Festive Enterprise The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England
J I L L P. I N G R A M
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
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Contents
List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 one
The Festive Gatherer and the Empathetic Thief: The Genealogy of a Character 17 t wo Forms of Investment: Mummings, Prologues, and Epilogues 45 t h r e e Reconciliation in The Winter’s Tale: Devotion and Commerce from Guilds to Church Ales 71 f o u r The Mobile Entertainer: John Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrimage 93 five Coding Complaint in Gesta Grayorum and The Christmas Prince 117 six “A Jest’s Prosperity”: The Market, Marprelate, and Love’s Labour’s Lost 143 Conclusion 159 Notes 165 Bibliography 207 Index 239
vii
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Introduction
Festive celebrations—devotional, calendrical, and recreational—animated English life from the thirteenth century onward. English “festivity” involved ceremonies and pastimes of either liturgical or customary significance, from Shrovetide feasts and village revels to saints’ plays. Festivity marked communal occasions: the installation of a mayor, a parish ale to raise funds, a guild procession to celebrate its patron saint, a monarch’s progress through a town, or St. Peter’s Eve bonfires. Participants enjoyed Corpus Christi Day processions, boy bishop ceremonies, misrule mock courts, Robin Hood games, pageant plays, and the like. The Reformation complicated that, for during the 1530s and 1540s, Henry VIII and Edward VI tried to suppress festive rituals associated with aspects of late medieval religious life.1 Towns, guilds, and parishes had long cemented broad communal ties or strengthened small group loyalties at such events: the Henrician and Edwardian antifestive measures threatened to wipe away these older modes of public worship and expression. And yet, festive entertainments persisted, if often transformed.2 Late sixteenth-century civic processions celebrated mayoral inaugurations instead of Corpus Christi Day, guilds shifted their patron saint observances on the calendar and renamed themselves, and banns criers Protestantized their town play themes. In both city and countryside, the older festive rituals were modified to serve many of the same social and civic ends they had done for centuries past.3 One of the most crucial of those ends was to excite donation and to gather money. This book is about festivity and the theater. Previous studies of festive drama have made two broad arguments. First, some have highlighted 1
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2 Festive Enterprise
the ways that the theater appropriated festive entertainments.4 Playwrights, for instance, penned scenes of sheepshearing festivals, lords of misrule, and morris dancers, scenes interpreted as compensation for lost traditional religious spectacle and ritual.5 Second, other scholars have found in the playwrights’ repurposing a “commodification” of the original communal festive experience. They assert that whereas medieval playing was devoid of commercial interests and was offered free of charge, early modern professional drama was profit-driven, with income from performances going to sharers in playing companies.6 Professional drama, we are assured, stripped festive events of their communal and charitable significance by staging them for profit in the marketplace.7 This book rejects both the “compensation” and “commodification” models, seeing instead a theatrical and a commercial continuum between medieval festive events and later sixteenth-and seventeenth-century dramatic productions. The economic exchange at the heart of early medieval festive ritual was as significant in joining performer and donor as it would be in joining early modern actor with audience. Instead of an alienating, commodifying effect, many early modern plays registered instead—in their forms, themes, and dramaturgy—a sociable commerce familiar from medieval festive rituals. That commerce, even in the later, more centrally profit-driven marketplace, recalled communal obligations and rewards. Festive Enterprise takes the developments from late medieval to early modern drama and places them against the backdrop of a changing society. Despite undeniable societal changes—the Reformation being the central, massive change that affected all others—there were deep continuities in drama and playgoing. The reason we find continuities lies in the shared practice of money-gathering. Plays needed to make money in the early modern theater just as they did in the centuries preceding them. York and Chester pageant plays had a commercial orientation because their guilds were taxed if they lost money.8 The shared economic goal affected their dramaturgy, and it is in tracing the development of dramaturgical devices salutary to money-gathering that this book is devoted. For only by discovering how playwrights shaped their plays so that audiences paid for them can we do justice to the process of change by which community-directed medieval festive drama became the product staged in London’s public playhouses in the late sixteenth century. I will concentrate on a few key questions: How did plays
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Introduction 3
