Labor and Theatrical Value on the Shakespearean Stage

No figure better captures the theater’s transitional and mixed economy than Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare was himself a product of England’s changing socioeconomic situation. His father appears to have occupied multiple social positions: he was a middle-class artisan who attained prominence in his community before suffering a serious decline in status. This ambiguity of social place seems to have followed William to London, as indicated by his reception by the theatrical community. Robert Greene famously labeled Shakespeare an “upstart crow” to highlight his place as an interloper in the London theater scene, while Ben Jonson alternately criticized the sloppiness of Shakespeare’s drama and memorialized him as “the wonder of our stage.” Shakespeare’s class insecurity is suggested by his endeavor to secure a grant of arms that included the rather defensive motto, “not without right.” Shakespeare was at once the son of a glover from the Midlands, a wildly successful businessman in London, and a pretender to English gentility. And as I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters, the London theater space that came to define Shakespeare had an equally ambiguous social and economic identity, as a highly profitable commercial institution that relied on aristocratic patronage but which was also informed by an increasingly unstable culture of labor.

Shakespeare’s plays, this chapter argues, negotiate the complex socioeconomic dimensions of the theater by drawing on the conflicted place of labor within the commercial theater, and by extension, within England’s emerging market economy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows a marked uncertainty about the relationship between the commercial and the artisanal aspects of theatrical production. The play attempts to resolve these tensions by representing the artisanal dimension of the professional theater as a nostalgic touchstone or criterion of communal value capable of pushing against the reifying logic of the market. The Tempest, written nearly two decades later, more confidently embraces the laboring aspects of theatrical production. Building on Paul Yachnin’s influential claim that early modern theater was in search of “foundational value” that could invest drama with social import, I argue that The Tempest draws on the theater’s culture of labor as precisely such a legitimizing source of value. Indeed, Shakespeare’s final play depicts labor as the literal foundation capable of giving some stability and permanence to an otherwise “insubstantial pageant.” Both plays are invested in thinking through the value of labor and theater in England’s new economy.

Valuing Labor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains multiple, sometimes contradictory, depictions of both work and acting. These contradictory representations are especially evident in relation to the play’s artisan-actors, who occupy an uncertain space within the play. Puck has nothing but disdain for these artisans, referring to them derisively as “[a] crew of patches, rude mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls” (3.2.9–10).^[1] In Puck’s view, the artisans are clownish knaves, notable for their unrefined appearance and behavior, mere “hempen homespuns” with “thick skin” (3.1.73, 3.2.13). Significantly, the artisans have a quite different understanding of their theatrical labor. In his effort to instill confidence in his companions before the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, Bottom describes them as “most dear actors” and asks them to “eat no onion nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath” (4.4.39–41). Whereas Puck represents the artisan-actors as driven by a basic sense of survival, their labor serving the immediate needs of sustenance, Bottom sees them in a more dignified light, stressing their ability to exercise self-control and to fashion their behavior in accordance with the demands of the occasion. Finally, in Puck’s address to the audience at the play’s conclusion, he represents himself and the other performers as actors who perform for money, asking the audience to forgive them “[i]f we shadows have offended” (5.1.409). In Elizabethan England the term shadow could signify a fairy, but it could also denote “an actor or a play in contrast with the reality represented.”^[2] In the play’s final moments, then, the fiction of the play and the reality of the theater merge, as we are reminded that the “shaping fantasy” of the fairy world to which Puck belongs has been, all along, the shaping fantasy of professional theatrical performance (5.1.5). We are explicitly reminded that the laborers of the play are in fact the professional actors who, through their dramatic efforts, have constructed the theatrical illusion.

