Hannah Lavery: "Exchange & Reciprocation"

Hannah Lavery

University of Sheffield

Exchange and Reciprocation in Nashe’s ‘Choise of Valentines’ (c. 1592)

1> At the heart of Thomas Nashe’s pornographic poem lies issues of exchange and reciprocation. Early modern authors of erotic-satiric texts such as the ‘Choise’ are writing within a longer tradition of the ‘impotency poem’ genre. Here, the meaning of the impotency relies on the satirical reinterpretation of the concepts of amicitia (a complex and profound friendship, implying mutual obligation, affection and pleasure), and fides (fidelity/ integrity). By recognising the central importance of the terms of obedience and exchange, the central relationships that form the basis for the erotic poem are re-imagined by some writers as an allegorical site within which wider social relationships can be satirised. In the relationships that are imagined in Nashe’s ‘Choise of Valentines’, the humour plays upon a knowledge of literary patronage relationships operating at the time. This is not to suggest that the poem is put forward as a discussion of these relationships per se, but that it is the ideas of exchange and obligation that underpin the humour, emphasising the ‘failure’ involved. The ironic tone for the humour relies on an interpellated audience, which forms both the means for communicating, and the subject of, the satirical significance for the text.

2> Thomas Nashe’s case demonstrates that the position for a writer seeking patronage in England could be one of extreme frustration and poverty. Nicholl notes:

“Patronage was precarious and usually rather brief, and Nashe was soon back on the streets again, his true milieu, living to the full his most famous persona Pierce Penniless, the half-starved malcontent young poet who petitions the devil to spirit away those capitalist ‘cormorants’ who ‘bung up all the welth of the land in their snap-haunce bages’ while we poor scholars must ‘wander in backe lanes and the out-shiftes of the Citie’.” (2)

3> A reading of the poem that pays attention to the ironic and satiric interpretations of issues of exchange and reciprocation aligns the themes in the ‘Choise’ with complaints against financial injustices found more clearly in other works.

4> One key pressure was the sense of commission that came with patronage, in the sense of a requirement for the writer to adopt different personas and writing style, depending on the commission. In a response to criticism by Harvey, Nashe replies:

“As newfangled and idle, and prostituting my pen like a Curtizan, is the next Item that you taxe me with; well it may and it may not bee so, for neither deny it nor will I grant it; onely thus farre Ile goe with you, that twise or thrise in a month, when res est augusta domi, the bottome of my purse is turnd downeward, and my conduit of incke will no longer flowe for want of reparations, I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senor Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine; but otherwise there is no newfanglenes in mee but pouertie, which alone maketh mee so vnconstant to my determined studies.” (‘Have with you to Saffron Walden’, 1596)

5> What is interesting about the statement is the use Nashe makes of the pen as metaphor for penis, established through the link of the ‘Curtizan’. Also, Nashe describes his activity in this kind of ‘popular’, commissioned writing as enacting a transaction, or participating in a relationship, akin to that of a prostitute and a paying client. Nashe’s construction in this passage of the process of writing as the active use of his pen-penis, links to the ideas of literary transaction that Nashe undertakes in ‘Nashe His Dildo’ (the popular nickname for the poem at the time of circulation). As a satirical ‘tool’ I suggest Nashe uses his ‘dildo’ (the ‘Choise’), to represent the failure and breakdown of systems of mutual reciprocation.

6> In ‘The Choise of Valentines’, Nashe investigates the construction of power relations within the context of a relationship of financial give and take. The humour of Nashe’s text depends largely upon the audience’s recognition of the ironic conjunction of the erotic and political positions. In this sense, one clear element of ‘exchange’ that takes place in the poem is the conscious interpellation of the ‘reader’ in relation to the production of significance within the text, and as a member of a recognisable group of consumption for the text.[1] This in itself then becomes part of the satirical significance for the poem.

7> The satirical nature of the text implies an incorporated if not an intended readership in general society. This is emphasised in the proem, in that the poet-narrator’s statement ‘all men acte what I in speache declare/ Onelie induced by varietie.’ (7-8) constructs a recognisable cultural ‘group’ upon which his work is based, and to which his narrative speaks. In Nashe’s final appendum ‘Claudito iam rivos Priape, sat prata biberunt’ (‘Priapus, drop the sluice-gates now: the meadows have had enough to drink’), he substitutes ‘Priapus’ for the original ‘boys’ (pueri). This acknowledges vicarious reader pleasure, through an ironic reinterpretation of Virgil to imply sexual satiation. Nashe is here taking a jibe at the ‘lecherous reader’. Further, the equation of ‘the meadows’ with ‘the audience’ contains a suggestion of multiplicity through which we can glimpse the process of circulation of this manuscript (another significant form of ‘exchange’ in relation to the development of the impotency poem).

8> It is this construction of a ‘group’ of readership for his piece which both builds the humour, and allows that humour to be based upon a recognition of shared understanding of the financial diction, upon which the satire relies. The idea of financial exchange is introduced when the male protagonist Tomalin can not find his ‘love’ Francis:

“But woe-alass, she was not to be found,
For she was shifted to an upper-ground.
Good Justice Dudgein-haft, and crab-tree face
With bills and staves had scar’d hir from the place;
And now she was compell’d for Sanctuarie
To flye unto an house of venerie.” (19-24)

9> Here, we learn that the narrator’s love-lover has been forced to enter a brothel through poverty. We, as reader, undertake this initial journey with the narrator Tomalin, and so are immediately linked to his character and his movements/ desires.

10> Whilst the seduction for the reader of aligning with the jocular, vernacular, narrator of the story is initially strong, there is evidence that Nashe’s male protagonist is intentionally undermined from the beginning of the piece:

“Thither went I, and bouldlie made enquire
If they had hackneis to lett-out to hire,
And what they crau’d by order of their trade
To lett one ride a iournie on a jade.” (25-28)

11> Here, Nashe begins his devaluation of sexual activity through the introduction of a series of misogynistic elements. Indeed, this misogyny cannot be denied. Though I would suggest that as Nashe aligns his poem-dildo with the concept of commission, and therefore elements of ‘contract’, this misogyny is not necessarily intended to singularly degrade femininity. This is used here as much to address concepts of subordination and oppression in themselves. Indeed, Nashe does not limit his critique here to feminine depravity, but through the placing of these terms within the mouth of Tomalin we see an implicit mockery of the masculine as well. At line 28 the simile of the ‘horse’ creates a dual meaning in relation to the eroticised situation that allows us to laugh with, but also at, the male character in his excessive and unnatural lusts at this point.

12> In fact, this critiquing of the masculine sexual position is strong from the very beginning, and this is constructed through representations of male ‘impotence’. The incorporation of positions of impotency are pejoratively representative of positions of ‘failure’ on the male protagonist’s part to ‘honour’ the terms of a reciprocal relationship. The bawd informs Tomalin that:

“None enters heere to doe his nicerie.
But he must paye his offertorie first,
And then perhaps wee’le ease him of his thirst.” (38-40)

13> This concept of ‘paying offertorie first’ ironically foreshadows the later episodes of impotency. Ultimately, as we see from the beginning of the encounter, the male protagonist’s desire is selfishly centred, having no intention of embarking upon a reciprocally beneficial experience, and therefore culminates in failure.

14> This situation is returned to again at the point at which the male protagonist first encounters his ‘lover’ in the text:

“As how my lambkin? (blushing, she replide)
Because I in this dancing-schoole abide?
If that be it, that breede’s this discontent,
We will remove the camp incontinent.
For shelter onlie, sweete heart cam I hither,
And to avoide the troblous stormie weather.” (85-90)

15> Here the reader finds confirmation that Francis has been forced into prostitution through a change in personal circumstance, and we feel sympathetic to this position. At the same time, however, we are aware of the naivety that Nashe underlines in this character: ‘But now the coaste is cleare, we wilbe gone,/ Since but thy self, true lover I have none.’ (91-2) Francis’ belief that her lover has arrived to ‘rescue her’ is poignant in the light of how the male character has introduced himself, and again the meaning is constructed through dramatic irony.

16> If we remember Nashe’s description of commercial, erotic, writing as a form of prostitution forced onto him as a result of poverty, we see the context within which his critique unfolds. Nashe creates an ironic representation of the patronage-client relationship at this point. Where the female character believes that her ‘true love’ will provide support and constancy in their relationship, we have witnessed from the beginning of this poem that the male views it as purely monetary, and entirely selfish, experience. The humour of this episode is as a result of the implicit understanding of the sexual relationship as evoking that of the patron-client contract.