motivate audiences to value entertainments? What shape did that motivation take? What were the social repercussions of those efforts? Many medieval festive entertainments were designed to gather money. They often served as village or parish fundraisers. Whether needing £3 to repair the church steeple, funds for players’ expenses, or money for a silver censer, parishes and villages deployed festivities as a dependable source of income. 9 Religious, trade, and craft guilds hosted feasts and plays; villages produced May games, Robin Hood games, and ales. And larger municipalities took advantage of the great festivals of the summer season, such as Midsummer and Whitsun, to draw paying participants. The economics of festivity drew participants to moments of exchange, social and monetary, revealing an acceptance of a commercial ethos in medieval festive drama that continued through to the early modern stage. Medieval festive dramatic plots might have pilloried greed in the marketplace, but festive drama built a marketplace too. Those producing events took care to ensure their financial success: guilds required members to buy liveries for a procession, churchwardens charged for ale, village officials sold ribbons for entry to a fair, and town play producers sent fundraisers to nearby towns with banns. Medieval festive entertainments often depended on such purchases, just as early modern dramatic productions depended on entry fees. Economic pressures led organizers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries to design festive entertainments with an eye toward motivating viewers and participants to help defray costs. That same economic imperative shaped dramatic structure. The fundraising element of festivities is important because money- gathering shaped the events’ aesthetics, which in turn affected subsequent dramatic form. Fundraising was the purpose of many early parish and civic festivities, but the method of fundraising also structured them. “Gatherers”—often role-playing costumed characters—solicited donations from spectators and participants. When professional playhouses rose up in London in the late sixteenth century, echoes of the older gathering rituals remained: in plotlines, in language concerning charity, in epilogues soliciting applause for longer theater runs, in lists of donors scripted into university plays, and in individual entrepreneurial schemes. To ignore the existence of money-gathering “remnants” is to miss a fundamental semiotic means through which playwrights mobilized their audiences. Late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century plays carry
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4 Festive Enterprise
language from late medieval money-gathering rituals: the interaction relying on audience “buy-in” to produce the events themselves. Medieval festive entertainments, folk and religious, often sprang from ceremonial rituals with their own set of signs, from fertility symbols in Maypole ceremonies to the body of Christ in Corpus Christi processions. Thus festive entertainments trafficked in coded utterances generally, a symbology to which participants and viewers alike were accustomed. Often gatherers used coded objects or costumes to signal solicitations, such as the Robin Hood outfit or the morris dancer’s ladle into which donors dropped their pence. Early modern audiences inherited a sensitivity to festive symbol, recognizing the festive forms passed down. When Thomas Nashe penned a ladle-gathering scene in his play Summer’s Last Will and Testament for Archbishop Whitgift’s 1592 Croydon entertainment, for example, Whitgift and the assembled audience would not have been dumbfounded by the reference.10 Such a theatrical vocabulary of the remnants of gathering rituals has not been set out explicitly. To shine a light on a gathering- inflected aesthetic—a “festive economics of form”—is to illuminate the influence of commercial ambition on dramatic artistic expression. What the contours of that influence show is that festive drama was neither constituted by nor determinate of commercial relationships. Instead it served as a conduit for participants’ expression of their desires and concerns. Producers needed spectator support, and the cultural marketplace responded, positively or negatively. In other words, paying audiences determined the value of dramatic entertainments. Entertainers’ pursuit of audience support can be situated within the historiography of markets generally across the medieval and early modern periods. Individual agents within those markets conventionally have been viewed through either a Marxist or a classical liberal theoretical lens: Marxists stress exploitative property relations and class conflict; classical liberals stress markets’ liberating potential. The history of festive entertainments requires joining together both approaches, as commercial conflicts drove marketing innovations often beneficial to participants. Entertainers navigating nascent commercial urban environments that privileged burgess rights, for example, could find markets and fairs conducive to small-scale efforts at making a livelihood.11 Twelfth-and thirteenth-century marketing transformations, described by R. H. Britnell, encouraged new patterns of commerce and itinerant marketing.12 This was the case despite the fact that such markets were
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Introduction 5