The play, in short, seems inflected by multiple understandings of labor in relation to theatrical performance: actors are alternately “rude” and clownish knaves, dignified artisans, and professional performers of the commercial theater. As scholars have recently shown, early modern literature is rife with such multidimensional and conflicted negotiations of the period’s fluid economic dynamics. David Hawkes, for instance, offers a novel interpretation of the early modern discourse on idolatry by relating it to commodity fetishism. As Hawkes argues, religious and aesthetic discourses offered a means for articulating economic changes before the emergence of an economic discourse proper. The struggle to make sense of nascent capitalism was aided by the economic sphere’s inextricable embeddedness within other social and cultural categories, which made it virtually impossible for early modern people “to consider the economic domain in isolation from the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of life.”^[3] Similarly, David Landreth, examining the role of early modern literature in making sense of currency production and circulation, notes that “before the emergence of political economy . . . the kinds of problems we would be inclined to call economic were as yet undisciplined.”^[4] What such studies have in common is the important insight that, before the formulation and institutionalization of a definitive discourse on economics, what we might call an aesthetic “play of figuration” helped to give shape and legibility to England’s socioeconomic changes.^[5] Metaphoric and loosely allegorical depictions rendered new and alien economic processes in more familiar forms.

At the same time, however, these studies tend to overlook one of the most significant categories of early modern England’s changing economic landscape: labor. Although commodification and the separation out of nominal value from practical value, or exchange value from use value, as well as the increase in global trade and renegotiations of the role of usury and other financial tools amenable to capital, all called forth new aesthetic representative strategies, we should keep in mind that the actual producers underpinning this economic turmoil also experienced a dramatic destabilization and erosion of meaning and place. The Statute of Artificers, as has been shown, expresses frustration and confusion over the instability of categories of labor, noting that so many people have fraudulently turned to skilled crafts “that they are only a cloak for vagabonds and thieves, and there is such a decay of husbandry that masters cannot get skillful servants to till the ground without unreasonable wages.”^[6] Artisans themselves, as we have seen, were equally concerned that skilled workers were increasingly “enforced for want of worke to betake themselues to labour in the Citie as Porters, Waterbearers, and in other such like meane callings.”^[7] What these two accounts of the changing place of labor demonstrate is the growing permeability of the boundary between vagrant or waged labor, on one hand, and traditional forms of artisanal and agrarian labor, on the other. Like England’s economy more broadly, it became increasingly difficult to make sense of the status of labor as social and economic relations underwent drastic alteration.

If changing economic conditions, especially in the realm of finance and exchange, were mediated by a variety of aesthetic representative modes, it is perhaps not surprising that the ambiguous and indeterminate place of labor should find dramatic representation, as indicated by the multiplicity of representations of labor in Dream. As we have seen, the dialogue between enemies and defenders of the stage indicates that the theater, as a social, economic, and political institution, was very sensitive to this struggle to give place and meaning to labor in England’s new economy. If Gosson could claim that “[m]ost of the Players have been either men of occupations, which they have forsaken to live by playing,” Field, as we saw in the introductory chapter, could just as confidently equate acting with “a hundred trades and mysteries” in England.^[8] For opponents of the stage, actors and playwrights exemplified that downtrodden group commonly known as “sturdy beggars,” the dispossessed laborers who turned to begging in lieu of any socially acceptable form of labor. For defenders of the stage, however, the theatrical enterprise was a skilled craft, and to that extent a perfectly legitimate form of labor.

To complicate this tension between classifications of labor, the theater was also torn between feudal and commercial social relations. In order legally to perform plays in England, an acting company needed to be officially attached to an aristocratic patron. At the heart of the theatrical profession, then, was a basic feudal relation of dependency. But only a small part of an acting company’s financial support came from aristocratic patrons, while the rest came from the paying audience. The theater, more than anything else, was a commercial institution, and thrived amidst the growing commercialization of London life. Melissa D. Aaron calculates that income from royal patronage was about 7.5 percent of the annual income for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the rest of its income coming from “mass popularity and volume sales.”^[9] Aaron also notes that, beyond its own immediate economic operations, the theater also provided a major economic stimulus to London’s otherwise impoverished suburbs, supporting myriad surrounding businesses. The imperative to profit does suggest that, at least in naked economic terms, the theater was capitalistic in its motivation, a moneymaking machine. And yet, the freedom that made this commercial success possible was largely the product of the guild connections of members of the theatrical community. The so-called freedom of the city that came with guild membership was central to the theatrical profession. Indeed, as Knutson has shown, the acting companies’ commercial success seems to have benefited from an ethos of solidarity and fellowship deriving directly from livery company models, which fostered “cooperative commercial strategies” among different acting companies and theater groups.^[10] If the theater was at the vanguard of a new economy, it was supported by and grew out of a very different socioeconomic framework.

