortable sensations it stimulates. Yet, despite the wild and unremitting digressions that make this book rhetorically difficult for today’s readers, Harington returns constantly to the ironic seriousness of his text, or more accurately to his “tesh” for such is the way he constantly refers to it within the document. In doing so Harington humorously voices what Ajax editor Elizabeth Story Donno noted as “a substandard pronunciation which was perhaps an identifying characteristic of a certain contemporary preacher” (Ajax 101, n. 99). And yet “tesh” might well be a naughtily voiced and reversed anagram of “shet”— Elizabethan scatological wordplay could certainly accommodate it. Regardless, Harington clearly and repeatedly refers back to his “tesh” for laughs, and the repeated nature of this comic parabasis or direct address evinces the mechanical repetition that Bergson argued was central to comedy. Learned aristocrats such as Harington don’t usually write treatises on toilets. But Harington insists on the fundamental significance of the topic and its pedigree, offers to install toilets, provides diagrams and prices, even acknowledges finally his compulsive “Latrina lingua” (Ajax 258). His concentration on the topic reverses high and low as vitally necessary, vitally physical data. For Harington, the self-cleaning Latrina is more worthy of regard than the authoritative Latin. Significantly, Harington makes early reference to Rabelais in terms of subversive democratic effects, unofficial comic freedom even wild proliferation of physical data. The Metamorphosis of Ajax develops its data along topical and rhetorical lines loosely paralleled to those observed by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World:

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“The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body” (26). As with Rabelais, this creative disclosure represents a significant part of Harington’s procedure as well. Scott-Warren tries to step around the issue by claiming “Throughout, comedy results from Harington’s reliance on authorities which are as much in need of justification as the points they are called on to justify” (72). Dusinberre, however, is more pointed: “Harington uses Rabelais as a text to subvert high culture, copying Rabelais’ mockery of authorities, his obscenity, his determination to reinstate the body at the center of discourse” (11). Just so, Harington lists other paradoxical studies far worse than his own concerning praise of folly, of usury, of bawdry, of the pox, of unlicensed prostitution, even of Nero, concluding with Rabelais, who he jokingly links to both nobility and stool and about whom he gets finely focused: A seventh (whom I would guesse by his writing to be groome of the stoole to some Prince of the bloud in Fraunce) writes a beastly treatise onely to examine what is the fittest thing to wype withal, alledging that white paper is too smooth, brown paper too rough, wollen cloth too stiffe, linen cloth too hollow, satten too slipperie, taffeta too thin, velvet too thick, or perhaps too costlie: but he concludes that, a goose necke to be drawne betweene the legs against the fethers, is the most delicate and cleanly thing that may be. (Ajax 64)

He even includes a marginal note, “This matter is discoursed by Rabbles, in his 13. chap. of his first booke,” to provide a wild goose chase for textual scholars. Harington constantly collides high and low in a variety of racy jests and jimcrack stories to ease tension and deflect criticism through laughter. In fact, beyond easing tension, Harington’s humor forms a precondition for discourse itself on his own eccentric terms. Bakhtin effectively describes the process in The Dialogic Imagination (where he probably had Rabelais in mind but could just as easily have been describing Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax): Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment—both scientific and artistic—and into the hands of free experimental fantasy. (Dialogic 23)

Harington uses laughter to demolish pieties about privies and approach the topic of sanitation without fear. His subjectively humorous analyses of wildly unrelated material lays down a prerequisite for coping. As an example of the “free experimental fantasy,” that Bakhtin mentions, consider Harington’s imaginative riff on Gargantua’s relationship to the topic of privies. Having searched the world for cure of his hemorrhoids, Gargantua does the right thing. According to Harington: He built a sumptuous privie, and in the most conspicuous place thereof, namely just over the doore, he erected a statue of AJAX, with so grim a countenance that the aspect of it,

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RADICAL COMEDY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND being full of terrour, was halfe as good as a suppository; and further, to honour him he changed the name of the house, and called it after the name of this noble Captaine of the greasie ones (the Grecians I should say) AJAX: though since, by ill pronunciation, and by a figure called Cacophonia, the accent is changed and it is called a Jakes. (Ajax 71)

Herein, as in the example of “tesh/shet”, Harington changes names and pronunciations at will. His reckless “Cacophonia” sounds like the messy heteroglossia of voices that Bakhtin declared fundamental to comic style and creative novelistic discourse: Boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole, often through a sentence. This varied play with the boundaries of speech types, languages and belief systems is one most fundamental [sic] aspects of comic style (Dialogic 308).

Harington clearly “plays with the boundaries” as a method for collapsing distance between writer and reader, between information and fantasy, between morality and shame. A gifted comic stylist with a taste for the unusual and risqué, he puts his comedy to work as a coping strategy to purge authoritarianism of all kinds. In terms of comic variety, consider Harington’s joke about the humble servingman, “wayting on his master at the Pope’s Court” who, having witnessed his master “kisse his holinesse foote,” ran away in fear, explaining later “when I saw that a man of your woorth and worship, in so publique a place, might kisse but his toe, I doubted they would have made me have kist him in some homlyer place” (Ajax 189). Or how about the one about Vespasian’s jester, reported in process as if Harington has just found the reference, who “quipped the Emperours ill feature of face, that even when he was merriest, looked as if he had bin wringing hard on a close stoole” (107)? Harington reports the case of a colic sufferer in the presence of the Emperor Claudius who suppressed his wind and died as a result: The Emperour enformed of his death, was much grieved thereat, specially hearing of the cause, and immediatly thereupon made it be solemnly proclaimed that if any man herafter should be troubled with the cholicke, it should not be taken for ill maners to break wind, though it were in the Emperours owne company. (122)

Harington admired this legal precedent so much that, years later, he repeated the story in his own medical translation titled The Englishmans Docter (1607). Here, he cannot restrain himself from retailing the effect of contemporary comedian Richard Tarleton with racy wordplay improvisations upon the term “prepuce” (Ajax 88). Then he gets biblical with a tone of ironic solemnity: In the aforesaid 23. Chapter of Deuteronomie in the 12. verse, I find this text: 12 Thou shalt have a place without thy tents, to which thou shalt go to do the necessities of nature. 13 Carrying a spade staffe in thy hand, and when thou wilt ease thee, thou shalt cut a round turfe, and thou shalt cover thy excrements therewith, in the place where thou didst ease thy selfe. (Ajax 139)

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The Old Testament is not usually so accommodating. Harington provides the above-quoted English translation himself, following the official Latin. His effect is to overturn and reverse the power of Latinate authority. However, he goes even further in homely terms to defend his argument for cleanliness: “Every cat gives us an example (as houswifes tell us) to cover all our filthiness” (175). Therefore, he advises, “refuse not to follow the example of the Cat of the house, to make your entries, your staires, your chambers, and your whole house, the less soure” (176). Throughout, Harington adopts multiple masks of voice, satire, and comic genre to unmask the odor of official distress about toileting. No more metaphorical perfumery and covering up. Instead, laughter airs out and sanitizes the living quarters of life. Women, especially, both signal and benefit from Harington’s reforms. The simple authority of “houswifes” above informs the powerful morality of Harington’s own mother-in-law, in his oblique reference: “a grave and godly Ladie, and grandmother to all my wives children” (Ajax 84). He recounts his mother-in-law’s salutary story of the dung carter, the angel, and the courtesan, wherein a studious hermit, contemplating the great wickedness of the city, crosses the street to avoid the stench of a gong farmer carting away excrement. His angel attendant however, ignores the carter but stops his nose at the sight of a woman gorgeously attired and well perfumed. The angel then explains this seeming incongruity to the hermit: “He was told by the Angell, that this fine courtesan laden with sinne, was a more stinking savour afore God and his holy Angels, then that beastly cart, laden with excrements” (Ajax 85). Gail Kern Paster, in The Body Embarrassed sniffs out misogyny at this point even as she concedes, “this troping of the whore’s body as privy is itself wholly conventional” (154). Harington assures his readers (whom he assumes mostly to be male) that they should recommend his water closet without shame, especially to the women in their lives: If you would know whether you should show it to Ladies? Yea in any wise to all maner of Ladies, of the Court, of the country, of the City, great Ladies, lesser Ladies, learned, ignorant, wise, simple. Fowle welfavoured, (painted unpainted) so they be Ladies, you may boldly prefer it to them. For your milkmaids and country housewives may walke to the woods to gather strawberries, etc. But greater states cannot do so; and therefore for them it is a commoditie more then I will speak of. (Ajax 219)

Harington employs a lightness of tone in his leveling repetitions but also speaks in practical terms with direct amoral imperatives. Paster, however, insists on reading shame, misogyny, and social consciousness, especially, as she sees it, “in Harington’s coy ‘&c.’ euphemism” (29) She observes of the passage: Though ladies necessarily have the same bodily needs as milkmaids and country housewives, they lack their freedom of expression—or what looks to Harington like the expressive freedom of a state of nature implied in the festive cover of strawberry gathering (Paster 29).

But while Harington offers the water closet especially to women (perhaps gallantly, undoubtedly unaware of his own sexism), he most clearly stresses it as a “commodity” with agreeable sanitary properties.

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As concerns the water closet itself, Harington provides installation estimates for specific locations, listing them in ascending order of cost and importance along with elegant justification: I would prayse it in my house to bee worth 100 pounds, in your house 300 poundes, in Wollerton 500 pounds, in Tibals, Burley, and Holmbie 1000 pounds, in Greenwitch, Richmond, and Hampton Court 10000. And by my good sooth, so I would thinke my selfe well payd for it. Not that I am so base minded to thinke that wit and art can be rated at any price, but that I wold accept it as a gratuitie fit for such houses and their owners. (Ajax 178)

He specifies individual prices for component parts such as “cesterne,” “pype,” “stopple,” and “brasse sluce” so that “a builder may guesse what he hath to pay” (194), at the same time as he provides carefully scaled illustrative woodcuts of the components both separately and assembled. These illustrations are provided by Harington’s personal secretary, Thomas Combe, as the author states: “my servant Thomas (whose pensil can performe more in this matter then my pen), will set downe the forme of this by it selfe in the end hereof” (Ajax 172). This section, called “An Anatomie of the Metamorpho-sed Ajax,” gets its own title page, as Anne Lake Prescott shrewdly observes, “walled off from the main text, as though it were itself a privy” (109). But it’s also attributed on the title page to “T.C. Traveller” (Ajax 187), imputing the “travail” of workmanlike illustration and detail. As Prescott again observes with enviable incisiveness: The author is ostensibly Harington’s servant Thomas Combe, for the practical mechanics of the watercloset are confined to the rear of the book and seated a rung or two down the social scale. Yet the style is (im)pure Harington and, hesitantly disagreeing with his learned editor, I suspect he wrote this, too. (109–10)

However, Harington too takes workmanlike pride in hands-on, follow-up service for his invention, as he affirms in the concluding “Apologie” to his book: But if one be a builder and a housekeeper both; then I will come home to his house to him, I will reade him a lecture of it, I will instruct his workemen, I will give him plots and models, and do him all the service I can (Ajax 218).

Harington clearly enjoys the irony of his published expertise on the theory and practice of toilets. By 1602, he had actually installed a water closet at Theobalds. In a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, again referencing his book on the subject, he reaffirms cost value of the toilet and endorses its sanitary value: Ryght honorable. I have sent yowr honor by the bearer hereof a homely present, and thowgh the mettle thearin bee neyther gold nor sylver yet, yf Master Controller of the works or I can judg owght, yt will bee worth gold and sylver to yowr howse. In my ydle discowrse on this subject (yf yowr honor can remember), I valewd this devyse for my own poor howse to bee worth one hundred pownds and in Theballs (as might be in proportion) worth a thousand.

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But seryowsly, yowr honor shall fynde for yowr howse in the Strand, as well for yowr pryvat lodgings as for all the family, the use of yt commodyows and necessary, and above all in tyme of infeccion most holsome. (L&E 93)

Harington’s theory-supported praxis of action is remarkable. An aristocrat installing toilets represents literalization of the dominant irony within The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Moreover, Harington’s “but-seriously” rhetoric above speaks (with all the off balance styling of stand up comedy) to contemporary necessities in sanitation and hygiene.6 In Harington’s argument, the key physical effect is to use water to flush away the excrement and abolish the bad breath of Ajax. Deep latrines and gong farmers will be a thing of the past if society can see fit to institutionalize the septic reforms put forth in Harington’s admittedly complicated book. Great houses, castles, and other live-in institutions such as universities, can be deodorized through Harington’s flushable water closet. Cultural literary critic Bruce Boehrer explains: The trick, for Harington, is to liberate such buildings from an economy of waste retention and connect them to an economy of waste expulsion instead, and his primary instrument for doing so is the sublimatory medium of the written word (175).

Boehrer, however, miscalculates in describing Harington’s rhetoric as “circulating filth” (175). Stylistically, Harington does suffer from verbal diarrhea, but rhetorically he circulates cleanliness. In practical, ethical, and even anthropological terms, filth and cleanliness come close together, constantly provoking distress as argued by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966). Harington’s book does much the same, but in a lightened key for the ironic purposes of disrupting social complacencies and coping with personal distress. To reduce and literalize his technique in terms of simple scatology is to make the same misunderstanding that contemporary readers made about this “mis-conceived Booke,” as Harington terms it in an epigram titled “Against Cayus that scorn’d his Metamorphosis” (L&E 190). Banished from court as a result of the book, Harington takes pride in a later epigram titled “To the Queene when she was pacified, and had sent Misacmos thankes for the invention” (L&E 167). Besides, a letter published in his Nugae Antiquae from his trusty cousin Robert Markham, indicates that the immediate political pressure was off: Your book is almoste forgiven, and I may say forgotten; but not for its lacke of wit or satyr. Those whome you feared moste are now bosoming themselves in the Queenes grace; and tho’ her Highnesse signified displeasure in outwarde sorte, yet did she like the marrowe of your booke. … The Queene is minded to take you to her favour, but she sweareth that she believes you will make epigrams and write misacmos again on her and all the Courte; she hath been heard to say, “that merry poet her godson must not come to Greenwich, till he hath grown sober and leaveth the Ladies’ sportes and frolicks. (Nugae 287–8)

6 In 1981, students at the North Staffordshire Technical College constructed a full-scale working replica of Harington’s invention. For an account of this painstaking project, see Kinghorn (1986). The replica itself figured prominently in “Flushed With Pride: The Story of the Toilet” which exhibited at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in 2002.

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The Queen knows, however, just as well as Harington himself, that such “frolicks” represent his usual form of address. His calculated foolishness is his mode of coping with his ambiguous position: high born, highly educated, ready for action, but never appointed to a serious position at court. Within the Metamorphosis of Ajax, gentle learned mockery privileges a reversal of expectations and possibilities. The “low” attains the “high.” Ridiculousness becomes wisdom; seriousness becomes ridiculous; authority gets subverted. Near the end (no real “conclusion” exists), Harington recounts the nonplussed reaction of his readers, noting slyly: “when they found Rabbles named, then they were at home, they looked for pure stuffe where he was cited for an author” (Ajax 1962: 208). The scholarly gag comes full circle at the same time as it illustrates itself throughout with a variety of woodcuts that suggest multimedia performance along the lines of multiple voices and generic variety. From illustrated sheet music (73–4) to cross-sectioned views of a water closet (196), from woodcut of a toilet in use, complete with accompanying verse (94), to an identifying rebus of a hare, ring, and tun (204)—the book both performs and illustrates its free-associational disregard for form. But such procedures do not render the material frivolous as argued by T.G.A. Nelson (1979) who compares Harington’s imagery to that of Donne and Herbert. Placing Harington in such poetic company leads to forced spiritual interpretations as in Nelson’s observation of Archimedes, “The rare Enginer” illustrated on page 195, as “an allegorical representation of God, who would like to see the world, that sink of corruption, turned into a cleaner and less noisome privy” (Nelson 277). In fact, the “rare Enginer” Archimedes—with possible pun on “rare/rear”—sights his way with great accuracy down the pot of a Harington toilet! Harington handles spirituality more directly than Professor Nelson might like, providing an illustration of a Cambridge don, “a godly father” (Ajax 94), sitting on a Harington toilet and defying the Devil. Moreover, the fish pictured in the cisterns throughout Ajax merely illustrate the unusual presence of water harnessed for sanitary purposes and are not to be routinely linked to the emblem for Christ as Nelson also suggests. John Leland (1982) goes even further, soft pedaling the irony and describing Ajax primarily as a spiritual tract. Ajax, however, is nothing if not physical, even though, as Nelson and Leland both observe, Harington skillfully and satirically diminishes a variety of sensual pleasures and immoral conduct. And yet all is presented in secular terms of the fantastic, technological, and unusual. As Harington ironically demands in defending his “fantastical” treatise: If I had entituled the booke, A Sermon shewing a soveraigne salve for the sores of the soule, or A wholesome haven of health to harbour the heart in, or A marvelous medicine for the maladies of the mind, would you ever have asked after such a booke? Would these grave and sober titles have wonne you to the view of three or foure tittles? (Ajax 181)

Clearly the answer is “no.” And Harington challenges his reader even further, alleging, “you hoped for some merriments, some toyes, some scurrilitie, or to speake plaine English, some knaverie. And if you did so, I hope now your expectation is not altogether frustrate” (181).