often developed by property owners and local governments to serve their own interests. In other words, the story is not one of unbridled exploitation. According to Rodney Hilton, the leading social forces in medieval peasant movements were those “most in contact with the market.”13 Marketplace pressures and interactions often brought the advantaged and disadvantaged together into negotiations. Entertainers—often at the disadvantaged side of the scale—worked creatively to gain advantage, aided by marketplace dynamics that necessitated collaboration. Like markets, festive events often served the economic interests of propertied and moneyed groups, whether ecclesiastical or civic, such as powerful trade guilds. Some claimed that market competition among urban guilds exacerbated inequality, but Gervase Rosser’s research on the 30,000 guilds operating in England between 1350 and 1550 shows that the pressures of commercialized society actually led to new levels of association and cooperation.14 What held for guild productions, such as Corpus Christi plays and processions, held true for festive entertainments more generally: requirements for sociability only intensified during the early modern period, when the credit-driven society became even more dependent on networks of trust.15 The range of associational strategies employed by late medieval and early modern festive entertainers to access those networks also reveals a significant scope for agency. The provisional, improvisatory efforts amateur actors employed, for instance, proved perfectly suited to a marketplace “audience.” By insinuating themselves into networks of association, producers of festive drama pitched messages to smaller “publics.”16 Fragmented and varied, these different publics were invited to respond to festivity according to their particular concerns. To study the modes of festive enterprise that persist through the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is to chart appeals to these various publics. It is also to follow the creative ways in which such messages were pitched. Since licensing and censorship exigencies (both in vagabond laws against itinerant entertainers and in the censorship of plays) placed controls on entertainers and their messages, festive utterances worked to find fissures in those controls. Festivity reflected a creativity at the heart of the culture: the creativity was spurred, largely, by economic motivation. Form as reflective of culture has lain at the center of “festive culture” scholarship since its inception.17 Anthropologically informed literary treatments of festivity, for instance, have highlighted
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6 Festive Enterprise
ways in which formal elements reflected calendrical customs or expressed political discontent.18 Refined formal analysis from scholars of elite festivities—such as the royal entry, civic pageantry, and court masques—have linked symbolic imagery with ritual function.19 Literary critics have attended more carefully to festive form as a response to historians’ more detailed analysis of festive culture.20 Yet few have investigated the formal or aesthetic effects on late medieval drama of economic exigencies. Entertainers often faced contested circumstances, whether it was guild precedence in a procession, civic approval for a town play, or ecclesiastical distrust of idolatry. To examine festive forms is to reveal an artistic mechanism with which entertainers navigated a world of economic, political, and ecclesiastical struggles for power. Whereas some historians, such as Eamon Duffy, have minimized the effect of networks of power upon popular festivity, others have recognized their influence. Leah Marcus’s The Politics of Mirth (1986), for instance, highlights royal and ecclesiastical advocacy of Stuart public mirth as a tool of official policy.21 The entertainments I have featured in Festive Enterprise operate within power networks, yet most often without directly expressing or rejecting any official policy. Most evade, in fact, a “functionalist” reading that finds a perfect correspondence between social structure and a unifying, expressive form, as Sarah Beckwith has argued with regard to liturgical drama.22 Rather, festivity is used to negotiate nuances of social status, to identify sources of income, and to pursue property rights and liberties among different groups, often groups in the same local community. Fifteenth-century mummings gave London burghers a place to stage political advice to the mayor; in 1478, Bristol Weavers sought favor from sheriffs with festive house visits; and early sixteenth-century performances of the Digby Mary Magdalen play brought a commercial ethos—staging the value of maritime business and the benefits of inherited property—to a devotional genre. Early seventeenth-century London public theater playwrights responded to evangelical hostility that at times threatened their livelihood by crafting festive scenes that drew on late medieval liturgy without placing them too fully in the religious register.23 James Simpson’s analysis of Shakespeare’s careful deployment of potentially idolatrous material in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest reveals formal innovations that allayed fears of the performance of sacramental “magic.”24 Simpson’s is a story of the gradual constriction of theatrical “play,” but Festive Enterprise
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Introduction 7
