Although there have been several studies examining the early modern theater as a commercial institution, there has been too little attention to the organization of labor within this commercial context.[1] As noted in the introduction, the theater was shaped by changing labor relations in addition to the expansion of market forces. In the following sections, I examine how writings by merchants, the entrepreneurs behind the prison at Bridewell, and the state contributed to a reconceptualization of labor as possessing primarily economic value. In these documents, labor is separated from its traditional grounding in a feudal moral economy and is positioned instead as a commodity to be exploited for profit. At the same time, however, economic dehumanization and objectification are countered through passionate defenses of the social and moral value of labor from dispossessed workers of various sorts. Then I turn to the dialogue between detractors and defenders of the stage, focusing in particular on how this dialogue often frames the legitimacy of the theater in terms that reproduce contemporaneous discourses on labor. Antitheatrical critics frequently accuse actors and playwrights of being idle vagabonds who should be compelled to perform more profitable labor, while members of the theatrical community defend themselves by using language that stresses their status as dignified and skillful laborers. Like the labor economy more broadly, the theater was situated between a declining feudal system, which embraced the craft and skill of labor in its communal context, and an emerging capitalist system that was radically transforming labor into a mechanism of private gain and profit, a dynamic reflected in the complex labor structures of the acting companies. As a result, the theater of the period is in a strong position to channel the tensions and anxieties of England’s workers, who were experiencing the steady reduction of their labor to a consumable and exploitable object. The theater, in direct and indirect ways, gives rise to an early manifestation of working-class identity and resistance.
The topic of labor and of England’s nascent working class is often overlooked in the historical and literary scholarship on the early modern period due in part to the long-standing equation of working-class consciousness with industrialization. In his monumental study The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson claims that working-class consciousness was solidified during industrialization: “In the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers.”[2] Thompson’s study is especially valuable for its effort to define class in more than mere economic terms by considering the cultural values and institutions associated with workers. Thompson refuses “any automatic, or over-direct, correspondence between the dynamic of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life,” addressing instead the inveterate traditions and cultural meanings that provided the foundation for a coherent working-class consciousness in the industrial era.[3] Significantly, although Thompson is primarily concerned with industrialization, he also indicates that the formation of class consciousness and community is not, in fact, amenable to easy periodization. As Thompson explains, “the factory hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was the object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of new political traditions. The working class made itself as much as it was made.”[4] Implicit in Thompson’s argument against an economistic historical model is a gesture toward what we might call the “long history” of English working-class consciousness. From this view, class consciousness is not epiphenomenal, the mental counterpart to a particular economic moment or stage of technological development but is rather the product of the extended struggle between workers and the capitalist forces that destabilized social and economic traditions from the sixteenth century onward. The formation of an industrial working-class consciousness in the nineteenth century is thus the making explicit of attitudes and perspectives that had previously remained at what Thompson describes as a “subpolitical” level of articulation among England’s workers.[5]
It is therefore difficult to confine an analysis of the making of working-class consciousness to the period between 1780 and 1832, due in large part to Thompson’s own nuanced approach to class identity. The possibility that these historical boundaries are not fixed is indicated by Thompson in a lengthy essay excoriating Althusserian Marxism, “The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors,” published in 1978. Opposing what he sees as Althusser’s static view of history, Thompson offers a more extended theorization of class development:
Class formations (I have argued) arise at the intersection of determination and self-activity . . . We cannot put “class” here and “class consciousness” there, as two separate entities, the one sequential upon the other, since both must be taken together—the experience of determination and the handling of this in conscious ways. Nor can we deduce class from a static “section” (since it is a becoming over time), nor as a function of a mode of production, since class formations and class consciousness (while subject to determinate pressures) eventuate in an open-ended process of relationship—of struggle with other classes—over time.[6]
Crucial here is Thompson’s repeated insistence that class formation is a gradual process, the result of a dialectic between historical determinations and agency that is articulated through struggle. Taking Thompson at his word, however, invites a more expansive consideration of this process of class becoming, because many of the determinate conditions of working-class consciousness can be traced back to the sixteenth century. In other words, while working-class consciousness is solidified and politicized in the nineteenth century, more needs to be said about the early modern roots of this class formation.
The framework for such an undertaking is in fact provided by Marx, who traces the emergence of both capitalism and the working class to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. This period, what he labels the era of “primitive accumulation,” is shaped by the tensions between “two very different kinds of commodity owners,” those who own the “means of production” and those who possess only “their own labour-powers” and who are thus increasingly “free” of the feudal social structures in which their labor had been imbedded.[7] This division between labor and capital, however, does not simply appear one day, as if to mark the end of feudalism and the beginning of a new epoch; rather, primitive accumulation denotes the gradual formation of class relations and identities. The emergence of capitalism, from this view, is first and foremost an accumulation of dispossessed labor—the enclosed peasants and the unemployed workers and servants who formed the pool of readily exploitable labor on which capital depended.[8] Capitalism, from its earliest moments of development, consists of the perpetual tension between these different social groups with their conflicting socioeconomic interests and desires, a circumstance suggesting that the making of the English working class cannot be contained to between 1780 and 1832. It is, instead, a making that spans centuries. Along these lines, Michael Perelman has retheorized the concept of primitive accumulation by arguing that it is a process that “remains a key concept for understanding capitalism—and not just the particular phase of capitalism associated with the transition from feudalism, but capitalism proper.”[9] Primitive accumulation is better understood not as a historical phase but as the very engine that powers capitalism, a dynamic process in which the working class is constantly made and remade through its struggle against poverty and exploitation. Approached in this way, industrial laborers do not constitute the working class but rather one of the many iterations of the working class in the long history of capitalism.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, labor became a topic of increasing focus and contention in England. During this period, one sees a distinct trend emerging that seeks to objectify and instrumentalize labor for economic purposes. Labor plays an especially important (though often disavowed or marginalized) role in early modern economic theory, long before the solidification of capitalist class formations in the industrial era, and it is here that we find the early traces of a primarily instrumentalist view of labor. Mercantile discourse, for instance, while locating value in the circulation of bullion, is often forced to acknowledge the importance of labor in the creation of wealth. Thomas Mun frames his strong support for expanding English trade by emphasizing the varieties of employment created by and required in order to facilitate international trade. He argues that “when all the other doores of charitie are shut, the East India gates stands wide open to receiue the needy and the poore giuing them good entertainment with two Moneths wages beforehand to make their neeedfull prouisions for the voyage.”[10] Mun couches the mercantile system’s dependence on labor in the moral language of charity and the reform of the idle, contending that “shipping will employ two thousand and fiue hundred Mariners at least; and the building with the repayring of the sayde ships, here at home will set to worke fiue hundred men, Carpenters, Cawkers, Caruers, Ioiners, Smiths, & other laborers, besides many officers; and about 120 Factors, in seuerall of the Indies.”[11] The depiction of mercantilist expansion as charity for the poor serves only to mask an exploitative wage relation. Indeed, trading companies much preferred free labor to wage labor, recruiting many of their sailors and seamen directly from prison and forcing them to work for minimal or no pay. Mun is primarily concerned in his writings with the establishment and maintenance of a trade balance, but in making his argument, he must note the role played by labor in the creation of the nation’s wealth. The discourse on trade is thus as much a discourse on labor, with the latter functioning in Mun’s writings as the productive force that keeps the wheels of commerce in motion.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, a more explicit articulation of the economic value of labor begins to develop. William Petty states more directly what Mun hints at, arguing that it is important to consider the commodity value of the sailors who work on ships, because “the Labour of Seamen . . . is always of the nature of an Exported Commodity, the overplus whereof, above what is Imported, brings home mony, &c.”[12] Petty’s method of “political arithmetic” is not limited to ships, but takes into account “the value of the whole people” of the nation when calculating England’s overall wealth. Petty puts forward a loose calculation of the nation’s assets, estimating that rent from land and wealth from private estates constitute only part of England’s total worth and that “the Labour of the People must have supplied” the remainder.[13] Accordingly, Petty proposes that a levy be raised and distributed to “laborious and ingenious Men” rather than to those who “employ themselves in any other way, which produce no material thing, or things of real use and value in the Commonwealth.” Petty not only focuses on the economic significance of labor, but he also encourages the state to distinguish between productive and unproductive forms of labor. The “study of Metaphysicks, or other needless Speculation” should be abandoned in favor of labor that is directly profitable.[14]
Mun and Petty approach the economic value of labor from a primarily theoretical perspective, engaging in relatively hypothetical speculation about the relation of labor to the nation’s wealth. But before Mun and Petty addressed the economic import of labor, Elizabethan efforts to reform vagrancy through the construction of workhouses had already given rise to a practical understanding of labor as economically productive and profitable. In 1552 a group of London citizens proposed purchasing Bridewell palace and transforming it into a “house of occupations” that would introduce the vagrant and idle to the virtues of labor.[15] In their petition to the state, the citizens explain that Bridewell will be financially self-sustaining, because “[c]ertain godly and honest citizens will deliver matter in stock, whereof the idle shall be set on work.” When the raw materials have been transformed into finished goods, these citizens will “receive the same wrought wares in satisfaction of the stock, allowing for the workmanship thereof; and always as the wares are wrought to renew the stock.”[16] The moral imperative to reform the idle slides into the more practical concern for economic sustainability. At one point, the citizens promise that goods produced by those imprisoned within Bridewell will be both well crafted and cheap: French caps, for instance, will be cheaper than those made in France because “there shall scarcely so much gain or profit be taken of [the prisoners’] labours, as shall countervail their charges and expenses.”[17] The citizens openly promise to exploit the labor of their prisoners so that England can enjoy quality goods at cheap prices. In the 1576 “act for the setting of the poore on worke,” the state officially endorses this exploitative practice, declaring that the governors of Bridewell “shall make payment to them which worke the same according to the deserte of the Worke” after selling the commodities at “some Market or other Place.” Most of the profit will be used to “buye more Stufe in suche wyse as the Stockes or Store shall not be decayed in Value.”[18] Functioning like a protofactory, Bridewell allows prisoners to keep a minimum of the wealth created by their labors, while the rest is reinvested in the production process. Labor power, which connects Bridewell to the market, is identified as the ingredient that will prevent the decay of the institution’s value.