17> It is at this point that Nashe progresses from an implicit critiquing of the protagonists to his clearest satirical communication:

“A prettie rising wombe without a weame,
That shone as bright as anie silver streame;
And bare out lyke the bending of an hill,
At whose decline a fountaine dwelleth still,
That hath his mouth beset with uglie bryers
Resembling much a duskie nett of wyres.” (109-114)

18> This is a satiric reinterpretation of the Petrarchan catalogue motif as employed by Remy Belleau in the parent text ‘Jan qui ne peult’ (c. 1577). Through his inversion of subject and meaning, beauty is utterly denied. In a pornographic process intentionally explicit images seek to promote sexual arousal; Nashe’s extreme revision of the passage denies this occurrence. Importantly, however, the male character is sexually overcome by the sight and touch of the female:

“A loftie buttock barred with azure veine’s,
Whose comelie swelling, when my hand distreines,
Or wanton checketh with a harmeless stype,
It makes the fruites of love eftsoone be rype;
And pleasure pluckt too tymlie from the stemme
To dye ere it hath seene Jerusalem.” (115-120)

19> The male reaction at this point comments again upon the excess, irrationality, and worthlessness, of the male protagonist’s approach.

20> Furthermore, the use of the transitive verb ‘to distrain’ is ironic. Meaning to effect the legal seizure of goods to enforce payment, Nashe heightens the ensuing episode of impotency for the male by emphasising the greed and excess of the male’s position here. We see that impotency is brought on through the excessive lust of the ‘patron’, leading to diminishment of power. The episode consistently mocks and degrades the gentleman rake through an ironic satire directed against greedy and voracious, imbalanced lust and action. This is ‘imbalanced’ not only in the sense of excess, but also in the sense of a production of relationships that do not recognise reciprocity and responsibility as part of that.

21> As the female resorts to her dildo to replace the repeated failures of her partner (233-239), in the wider context of this poem as ‘Nashe’s dildo’, we see the idea of having to ‘make do’ in order to receive fulfilment. This denies the lover-patron as possessing that power, and instead we see the implementation of a means for self-fulfilment that reflects a dangerous position of self-sufficiency and individualism. This triumphing of the dildo is by default critical of the other’s actions, with the statement that this tool, (presumably unlike the patron-lover) ‘bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale’ (241). Again, the adoption of financial jargon highlights the multiple significances that Nashe intends his ‘dildo’ to hold.

22> In this paper I have shown examples of how the allegorical implications of ‘impotency poems’ imply a satirical basis for the work itself, as commenting on social relationships in a literary sense, but also through the very systems of readerly exchange that form the basis for the construction of meaning. Nashe humorously adapts contemporary understanding of patronage and literary production in order to satirise relationships whereby the writer is used and degraded. Equally, the excessive sexuality of the piece is made negative, and this throws a wider critique out on to the audience that recognises and consumes these relationships.
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Notes

1. cf. Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995) for his discussion of social networks in relation to manuscript circulation.

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Works Cited

Belleau, Rémy, (1618) ‘Impuissance’, [‘Jan qui ne peult’], Le Cabinet Satyrique, Paris.

Kuin, Robert, & Prescott, Anne Lake, (2000), ‘The Wrath of Priapus: Rémy Belleau’s “Jean qui ne peult” and its Traditions’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37.1, 1-17.

Nashe, Thomas, (1905) ‘Choise of Valentines’, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, vol. 3, London, A. H. Bullen.

Nashe, Thomas, (1905) ‘Have with you to Saffron-Walden’, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, vol. 3, London, A. H. Bullen.

Nashe, Thomas, (1905) ‘Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell’, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, vol. 1, London, A. H. Bullen.

Nicholl, Charles, (1984), A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Virgil, (1977) Eclogues (of) Virgil, ed. Robert Coleman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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Hannah Lavery recently completed a PhD with research on the development of the impotency poem from ancient Latin, through continental Renaissance texts, into English early modern poetry. She teaches in the English and History programs at both Open University and University of Sheffield.

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures

Mary Lindroth: "Liquid Societies"

Mary Lindroth
Caldwell College

Moliere’s ‘Liquid Society’: Ivo van Hove’s and New York Theatre Workshop’s Production of The Misanthrope

1> When Alceste and Philinte enter the stage in Ivo van Hove’s New York Theatre Workshop’s production of The Misanthrope, it is clear that they inhabit a 21st-century world since their business suits make them look every bit the modern professional and since Alceste carries a copy of Le Monde in his hands. Indeed, reviewers like John Heilpern emphasize that the production is “avant-garde” and “ultra-modern,” leading him to the question of “Where’s Moliere in all this?” Heilpern quips that “he left,” thereby leading readers and audiences to the conclusion that there is very little that is early modern in the production. Contrary to Heilpern’s assertion, however, an examination of van Hove’s production, Tony Harrison’s script, and Moliere’s play (translated by Maya Slater) shows that many of the “ultra-modern” tricks—like carrying Le Monde—are both early modern and 21st-century. Nowhere in Moliere’s text, does Alceste appear with newspaper in hand. Alceste does, however, discuss journalism especially when he is railing against the vogue of flattery and when he is noting that “even my valet appears in the Gazette” (Slater 3.5.1074). The reference to La Gazette de France would have meant something very particular to 1666 audiences since it was a relatively new creation, first established in 1631. The reference is less clear almost 400 years later and Harrison’s adaptation acknowledges this by updating Alceste’s pronouncement to “The lowest of the low/get 15 minutes on a TV show.” Harrison’s translation replaces an early modern suspicion of print journalism with a modern suspicion of broadcast journalism and thus, as Heilpern suggests, erases anything that is early modern. van Hove’s production, however, acknowledges both the world of 1666 audiences and of 2007 audiences. When Alceste walks on stage with Le Monde in hand, he is re-inserting the early modern into an otherwise very modern production.

2> Just as Stephen Greenblatt argued that new historicism’s exploration of the relationship between historical texts and literary texts “is not one of cause and effect . . . [we] are dealing rather with a shared code” (86), so too it is important to explore the relationship between audiences then and now not to determine if one caused the other, but rather to investigate and recover “a shared code” between audiences. In this case, the shared code is that of dramatic performance since both van Hove and Moliere come at The Misanthrope from an actor’s vantage point. While Moliere criticism has explored the relationship between literary text and dramatic performance, and while it has discussed the function of the audience’s response to a comedy, it has been slow to articulate a precise relationship between early modern audiences and modern audiences.[1]

3> van Hove’s productions are steeped in the world of theater and theatricality. He is playwright, theatre director and artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam. His productions, whether Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (for which he won an Obie) or Tennesee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire or Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew attempt to re-conceive and re-energize dramatic classics for modern audiences. The productions are informed as much by the work of actors as they are by scripts for performance. Each one of the aforementioned productions is distinguished by memorable acting turns (reviews consistently applauded the wonders of actress Elizabeth Marvel as Hedda Gabler), by strenuously physical acting, and by outrageous acts such as dousing Hedda in tomato juice. The Misanthrope is equally informed by the work of actors. It is every bit as physical as past productions since Alceste periodically wrestles characters to the floor, including Oronte, Celimene and even Eliante. The production also includes a signature van Hove outrageous act (marked in two performances with loud gasps and involuntary intakes of breath on the part of the audience) and this time features Alceste strategically applying ketchup, chocolate syrup, confectioner’s sugar, berries as well as a well-placed hot dog and other messy and sticky food stuffs to his body. Further, the production signals the significance of the world of the actor when it begins with a video introduction of the actors applying makeup. The live-feed video also follows exiting actors to the backstage dressing rooms, complete with make-up tables, couch and coffee machines.

4> In his September 25, 2007 New York Times review of the production, Ben Brantley complained about the innovative contributions made by the actors and suggested that the overall effect was an “acting exercise” that seemed to be “a throwback to the experimental theater of the 1960’s, when the theories of elemental acting of Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud held sway.” Brantley suggests, then, that van Hove’s work with actors is somehow outdated or perhaps even cliché. As will become clear, however, van Hove’s work with actors is more in line with such postmodern acting groups as the Wooster Group, Complicite and Anne Bogart’s SITI (indeed, Anne Bogart even interviewed van Hove on behalf of The New York Theatre Workshop suggesting the similarity in their approaches to acting). Each of these groups promotes physical acting that incorporates and combines body, music, video, movement and voice in new and startling ways. Each one of the aforementioned companies also tackles dramas from a historical past and has had some measure of success recreating a living rather than a historic past. The reason for that success is that they are able to illuminate a shared code of dramatic performance; one that engages actor and audience together and that enables audiences of today to recognize their part in a centuries-old practice.

5> The shared code of dramatic performance is especially accessible when groups like Toneelgroep Amsterdam turn their attention to texts that are metatheatrical and that are laden with references to the world of dramatic performance. Moliere’s The Misanthrope is one such text. No matter how brief or voluminous, every biography of Moliere points out that he sacrificed a very promising and distinguished career as lawyer in order to become playwright, actor, and director of an acting troupe. Virginia Scott’s biography is representative and its title (Moliere: A Theatrical Life), chapter headings (such as “Last Act”) and narrative reflect the focus on Moliere the performer. While Scott challenges the received opinion that Moliere took his stage name in order to protect his family, she does point out that taking stage names was part of a larger theatrical practice in 17th-century France (59). Moliere acted in many of the plays he wrote, including The Misanthrope, thereby suggesting that he was firmly entrenched in that theatrical practice. He played the role of Alceste and his wife, Armande, played the role of Celimene. It is not surprising to discover, then, that so many of Moliere’s plays are metatheatrical. In The School for Wives Criticized and The Impromptu at Versailles, Moliere directly addresses and critiques acting styles and audience responses. In The Misanthrope, characters refer to characters in other Moliere plays. After the argument between friends that opens the play, Philinte suggests to Alceste that “It strikes me we resemble, in a curious way,/The brothers in The School for Husbands, Moliere’s play” (Slater 1.1.97-100).