traces a narrative of creativity within those constrictions. That creativity is most visible in the subtleties of formal adjustments required to negotiate slippery social and political networks. Much of the New Economic Criticism focuses not on form, but instead on the explicit content of plays and poems as expressing attitudes towards market conditions. Those looking at economic matters while also attending to aesthetics often draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a symbolic market when examining the interrelation of commercial and artistic endeavors. These contributions have complicated the history of economic thought in interesting ways.25 Yet the limitation of these approaches is to make symbolic what is more fundamentally material: practical concerns of making the business of playing profitable in the marketplace of theater. The “enterprise” foregrounded in this book’s title addresses those practical concerns. The noun “enterprise” denotes a “bold or difficult . . . undertaking,” as financier Philip Henslowe or James and Richard Burbage could attest of their playhouse ventures in late sixteenth-century London.26 Bold as it was, the business of playmaking was no different from many other business endeavors facing uncertainty in the growing economy at the time, having to contend with the influx of foreign artisans, inflation, and periodic outbursts of plague.27 Enterprise was risky but it could bring reward. Writers attached this profiteering notion to “enterprise” in treatises on navigation and merchant travel, such as Richard Eden’s 1553 translation of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmography, which details how worldly riches are obtained as the “rewarde of noble and honeste enterpryses.”28 “Enterprise” as a transitive verb, however, carried a more clearly martial sense. In its early use, one would “enterprise” upon an enemy, or “enterprise” a battle, as when “Trystram enterprysed the bataylle to fight for the trewage of Cornwayl” in Caxton’s 1485 translation of Malory’s Morte Darthur.29 The verb implied physical engagement, with an added meaning “to take on, tackle.”30 Festive gatherers were not soldiers, but their face-to-face physical solicitations, the directives for processors on Corpus Christi Day, or the efforts of pageant putters might resonate in this material context. Both those who enterprised and those who created enterprises faced similarly unsteady economic environments. John Lydgate wrote his 1430 mumming for London Mercers amidst a controversy over foreign workers: foreigners reviled as unfair
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8 Festive Enterprise
competition for guild members’ jobs, for example. The intransitive “enterprise”—meaning “to make an attempt,” or “to work toward a goal”—perhaps best joins the impetus of a Lydgate with the drive of a Shakespeare.31 “Enterprise” signified persistence, and it signaled a belief that economic actors could manage the vicissitudes of the market. It was the very changeability of economic forces and factors, not their stability, that drove the opportunism that is partly the story of this book. Festive gatherers had to procure a “yes” where onlookers might have thought “no.” “Festive enterprise” means the creative ways that producers of festive entertainments, for hundreds of years leading up to and through the opening of London’s public playhouses, attempted and worked to finance their productions. A will to improvisation drove those early efforts, serving as a model for later innovators seeking income for their own enterprises. Many scholars have imagined profit-seeking, however, as a point on the far end of an ethical spectrum that stretched from communal to self- interested concerns. Keith Wrightson finds medieval economic culture antagonistic to individual economic freedom: medieval agents considered economic activity “in terms of moral imperatives,” and thus subordinated market activity to ethical considerations, in his view.32 Indeed moralizing, ethically based arguments against exploitative trading practices were rooted in medieval Scholastic arguments regarding “just price” and concern for the “commonalty” as against self-interest.33 Some economic historians even contend that the “moral economy” of medieval England was essentially an antimarket ideology.34 Yet late medieval market morality incorporated pragmatic financial concerns. As Joel Kaye has shown, medieval economic thought was sophisticated in adapting ideas to the changing realities of the marketplace.35 Writers formulated the notion of a self-ordering market system through which equality resulted as a product of willed inequalities. Commentators such as Jean Buridan argued in the fourteenth century that the quest for personal advantage was the natural condition of just exchange.36 Parish moneymaking strategies should be viewed within this context. Indeed, critical approaches to religion and drama that identified income-generating practices within the Church as indicative of increasing secularization have been conclusively refuted by Paul Whitfield White and others.37 As I hope to show in this book, plays often joined efforts of commerce with salvation, a pattern visible both in medieval
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Introduction 9
festive productions and in festive scenes in later public theater. Many fundraising ventures offered believers spiritual benefits in exchange for charitable efforts at seasonal celebrations.38 Almsgiving was a mode of promised expiation for daily sin, and festive entertainments were often extensions of liturgical practice.39 Marchers in Rogation processions would bless crops in exchange for God’s mercy, monastic and morality plays staged heavenly returns for charitable activity, and pious motives attended many mimetic games sponsored by parish guilds.40 Structurally aligned with the sacred, some pageantry patterned itself on earlier biblical models. When a city’s mayor and aldermen presented the sovereign with money or a gift during a royal progress, for instance, viewers witnessed a parallel with the Epiphany gift.41 The Feast of the Holy Innocents was a popular event in the medieval Church, in which the boy bishop led a procession of youths to the altar at the beginning of the service, celebrating the Innocents as examples of God’s saving