Drama, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation in Early Modern England

196 Pages·2011·0.78 MB·English

RUDE MECHANICALS: STAGING LABOR IN THE EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
THEATER

by

Matthew Kendrick

BA, English, University of New Hampshire, 2005

MA, English, University of Rochester, 2006

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of

the University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh

2011
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

Matthew Kendrick

It was defended on
September 29, 2011
and approved by

John Twyning, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh

Jennifer Waldron, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh

Nicholas Coles, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh

Rachel Trubowitz, Professor, Department of English, University of New Hampshire

Dissertation Co-Chair: Jennifer Waldron, Professor, Department of English, University of
Pittsburgh

Dissertation Co-Chair: John Twyning, Professor, Department of English, University of
Pittsburgh

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Copyright © by Matthew Kendrick 2011

iii
Rude Mechanicals: Staging Labor in the Early Modern English Theater

Matthew Kendrick, PhD

University of Pittsburgh, 2011

This dissertation explores the relationship between the early modern theater and changing
conceptions of labor. Current interpretations of the theater’s economic dimensions stress the
correlation between acting and vagrant labor. I build on these approaches to argue that the
theater’s connection to questions of labor was far more dynamic than is often thought. In
particular, I argue that a full understanding of the relationship between the theater and labor
requires that we take into account the theater’s guild origins. If theatricality was often associated
with features of vagrant labor, especially cony-catching and rogue duplicity, the theater also
drew significantly from medieval guild practices that valued labor as a social good and a creative
force. I contend that the theater’s residual guild structure invests representations of labor with an
ennobling and humanizing support. In a variety of plays, from Jonson’s Every Man in his
Humour to Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, theatrical techniques like disguise and
deception gesture towards vagrancy while also enabling laborers of various stripes to affirm their
skillful creativity. Plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest depict theatricality
as an act of labor, a craftsmanlike endeavor rather than a commodity or mere function of
commercial forces. In doing so, the plays carve out a space of artistic autonomy for the theater
while affirming the creative power of labor.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE………………………………………………………………...................................... v
1.0: “PROFESSIONS AND OCCUPATIONS OF PLAYS”: LABOR AND THE
STAGE........................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1: EARLY MODERN LABOR IN CONTEXT…………………………………….. 2
1.2: LABOR AND THE STAGE……………………………………………………... 13
2.0: THE LABOR OF DRAMA IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ……………..…. 34
2.1: “THOU ART TRANSLATED”: EXCHANGE IN THE GREEN WORLD..... 36
2.2: “HERE IS A PLAY FITTED”: THE LABOR OF DRAMA………………….. 50
3.0: “YOU MAR OUR LABOUR”: ACKNOWLEDGING WORK IN THE
TEMPEST……………………………………………………………………………………… 66
3.1: LABOR AND REALPOLITIK, OR THE LIMITS OF POWER…………….. 68
3.2: ACKNOWLEDGING WORK…………………………………………………....79
4.0: THE LABORING BODY AND ARTISANAL CONSCIOUSNESS: THE
SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY AND A SHOEMAKER, A GENTLEMAN….…………...…..... 99
4.1: ARTISANAL CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THINKING WITH THE BODY….. 100
4.2: THE LABOR OF COMMUNITY IN DEKKER’S THE SHOEMAKER’S
HOLIDAY…………………………………………………………………………. 114
5.0: “THE HUMOUR OF NECESSITY”: DISPOSSESSED LABOR AND
SUBJECTIVITY IN JONSON’S EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR……………………… 150
5.1: THE HUMOURS AND NECESSITY…………………………………………. 151

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5.2: “GIDDY HUMOUR AND DISEASED RIOT”: ORDER AND ECONOMIES
OF LABOR…………………………………………………………………………………… 157
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………. 173

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“A poem, as I have told you, is the work of the Poet; the end, the fruit of his
labour, and study. Poesy is his skill, or Craft of making: the very Fiction itself, the
reason, or form of the work.”
- Ben Jonson

PREFACE

On Shrove Tuesday, March 4, 1617, a group of Clerkenwell apprentices rioted in response to the
movement of their favorite acting company, Queen Anne’s Men, from the public Red Bull
playhouse in Clerkenwell to a new, private playhouse, the Cockpit, located in the exclusive
neighborhood of Drury Lane. The apprentices wreaked havoc on the Cockpit; one account
written by John Chamberlain describes how these apprentices “fell to great disorders, in pulling
down of houses, and beating of guards that were set to keep rule, specially at a new playhouse,
some time a cockpit, in Drury Lane, where the queen’s players used to play.”1 A letter to the
Privy Council highlights the anger and violence displayed by the apprentices, describing how
“there were diverse persons slayne, and others hurte and wounded, the multitude there assembled
being to the number of many thousands as wee are credibly informed.”2 The riot was eventually
quelled, though not before the apprentices inflicted significant damage on the theater and those
people who unwisely attempted to stop them. Even still, the apprentices had anger to spare, and
organized another riot the following year, again on Shrove Tuesday.