Ideologically, these descriptions of Bridewell are conservative in aim, highlighting the need to reform the idle in body and spirit so that they can return to society and thereby contribute to the preservation of the normative social order. Economically, however, these accounts represent a radical departure from any traditional view of social and labor relations, constituting an unmistakable example of the protocapitalist putting-out system. Putting out preserved craft production while shifting control over manufacture away from the producers and into the hands of wealthy merchants and citizens. As a mechanism for economic exploitation, putting out operated insidiously, transforming labor relations from within the traditional craft structure as merchants began to circumvent the guilds and companies by employing workers directly in the production of commodities. With the putting-out system, Fernand Braudel explains, “all the sectors of craft life were touched, and the guild system was gradually being destroyed, although outward appearances were maintained.”[19] Bridewell contributed to the institutionalization of this gradual destruction by allowing entrepreneurial citizens and tradesmen to purchase the labor power of the prisoners, many of whom were violently compelled, through whipping and other forms of torture, to transform raw materials into marketable commodities. Although England’s workhouses were represented as institutions of moral reform, in practice they operated according to the logic of capital, concealing economic exploitation and the drive for profit within a narrative of moral penance and personal improvement.[20]
The emerging view of labor as a commodity, as a productive force to be tamed and harnessed in the pursuit of profit, suggests that the English working class was being forcibly constituted by disciplinary mechanisms and protocapitalist economic discourse well before the industrial era. Mark Netzloff has also pushed against the standard industrial periodization of the working class by looking at the “alternative forms of nationhood associated with the laboring classes” in the period.[21] Netzloff looks primarily at cottagers, although the making of the early modern working class affected virtually every group of workers and cut across every sector of the economy. Moreover, documents from a variety of early modern workers indicate that they did indeed share a sense of identity and economic interests. For instance, a 1603 petition from metalworkers complaining about the engrossing of iron directly identifies the source of their economic woes:
Wheareas diverse and sundry persons in the counties of Stafford, Warwick, Worcester, and Salop which were brought up in the mysteries or manual occupations of nailers, buckle-making, spurries, locksmiths, lorimers, stirrup-makers, and such like sciences and certain other persons of other trades being all now grown into wealth and having given over their said trades of making the said ware and other trades wherein they were brought up, have used of late to buy said wares of others that do make them and to sell the same in other countries.
As a result of this trend, the petition continues, “many thousands of the said poor artificers of the said trades . . . are all ready to beg their bread not only to the great ruin, hurts, and miseries of themselves and their families, but also to the hindrance, impoverishing, and utter decay of all of the inhabitants there by the daily increasing of many beggars.”[22] The petition pinpoints one of the driving forces in the emergence of capitalism: the gradual separation of the commercial and production elements within the trade guilds, a division that resulted in the steady impoverishment of the producing class and the corresponding enrichment of the commercial class.[23] Artisans who could no longer sustain themselves might try to sell their labor to the “certain other persons” who now possessed most of the capital resources. Otherwise, they could reasonably expect to become beggars.
Not only does this petition offer a lucid explanation of the economic practices undermining the workers’ livelihoods, but it also articulates a certain moral economy of labor. These workers define themselves as a social group in direct opposition to the engrossers. The desperation and panic experienced by the laboring community as it witnessed its economic security steadily erode is captured in such petitions to the state. A 1624 petition of the clothworkers of London is especially urgent. The petition begins by reminding the state of its responsibilities to the laboring community, noting that his “Maiesties most noble Progenitors, Kings and Queenes of England, the State haue from time to time had an especiall care for the imployment and setting on worke of the said Artizans, and thereupon haue made diuers good prouisions for their reliefe.” That the clothworkers find it necessary to emphasize this “especial care” indicates that the state has been remiss in its responsibilities, at least from the perspective of those most affected by economic turbulence. The petition proceeds to enumerate the consequences of the state’s inaction:
Some [laborers] are enforced for want of worke to betake themselues to labour in the Citie as Porters, Waterbearers, and in other such like meane callings; others to returne home into their Countries, and there to be either chargeable to their friends, or to follow husbandry and dayly labour; others to depart the Realme to diuers remote parts in the world, where the secrets of their Art are disclosed, to the preiudice of those Artizans that remaine at home; and others for lacke of imployment are fallen to idlenesse and begging, and betake themselues to other euill courses, to the great scandall of the gouernment of this Commonwealth. And if the Petitioners should not in some measure get worke from the Drapers of London, they might for the most part of them perish for want of food.[24]
As with the metalworkers, the source of the clothworkers’ unemployment and the degradation of their labor is attributed to the monopolistic engrossing of cloth by the drapers company, which used its influence to employ the less powerful clothworkers directly in the production of commodities. The artisan’s labor, the petition implies, derives its value from its inscription within a social network of obligations extending all the way to the Crown. As the petition makes clear, however, this sense of social continuity and order has been fundamentally destabilized by the blight of poverty. Labor finds itself an outside presence, struggling to reconnect with the larger sociopolitical order to which it had once belonged. The workers recognize that something has gone drastically awry and that traditional laboring existence is increasingly untenable. The petition identifies external factors as the primary cause of the clothworkers’ deteriorating condition—the impoverished artisans have been “enforced” to their condition because of a lack of jobs, and further harm to the guild system in the form of the dissemination of trade secrets follows from this basic determinant.