grace.42 Early modern dramatists translated these benefits, and the attendant social grace conferred upon festive participants, who often solidified social ties at feasts or fairs, as an acceptance of festive commerce, either in the approval of the exploitative peddler of wares or the itinerant entertainer, both examples of stage versions of the festive “gatherer.” Public theater playwrights penned this social incorporation (and its opposite, the expulsion of the villainous fraud) to dramatize the entertainer’s debt to his audience. The ultimate arbiter of the festive player’s success was the spectator. Patron approval was possible, however, only when patrons grasped the import of the performer’s festive expression. Successfully staging festive language—the gestural language of a morris dance, a ballad’s refrain, or a lord mayor’s show’s procession of mythological figures— relied on the audience’s interpretive skill. That ability had been honed through drama’s roots in liturgical expression, which necessarily operated through sign, offered as a way to comprehend holy mystery. By appealing to that ability, writers offered spectators a sense of their own participation in creating meaning.43 Festive language thus cast the spectator as the agent of meaning in the festive exchange.44 Given such agency, audiences responded to moments of funding solicitation—charitable and hostile alike—with a sense of investment. Those solicitations, in medieval festive events or in epilogues on the early modern stage, created an immediacy between actor and audience. In such moments, early
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modern plays integrated the audience with the early modern performance rather than commodifying the experience. Participants in medieval festive rituals may not have thought that they were agents in the performances they experienced. Yet their economic commitment to the events made those events possible. The nature of this commitment varied widely. Traditional processions and some pageants did not charge spectators: when St. Cuthbert’s banner was carried through Durham on Corpus Christi Day from the fifteenth century onward, for example, spontaneous donations were not expected.45 Yet all occupations were required to process with their banners and their own lights, thus essentially paying their own way to participate in the celebration.46 Durham residents were expected to pay for candles, torches, and banners, thus signaling—both symbolically and materially—their membership in the guild or corporation. When the Host carried through town, citizens and guild members were also sometimes obligated to money-gather for the procession and pageants. For other pageants in large towns, craft guilds often employed their own rent-gatherers responsible for eliciting funds for craft masters from guild members.47 Festive occasions and financial contribution were often inextricably linked in this way. Just as fourteenth-century guilds offered gathering roles to their members, fifteenth-and sixteenth-century parish, borough, and large aristocratic households shaped social expectations of their members through the aesthetics of festive events. One formally structured event— the procession—shows how. The procession—traditionally an ambulatory celebration through town on a liturgical feast day, a saint’s day, or a mayoral inauguration—signaled civic obligation, staging hierarchically ordered roles in order to illuminate the nature of mutual duty. Corpus Christi processions up through the 1540s were organized with a carefully defined order of precedence: humbler crafts came first, followed in turn by the wealthier crafts, aldermen, councillors, sheriffs, the town magistracy, the clergy carrying the Host, and, finally, the mayor.48 At Queen Elizabeth’s royal entry in 1559, civic obligation to the sovereign was dramatized through gift-giving encounters.49 The processional London mayoralty shows also highlighted social elites, as shows installed a new mayor annually, and drew participants from the livery companies.50 When Anthony Munday penned his 1605 Lord Mayor’s show, The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia, he honored Sir Leonard
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Introduction 11
Halliday, a Merchant Taylor; Thomas Middleton’s 1617 mayoralty pageant The Triumphs of Honour and Industry similarly celebrated the merchant elite’s commercial success.51 These elite processional productions celebrating civic commercial leaders bore traces of the marching watch, a medieval practice that offered citizens a more central participatory role. Essentially a circuit of local boundaries, the ritual required participants to ride the “circuit” and to report for such occasions in armor.52 A practical necessity to protect and reaffirm local borders, the festive event both rewarded and penalized citizens financially, depending on their level of willing participation. Rewards could include feasts. In fourteenth-century York, for instance, the sheriff provided a feast for the corporation at his own expense, a tradition that continued in some parts of the north through the seventeenth century.53 Penalties included things such as hefty fines, which attended any mayor in Canterbury who neglected the watch on the eve of the translation of St. Thomas of Beckett. A 1529 Burghmote Court order ruled that “yf any Maier here aftir . . . wille not observe this acte in contynewyng the seide wacche . . . [he will have to] forfett to the . . . [c]ite [£10].”54 Such enforced participation, whether guild-, parish-, town-, or government-driven, could initiate social tensions rather than