I was chosen in the eighth grade, despite my vocal opposition, to play the part of Richard III in a school production of Shakespeare’s play. As an especially brooding teenager, my English teacher apparently felt that I would be perfect for the part of Shakespeare’s malcontent king. While my teacher undoubtedly believed it was a great honor to play the title role in a Shakespeare production, I certainly failed to see it that way. Growing up in a blue-collar household, I had the distinct understanding that Shakespeare was not for me. In my hometown, an affluent Boston suburb, Shakespeare, the ultimate symbol of social distinction, was better suited to my more culturally literate and economically advantaged peers, the children of doctors, lawyers, and university professors. High culture was something others enjoyed, a privilege that was off limits to regular people who lacked the resources to attend more refined cultural institutions such as the theater. In this instance, however, I had no real choice in the matter, and so I soon found myself in the school auditorium, nervously waiting for the curtain to rise. As I adjusted my withered arm for maximum effect and arched my shoulder until it resembled a hump, I watched my classmates, adorned in elaborate homemade costumes, pose for their proud parents. My own costume was little more than a black bed sheet, worn as an ill-fitting cloak, which my teacher and some of the other parents had tried to improve at the last minute before the show began. Strangely, I remember very little of the actual performance. Instead, I remember mostly a feeling of profound inadequacy as I stood on the stage. I was a working-class stereotype: an academically unremarkable son of an Irish American firefighter and a waitress. And here I was performing Shakespeare before a mostly upper-middle-class audience, awkwardly filtering blank verse through a thick New England accent while wrapped in an old bedsheet and balancing a Burger King crown atop my head.
At the time, of course, the experience was rather traumatizing, and it only served to reinforce my sense of alienation from Shakespeare. As the years passed, however, and as I rediscovered Shakespeare as an undergrad, I began to reevaluate the plays. If initially Shakespeare had been a marker of class difference, I now began to see my own class background reflected in the plays. I fell in love with Shakespeare in college, not because I acquired a newfound taste for high culture but, on the contrary, because Shakespeare’s plays affirmed my own low-culture, working-class ways of seeing the world. The trials and tribulations of kings and aristocratic lovers were moving, but equally gripping were the struggles of marginalized characters like Caliban, Ariel, Dogberry, Touchstone, and Bottom. These laborers of various sorts, it seemed to me, faced the same kinds of social indignities and inequalities that I had always associated with Shakespeare—or at least with those who claimed Shakespeare as a marker of class and cultural distinction.
My new appreciation for Shakespeare developed more critical scholarly dimensions as I became increasingly aware of the dearth of academic attention to questions of labor and class in Shakespeare’s plays. Sharon O’Dair, in a similar consideration of Shakespeare and class, suggests that this critical blind spot is structural to the university as an institution: “in the academy as we know it, the affirmation of a lower-class identity is hardly compatible with an (upper) middle-class identity, which is what higher education affirms. Working-class kids who succeed in the academy or subsequently in the professions are reconstituted and normalized as (upper) middle-class. In the academy, working-class identity is not merely not affirmed, but actively erased.”[1] As O’Dair goes on to discuss, the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has often played a central role in the erasure of working-class identity within the university. A central component of my argument in this book is that such erasure is not justified by the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and that, in fact, much of the critical attention to early modern drama entails a certain silencing of the voices of laborers and the economically unprivileged. In this regard, Benjamin’s observation that the historian must “brush history against the grain” is especially relevant to a study that seeks to recover the laboring dimensions of early modern drama.[2] To read the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries against the grain of much contemporary criticism is ultimately to situate early modern drama in relation to an emerging working-class formation in the period. And because this class identity is actively erased within the university, reading early modern drama with an eye toward laborers requires an open-mindedness to counterintuitive understandings of the plays.