6> Whereas audiences of 1666 would immediately recognize the reference since the play was only five years old and since Moliere played one of the brothers, Sganarelle, modern audiences would be less likely to get the reference. Rather than sacrifice the metatheatrical reference, Tony Harrison’s text seeks to include audiences by instructing them. Philinte says to Alceste “I think by now I know you pretty well…/we’re very like Ariste and Sganarelle, the brothers in that thing by Moliere,/you know, The School for Husbands, that one where…” to which Alceste responds “For God’s sake, spare us Moliere quotations!”.

7> The van Hove production enhances the metatheatricality present in the Moliere text and updated in the Harrison text. From the very beginning the production reminds audiences that what they are watching is a play. The camera continually reveals to us that the characters are actors since it captures them putting on their makeup at their mirrors or relaxing on a couch until they are required to speak as their characters. The actors also reveal that they are actors when they break the fourth wall at certain crucial moments. For example, Alceste accosts one of the behind-the-scenes camera operators with a “Hey, Hey, Hey” to get her to turn the camera lens onto the letter he is holding. His goal is to have the audience see the proof of Celimene’s infidelity. Later, Alceste chases Celimene off the stage and out of the theater onto the New York City sidewalk much to the surprised delight of passersby and even the occasional nonplussed cabbie. Meanwhile, the theater audience views the confrontation between theater world and real world on stage. Alceste brings some of that real world back into the theater when he returns with two gigantic plastic bags of garbage which he proceeds to strew across the stage floor. In at least two of the performances, the audience was visibly dismayed and unsettled by the question of whether the garbage was real New York City garbage or whether it was a stage prop.

8> In foregrounding metatheatricality, the production increases the opportunities for audience engagement. For example, in both Moliere’s and Harrison’s texts, Alceste is supposed to address Philinte and Eliante when he alerts them that he plans on going back to Celimene even though he knows she has betrayed him. In the performance, however, Alceste turns directly to the audience in order to ask them the rhetorical question “Just how degrading can a passion get?” Alceste then instructs the audience that they should “watch me grovel. You’ve seen nothing yet./There’s more to come. Just stay and watch the show./ You’ll see my weakness reach an all-time low./ Never call men wise. Look how they behave.” When Alceste does this, he extends the play world past the stage and into the audience (“stay and watch the show”). He urges us to “see my weakness” in order that we “Never call men wise.” The production reminds us that Moliere’s comedies engaged his audiences, whether in the city or the provinces, in a critique of their society, and the audiences, then and now, have a role to play.

9> A comparison of the Moliere play, Harrison text and van Hove production shows that metatheatricality is something that the audiences responded to in 1666 and that audiences are responding to in 2007. It is the inclusion of the metatheatrical that provides a pathway to the shared code of performance. When directors and actors decide to recreate the world of the dramatic past faithfully, they leave out one essential component of the shared code of dramatic performance. Such productions, in creating historically accurate sets and characters, inevitably distance modern audiences from the actions on stage. In the case of a faithful production of The Misanthrope, for example, characters might appear historically accurate when they wear panniers and elaborate wigs and reference the court of King Louis XIV, but they will never resonate with 2007 audiences in just the same way as they did with 1666 audiences. A production of The Misanthrope that does not directly engage an audience in a critique of a society that is felt as present will never be anything more than a museum piece. What van Hove’s production does, all its modern dressing and technological wizardry notwithstanding, is invite today’s audiences to see that society in 2007 and 1666 is and was undergoing a seismic shift in articulating its networks of human relationships.

10> As revealed in several interviews, when van Hove decided to apply the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of a liquid society to his production of The Misanthrope, he did so because he wanted audiences to see the noteworthy absence of long-term relationships he had seen when he read the text. Alceste, Philinte, Celimene and Eliante are not a part of any family. The only thing that ties them together is the bond of friendship and it is quite tenuous. van Hove has noted that he thought that dramatizing a world where human relationships are precarious was particularly timely for 2007 audiences whose preoccupation with modernity and technical innovations might be getting in the way of their relationships and of their humanity. This is clearly demonstrated in the scene when Celimene, Clitandre, Acaste, Eliante, and Philinte come together for a gossip-fest. They gather around a table and even bring food to that table. Instead of joining together in the sharing of food and conversation, they promptly isolate themselves from one another by opening up their cell phones to talk, loudly, to other, distant people rather than to the people right in front of their noses. The staging underscores this point since the actors turn their backs to one another as they continue with their cell phone conversations. Throughout the performance, the point is made again and again, that technology, whether in the form of BlackBerry, cell phone, lap top or video camera, isolates people from one another. The production, then, engages audiences in a critique of a present world where the absence of family and other long-term relationships can lead to negative consequences. That present world contains both Moliere’s historical past and a technological present.

11> This is not to say that Harrison’s text and van Hove’s production include all the early modern details. References to the court of Louis XIV and to class are omitted. None of the servants that are in Moliere’s cast of characters are present nor are any of the references to king and courtiers. The omission of such details does not efface the early modern, however. In a brief report announcing van Hove’s production and an equally contemporary production of Tartuffe for the November 2007 issue of American Theatre, Cassandra Csencsitz suggests that the “new look” provided by both productions “may be uniquely fidele to the actor-cum-playwright’s tragicomic spirit” (23). That The Misanthrope is tragicomedy is clear in the depiction of the central character, Alceste, who has both comic and tragic potential. Alceste, the misanthrope, would have been immediately recognizable to early modern audiences as a comic type (across the ocean, in England, Ben Jonson included the figure in several of his comedies). As Nicholas Grene reveals in his examination of the comedies of Moliere, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, 19th-century critics were prone to misreading Alceste as a tragic character. By 1980, however, Grene could pronounce that “a comic Alceste is now critically orthodox” (187). Grene’s study adds another dimension to the debate and determines that Alceste is both comic and tragic. Alceste’s opening “Leave me alone” and his subsequent diatribe against friendship clearly sets him up as a comic figure since he is railing against friendship to his best friend, Philinte, thereby revealing the contradiction of his pose. Alceste is also a sympathetic character with tragic potential, however. Eliante defends Alceste and claims a noble and heroic character for him: “The way he won’t agree to play the hypocrite/Does have a noble and heroic side to it” (Slater 4.1.1165-1166).

12> While the reviews of van Hove’s production have been mixed, the praise for Bill Camp’s portrayal of Alceste has not. Reviewers take note of Camp’s robust comic turns as well as his ability to suggest Alceste’s potential as a tragic hero. Ben Brantley, for example, writes that Camp “elicits a tragic dimension from Alceste, an Olympian agony and self-disgust that a more conventional production could not support.” One memorable scene in which Camp suggests the tragic nature of Alceste’s character is when he breaks down into tears after he discovers that his beloved Celimene has been unfaithful. In two performances, the audience could see tears coming out of his eyes and snot running out of his nose. The tears and snot signify the character’s tragic dimension since he has fallen (literally onto his knees) from the position of reasonable man. The descent from reason continues when Alceste pounces upon Eliante to demand that she help him seek revenge: “Avenge me on your cousin, who betrays/a tenderness kept burning all these days./Avenge me. Eliante. I’m torn apart.” What the tears and snot also suggest, however, is the actor’s craft and since the production has reminded the audience again and again that because the people on stage are actors, audiences should be suspicious of the actor’s tears and their ability to represent the truth of the character’s/actor’s feelings.

13> 1666 audiences would have recognized a similar tension when watching Moliere perform the character of Alceste. Alceste is in part an admirable character because of his recognition of the great gulf that exists between what people say and what they do. He insists that the goal for all humankind should be “To show our secret, inner thoughts, without deceit./ We must speak from the heart, lay bare our sentiments,/ Not hide the truth with empty, formal compliments” (Slater 1.1.70-73). What would have made the words particularly resonant was that an actor, whose whole livelihood depended upon his ability to use deceit, spoke them.