As I have been suggesting, the theater’s connection to changing labor relations has a more significant presence in the period’s drama than has been previously acknowledged. As will be seen, the green world of Dream, and Puck especially, stages the sort of play of figuration called forth by a nascent exchange economy. But the play is unique in that it presents this articulation of socioeconomic change from the perspective of labor. The play offers a nuanced engagement with England’s economic conflicts and tensions, exploring the commercial logic that informed playgoing. In particular, the play suggests an uneasy relationship between the stage and the commercial forces that were shaping and commodifying it, a tension that finds its central articulation in Bottom and his fellow artisans, the so-called rude mechanicals of the play.^[11] As artisan-actors, they evoke the artisanal world that informed early modern theater, their comedic presence serving to remind the audience of the labor underpinning theatrical commerce. What the play presents us with, then, is a figurative rendering not only of emerging market mechanisms, but more precisely of the relationship between market forces and production. In doing so, the play engages with the instability of labor but also draws nostalgically from an English past in which labor—including theatrical labor—was imagined to be more thoroughly embedded within social and political tradition and meaning.

With specific reference to the fairy realm of Dream, Northrop Frye famously defined the Shakespearean green world as “a dream world that we create out of our own desires” that provides “the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.”^[12] But as others have more recently noted, the green world of Dream is concerned not so much with transcendent perfection or escapism as it is with the economic problems relevant to life in early modern England. The green world seems to figure aspects of England’s changing economic landscape. David Marshall, for instance, notes that the play “dramatizes an economy of exchange.”^[13] For Terry Eagleton, the play depicts a vision of the self as “a commodity which lives only in the act of barter, [with] love operating as the universal commodity.”^[14] Bruce Boehrer likewise points out that it is through the “exchange of love objects [that] the play’s various plots achieve their resolution.”^[15]

It is worth thinking more about the play’s attention to the logic of exchange. For the green world, as we are reminded by multiple characters, is a place of “translation” in which the fixed order of Athens gives way to the free-play of desire and where lovers become interchangeable. When Helena says to Hermia, “Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, / The rest I’d give to be to you translated,” she hints at the awesome power of exchange, which not only renders individuals interchangeable but also facilitates the very erasure of one’s unique identity (1.1.190–91). When, in response to Puck’s magical potion, Hermia asks, “Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?” the comedy of the situation is haunted by a sense of horror, a realization that there may no longer be any fundamental reality behind the shaping fantasy of desire (3.2.273). Identity has been (perhaps permanently) dissolved in the act of translating reality into fantasy. Nothing is quite the same after the lovers lose their sense of identity in the green world. Thus, when Demetrius finally awakens from the dream, he feels as if he is “[h]alf sleep, half waking” (4.1.146). Even though he has just spoken to Theseus and Egeus moments before, he asks his companions: “Do not you think / The Duke was here, and bid us follow him?” (4.1.193–94). The fantasy of the dream seems to have a lasting effect on reality, and this lingering of the dream complicates any return to normalcy. It suggests the arrival of a new economy of desire that thrives on flexibility and fluidity, an economy that is not subject to Athenian order. Demetrius remains enamored of Helena even after waking, his continued desire serving as a reminder that, after the night’s strange events, it will no longer be possible to fully separate reality from fantasy. If the exchange and translation occurring in the green world is emancipatory, freeing desire from patriarchal control, it is also somewhat frightening in its power.