In the field of early modern literary studies, the systemic erasure of working-class perspectives manifests as a preference for a mode of economic criticism that attends almost exclusively to financial mechanisms while neglecting the socioeconomic role of labor. In defining the so-called New Economic Criticism as it pertains to the early modern period, Linda Woodbridge observes, “References to reckoning, accounts, inventories, bills of exchange, factors, merchants, usury, commodity purchase, and many kinds of coins circulate in Renaissance literature of all sorts.”[3] Conspicuously absent from this list of economic activities is labor, a strange oversight when we consider that the circulatory process of a capitalist economy is sustained by the exploitation of workers. The commodities that were traded on England’s expanding markets had first to be produced, after which they were transported on trade routes powered by laborers of various sorts. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker demonstrate, beginning in the sixteenth century exploited workers were disdained as so-called hewers of wood and drawers of water. These hewers and drawers made the capitalist world; however, they are rarely acknowledged as having existed at all:
Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself is treated as a given: the field is there before the plowing starts; the city is there before the laborer begins the working day . . . The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally, reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The result is that the hewers of wood and the drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous, and forgotten, even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building the infrastructure of “civilization.”[4]
While early modern drama certainly abounds with references to the circulation of commodities and to the other economic operations that Woodbridge notes, there are also abundant references to the workers underpinning these processes. The Tempest, which I discuss in detail in chapter 5, takes the hewing of wood as a central theme. Prospero punishes Ferdinand by making him into a “log-man” who must chop and gather wood—a condition that Ferdinand describes as “wooden slavery” (3.3.67, 63).[5] Unlike many historians and literary scholars of the early modern period, Prospero openly acknowledges the importance of Caliban’s similar condition of “wooden slavery,” when he tells Miranda that Caliban is necessary because he fetches “in our wood and serves in offices / That profit us” (1.2.371). A play such as The Tempest seems more interested in labor—and the degradation of labor, more precisely—than commercial matters.
This book attends to the largely unacknowledged side of the period’s emerging capitalist economy. Where most economic criticism focuses on literary representations of the circulation of commodities and money, this book examines how plays represent and evaluate the laborers underpinning this new economy.[6] In contrast to other studies, this book explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. Historians have long identified sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as the birthplace of early capitalism. With the growth of commerce and market relations came a corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers. The expansion of capital is inseparable from the expansion of an underclass of dispossessed laborers consisting of enclosed peasants, dismissed servants, and unemployed apprentices, artisans, and tradespeople, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. State authorities responded by attempting forcibly to reform the “idle,” establishing workhouses, such as Bridewell prison, where vagabonds could be disciplined and compelled to labor. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England, and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment during which time they might be forced to take on supplementary wage work to make ends meet.
This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to London’s more established trades and occupations. The downward pressure on England’s workers was an everyday experience in the theaters. Although some actors prospered and became sharers in playing companies, most actors worked for a small wage and lacked employment security. Likewise, the more successful playwrights acquired wealth by becoming sharers in a company, while the majority of playwrights—such as Dekker, Middleton, and Jonson—either supplemented their theatrical income with other occupations or, as in Dekker’s case, wrote plays just to maintain subsistence living. At the level of cultural representation, moreover, actors were frequently identified as vagabonds, a categorization that connects them directly to the indignity experienced by so many of England’s laborers. The Elizabethan state included “fencers, bear-wards, common players in interludes, and minstrels, jugglers, peddlers, tinkers, and petty chapmen, who shall wander abroad” on its list of people who should be classified as masterless men.[7] Although patronage arrangements offered professional acting companies legal protection from vagrancy charges, critics of the theater continued to identify actors as masterless men. Thus, Philip Stubbes, for instance, maligns actors by asking, “Are they not taken by the lawes of the Realm for roagues and vacabounds?”[8] If actors and playwrights were, to varying extents, associated with England’s established trades and guilds, they were also seen as vagabonds who should be set on more honest forms of labor. Patronage offered acting companies shelter from legal persecution, but the theatrical profession was nevertheless depicted in antitheatrical discourse as a refuge for vagabonds and criminals. To this extent, the theater was shaped by the same tensions and economic pressures that attended the broader formation of a nascent English working class.
This book’s central premise is that anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater’s socioeconomic position, an emerging working-class identity engendered by the violent emergence of capitalism. As the nexus of a declining feudal social structure and a developing capitalist regime of commodity production, a location in which dispossessed labor intersected with traditions of skilled labor and the unwieldy consumerist energies of the marketplace, the space of the theater was uniquely situated to channel and give dramatic form to the growing antagonisms and tensions that shaped life as a laborer in early modern England. The stage offered a space in which to negotiate the value and meaning of labor in an increasingly exploitative society.