TOILET TALES AND THE METAMORPHOSIS OF AJAX

Fig 5.1

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A Harington Toilet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) G.10364. By permission of The British Library.

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Fig 5.2

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Cambridge Don and Devil, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) G.10364. By permission of The British Library.

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A clearer admission of shameless attention-getting could hardly be imagined. Modern critics such as Burrow and Scott-Warren consider Harington’s Ajax to be either a cynical assertion or his biggest mistake. But was it? You can’t take him seriously and he insists that you don’t, but then nothing is to be taken seriously, especially toilets. And yet the famous Elizabethan age of discovery, of letters, of class hierarchy and political insecurity, was also a great age of seriousness. Harington, in contemporary jest book fashion, looked back to Sir Thomas More and Rabelais at the same time as, unknowingly, he looked forward to the Dadaists and Absurdists. Laughter liberates and informs just as much as technology. Harington knew it then, insisting on the urgent necessity of publishing: “I was wont to fight for the jestification of my wit” (Ajax 258). Throughout The Metamorphosis of Ajax Harington layers classical learning, technical advice, shameless jokes, and illustrative materials in a weltering variety of prose, verse, caricature, digression, name-dropping, and innuendo—and all related to the urgent necessities of his flushable water closet in relation to the politics of his time. Such satire easily surpasses contemporary mock encomia to reach out powerfully— and self-consciously—toward unstable intertextual form and heteroglossia of voices. Indeed the final aria of names, places, people, scoffs, accusations, jests, and stories seems as out of control as it is intertextually variable. After a lengthy series of courtroom accusations and counter-accusations concerning the appropriateness of his material, Harington swoops back imperatively and raconteur-like into the text as follows: I know you have read old Scogins Jests. Did not he when the French king said that he had set our kings picture in the place where his close stoole stands: “Sir,” saith he, “you do the better, for every time you looke on him you are so frayd that you have need of a close stoole.” Now I hope I offer A Jax no greater scorn then that was. (Ajax 260)

Furthermore, he brushes off accusations of papist sympathy as “no better behaviour then to tell me my faults at Bath, when I am at London” (262). Politically unworried as ever, he counterbalances his accuser thus: “It may be he thinkes he hath advantage of me because he can prate in a Pulpit cum licentia, but he shall see by this little, that I have libertie if I list, to replie in Print cum privilegio” (263). Harington’s loaded terminology expresses at once royal assent and an inchoate freedom of the press that would be realized only years later. Significantly, his humor combines with a variety of voiced perspectives to nullify any seriously damaging critique. Like a jester, he exonerates himself by the power of his insouciant words but also by the power of popular print itself. Perhaps the greatest irony of it all resides in the fact that English society would have to wait over two hundred years for the medical benefits of a water borne sewage system as envisaged in Harington’s wildly comical imagination. Unlike Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, Harington’s relative anonymity combines with his close proximity to political power in the late-Elizabethan period. His wit and humor speaks directly—and of necessity indirectly—to the politics of his time. As a courtier seeking, but never gaining, high-level political portfolio, he stands gesturing ever-brilliantly on the periphery. His witty innovations in language and action provide comment upon his time at the same time as they provide solace

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from those distressing times. Harington constantly asserts ironic disjunctions and irreverent wordplay in service of a dominant democratizing metaphor of reversal— high is low, low is high; toilets are as important as politics; politics is in the toilet. It’s time to clean up government. Licensed by his untouchable position as godson to Elizabeth I, by his classical education at Eton and Cambridge, by his subversive humor in unexpected situations, and by the burgeoning power of popular print, Harington represents the ultimate Elizabethan jester. But with a difference: he exactly does not have to be a jester. And yet he relies often upon this reversible status for its power to cope—through irony, innovation, pleasure, and problem solving—with intolerable external situations ranging from royal displeasure and military fiasco, to cutthroat politics and allegations of treason, to rural boredom and overlooked ability. That weirdly unprecedented grab bag of literary innovation and scientific vision titled The Metamorphosis of Ajax effectively satirizes the culture and politics of Elizabethan England. Ironically, its author—and there is never any doubt as to his identity—operates at the center of power without executive power. Harington asserts his wit and humor, within the document and within his own public behavior, as part of an alternative coping strategy, as humor on the written record—literally and figuratively—put to politic use.

Chapter 6

Marston’s Absurd Theater: The Antonio Plays If Harington’s extended gag about the toilet-toiling aristocrats is funny, then consider Marston’s drama about Antonio the baby revenge hero. Antonio constantly discovers that he constantly is a boy actor who is constantly uncertain about the script in which he finds himself. He is a character in search of an author. But the author seems not to care, dedicating his work to “The only rewarder and just poiser of virtuous merits, the most honorably renowned Nobody” (Antonio and Mellida 3). The script broadcasts itself as a go-to-hell improvisation that is self-consciously made of and for professional theater. Like Groucho Marx looking into the camera and commenting on the possibilities of the film in which he is performing, Marston’s comedy seems constantly to assert its artifice in the very moment of its realization. The script never lets its audience forget that it is made up of extroverted performance and that it competes within a “mart” of professional play. The OED even credits Marston with first figurative use of the term “mart,” quoting a line near the end of Antonio’s Revenge: “Farewell, mart of woe” (Act IV, scene 3, 177). Both Antonio plays involve spectacularly overwrought incidents of character and action where vengeance, through high passion and low cunning, is made abruptly, horribly, and ridiculously convenient, where—again quoting from Antonio’s Revenge—“Never more woe in lesser plot was found” (Act V, scene 6, 59). Precisely, but not really. Marston’s constant irony promotes absurd theatrical effects, including comic inflation and deflation, and reflexive realizations onstage that emphasize even as they subvert the very genre of revenge. Witness the Pirandello-like Induction to Antonio and Mellida wherein the assembled actors discuss their parts seemingly in the very moment of perceiving them. Bit-player Alberto seems informed on most of the parts, but the principal actor playing Antonio frets about his inability to double as an Amazon. He is, however, quickly set straight on the duplicity of human nature: “Not play two parts in one? away, away; ‘tis common fashion. Nay, if you cannot bear two subtle fronts under one hood, idiot go by, go by, off this world’s stage” (73–6). Antonio maintains his caution in double entendre about “the right point of a lady’s part” (77–8) only to be interrupted by a hitherto silent actor who pulls his sword and launches into blank verse rant: By the bright honor of a Milanoise, / And the resplendent fulgor of this steel, / I will defend the feminine to death, / And ding his spirit to the verge of hell / That dares divulge a lady’s prejudice (81–5).

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Three characters immediately scramble offstage in fear while another laughs off the interjection as pure show business: “Rampum scrampum, mount tufty Tamburlaine!” (86). Make no mistake, we are in a world of outrageous theatrical disjunction and ironic performance pastiche where somebody might get “dinged”. In Marston’s plays the thrust of action is basically sensational, not moral; a matter of contemporary theatrical and popular culture, not ethical consistency excavated from the classics. The energies of these plays are not to be appreciated within causal plot structure or consistent moral stance. Rather, they aim at emotional involvement veering ever towards over-the-top absurdity. Balance and caution are rejected in favor of delectable, excruciating, overwhelming self presentation of revenge, as signaled in Marston’s earlier, more conventional, application in The Scourge of Villanie II: “Hence idle Cave, vengeance pricks me on, / When mart is made of fair religion” (Poems 108; 72–3). Like Christ, who snapped at the intolerable sight of money changers in the temple, the revenger too must drive out all the recreants. But unlike the exercise of justice (divine or earthly), revenge—like theater—must above all be enjoyed in a space created by parody that simultaneously inflates and deflates possibilities. All stances are understood to be slippery histrionic stances. Attempts at impartiality are renounced in favor of overstated self assertions, as in Marston’s aggressive challenge from the outset of The Scourge of Villanie: “Hee that thinks worse of my rimes then my selfe, I scorne him, for he cannot; he that thinks better is a foole.” (Poems 101; 35–7). Likewise the Antonio plays are especially conscious of their ludicrous theatricality and ironic reflexivity especially in relation to audience perceptions and expectations. Herein all characters are comic actors and one’s every statement and action involves the funny business of italicized self-consciousness. Historically, such reckless comic presentation has ensured that potential critics of Marston scramble for cover elsewhere. In the past, avoidance of the Antonio plays perhaps helped to enhance reputations for critical sensitivity. These plays, however, are anything but sensitive. Rude, crude, and theatrically unglued (and the OED credits Marston with first use of the metaphorical term “unglued” [AR Act IV, scene 2, 45]), the Antonio plays constantly overleap boundaries of expectation, convention, and taste. Such excessiveness is seen especially in eccentric and overstated assertions of language and action. After that weirdly improvisational behind-scenes induction that opened Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge, as part 2, opens in the midst of shocking action, as indicated by the outrageous stage direction that begins the play: Enter PIERO unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand, bloody, and a torch in the other, STROTZO following him with a cord.

Piero, homicidal maniac and villain of the piece, outside his daughter Mellida’s bedroom at two o’clock in the morning, crows in triumph as he instructs his henchman to bind the body of a dead courtier to the body of his own living daughter Mellida: Ho, Gaspar Strotzo, bind Feliche’s trunk Unto the panting side of Mellida. ‘Tis yet dead night: yet all the earth is clutched In the dull leaden hand of snoring sleep; No breath disturbs the quiet of the air,

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No spirit moves upon the breast of earth, Save howling dogs, nightcrows, and screeching owls, Save meager ghosts, Piero, and black thoughts. (Act I, scene 1, 1–8)

Granted, the speaker of these lines is as preposterous as he is insane. He implicates his own daughter in fornication in order to further his agenda of revenge against her true love, Antonio. Such action makes perfect sense to Piero, as it does within the play itself, a play that deconstructs notions of sanity and society and the causeand-effect relationships that purport to hold a society together. Antonio’s Revenge pitches itself, in the manner of an overwhelming joke, at sane expectations of interaction purposely to dislocate social and political comforts. Through disjunctive presentation, combined with an unremitting theatrical self-consciousness, the play explodes conventional morality to broadcast revenge in compellingly mimetic ridiculousness. Mark Thornton Burnett cites performance and anthropological critics in his shrewd observation: “Marston experiments with performative styles to demonstrate the effect on individuals of a repressive society in which the use of language is strictly regulated” (319). Presumably Marston’s fellow student at the Middle Temple, John Manningham, noted the same tendency in Marston, to judge by the following anecdotal entry in his diary for 21 November 1602: Jo. Marstone the last Christmas when he daunct with Alderman Mores wifes daughter, a Spaniard borne, fell into a strang commendacion of her witt and beauty. When he had done, shee thought to pay him home, and told him she though[t] he was a poet. “’Tis true,” said he, “for poetes fayne, and lye, and soe dyd I when I commended your beauty, for you are exceeding foule.” (Sorlien, ed. 133)

This anecdote clearly relates the obverse of fashioning an acceptable self. Rather, the figure of Marston in the story fashions an unacceptable self that both revels in and insists on the shocked attention it elicits. Moreover, he inflicts pain through language with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma. To be at the center of such retailed gossip, Marston either did insult the young woman as described or was eminently capable of doing so. The anecdote reads like an urban myth wherein the warning is implicit but nevertheless clear: Beware of this funny, sarcastic bastard. Somewhat in the manner of a practical joker, he means to offend against comfortable sensibilities and to re-order the world by forcing disjunctive surprise. His performance style involves shock, irony, and vituperation, and he disregards polite restraint even in the most innocuous of situations. Critics commonly make reference to the Cambridge frolic The Return from Parnassus, Part 2 to identify Marston’s satirical technique in terms of his well-known nom de plume: “What, Monsier Kinsayder, lifting up your legge and pissing against the world” (Leishman, ed. 241; 267–8). But the terms immediately following strike me as more significant. Marston is referred to as a “Ruffian,” a “royster doyster,” “Aretine” In clear identification with contemporary cultural crudeness, he “Cutts, thrusts, and foines at whomsoever he meets, / … Brings the great battering ram of tearms to towne, / And at first volley of his Cannon shot / Batters the walles of the old fustie world” (242; 269–84).

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Aggressive, offensive, daring, risqué, even avant-garde, Marston’s ingeniously contrived “battering ram of tearms” effectively clobbers more polite and conventional usage in the theater. Writing on the Antonio plays, editor Reavley Gair observes: “By the end of their respective first acts both plays have introduced a new word to the audience on the average of every fifteen lines” (AR 31). Marston’s effect in the theater must have been disquieting at best, or, even better, totally disorienting. Perhaps as a consequence, he gets set apart from other contemporary poets described in Parnassus by virtue of the fact that no positive classical references are made in relation to him. Unlike other Elizabethan poets, Marston’s image asserts itself as recklessly contemporary, not classical or even classifiable. Aretine and comic pornography, explosive rhetoric, surprise effects, wacky vocabulary, vituperation, and disgust—such relations set Marston apart from his contemporaries. This is not to follow Samuel Schoenbaum’s biographical identification of Marston with the malcontented figures in his plays. In “The Precarious Balance of John Marston,” Schoenbaum described his subject as some sort of maladjusted neurotic with a penchant for violence. Of course Ben Jonson, capable himself of extreme behavior, seems to have seen Marston in much the same way, judging by his mention years later in conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden that he “had many quarrels with Marston: beat him, and took his pistol from him” (“Conversations” 601). Jonson knew Marston personally, had been officially indicted with him over the excesses of their Eastward Ho collaboration, and was in direct competition with him for the entertainment penny of London playgoers. Such familiarity might well have bred Jonson’s contempt. Moreover, Marston’s extreme pitch of dramatic situation within his plays, relentless linguistic faddishness, and crazed disregard for tonal balance, seem calculated to put conservative critics on edge, if not disturbingly off balance. But it is the critics, not Marston, who are off balance. Marston’s drama amorally undermines, theatrically mocks, and constantly “batters the walles of the old fustie world” of conventional expectations. Appropriate balance contains very little meaning within Marston’s plays. He is the chief joker and theatrical bad boy of his time, assuming his audience to be familiar and interactive with contemporary popular theater, and using a variety of ironic techniques successfully to surprise, entertain, and emotionally unsettle that audience. Jonathan Dollimore grants pride of place to Antonio’s Revenge as a capital ‘R’ “Radical Tragedy” in his book of the same name because of the play’s insistent breakdown of coherent human subjectivity and displacement of comfortable providentialism. Again and again, through linguistic outrageousness, musical surprise, Senecan quips, disconnected outbursts, and extremely contrived dramatic situations, figures in the play call attention to their artifice. They regularly step outside their roles to comment on the action of the play, make comments totally inappropriate to the action involved, or disavow any sense of human rationality or social connectedness. These features however are a recipe for “Radical Comedy”. In self-conscious artifice, the boy actors of revenge connect most outrageously with the audience itself, an audience that gets enlisted literally within the terms of presentationist artifice. Consider Piero, roaring center-stage with one eye on the audience in self-conscious realization:

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The bulk of man’s as dark as Erebus, / No branch of reason’s light hangs in his trunk; / There lives no reason to keep league withal, / I ha’ no reason to be reasonable (Act I, scene 4, 25–8).

In other words: stop making sense. This is a play, I am an actor, and both are ludicrous. Piero’s thematic opposite, Pandulpho, the ostensible voice of Stoic endurance in the play, likewise “sees the light” of his situation and is even more self-referential: Man will break out, despite philosophy. / Why, all this time I ha’ but played a part, / Like to some boy that acts a tragedy, / Speaks burly words and raves out passion; / But when he thinks upon his infant weakness, / He droops his eye (Act IV, scene 5, 46–51).

Of course the speakers of the above-quoted lines really are boys playing excruciatingly dramatic parts. They pitch themselves at a surprising level of ironic, self-conscious expression, a level at which Pirandello and Artaud would later operate. William Hazlitt in 1820 was first to perceive a burlesque energy about Marston’s work: Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose to tragedy from the ground of comedy, and whose forte was not sympathy, either with the stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient scorn and bitter indignation against the vices and follies of men, which vented itself either in comic irony or in lofty invective. (6: 224)

Or maybe both, as in the bitter invective of Feliche, early in Antonio and Mellida, as he witnesses Rossaline spit unchallenged upon a courtier’s shoe and lashes out against the world: “O that the stomach of this queasy age / Digests or brooks such raw unseasoned gobs / And vomits not them forth! O slavish sots!” (Act II, scene 1, 87–9). Such overstated invective is hardly “lofty.” Later in the scene, Balurdo tries amorously to woo Rossaline but loses track of his thought: “now would I might be the toy, to put you in the head kindly to conceit my—my—my—pray you give m’ an epithet for love” (220-22). Feliche complies with, “‘Roaring’”, and Balurdo begins literally to roar: “O love, thou hast murder’d me, made me a shadow, and you hear not Balurdo, but Balurdo’s ghost” (224–25). Then the “lovers” wander off in ridiculous repartee: ROSSALINE BALURDO ROSSALINE BALURDO ROSSALINE BALURDO (226–31)

Can a ghost speak? Scurvily, as I do. And walk? After their fashion. And eat apples? In a sort; in their garb.