Love within the green world seems to capture the peculiar way in which exchange both unites and separates, collapses identities and reinforces the divide between individuals. When they initially enter the green world, Lysander makes a promise to Hermia. He says they are “[t]wo bosoms interchained with an oath, / So then, two bosoms and a single troth” (2.2.49–50). But this oath proves untenable. Lysander and Hermia appear to have merged through their confession of mutual love, to have become one. But this apparent unity does not forge an unbreakable bond, as Hermia’s response hints: “But, gentle friend, for love and courtesy, / Lie further off, in human modesty” (2.2.55–56). This strange separation in unity conveys nicely the logic of the green world, in which things are made interchangeable, transformed into an apparent unity, and for that very reason driven farther apart. The act of exchange brings differences together momentarily, only to dissolve that connection in the process of circulation. No sooner do Hermia and Lysander close their eyes than the link that “interchains” them is severed. The exchange of love oaths is meaningless precisely because they are exchangeable. Helena sums up this dilemma when she confronts Lysander, who has confessed his love to her: “Your vows to [Hermia] and me, put in two scales, / Will even weigh; and both as light as tales” (3.2.131–32). When oaths of love are rendered interchangeable, she says, the “truth kills truth” (3.2.129). The exchange of love oaths negates their particular qualities—the substance of their truth.

What we encounter, then, with the transition from the ordered society of Athens to the fluidity of the green world, is a hybrid social vision. On one hand, Athens is a distinctly feudal society, grounded in patriarchal authority and deference to tradition. The conflict at the heart of the play is set in motion by Hermia’s desire to resist the “unwished yoke” of the traditional, closed marriage system (1.1.81). Theseus responds to Hermia’s frustration by reminding her that she is “but as a form in wax / By [Egeus] imprinted” and therefore is without power to resist his patriarchal command (1.1.49–50). Indeed, Athens is an almost exaggerated world of paternal authority and hierarchal order, with Hermia’s transgression invoking the dire warning from Theseus that she must “either prepare to die / For disobedience to your father’s will” or submit to “austerity and single life” (1.1.86–87, 90). The green world, on the contrary, is a place where desire transgresses boundaries and identities are translated and exchanged and where “the sharp Athenian law cannot pursue” the disobedient lovers (1.1.162–63). In the green world, the Law gives way as hierarchical relations of power are leveled by the free play of desire and lovers and identities become exchangeable. Even Oberon’s domination of Titania, which would appear to reinforce gendered relations of power, in fact serves to demystify and interrogate the masculine Law. The magical “juice” that Oberon places on Titania’s eyes so that he can manipulate her and steal her changeling child reveals, in exaggerated form, the coercive and violent operation of the Athenian law.

It is appropriate that this oddly hybrid mix of social models is the home of one of Shakespeare’s most polyvalent characters, the mischievous Puck, or Robin Goodfellow. The possible source material on which Shakespeare could have drawn in constructing this character attests to the multiple interpretations that attended the Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, folklore. The figure of Puck, as he is often depicted in popular discourse, is an amalgam of a diverse array of socioeconomic elements; within the play, this variety of meanings figures the multidimensionality of the theater as a social and economic institution: he is alternately an agent of exchange or translation, an unruly laborer, and an actor.