14> The audience’s role is a key component in any dramatic performance. In his essay on Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin critiques the modern practice of neglecting the audience. Benjamin reminds readers that, historically, the gap between the action on stage and the audience was not in place. He uses as his example the French classical theater and the practice of sitting aristocratic members of the audience directly upon the stage. Benjamin then comments “To us, this seems inappropriate. According to familiar notions of ‘the dramatic,’ a nonparticipating third party—a dispassionate observer or “thinker” – should not be associated with the action onstage.” (303). Benjamin then uses the example of Brecht and of epic theater to align the past world of dramatic performance with the modern world. While no audience members, aristocratic or otherwise, sit upon the stage in Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope, the production does align early modern codes of performance with modern codes of performance.
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Note

[1] Moliere literary criticism has focused on the centrality of the theatrical world throughout the modern period. By the mid-20th century, it was W.G. Moore who determined that “…many features of Moliere’s comedy are to be explained by his profession…his plays should be read as the work of a man who was not primarily satirist or moralist but an actor, a ‘comedien’ (40). As David Hartley argued in his 1992 article, a focus on the theatrical monopolized Moliere criticism throughout the 20th century. In 1971, P.H. Nurse posited a universal and Christian Humanist audience that would have responded to the comedy the same in 1666 or 1971: “…many of the things which provoke the misanthrope’s indignation are presented to us as objectively reprehensible, so much so, that many a spectator has been tempted to share Alceste’s responses…at the same time inviting our approval of them” (159). Nurse continued to argue this point regarding the audience in a later version of the essay appearing in Moliere and the Comic Spirit. Geneva: Droz, 1991 which Harold Bloom then included in his edition of Moliere criticism, Moliere. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Nicholas Grene, on the other hand, attempted to distance himself from critics who identified an ideal audience and defined a “notional” audience. In his preface, Grene explained what he meant by audience: “I do not mean the audience in the theatre for whom the play was first written and before whom it was first performed, nor yet the succession of various audiences who have seen it since” (xvii). Grene argued “for a notional audience (to avoid the ambiguous term ‘ideal’) to whom the aesthetic design of the whole might be apparent” (xvii). Like Grene, Harold C. Knutson, compared the comedies of Ben Jonson and Moliere and determined that geography must have made a difference in the audience’s response. Knutson argued that Moliere’s plays created a “recognizable world” whereas Jonson’s plays created a world that was “cut off from normal society” (138). Still another critic, Andrew Calder, argued that there was both a universal and a particular (17th-century) audience to consider. Calder’s actual examination of both audiences, however, in its focus on the philosophical responses of both a universal and a particular audience was still somewhat ahistorical. Most recently, the work of Stephen Fleck and Gretchen Elizabeth Smith vigorously examined the contours of the relationship between a 17th-century and a modern audience. Fleck and Smith focused on Moliere’s comedy-ballets and the relationship between royal/aristocratic audience and royal/aristocratic/professional players and playwrights. In a reading of the comedy-ballet George Dandin, Smith concluded that the 17th-century audience response would have depended upon an elaborate system of cultural and performative signs or “gestes”: “Because they were a closed audience, whose readings in matters of class could have been anticipated by both playwright and king, both playwright and king were able to direct and manipulate not only the reading but the response. Louis disrupted the expectations of the noble spectators…Moliere seemed to set things right again…” (130-131). The audience that I mean is not universal, ideal, notional or aristocratic. Instead, I have two particular audiences in mind: a 17th-century one and a 21st-century one. Both audiences are quite different for historical, cultural and geographical reasons, but they can be said to have similar responses when a production elicits a shared code of performance.
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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2003.

Bloom, Harold. Moliere. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

Brantley, Ben. “No Wonder He’s Cranky; He’s Covered in Condiments.” Rev. of The Misanthrope, dir. Ivo van Hove. New York Times 25 Sept. 2007: E1, E6.

Calder, Andrew. Moliere: The Theory and Practice of Comedy. London: The Athlone Press, 1993.

Csencsitz, Cassandra. “Front & Center.” American Theatre November 2007: 23.

Fleck, Stephen. “Music, Dance and Laughter: Comic Creation in Moliere’s Comedy-Ballets.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature. Paris: Biblio 17, 1995: 21-43.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Grene, Nicholas. Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere: The Comic Contract. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980.

Hartley, David. “Language and Authority in Moliere.” Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resource of Language. J. Dunkley and W. Kirton, eds. Glasgow: U of Glasgow, 1992: 29-41.

Heilpern, John. “Van Hove’s Misanthrope: An Orgy of Garbage and Junk Food.” Rev. of The Misanthrope, dir. Ivo van Hove. The New York Observer 8 Oct. 2007: C8.

Knutson, Harold C. The Triumph of Wit: Moliere and Restoration Comedy. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1988.

The Misanthrope. By Moliere. Dir. Ivo van Hove. Perf. Bill Camp. New York Theatre Workshop. 15 Sept.. 2007 and 6 Oct. 2007.

Moliere. “The Misanthrope.” Trans. Maya Slater. The Misanthrope, Tartuffe And Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. [All references to Moliere’s text are taken from this translation.]

---. “The Misanthrope.” Translated and adapted by Tony Harrison from Moliere’s Le Misanthrope. London: Rex Collings, 1973. [All references to Harrison’s text are taken from the script used by The New York Theatre Workshop.]

Moore, W.G. Moliere: A New Criticism. London: Oxford UP, 1949.

Nurse, Peter H. Classical Voices: Studies of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Mme. de Lafayette. London: George G. Harrap, 1971.

---. Moliere and the Comic Spirit. Geneva: Droz, 1991.

Scott, Virginia. Moliere: A Theatrical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Smith, Gretchen Elizabeth. The Performance of Male Nobility in Moliere’s Comedies-Ballets: Staging the Courtier. Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2005.

van Hove, Ivo. Interview. New York Times 23 Sept. 2007, Arts and Leisure Section: 8.

---. “Thoughts on Moliere’s The Misanthrope.” Sept. 2007.
<http://www.nytw.org/thoughts_on_molieres_the_misanthrope.asp>.
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Mary Lindroth is an associate professor and Chair of English at Caldwell College, New Jersey. She has published articles investigating film/theater interpretations of early modern works, including The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Titus Andronicus, for Cineaste, Literature/Film Quarterly, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Studies in Popular Culture.

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures

Jessica Malay: "Buildings with Words"

Jessica L. Malay
University of Huddersfield

Buildings with Words: Architectural Metonymy in Early Modern Literary Texts

1> In sixteenth century literary devices derived from the English landscape evolved in significant ways from their sources in classical and medieval literature. In these source texts the convention of the locus amoenus, or pleasant and often virtuous place of repose, functions as a formulaic topos recognized by readers as a preparatory structural device for particular types of literature. In this topos, as traditionally employed, the entrance into this pleasant landscape signaled a remove from the demands and corruption of society into a place of peace, contemplation and virtue.[1] Certainly, elements of this convention continued to function within an emerging landscape discourse of the sixteenth century. However the trope of the “pleasant place” also emerges in literary texts of the period as a politically charged device that, even when used as a simple metaphor, was increasingly employed to communicate particular political beliefs.

2> Two of the most important catalysts for this invigoration of the locus amoenus topos were the modifications in the structures and practices of government emerging in the early sixteenth century and the comprehensive, and often politically calculated, redistribution of church land after the dissolution which often went hand in hand. The rise of a centralized and unified monarchy, already underway under previous kings, converged in the reign of Henry VIII. During his reign he consolidated important power structures, administering these through a bureaucracy run by men from the gentry classes. This created a climate of opportunity for many who vied for newly available monastic land in order to enhance their financial, social and political position. Some of these lands were bought as a type of “portfolio investment” while one or two venues would be heavily invested in to create a primary residence. [2] This primary residence in turn was expected to participate in the maintenance or elevation of an individual within the socio/political milieu and in this way developed a semiotic connection with the owner.

3> Sir Bryan Tuke, who held the post of the treasurer of the King’s chamber, purchased Layer Marney in Essex from the two daughters and co-heirs of John, second Lord Marney.[3] And while his own finances suffered from the strains of his office, his purchase of the Layer Marney estate established his heirs as powerful local figures for nearly a century. Philip Hoby, one of the grooms of the privy chamber and a diplomat during the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI, acquired Bisham Abbey in a trade with Anne of Cleves. The acquisition of Bisham Abbey again established the Hoby heirs both locally and within Tudor and later Stuart politics.[4] Maurice Howard suggests that Sir Anthony Browne, Henry’s Master of the Horse, was allowed to purchase Battle Abbey because of Henry’s desire to place a trusted servant in a strategic defensive position. Browne used stone from the abbey to build both civic and domestic buildings, and his position of authority in the local area was attested to at his death by the grand tomb chest erected in the parish church just outside the abbey.[5] Sir Richard Grenville’s letter to Cromwell, asking for the priory of Launceston, makes clear that the establishment of oneself in a property worthy of one’s position in society was understood and accepted within the culture. He explains, “Nor I do not this for no covetousness, but to stand in the case of others.”[6] Later, in the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir William Savile of Thornhill was advised by his uncle:

"Considering your houses in my judgment are not suitable for your quality, nor yet complete with furniture, I conceive your expenses ought to be reduced to two thirds of your estate, the rest saved to the accommodation of you in that kind."[7]

4> William Woolley “condemned Godfrey Clerk’s house at Chilcot in Derbyshire as ‘not equal to his estate and quality, being Knight of the County and married to Catherine, daughter of Philip, Earl of Chesterfield.’”[8] Finally, as the case of Robert Sidney reveals, one’s reputation and one’s house were often synonymous. In a letter to his wife concerning their house, the famous Penshurst, Sidney complains, “If I find no meanes for my workmen my building cannot go forwards which wil be disgrace to me.”[9]