Citing plenty of such comic irony and lofty invective, T.F. Wharton, in The Critical Fall and Rise of John Marston, credits the twentieth-century Theatre of the Absurd for awakening readers critically to Marston’s forms of theatrical disaffection. Likewise attuned to the burlesque reflexivity of these plays, R.A. Foakes, in a famous Philological Quarterly essay, took Marston at his own word in referring to them as

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“fantastical”. I would agree, adding further that Marston’s radically comical, absurd theatre is capital “T” “theatrical”.1 Operating in what can only be called an “irony-free” zone, critics still try to find the answer to Marston’s drama within conventional rhetoric, theology, or philosophy. In “Stoicism and Revenge in Marston,” G.D. Aggeler focuses on classical and biblical antecedents to read Antonio’s Revenge as an ethical attempt to reconcile the duty of vengeance with lived morality through Stoicism. In Aggeler’s reading, Pandulpho demonstrates his mastery over his own emotions by “laughing at the murder of his son, Feliche” (509). But Pandulpho not only laughs: he laughs and laughs and laughs. Three times within fifty lines in Act I, scene 5, Pandulpho is given the line “Ha, ha, ha,” echoing and exceeding in unglued passion the intolerable frustration of Titus Andronicus. Marston signals parodic excess in a key of maniacal declamation, as when Antonio, with a copy of Seneca’s De Providentia in hand (like Hieronimo and Hamlet, Antonio loves books), reads the Latin lines, scoffs venomously in reaction, and then throws himself to the ground groaning, “Behold a prostrate wretch laid on his tomb: / His epitaph thus: Ne plus ultra, Ho! / Let none out-woe me, mine’s Herculean woe.” (Act II, scene 3, 131–3). Ne plus ultra may well be the motto alleged to have been inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules. Prostrate wretches don’t usually quote them. Nor does theatrical presentation provide academic footnotes for the audience. In the theater one hears something louder and quite different as in the blaring reflexivity of Pandulpho’s protest: Wouldst have me cry, run raving up and down / For my son’s loss? Wouldst have me turn rank mad, / Or wring my face with mimic action, / Stamp, curse, weep, rage, and then my bosom strike? / Away, ‘tis apish action, player-like (Act I, scene 5, 76–80).

An actor staunchly refuses to be an “actor.” This is less a matter of neo-Stoicism than it is of frantic theatrical self-realization wherein the audience once again shares the irony of complicit theatrical understanding. To reach back through Seneca and Stoicism for Marston’s resonances is to de-emphasize his more immediate sense of boisterous theatricalism and self-conscious parody. In his full-length monograph on Marston’s drama, George Geckle seeks to exonerate Antonio’s Revenge from all traces of parodic absurdity by studiously linking its many parallelisms in Thyestes. But such a strategy satisfies only academic and reader approaches. The Antonio plays operate more expressly within theater and performance. Nevertheless Geckle traces what he considers to be Marston’s ethical conclusion of “woe” through a tradition leading from Aristotle to J.V. Cunningham via the fourth-century grammarians Donatus, Evanthius, and Diomedes, as well as Sidney, Minturno, Cinthio, Castelvetro, Mazzoni and Tasso—they sound like a woeful list of Marston characters. Geckle, however, is certain that these are critics whom Marston “may also have read” (92). Maybe. But Marston does not “read” 1 My debt to Foakes (1962) will be apparent throughout. Marston himself referred to his technique as “seriously fantastical” in his Antonio and Mellida dedication to “Nobody”: “Since it hath flow’d with the current of my humorous blood to affect (a little too much) to be seriously fantastical, here take (most respected Patron) the worthless present of my slighter idleness” (3).

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in systematic and scholarly ways. Instead, he filches, twists, shouts, improvises, and parodies in a constant search for dramatic effect. His time signatures are not classical: they are immediate, disjointed, and sensational. The Antonio characters have more in common with jugglers, clowns, dancers, and automatic mimes than they do with classical rhetoric. Classical rhetoric is used as background for sight gags. In “Marston, Calvinism, and Satire,” Scott Colley forces a conventional Protestantism too much, but is accurate in his observation that “we can never hope to account for the full range of Marston’s oddities by positing one simple or final cause” (95). There is no “final” cause for Marston’s varied effects except for theater itself, theater in the moment wherein Marston’s “oddities” represent absolute performance. From the first, Marston is interested in local theatrical effect, in extroverted comic inflation/deflation, in absurd and discontinuous action that is critically self-conscious of the very genre of revenge. The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, even Thyestes—Marston entangles all of them and more with intertextual wit and sophistication, verbal pyrotechnics, and entertaining stage action. Consider the first scene of Act IV in Antonio and Mellida where Antonio, like Hamlet, “in his sea gown” hits the stage in laughable prostrate grief once more only to overhear his father grieving aloud, “O lares, miseri lares!” (Act IV, scene 1, 88). Yes, the line is from Seneca but more important is the fact that Andrugio does not perceive his son’s presence as he continues to descant upon his loss and the two move into a beat of dialogue worthy of Groucho and Chico or even Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett: ANDRUGIO

My son, my son, My dear sweet boy, my dear Antonio. ANTONIO Antonio? ANDRUGIO Ay, echo, ay; I mean Antonio. ANTONIO Antonio? Who means Antonio? ANDRUGIO Where art? What art? Know’st thou Antonio? ANTONIO Yes. ANDRUGIO Lives he? ANTONIO No. ANDRUGIO Where lies he dead? ANTONIO Here. ANDRUGIO Art thou Antonio? ANTONIO I think I am. ANDRUGIO Dost thou but think? What, dost not know thyself? ANTONIO He is a fool that thinks he knows himself. (Act IV, scene 1, 89–105)

On Marston’s stage, nothing is certain beyond performance in the moment. And nothing about performance is subtle. Thus Piero’s abrupt opening entry in Antonio’s Revenge, as previously quoted—“unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand, bloody, and a torch in the other”—is less an emblematic stage direction in the Senecan mode than it is an outrageous attention-grabbing effect that explodes with irony (not to mention a Richard III-type exclamation) as Piero, for a brief moment, contemplates the availability of Antonio’s newly widowed mother

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and exclaims: “By this warm reeking gore, I’ll marry her. / Look I not now like an enamorate? / Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother—ha!” (Act I, scene 1, 102–4). This from the villainous figure whose moral awareness itself is farcically shallow. Piero, having murdered Pandulpho’s son, feels a twinge of guilt in Pandulpho’s presence and shares his ‘remorse’ matter-of-factly with the audience: “Fore heaven he makes me shrug; would ‘a were dead’” (Act II, scene 2, 26). Piero even gleefully manipulates his henchman Strotzo into a theatrical confession of all the killings, promising to exonerate him publicly at the last. The two of them take fulsome pleasure in the enormity of the histrionic effects they hope to create— elaborating on the contrived emotion of their rhetoric, the duplicities of their presentation, and the bogus sincerity of Piero’s magnanimous forgiveness—only to have Piero strangle Strotzo in front of all assembled immediately upon receipt his public confession. Conventional expectations are constantly undercut, as when Antonio, agitated by Pandulpho along with the ghosts of his Father and others, vows finally and emotively, “Fright me no more; I’ll suck red vengeance / Out of Piero’s wounds, Piero’s wounds” (Act III, scene 2, 78–9). And Piero immediately enters “in his nightgown and nightcap”, a touchingly ironic and harmless picture of concerned parenthood. Such forced theatricality stresses the ludicrously reflexive energy of performance, as Piero does in Antonio and Mellida when he intercepts Antonio’s letter to Mellida and goes off his head with panicked stuttering imperatives: Run to the gates; stop the gondolets; let none pass the marsh; do all at once. Antonio his head, his head! Keep you the court; the rest stand still, or run, or go, or shout, or search, or scud, or call, or hang, or do-do-do, so-so-so-something. I know not who-who-who-what I do-do-do-nor who-who-who-where I am. (Act III, scene 2, 171–7)

Center stage, Piero jettisons all credible authority as Duke, father, even actor ironically to claim ludicrous authority as performer. He then launches into passionate idiomatic Italian verse as surprise prelude to Antonio and Mellida, together in the following scene, performing in Italian for some twenty lines in manner of a passionate operatic duet. At the lovers’ exit, a lone page remains onstage to apologise directly to the audience for this “confusion of Babel”, and speculate as follows: “But howsoever, if I should sit in judgment, ‘tis an error easier to be pardoned by the auditors’ than excused by the author’s” (Act IV, scene 1, 224–6). That is: judgment remains to be exercised by the audience, not by the author—he presumably has none. Of course malcontents and revengers often operate within a realm of passionate intensity that is rich in radical action but poor in conservative judgment. Such disparity explains a good deal of their theatrical appeal—what Michael Scott, in an essay titled “Ill-mannered Marston”, identifies distinctly as “‘critic-proof’ ‘theatre machines’, confronting the literary conventionalist and defying dominant ideologies” (224). Confrontation and defiance certainly attend the revenge actions of Antonio’s Revenge in the murder of Piero’s little son Julio. The resonances of the scene run as deeply through blood feud and human sacrifice as they do through stage horror and romantic excessiveness. Extremity generates extremity, as consanguine associations of “brother,” “father,” and “sister” sung from the mouth of the innocent

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Julio only further enrage Antonio and compel his vengeance. The scene retains and stresses overstated theatrical imperatives, as Antonio ignores Julio’s infantile pathos— “Pray you do not hurt me. And you kill me, ‘deed, / I’ll tell my father” (Act III, scene 3, 27–8)—ostensibly to kill that part of Piero that resides within his son. Julio murdered onstage, the theater itself reacts to the horror: “From under the stage a groan” (50 sd), just as Antonio conversely revels in blood:“Lo, thus I heave my blood-dyed hands to heaven, / Even like insatiate hell, still crying; ‘More!/ My heart hath thirsting dropsies after gore!’” (67–9). Here, the paradoxical construction and stressed rhyme of “heaven/hell” and “more/gore” represent the whole overstated nature of the play in miniature. Ethical applications collide with and spin off of theatrical possibilities. Moreover, such histrionic possibilities constantly redouble themselves as the life blood of theater. As if to accent and disperse the excruciating theatricality of the preceding scene, Balurdo enters “with a bass viol” (Act III, scene 4, 16) intent on serenading Maria on behalf of Piero. The pun is implicit visually and aurally: a “bass viol” / base vile is neither a solo nor a romantic instrument. Neither is a beat of Marston’s satire. But it certainly is contrived, self-conscious, and visually stressed, as the child actor struggles with the oversized musical instrument. This is the same Balurdo who entered Act 2 “with a beard half off, half on” (Act II, scene 1, 20), accentuating his detached artifice. Indeed in the middle of Antonio and Mellida, Balurdo enters “backward, DILDO following him with a looking glass in one hand and a candle in the other hand” (Act III, scene 2, 116), suggesting the misdirected, well-lit ludicrousness of this comic figure from the very first. And then, at this relatively late point in Antonio’s Revenge, Balurdo attracts further histrionic attention as he very politely and formally, in his own ridiculous words, makes a “most retort and obtuse leg” (Act III, scene 4, 19) to Maria. Balurdo continually stresses and repeats the phrase “most retort and obtuse,” thereby absorbing the image as a feature of his ridiculous onstage personality and of the play as a whole. “Retort and obtuse” becomes a comic gag line, a recognizable lazzo that occurs throughout Antonio’s Revenge, even to the point of capping the outrageously histrionic assassination of Piero at the end. During their obligatory death masque, the revengers dance and discourse in conspiratorial whispers until suddenly Piero is grabbed and tied to a chair, his tongue is plucked out, and a Thyestean/ Titus Andronican dish of roast child is served up to him along with Antonio’s arch comment: “Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lovest” (Act V, scene 5, 49). Pathetically, the speechless Piero “seems to condole his son” (49). Maniacally, the revengers fall over each other in Marston’s further stage direction: “They offer to run all at PIERO and on a sudden stop” (73). The revengers take turns blurting their vilification at Piero: Antonio calls him, “Scum of the mud of hell!”; Alberto: “Slime of all filth!”; Maria contributes, “Thou most detested toad” (Act V, scene 5, 65–6). And Balurdo is given the laughable last word, “Thou most retort and obtuse rascal!” (67). Then, after three delectably retributive stabbings, “They run all at PIERO with their rapiers” (79). Exclamatory, reckless, extreme, and disconnected—the language and action of the play moves quickly and with a self-aware sense of stylized improvisation. Herein, the play’s “wholesale repetitiveness” of which T.F. Wharton once complained in

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Essays in Criticism2 asserts itself as a standard comic technique. Everything within the play is bounded self-consciously by performance. The first word of the revenge is given to Antonio in terms of drama: “Let’s think a plot; then pell-mell vengeance!” (Act IV, scene 5, 95). In Marston’s drama, no better “plot” exists than a non sequitur such as “pell-mell vengeance.” Antonio even enjoys his initial stabbing of Piero with the rhetorical intensifier, “Now, pell-mell!” (Act V, scene 5, 76). In each case a note of reckless disorder is unmistakable, as in Antonio’s disconnected imperative just prior to the murder of Julio: “Have at adventure, pell-mell, no reverse” (Act III, scene 3, 24). The blustering contemporary slang term “pell-mell” seems to cover all the possibilities at the same time as it suggests the indiscriminate nature of the action. And yet the characters of the play try always to assert the finest of discriminations. In this, and in their comic repetitions, lies much of the ridiculousness and conscious parody of Antonio’s Revenge. Piero, actually, is first to use the term “pell-mell” in the play, and he is especially stage-conscious as he spouts residual classical terms from The Spanish Tragedy: “O now Tragoedia Cothurnata mounts; / Piero’s thoughts are fixed on dire exploits; / Pell-mell!” (Act II, scene 5, 45). Even Richard III prefixed his last oration in similar terms: “March on. Join bravely! Let us to it pell-mell– / If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to hell!” (Richard III, V, iii, 313–4). The pellmell play of Antonio’s Revenge follows hard in rigorous and overstated theatricality, a theatricality of absurd commotion that disconnects dramatic conventions and de-centers moral certainties. Every theatrical revenger (like every great comic), must somehow disguise himself, or otherwise evade responsibility to face a corrupt, intolerable, or seriously overwrought world. Antonio presents one of the most extreme strategies of histrionic self-consciousness, as noted by the stage direction that begins Act IV of his revenge: Enter ANTONIO in a fool’s habit, with a little toy of a walnut shell and soap to make bubbles.

This strategy goes well beyond Hamlet’s “antic disposition” to accentuate the ludicrous metadrama of boy actors involved in moment-by-moment theatrical construction of the play. His costume and props visually shout his disposition. Antonio shouts it too in determined ironic resolve: “He is not wise that strives not to seem fool” (Act IV, scene 1, 25). Balurdo, too, promised the same absurd function from the very outset, significantly capping a discussion of performance art in the Induction to Antonio and Mellida as follows:

2 Wharton’s piece capped off a notable controversy in the 1970s when Essays in Criticism featured a “Critical Forum” exchange about parody in English Renaissance drama. Richard Levin (“The New Inn and the Proliferation of Good Bad Drama,” 22 (1972): 41–47) was countered in the same volume by R.A. Foakes (“Mr Levin and Good Bad Drama,” 327–31), followed by Levin’s reply (The Proof of the Parody,” 24 (1974): 312–17) and Wharton’s article (“Old Marston or New Marston: The Antonio Plays,” 25 (1975): 357–69). All parties, however, ended up focusing on Marston’s dramaturgy, a point which says something itself about the compelling power of irony, parody, and flexibility of interpretation in Marston’s plays.

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[To Balurdo] Well, and what dost thou play? The part of all the world. “The part of all the world.” What’s that? The fool.