These petitions are insightful because they demonstrate that workers, faced with the increasing commercialization of traditional occupations, were developing their own sense of the social, moral, and economic value of their labor in opposition to this perceived economic injustice. The engrossers’ wealth is directly proportional to the workers’ poverty, and this growing relation of inequality is taken to be a sign of moral decline for the entire nation. The blending of moral and economic values in petitions and declarations from the dispossessed is especially evident in the experiences of agrarian laborers. Gerrard Winstanley, in The New Law of Righteousness, blends moral condemnation with economic pragmatism, warning other workers that “[i]f you labour the earth, and work for others that lives at ease, and follows the waies of the flesh by your labours, eating the bread which you get by the sweat of your brows, not their own: Know this, that the hand of the Lord shall break out upon every such hireling labourers, and you shal perish with the covetous rich men, that have held, and yet doth hold the Creation under the bondage of the curse.”[25] This statement succinctly formulates Winstanley’s understanding of the value of labor, expressing awareness of the social and economic inequality that inheres within the wage relation. These “hireling labourers” are sinful to the extent that their labor sustains the exploiting class of “covetous rich men.” Winstanley’s biblical language functions to assert the moral injustice of the wage relation while also articulating the economic mechanism—the redistribution of wealth from the laborer to the employer—underpinning this injustice.[26]
Such petitions and declarations from workers should be read in dialogue with the emerging economic valuation of labor formulated by state authorities, prison entrepreneurs, and merchant pamphleteers. For workers themselves, this growing awareness of labor as a commodity is accompanied by a need to connect their labor to an alternative sense of value and meaning, to formulate a counternarrative to the forces that were instrumentalizing labor power. In the case of the guilds, the decline of traditional artisanal production as a result of engrossing and putting-out inspires a heightened sensitivity to the communal and qualitative value of labor: workers petition against de-skilling, wage labor, and unemployment because, from their perspective, the new regime of production neither nurtures nor properly rewards craftsmanship and thereby undermines the stability of both the laboring community and the nation as a whole. For Winstanley as well, the replacement of tenant–landlord relations with a harshly exploitative wage relation engenders direct resistance to agrarian capitalism. From the perspective of early modern workers, then, labor is not a thing to be tamed and commodified; instead, the voices of laborers are presented in their complex reality, a reality defined by hunger, pain, and indignity. These expressions of protest formulate a kind of hybrid valuation of labor, drawing on a traditional moral framework for understanding work while adjusting that framework to account for the blatant exploitation and degradation of the nation’s laborers.[27] Marx and Engels famously observed of capitalism that “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”[28] When this process of naked exploitation begins to make itself felt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, struggles against exploitation do not manifest necessarily as organized resistance: in the early modern period, resistance often occurs in the field of meaning, as an effort to invest labor with symbolic value that pushes against degradation and exploitation.
Economic documents from the period reveal a concerted effort to transform idle labor into economically profitable and productive labor. This process of reduction and dehumanization, however, invites a response from England’s laborers, who refuse to remain silent in the face of these new labor relations. Although it would be inaccurate to claim, based on this evidence, that there was a developed working class in the early modern period, it would also be wrong to minimize the significance of the voices of these laborers. Two interconnected elements lead Thompson to focus his attention on the industrial era. The first is “the growth of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes,” while the second is “the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organization,” including, in particular, “trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organisations, [and] periodicals.”[29] The first element, although not as manifest in the early modern period, is nevertheless demonstrated in economic documents. In petitions from “poor artificers” decrying the engrossment of resources and the decay of their various trades, and in tracts condemning the capitalist wage relation and “hireling labourers,” early modern workers can be seen defining their own interests, centered on the application and valuation of their labor, against those who seek to exploit them. And while the early modern period lacks trade unions and other clearly defined and politicized labor organizations, this does not minimize the importance and intensity of laborers’ struggles. The challenge, then, for the scholar of early modern culture is to uncover the articulation of incipient working-class interests and subjectivities despite the absence of formal political and economic organizations in the period.
Scholars have long identified the theater as a primary arena in which England’s new economy was explored, interrogated, and conceptualized. In this section, I want to suggest that the theater also gave expression to concerns surrounding the place and value of labor and, indeed, that the theater, as a social, economic, and cultural space, can be seen as a loosely structured precursor to the kinds of organizations conducive to working-class consciousness that Thompson locates in the nineteenth century. Studies of the stage’s laboring dynamics often note the hybrid economic nature of the theater. Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda observe that “playing companies were transitional economic formations that retained certain aspects of a feudal-patronage and guild-system while embracing emergent capitalist methods.”[30] While the theater’s economic hybridity certainly plays a significant role in shaping dramatic form and the subjective experiences of actors and playwrights, it is also important to consider the antagonistic dimensions of this transitional position. Playing companies, informed by guild structures, patronage relations, and the market, were situated between a declining craft system and an emerging capitalist system. The theater, in other words, was shaped by the same economic trends and tensions that gave rise to petitions and pamphlets from concerned laborers, and therefore, any study of the stage’s economic dimensions cannot be isolated from questions of labor. The tendency to characterize actors as masterless men and the theater itself as a hotbed of vagrancy indicates the overlap between actors and playwrights and England’s larger population of laborers. While the theater included features of guild, patronage, and market structures, the members of playing companies were continually linked to vagrancy in the popular imagination. Antitheatrical rhetoric that equated the stage with vagrancy was participating in a larger strategy, led by England’s legal and moral authorities, to fight idleness in order to produce more easily exploitable and disciplined laborers. Implicit in every moral condemnation of the theater as a hotbed of vagrancy is thus an urge to tame and discipline unruly laborers, to transfer the unregulated energy of the stage into the workhouses where it can be made docile and profitable.
A major component of the theater’s economic hybridity is therefore the product of its direct relationship to competing definitions of work: many people in the theatrical community, including actors, playwrights, and impresarios, were citizens and had connections to London’s craft and trade guilds, and acting companies typically employed less-rigid versions of the apprentice system in training actors; at the same time, for many observers, actors and playwrights were little better than dispossessed laborers who had taken their begging to the stage. Ultimately, of course, these two categories of laborers were intimately connected, because the increasing dispossession of craft and tradesmen made it difficult to separate the honest laborer from the beggar. This intersection of vastly different understandings of laborers—one grounded in traditions of skill and craft and the other reflecting the blight of poverty and dispossession that accompanied the growing commodification of labor power—is the product of the theater’s material circumstances. The links between the playing companies and customary structures of labor meant that members of the theatrical community were also, to varying degrees, affected by England’s radical and frightening transformation of labor.
The implications of these competing definitions of work have not, however, been developed in detail. Despite the theater’s hybridity, many studies of theater economics downplay the association of the stage with vagrancy and labor, stressing instead the theater’s entrepreneurial commercialism. For instance, William Ingram, noting the multiplicity of attitudes toward the theater, proposes that we attempt “to understand . . . how the stage player, as free entrepreneur, was caught up in the clash of these attitudes.”[31] Attention to the clash of attitudes, however, is stymied by the guiding presumption, which shapes Ingram’s study, that members of the theater were indisputably entrepreneurs. Some of these people were entrepreneurial, looking to the theater as a profitable investment. John Brayne, for instance, a wealthy grocer who invested substantial amounts of money in James Burbage’s Theatre, seems to have been driven by mercenary interests. So convinced was Brayne that the Theatre was a sound investment that he liquidated most of his considerable assets and even borrowed additional money to support the venture. But Burbage was different: if Robert Myles, a goldsmith, is to be believed, Burbage was “but a poor man & but of small Credit, being by occupacion A Joyner, and reaping but A small lyving by the same, gave it over, and became A Commen Player in playes.”[32] Brayne may have treated the Theatre as a capital investment, but Burbage’s poverty indicates a different motivation. As a poor householder, Burbage turned to acting as an alternative to his official occupation. Although some actors and playwrights made a good deal of money from the stage, to characterize them as entrepreneurs ascribes a cogent commercial ideology to the theater. As the distinction between Brayne and Burbage demonstrates, some people saw the theater as a place in which to invest money, whereas for others it was a place where one could hopefully escape economic precariousness by transferring occupational skills from one form of labor to another.