In popular culture, Goodfellow is commonly connected to the lower classes and criminality. One of the earliest associations of Goodfellow and rogue culture comes from Thomas Harman, who dedicated his career to vilifying England’s poor and dispossessed. Harman recounts a story about “a hoker [that] came to a farmers house in the dead of the night” and robbed it. When the residents awoke, Harman speculates, “they surely thought that Robin good fellow, (according to the old saying) had bene with them that night.”^[16] There is clearly a certain amount of humor in Harman’s recounting of this story, although he also expresses disdain for the mystifying nature of fairy myths. Belief in the magical and wily practices of Goodfellow reflects nothing more than a failure, in Harman’s view, to recognize the real problem of lower-class transgression. The myth of Robin Goodfellow allows Harman to articulate his concerns about class relations. In another association of Goodfellow with vagabonds and cony-catchers, Thomas Dekker cites Goodfellow in reference to thieves who, as he says, “fly to the shops of certaine brokers, who traffick only in [stolen] merchandize and by bills of sale (made in the name of Robin-goodfellow and his crew) get the goods of honest Citizens into their hands.”^[17] In Dekker’s description, Goodfellow extends beyond thievery to implicate the larger system of exchange that underpins such illegal activity. Indeed, Goodfellow designates here not so much a group of people or a class but the opaque world of mercantile traffic, where one person’s property can vanish through the sleight of hand of buying and selling. Scot, too, invokes the market economy in his discussion of supernatural beliefs. The task of debunking superstition is a difficult one, and he speculates: “I should no more prevail herein, then if a hundred years since I should have intreated your predecessors to believe, that Robin Good-fellow, that great and ancient Bull-begger, had been but a cosening Merchant, and no Devil indeed.”^[18] Within the play, the fluidity of market exchange manifests as Puck’s facilitation of the series of magical translations that render identities and perceptions interchangeable.

If Goodfellow could stand in for both rogues and the market system, it is perhaps not surprising that he could also represent acting, a profession that was associated with both rogue culture and London’s growing market culture. Thus, in a pamphlet titled Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, a burlesque account of the recently deceased actor Richard Tarlton and his afterlife adventures, the anonymous author writes under the name of Robin Goodfellow. He tells his readers that “although thou see me here in the likenes of a spirite, yet thinke mee to bee one of those . . . that were rather pleasantly disposed then indued with any hurtfull influence, as Hob Thrust, Robin Goodfellowe and such like spirites . . . famozed in euerie olde wiues Chronicle for their mad merry pranckes.”^[19] Goodfellow, with his mad, merry pranks, is a logical double for Richard Tarlton, the famous clown of the London theater scene. Puck’s most explicit appearance as an actor in the epilogue is an address to the commercial audience, when he says,

This epilogue directly identifies Puck as an actor, and his reference to himself and his colleagues as “shadows” suggests a general equation of actors and fairies.^[20] More generally, fairies might be seen as actors because, like their thespian counterparts, they are “masters of deception, able to adopt the roles of anything and everything from beautiful, beguiling maidens to the surliest and least tractable of infants.”^[21]

But if Puck is a figure of exchange and an actor, he is also a laborer. This role is consistent with the traditional folk conception of fairies as existing to aid the lower classes in their daily toils, despite a penchant for deception and pranks. Another fairy identifies Puck as

This description is notable for its vacillation between productive and unproductive forms of labor. Puck supports laborers in the performance of their duties, but as Robin Goodfellow he is also inclined to undermine that labor, his pranks increasing the amount of time and energy expended in the course of work. If Puck can facilitate and aid labor, he is also capable of strategically complicating the performance of labor. Indeed, in this account he seems to engage in a sort of antilabor, exerting effort so that the efforts of others will go to waste. By “labor[ing] in the quern,” Puck’s work serves only to increase the amount of labor on the part of the “breathless housewife.” From the perspective of the laborer who sees his or her efforts go to waste, Puck’s knavery is certainly far from benevolent.^[22]

In the fairy’s description of Puck’s deviousness, one can see the figure of the able-bodied poor, or so-called sturdy beggar, toward whom writers such as Harman were so hostile. Like “sturdy beggars” who were believed to abandon proper labor for a life of idleness, often migrating to London and occasionally becoming actors, Puck is fully capable of productive labor—he simply chooses not to do it. These able bodied poor were a significant problem in England’s changing economic landscape, and a good deal of violence and rhetoric was directed at reforming such laborers. Along these lines, Puck constructs his entire identity around his talent for disrupting and undermining the efforts of others. He explains to the other fairy that his service is to “jest to Oberon, and make him smile,” but the example that he uses to articulate this jesting suggests that his service is in fact a form of disservice, his specialty the creation of general anarchy and disorder (2.1.44). He recounts how he enjoys confounding “the saddest tale” told by “[t]he wisest aunt,” pretending to be a “three-foot stool” and then slipping “from her bum” (2.1.51–53). The woman’s “sad tale” is suddenly interrupted by her startled cry of “tailor” as the “whole choir hold their hips and loffe” (2.1.54–55). A solemn occasion is transformed into its opposite by Puck’s intervention.