5> Thus, by the sixteenth century, the individual him or herself could be defined in terms of one’s relationship to property. [10] Howard, more practically asserts that the way in which an individual managed one’s property transactions could “make or break his or her reputation for moral probity.”[11] By the same token, an individual’s property was increasingly recognized as a “vast system of signs, signs that ‘advertise’ meanings . . . to those watching them,” that functioned as a “text, or a stage.”[12] What many wished their houses to advertise, was, of course, their worthiness—most especially their moral worthiness. This development of the connection between owner and house resulted in the infusion of the convention of the locus amoenus trope with conceptions of individual power, identity and social consciousness. From this emerged a discourse which utilized and refined images of country estates to produce significations of social qualities and characteristics seen as desirable within the culture. It was a discourse that Keri McBride contends, promoted a particular understanding of the “legitimate exercise of power that is both visible in and engendered by the right relationship of human being to land.”[13]

6> The way these significations functioned is best explained by Gérard Genette in his discussion of the literary figure. Genette explains, “its existence depends completely on the awareness that the reader has [ . . . ] of the ambiguity of the discourse that is being offered to him.” Genette goes on to quote Sartre’s observation that “it is he [the reader] . . . who enables the significance” of each figure to be understood. The figure becomes a hermeneutic circle that “depends on the gap between these words and those that the reader perceives, mentally beyond them, ‘in a perpetual supersession of the written thing.’”[14] Consequently, as James Duncan explains, “objects and certainly abstract groupings such as landscapes have no intrinsic meaning. The meaning they have is social; it arises out of social interaction and is conferred upon them by social groups.”[15] This element of shared meaning or consensus was present in the figure of the country house estate and explains why literary devices derived from it were ubiquitous in the period, providing a potent metaphor that was accessed extensively.

7> The most widely recognized deployment of this landscape discourse is Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” the oft-cited model for the genre. In this poem, his reader is initially introduced to an idealized pastoral world, inhabited with mythological characters cavorting in the forests and meadows surrounding the estate of Robert Sidney. As the poem progresses, themes of plenty, hospitality and virtue are clearly associated with Robert Sidney who is presented in a pastoral role, preserving the community through his just stewardship.[16] Decades earlier, in 1586, Geoffrey Whitney used a similar discourse in his “Patria Cuique Chara: To Richarde Cotton Esquier.” Here he likens Cotton’s Cumbermaire estate to “A Comon-wealthe [ . . . ]/ By whose supporte, the meaner sorte doe live.”[17] Cotton’s estate is seen as “A stately seate” where Cotton spends his time to his “praise, and to your countries good.”[18]

8> These examples reveal what Roman Jakobson describes as “contiguity”—where the moral qualities of the owners become metonymically associated with the landscape itself.[19] Charles Molesworth notes that a “strategy of metonymy” becomes a way of establishing the connection between value in the sense of property and value in its more spiritual sense. A man’s estate is viewed as the “effect” of his virtue.[20] In Jonson’s “To Penshurst” Robert Sidney is seen not merely to build but to “dwell” in harmony with human, animal and mineral upon his estate.[21] In like manner, Whitney presents Cotton as the master who “hath no stinge” where all “in the hive with him doe live in blisse.”[22]

9> These and other texts developed the metonymic connection between a house and its owner into a paean of virtue and tranquillity in keeping with the locus amoenus convention. At the same time they infused the trope with politically charged messages that could be deployed to communicate particular political positions. One example of this can be found in Mary Sidney’s “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Philip Sidney,” a dedicatory poem in the Tixall Manuscript of the Sidneian Psalms (1599). Sidney used this poem as both an elegy to her brother, and a politically charged admonition to the Queen. In this poem Mary Sidney counsels Elizabeth to consider more seriously the militant Protestant position Philip Sidney advocated, as well as to chastise the Queen for her neglect of him. One of the most salient metaphors within the poem is Mary Sidney’s identification of her brother as a “goodly building [ . . . ]/cut off by fate.” Here Sidney goes beyond simply displaying her brother’s virtue through a culturally accessible figure. By asserting his virtue through a metonymic association with a “goodly building,” she presents the ambiguity of Philip Sidney’s place in the court of Elizabeth. In that gap between the words and that which is perceived beyond those words, as discussed by Genette, Sidney subtly criticizes the Queen for being blind to her brother’s extraordinary worth:

"As goodly buildings to some glorious ende
cut of by fate, before the Graces hadde
each wondrous part in all their beauties cladde,
Yet so much done, as Arte could not amende;
So thy rare workes to which no witte can adde,
in all mens eies, which are not blindely madde
Beyonde compare above all praise, extende."[23]

10> Her inference that only one “blindely madde” could fail to see the rare work that was her brother, even in his unfinished state. This inference asserts paradoxically that Philip Sidney was already perfect despite being incomplete. Here Mary Sidney suggests the Queen’s indifference denied Philip Sidney the full glory due him. Her patronage, which could have provided Philip Sidney with an actual country house estate to advertise his worthiness—and political power—was denied him. Instead, Mary Sidney makes clear it is her brother’s virtue alone that animates the metonymic device of the house, in the absence of the material object itself. Earlier, Philip Sidney himself employed this device of the goodly building to represent his virtue when he humbly begs the queen to “reed my hart in the course of my life, and though it self be but of a mean worth, yet to esteem it like a poor house well set.”[24] Again, the inference that he is indeed a “poor” if “well sett” house contains a veiled criticism of the Queen’s neglect. Here Sidney also imbeds an allusion to Matt. 7:24-25,[25] allowing the metaphor to more robustly communicate his virtue. The Sidneys’ use of the word “building” reveals that by the late sixteenth century the convention of the metonymic substitution of a country house, with its layered allusions to classical and biblical topos, for a particular person had begun to function as an idiom. The use of the term “building” was understood by contemporary readers as containing within it the multivalency present in the discourse of the country house without the need for further exposition or development.

11> This use can be seen in a number of other works from the period. William Shakespeare employs it when describing the murdered Duncan in Macbeth. In this scene Macduff cries out:

"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence
The life o’th’ building."[26]

12> And while these lines infer the building is an ecclesiastical edifice, the metonymy is not fixed and functions to appropriate allusions of both the church and palace connected with kingship. Shakespeare also uses this device in connection with the young man of the sonnets. In sonnet 80, after rehearsing his own humility, he expresses the fame and social stature of the young man by declaiming, “He of tall building and of goodly pride” (789). This metonymic device was also applied to women. In Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy, the respected Antonio laments the suicide of his wife after she is raped by the Duke’s step-son:

"Draw neerer Lords and be sad witnesses
Of a fayre comely building newly falne,
Being falsely undermined [by] violent rape [ . . . ]"[27]

13> This use of the metaphor calls to mind Mary Sidney’s appropriation of similar discourse concerning the early demise of Philip Sidney where the culturally rich signification of the country house is present even in its absence, with lack providing additional poignancy to the lament through the oppositional figure of the ruined house. This can also be seen in the example from Macbeth.

14> Shakespeare uses this figure again, if less tragically in Two Gentlemen of Verona where Shakespeare employs the device to not only illustrate the effect of unrequited love upon Valentine, but to allude to a topical social issue of the time:

"O thou that dost inhabit in my breast,
Leave not the mansion so long tenantless,
Lest, growing ruinous, the building fall
And leave no memory of what it was!
Repair me with thy presence, Silvia." (5.4.7-10, p. 22)

15> Valentine’s use of the extended metaphor of a neglected building may be employed light-heartedly in this passage. However, while the metonymic association of a gentleman with his country house enriches the character of Valentine, while at the same time inserts anxiety into the scene by alluding to a destruction which threatens to destabilize the landscape. For while the discourse of the country house attempted to posit a secure and unchanging social structure, the very imagery that participated in the promulgation of this ideological position could, conversely, be deployed to question or even undermine it.

16> Shakespeare’s almost comedic use of the metonymic device of the building as representative of virtue in Cymbeline, while not particularly ideologically damaging, does show a willingness to subtly undermine the discourse supporting prevailing cultural norms. In act four the Roman General, Caius Lucius stumbles across the body of the slain Cloten:

"Soft, ho! what trunk is here
Without his top? The ruin speaks that sometime
It was a worthy building." (4.2.355-357)

17> Cloten, of course, is not a “worthy building.” Instead, alive he was a depraved and wicked usurper, an agent of chaos and destruction. Only by reducing him to a ruin is he rendered harmless. In this play the effect upon landscape discourse by such contradictory usage would have been contained within the confines of the drama. Even the play’s wise and virtuous heroine, Imogen, mistakes the trunk for a “worthy building,” that is, her husband, Posthumous, though at this point in the play Posthumous’s worthiness has come into question and the two figures are subsumed into the metonymic device.