In addressing these issues, the book employs a Marxist critical methodology, an approach that is, within the field of early modern literary studies, about as uncommon as are discussions of labor. The absence of a significant body of Marxist scholarship pertaining to Shakespeare and his contemporaries is certainly frustrating, an oversight likely engendered by the new historicist hegemony of recent decades, which has tended to dismiss the critical exploration of class and labor as an exercise in economism. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt explicitly define new historical practice against “such key [Marxist] concepts as superstructure and base or imputed class consciousness,” effectively denying legitimacy to the issues and concerns that are typically considered to be objects of Marxist critical theory.[9] As this book argues, however, class and labor should indeed be seen as determinate categories for the study of early modern theater and drama, not because they possess some inherent or transhistorical primacy but because the institution of the theater itself was inseparable from the growth of capitalistic class and labor relations. The production of drama in the period was informed by emerging class formations and, concomitantly, the development of new ways of thinking about and valuing labor. Early modern drama is therefore not superstructural, a mere reflection of economic forces, because the theater was embedded within London’s labor and commercial structures. In studying early modern theater and drama, sensitivity to cultural and textual analysis, on one hand, and attention to socioeconomic forces, on the other, cannot be treated as mutually exclusive critical endeavors. To dismiss Marxist approaches to the study of early modern culture as reductive and economistic encourages critics to overlook the immense complexity and richness of the theater as a socioeconomic institution.
Fortunately, the decline of new historicism in the past decade or so has brought with it renewed interest in Marxist approaches to early modern drama.[10] In an important recent essay, Crystal Bartolovich discusses the potential for Marxist theory by examining Marx’s own engagement with Shakespeare. Bartolovich notes a curious aspect of Marx’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare: Marx cites Shakespeare’s plays frequently in his writings, but he never produces a “Marxist” reading of any play. Instead, Marx uses Shakespeare “in an antagonistic, ironic way, using fragments from the plays to mock or give the lie to prized mainstream assumptions that attempt to suture the contradictions of the status quo.”[11] Marx valued the plays because of their critical open-endedness and their ability to interrogate the social instability of emerging capitalism. To “Shakespearise,” as Marx did, “is to be open to the full range of social forces and relations rather than being bound to any particular narrow ideological script, past or present.”[12] Bartolovich’s notion of critical Shakespearization suggests a new path for Marxist studies of early modern drama. Indeed, drama from the period—not just Shakespeare’s—provides insight into the “full range of forces and relations” of emerging capitalism because the theater was itself, in many ways, a microcosm of those forces and relations. Approaching early modern drama as Marx approaches Shakespeare involves exploring how the dramatic text shaped and was shaped by the socioeconomic relations and tensions of the theater.
Along these lines, the following chapters explore the interarticulations of economic and aesthetic spheres in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In chapter 1, “The Theater between Craft and Commodity,” I develop the central argument that the stage was especially sensitive to changes in the way labor was understood in the period. By situating the stage in the context of London’s declining skilled trades and occupations, the chapter demonstrates the multiple connections between the proletarianization and commodification of labor and representations of laborers within the theater. The chapter begins with an overview of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century labor history, focusing in particular on the emergence of a discourse—expressed in a variety of economic documents and anticipating later theories of political economy—that attempts to define labor purely in terms of its profitability. In turn, this objectification of labor is resisted through pamphlets and petitions from workers who seek to reassert the social and moral import of labor. I then move to a reconsideration of debates about the theater, arguing that antitheatrical writings, defenses of the stage, and playwrights’ attitudes toward audiences all encode a struggle to define the value and purpose of labor. The overlap of discourses on labor and the theater, I argue, gave rise to an incipient sense of working-class identity within the theater, transforming the stage into a space where resistance to the degradation of labor could be given dramatic form.
In chapter 2, “Crafty Performance in City Comedy: Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour and Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho!,” I develop further the subjective dimensions of dispossessed labor by examining the way theatrical performance engages with changing conceptions of skill. In this chapter, I explore in more detail the peculiar accusation from antitheatrical critics that the theater constitutes an “occupation of idleness.” This confused merging of industrious workers and idle beggars is the result of the growing placelessness of occupational skill, which was becoming increasingly detached from the feudal structures that had previously regulated labor. As workers were being severed from their traditional livelihoods, social critics anxiously imagined the subversive ways in which these men and women were applying their talents in the unregulated environs of the London suburbs. Looking at Every Man in his Humour and Eastward Ho!, I argue that city comedy’s fascination with crafty rogues and vagabonds constitutes an effort to positively revalue this dispossessed labor. In these plays the placelessness of labor, its slipperiness and its ambiguity, is not condemned, as it is by authorities and social critics, but embraced and transformed into theatrical performance. In city comedy the craft of labor and the craftiness of cony-catching merge with theatrical performance.