Freud uses the term overdetermination to describe dream elements that derive meaning from multiple sources as they “cross and interweave with each other many times over in the course of their journey.”^[23] Likewise, Puck offers an overdetermined amalgam of the theater’s emerging capitalist context, bringing together, in sometimes contradictory ways, themes of acting, work, and the reifying logic of the market. It is significant, then, that Puck interacts throughout the play with the so-called rude mechanicals, who harken back to a past configuration of labor and theater that is perhaps not quite so overdetermined. There is a critical tendency to see the mechanicals as bumbling idiots, a reading that accords with Puck’s labeling of them as “hempen homespuns” and “rude mechanicals” with “thick-skin.” (3.1.73, 3.2.9, 13) To view the mechanics as clowns is thus uncritically to adopt Puck’s hostility. Puck’s view, however, is not unrivaled, for while he sees the artisan-actors as rude mechanicals, they see themselves as “dear actors” with an important civic role to play within Athenian society (4.2.40). The mechanicals represent a traditional artisanal class whose labor is grounded in a guild structure, and their theatrical performance emerges directly from this culture of work. By depicting this troupe of actors as craftsmen, the play directly draws on the medieval mystery plays and the midsummer festivals that were organized and performed by local guilds. When the play’s medieval heritage is noted by scholars, however, it is typically dismissed as little more than an homage to a bygone era of drama. This argument is made most forcefully by Montrose, who contends that the mechanicals’ presence is “an incongruous evocation, an oblique marker, of a popular and artisanal ethos that A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its playwright have ostensibly left behind—a lingering trace of cultural, social, and spiritual filiation.”^[24] From this view, the play stages a mode of theatricality rooted in guild labor only so that it can be ridiculed and ultimately exorcised. In the process, Shakespeare is able to affirm the sophistication of the new commercial theater over against the medieval theatrical tradition’s amateurish lack of refinement.^[25]

While it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the play identifies acting entirely with the mechanicals, the play’s contextual basis suggests a more complicated relationship between the commercial world of the professional theater and its medieval guild origins than is often acknowledged. It is likely, for one thing, that Shakespeare was familiar with the mystery plays, if not through personal experience then through cultural osmosis. The mystery plays were not, by the time Shakespeare was writing, a distant memory, and performances continued into Elizabeth’s reign. Shakespeare’s theater, moreover, was not a radically new innovation but in many ways the product of a long social and cultural evolutionary process. As has been shown, early modern drama adopted the corporeal focus of medieval religious drama to formulate a bodily theatricality.^[26] When the mechanicals are called “[h]ard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labour’d in their minds till now,” this is certainly an insult, but it also emphasizes the incarnational heritage of artisanal theatrical practice (5.1.72–73). The mechanicals’ rehearsal is notably bodily, with the assignment and preparation of the roles stressing the physical presence of the performers.^[27] As the artisans “spread” themselves through the performance space, the rehearsal is interrupted by their attention to their bodies. Flute, for instance, notes that he cannot play the role of Thisbe because “I have a beard coming” (1.2.43). Moreover, the interlude is organized around the imagined sensory perception of the audience. If allowed to play the lion, Bottom promises to roar so loud that it “will do any man’s heart good to hear me” (1.2.66–67). After considering that this might “fright the ladies,” he decides to “aggravate [his] voice, so that [he] will roar you as gently as any sucking dove” (1.2.74–77). The artisans’ corporeality is thus a feature of their theatrical endeavor, their attention to sense perception connecting them to the audience. Their revisions to the interlude are mediated by a marked sensitivity to the body. As much as the mechanicals’ awkwardly corporeal theatricality earns them ridicule from their social superiors, it also locates them within the medieval theatrical tradition that formed the basis of Shakespeare’s theater.