18> Other texts go beyond simply toying with landscape discourse, instead inserting alternative values into it by a reshaping and realigning the tropes and metonymies associated with it. This is what Amelia Lanyer does in her poem “The Description of Cooke-ham.” In this poem the estate of Cookham is not, like Jonson’s Penshurst, an idealized country house estate invigorated by the virtue of its owner, but quite the opposite. The “princely Palace” confers nothing upon the resident and serves only as that “sweet place” where “Virtue then did rest.” The house serves as a mere staging point for virtue. Lanyer describes the physical structure of the house at Cookham only briefly, quickly moving the subject of her poem, Margaret Clifford, the Countess of Cumberland, from the “Palace” to the unbounded spaces outside the house. These come to represent an alternative metonymic space, that of Paradise.[28] Early in the longer poem to which “The Description of Cooke-ham” is appended, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, the Cookham estate is described as a “Paradice,” (51-52) and is aligned with heavenly authority rather than the earthly authority represented by the great buildings in contemporary landscape. Lanyer does this by preparing the reader for an alternative understanding of the pastoral images used in landscape discourse. In her Passion narrative which precedes “The Description of Cooke-ham” she reinscribes this imagery by powerfully affiliating it with Christ, a strategy also employed by Philip Sidney. Margaret Clifford, a figure closely connect with Christ in this text, is represented as the animating and spiritual force present in the Cookham estate. On the “sacred hill,” far removed from the actual male created space of the Cookham country house, Lanyer presents Clifford as participating in a community made up “Christ and his Apostles,” and a household of women, including Lanyer (133). In “The Description of Cooke-ham,” Lanyer employs the imagery of the country estate to propose alternatives to the very ideologies this imagery fostered. She is able to do this because the topos, as discussed above, was already infused with biblical and classical allusions associated with virtue. In many ways, what Lanyer does is to realign the topos in keeping with its earlier employment as a classical/biblical locus amoenus, challenging the accrued political assumptions present in the trope by the early seventeenth century.

19> The device of the “goodly building” was derived from landscape practices emerging from the socio-political environment of the sixteenth century. It appropriated elements of the locus amoenus topos infused with Classical and Biblical allusions to virtue in order to elevate the individual connected with a country house estate. The device served to posit a cultural stability dependent upon what was perceived to be the “right relationship” amongst those who inhabited the landscape of early modern England. The disruptions and renegotiations in this relationship caused by the redistribution of land after the Reformation, as well as changes in the political system that saw the last vestiges of a more feudal social construct dissipate, made use of this device as part of a strategy aimed at maintaining a socially constructed “right relationship” between all members of the society. Yet at the same time, the instability inherent in the device allowed for its strategic deployment capable of challenging and reshaping prevailing political and social norms.
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Notes

[1] B. David Evett, “‘Paradice’s Only Map’: The Topos Of The Locus Amoenus And The Structure Of Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House,’” PMLA 85.3 (1970) 505.

[2] Maurice Howard, The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 2008) 17-23.

[3] “Parishes: South Weald,” A History of the County of Essex, vol. 8 (1983) 74-90. Online at <http://www.british%20history.ac.uk/>.

[4] Piers Compton, The Story of Bisham Abbey (Maidenhead: Thames Valley, 1973) 55.

[5] Howard, 22.

[6] Richard Grenville qtd. in Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London: Allen Unwin, 1971) 229; catalogued in Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-1547, vol 14. 1 (London, 1894) 580.

[7] William Savile qtd. in Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry: 1480-1680 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP) 1999 16.

[8] William Woolley qtd. in Nicholas Cooper 16.

[9] Sidney, D’ Lisle ms. 2.155.

[10] Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics Of Place And The Poetics Of History, (Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1984) 23.

[11] Howard, 17.

[12] Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: a Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 137, 139.

[13] Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2001) 6.

[14] Gérard Genette, Figures Of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia UP, 1982) 54.

[15] James S. Duncan, “Landscape and the Communication of Social Identity,” The Mutual Interaction of people and their Built Environment: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Amos Rapoport (Paris: Moulton, 1976) 392.

[16] Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” The Poems and Prose Works, Ben Jonson, eds. C.H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954) 94.

[17] Geoffrey Whitney, “Patria Cuique Chara,” A Choice of Emblemes, 1586, ed. John Horden. (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar P, 1969) 201.

[18] Whitney 201.

[19] Genette 55.

[20] Charles Molesworth, “Property and Virtue,” Genre 1.2 (1968) 145-146.

[21] Jonson, “To Penshurst” 96.

[22] Whitney 200.

[23] Mary Sidney, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, et. al., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 112.

[24] Philip Sidney, The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963) 147.

[25] 24: Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 25: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. From: Bible, Authorized Version [King James] (London, 1616).

[26] William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Well, Gary Taylor, et. al., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005) 3.1.65-68, p. 978. All subsequent references to Shakespeare are from this edition and are referenced parenthetically.

[27] Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy in Thomas Middleton, The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) 1.4.1-3.

[28] Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 130: lns 5-7. All subsequent references to this work are from this edition and are referenced parenthetically.
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Jessica L. Malay is a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield where she teaches Renaissance Literature. Her interests include literary history and the effects of culture on literary production. Dr. Malay’s recent publications include: Inhabiting Place: Textual Constructions of Space in the Writing of Renaissance Women (Mellen, 2006); “Jane Seager’s Sibylline Poems” ELR (2006); and “Elizabeth Russell’s Textual Performances of Self” COMITATUS (2006).

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures

Sharon Meltzer: "Genre, Culture & the Moment"

Sharon B. Meltzer
Richard J. Daley College

Genre, Culture, and the Moment of The Merchant

1> The Merchant of Venice is the first written of Shakespeare’s plays to generate controversy over its genre, since Edmund Kean transformed the red-wigged villain of Portia’s golden comedy into the Romantic era’s dignified tragic victim of finally unbearable injustice (Barnet 65). Post-Holocaust critics Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom, John Gross and Kenneth Gross have responded to their discomfort with the play’s anti-Semitic content (Bloom even wishes the play, with its “bottomless” ironies, had never been written) by focusing on Shylock’s dramatically transcendent “inwardness” as marking a transformative deepening in Shakespeare’s treatment of character. With all the great respect due the Bradleian cult of character, a consideration of the play’s genre and culture can restore our bearings about its tone by exposing the materially based realism in The Merchant of Venice and with it core values that underlie not only this play but Shakespeare’s most profound work to follow.

Comic Genre and Conservative Culture

2> Genre was the scaffolding from which Shakespeare built his early theatrical triumphs, bringing the two comedies that immediately preceded Merchant to brilliant effect by tapping their very devices for his themes: identity in The Taming of The Shrew and imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If there is a comparable intensity of creative energy at work in The Merchant of Venice it too comes from Shakespeare’s turning one of his artistic tools to thematic purpose. For in The Merchant, Shakespeare holds his all but proverbial “mirror” up to the life of his own changing social and economic culture. James Shapiro’s historical study of attitudes towards Jews in England in a proximate period, though it too owes its existence to Shylock, concludes that those early modern attitudes reflect the dominant Christian culture’s need to define itself. It is the social reality Shakespeare’s mirror reflects in The Merchant of Venice that for the first time in his career unbalanced his comedy’s effect.

3> Foregrounded against an era of expanding trade and adventurous enterprise whose risks are invoked in the play’s opening scene, both the aristocratic gentility nostalgically centered on Portia’s Belmont, and the choral community of convivial Christian friends in Venice, challenged by the realistic commercial values of Shakespeare’s Venetian Rialto—the universal solvent and its material power—prove conspicuously conservative.

4> Portia’s fairy-tale predicament as a daughter whose all-provident father sets the terms of her betrothal by the casket test is the conservative linchpin of the comic plot. Like the rebellious daughters of the senexes in Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies, Portia restlessly chafes in her golden cage, but unlike her saucy peers, she responsibly conforms, albeit not without some humorous hint of supervention on her part (“bred’ / ’head’ / ’nourish’ed’ / ‘engendr’ed’ / ’fed’ [3.2.63-68]), for which she is rewarded by marriage to the object of her generous heart and head-over-heels attraction— extraordinary cooperation, for a Shakespeare play, with patriarchal conservatism.

5> Conservatism is also implicit in the play’s rewarding of Portia’s graciously profligate suitor Bassanio, whose prodigality has led him into indebtedness and fortune-hunting. His appeal to his devoted friend Antonio to advance the cost of his courtship issues in the crux of the play’s other main plot, Antonio’s bond to Shylock. For all his lame vows to compensate when the plan backfires—he would give the bond many times over, in Portia’s money, or legally irrelevantly, give his “hands . . . head . . . heart” (4.1.208-16)—Bassanio is willing to venture the life of his friend to woo the wealthy Portia in style. Shakespeare does not mock Bassanio’s courtroom rhetoric for being all he has to be generous with, but gives him no economic activity except to spend, borrow, or seek to marry wealth. In Shakespeare’s most likely source for the casket test, Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, Bassanio’s counterpart omits to tell his godfather that he has twice lost his fortune to circumstances of that test (trickery, drugs) (Myrick 105). Shakespeare gives Bassanio no such excuse for needing the loan; he is merely extravagant. He wins the service of Launcelot Gobbo because he provides “rare new liveries” (2.2.11), and Portia, because the Renaissance gentleman knows how to say the right thing at the right time; in this case, understanding that a patriarch who held on to the power of his wealth would have known his Machiavelli, that appearances can be expected to deceive—that those golden locks could be a wig (3.2.88-97), strategy to be used as well as defended against. The rewarding of this charming, cultured Bassanio’s dependent profligacy by the liberality with which the lady he wins disposes her superabundant wealth, a male Cinderella story, does little to avoid appearing like the static exploitation of aristocratic privilege and luxury it is.