Discounting seriousness, the fool asserts a new seriousness of the world, a parallel, theatrical seriousness in line with outraged malcontents and extremist reformers everywhere. Besides, in Antonio’s Revenge nobody outpassions the “foolish” principal. Pandulpho in grief declares himself “the miserablest soul that breathes” (Act IV, scene 5, 53), and Antonio—as usual prostrate in grief—“starts up” (53) indignantly appalled to set Pandulpho straight on the extent of misery in this play. As always, Antonio’s lines of rhyme ridiculously draw attention to their artifice: “I scorn’t that any wretched should survive / Outmounting me in that superlative, / Most miserable, most unmatched in woe. / Who dare assume that, but Antonio?” (Act IV, scene 5, 55–8). Passion is asserted at the same time as it is undercut. Pandulpho began the scene with the curiously ambiguous line, “Antonio, kiss my foot” (Act IV, scene 5, 1) as he laid the body of his murdered son literally upon the prostrate body of Antonio. The revengers themselves inter Pandulpho’s son through the helpfully literalist stage direction: “They strike the stage with their daggers and the grave openeth” (Act IV, scene 5, 64), going well beyond Hieronimo’s lonely action in The Spanish Tragedy: “He diggeth with his dagger” (Act III, scene 13, 71), and introducing the heightened final movement of the play. Antonio, in excruciating Kydian passion finally bellows “Vindicta!”, only to be undercut immediately by Balurdo’s pathetic poor Tom-ish interjection, “I am a-cold” (Act V, scene 3, 42). Vengeance—collectively, ridiculously, theatrically—perpetrated, Piero’s body— literally and figuratively—does not even have time to get cold before a hitherto unmentioned body of Senators enters officially to thank Antonio and his revengers for their act of revenge. The first Senator even gestures towards the revengers’ performance in Brechtian estrangement, calling them “Well-seasoned props” (Act V, scene 6, 25). This usage for the word “property” is not recorded in the OED before 1685. And yet Marston’s play never lets us forget that the revengers operate figuratively as structural underpinnings but also practically as the very self-referential material of the revenge drama itself. Moreover, true to the theatrical nature of their enterprise, Antonio and his group merely adopt another role: monastic resignation, with all of its ironic moral resonance for a group of Italianate assassins. Finally, a telling stage direction: “The curtains are drawn; PIERO departeth” (Act V, scene 6, 36). Doubtless the virtuoso actor who ranted and sweated and raved in the oversized part of Piero, exits under cover only to return and perform with Antonio and the others in the concluding scripted direction of the play: once again, as throughout, “They sing.” The power of the Antonio plays resides within the histrionic power of theater itself. Contested points of origin, presumed sources, classical configurations, literalist moral stances, even that great critical booboo, theatrical convention—all these concerns dissolve within the seriously play-full parameters of Marston’s drama. I doubt that any audience ever made hagiographic connections between Antonio

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the revenger and Anthony the saint (Lewis 1989). If anything, “Antonio’s revenge” probably suggested something like “Joe’s revenge” to contemporary Elizabethan ears, or perhaps even the revenge of a “nobody” as suggested in Marston’s dedication to Antonio and Mellida. Antonio himself, like the rest of the figures in these plays, seems never to know who he is, who anyone else is, or even what is happening at any moment in the play. Consequently, I also doubt that Antonio’s Revenge represents much in the way of moral arguments against revenge or against Antonio’s essential villainy as a revenger (Ayres 1972, Baines 1983). If the play exposes anything essential about Antonio, it exposes his essential theatricality and self-consciousness of representation. As T.F. Wharton observed, De-centred and de-stabilizing, anarchically playful, constantly transgressing boundaries of literary convention, politics, or gender, Marston’s vexing transactions with his audience always challenge us, not least by the jagged shifts of tone, characterization, and meaning which are not merely his protective colouration but his very essence (Drama 10).

Such “jagged shifts” keep everyone—inside and outside the text—off balance. Together, the Antonio plays form something of a two-part revenge musical having more in common with Brechtian alienation and the Theatre of the Absurd than they do with excavations of classical thought and assertions of ethical consistency. They are simply too consciously, and therefore complicatedly, burlesque. They constantly privilege ridiculousness and farce to defy thematic consistency as a shallow scholarly afterthought and subvert any moral resolution as a joke. The admittedly outrageous energy of these plays is parodic, melodramatic, ludicrous, and satirical. And they are to be enjoyed as such. Wittgenstein once said that he could imagine a book of philosophy written entirely in the form of jokes. In some senses, Marston wrote jokes that take on the form of a histrionic philosophy. He combines post-Montaigne skepticism with jackass cultural observations, and asserts contemporary pratfalls with sheer ludic energy. Against such radically comic assaults, the “old fustie world” doesn’t stand a chance.

Chapter 7

Sex, Lies, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside Where does one begin when considering Middleton’s comedy? Sex? Lies? Big city London? Satirical exposure of bourgeois vice? Urbanity, requiring a myriad of social and sexual connections? Consider the following self assured beginning that I once encountered on a student paper: “In his play A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Middleton fails to exclude carnival excess.” I couldn’t help myself. I wrote “Thank God” in the margin of the paper. But I now know that I was wrong. There’s no point in thanking God for Middleton’s carnivalesque comedy because his comedy itself is so secular, so smart, funny and theatrical, and so constantly fraught with comic contingency and slippery situational ethics. Middleton did not write this play for God. He wrote it for professional players. So beyond the straight-faced critical booboo of observing that Middleton “fails to exclude carnival excess” one must also accommodate the fact that he includes so much: multiple plots, inscrutable characters, and ironic actions that defy both conventional expectations and polite understandings. I will return to Bakhtinian conceptions of carnival and the grotesque later, but wish to stress at the outset that Middleton’s comedy stresses new age performance. Middleton is a writer for the stage, a figure “daily accompaninge the players” as noted in a contemporary testimony. Like the comic writers in Television City—Buck Henry or Larry Gelbart or Seinfeld’s silent partner Larry David—Middleton is a gifted comic strategist, aware of contemporary edginess and sentiment, of timing and manner, of laughter and tears, of pomposity and subversion. In his own time, he was identified as a “wit”—“Facetious Middleton” as one early commentator described him. Critics—generically certain, anal retentive, and resolutely serious— chronically distrust the truly facetious. And for good reason. Facetiousness suggests an excessive, multifaceted ability to improvise and reverse oneself at will. Two-faced and more, Middleton’s characters have little difficulty in effecting comic reversals and undermining a variety of oppressive —even self-directed—authorities. Here’s an explanatory verse, Epigram 48, “To Mr. Thomas Middleton,” in the anonymous collection titled Witt’s Recreations (London, 1640; STC 25870): Facetious Middleton thy witty muse / Hath pleased all that books or man peruse. / If any thee despise, he doth but show / Antipathy to wit in doing so: / Thy fame’s above his malice and ‘twill be / Dispraise enough for him to censure thee (B7v).

In Middleton’s own time, the term “facetious” had to do with sprightly style and pleasantly jocose manner. And his comedies can certainly be read that way. Swinburne appreciated Chaste Maid, identifying much humor but “very little chastity” even as

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he winningly described it thus: “a play of quite exceptional freedom and audacity, and certainly one of the drollest and liveliest that ever broke the bounds of propriety or shook the sides of merriment” (391). A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (by its very title) signals and forces such ironic disjunctions through social and behavioral edginess, a modern flippancy built on antithetical terms and powered by unremitting paradox. Herein, as in, but intensified beyond, other “city” comedies of the period, material social conditions determine individual consciousness in tough and unsentimental comic truths: Life is cheap. Desire is expensive. Both are pursued exhaustively. New Mermaids editor Alan Brissenden observes that the action of the play “moves in an ambience of illicit sex” (xv). But it does so for the purposes of a realistically bewildering urban grotesque, a Bakhtinian assertion of the lower bodily stratum and a discomfort with the complexities of the world as we fear it might be if only we were fully informed. Middleton’s recklessly carnivalesque critique asserts itself so fully as to be almost a reversal in itself. Chaste Maid is set in London—at once inner city Cheapside and the salons of the Strand. The time is Lent—at once personal abnegation and delirious consumerism. The action is marriage—at once a blessed idealist union and a sordid battleground of sexual distress. Such constant irony evacuates the space usually taken up by authority and replaces it with comic contingency. Oh sure, one could read Chaste Maid as a Christian play, but that would make about as much sense as considering M*A*S*H* a Catholic comedy or Seinfeld as a comedy about Jewishness. But at least M*A*S*H* included Father Mulcahy, and Seinfeld—beyond George’s momentary dalliance with the Latvian Orthodox faith—even featured a somewhat nebbish Rabbi in a few episodes. By contrast, Middleton’s play is peopled entirely by secular folk intent on getting ahead and making the necessary moral short cuts to do so. Invoking Calvinist penitence or conversion as Herbert Jack Heller does in his monograph on Middleton titled Penitent Brothellers does not really fit with this play, reducing it to a satire on Puritans or dealing partially with the moral struggle of a single character. No such singularity of effect or interpretation presents itself within the rapid comic variety of Chaste Maid. Consider class. Near the end of his discussion of Jacobean city comedy, Leonard Tennenhouse decries the contrived patriarchal endings of Middleton’s plays, noting that despite their veneer of realist situational comedy, Middleton’s dramas conclude with aristocratic values inevitably reasserted at the conclusion. Chaste Maid is considered a case in point, and Tennenhouse quotes Sir Oliver Kix’s offer of reward to Touchwood Senior, the debased gentleman Lothario who has just administered “magic waters” to Kix’s wife and successfully impregnated her. Touchwood hereby achieves a form of highly remunerative sexual patronage, as Kix encourages him: “I have purse, and bed, and board for you: / Be not afraid to go to your business roundly, / Get children, and I’ll keep them” (Act V, scene 4, 81–3). Tennenhouse appraises this conclusion at face value in medical and genealogical terms, declaring, However uncomfortable the modern reader might feel with this arrangement, as a conclusion to a play riddled with sexual disease and greed, it nevertheless fulfills the Jacobean conditions for comic resolution. Sir Oliver declares the child his, and the child assumes its position within a genealogical system of descent (170).

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But precisely such a genealogical system of descent has been parodied throughout Middleton’s play. The “big” secret of noble birth perpetuates the “big” lie about aristocratic ascendancy. And such ascendancy continues to be lampooned even at the conclusion, as Sir Oliver contrives the sexual situation of a complaisant cuckold, a situation parallel to that of Allwit at the beginning of the play. The “modern reader” need feel no more discomfort than Allwit’s servants do when Allwit concludes his self-satisfied itemization of carefree cuckold disinterest by launching into song: “La dildo, dildo la dildo, la dildo dildo de dildo.” The first servant incuriously asks, “What has he got asinging in his head now?” And the second servant disrespectfully postulates, “Now’s out of work he falls to making dildoes” (Act I, scene 2, 57–9). His servants consider Allwit to be nothing but a dildo—in either contemporary slang sense of “nonsense refrain” or “fake penis.” According to the OED, Middleton alone asserts both senses. In fact, his servants consider Allwit to be less than a dildo. So much for noble genealogy. The servants in Middleton’s play represent an underclass that lives and thrives by irony, especially the irony of noble birth. In Middleton’s drama the irony is barefaced, straight faced, and unremitting. Consider the unions that conclude Chaste Maid. Tim Yellowhammer, Cambridge undergraduate (and therefore idiot) proves a whore to be an honest woman by logic and then marries her. The whore herself, referred to throughout as “Welsh Gentlewoman,” embraces marriage to the college boy as proof of her “honesty.” Tim hereby jilts his tutor who is no doubt eager to begin cruising again for undergraduate boys. Tim’s sister Moll marries Touchwood Jr., younger and doubly impoverished brother of Touchwood Sr., to complete the romantic center of the play. In so doing, Moll has defied the wishes of her parents who would have had her marry up in society by wedding the notorious Sir Walter Whorehound. Only parents as resolutely class ambitious as the Yellowhammers could have betrothed their daughter to a knight named Sir Walter Whorehound. Besides his country whore, the Welsh Gentlewoman, Whorehound keeps a city whore, Mrs Allwit, to the complaisant delight of her husband. Lady Kix’s pregnancy, however, disinherits Whorehound whom the Allwits immediately and self-righteously reject. As a consequence, Mr. and Mrs. Allwit move on up a few social notches to high class prostitution in the Strand. Allwit even regales his wife with fantasies about renting out to a countess in conjunction with a velvet chamber pot: “Life, for furniture, we may lodge a countess: / There’s a close-stool of tawny velvet too, / Now I think on’t wife” (Act V, scene 1, 174–6). He voices a compressed scatological irony that would have made Harington proud: to have a countess and a comfortable chamber pot is to have everything. In Chaste Maid, hierarchical genealogy and the comfort of noble birth equals high class prostitution, with an insatiable desire for gain and a limitless capacity for both exploitation and comfortable self delusion. But Middleton’s play refuses moral conclusions in a new age Jacobean spirit of horizontal time and space as opposed to old style stratified medieval hierarchy. As Bakhtin famously observed of the postRabelaisian world:

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Relentlessly horizontal in their contacts (if not in their ambitions), the Yellowhammers establish themselves from the outset as middle-class early modern, as monied with a light taste for music, dance, and education, along with workaday scorn for the niceties of Latin. They are future-oriented Londoners in search of success for their offspring and therefore themselves. Morality must be considered but should not interfere with their acquisitive ambitions. They know they are involved in a complicated social game. However, in Chaste Maid, the character Allwit declares the newly urbane moral of the age in game-play terms that are as dispassionate as they are fatalistic: “There’s no gamester like a politic sinner, / For who e’er games, the box is sure a winner” (Act V, scene 1, 179–80). Indeed, any birth signals introduction to an amoral but nonetheless social and comical game. Middleton’s play enacts a complicated urban Darwinism to illustrate survival of the fittest complete with necessary social mutations to ensure that survival. As a cuckold contented equally with his consumerism and his complacency, Allwit might seem to be an overstated case in point. But all the characters effortlessly mutate themselves in terms of self interest. Enter the Promoters, a pair of corrupt minor officials selectively enforcing the vegetarian statutes of Lent. Their initial beat of comedy reads like a three-step recipe: 1. They confiscate veal from a decent poor man trying only to feed his family. 2. Bribed by a wealthy merchant, they let the man pass by with half a lamb. 3. As Middleton’s stage direction puts it: “Enter a WENCH with a basket, and a child in it under a loin of mutton” (Act II, scene 2, 145). Confronted, the Wench exacts a promise from each of the Promoters to care for her basket and then vanishes into the City having effectively abandoned her unwanted child. The promoters drool over their booty. Using up comical time to their disadvantage, but to audience delight, they speculate about cuts of meat: “a shoulder of mutton,” “a quarter of lamb,” “some loin of veal,”—in goofy intertextual replay of the shepherds’ exposure of Mak’s heir, one of them even declares, “No faith, here’s a lamb’s head” (188) even as he reaches into the basket to reveal the infant child. Some years ago, even as he conceded that Middleton’s comic world was one from which God had withdrawn, Slights linked this episode to Mak and the Secunda Pastorum in terms of “the basic incarnational truths of comedy” (“Incarnations” 19). The only withdrawal here is performed by the Promoters themselves in their hilariously aggrieved outrage. “A pox of all dissembling cunning whores” explodes the first Promoter, followed by the automaton literalism of second Promoter, “The quean made us swear to keep it too” (192, 195). Their incompetence soars as they make an official motion to spend the rest of the day drinking at the Checkers Inn, Queenhithe. One can imagine them taking the child with them, or using it as a further bribe. Herein, petty officialdom collides with sheer survival, just as Carnival and Lent collide to reconfigure the world in terms of unsentimental comic tension.