In chapter 3, “Casting Apprentices in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” I argue that Beaumont’s play offers important insight into the relationship between London’s guilds and the theatrical community. The play suggests that both apprentices and freemen often considered producing and acting in plays to be a viable alternative to service in one of London’s traditional trades and occupations. As is well documented by historians, many guilds and livery companies were becoming increasingly abusive toward apprentices and yeomen, often putting them to work in ways that ignored or diminished their skill and craftsmanship. The opportunity to display one’s skill on stage, I argue, was becoming more and more attractive to young men who felt that their talents and ambitions were no longer nurtured by the trades in which they had trained. Early modern England’s apprentice population often saw acting in the theater as a legitimate form of skilled labor, one that offered escape from an increasingly restrictive and economically stagnant guild system. In this chapter, I push against standard readings of Beaumont’s play that interpret it as a satire of London’s citizens, arguing that the play’s satirical intentions in fact work to reveal the social and economic conflicts of the period. While the grocer and his wife are certainly skewered, their apprentice, Rafe, is not. For the most part, scholars have failed to recognize Rafe’s connection to the fraught labor dynamics that shaped early modern London. In the context of the period’s labor struggles, Rafe is better interpreted not as a clown but as a member of London’s growing underclass of exploited and misused apprentices. The stage becomes the location of an alternative occupation for Rafe, providing a space where he can escape the demands and pressures of an imperious master. Beaumont’s play is unique, offering a more explicit representation of some of the sources of contention that inform city comedies.
In chapter 4, “Thinking with the Feet in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman,” I explore the corporeal dimensions of laboring identity and experience, looking specifically at representations of artisanal laborers. Through readings of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, as well as a variety of guild and artisanal documents, this chapter considers how laboring bodies resist dominant class efforts to elide the value of productive activity. In these plays, aristocratic and mercantile attitudes toward labor are displaced by a vision that embraces the laboring body as the source of social and economic value. In opposition to aristocratic and mercantile worldviews, the plays affirm an artisanal consciousness, a perspective that views the social in terms of the sensuous activity that underpins the production process. The plays, in short, offer a thoroughly embodied vision of the social world, one in which social and economic value derives neither from an essential birthright nor from the impersonal circulation of goods on the market, but must be enacted through sensuous communal labor. Such communal labor, centered on bodily experience, is represented as being productive of social and national cohesion rather than commodities or profit.
In chapter 5, “Labor and Theatrical Value on the Shakespearean Stage: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest,” I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as negotiations of the theater’s relationship to the market. In contrast to interpretations that see Dream validating the professional commercial theater over against medieval theatrical traditions, I argue in this chapter that the play associates theatricality with the so-called rude mechanicals, the artisan-actors whose performance at Duke Theseus’s wedding harkens back to medieval mystery cycles and civic theater. Opposite the rude mechanicals is Puck, or Robin Good-Fellow, who has a multivalent presence within the play. In this chapter, I demonstrate that he is at once an itinerant actor, an unruly laborer, and an agent of exchange or “translation.” Drawing on contemporary discussions of fairies, I argue that Puck gives form to some of the perceived destabilizing consequences of England’s new economy. To this extent, the chapter shows that the play expresses a certain anxiety about a commercial theatrical culture that renders acting dependent on the fetish of money and consumerist desire. The mechanicals, whose clownish behavior makes them at once a source of laughter and stubbornly resistant to “translation,” serve as counterpoints to the deterritorializing energy of the market. The Tempest registers a more explicit anxiety about the commodification of theatrical performance. Within the play theatrical performance and the performance of labor overlap in suggestive ways. This section takes as a starting point the Boatswain’s complaint that his aristocratic passengers “mar” the labor of the boat’s crew, suggesting that the play as a whole examines this dynamic as it pertains to the relationship between theatrical professionals and the paying audience. By emphasizing the material and skillful labor of theatrical performance, the play seeks to distance itself from market commodification. In doing so, it also articulates a critique of a socioeconomic system that disavows the social importance of labor to justify exploitation.