heal them. Yet at the same time, ceremonies offered participants a sense of their own financial agency. Roles such as the extender of charity, the pageant-wagon putter, the circuit rider, or the recipient of largesse defined citizens’ identities in their communities. It is this financial agency that helps characterize the commercial continuum joining late medieval festive events to early modern drama, even while the nature of that agency appears widely divergent. When early modern viewers paid their pence to the doorkeeper at the Globe Theatre, their financial support differed from their donations to a church ale or their handing coins to a Robin Hood gatherer. Yet it was a difference in degree, not in kind. Both medieval festive productions and early modern plays conferred roles and conveyed expectations for patron support. Thomas Pettitt’s taxonomy of “encounter customs” helps when analyzing festive interactions, since it characterizes the spectrum of economic functions.55 Pettitt’s central concern is anthropological, not economic, but his taxonomy usefully distinguishes financial encounters. Most encounters involve exactions, where the active group has to “beg or cajole resources—food, drink, provisions, money—from the
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others.”56 This exaction encounter—often referred to as a “quête”—was influenced by Roman Church rites and is traceable to early medieval practices.57 Essentially a “house visit” by costumed visitors who perform in expectation of hospitality (typically a donation of food or, especially, drink), the quête is a form of ritualized begging. The ritual became Christianized with Christmastime festivities, when on St. Nicholas’s Day a boy bishop would begin his quête through the streets.58 Exactions included Christmas disguisings, in which visitors danced with their hosts, and misrule festivities, “when householders [were] disturbed by raucous intruders.”59 The “hocking” custom posed as a violent exaction: during the week after Easter, “gangs of women” intercepted passing men and demanded money of them.60 Hocking rites, barring out rituals, and lords of misrule made a game of rebellion, and could symbolize social disorder. Yet the game could take a dark turn with serious damage to property or life. Such festive “exactions” enforced communal bonds but also stratified, alienating those disinclined to pay. Intimidation, implicit threats, the specter of violence, and modes of revenge for reluctant givers were all part of the festive repertoire. At the other end of Pettitt’s spectrum, “beneficent” encounters might include the giving of largesse. The sponsors of civic processions choreographed the charitable bestowal of goods: Henry VIII’s 1552 London mock-ceremonial lord of misrule knighted the London sheriff’s lord of misrule, and “cofferers” cast “gold and sylver in every plase as they rod.”61 In a procession preceding Exeter’s 1590 “Lammas Fair,” city waits “caste out peares and aples in to the streetes,” showing the mayor’s beneficence.62 On the St. George’s Day procession in Chester in 1568–69, companies such as Fletchers and Coopers distributed coins to prisoners at Northgate as they rode past the prisons.63 This beneficent giving signaled magnanimity, while portraying recipients as deserving. The efficacy of the festive encounter, whether beneficent or exacting, lay in this signaling function, which essentially conferred roles on both giver and recipient of resources. We can trace this role-conferring function at outdoor festive events but also in late medieval plays. When characters elicited funds from audience members during a play itself, they relied on the audience member’s assent to play the role of willing donor. Mankind (ca. 1470), the anonymous early Tudor interlude, stages such a scene, where the Vice Titivillus essentially performs a quête during the play.64 Another
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scenario cast spectators as willing robbery victims of the popular Robin Hood gatherer. So effective was this scenario at fairs and ales that individuals playing Robin Hood raised twice as much money as other, nonspecific gatherers.65 Remnants of the Robin Hood figure are also there in the “empathetic thief” character on the early modern stage, a robber who elicits sympathy and identification from audience members.66 Comprehending the influence of gatherers’ fundraising strategies on the creation of these figures offers a new dimension to dramatic character. Spectators connect with such characters, who appealed to the cultural memory of the familiar festive solicitation. This connection is often described as liminality, whereby a dramatic character is part of the action on stage while at the same time engaging with the audience.67 Liminal, theatrical roles that were related to money- gathering included the “expositor” and the “prologue” or “epilogue” characters, also known as “presenters.”68 Presenters who address the audience directly have a metatheatrical function, inviting the audience into the prologue or epilogue threshold moment and instructing patrons in how to judge or contribute to the play. This function challenges the common contention that such roles alienated the audience from the action.69 We can trace the development of this threshold figure from eleventh-century liturgical settings, through fourteenth-century prolocutors, fifteenth-century vexillators carrying banners to attract potential donors to play banns, to sixteenth-century presenters asking for “space” for players on pageants. All served as models of the late sixteenth- century public playhouse prologue and epilogue.