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The Kixes would pay handsomely for the same package that the Wench abandons in relief and that the Promoters reject as, at best, administrative inconvenience, at worst, bad meat. As Theodore Leinwand puts it, Middleton’s social solutions are “unsavory” (135). But a comic edginess constantly cuts short any convenient or romantic comic solutions even as the audience savors the dramatic irony of superior knowledge. Concerning the comic metropolitanism of Chaste Maid, Leinwand observes that “Middleton seems self-consciously to have stuffed this city comedy with the reductio of every conceivable role in the genre” (76). Herein, the audience makes sense of the senselessness of extreme behaviors and urban social complexity. Yet within Middleton’s city comedy there are NO solutions, few satisfactions, and only ironic understandings. At the same time as this nameless bastard child is abandoned, the Allwit/Whorehound child—itself illegitimate—is about to be christened, marking the scene as central to the play in terms of class, comedy, and carnivalesque irony. The very middle of the play—Act III, scene 2—brings together Mrs. Allwit abed with child lately-delivered in the company of six Puritan women gossips, a Nurse, Lady Kix, and Maudlin Yellowhammer. This carnivalesque scene bodily (and bawdily) celebrates transformative Renaissance realism as observed in general terms by Bakhtin: Two types of imagery reflecting the conception of the world here meet at crossroads; one of them ascends to the folk culture of humor, while the other is the bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being. The conflict of these two contradictory trends in the interpretation of the bodily principle is typical of Renaissance realism. The ever-growing, inexhaustible, ever-laughing principle which uncrowns and renews is combined with its opposite: the petty, inert “material principle” of class society. (Rabelais 24)

At this point in the play, folk culture of Lenten abnegation and christening joy collides with mannered personal interaction and judgmental asperity. Herein the women collectively take over the action in complicated subaltern terms of “gossip” status. Noting derivation from the Old English “godsib” meaning “godparent,” Linda Woodbridge observes that “its transferred meaning, ‘familiar acquaintance,’ was probably acquired through women’s frequently-satirized habit of congregating at christenings” (224). The gossips of Chaste Maid are satirized too but in a distinctly ironic way whereby their unofficial “folk” status becomes official. In a recent monograph on Middleton, Swapan Chakravorty specifically adduces Bakhtin, identifying the scene in the tradition of “caquets” (101). Bakhtin describes this traditional cultural meeting as “the usual female gathering at the bedside of a woman recovering from childbirth, … marked by abundant food and frank conversation at which social convention was dropped” (Rabelais 105). Within this gendered democracy—and even in the presence of the socially superior Lady Kix— the women are free to express themselves. It is significant that prior to the exits of Allwit and Sir Walter Whorehound the women behave themselves as gauche and self-conscious, enduring Allwit’s contempt and remarking on Sir Walter’s dignified manners and appearance. Commanded to sit by Sir Walter, the women are all obedient acquiescence. Alone among themselves they do as they please, their overindulgence

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and recklessness registering with the audience as a measure of carnival protest, as an exercise (albeit circumscribed within patriarchy) of gender freedom. More recently, Janelle Jenstad focuses on Third Gossip’s assertion, “See gossip and she lies not in like a countess” (Act III, scene 2, 101), in conjunction with Allwit’s scornful previous observation, “A lady lies not in like her” (Act I, scene 2, 32), to pursue the question literally: “What does it mean to lie-in like a countess?” and “Does Mrs. Allwit lie-in like a countess or not?” (373, 393). Well—she does and she doesn’t, as Jenstad uncovers through a well-researched historical piece that describes furnishings from a lady’s lying-in chamber from nearly 75 years before along with the parallel taxonomy of Elizabethan sumptuary laws. She settles on a sense of double-barreled satire in relation to the Allwits’ upwardly mobile fantasy of conspicuous consumption in relation to the downwardly mobile predicament of near contemporary aristocratic families. But to load Middleton’s comedy with the possibility of social transformation and then accuse it of blocking such transformation is to apply too much pressure. Moreover to appeal literally to “all the gaudy shops / In Gresham’s Burse” (Act I, scene 2, 34–5) is to quote Allwit at his own word and allege falsely (or metonymically) that “Mrs. Allwit is linked not to a community of friends but to the shop itself” (Jenstad 391). Theatrically, Mrs. Allwit revels in her community of friends. She even toasts them with all the pleasure and subtle condescension of a countess: “Here Mistress Yellowhammer, and neighbours, / To you all that have taken pains with me, / All the good wives at once” (Act III, scene 2, 79–80). Allwit himself cringes at the pressure of economic expense even as he revels in his effortless comfort. But he does not revel in much, and any criticism that interprets through his eyes runs a risk of missing the point. This character is at once a blocking miser and a facilitating harlequin sporting the new age mask of a comfortable Jacobean pimp. Jenstad’s literalized historical questions about cost value, cloth value, and price, in relation to noble families in England, risks the clumsy literalism of explaining a joke. Let’s de-literalize further. In anthropological terms, Middleton dramatizes a scene of oppressed female interaction that has its linguistic counterpart in the little-known Chinese form of nu shu or nonsense writing. Ethnologist Yao Souchou identifies nu shu as “an esoteric script by women to express their inner world of feminine friendship, patriarchal repression and domestic practicalities” (194). She describes an example from the southern Hunan province of China: “the coded writing is used by women for recording ritual performances, celebrating ‘sisterhood’ formed outside the family, and above all, for she ku or ‘telling bitterness’” (194–5). All this is staged by the Puritan women of Middleton’s play: they affiliate with each other as “neighbour,” “gossip,” and “sister” throughout this ritualized association. Unlike males, they require a ritual form within which to drink and carouse. Moreover, they “speak bitterness” through their reckless and unashamed female bad behavior. Bakhtin almost describes the scene directly in gendered terms of “public” (hence permissible) male and “private” (transgressive) female interaction: This female cackle is nothing but gossip and tittle-tattle. The popular frankness of the marketplace with its grotesque ambivalent lower stratum is replaced by chamber intimacies of private life, heard from behind a curtain (Rabelais 105).

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And who’s listening? The petty, unmanned, exploitative, misogynist Allwit. Some feminist commentators take Allwit further at his own word, insensitively viewing the gossips’ scene through his judgmental eyes. Thus Ingrid Hotz-Davies in her analysis of the satire: The christening scene is important because it is the only scene in which we see a community of women, and hence this would be the ideal place for a powerful feminist statement. Instead, we see a load of drunken old women accompanied by Allwit’s choric and not altogether misleading descriptions of what is going on. (32)

Allwit’s observations, however, are both misperceived and misleading. The gossips’ scene is a scene of fun where Allwit has no influence. And it moves very fast on page and stage. Within the unthreatening environment of a female party, these women enjoy themselves, express themselves, and indulge excessively. Their interaction is free and inoffensive including even surprising double entendres, as in First Puritan’s observation: “Children are blessings, if they be got with zeal, / By the brethren, as I have five at home” (Act III, scene 2, 40–1). They may very well be unaware of their own innuendo or they may just as well be reveling in it thus intensifying Allwit’s disgust. The “religious spin” that Heller notices (82) can be carefree too, as when First Puritan “reels and falls” and attempts to regain her dignity with the jocose observation: “’Tis but the common affliction of the faithful, / We must embrace our falls” (Act III, scene 2, 196–7). Even as they freely misbehave, these women also attempt to curb their unruly behavior. Within the patriarchal confines of Middleton’s scene, such circumscribed behavior is all that is permitted them. Allwit condems their behavior. But Allwit is snide and full of contempt, an idiotic killjoy totally lacking in assertive power. Curiously Hotz-Davies claims that audience sympathy shifts within the scene to Tim on the basis of his limp asides as the women line up to kiss him. It’s a generous greeting for a schoolboy home for the holidays. Tim himself is a joke. Abashed and impudent, he needs some apologizing for as his mother explains, “In the university they’re kept still to men, / And ne’er trained up to women’s company” (Act III, scene 2, 135–6). College guys, affecting airs of superiority, hate getting kissed by their mothers or by their mothers’ friends. Of course Tim—who wants to be known henceforth as “Timotheus” although his mother will have none of it—is accompanied by a sensitive male tutor, and Tim relies on him to wipe off the gleeful kisses of the local women. Hereby Tim’s comic distress modifies and intensifies Allwit’s more misogynistic disgust at the end of the scene when he cravenly hurls insults at the now departed women:“You had more need to sleep than eat; / Go take a nap with some of the brethren, go, / And rise up a well-edified, boldified sister” (Act III, scene 2, 212–14). Again, any commentator who takes Allwit at his word in this scene misses both the fun and the import of the comedy. In her analysis, Gail Kern Paster inadvertently promotes Allwit to the status of choric commentator at the same time as she degrades the Puritan women into “infantile gluttony and incontinence” (55). However the gossips are only figuratively incontinent, their “wetness” linked to drinking, eating, slobbering, kissing, crying, talking excessively, and spilling wine. After a few drinks Third Gossip reveals that

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her daughter is “too free” (Act III, scene 2, 111) in that she “cannot lie dry in her bed” (113). This admission represents the only evidence of literal incontinence and it is considered unusual. The women themselves are experiencing the freedom of open discussion and noncondemnatory interaction. Again, they are “too free” only within the patriarchal confines of the scene. In terms of carnival, they are perfectly and appropriately “free” as women and celebrants. Focusing on a newly-christened baby girl with reckless hopes and best wishes, the women do indeed see “a small version of themselves” as Paster observes (55). Sadly, they are infantalized by the Bakhtinian “tittle-tattle” of this extended scene. But to focus, as Paster does, on gender demarcation at the expense of carnival is too confer normative value on to Allwit and misrepresent the sharp comedy involved. As in nu shu the bodies of these silenced women “speak” at a level both above and below social contact. Bakhtin affirms: The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body (Rabelais 26).

Allwit, as pathetically modern patriarch, would deny this productive body. Middleton’s drama constantly asserts it as both physically productive and comically provocative. The clearest example in the play of male-female confrontation involves the ongoing marital dispute of the Kixes. Sir Oilver Kix and his Lady have everything: wealth, power, good looks, even a curiously co-dependent relationship. But they do not have a child, and Lady Kix’s grief is unrestrained as she moans, “O, O, O, / To be seven years a wife and not a child, O not a child!” (Act II, scene 2, 134–5). She is in obvious pain. They are in desperate emotional straits. And Kix spares no expense in trying the most recent and most costly reproductive technologies. Of course the wealthy couple has a further financial motive for producing an heir: the disinheriting of Sir Walter Whorehound. And yet the Kix’s wail together—and at each other— with all the emotional distortion of an unfulfilled infertile couple. Their emotional highs, lows, and irrational blame-laying spices each scene in which they appear. In fact the mood swings of the Kixes provide deep comic movements in the play, their hurtful recriminations stabbing each other for maximum effect. Cruelly punning, he calls his baroness “Barrenness” (Act III, scene 3, 42). Rebuffed, she calls her undersexed lord “Brevity” (Act II, scene 1, 151). Kix threatens to “keep some fruitful whore,” promising that “She and her children shall have all.” But Lady Kix stops him immediately with “Where be they?” (62–5). That is: Children? What children? Show me. In the heat of bickering, Kix alleges that Lady Kix enjoyed absolutely no possibilities before she met him. “Singleness confound her,” he declares, “I took her with one smock” (Act III, scene 3, 76–7). Lady Kix slaps back immediately, “But indeed you came not so single, / When you came from shipboard” (79). And Kix thereby positively wilts in abashed self-consciousness. Indeed the image of Kix coming ashore years before, hand-in-hand with an older Navy officer, parallels Tim’s appearance in the previous scene, hand-in-hand with his Cambridge Tutor. Editor Alan Brissenden points to context in suggesting that Lady Kix might also be

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reminding Kix of being a lice-ridden young sailor. Either way, the couple certainly means to demean each other. They reconcile tenderly and momentarily before launching into verbal assaults again at the end of the scene: She calls him “Grub” (114). He calls her “Pox” (115). Lord and Lady Kix make no more sense as a couple than Tim Yellowhammer and the Welsh Gentlewoman do when they attempt to converse at Latin and Welsh crosscurrents. To Tim’s Latin fertur and abundundis, the Welsh Gentlewoman responds: “He mocks me sure, and calls me a bundle of farts” (Act IV, scene 1, 118). Tim, of course worries that her Welsh-speaking might actually be Latin at a level significantly above him. In Middleton’s comedy, communications are as twisted as personal motivation, social possibility, class contingency, and situational reversal—a realist bedlam of thoroughgoing misinformation and misconnection. A knight named “Whorehound” is a trusty benefactor. The Yellowhammers of Cheapside have Oxfordshire relatives craftily impersonated by an inner-city pimp. Sims the porter from Cambridge cleverly translates Latin for fun and profit. The Thames watermen—not known for sensitive perceptions—collectively accuse Mrs. Yellowhammer of being a bad mother. At news of his wife’s pregnancy by another man, Kix declare in ludicrous triumph: “My wife’s quickened, I am a man for ever” (Act V, scene 3, 1). Nothing makes sense. Except to the audience. In her analysis of the play along the lines of current medical technologies, Catherine Belling concedes that “the audience knows everything” (95) even as she raises issues related to donor insemination (DI) and secrecy. But there’s never any secret about Lord Kix’s inadequacy. Nor much about Touchwood Sr.’s outrageous adequacy. Within crude patriarchy, impotent males are funny. Upper class impotent males, especially older ones with a desirable wife are doubly funny. That same impotent male who, like Kix, thinks he is desirable while being cuckolded by a younger man, like Touchwood Sr., is yet funnier again. The play relies on it. Belling suggests that nothing in the play indicates that Touchwood Sr. finds Lady Kix particularly attractive, but in comedy older Lords typically wed younger women. Remember too, Lady Kix’s immediate remark at word that college boys are “kept still to men, / And ne’er trained up to women’s company”: “’Tis a great spoil of youth indeed” (Act III, scene 2, 137). No longer a youth, Touchwood Sr. yet possesses fertility almost unimaginable. In the Kix’s situation, such fertility is also highly desirable. Moreover, Belling also observes that Touchwood Sr. “has his own financial reasons for wanting the Kix’s to succeed” (85). Lady Kix, full of pain and resentment as a childless woman, also realizes that her pregnancy will ensure success almost unimaginable. “Magic water” represents possibilities beyond euphemism that certainly achieve desired effects. Middleton presents a dramatically bewildering range of medical, social, sexual, and emotional possibilities. Within Middleton’s complicatedly ironic patriarchal perspective, however, Lord Kix has been a success all along. His success even exceeds his social precedence. Marketplace power, material wealth, and individual prerogative circumscribe a newly emergent reality within London and within Middleton’s city comedy. Yet Leinwand sees Kix merely as a self-admitted failure, declaring “he represents the total dissolution of the gentry (no progeny) as he sheepishly offers to ‘make good deeds my children’” (133–4). Leinwand further observes: “By settling for

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‘the erecting of bridewell and spittlehouses’ (Act II, scene 1,[146]), Sir Oliver admits his failure” (135). Perhaps. But only momentarily and within a surprisingly enlightened vision of contemporary social service. Besides, in Middleton’s comedy the momentary represents everything—even social possibility. In a sense, Kix takes his wife at her word when she challenges him, “Give me but those good deeds, and I’ll find children” (Act II, scene 1, 149). Her ensuing success in getting pregnant by Touchwood ensures Kix’s ironic success as a noble, an individual, and a man. Belling observes: “Middleton presents adultery as a very pragmatic means of achieving heterologous insemination in the absence of a cure for the husband’s impairment and of alternate asexual reproductive technology” (88). This is hilarious but misses the fact that asexuality and Touchwood Sr. seldom go together—to the obvious relief and perhaps even pleasure of Lady Kix. Women characters within Middleton’s drama characteristically convey the most in terms of normative significance and possibility. In an article titled “Consuming Mothers / Consuming Merchants: The Carnivalesque Economy of Jacobean City Comedy,” Shannon Miller observes the power of maternal imagery as follows: “With representatives from the gentry, middle, and lower classes, the play demonstrates the ubiquity of the producing woman” (81). Indeed situationally cross-class possibilities in Chaste Maid are signaled by the separate birthing experiences of the Country Wench, Mrs. Allwit, and Lady Kix, as well as a variety of reported births before and after the fact. Childbirth, herein, represents problematic wealth throughout—wealth literally and figuratively that suggests itself as beyond the tally sheet of material expense or family genealogy. Belling even provides informative genograms for the play that detail heredity in socioeconomic and biogenetic terms (90, 91). She is very Middletonian in this regard. In childbirth, as in everything else, Middleton excises the morality to foreground production. And yet Miller declares: “At the play’s close, Lady Kix’s ‘blossoming’ belly reminds the audience that her virtue is no longer intact” (82). But it never was. Nobody’s ever is. In Middleton’s comedy, virtue is strictly a matter of situation and contingency. Lady Kix has doubtless had previous pregnancies as she herself declares in her own defence: “I barren! / ‘Twas otherways with me when I was at court” (Act III, scene 3, 55–6). Otherwise full of reproductive morality, Yellowhammer himself has another son mentioned only in a moment of unusual but revealing sentimental rationalization: I have kept a whore myself, and had a bastard, / By Mistress Anne in Anno— / I care not who knows it; he’s now a jolly fellow, / H’as been twice warden, so may his fruit be, / They were but base begot, and so was he (Act IV, scene 1, 272–6).

This, at the same time as he arranges his daughter’s enforced marriage most practically with a man named Whorehound: No matter so the whore he keeps be wholesome, / My daughter takes no hurt then, so let them wed, / I’ll have him sweat well e’er they go to bed (278–80).