Tom Rutter builds on the characterization of actors as entrepreneurs, arguing that actors articulate a newfound sense of being “skilful professionals” by depicting “actors of the past as amateurish, inept, and old-fashioned.”[33] Treatment of members of the theatrical community as entrepreneurs or professionals who define themselves against “rude mechanicals” presents a relatively frictionless version of the period’s nascent capitalism. These readings rest on the presupposition that the rise of capitalism brought with it a wave of upward social mobility and an ethos of self-improvement. It is important to remember, however, that upward mobility was the exception rather than the norm for most of the population. If Gregory King’s 1688 assessment of English wealth is even remotely accurate, it seems likely that most people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced and/or lived in fear of downward social mobility. Although it is undoubtedly true that some actors and playwrights enjoyed financial success, many were also transplants from the guild yeomanry, a class consisting of journeymen and householders who were not accustomed to upward mobility, because only a select few could hope to achieve the livery and many spent their time trying to avoid poverty.[34] It seems likely that many of these actors and playwrights brought with them to the theater a consciousness informed by a sense of economic hardship and struggle rather than one of professional entrepreneurialism. The entrepreneurial dimension of the acting companies was, after all, accompanied by a complex arrangement of labor relations. For instance, actors were typically divided into two groups within a given company: a handful of sharers with a direct financial investment in the company and a secondary group of hired actors who received a wage for individual performances. If members of the former group were sometimes known for their wealth, hired actors were typically known for their poverty. In The Raven’s Almanacke, for instance, Thomas Dekker, himself no stranger to poverty, mockingly warns players that they will face “Saint Iulians plague,” noting that “a number of [players] (especially the hirelings) be with emptie purses at least twice a week.”[35] The humor of the warning is partly ironic, hinging on the fact that many actors are already plagued by poverty and hardship. In Jonson’s Poetaster, Histrio, an actor, complains about the economic insecurity of his profession, noting that “this winter has made us all poorer than so many starved snakes” (3.4.278–79).[36] The majority of actors experienced varying levels of economic precariousness, in contrast to the relative wealth and stability of some financially successful sharers, a circumstance that appears to have been commonly recognized.
Even the wealthier company sharers were not entirely immune to “emptie purses,” and like their hireling counterparts sharers could suffer economic hardship and indignity at the hands of financiers and theater entrepreneurs. In 1615, the Lady Elizabeth’s Men presented articles of grievance against Phillip Henslowe, accusing the impresario of exerting control over the company through a form of debt bondage. Among the accusations was the claim that Henslowe had deprived the company of its hired actors: “Hee hath taken all boundes of our hired men in his owne name whose wages though wee have truly paid yet att his pleasure hee hath taken them a waye; and turned them over to others to the breaking of our Companie.”[37] This particular article of grievance highlights the shared interests among the different kinds of actors in a company, because Henslowe’s abuse of the hired actors and his appropriation of wages prove detrimental both to the hired men and to the sharers of the now-broken company. Although, within a company, there were clear divisions between sharers and hired actors, both groups could find themselves at the mercy of impresarios and financiers such as Henslowe. The theater may have been a space of entrepreneurialism, but it was also home to some of the same relations of labor and exploitation that were coming to shape England’s broader economy. Accordingly, it is a mistake to assume that entrepreneurialism was the dominant value system within the theater. In the same way that, within England’s emerging capitalist economy more broadly, commerce is inseparable from labor, so within the theater the spirit of entrepreneurialism is underpinned by the labor of actors and playwrights, some of whom were wealthy and some of whom lived with economic hardship.
In the following chapters, I attempt to situate theatrical labor at the point where the allure of commercial wealth meets the countervailing fear of impending poverty. The theater’s success and the professionalization of theatrical labor, this book argues, must be read within the context of a social milieu defined by hardship and dispossession. Drama from the period abounds with characters dealing with economic difficulties, and this friction was at the center of theater life as well. Indeed, the debate among contemporaries over the place of the stage in early modern London reproduces, to a remarkable extent, the changing valuations of labor that we find in the period’s economic documents. In addition to classifying actors as vagrants, critics of the stage express particular concern with the way the theater has organized and provided refuge to London’s dispossessed by transforming begging and idleness into a form of work in its own right. Condemnations of the stage often hinge on a contradiction: as a mode of idleness acting represents a failure to engage in a reputable form of labor; at the same time, however, acting is consistently described in the language of traditional structures of work. I examine this paradox in more detail in chapter 2, but a brief look at John Cocke’s and Samuel Cox’s descriptions of actors will illustrate the logical contradiction in antitheatrical discourse. Cocke cites the statute against vagabonds, contending that it “hath done wisely to acknowledge [the actor] a rogue errant.” The statute is correct not only because actors who lack a patron are technically masterless, but more importantly because the actor’s nature “is compounded of all natures, all humours, all professions.”[38] Unlike the rigidly regulated system of labor that defines agrarian/guild production, the actor’s labor is abstract and versatile. For Cocke, the term rogue does not denote a legal category so much as it describes the fluid and malleable application of the actor’s labor. The result is that the actor appears to be at once unemployed and a master of all professions.
Samuel Cox expresses a similar concern about the relationship of acting to labor, lamenting that actors are allowed “to make professions and occupations of plays” while “our brethren” are “ready to starve and die of penury” in the streets.[39] Cox offers a relatively nuanced critique of acting, refusing to condemn the theater in its entirety. In particular, he is supportive of medieval civic theater, in which “certain artisans in good towns and great parishes, as shoemakers, tailors, and such like . . . used to play where it was lawful for all persons to come.” Unlike commercial actors, artisan-actors did not make “their playing an occupation of idleness all the whole year, but an occupation only at certain festival times of rest when the people are free from labour.”[40] Cox’s critique of actors as at once idle beggars and a distraction from other people’s poverty displays his confusion in conceptualizing acting in relation to common categories of labor: unlike other beggars or “brethren,” actors are beggars who deserve only scorn, apparently because their begging occurs on stage. The critique thus takes as its object not acting itself, but more precisely acting that upsets traditional conceptualizations of labor. Like Cocke, Cox describes the commercial theater in terms of a contradiction, emphasizing its capacity to make “an occupation of idleness.” Whereas medieval civic theater functioned to reproduce a standard system of labor, temporarily embracing idleness only to reaffirm the importance of diligent work, the early modern theater has paradoxically institutionalized idleness or unemployment as an autonomous form of labor.
Defenders of the theater often center their arguments on the same conceptions of theatrical labor as their adversaries. The primary difference is that defenders attach a positive valuation to the theater’s relationship to labor, denying the accusation that acting is an “occupation of idleness.” Thomas Heywood tellingly begins his defense by distancing himself and his profession from vagrant culture, explaining that “I will neither shew my selfe ouer-presumptuous, in scorning thy fauour, nor too importunate a beggar, by too seruilly intreating it.”[41] By marking his project off from any form of begging, Heywood lends credence to Stubbes’s accusation that actors live “vpon begging of euery one that comes” to the theater.[42] Significantly, in fashioning his defense, Heywood cites examples from England’s past and the classical tradition. He notes, for instance, how “amongst other commendable exercises in this place, the Company of Skinners of London held certaine yearely solemne playes.”[43] Heywood shields acting from criticism by invoking the artisanal civic drama out of which early modern theater grew. Even though his defense is primarily moral in emphasis, he finds himself bolstering his argument by trying to situate acting as a respectable form of labor. Heywood’s defense is largely reactionary, however, attempting to deny that actors are vagabonds by nostalgically invoking a bygone era of guild drama. Missing in the defense is a recognition of the hybrid nature of early modern theatrical labor, its combining of elements of dispossessed labor with traditional and socially accepted forms of labor.
In contrast to Heywood, John Webster does not deny the peculiar unsettledness of theatrical labor, its vagrant mutability. In Webster’s short piece titled “An Excellent Actor,” which he composed for Thomas Overbury’s Characters, he describes actors in positive terms:
All men have been of his occupation: and indeed, what he doth feignedly, that do others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a parasite this man tonight, tomorrow a precisian, and so of divers others. I observe, of all men living, a worthy actor in one kind is the strongest motive of affection that can be: for when he dies, we cannot be persuaded any man can do his parts like him. Therefore the imitating characterist was extreme idle in calling them rogues.[44]
Unlike the theater’s critics, who respond to the theater’s paradoxical merging of idleness and organized occupation with confusion and disgust, Webster affirms the versatility of acting while representing it as a skillful endeavor, so that a good actor, although lacking an essential identity, is irreplaceable and unique in his talent. Being vagrant in one’s labor is transformed into a positive condition: the actor is not an idle vagrant or a rogue but a skillful practitioner of all occupations and trades. In fact, it is the moralizing critic and pamphleteer whose activity is “extreme idle,” in contrast to the actor’s refined occupational skill. Webster thus transvalues the common association of actors with idleness by suggesting that the theater’s ambiguous relation to standard occupations is actually its most laudable aspect: actors do not have a single occupation, it is true, but this is only because they have an infinite variety of occupations, all of which require immense skill.