1 Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68), 1:161.
2 Ibid.
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The precise cause of this riot remains unclear. Contemporaries who chronicled the event
offer no concrete explanation, relying instead on stereotypical assumptions about apprentices’
“lewde and loose” nature.3 The idea that the riot was the product of the apprentices’ hotheaded
disposition is echoed in more recent accounts of the event. Andrew Gurr, for instance, claims
that the apprentices’ decision “to attack the Cockpit ahead of the northern ampitheatres and the
Blackfriars…. suggests that they were taking revenge for the loss of their plays.”4 Although
revenge may have played a role in the riot, it is important not to overlook the larger
socioeconomic dimensions of the event. To suggest that the apprentices were acting out of
revenge risks representing the apprentice community in its entirety as irrational, driven by
unthinking passion. Underneath the event’s violence is a more coherent narrative of the emerging
class tensions that were beginning to shape London society. In a recent intervention into this
discussion, Mark Bayer reminds us of the distinct class aspects of the conflict: not only could the
apprentices not afford the more lavish environs of Drury Lane; their working-class understanding
of the theater as carnivalesque entertainment rather than cultural capital would have clashed with
the elitism of the Drury Lane crowd. In short, the move of Queen Anne’s Men from Clerkenwell
to Drury Lane staged, quite literally, a tension between two distinct ways of seeing the theater.
As Bayer contends, “the moral economy of the Clerkenwell apprentices conflicted with the
market-driven model followed by the troupe who were motivated by profitability, the
accumulation of cultural capital, and increased social respectability.”5
In addition to a violation of a working-class moral economy, the Cockpit riot also points
up an aspect of the early modern theater that is often neglected. The riot indicates the

3 Ibid.
4 Andrew Gurr, Jacobean Public Theatre (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 171.
5 Mark Bayer, “Moving UpMarket: Queen Anne’s Men at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, 1617,” Early Theatre 4
(2001): 142.
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inextricable connection between the theater and laboring identity. This connection permeates
early modern theatrical debates, which were often framed around the changing conditions of
labor. The theater’s critics and state powers often treated members of the theatrical community
as little more than vagrant laborers, dispossessed members of the new economy. Phillip Stubbes,
for instance, referring to the statutes against vagrancy, asks his readers: “And is it not true? liue
[actors] not vpon begging of euery one that comes? Are they not taken by the lawes of the Realm
for roagues and vacabounds?.”6 Members of the theatrical community, however, saw themselves
and their profession in a far more dignified light. Nathan Field suggests a double standard at
work in anti-theatrical logic, explaining that acting should be seen on an equal footing with all
other trades:
Why, neither Christ nor they by their letters patents incorporated either the mercer,
draper, goldsmith, or a hundred trades and mysteries that at this day are lawful, and
would be very sorry to hear the sentence of damnation pronounced against them, and
simply because they are of such a trade; and yet there are faults in all professions, for all
have sin, may be freely spoken against.7
As suggested by Field’s defense of acting, one important source of the actor’s dignity was the
theater’s lingering guild tradition, which offered an alternative conception of both acting and
labor that stressed the guilds’ deeply entrenched aura of respectability. As this dissertation will
demonstrate in greater detail, members of the theatrical community are represented, in pamphlets
and on the stage, not as vagrants or dispossessed laborers but as craftsmen in control of their
theatrical and professional identities.

6 Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (London: 1583), 91.
7 Nathan Field, “Letter to Revd. Mr. Sutton,” in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004), 277.
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The accounts of the Cockpit riot articulate the laboring dimensions of the theater.
Chamberlain revealingly explains that “the ‘prentices, or rather the unruly people of the suburbs,
played their parts in diuerse places” as they rioted.8 In this description the apprentices are like
unruly actors, which echoes standard condemnations of actors as choosing a life of vagrancy
over one of respectable labor. The accounts of the riot also focus a good deal of attention on the
objects of the apprentices’ wrath. According to Chamberlain, the apprentices cut “the players’
apparel in to pieces, and all their furniture, and burnt their play-books and did what other
mischief they could.”9 Edward Sherburne echoes this destruction, complaining that the
apprentices “broke open [the players’] trunkes, and what apparel, books, or other things they
found they burned and cut in pieces.”10 The apprentices’ anger does not appear to be an act of
mindless revenge; on the contrary, it is targeted at the material conditions of the theatrical world:
the props, playbooks, and even the actors themselves. By destroying these things, it is as if the
apprentices are reclaiming the theater for themselves.
This dissertation looks at the tensions surrounding labor and the stage, arguing that the
conflict exhibited by the Cockpit riot permeates early modern drama. Through an exploration of
the relationship between the early modern theater and changing conceptions of labor, this
dissertation demonstrates that early modern drama can be seen as a poetics of labor that
articulates the tension between a traditional moral economy of labor and England’s new
economy. Current interpretations of the theater’s economic dimensions stress the correlation
between acting and vagrant labor. I build on these approaches to argue that the theater’s
connection to labor was far more dynamic than is often thought. In particular, I argue that a full

8 Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 161.
9 Ibid.
10 Edward Sherburne, in English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660, eds. Glynne William Gladstone Wickham,
Herbert Berry, William Ingram (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 629.
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