Sarah Beckwith has argued that the medieval theater cannot be seen as a reflection of economic infrastructure, since the plays themselves “are the cultural vehicles of socio-political life and the central means of their articulation.”^[28] This overlap of cultural and economic spheres applies to the early modern theater as well, which continued to be informed by a tradition premised on the interrelation between theatrical performance and the labor that made it possible. The mechanicals’ labor is shown to be central to the staging of the interlude when they realize the need to construct a wall using “some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast” (3.1.64–65). In order to construct this wall, the mechanicals presumably take advantage of their combined artisanal skills and their access to building materials. Such autonomous exercises of artisanal labor were becoming more and more uncommon in Elizabethan England, as artisans increasingly found themselves separated from the materials and practices that had sustained them in the past.^[29] When Bottom addresses his audience to inform them that “[t]his loam, this rough-cast, and this stone doth show / That I am that same wall,” he thus evokes a diminishing mode of production at the same time that he connects this production process to the theater (5.1.160–61).

The mechanicals’ ability to fashion a wall from stone and plaster recalls the artifice of medieval pageant wagons while also pointing to the sophisticated props and stage constructions of the early modern theater.^[30] Indeed, both the Theatre and the Globe were constructed by the Burbages using wood and roughcast plaster, even though most playhouses were built from brick.^[31] In a self-referential gesture, the play draws attention to the physical constructedness of the playing space, which indeed encircled the audience in “some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast.” As Bruce Smith has speculated, the decision to use plaster and wood might be due to the superior acoustics offered by the material.^[32] The Burbages’ knowledge of this acoustic quality would have come from their artisanal familiarity with plaster construction, from their training as “rude mechanicals.” In his work of criticism, Discoveries, Jonson also references the plaster construction of the theater in order to point up the superficiality of the average London consumer’s perception of reality:

Here, the theatrical façade or the illusion that conceals the true foundational constructedness of the theater is the result of London’s growing culture of commodification. Jonson, perhaps tapping into his roots as a bricklayer, attempts to expose the absurdity of commodity fetishism by juxtaposing the material construction of the theater with the illusory values imposed by the consumerist gaze. For Jonson, and for Shakespeare via the rude mechanicals, emphasis on the materiality of the theater opens up a critical distance between the stage and the audience, temporarily separating the realms of production and consumption.

In tapping into the medieval theatrical past and by stressing the constructedness of the early modern theater, Shakespeare builds on a traditional framework that understood drama to be an expression of artisanal identity. Indeed, the most notable aspect of the mechanicals is the stubborn fixedness of their identities as artisans. Where Puck, in his proteanism, is an empty cipher who “mediates one character to the other,” the mechanicals, and Bottom in particular, resist translation, never losing their identities in the green world.^[34] The mechanicals are always something more than the roles they play, their artisanal identities seemingly fixed in place. Labor, as a distinct identity and way of seeing the world, is what distinguishes the mechanicals as artisan-actors, investing them with a material realness that contrasts sharply with the airy nothingness that facilitates the fairy world’s regime of exchange.

Our introduction to the mechanicals stresses their artisanal identities. As Peter Quince assigns the roles for their “interlude,” the mechanicals remain defined by their respective trades: they are addressed as “Nick Bottom, the weaver,” “Francis Flute, the bellows-mender,” “Robin Starveling, the tailor,” and “Tom Snout, the tinker” (1.2.16, 38, 54, 57). Like medieval artisan-actors, the mechanicals do not view themselves primarily as actors; instead, their acting reflects their sense of civic duty and pride, as suggested by Quince’s description of the group as consisting of every man who “is thought fit through all of Athens to play in our interlude before the Duke and the Duchess, on his wedding-day at night” (1.2.4–7). Professional acting companies would not have referred to their performances as interludes, a term which was primarily reserved for medieval performances. Interludes were common until the early years of Elizabeth’s reign and “were superseded only when there was a radical reorganization of the dramatic activities contingent upon James Burbage’s opening of the Theater in London in 1576.”^[35] The term interlude evokes a specifically amateur mode of acting and thus serves to remind us that the mechanicals’ theatrical activities and their artisanal status are interrelated.