6> The genteel Bassanio fears Gratiano’s “vulgar tongue” unsuitable to accompany him on his quest for the refined lady, but in the Venetians’ spirit of generous friendship, allows him to tag along nonetheless to Belmont, where Gratiano proceeds to gratify the needs of the comic plot by acting in comic imitation of his aristocratic friend, first in contracting with Portia’s maid, then in transgressing his vow not to part with the gift of “her ring,” a vulgarism in his speech. When Gratiano plays the taunting chorus in the famous courtroom scene, calling for the pillorying of the defeated moneylender, his popular, or vulgar conservatism, memorably captured by a student’s costuming herself in a baseball cap worn backwards, is the conservatism of rednecks who, given occasion to tap into their prejudices, like the jeering citizens at the execution of Roderigo Lopez Stephen Greenblatt feels Shakespeare must have deplored (277), think no farther than their unexamined prejudices, their need for reinforcement by peers, and narrow social conformity.

7> Cultural conservatism is implicit in Portia’s satirical mockeries of her foreign suitors, who fail to suit her tastes; the most insidious kind, because it is justified by comedy’s biological objective, marriage. As Shylock shrewdly observes, the last thing the privileged of a dominant culture would want is to marry their daughters to their foreign-born slaves (4.1.94). We still debate whether to call this cultural, biological, or xenophobic conservatism.

8> It is from the ironically qualified conservatisms of the eponymous merchant that the action of the play springs. Antonio is the embodiment of generosity, of Christian largesse and self-sacrifice—anything for a friend. But this very quality shades perceptibly into saccharine excess and is colored by a not unrelated emotional need to be recognized for his sacrifices, showing that Antonio is, after all, a mere mortal, whose unexamined application in his material social world of Matthew 25’s “spirit” of unlimited charity, a “brotherly love” to which Shakespeare adds suggestively homosexual overtones, disquietingly reproaches us. Antonio’s friends speculate that it is his worldly risk taking that provokes his anxiety (he “knows not why” he “feels so sad” [1.1.1-2]). He dismisses that, claiming the great number of his ventures protects him. And he rejects that love is the cause. But as the plot unfolds, Antonio proves in denial on both counts, not knowing his own boundaries. He signs an absurd bond in overconfidence, only for all his ships to appear lost, and signs it on behalf of his special friend knowing he will at best lose him by it to marriage. The plaintive strain in Antonio persists.

9> But the aspect of Antonio’s Christian conservatism at the root of the play’s intense drama is his conflation of religion and economics. Antonio, Shylock complains in his only aside in the play, “rails / Even there where merchants most do congregate, / On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift, / Which he calls interest” (1.3.46-48). A little later, addressing him: “you call me cutthroat dog / And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine”’ (1.3.108-09), to which, Antonio: “I am as like to call thee so again, / To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too” (1.3.127-28). Antonio hates Shylock because he charges interest, and in a play where genteel manners prevail and are valued, he feels righteously justified in spitting on him for it.

10> The grounds of Antonio’s contempt for Shylock, that he charges interest—any interest—on his loans would have marked him with a nostalgic Christian conservatism, at the very least for those in Shakespeare’s audience who shared the eponymous merchant’s profession, and there were some (Gurr 224). From the time of Cosimo de Medici, the Pope had relaxed the Christian prohibition against charging interest on loans, to the advantage of the Church, and the Medici had grown wealthy lending money at interest (Means 39-43). England’s maritime mercantile expansion in Shakespeare’s time could not have occurred without venture capital (Braudel 368; Goody 76), nor venture capital become a route to prosperity, without interest. In 1571, a generation before the composition of The Merchant of Venice, Elizabeth I had set a limit on the rate of “usance”—interest—of 10%, indicating that the practice, though technically illegal, required protection from abuse (Nugent 203). Theresa Nugent shows that between Robert Wilson’s plays of 1581 and 1590 a shift in the treatment of “usury,” as the charging of interest was loosely termed, “from murderer of communal fellowship to tolerated social practice illustrates the growing acceptance of money-lending” (204). That even these so-called Usury Laws against excessive interest were more honored in the breach than the observance is attested by Eric Sams’ documentation of Shakespeare’s own father’s being twice fined for charging excessive interest on loans (200:16), and Shakespeare’s himself lending money at interest (Sams10). Shakespeare and his audience lived in the same world. Though some in that audience may have responded with nostalgia to Antonio’s reactionary posture, the commercially aspiring among them would have seen Antonio’s expressed grounds for contempt of Shylock as antiquated, and, by implication, Shylock’s more realistic economic modernity. To the indubitable, if politically vulnerable power in the play of the wealth Shylock accrues thereby we will return.

11> Culturally, as well as economically, Antonio and Shylock could not be farther apart. They cannot read the same text in the same way. If Shylock, to justify his Jewish dietary aversion to pork, distorts the New Testament by ignoring the context of Christ’s purging a demonic legion by drowning the swine possessed by them, to dwell instead on Christ’s “conjuring the devil into pigs” (1.3.32), Antonio returns the favor by bringing an absence of context to Shylock’s use of the Old Testament. To defend “thrift,” prospering by one’s enterprise, Shylock offers the example of Jacob, who, many times tricked by his father-in-law into continuing dependence and inability to provide on his own for his growing family, figures out a contractual means to win a portion of the wealth he helps Laban accumulate (Genesis 29-30). Shylock, with obvious relish, calls this clever enterprise (1.3.73-87). Jacob’s Biblical fate was to found the Jewish nation. Antonio takes the conservative religious view of the exploited, hard-working Jacob’s primitive experiment in voodoo genetics: Jacob’s fortunes, like his own, were in God’s hands. Shylock is making the case that Jacob’s cleverness, like the interest Shylock charges, enables his “godspeed.”

12> In this play where fellowship and manners matter so much, Shylock is the entrenched, stand-offish outsider who, conspicuously conservative of his own culture in the Christian community in whose midst his kind were permitted for their historical utility as sources of capital to dwell, refuses to eat with Christians, stops the ears of his house to avoid hearing their music, and creates an oppressive isolation for his daughter in their home. Shakespeare makes Jessica’s elopement a direct consequence of Shylock’s contravening his own expressed prohibition against dining with Christians, so that the plot here serves as an ironic confirmation that Shylock was right to play his position defensively. Reciprocally, when Antonio “softens” towards the Jew because Shylock agrees to lend him the sum he is seeking without interest, Antonio makes a strategic mistake, which argues that he too would have done better to maintain an attitude of mistrust. Shakespeare has captured in the action of his play the unrelenting cycle of xenophobic prejudice.

The Universal Solvent and the Law

13> Shylock may never have gotten his dinner. During Lorenzo’s delay absconding with the conventionally maidenly modest Jessica, and her father’s gold and jewels, the literal winds of opportunity come up and his host heads for Belmont, canceling the masque, an aristocratic revel, for fortune hunting. Historian Theodore Rabb has bluntly called The Merchant of Venice “a play about capitalism” (67). Stephen Mentz finds that “attention to Launcelot Gobbo,” the go-between of its Christians and Jews, “leads to a broader economic reading of the play . . . that the servant . . . represents the inexorable urge to exchange that was part of the emerging ideology of capitalism” (185). That both the enabling of Bassanio’s suit for Portia’s aristocratic wealth, hence the comic plot, and the courtroom drama that menaces and resolves it, depend on the money Antonio borrows from Shylock hovers ironically over the entire action of the play and its conservative Christian society.

14> While the Christian spirit of transcendent “mercy” emerges from the nostalgic gentility of Belmont and makes for the memorable set piece of the play, what wins in the trial scene is legal one-upsmanship, not Christian charity, the law of man that operates in the commercial world of the Rialto, not God’s. Antonio himself recognizes that Venice’s reputation as a trading city is on the line if he filches on a contract (3.3.26-31). Shylock’s power to exact his penalty proceeds from the letter of the law in a mutually signed “bond,” emphatically upheld by Portia (4.1.217-21), and in the drawing out of the trial with melodramatic exaction that power is undermined only by supervening laws—against spilling blood—for which Shylock would lose his wealth, then against taking “in excess” of the pound of flesh—for which he would lose his life. At this, Shylock ceases to pursue his claim.