Nathan Field, in one of the most concise and persuasive defenses of the theater, frames acting entirely around its relationship to other trades and occupations. He begins by noting that “in God’s whole volume (which I have studied as my best part) I find not any trade of life except conjurers, sorcerers, and witches, ipso facto damned.” He continues, describing trades and professions as a continuous spectrum of labor rather than in terms of moralizing binaries between good and bad, Christian and heathen occupations:
Why, neither Christ nor they by their letters patents incorporated either the mercer, draper, goldsmith, or a hundred trades and mysteries that at this day are lawful, and would be very sorry to hear the sentence of damnation pronounced against them, and simply because they are of such a trade; and yet there are faults in all professions, for all have sin, may be freely spoken against.[45]
In a relatively short piece of writing, Field chooses to stress the laboring dimensions of the theater. While acknowledging that the theater is not the location of a traditional or recognized mystery, he links acting with “a hundred trades and mysteries” in England, suggesting that theatrical labor, although different, is equally valuable and worthy of respect.
Each of these defenses of the stage shares a common feature: they respond to antitheatrical critics by focusing specifically on the question of the place of labor in the theater. In response to critics who associate the stage with vagrancy and idleness, defenders of the theater depict acting as a variation on traditional occupations and forms of labor. The world of the early modern theater, as indicated by the dialogue between detractors and defenders, can be seen as a microcosm of the period’s labor dynamics. The downward pressure on laborers of all stripes due to the rapidly expanding market in labor power underpins every aspect of life in the theater. The anxieties expressed by laborers who watched their livelihoods decay and their labor become commodified were carried into the world of the theater by actors and playwrights who were also touched, to varying degrees, by a radically new conception of the social and economic value of labor. If metal workers and farmers actively opposed the subordination of their labor to profit, actors and playwrights also formulated, in defenses and on the stage, an oppositional valuation of their labor. Actors and playwrights resist the idea that their labor is idle and that it should be applied in more profitable ways.
Members of the theatrical community were likely to be uniquely attuned to how the new economic logic of emerging capitalism was affecting labor. In addition to being persecuted by critics who insisted on devaluing their labor as vagrant and idle, they were also active participants in another, closely related, kind of labor commodification. In an often-quoted passage, Thomas Dekker describes the theater as “your Poets Royal-Exchange, vpon which, their Muses (that are now turnd to Merchants) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware then words. Plaudities and the Breath of the great Beast, which (like the threatnings of two Cowards) vanish all into aire.”[46] Dekker’s remarks can be read as expressing concern over the translation of creative or aesthetic value into monetary value, a dynamic that is inextricably connected to the decline of feudal labor arrangements. Tracing the separation of the artist from the artisan in the early modern period, Larry Shiner identifies the market as a primary force in the emergence of the concept of “art.” Shiner argues that “[i]n the emerging market system, labor becomes abstract in the sense that it has no tie to a specific place or purpose, no predetermined subject matter and, therefore, no specific tasks of execution but only a generalized creativity.”[47] The marketplace of drama, Dekker’s poetic Royal Exchange, presupposes a socioeconomic system in which control of labor has shifted from the artisan to the market. On one hand, this shift frees the artisan-artist’s labor, divorcing it from traditional frameworks, but on the other hand, as with any other commodity, the creation of art for the market involves a tension between producer and purchaser, because the creative product becomes a manifestation of one’s commodified and alienated labor.
The question of how the early modern theater’s commercialization informed dramatic production has been addressed. For the most part, however, critics who examine the stage’s commercial status begin with the premise that those involved in the theater world actively embraced the monetization of their work. The result is an interpretation that often comes close to reducing drama to consumer demand. Laura Caroline Stevenson makes the claim that “economic change created circumstances that favoured the burst of literary talent in Elizabeth’s reign; and some authors, as if grateful for the favour, returned the compliment by praising the exploits of merchants, industrialists, and craftsmen.”[48] Plays, according to this thesis, provided ideological validation for the very market forces underpinning their production. Douglas Bruster makes a similar argument, positioning drama as “a poetics of the market” that “reflexively” articulates the logic of the nascent capitalist economy.[49] The idea that drama constitutes a reflexive engagement with the rise of market relations would seem to minimize critical agency on the part of playwrights, actors, or audiences, reducing the entire theatrical enterprise to a function of economic processes. A far more nuanced assessment of the stage’s market dimensions comes from Jean-Christophe Agnew, who contends that the “extraterritorial zone” of the theater, by bringing together London’s dispossessed populations, served as a space where people, including playwrights, could strive to make sense of the “vicissitudes of exchange” that attended the new economy.[50]
Despite attention to the laboring status of some of the dispossessed, Agnew does not fully explore the implications of how this most vulnerable population might have navigated the “vicissitudes of exchange.” If the rise of an exchange economy is fundamentally inseparable from the emergence of a regime in which labor itself is bought and sold, then an examination of exchange relations must also take into account how the stage negotiated the changing status and value of labor. What is needed, in short, is a consideration of the vicissitudes of labor in an era in which the very idea of work was undergoing radical transformation. While drama was certainly produced as a commodity, more attention must be given to the tumultuous boundary where theatrical production intersected with commodification. Kathleen McKluskie approaches this topic when she identifies a shift from “use value to exchange value” in the theater, which resulted when drama became more and more an impersonal commodity to be bought and sold rather than a source of meaningful connection within the community.[51] McKluskie links the commercialization of the stage to labor conditions, suggesting that playwrights “showed some awareness that theirs was a culture of intellectual underemployment” in which “commercial literary production, even in the theatre, was not sufficiently developed to provide full employment for all those who sought a literary career.”[52]
McKluskie’s point about the movement away from use value and toward exchange value within the theater is a potentially fruitful way to frame the stage’s relationship to broader economic change, as it directs our attention to questions of labor. As we have seen, England’s economic landscape increasingly favored exchange value over the traditional feudal subsistence economy. Labor, as the productive force underpinning the exchange economy, was at the center of this process of revaluation. In the economic microcosm of the theater, as well, labor was at the center of an expanding market system. We have seen that labor was a topic of interest for actors and playwrights, and it should perhaps come as no surprise that these same people frequently expressed concern over the shift—to borrow from McKluskie—from use value to exchange value in the way plays were produced and consumed. Importantly, this concern does not manifest simply as hostility toward the theatrical marketplace or the commodification of drama—although, to be sure, this hostility is present. More specifically, we encounter—in such writings as dramatic prologues, prefaces, and dedications—a consistent effort to define the value of drama as a kind of craftsmanship by positioning it in contrast both to the demands of consumer appetite and to menial or degraded forms of labor.
That writing plays was registered as an act of labor with unstable meaning and value attached to it can be seen in instances of competition between playwrights, which were often formulated as conflicts between competing kinds of labor. In his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, Thomas Nashe rails against the new breed of commercial playwrights, complaining that “euery mechanicall mate abhorreth the English he was borne too” and attempts instead to imitate classical dramatists.[53] These playwrights, who “repose eternitie in the mouth of a player,” lack real talent and have “no more learning in their scull than will serue to take vp a commoditie.”[54] Such upstart playwrights, trading in “the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse,” are insulted in two interconnected ways in this account.[55] First, the commercial playwrights are directly linked to menial work, implying that the playwrights’ lack of dramatic talent reduces their art to a form of itinerant plebian labor. Then, having been categorized as workers or “mechanical mates,” the playwrights are accused of producing plays only for personal gain—”to take vp a commoditie.” The bipartite structure of Nashe’s argument posits a causal link between being a plebeian laborer and producing plays as commodities. Nashe’s critique is thus quite specific: commercial playwrights are represented as sell outs, as workers who have turned their creative labor to market-based production. In short, Nashe attempts to devalue these upstart playwrights’ talents by devaluing their status as laborers.
It is fascinating to compare Nashe’s words about blank-verse-spewing upstarts with Leonard Digges’s commendatory verses for the first folio of Shakespeare’s Poems, published in 1640. As if directly appropriating and subverting Nashe’s critique, Digges defends Shakespeare’s own legacy by defining him over against more-recent theatrical upstarts:
But happy Verse thou shalt be sung and heard,
When hungry quills shall be such honour bard.
Then vanish upstart Writers to each Stage,
You needy Poetasters of this Age,
Where Shakespeare liv’d or spake, Vermine forbeare,
Least with your froth you spot them, come not neere;
But if you needs must write, if poverty
So pinch, that otherwise you starve and die.