Throughout, Yellowhammer is central to Middleton’s manipulations of comic deception rather than romantic recognitions of hope. In fact, Middleton’s comedy

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examines behaviors with an amoral sense of big-city reportage. Incidents and perceptions that would have enraged the morality of satirists such as Jonson or Marston are, for Middleton, a matter of current events. In her essay on Middleton titled “Against Moralizing Jacobean Comedy,” Joanne Altieri recognizes the comic art of Chaste Maid as “naturalistic, low-keyed, completely unexaggerated in its representation of what is, after all, a most exaggerated situation” (184). How exaggerated? Death even threatens to invade this comedy. The very word “O death” is Moll’s first line (Act I, scene 1, 114), spoken in distress as she perceives the presence of her Whorehound husband-to-be. Otherwise secretly betrothed—even sexually active already—Moll Yellowhammer and her boyfriend Touchwood Jr. fake simultaneous deaths to choreograph an outrageous final deception involving the reversal of Moll and Touchwood rising from their coffins to turn their burial sheets into wedding sheets. Surprise cuts across both audience and cast. Nobody onstage or off—even as Touchwood Sr. delivers a heartfelt eulogy wishing that the two were alive and married—is aware that the two are alive and will be married. Then, in a horizontal rationalization worthy of Kix or Allwit, Yellowhammer expresses thrift-conscious relief that one feast will suffice for both funeral and marriage. In Middleton’s comedy, marriage is not romantically realized; it is as contrived as role play, playing dead, or of making a whore “honest” through logic or matrimony. Throughout, Middleton grasps and theatricalizes the exaggerated emotionality of teenage love in constant dialogue with adult rationalizations, idiotic improvisations, and family business practices. The deeply regenerative folk humor observed by Bakhtin, gives way to ironic interactions of overwhelmingly materialist oneupmanship. Whether or not Middleton read Aristophanes, he is rightly considered by Altieri to be an Aristophanic comedian. But more. His detached irony combines with facetious irreverence to rip across emotional reactions and gender pleadings as in Hotz-Davies or Paster. Any moralist or formalist packaging also gets stripped, as in Rowe’s trim conclusion: “As enjoyable as his plays may appear, Middleton ensures that we cannot accept the game of comedy that it portrays” (149). Enjoy but don’t accept? Middleton “ensures” nothing of the kind, especially not the relentlessly Christian interpretations of Heller as argued in his book with the picturesque title Penitent Brothellers. A more inclusive title—suggesting the crowded complexities of character and action but drawn from an equally minor Middletonian character— might be “Walkadine Hoards.” Middleton’s Christianity is doubtless operative at some irretrievable early modern cultural level in his drama, but in city comedy he is a playwright first. His meanings assert themselves as utterly theatrical, carnivalesque and comic, within constant irony and a morally relative grasp of alterity and selfdelusion. Slights observes the effect shrewdly as a Jacobean comic countergenre: A new and persistent note had been struck in plays such as Middleton’s A Chaste Maid, in which fertility is as much a curse as a blessing and the comic society exists in fragments as remote and often uninviting as Wales, Cambridge, and the stews of London (89–90).

How uninviting? Forget about the puny misdemeanors of your neighbor. Bigcity London contains at best unusual behavior, at worst perversions unimaginable,

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wherein a character such as Allwit represents a moral black hole. To him, pimping, extortion, and confidence exploitation of all kinds is reconfigured in altruistic terms. Throughout, Allwit thinks that he is providing a service for others as well as, of course, for himself. More than a business, he represents a lifestyle. His particular carnival is as out of control as urban sprawl, as grotesque as the emotional neediness and contortions of human interaction, and as reversed as the accusation—delivered straight face—that he has actually been sleeping with his wife! He re-inflects indignation throughout but most especially near the conclusion when, having lost his stake in Sir Walter Whorehound’s finances, he puffs himself up, hilariously selfrighteousness, as he attacks the ruined knight: I must tell you sir, / You have been somewhat bolder in my house / Than I could well like of; I suffered you / Till it stuck here at my heart; I tell you truly / I thought you had been familiar with my wife once (Act V, scene 1, 151–5).

Someday, Sir Oliver Kix might very well make the same allegation against Touchwood Sr. But so long as the assets maintain their liquidity, anything goes and self-delusion represents the best form of self preservation. Of early modern London economics, Mathew Martin rightly observes: “In this increasingly complex economy with its multiple layers of mediation between buyer and seller money took on a life of its own” (19). Middleton’s self-interested characters grasp the concept fully. As Allwit summarily declares, “What cares colon here for Lent?” (Act II, scene 2, 86). Satisfaction, measured in money or consumption, represents its own permission. It’s a wonderfully rude comic truth that people characteristically take permission wherever they can find it. Middleton’s comic characters certainly do. And so long as things work out to personal advantage, who can blame them? As the great comic actress Doris Day once said, in a moment of bittersweet self-reflection (and I quote her from her “A&E Biography” special): “I don’t know if there’s a heaven. I guess this is heaven. Where everything is going right is heaven. Isn’t it?” Middleton’s dramatic world is more truthful. In his world characters do not look up to heaven. Instead, they look around at each other even as they constantly angle for personal advantage. The rich get richer, the poor get children, a loathed relative gets disinherited, a couple of teenagers get together, and a part-time pimp even learns to love (as well as reinvest) his wife. Everything within the comical urban grotesque of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside goes “right”—but only because it’s wrong to begin with. How wrong? Absolutely certain, but very wrong—like parents, aristocrats, husbands, counselors and literary authorities everywhere.

Chapter 8

“Of What Bigness? / Huge”: Ben Jonson’s Supersized Comedy Ben Jonson had something smart to say about just about everything and everyone— including just about everyone treated of in the previous chapters of this book. He famously pointed out to Drummond of Hawthornden that “Shakespeare wanted art” (“Conversations” 597), that Dekker among others was a rogue, that Middleton among others was “but a base fellow” (598), that “Marston wrote his father-inlaw’s preachings, and his father-in-law his comedies” (599), that “when Sir John Harington desired him to tell the truth of his epigrams, he answered him that he loved not the truth, for they were narrations, and not epigrams” (598). Jonson also declared that Harington’s Ariosto “under all translations was the worst” (598). But the final line of Jonson’s poem “On the Famous Voyage” links him with Harington in the laxative wish that, “My muse had ploughed with his, that sung A-JAX” (Poems 92). Jonson knew a thing or two about scatological humor, the lower bodily stratum, and the complexities of personal interaction. And yet Jonson’s comic “truth” has only recently come out of the shadow of his moral truth as learned authority, masque artiste, defender of the “plain style,” or even arbiter of normative contemporary tastes. In 1998, Julie Sanders edited an important revaluation titled Refashioning Ben Jonson that deconstructed absolutist understandings of his work to stress multiplicity and pluralism in his various constructions of meaning. In this spirit of possibility, one might consider the great glib profusion of Jonson’s comedy as voiced early in Volpone’s rhetorical question: “What should I do / But cocker up my genius and live free / To all delights my fortune calls me to?” (Volpone Act I, scene 1, 70–2). Take it all. Live the life. Jonson knew the strangely all-or-nothing parameters of comedy. In fact Jonson’s comedy has always been tied to excess—excess beyond even the usual clichés: the more the merrier; the bigger the better; nothing succeeds like excess; it’s too much. The nineteenth century credited his classical authority as heavyweight moralist, but it was all too much even for the critic William Hazlitt who, having declared Jonson as second in significance only to Shakespeare, conceded: “There are some people who cannot taste olives—and I cannot much relish Ben Jonson” (39). In the 1970s, Robert M. Adams descanted “On the Bulk of Ben” even as Jonas Barish backhanded Jonson with the following praise: “His inability to portray the speech of healthy normalcy marks one limit to his immense gift as a mimetic artist” (97). This quite apart from Jonson’s gifts as a performance artist which in the 1980s stimulated interpretation variously as Jonson’s manliness, Jonson’s corpulence, even Jonson’s funnybone—culminating in a spirited exploration of “Renaissance Overeating” featuring especially the “Sad case of Ben Jonson.” In the 1990s, Jonson was declared wide-reaching enough for the postmodernist observation of Julie Sanders

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and others that “since there is effectively no normative heterosexuality in his works, he is in a sense one of the queerest of Renaissance writers” (Refashioning 19). He certainly is queer enough that his critical influence now stretches to Las Vegas and is accommodated within the annual Ben Jonson Journal—a publication housed not too far from the never-ending carnivalesque performance of the Strip. Clearly, Jonson has finally hit the Big Time to which he had always somewhat aspired, if we are to believe his own testimony to Drummond of Hawthornden who noted: “He [Jonson] was better versed, and knew more in Greek and Latin than all the poets in England and quintessence[th] their brains” (609). Admittedly, that’s a rather large claim, but Jonson remains quintessentially significant within studies of early modern comedy and culture in England. He practically “invents” the comedy of humors on the English stage, self-consciously developing and asserting those obsessive characters caught in their own extreme and particular humor. In the Induction to that huge play Every Man Out of His Humour Jonson traces the derivation of the term from its ancient Hippocratic sense of air- or water-quality to its medieval Galenic sense of “choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood” on to his own theory of comic character: As when some one peculiar quality / Doth so possess a man that it doth draw / All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, / In their confluxions, all to run one way: / This may be truly said to be a humour (l, 103–07).

Inflexibly eccentric behavior manifests itself in various “humors” with all of the recondite possibilities that Bergson would distil into a twentieth-century theory of comedy and automatism. But Jonson moved on from the essentials of internalized “humor” to the multitudinous complications of atomic theory in the actions, reactions, schemes, plans, and explanations of three marvelous comic plays, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Ironically, Jonson’s microscopic focus on contingencies of character interaction explodes with macroscopic exposure of complex and barely explicable behavior out of all proportion to circumstances. Indeed the title for this chapter comes from that early inquiry of Volpone—himself 80 years old going on 25—as to the size of the bribery of those other old farts who hope to impress him, outlive him, and finally inherit his huge estate. Fat chance— although they do indeed outlive him in a variety of morally corrected if dissatisfying ways. Having thus appropriately “snaffled” his moral critics as to the corrections of Comedy, Jonson moves on to the more open-ended and complicated conclusions of Face and Lovewit, Morose and Truewit, and Overdo and everyone—onstage and off—at the end of their specific comedies. In all cases, Jonson’s comedy constantly promises more. In this chapter, I argue that Jonson’s comedy contains even as it asserts all the radical survivalist impulses pulled together in the Zany, the Spoil-Sport, and the promise of success. In doing so he combines early humor and lyrical farce within dramatic Rabelaisian pileups, and outrageous punishments, to assert a carnivalized sense of large-store, comic survival. He represents massive collisions of the medieval and the renaissance, the classical and the modern, even the classical and the grotesque, to assert an aesthetics of wild association, frantic heterogeneity, and

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complicated comic variety barely hinted at in the oft-quoted “Argument” that fronts The Alchemist: Our Scene is London, ‘cause we would make known, No country’s mirth is better than our own. No clime breeds better matter, for your whore, Bawd, squire, imposter, many persons more, Whose manners, now call’d humours, feed the stage: And which have still been subject for the rage Or spleen of comic writers. (5–11)

Bakhtin sets forth such comic proportions in material terms of time and table: As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. (Rabelais 10)

In performance, The Alchemist enacts a wonky clockwork brilliance as argued in Jonson’s Magic Houses by Ian Donaldson and perceived even by the character Subtle who avers of his own interior vengeance: “The quickly doing of it, is the grace” (Act IV, scene 3, 104). In the next act another character—in ludicrously pompous Puritan terms—declares literal time and place of the opening performance: “Upon the second day of the fourth week, / In the eighth month, upon the table dormant, / The year, of the last patience of the Saints, / Six hundred and ten” (Act V, scene 5, 102–05). Any audience finds itself surviving along with the actors, in the play, in the same house, along the same lines of great-time consciousness—from 1610 to now. Jonson, in person, definitely busied himself with the time-sensitive completion of his Workes, but even he was aware that they outlived him on the stage in a sense of time not subject to the usual categories. Nor was the reception of his plays ever within his control, to judge by his vexed relation to audiences and actors as well as the over-the-top contract with his audience that forms the Induction to Bartholomew Fair. And yet a curiously primal agrarian impulse informs Jonson’s urbane comic heft, as in the opening lines of his Masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue: “Room, room, make room for the bouncing belly, / First father of sauce, and deviser of jelly, / Prime master of Arts, and the giver of wit, / That found out the excellent engine, the spit” along with many other kitchen and farming implements, recipes, place settings, preservatives, and huge table helpings, ensuring that “[By] eating and drinking until thou dost nod / Thou break’st all thy girdles, and break’st forth a God.” Likewise in Christmas, His Masque a couple years before in 1616, old, overweight Father Christmas breaks into a court feast with his various unruly sons and daughters significantly named: Misrule, Mumming, Carol, Minced Pie, Baby Cake, and Wassail. Culturally, these disruptive antimasque figures reach all the way back to Mak’s Christmas impostures, appetites, and radical athletic incursions of the impossible. Collectively, they represent the high culture version of English folk custom at the mid-winter festivity, typically including a Lord of Misrule and other

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Mummers such as the zany figures Pickle Herring, Pepper Breeches, Maid Marion, and Master Allspice who dance together and stamp their feet to bring the old year metaphorically back to life as a gift of survival and escape from poverty within in the New Year and for all time. In The Alchemist, Jonson’s updated “low” culture version of such hopes voices itself ironically in the verse of Sir Epicure Mammon, a debauched knight with hugely overwhelming consumerist visions of his table after gaining the Alchemical Answer in the form of the Philosopher’s Stone: My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded, With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels’ heels, Boil’d i’ the spirit of Sol, and dissolv’d pearl, (Apicius’ diet, ‘gainst the epilepsy) And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamond, and carbuncle. My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calver’d salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys: I myself will have The beards of barbels serv’d instead of salads; Oil’d mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dress’d with an exquisite, and poignant sauce; For which, I’ll say unto my cook, “There’s gold, Go forth, and be a knight.” (Act II, scene 2, 72–87)

In theory, of course, for 30 pounds a cook could indeed become a knight in King James’s administration and find a place at the far end of the banquet table at Court. Jonson, although he never demeaned himself with a knighthood, did indeed often sit at the table of the great and probably did just as often resent his placement. At least he did on one occasion, as recounted to Drummond of Hawthornden, when he dined with Robert Cecil: Being at the end of my Lord Salisbury’s table with Inigo Jones, and demanded by my lord why he was not glad, ‘My Lord’, said he, ‘You promised I should dine with you, but I do not’, for he had none of his meat, he esteemed only that his meat which was of his own dish. (469)

Herein, Jonson radically aspires to the same material nourishment as his betters. There’s a completely reversible comic vision in that impulse—a fantasy vision captured in Jonson’s momentary perception “To Penshurst”: “Where the same beer, and bread, and self-same wine, / That is his Lordship’s, shall be also mine” (Poems 97). Perhaps the same impulse is voiced radically and summarily by Ananias in The Alchemist: “I hate traditions: / I do not trust them” (Act III, scene 2, 106–7). In his Introduction to Jonsonians: Living Traditions, Brian Woolland allows that traditions “are not so much fixed bodies of knowledge as active and evolving processes” (2). Of course Ananias, as a nearly self-destructive zealot, is not to be taken too seriously, but then what is? Jonson’s rambling testimony as taken down by Drummond of

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Hawthornden? His opinion of Inigo Jones? The game of Vapours in Bartholomew Fair? Antimasques of dancing bottles and food-come-to-life superseded ironically by their betters in the Masque proper? Or even Lady Would-be’s absurd imprecation, “I pray you, lend me your dwarf” (Volpone Act III, scene 5, 29). Indeed how serious can any of it be if we recall even part of the menu promised when “Inviting a Friend to Supper”: Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate, An olive, capers, or some better salad Ush’ring the mutton; with a short-legged hen, If we can get her, full of eggs, and then, Lemons, and wine for sauce: to these, a cony Is not to be despaired of, for our money. (Poems 70)

All this is promised at a supper featuring oral readings of the classics but definitely no Jonson poems, free drinks at the table but definitely no hangovers. Nothing to despair of here: All this and so much more in an invitation to dine “freely but moderately.” In his essay titled “Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson,” Bruce Boehrer rightly asks: How is it possible to dine ‘freely but moderately’ on a menu that includes eleven flesh or fowl courses, together with cheese, fruit, pastry, salad, eggs, and large quantities of wine? (1073).