A Dramaturgy of Festive Expression Rather than detail such influences chronologically, however, it makes more sense to consider them at the dramaturgical level. The first two chapters in this book treat methods of audience address, with dramatic character the focus of chapter 1, and prologue and epilogue the concern of chapter 2. The next two chapters turn to settings that join sacred and commercial pursuits. Chapter 3 examines the sheepshearing festival in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610), arguing that it reflects an economics of redemption familiar from medieval festive events. Chapter 4 focuses on John Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrimage (1618) as a progress that
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elicits the rewards and obligations of its medieval precursors. The final two chapters analyze the festive language of mockery and its marketability. Chapter 5 treats the neglected genre of university and Inns of Court drama, with specific attention given to holiday revels featuring inversionary lords of misrule. Like medieval ecclesiastical, courtly, and civic lords of misrule, such theatrical figures were used in mock rebellion, while sometimes subtly coding actual complaint. In particular, the student productions of the 1594 Gray’s Inn Gesta Grayorum and the 1607 St. John’s College, Oxford, The Christmas Prince code their respective complaints in a particularly financial manner. They enlist support for their causes through their lists of potential donors, in subsidy lists that mock taxation practices (in the former) and illuminate controversial religious affiliation (in the latter). Utilizing festive forms to convey controversial messages was, of course, not unique to either medieval festive events or early modern drama, as demonstrated by scurrilous broadsides, libelous ballads, and fifteenth-century “mock testaments” that willed relics to dead popes in hell.70 Yet what emerged after the Reformation in England was a growing literate populace and a burgeoning public theater audience that meant the explosion of the market for such messages. Larger audiences attracted politicized groups who mobilized particular “publics” to win over opinion to their positions. In such efforts, newly ascendant groups aimed for an ideological and discursive hegemony that gave them control over the parameters of legitimate public speech.71 And so chapter 6 examines such an aim in the late sixteenth-century phenomenon of the satirical Martin Marprelate tracts (printed and circulated 1588–89). The anonymous Marprelate tracts pitted an antiepiscopal message against the bishops’ anti-Martinist writers, using a clandestine printing press to produce thousands of copies—with an output of twenty tracts in two years—to appeal to a popular readership. The festive form of Marprelate (written in a popular mode of garrulous, gossipy satire, and frequently alluding to festive figures such as Maid Marian, morris dancers, and gatherers) was employed in order to sell more pamphlets, and thus was rooted in its ability to be widely marketed. Just as the economic basis of festivity’s efficacy for the Marprelate writers—ensuring the pamphlets’ popularity—made it marketable, that same marketability made it aesthetically a failure. The pamphlet’s festive scurrility was overly personal, libelous, and singularly vulgar. I examine that artistic
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Introduction 15
failure through Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594), which engages with the Marprelate controversy through the play’s implicit commentary on the misuses of festive railing satire.72 Shakespeare pens characters who echo utterances from Marprelate: libel, ad hominem attack, and mockery, all festive modes employed with the intent to harm personal reputation. The play suggests that such strategies do not serve festive entertainers, because they betray the festive license given to them by their public. There are limits to the usefulness of the festive exchange: the limits, Shakespeare suggests, are market-driven. In some cases, the fight to mobilize a public could fracture communities. I conclude the book with a consideration of how types of festive excess, appealing to different types of publics, serve consumers while degrading the quality of artistic output. The festive enterprise I trace throughout operates through a language of form and gesture and within the structure of a social commerce that nonetheless contains limits. The boundaries not only of what is “sayable” but the manner in which it is said become adjudicated by a marketplace of paying customers. I trace a festive model more pervasive than previously acknowledged, a model that shaped the drama’s form but that also served as a vehicle for grievance: economic, religious, and aesthetic. Yet festivity’s primary function, because it was largely rooted in solicitations to give, was in its power to appeal to the good will of spectators, offering them an agency in creating and approving of performances. When that function was applied to the early modern stage, it exposed the power of the marketplace. Market-driven entrepreneurs such as John Taylor, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare understood the fact that prosperity—of a jest, of a playhouse, or of a solicitous line of dramatic poetry—lay in the judgment of the audience. They wrote that understanding into the structure of their works, where reminders of their debts—not only to their audiences, but to original festive fundraising practices—reveal the social pressures on both satire and commercial practices.
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