On God’s name may the Bull or Cockpit have
Your lame blancke Verse, to keepe you from the grave:
Or let new Fortunes younger brethren see,
What they can picke from your leane industry.[56]
If Nashe’s preface critiques commercial playwrights as plebeians who write from need and for money, Digges represents Shakespeare’s imitators in precisely the same language. The repeated imagery of hunger and desperation is a strategy to deprive these upstarts of any aesthetic integrity by depicting their plays as products of economic necessity. From this a simple conclusion can be drawn: popular playwrights possessed a disdain for the image of playwriting as a form of desperate labor or as something done for the sole purpose of preventing one’s slippage into poverty. The notion that playwriting might be little more than an act of abject, devalued labor performed out of need and in order to make money rather than in accordance with an artistic design haunts discourses on the theater.
Playwrights, writing for both public and private playhouses, frequently address the tensions of the dramatic marketplace in language that relates the production and consumption of drama to forms of labor. According to Paul Yachnin, such references to work indicate that playwrights sought to shield themselves from the indignities of being seen as laborers: “writing for money, for common tastes, for performance in commercial houses before paying customers—all this connected playwriting with ungentlemanly occupations such as leatherworking (Shakespeare’s first trade) and bricklaying (where Jonson started his working life).”[57] Yachnin makes an important point, although he does not make it clear why commercial playwriting would equate, in the minds of playwrights, with common and ungentlemanly work. What needs to be explored in more detail are the links, conceptual and material, between menial work and commercial playwriting. What we encounter from playwrights is not disdain for work and workers per se, but rather, and more complexly, a desire to compensate for the nagging fear that their own creative labor was degraded in the act of commercial exchange. By writing for money and at the demand of customers, playwrights risk validating discourses that devalue and minimize theatrical labor. What we often discover, then, is a friction between competing definitions of labor: on one hand, playwrights who feel that their artistic integrity is threatened tend to depict the threatening forces (new playwrights, the undiscerning audience) as menial or unskilled workers; on the other hand, these same playwrights often compensate for their sense of insecurity by depicting their own theatrical endeavors as skilled and autonomous craftsmanship.
Prefaces and prologues composed for the public theaters are especially likely to contain expressions of hostility that denigrate the laboring components of the audience. This attitude, however, reflects more than elitism on the part of playwrights; rather, in the multitude of poor craftspeople, apprentices, and vagrants who constitute the amphitheater audience, playwrights are confronted with the living embodiment of their own sense of debasement in this new commercial economy. The tendency to associate the dramatic marketplace with the debasement of labor makes sense in the context of theater economics. After all, writing plays for the paying audience could indeed make for a precarious living. Thomas Dekker, for instance, was all too familiar with this reality, having spent several years in debtors’ prison over the course of his writing career. In the prologue to If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It, written just before a period of imprisonment spanning from 1613 to 1619, Dekker complains about playwrights’ dependency on market demand:
But tis with Poets now, as tis with Nations,
Th’il-favouredst Vices, are the brauest Fashions.
A Play whose Rudeness, Indians would abhorre,
Ift fill a house with Fishwiues, Rare, They All Roar.
It is not Praise that is sought for (Now) but Pence,
Tho dropd, from Greasie-apron Audience. (Prologue, 15–20)[58]
Dekker positions himself against playwrights who sell out and produce inferior plays in order to satisfy the paying audience. Indeed, the rudeness of these plays mirrors the rudeness of the unrefined workers who pay for them. Artistic labor, Dekker complains, is debased to the level of a fishwife’s when it is performed in order to receive the greasy money of a rude audience. At the same time, of course, the play itself attests to Dekker’s dependency on the dramatic marketplace: appeasing consumers was the only thing keeping him out of poverty and out of debtors’ prison. Dekker’s frustration with commercial playwriting is informed by his experiences with debt and poverty, with the prologue allowing him to project his economic insecurity onto the audience.
Dekker’s expression of anger over the paying audience’s poor taste represents his desire to resist the commodification of culture. Hugh Grady has explored commodification as a central theme in early modern drama, examining how Shakespeare’s plays, in particular, negotiate the reification of values due to “the privileged, equivocal space of the theatre.” Drawing on Habermas’s theory of the lifeworld, the space of practical, lived articulations of meanings and values that are irreducible to the systematization or rationalization of capitalism, Grady suggests that “the complex communicative situation of Shakespeare’s theatre” enabled drama to push against the emerging reification of social and political regimes engendered by England’s commodity culture.[59] Surprisingly, Grady gives little attention to the role of labor in his interpretation of dramatic ideology critique. I would argue that what makes the early modern theater a privileged space is the fact that actors and playwrights were confronted, at a most intimate and personal level, by the commodification and alienation of their labor. For Dekker and many other playwrights, dependency on the market for survival was not a theoretical concern. In order to eat and to stay out of prison, the playwright had little choice but to compromise his dramatic vision by producing entertainment that would sell. What makes Dekker’s perspective especially significant is the way it frames cultural commodification in terms of labor and the financial viability of dramatic production.
This conceptualization of playwriting in the language of work and economic hardship is made even more explicit by John Webster in his preface to The White Devil. Like Dekker, Webster had difficulty finding an appreciative audience for his play, which was a financial failure when it opened at the Red Bull Theatre. In the preface, Webster blames the play’s failure on two factors. On one hand, the weather was uncooperative, because the play opened “in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting-out of a tragedy) a full and understanding auditory” (3–6).[60] The more significant factor, however, was the audience, since “most of the people that come to that playhouse resemble those ignorant asses (who, visiting stationers’ shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books)” (7–9). The reference to stationers’ shops and the preference for new books is suggestive, because it registers Webster’s frustration with the literary marketplace’s emphasis on quantity over quality. The experience of buying a new book is more important than enjoying a good book. This same lack of discernment is operative in the Red Bull audience, which Webster describes as “the uncapable multitude” that “is able to poison” a play with its breath (21). We know that the Red Bull audience, Webster’s “uncapable multitude,” consisted largely of craftsmen, apprentices, vagrants, prostitutes, and other lower-class workers drawn from Clerkenwell. By describing this lower-class labor pool as a mindless multitude that is prone to commodity fetishism, Webster establishes a conceptual correlation between market culture and the debasement of labor, as if the two things are inseparable moments in a single process. It is thus interesting that Webster concludes the preface not by separating himself from labor altogether but by in fact representing himself and his peers as laborers of a different sort:
Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance: for mine own part, I have ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men’s worthy labours, especially of that full and heightened style of Mr. Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Mr. Johnson, the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr. Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood, wishing what I write may be read by their light. (32–40)
Where some playwrights produce drama simply to satisfy consumers, Webster and his peers endeavor to subordinate financial interest to artistic vision, focusing primarily on the quality of their labors. To be a “worthy” laborer/playwright requires dedication to one’s craft, whereas other playwrights, like common and exploited workers, are commanded by the external pressures of the market. In denigrating the Red Bull audience, Webster is expressing a sense of elitism. But it is also important to consider that this elitist “othering” of the lower-class audience is constructed in terms of labor. Webster defines his artistic labor against commercial dictates, which he registers as the plebian tastes of common laborers—the “uncapable multitude”—in the audience. The dramatic marketplace is conceptualized as a force that debases and devalues the playwright’s skillful industry and labor.
In their prologues and prefaces, we see Dekker and Webster engaging in a form of displacement whereby the most visible victims of the growing commodity culture—the people who made up the pool of cheap labor in London’s suburbs and who attended amphitheaters such as the Fortune and the Red Bull in large numbers—are identified as its cause. Importantly, however, disdain for audiences’ poor taste was not reserved solely for public playgoers. Of the early modern dramatists, Ben Jonson, with his attitude toward his livelihood, perhaps best demonstrates the complex perspectives, valuations, and tensions that shaped the experience of theatrical labor and that led playwrights to formulate their experiences using discourses of labor. Jonson’s participation in both public and private theaters offers a broad insight into how playwrights understood the relationship between consumerism and theatrical labor in London’s various dramatic venues. Indeed, although early modern conceptions of theatrical performance and production are often, as we have seen, informed by ideas of labor, Jonson’s career as a poet and a playwright is almost entirely defined by his attitude toward the intersections of labor and poetic creation. As a former bricklayer, Jonson was certainly no stranger to labor, and in Timber or Discoveries, his commonplace book, he defines good writing as a form of skilled labor or artifice:
The true artificer will not run away from nature, as he were afraid of her, or depart from life and the likeness of truth, but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamburlaines and Tambur-chams of the late age . . . In the meantime, perhaps, he is called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious word can come in their cheeks, by these men without labour, judgment, knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred above him.[61]
The effective poet or writer is equated directly with the skill and knowledge of the “true artificer,” while the poetry of more popular playwrights such as Marlowe is defined as an absence of labor. In this formulation, it is clear that Jonson claims artifice as his own unique property, articulating a labor theory of poetry/drama. Playwrights such as Marlowe, in contrast, have chosen monetary value and popular appeal over the value of labor, producing plays in accordance with the “vulgar” tastes of the paying audience rather than in accordance with their own sense of artifice.