At all points, Jonson’s work in poetry, prose, and drama is to be consumed largely without regard to consequences or to satiation. Such radical comedy promises innovation, not satiation. Writing of that other great, gargantuan gourmand, Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin affirms the positive, unfinished, ever-acting, political aspect of the grotesque consuming body as follows: The body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense. … Man’s encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits between man and the world are erased, to man’s advantage. (Rabelais 281)

Volpone erases just such limits at the end of Act one. Realizing that his deception has taken full hold of his rivals, he paws his treasure and exclaims his pleasure through disconnected joy: “Why, this is better than rob churches yet, / Or fat by eating, once a month, a man” (Act I, scene 5, 91–2.). Further erasure is suggested by Volpone’s “handsome, pretty, customed bawdy-house” (Act V, scene 7, 12) which, as Ronald Huebert observes, “he mentions with the kind of affection you’d expect from a pimp who made a big enough killing to retire” (56). Such observation suggests also the blank amorality of Volpone as a smug pimp with a love of gold reconfigured in contemporary terms as personal accoutrement or “bling.” He’s an attractive, vaguely ludicrous, but also a surprisingly insightful pimp for all time, especially when one considers his almost wistfully self-conscious, exclamatory observation early in

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the play: “What a rare punishment / Is avarice to itself!” (Act I, scene 4, 142–3). He sounds as morally blank as Barabas from The Jew of Malta or Yellowhammer in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Those characters, however, voice their greed as a matter of tactical improvisation. For Volpone, it’s a complicated type-A inner drive that will not allow him to stop even in his old age. As inveterate player in the rolewithin of Scoto, along with other histrionics, Volpone represents a fake, playing the part of a fake to dupe a jealous husband and bed the young wife. This performance seems absolutely convincing only to Sir Politic Would-be, an over-conscientious English politician. Volpone is a “player” in the same league as Subtle, Face, the more recondite sharpers of Bartholomew Fair, professional actors then and now, and elite confidence tricksters everywhere. From a radical perspective, the great power of Volpone—as of all Jonson’s comedy—is that it can sell you to yourself. Buyer, beware. A play such as The Alchemist enacts innovative bargaining throughout where characters and actions teeter always on the edge of life-changing discovery or embarrassing exposure. Herein an alchemistry of hopes, ideas, styling, self-concept, world-view, politics, reality, and understanding all combine within the possibilities of a future that exists only moments away. Another word for all this is farce. But farce within Jonson’s purview is never simple. Character and plot recede behind a stage world of action, reaction, and momentary connection that foregrounds the accomplishments and failures of life. In this regard, alchemical distillation represents the controlling metaphor of the play: 1. Free the essence of the metal though heat; 2. Purify the metal by reducing it to ashes; 3. Reunite the essence with the purified metallic base. That all this is impossible need not be considered. It is conceivable and therefore in some sense possible—an image of molecular human vitality bargaining with the overwhelming power of the world. Such accomplishments and failures take place moment by moment. That The Alchemist takes place within a time of plague only adds to the crucially high stakes involved where everyone is looking for a sign—a sign of life-asserting success or of utter failure and dissolution. As with Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare, everyone has a crucial story to tell, but here nobody focuses on plague. Instead they focus on themselves. In a recent article titled “‘You Need Not Fear the House’: The Absence of Plague in The Alchemist,” Patrick Phillips reads the play as “a response to—and even a ‘remedy’ for—the very real and deadly epidemic of 1610” (44). Jonson’s characters hereby perform Dekker’s grim ironies of consideration through contagious misguided enthusiasms and even a sense of metadramatic overcrowding that abolishes literal fear through comic performance. The comedy of The Alchemist radiates from extreme contrasts between characters such as the massively, gluttonously deluded Sir Epicure Mammon, the pathetically smartass gambler Dapper and the ever hopeful shopkeeper Drugger who, humbly through decorating advice, “would be glad to thrive” (Act I, scene 3, 13). The Puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome represent parallel dishonesty from a distinctly self-righteous vantage point. The crooks, Subtle, Face, and Dol, work hard

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to perform the scams required to feed the hopes desired in each and every case. Moreover, they provoke instant recognition within the plot of the play, as they open the action through blistering accusations and counter accusations. Likewise, the final lines of the preceding “Argument” reveal the whole linear plot of the play in little: Much company they draw, and much abuse, / In casting figures, telling fortunes, news,/ Selling of flies, flat bawdry, with the stone: / Till it, and they, and all in fume are gone (9–12).

None of it is real. But all of it is overwhelming. Constantly surprising incursions of language, character, and action finally resolve themselves into a conclusion of “goodbye” nonexistence. As comedy in process, The Alchemist represents a change of state from accepted faith to speculative possibility. Herein the plague moves from the static and neverchanging Moral Punishment of God to the actively opportunistic infection of a specific microorganism; distillation moves from magical mist to the process of evaporation; and politics moves from moral family affiliation to the situational ethics of tactical choice. But no one in 1610 knows the secret that explains any of these occurrences. Nor do many people today. In every case, an overpoweringly complex vocabulary stands in for—and even explains—the truth, as when Subtle points out that all metals “would be gold, if they had time” (Act II, scene 3, 136), and pronounces as follows with all the searching gravity of crackpots and tricksters everywhere: “’twere absurd / To think that nature, in the earth, bred gold / Perfect, i’ the instant. Something went before” (137–9). Anyone who inquires—defensively, scornfully, or even vaguely interested—as to what that “something” is will become a part of the overwhelming process. Don’t ask. They’ll tell. The character Surly, for all his defensiveness, falls into the trap by asking, “Ay, what is that?” and the “learned” alchemist hammers him with an avalanche of barely decipherable terminology and detail, delivered in an attitude of measured certainty, for over thirty-five lines. A similar effect is created later as Dol enters “in her fit of talking” (Act IV, scene 5, sd) and neither Mammon, nor Subtle, nor Face can get a word in edgewise for some thirty lines. As a disciple of religionist Hugh Broughton (or L. Ron Hubbard, or Sun Myung Moon), Dol spouts the verbal cover of crackpot theology while the others confer in all seriousness and Mammon effectively gets the brush off. Dol deserves appreciation as a “woman on top.” The physical version of this vocal farce occurred earlier when Dapper, ritually rinsed in vinegar, fasting, having “cry’d hum” “and as oft buzz” (Act III, scene 5, 2, 3) and blindfolded, gets shaken down to the last coin by Subtle and Face to the accompaniment of Dol on the cithern and their own contrived fairy language consisting of ti, to and ta. In Better a Shrew than a Sheep (2003), feminist comic commentator Pamela Allen Brown reads Dol in relation to the philosopher’s stone itself as well as to barely subdued erotic discipline in relation to Dapper and to the other two cons with whom she associates herself (163–4). With Subtle and Face, Dol performs as implicit histrionic counterpart to the equally implicit arcana criminalis that Slights, in Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy, cogently argued as the very “foundation” of The Alchemist. Contemporary alchemist John Dee was also involved in the development of spherical trigonometry

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and Kepler was even casting horoscopes at the time. The secrets of math, physics, chemistry, religion, and engineering were all entangled. The secrets of Newton, Boyle, Darwin, Marx, Einstein, and even Derrida, were yet to be promulgated—but they were already there. Of course in The Alchemist the whole thing “blows up”—literally and figuratively—at Lovewit’s return to his house in Blackfriars. Like a parent returning too early from a holiday, Lovewit discovers the house in shambles and quickly figures out what has been going on. Unlike a parent, however, he readily enters into a party mood. What Mathew Martin observed as the “alchemical theater” of Subtle, Face, and Dol, a “laboratory” for testing the possibilities of a variety of gullible characters, becomes a newly renovated house of resort with comic possibilities already built-in—and not fully to Lovewit’s advantage. Martin shrewdly describes the new situation that manifests itself at the end: Lovewit has his own desires and susceptibilities, which Face manipulates to pull off his last and greatest scam. He persuades Lovewit to play the role of the Spanish Don and so suckers him into a January-May match with a young woman seemingly open to any suggestion and in whom Face has previously expressed sexual interest. (110)

That’s a subtle conclusion at Lovewit’s return: the party’s over when actually it’s just getting started, renewing itself in a context merely modified from what went before. Subtle moves on even as he and Face continue to exchange insults. Dol will play “Madam Suppository” (Act V, scene 5, 13) somewhere else. Mammon’s self-admitted “voluptuous mind” (Act IV, scene 5, 74) will seek other outlets. Furthermore, as “indulgent master” (Act V, scene 3, 77), “Jovy boy” (Act V, scene 5, 144), or Face’s ultimate triumph of manipulation, Lovewit will never be the same. Or will he? Metadramatically, he’s back “in the house” at Blackfriars where wit represents the most prized commodity, comedy knows no boundaries, and theatrical imagination contains no rules. At the very end, in further metadramatic expansion, Face enters directly into the consciousness of the audience as he promises, if acquitted—and he has proven that he always is—“To feast you often, and invite new guests.” The party never ends. For Bartholomew Fair, as Jonson’s most extreme comedy, the “enormities” likewise never end. This play literalizes itself within carnivalized festivity, a prescribed period of time-out behavior that is officially registered on the calendar and cordoned off within Smithfield but actually located within unofficial performances, suspensions of hierarchical structure, enjoyment of disguise, and general spirit of abandonment. Modern English playwright and director Peter Barnes has worked with Jonson’s drama, and he registers both critical praise and directorial perception within this particular comedy: At the heart of his work is Bartholomew Fair, a massive fresco, packed with thirty-two characters, all shouting for attention, plus some six competing storylines. There are no leading characters. Or rather, there are thirty-two leading characters; no one dominates and everyone uses their time and space on stage to maximum effect. This is surely democracy in action. (43)

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It is certainly multiplicity in action. Comedy and democracy combine within Barnes’s concept as cultural populism, a messily joyful classlessness that collapses distance between people and encourages free, familiar, profane, and uncontrolled contact within a variety of competing discourses. Bakhtin’s sense of grotesque assertion, heteroglossia of voices, and carnivalesque reversal also deserves consideration here within Jonson’s comic sense. Such radical traction works with and against Jonson’s preconceived classicism. Those critics who focus on the antitheatrical framing of the Induction tend to miss the reforming playfulness of the play. Leah Marcus famously even admitted as much. In an essay titled “Of Mire and Authorship” she revised her court-centered earlier thesis in The Politics of Mirth to see the comedy freshly from below. As Marcus puts it, Considered from the bottom up instead of from the top downward, Jonson’s hedges against free interpretation are desperately futile attempts at containing his own ludic impulses along with the populist energies he purported to despise (177).

Bartholomew Fair has it both and every way. In their problematizing cultural critique, Stallybrass and White intuit a particular effect of non-containment common to early European fairs as “a form of defamiliarization in which the romantic-commercial novelty of foreign commodities confronted and relativized local custom” (37). As a consequence, “The fair ‘turned the world inside out’ in its mercantilist aspect just as much, if not more, than it ‘turned the world upside down’ in its popular rituals” (37). In mercantile and political terms, things change. The eccentric characters and radical reversals of comic drama likewise effect change in personal and political consciousness, sometimes forcing significant reversal as will be seen in the character of Zeal-of-the-land Busy when confronted by radical puppetry or the character of Justice Overdo when confronted with his own ridiculousness. To credit such modification and reversal as necessarily in the service of the political state is to disengage from the play to favor the Induction, to disengage from the Fair to favor the cleanup, or to misconceive the fair in anachronistic terms of the contemporary mall or shopping center. Admittedly both the early modern fair and the contemporary shopping mall represent experiences in simulation where consumption and entertainment are closely intermixed, where commerce equals gambling and rules are made to be circumvented. But such grotesqueries of relativism and defamiliarization have always played a significant role in radical comedy. Bartholomew Fair both exemplifies and appeals to these radical energies of theater where competitive participating bodies get constantly, grotesquely, informatively out of control. In defining the grotesque body in opposition to the classical, Bakhtin differentiates between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle Ages, in a different aspect of its life, and a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world. As conceived by these canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed. (Rabelais 29)

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None of these preconceived “canons” pertains to Bartholomew Fair. Besides, popular festive forms even in the classical world enjoyed loose associations, local habitations, and even the names of problematic (and variously protuberant) inspirational deities such as Mercury, Cupid, Prometheus, and most especially, Bacchus. The dishes and delights that are so massively offered and consumed within Jonson’s comedy take on similar forms, perhaps nowhere so subversively as within the Royal masque itself wherein Jonson declared his own poetry to be the very soul of the experience. But then again one would have to go a long way within early modern English drama to encounter the robust festival reversals, literalized assertions of lower bodily strata, and even basic acts of “pigging out” that suffuse Bartholomew Fair. Huebert shrewdly marks a transition within Jonson’s stage practices: “The chicanery by which the world is run in Volpone and Epicoene goes through a further stage of refinement and emerges in The Alchemist as absurdity” (64) while seeing Bartholomew Fair as “an outrageously comprehensive act of self-parody” (66). But I would deemphasize Barish’s biographical relation of Jonson and self-parody to credit Marcus’s more complicated cultural sense. Bartholomew Fair springs the parameters of comedy within remarkably open-ended possibilities that involve a huge cast, a variety of motivations, actions, accents, disguises, and intertextual discourses. Here the active center involves a would-be writer, Littlewit, intent on viewing a production of his puppet play at the annual Smithfield fair herein coterminously named and staged within Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. In love with his wife as well as with his wit, this minor official is also pleased with the marriage license he has just penned for wealthy ward Grace Wellborn and Bartholomew Cokes, a delightfully sociable but congenital idiot. Justice Overdo, Grace’s guardian, attends Bartholomew Fair undercover, ludicrously disguised in the person of Mad Arthur of Bradley intent on spying out social and behavioral “Enormities.” Blithely unaware of his own ridiculousness, Overdo justifies his authority as he comments on his own enormity of disguise: “They may have seen many a fool in the habit of a Justice; but never till now, a Justice in the habit of a fool” (Act II, scene 1, 7–9). Such relativism represents the overstated histrionics of the play as a whole whereby authority itself effects democratizing reversals that are outrageously ironic as comedy and powerfully transformative as culture. Jonson literalizes his materials through comic parody and contemporary representation. The annual cloth fair and livestock show, occurring in London since the Middle Ages on the feast of St Bartholomew, had grown by 1614 into a huge civic free-for-all characterized by overcrowding (even by London standards), celebration, excitement, performance, and display—but also by deception, cheating, drunkenness, petty crime, and exploitation. Ursula, bootlegger and profane pork roaster, along with a variety of punks, pimps, and tricksters, combines with Bartholomew Cokes, ultra-rich simpleton and compulsive shopper, to assert a spirit of limitless indulgence and comical misbehavior. In fact as out-of-control, carnivalized Queen of Mis-rule, Ursula crosses the usual boundaries, as evidenced early by her imperative demand, “Did not I bid you should get this chair let out o’ the sides for me that my hips might play?” (Act II, scene 1, 63–4). Likewise, Jonson looks back to the classics only in terms of parody as Overdo constantly encounters “enormities”—his personal gag line—at the Fair and exclaims, “O tempora! O mores!” (Act II, scene 2, 114), in

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mock-Ciceronian distress. Overdo’s counterpart in mock-authority is the illiterate baker-turned-Puritan-preacher, Zeal-of-the-land Busy, who at first refuses to attend but, manipulated by Littlewit who claims that his pregnant wife craves pork, agrees to make an exception. Sniffing meat on the grill, Busy clarifies his moral abnegation within the stage direction “scents after it like a hound” (Act III, scene 2, 79), followed by his further moral relativism, rhetorically amplified as teaching sermon, gluttonous drooling, and ludicrous self justification: And it were a sin of obstinacy, great obstinacy, high and horrible obstinacy, to decline or resist the good titillation of the famelic sense, which is the smell. Therefore be bold (huh, huh, huh), follow the scent. Enter the tents of the unclean, for once, and satisfy your wife’s frailty. Let your frail wife be satisfied; your zealous mother, and my suffering self, will also be satisfied. (80–6)

Anyone seeking “satisfaction” might better make application to Ursula as the ironic— and not so ironic—main authority of the play and purveyor of rude social truth. Both Overdo and Busy represent the “too-muchness” of social authority within a carnivalized context where the court of last resort is really only a court of small claims known as “Pie-powders.” Some court. Both authority figures fail miserably and laughably in their attempts to assert social and religious values. Disguised as a madman given to public oration, Overdo launches into a rant against smoking and drinking that stretches over a scene of some one hundred and forty lines. He hits the high note of purity against tobacco with the blustering rhetorical question, “And who can tell if, before the gathering and making up thereof, the alligator hath not piss’d thereon?” (Act II, scene 6, 24–5). At the same time others onstage mimic and ridicule Overdo in his overdone rant, Cokes’s pocket gets picked, and Overdo himself get accused of the theft and summarily beaten for the crime. He eventually shares time in the stocks with Busy, while the lesser authority figure of Wasp literally finds a way out: “As they open the stocks, WASP puts his shoe on his hand, and slips it in for his leg” (Act IV, scene 6, 77, sd). Some authority. In this play, authority constantly gets over-turned and exposed by a variety of ludicrous actions and knockabout punishments as well as by a life-changing debate on censorship between Pastor Busy and a puppet. Their “debate,” however, sounds like a heated game of vapours based on contradictory sexuality, until the puppet lifts up his gown without shame to demonstrate that “we have neither male nor female amongst us” (Act V, scene 5, 97–8). Even worse for Busy, the puppet condemns his hypocritical Puritan pronouncements and lack of theological training as follows: I’ll prove, against e’er a Rabbin of ‘em all, that my standing is as lawful as his; that I speak by inspiration, as well as he; that I have as little to do with learning as he; and do scorn her helps as much as he (102–5).

Examining self-knowledge in Bartholomew Fair as illustrative of the ‘ends’ of a bourgeois humanist education,” Tudeau-Clayton assumes this point to be the climax of the play, “an allegory of its own conditions as performance in the public theatre” (178). But such narrowing of perspective vitiates the “overdone” complexity of the comedy wherein, as Tudeau-Clayton readily admits, “participatory forms of

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culture including theatrical performance may offer alternative forms of knowledge” (194). The play signposts just such a possibility within the game of “Vapours” that dominates Act four: Here they continue their game of vapours, which is nonsense: every man to oppose the last man that spoke, whether it concern’d him, or no (Act IV, scene 4, sd).