It will have been noticed that the book is focused primarily on comedy. The decision to discuss Eastward Ho!, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and A Shoemaker, A Gentleman is perhaps self-evident, because these plays center on the lives and experiences of artisans and apprentices. But as a dramatic form more broadly, comedy is especially conducive to lower- and working-class attitudes and values, even those plays that do not directly engage in the representation of artisans and apprentices. As has long been noted, the carnivalesque quality of much early modern comedy links the genre to plebian culture.[13] Perhaps the most socially and politically consequential component of carnival is its ability to construct alternative ways of seeing the world. Carnival does not simply oppose or negate dominant values and social relations; instead, it breaks the dominant down in order to critically interrogate and reconstruct the social. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, “Carnival is the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life.”[14] Each play examined in this book uses the comic form as part of a strategy for pushing against the relations of exploitation within England’s new economy. Rather than negate or deny, in a utopian or idealistic way, these prevailing relations, the plays instead offer alternative models for valuing labor. By depicting workers as human, and labor as the lynchpin of social meaning and cohesion, the plays help to articulate a counterdiscourse to an emerging regime of objectification and commodification. This book examines comic characters who are socially marginalized and dispossessed, and who thus speak from a position of alterity. These characters often elicit our laughter, but through this laughter they also invite the audience to perceive the social world, and especially the forces of oppression and inequality, in new ways. Comic laughter serves to defamiliarize relations of exploitation between classes so that social relations can be reimagined. If, according to Philip Sidney, “[c]omedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life” which the poet represents “in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that be,” comic characters such as Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, Jonson’s Brainworm, and Dekker’s band of shoemakers radically extend this assessment by exposing the social and economic contradictions that generate “common errors.”[15] The only thing more “ridiculous and scornful” than these comic characters is the social reality that has created them and against which they must struggle for recognition.
The plays discussed in this book are comedies, but they also deal in direct ways with profound, and to some extent tragic, social and economic concerns. In Every Man in his Humour, for instance, the character of Brainworm troubles authoritative discourses that seek to contain unruly laborers. The play’s comedy hinges on the blurred boundary between Brainworm’s true identity as a servant threatened with unemployment and his performative identity as a rogue and a vagabond. Consequently, our laughter at Brainworm’s antics is accompanied by an awareness of the painful socioeconomic circumstances that have engendered them. Comedy thus effects a certain critical realism within the play. Social identities are likewise blurred in Eastward Ho!, as the seemingly clear cut distinction between London’s industrious citizens and its prodigal gallants collapses on itself, exposing the ambiguity and fluidity of class identities in an emerging capitalist economy. The play’s parodic representation of the gentry serves, ultimately, to interrogate the very notion that the gentry can even exist in an economic landscape that values, above all else, the productivity and profitability of labor.
In other plays, satire seems to draw out some of the more disturbing and violent implications of London’s commercialization. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Rafe’s seemingly absurd transformation into a stage actor evokes laughter, but the role he plays gestures towards the period’s apprentice riots. Meanwhile, George and Nell’s buffoonery as audience members hints at the cruelty and exploitation that was coming to define an increasingly profit-driven master–apprentice relation. In all of the plays discussed, the ultimate object of laughter is not any particular social type or class identity but rather the larger system of commerce and commodity production. Laughter in these plays is not a negative force but a critical one, helping to lay bare the socioeconomic contradictions of the period, and thereby opening a space of agency and expression for those most affected by England’s new economy.
Sharon O’Dair, Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines in the Culture Wars (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.
Linda Woodbridge, introduction to Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 11.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 42. Italics in original.
All references are to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
To my knowledge, there have been only a handful of monographs published on the topic of work: Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Labored Art (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), and Tom Rutter, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), explore the intersections of labor and theater, while Laurie Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1557–1667 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), looks at authorship in terms of conceptualizations of labor; in addition, Michelle Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2009), and Natasha Korda, Labor’s Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), examine the topic of women’s labor, while Ronda Arab, Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), looks at labor and masculinity in the theater, and, finally, a collection edited by Dowd and Korda, Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011) offers a broad array of essays on dramatic representations of labor.
Anon., Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent, in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 304.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1583), M1v.
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9.
Shakespeare, in particular, has been the subject of a nascent Marxist revival, with the publication of two recent books: Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds., Marxist Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2001), and Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Crystal Bartolovich, Jean E. Howard, and David Hillman, Marx and Freud: Great Shakespeareans Vol. X (London; New York: Continuum Press, 2012), 37.
Ibid., 53.
See, especially, Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1986).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 123. Italics in original.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 229.