Jonson’s discussions of writing often center on a fundamental distinction between skilled poetry and “vulgar” poetry, the latter pertaining to poets who write for the stage and purely for money. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms dramatist and playwright do not become common until the latter half of the seventeenth century. The first two recorded usages of “playwright,” in fact, come from Jonson. In the commendatory poem that opens Sejanus His Fall, attributed to one Cygnus but possibly composed by Jonson, the author is praised over against “the crew / Of common playwrights, whom opinion blew / Big with false greatness,” but who cannot match “[t]he wit, the workmanship, so rich, so true” of Jonson’s play (3, 6–8).[62] In an epigram included in the 1616 folio The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, Jonson reiterates his disdain for common playwrights:
Playwright me reads, and still my verses damns,
He says I want the tongue of epigrams;
I have no salt, no bawdry he doth mean;
For witty, in his language, is obscene.
Playwright, I loath to have thy manners known
In my chaste book; I profess them in thine own.[63]
In both instances, the neologism playwright is used as an oppositional term, defining the craft of poetry against composers of plays who lack workmanship and skill. A wright was typically someone who worked as a joiner, and so by designating certain peers as playwrights, Jonson attempts to juxtapose his own complex craftsmanship and what he considers to be the more formulaic or unexceptional work performed by others.
In many ways, Jonson’s effort to differentiate himself from “common playwrights” indicates a certain insecurity on his part. Despite being confident and proud in his artifice, he is also fearful that his skill will not be recognized or adequately valued. Jonson sees himself as a master craftsman, but for that very reason other poets are likely to be favored ahead of him. The mechanism that elevates the unskilled and talentless poet above the true artificer is the homogenizing and reductionist tendencies of the theatrical market. If audiences prefer Tamburlaine, this is because Marlowe has debased his plays to a level “to warrant them to the ignorant gapers” that constitute the theatrical audience.[64] Jonson laments that we, as consumers, are so eager “to thrust all our riches outward and be beggars within; to contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world.”[65] The fetishistic fascination with the “things of the world” is a symptom of the pursuit of money, as “the great herd, the multitude . . . conspire and agree: to love money.”[66] This rampant consumerism extends to art, where the “Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn and held with newness than goodness. We see it in fencers, in players, in poets, in preachers, in all where fame promiseth anything.”[67]
Bruce Boehrer interprets Jonson’s attention to labor as a strategy to distinguish himself from the lower or common members of society. In doing so, Jonson becomes one of England’s “first self-conscious representatives of literature as a vocation.”[68] More recently, Laurie Ellinghausen contends that Jonson inscribes his poetry within a binary understanding of labor, explaining that “Jonson’s representations of labor take two forms: one, as part of the earthly realm, which he aligns with the business of theater and printing house; and two, as an abstract ideal that becomes the locus for virtuous, diligent composition from the ideal poet.”[69] However, Jonson’s alignment of his work with skill and craftsmanship suggests that he has a more historically precise understanding of labor in mind. Rather than interpret Jonson as opposing material labor to ideal labor, it is more accurate to say that he opposes the autonomous labor of the craftsman to the commodified labor of the marketplace. Accordingly, Jonson is at pains to define the value of his poetic labor as something other than mere market value. If popular success requires that the poet subject his labor to the command of money, Jonson instead hopes that “Another age, or juster men” will appreciate and value his work in the future.[70] Writing with skill, Jonson realizes, may not lead to financial success, but it will allow him to maintain control over his poetic labor. By positing a more appreciative and refined hypothetical audience in the future, Jonson is able to invest his poetry with a value that transcends market forces.
What appears in Jonson’s writing to be elitism is better understood as another articulation of the same fear of the commodification and proletarianization of labor that we have seen expressed in other economic documents and discourses on the theater. Accordingly, some of Jonson’s most incisive observations about the commodification of poetic creation are found in his dramatic prologues and prefatory letters. The prologue to Cynthia’s Revels, for instance, distinguishes between the careful judgment of the discerning audience, expressed as “gracious silence, sweet attention, / Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,” and the thoughtless approval of “popular applause, / Or foamy praise, that drops from common jaws” (Prologue, 1–2, 13–14).[71] Jonson hopes that the audience at Blackfriars, where the play was performed, will appreciate the quality of his play, which requires an ability to “define / What merit is” (Prologue, 16–17). The play, Jonson makes clear, is targeted to that discerning segment of the audience, while
To other weaker beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their virgin strain,
To every vulgar and adulterate brain. (Prologue, 6–8)
Here, we see that Jonson’s desire for an appreciative and understanding audience expresses a concurrent concern over the debasement of labor. To prostitute one’s dramatic labor is to subject it to commercial exchange, which is equated, in Jonson’s mind, with the popular applause of the audience. Particularly significant about this description is the way it affords autonomy and agency to the poet’s labor: Jonson, and not the paying audience, has the power to determine how his labor is directed and received. In refusing to prostitute his dramatic labor, Jonson troubles the basic producer–consumer relation underpinning theater economics by suggesting that the dramatist, as laborer and producer, determines the qualitative value of his creation, while the audience plays a relatively passive role in this process. Jonson’s elitism, his disdain for the popular audience, encodes and attempts to compensate for this fear of the devaluation and adulteration of dramatic labor in the theatrical marketplace.
Likewise, in the preface to Volpone, which opened at the Globe, Jonson defines his poetry against that which is composed only to elicit the “beastly claps” of the audience (73).[72] Jonson claims that he will preserve his own sense of poetic and creative value through an act of negation, vowing rather “to live graved in obscurity than share with [other poets] in so preposterous a fame” (76–77). Such preposterous fame is acquired by catering to consumer desire, whereas obscurity preserves a measure of creative autonomy. In a telling conclusion to his preface, Jonson describes his approach to poetry in terms that place him in dialogue with antitheatrical critics. He promises to “raise the despised head of poetry again, and, stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form, restore her to her primitive habit” (129–31). Jonson shares with critics a disdain for the theater, and like them he, too, represents drama in the language of vagrancy—indeed, the medium itself has been beggared in this account. But unlike the critics, Jonson wants desperately to resist this proletarianization or debasement of poetic labor. His understanding of poetry preserves the integrity of the artisan-artist, as hinted at when the prologue states that Jonson “in five weeks fully penned [the play] / From his own hand, without a coadjutor, / Novice, journeyman, or tutor” (Prologue, 16–18). If the poetry of the market is commodified and debased, Jonson’s poetry, in contrast, is the work of an autonomous master craftsman who refuses to see his labor alienated. The Alchemist similarly begins with a letter to the reader in which Jonson complains that the “only point of art” that seems permitted on the stage is that which “tickles the spectators” (7).[73] Jonson’s criticism of other playwrights as well as the average theatergoer is ultimately directed at the economic forces underpinning literary production. Plays have been reduced to commodities, and the common audience “commend[s] writers as they do fencers or wrestlers, who, if they come in robustiously and put for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the braver fellows” (15–18).