15> But Portia finds a counter suit against him as an “alien” seeking “the life of any citizen,” that calls for the forfeit of all his goods and puts his life at the mercy of the Duke. Though Venice allows Shylock to profit by his enterprise, its law, otherwise admirable for its equity, does not regard him as “like” its Christian citizens (3.1.64). Shakespeare’s Duke, however, contrastingly quickly, mitigates Shylock’s penalties:

"Duke. That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it.
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio’s;
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive into a fine." (4.1.367-71)

16> Shylock, suggestively either too proud or too preoccupied with his devastation, responds as if he does not grasp the Duke’s implication:

"Nay, take my life and all! Pardon not that!
You take my house, when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house. You take my life
When you do take the means by which I live." (4.1.373-76)

17> This equation of life and wealth is no more satire of the Jew’s greed—Shylock would have profited nil had Antonio made good his loan—than it is Antonio’s when. earlier in the proceeding, reconciling himself to his doom after characteristically “transcending”—but not without mentioning—his dear friend’s responsibility for his plight: (“Give me your hand, Bassanio; fare you well, / Grieve not that I am fall’n to this for you”), he too partakes of Shylock’s material perspective:

"Antonio. For herein Fortune shows herself more kind
Than is her custom; it is still her use
To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,
To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow
An age of poverty: from which ling’ring penance
Of such misery doth she cut me off." (4.1.265-71)

18> Antonio’s tone is plaintive, pathetic, self-comforting; Shylock’s poignant, outraged, bitter, tragic, but their necessary association of worldly wealth and life worth having, identical. In real life, the material matters.

19> In the resolution of the courtroom drama, Shakespeare plays rhetorically with the punitive disposition, at Antonio’s bidding, of the power of Shylock’s wealth, a disposition variously misread, when not ignored, in the critical literature (Bloom 184; John Gross 89). Shakespeare has Antonio ask the court to return to Shylock the half of his wealth due the state, less the unspecified fine, while Antonio himself, ironically, gets to keep the other half of Shylock’s wealth to “use” in his lifetime (i.e., profit from). Antonio’s further stipulation that all Shylock’s wealth revert upon his death to his Christian son-in-law and his daughter turns the knife that they will inherit her father’s money though she has abandoned him, even as it rests ironically upon the prized value of his scorned economic activity. Insofar as Shylock is present in the fifth act of the play, it is, claims about her callousness to the contrary (John Gross 74-75), in Jessica’s uneasy joking consciousness of herself as a betrayer of her father in an “unthrift” love (5.1.13-16).

The Material Nexus: The Matter of Life

20> The Merchant’s legacy to Shakespeare’s development as a creative artist is at least as much to values, to what “matters,” as to inwardness in the portrayal of Shylock’s character. Eric Sams’ rigorously documented account of Shakespeare’s early cultural influences: family, nature and animal husbandry, religious politics and the law, as well, of course, as theater, resonates with both the underlying realism and the cruxes of this text.

21> Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity on pain of death, felt by many as the worst affront he suffers, is rhetorically colored by its source, religiously conservative Antonio; by the Duke’s putting authority behind it despite having elsewhere shown that mercy is indeed “mightiest in the mightiest” (4.1.87); and by Shylock’s choice. It is not “nice,” that his conservative Christian antagonist and the voice of political authority impose outward conformity on his difference. But no religious fanatic, Shylock chooses life. His “I am content” (4.1.393) is the only social reply he can make, as he is once again socially defined. Just as Shakespeare mirrors the conservative fault lines and the pervasive hypocritical subjection to the universal solvent in his society, he mirrors the religious politics of his time. Caught between her father’s ambitions and her Catholic foreign competitors, the reign of England’s insecure queen could still be marked by politically motivated pendulum swings of religious oppression. Members of Shakespeare’s family had been punished as Catholic recusants (Sams 12-14). There is no record of The Merchant of Venice being performed at court during Elizabeth’s reign (Barnet 162).

22> Shylock’s last speech asks leave to go, assumes his right to a certain courtesy, and accepts his obligation under the law, the social commonality whose authority has brought order despite his culturally vulnerable social position, and, after all, more justice than his fulfillment of his wrath would have done. But when he says that he is “not well,” making indistinguishable his emotional and his physical state, we experience him as a sentient human creature whose feelings are implicated in a material world; not just by his rage for vengeance, but in his balance sheet at the departure of Launcelot, “a patch,” but “kind enough”; and for the symbolic importance Shylock attaches to material things—the stolen turquoise ring his dead Leah gave him when he was a bachelor; the monkey for which his daughter trades it; his, like Portia’s father’s, mutually implicated “daughter” and “ducats.” Even as such allusions reinforce Shylock’s cultural isolation, they show Shylock attaching himself to the material world with honest emotion, and living with its real human and economic conflicts. The exceedingly generous, self-sacrificing Antonio, meanwhile, is melancholy, morbidly emotionally needy of the recognition of the object of his suggestively homosexual affections, and familialy unconnected.

23> Shylock is often complimented for his rhetorical intelligence, but rhetorical skill, and even immense cleverness—Richard III’s, Iago’s, Edmund’s—have by themselves no moral weight for Shakespeare. They demand and gratify our attention, and we admire them, but they do not touch us. The morally outrageous fallen aristocrat Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s very next play, who won Harold Bloom to Shakespeare in his childhood, and who so compelled his creator’s, as he does our fascination that it took Shakespeare three plays to kill him off, captivates us all not just because he is a master of clever casuistry, but because of his devastatingly realistic material vision. To the materialist Falstaff, “Honor is a mere scutcheon” (Henry IV, Part One 5.1.141). The lives of the rabble he recruits to battle for his own profit do not matter to him; only his sack. His appeal for understanding? “I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty” (3.3.172-3).

24> Shylock’s language is vivid, sometimes to the reader’s embarrassment, for being riddled with animal references—over a hundred in his five scenes—most to particular animals, but also to parts of the human body, physical actions it performs or receives, and the objects that impose on it, grounding his language, like so much else in the play, in material reality. One of the lasting contributions of Eric Sams is his solid documentation of Shakespeare’s minute familiarity with the language of the country and his father’s agricultural trades: the raising, trading and processing of animals, including the tanning of hides. Given that Shylock’s thematically all-important trade as a moneylender is a city trade, for the historical reason that Jews were forbidden to own land in medieval and Renaissance Europe, Shakespeare’s imparting to him so singularly the vocabulary of his own childhood association with animal nature deepens the connection of this play, through the language of Shylock, with the significance of imagery of animals and of the body in what Shelley, and most of its serious readers since regard as the greatest drama in all of literature, King Lear.

25> When, doubly abandoned by daughters and the tragic self-inflictor of the loss of a third, Lear comes to feel that as king he had “ta’en/Too little care” to shake the superflux” to “wretches in need,” instead of showing “the heavens more just” (3.4.33-360), his insight is grounded, like Shylock’s appeal for recognition as a sentient creature by the human community from which he is culturally alienated (“Hath not a Jew eyes? . . . ” [3.1.55 ff.]), in the painful truth that socially “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal” as Edgar disguised as a besmirched, naked Bedlam beggar. The nature and clothing imagery integral to the shattered existential world of King Lear unequivocally establishes that Shakespeare at his most profoundly poetic resorted to the language of our animal nature. And Lear, like The Merchant of Venice, uses this language to reinforce the need to take account of that animal nature, and be socially responsible for transcending it, by law and compassion. Hamlet’s moment of detached reflection in the graveyard upon his return to his alienating social world is expressed as well in the language of the body as part of the cycle of physical nature: “Imperious Caesar, dead and gone to clay / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (5.1.215-16).

26> These are tragic plays, about kings, but their grounding in material reality and their profoundest insights are already implicit in the ironic observation of conservative culture that unbalanced the genre of a comedy about Shakespeare’s changing social world. The same may be said of the solacing relationship of fathers and daughters in Shakespeare’s late romances, set in motion, perhaps, when for the first time in his plays, comic or tragic, the reader is invited to think with sadness about the pain of the abandoned senex and of the daughter who does what she has to do to survive in the real, material world.
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Works Cited

Barnet, Sylvan, “The Merchant of Venice on Stage and Screen.” The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. Ed. Kenneth Myrick. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998.160-73.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life: 1400-1800. Trans. Miriam Kochan. New York: Harper, 1967.

Goody, Jack. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World. New York: Norton, 2004.

Gross, John. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

Gross, Kenneth. Shylock Is Shakespeare. Chicago, U of Chicago P, 2006.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England. 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Means, Howard. Money and Power: The History of Business. New York: Wiley, 2001.

Mentz, Stephen R. “The Fiend Gives Friendly Counsel.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 177-87.

Myrick, Kenneth, “A Note on the Sources of The Merchant of Venice.” The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. Ed. Kenneth Myrick, The Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998: 105-07.

Nugent, Teresa Lanpher. “Usury and Counterfeiting in Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London and in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in the New Economic Criticism. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 201-17.

Rabb, Theodore K. The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Basic, 2006.

Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-94. New Haven: Yale, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. The Signet Classic Shakespeare, Ed. Gen. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998.

---. Henry IV, Part One. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998.

---. King Lear. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998.

---. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Kenneth Myrick. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. Gen Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.
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Sharon Bittenson Meltzer, Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale 1970, Assistant Professor in English and Humanities, University of Chicago, and Professor of English, Richard J. Daley College, City Colleges of Chicago to 2007, has taught Shakespeare at Tufts University, the University of Chicago Extension, and Daley College.

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume One (2008): Genres & Cultures