This game represents total, oppositional theater. Both Overdo and Busy learn this vital lesson of opposition. But they do not renounce their humanism as TudeauClayton alleges. Instead, they laugh and thereby radically modify their morality at a sudden glorious recognition of their ridiculousness. Nor is Bartholomew Cokes merely an object of derision in this play any more than Dame Purecraft who has exercised her authority, as well as her freedom of choice, and decided to marry a madman. The other female characters Win Littlewit and Mistress Overdo find themselves exploited within the Fair and manage to extricate themselves more by luck than by good management. But luck is important at the Fair. It’s all a game of chance. Recently, Ian McAdam discusses the Puritan dialectic of the play in a widely-informed reading that goes beyond simple satirizing of hypocrisy to consider Jonson’s complex engagement with the cultural and ideological issues of his day. McAdam’s conclusion is instructive with regard to comedy and gender: The unveiling of the ‘whores’ Win Littlewit and Mistress Overdo re-establishes (disturbingly) the need for effective patriarchal control of—and (possibly more benignly) a more realistic responsibility to—the citizens’ wives and their immediate familial and social concerns (429).

But he then swerves toward declaring compromise an uncomfortable “enormity” in itself when the play has shown throughout that lack of compromise represents an enormity in itself. And enormity represents comedy for Jonson. Resisting the vision of community and compromise that is offered at the conclusion makes the uncompromising postmodernist feel ethical, but only as ethical as Trouble-all who never feels anything but ethical. It’s all too much in terms of ridiculous contrivance and oppositional complication wherein the comedy of the play thrives on inflation of effect followed by inevitable deflation of understanding. But such reversible deflations of understanding ironically accommodate political possibilities. Cokes’s upper-class ineffectuality takes the form of ludicrous political action. Completely unable to control his childish glee at the fair, he falls prey to every fad, scam, and musical note that enters his consciousness, and barely escapes with his underclothes. He alone of the other male characters in the play does not have a job. Instead, he has so much money he can afford to lose a purse, laugh about it, and ride piggy back on his man while rationalizing, “’Twas but a little scurvy white money, hang it” (Act II, scene 6, 129). Everyone else in the play is working desperately for remuneration. Thankful that there are otherwise few representative characters of the Nobility in Jonson’s plays, director Peter Barnes draws a perceptive generic comparison:

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The Alchemist, a tale about three crooks, is in verse, the great fresco of Bartholomew Fair is in prose. The division is probably because The Alchemist is about peoples’ dreams and aspirations, whilst the even more down-to-earth Bartholomew Fair is about how they live (48).

Herein perverse practicalities overrule hypothetical dreams with a physical focus demonstrated nowhere so pointedly as when Cokes loses a second purse: “EDGWORTH gets up to him and tickles him in the ear with a straw twice to draw his hand out of his pocket” (Act III, scene 5, 150 sd). In Bartholomew Fair, if it can be contrived it can be physically played, suggesting a limitless capacity for innovation and change. The sprung parameters of prose in this massively down-to-earth play work together within the sprung parameters of Jonson’s comedy itself to produce a creative tension between early jokers such as Mosca and Face, who could do it all, and authoritative spoilsports such as Wasp, Busy, Overdo, and Trouble-all who continuously and compulsively overdo one thing. Indeed Trouble-all’s singular authority of Justice Overdo’s warrant represents the ultimate in Bergsonian automatism. But in all cases, Jonson’s comedy promises more: Face certainly did with a metadramatic invitation at the end of The Alchemist: “To feast you often, and invite new guests.” At the end of Bartholomew Fair, the onstage party crashes through the fourth wall as Cokes’ declares: “Bring the actors along, we’ll ha’ the rest o’ the play at home” thus avoiding the romance of other comedies to offer the basics of food and drink and plenty of it outside the confines of theater, and of metaphor, and even of the play itself—to “ha’ the rest o’ the play at home” is to get real. McEvoy recently summarizes Jonson’s effect in this regard: A significant element that contributes to the impact of his best plays on the stage is produced by the drama’s own assertion that it is not a work of art that is taking place in a make-believe realm existing for the detached observation and disengaged moral edification of the audience. Again and again, Jonson’s middle comedies assert that the onstage action is in some sense continuous with the “off-stage” world. (68)

Jonson’s comedy typically asserts its own inner discoherence and relates it to the world at large. To posit the royal Epilogue that follows Bartholomew Fair as the real ending of the play is to miss a broadly posited comic point. Formality is an afterthought—the real fun is occurring elsewhere. Of course academics can regularly miss the point without fear of consequences. Those who do consider consequences take the comic option every time. Even Jonson, who knew a thing or two about Trouble-all, inflexibility, and consequences, had to learn to do so, had to get real, by answering the overwhelming comic question, “Who’s he when he’s at home?” We find out about Overdo, just as Drummond found out about Jonson. Jonson’s many invitations coalesce into a non-determined, un-judged but wellstocked, comic vision of the future. In her work on Jonson’s antimasques, Lesley Mickel adduces the reckless conclusion of Bartholomew Fair in cautionary terms: The law is overturned by festive anarchy, a process mirrored in the court masques immediately preceding Bartholomew Fair. In these instances, elements of the grotesque

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No such mini-drama here. Bartholomew Fair concludes itself in size large. Anything remotely classical was overwhelmed from the beginning as the Stage-Keeper pleaded with the audience and the Scrivener tried to contract audience appreciation in terms certain to elicit outraged audience response. Nor is there any fear that received cultural authority will fully and un-problematically re-instate itself. Things have changed, no matter how much authority—in the character of Overdo, Wasp, or Busy, the person of Jonson, or the repressive hypothesis of Foucault—would insist on the reinstatement of authority. Such change may not be a change of state or an immediate change of politics, but it is a change of clothes and a change of scenery and a modification of the way things were. No established authority is immune to such change. Radical comedy ensures it. Herein, Jonson’s authority figures all learn the folly of their particular certainties. They learn to loosen up like the zanys whom they encounter. Another name for all this is generosity: “comic change” where good intentions get abolished in favor of good actions, strict morality gets modified by humane toleration, and laughter abolishes oppressive authority of all kinds. Typically, romantic comedy promises moral futures symbolized by appropriate couples in bed. Jonson’s comic futures take the larger form of odd couples, many beds, multiple motives, and a variety of directions toward heavily-laden banquet tables. Metaphorically, a full kitchen and a full belly suggest full affiliation. Theatrically, a full repertoire and a full house suggest full representations. And Jonson, like the rest of us, wouldn’t have it any other way. “Invention” not so much in terms of classical rhetoric but in terms of sheer comic variety was always Jonson’s strongest point. And he was always ready to insist on it. To conclude, I return to Alan Fisher’s essay titled “Jonson’s Funnybone” in which he argued Jonson’s comedy as a complex, mock-heroic effect that is “less pointed than diffused” (60). Certainly Jonson’s comic invective flows to the point of saturation. However, Jonson’s comedy asserts itself generally as more of a “Funny bag” or funny belly—a Bakhtinian “baggy monster” with a gargantuan appetite for effects. Admittedly, there are few belly laughs within Jonson’s comedy, but his large comic vision finally gets past the implicit determinism of every man and his “humour” to waft absurdily out of the text as a game of “vapours” and thereby register ludicrous flexibility within theater and within society. The irony of all this in terms of Jonson’s overall performance is caught nowhere so well perhaps as in the poem “My Picture Left in Scotland” where he finally recognizes his “mountain belly” and “rocky face” as two comic metaphors that are both hugely “out there” while operating always on the edge. Yes, there’s something compulsive in the radical nature of Jonson’s comedy, a comedy that fits with the performative works discussed previously in this book. In fact, in terms of context, culture, and performance, such comic compulsion is absolutely necessary and curiously self conscious, not a matter of romantic fictions but of radical cognitive changes where personal experience is as valuable and worthy of assertion as external political, or even classical authority. And the heroes of early

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modern comedy insist on their compulsions. Hereby, personal experience represents a laughably necessary form of authority that conventional authority totally distrusts. Yet such comic opposition constantly creates and reconfigures culture. Radical comedy performs even as it parodies the highs and lows of interactive human life. Like Mak in the Christmas story, Barabas on the loose in Malta, Sir John Harington on the toilet, or Antonio lost in the ridiculous identities of revenge, Jonson’s comedy was “out there” all along, seeking to deform, inform, and reform early modern English culture.

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Index

Adams, Robert M., 95 Aggeler, G.D., 76 Altieri, Joanne, 93 Aristophanes, 60, 93 Aristotle, 76 Poetics, 1 Artaud, Antonin, 42, 75 Austin, Dennis, 28 Ayres, Philip J., 82 Baines, Barbara J., 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 13, 87, 93, 99 The Dialogic Imagination, 1, 6, 18–19, 60–61, 62 Rabelais and His World, 6–7, 12, 14, 37, 86, 87, 88, 90, 97, 99, 103 Balmford, James A Short Dialogue Concerning The Plagues Infection, 48 Barabas, 5, 8, 23–4, 27, 29–34, 100, 108 Barish, Jonas, 95 Barnes, Peter, 102–3, 106 Barthes, Roland, 26, 27, 30, 31, 34 Bawcutt, N.W., 27n4, 31 Beckett, Samuel, 77 Belling, Catherine, 91, 92 Bergson, Henri, 4, 5, 60, 96 Laughter, 60 Bilger, Audrey, 1 Blanchard, W. Scott, 57 Boehrer, Bruce, 65, 99 Brissenden, Alan, 84, 90 Brooke, Nicholas, 23 Brown, Pamela Allen, 101 Bungey, 56 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 73 Burrow, Colin, 55, 69 Burton, Robert, 25 The Anatomy of Melancholy, 57 Carew, Richard, 25–6 Carnival, 7, 11, 18, 83, 86, 90, 97, 102–3

Castiglione, Baldassare, 52 The Book of the Courtier, 25, 60 Cecil, Sir Robert, 53, 55, 64, 98 Chakravorty, Swapan, 87 Chaplin, Charlie, 60 Cher, 1 Chettle, Henry, 44 Clapham, Henoch, 41 Clark, Sandra, 44 Cleanness, 58 Colley, Scott, 77 Combe, Thomas, 64 Comedy, classical, 7, 15 Comedy, radical, 9, 24, 74, 99, 103, 108–9 Craig, D.H., 51n1 Cunningham, J.V., 76 David, Larry, 83 Day, Doris, 94 Dekker, Thomas, 7, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 50, 95 The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), 37–40, 42–50, 100 Descartes, Rene, 6 Dollimore, Jonathan, 74 Radical Tragedy, 2 Donaldson, Ian, 97 Donne, John, 6 Donno, Elizabeth Story, 57, 60 Douglas, Mary, 65 Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 74, 95, 96, 98 Durer, Albrecht, 25 Dusinberre, Juliet, 52n2, 61 Eastward Ho, 74 Ecclesiastes, 6 Edminster, Warren, 16 Eliot, T.S., 30 Elizabeth I, Queen, 43–4, 53, 54, 70 Elyot, Sir Thomas The Boke Named The Gouernour, 25

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Essex, 2nd Earl of, 53–4, 58 Evitt, Regula Meyer, 13 Fenton, Roger, 41–2 Fiondella, Maris G., 18, 19 Fisher, Alan, 108 Fisher, Seymour and Rhoda Pretend The World is Funny and Forever, 9 Foakes, R.A., 75, 76n1, 80n2 Foucault, Michel, 3, 108 Freer, Coburn, 29 Freud, Sigmund, 59 Frye, Northrop, 21 Gair, W. Reavley, 74 Geckle, George, 76 Gelbart, Larry, 83 Godiva, Lady, 59 Godskall, James, 40–41 Greenblatt, Stephen, 27 Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 29 Greenburg, Stephen, 39n2 Grimble, Ian, 51n1 Harbage, Alfred, 24 Harington, Sir John, 5, 7, 44, 51–6, 58, 60, 65, 69–70, 85, 95, 109 The Metamorphosis of Ajax, 9, 51, 53, 56–70 Letters and Epigrams, 53–5, 56, 65 Nugae Antiquae, 65 Orlando Furioso (trans.), 52, 53, 55, 56 Hazlitt, William, 72, 95 Heller, Herbert Jack, 84, 89, 93 Helterman, Jeffrey, 15, 19, 20 Henry, Buck, 83 Hero, comic, 2–3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 22 Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 3, 4, 6 Holcomb, Chris, 52, 59 Hopkins, Lisa, 28 Hotz-Davies, Ingrid, 89, 93 Huebert, Ronald, 99, 104 A Hundred Merry Tales, 50 Jambeck, Thomas J., 20 James VI and I, King, 44, 98 Jenstad, Janelle, 88

Jonson, Ben, 1, 5, 69, 74, 93, 95, 104, 107, 108 The Alchemist, 4, 7, 29, 96, 97, 98, 100–102, 107 Bartholomew Fair, 7, 96, 97, 102–8 Christmas, His Masque, 97–8 Every Man Out of His Humour, 96 “Inviting a Friend to Supper”, 99 “My Picture Left in Scotland”, 108 “On the Famous Voyage”, 95 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 97 “To Penshurst”, 98 Volpone, 95, 96, 99–100 Kinghorn, Jonathan, 65n6 Kolve, V.A., 21 Kyd, Thomas The Spanish Tragedy, 77, 80, 81 Langer, Susanne, 4 Leinwand, Theodore, 87, 91 Leland, John, 66 Levin, Richard, 80n2 Lewis, Cynthia, 82 Lewis, Jerry, 1 Lock, Charles, 13 Lodge, Thomas, 40 McAdam, Ian, 106 McClure, Norman, ed. Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, 53 McEvoy, Sean, 107 Mack, Maynard, 14, 21 McNulty, Robert, ed. Orlando Furioso (Trans. Sir John Harington), 55, 56 Mak, 2–3, 8, 11–22, 23, 29, 44, 86, 109 Mankind, 21 Manningham, John, 73 Marcus, Leah, 103 Markham, Robert, 53, 65 Marlowe, Christopher, 6, 7, 37 The Jew of Malta, 4, 23–4, 26–35, 100 Marshall, Cynthia, 28n6 Marshall, Linda E., 19 Marston, John, 1, 6, 7, 71, 73–4, 82, 93, 95 Antonio and Mellida, 7, 71–2, 75–82 Antonio’s Revenge, 71–82

INDEX The Scourge of Villanie, 72 Martin, Mathew, 94, 102 Marx, Groucho, 71, 77 M*A*S*H*, 84 Menippean satire, 42, 57, 60 Mickel, Lesley, 107 Middleton, Thomas, 6, 7, 83, 85, 95 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 4, 7, 8, 83–94, 100 Miller, Shannon, 92 Mullaney, Steven, 33 Munro, Ian, 40, 42, 45, 47n4 Nature, 21 Nelson, T.G.A., 66 Norland, Howard B., 11 Ornstein, Robert, 8 Partridge, Eric Dictionary of Slang, 15 Paster, Gail Kern, 63, 89–90, 93 Pendry, E.D., 37, 39n2 Petowe, Henry, 43, 44 Phillips, Patrick, 100 Pirandello, Luigi, 71, 75 Plague, 9, 37, 39–42, 48, 100, 101 Prescott, Anne Lake, 64 Puttenham, George, 52 Rabelais, Francois, 7, 60–61, 99 Return from Parnassus, The, Part 2, 73 Rocklin, Edward L., 34 Ross, Lawrence J., 22 Rowe, George E., 93 Rowse, A.L., 57 Sanders, Barry, 4 Sanders, Julie, 95 Schell, Edgar, 19, 20 Schmidt, Gary D., 14 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 74 Scott, Michael, 78 Scott-Warren, Jason, 53, 57, 61, 69 Second Shepherds’ Play, The, 2–3, 8, 11–22 Seinfeld, 84 Seneca, 76, 77 Shakespeare, William, 7, 8, 69, 95 As You Like It, 28, 52

121

Hamlet, 77 Richard III, 77, 80 Titus Andronicus, 7, 77 Troilus and Cressida, 7 Sider, John W., 21 Sidney, Sir Philip The Defense of Poesy, 52 Siemon, James R., 7 Sinanoglou, Leah, 20 Slack, Paul, 39n2 Slights, William W.E., 17, 86, 93, 101 Smith, Shawn, 23, 29 Sontag, Susan Illness as Metaphor, 38–9, 50 Souchou, Yao, 88 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 7, 30, 103 Steane, J.B., 23, 30 Steeves, H. Peter, 4, 5 Stevens, Martin, and A.C. Cawley The Towneley Plays, 12n2, 16, 19n5 Stone, Lawrence, 55 Stow, John, 25 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 83–4 Tambling, Jeremy, 31 Tarleton, Richard, 60, 62 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 84–5 Thayre, Thomas, 40 Thompson, Peggy, 19, 22 Three Stooges, the, 4–5 Thuresby, Cuthbert, 38 Thyestes, 76, 77 Torrance, Robert The Comic Hero, 3 Trotter, Margaret, 57n4 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 105–6 Vaughan, Miceal, 20 Waage, Frederick O., 37, 47–8 Wharton, T.F., 75, 79, 80n2, 82 White, Hayden, 39 Wilde, Oscar, 77 Wilson, F.P., 38n1, 39n2, 44n3 Wilson, Thomas The Art of Rhetoric, 52 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 82

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Witt’s Recreations, 83 Woodbridge, Linda, 87 Woolf, Rosemary, 13n2, 21

Woolland, Brian, 98 Zall, P.M., 50n5