This interpretation of Jonson’s concept of authorship diverges somewhat from Joseph Loewenstein’s argument about the development of “possessive authorship” in the early modern period.[74] While the market in literary goods undoubtedly provided a source of agency for authors, it is important to consider that Jonson situates his claim to authorial control and possession within the framework of labor. In other words, to the extent that Jonson is a possessive author, the object of his possessive impulse is not the material book or creative artefact itself but the labor that produces it. The property with which Jonson is concerned is certainly intellectual, but it is also something comparable to the property in skill that instilled the master craftsman—or in Jonson’s language, the “true artificer”—with a sense of distinction in comparison with other laborers. Jonson’s concern, like that of the other workers we have encountered, is with who or what determines his labor: the market or his own creative design. This conflicted relationship with the theatrical marketplace exemplifies the tensions that shaped early modern theater and English society more broadly. Jonson’s attitude toward poetic labor shares with other documents of the period a desire to define labor over against commodification. In Jonson’s writings, labor is placed at the center of efforts to value drama, and in turn, the theater becomes a primary forum for the negotiation of the value and meaning of labor in England’s emerging market economy.
The fact that Jonson seems equally hostile toward public and private theater audiences suggests that the target of his criticism is not based on any kind of class allegiance. On the contrary, Jonson appears to have been just as doubtful about the aesthetic appreciation of the elites at the indoor theaters as he was about the plebeians at the amphitheaters. Jonson’s disdainful attitude toward playgoers acts as a defense against a culture that confuses aesthetic value with market value, a trend extending beyond the class composition of any particular audience.[75] His target, in short, seems to have been the paying audience in general, and the economic undertones of his criticisms illustrate that the relationship between the stage and the audience was primarily commercial rather than based on any kind of class alignment or identification. Jonson’s writings on the topic of poetic workmanship and theatrical production therefore offer a window into the mind of the conflicted author poised between disparate conceptions of economic and dramatic value.
Early modern documents, theatrical and otherwise, that engage with the status of workers indicate that changing conceptions of labor had profound subjective (in addition to objective) implications for the workers who experienced this change directly. This chapter has traced an emerging but pronounced theme. As labor became increasingly treated as an object to be instrumentalized for economic purposes, laborers of various sorts pushed back by representing labor in two interrelated ways: by stressing the social and communal element of labor and by reaffirming craft traditions over against the debasement of labor due to the processes of proletarianization. A common thread running throughout all of these documents—economic and literary—is a certain tension between competing senses of value. This tension centers on the growing ascendancy of exchange value and the corresponding elision of more-traditional values of the community. Resistance to this new regime of monetary value is often articulated in discourses of work that seek to depict qualities such as craft and autonomy in the labor process as possessing social worth that transcends or escapes the reductive limitations of economic valuation. England’s population, these documents show, did not remain quiet as labor became an alienated commodity. As a result of the stage’s unique socioeconomic situation, drama is often able to give form to this desire for nonalienated and noncommodified valuations of labor. In the following chapters, I examine plays that attempt, through various aesthetic means, to represent labor as a process rather than as a thing, and as a fundamentally intersubjective social phenomenon rather than as an activity performed by atomistic economic agents. In Jonson’s language, these plays all dramatize the endeavor to recover the “true artificers” concealed beneath the “rotten and base rags” of commercial culture.
See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Melissa D. Aaron, Global Economics: A History of the Theater Business, the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, and Their Plays, 1599–1642 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 11.
Ibid., 192.
Ibid., 194.
Ibid., 59.
E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 106. Italics in the original.
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 874.
Some of the best data on early modern poverty are found in Jeremy Boulton, Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99–119. Boulton estimates that, for instance, in Boroughside in 1622 about 19 percent of householders lived in poverty, while an additional 43 percent possessed just enough income to survive. This latter group was at constant risk of slipping into the category of the poor, and many did at various points in their lives. For a recent discussion of the extent of poverty in early modern England, and how it could befall virtually all categories of labor, see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12–32. For useful overviews of the poverty problem, see also Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and Early Modern Literature (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1–38; and John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 1–19.
Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 37.
Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1621), 42.
Ibid., 41–42.
William Petty, Political Arithmetick, or, a Discourse Concerning the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings (London, 1690), 19.
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 38.
Useful discussions of the development and administration of Bridewell include Edward G. O’Donoghue, Bridewell Hospital: Palace, Prison, Schools from the Death of Elizabeth to Modern Times (London: Bodley Head, 1929); Joanna Innes, “ Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells , 1555–1800,” in Labour, Law, and Crime: An Historical Perspective, ed. Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (London : Tavistock, 1987), 42–122; and Twyning, London Dispossessed, 20–53.
Tudor Economic Documents, ed. Eileen Power and Richard Tawney (London, 1961), 309.
Ibid., 308.
Ibid., 333.
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 1: The Wheels of Commerce (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 317.
For a discussion of the changing values associated with early modern prison culture, see Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (London: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Culture, and the Literature of Early Modern Colonialism (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 204.
Anon., A Petition from West Midland Metal Workers against the Engrossing of Iron, in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 188.
For a discussion of the internal dynamics of the guilds, see George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904).
Anon., The Humble Petition of the Artizan Cloth-workers of the Citie of London (London, 1624), 1.
Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness, in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1:516–17.
For a detailed discussion of Winstanley’s response to the wage relation, see Matthew Kendrick, “The Politics and Poetics of Embodiment in Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger Writings,” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 42, no. 3 (2013): 283–308.
I base my understanding of the traditional moral framework of labor on Underdown’s influential argument regarding the seventeenth century divide between rich and poor, according to which poor laborers held to “the traditional conception of the harmonious, vertically-integrated society—a society in which the old bonds of paternalism, deference, and good-neighbourliness were expressed in familiar religious and communal rituals.” David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 11.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 194.
Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., introduction to Working Subjects in Early Modern England (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 7.
William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 45.
Quoted in Charles William Wallace, The First London Theatre (London: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 3.
Tom Rutter, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54.
Depending on how the Elizabethan subsidy rolls are interpreted, poverty levels for London householders range from a very pessimistic three quarters to a slightly less pessimistic one third. See Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 170-71.
Thomas Dekker, The Raven’s Almanacke (1609), in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 4 vols. (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney Ltd., 1885), 4:193.
Ben Jonson, Poetaster, in The Devil Is an Ass and Other Plays, ed. M. J. Kidnie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 41.
John Cocke, “A Common Player,” in English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179–80.
Samuel Cox, “letter to an unknown recipient, dated 15 January, 1590,” in Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, 168.
Ibid., 169.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. A5r.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses, (London, 1583), sig. M1v.
Heywood, An Apology, sig. A5r.
The quote is from John Webster, “An Excellent Actor,” in Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, 181. The editors attribute the passage to Thomas Overbury, although it is generally accepted that Webster composed “An Excellent Actor.” For a discussion of Webster’s contribution to Overbury’s Characters, see Charles Forker, The Skull beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1986), 121.
Nathan Field, “Letter to Revd. Mr. Sutton,” in Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Tanya Pollard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 277.
Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-booke (London, 1609), 27.
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 127–28.
Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1.
Bruster, Drama, 11.
Agnew, Worlds Apart, 55.
Kathleen E. McKluskie, “The Poets’ Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama,” in Patronage, Politics, and Literary Traditions in England, 1558–1658, ed. Cedric Brown (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 127.
Ibid., 133.
Thomas Nashe, “To the Gentlemen Stvdents of Both Vniversities,” in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1905), 3:311.
Ibid., 3:312.
Ibid., 3:311.
Leonard Digges, “Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems,” in William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 1, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2000), 28.
Paul Edward Yachnin, Stage-wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xii.
Thomas Dekker, If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It, in The Complete Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 140.
References are to John Webster, “To the Reader,” in The White Devil, ed. René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Ben Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), 24.
Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, in Kidnie, The Devil Is an Ass and Other Plays.
Ben Jonson, “To Playwright,” in Epigrams and The Forest, ed. Richard Dutton (New York: Routledge, 2003), 44.
Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, 24.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 64.
Bruce Boehrer, “The Poet of Labor: Authorship and Property in the Work of Ben Jonson,” Philological Quarterly 72 (1993): 303.
Laurie Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 65.
Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, 24.
All references to Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson: Volume 1, 1597–1601, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
All references to Ben Jonson, Volpone, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Norton, 2002).
All references to Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, in Bevington et al., English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology.
Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Jonson’s general hostility toward audience stupidity perhaps illustrates Gurr’s point that the division between indoor and outdoor theaters does not necessarily indicate a division in audience taste between elite and plebeian playgoers. As Gurr observes, “The fact that the hall playhouses could perform plays from the amphitheatres . . . suggests the division was more of social class than audience taste. That in turn implies that the price of admission had more effect than any class loyalty shown in the specific amphitheatres.” Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79.