Given the distinct laboring identity of the mechanicals, it is perhaps not surprising that, of all the characters, they alone seem resistant to the logic of exchange or translation. When Bottom is affixed with the ass’s head, Snout’s exclamation, “[T]hou art changed!” suggests that Bottom has fallen victim to the fairy world’s system of exchange. Significantly, however, Bottom does not register this change, imagining that his colleagues are playing a prank on him, and announcing that “I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid” (3.1.119–20). When Titania arrives on the scene and professes her love for Bottom, he dismisses her overture, noting that she “should have little reason for that” (3.1.137–38). Even the pampering by his fairy servants is not enough to convince him of his new gentle status in the fairy world. When Mustardseed inquires, “What’s your will?” Bottom answers that he “must to the barber’s, monsieur, for methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face.” (4.1.21–25). If in the eyes of other characters, Bottom has been translated, his old laboring identity exchanged for a radically new identity, he continues to see himself as Bottom the weaver.

Bottom’s fixed identity pushes against exchange and translation in two interrelated ways. First, Bottom’s inability or unwillingness to lose his laboring identity in the fairy world contrasts with Puck’s proteanism. Bottom’s deep attachment to his artisanal social position makes him partially immune to the translation that Puck inflicts on others. Second, Bottom and Puck present us with two visions of theatrical performance as it relates to labor and exchange. Puck approaches acting as a vehicle for his translating magic. When he first encounters the mechanicals rehearsing the interlude, he responds not by disrupting the rehearsal directly, but by participating in the performance: “What, a play toward? I’ll be an auditor; / An actor too perhaps if I see cause” (3.1.73–74). Puck seems to see the mechanicals’ theatrical performance as an opening for his schemes as he becomes an invisible participant in the rehearsal. He uses theater as an instrument to alter Bottom’s identity, changing him into an ass. For Bottom, in contrast, theatrical performance is a way to resist the subjective erasure of translation. On waking from his dream, he struggles to recall the events that have transpired. This proves a nearly impossible task, however, and Bottom proclaims in frustration, “Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (4.1.205–6). But if Bottom alone cannot recall the dream, theatrical performance can: “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (4.1.212–16). For the aristocratic victims of Puck’s magic, the events of the dream quickly fade, “Like far off mountains turned into clouds” (4.1.187). Bottom instead hopes to bring the dream to life with drama. Theatrical performance, with its material support in labor, will keep alive this “most rare vision” in which a rude mechanical is ennobled and lavished with respect (4.1.203).^[36] This desire to keep the vision of the dream alive through drama suggests continuity between the events of the dream and the real world in which he is a craftsman, rather than a radical break between the two. Bottom’s ability to preserve his laboring identity throughout the dream episode allows him to “join” together the dream and reality, thereby short-circuiting the process of translation. The dream is not repressed but subjectivized by Bottom, made a part of him and denied its presence as a frightening alien intrusion. Hence, he awakens by immediately calling on his companions to inform him “when my cue comes,” as if his activity as an artisan-actor had never been disrupted by Puck’s scheming (4.1.199).

The frustration expressed by the mechanicals over Bottom’s absence from the final rehearsal further articulates Bottom’s confidence in the theater’s privileging of labor. Flute laments Bottom’s absence, because Bottom “hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens” (4.2.9–10). Bottom’s ability to perform the part is viewed by his companions through the prism of his artisanal status: his wit is directly linked to his identity as a “handicraft man.” Snug further complains that Bottom has ruined a great opportunity for them all, because with the interlude “we had all been made men” (4.2.17–18). Flute seconds this frustration, convinced that the Duke would have given Bottom “sixpence a day for playing Pyramus . . . He would have deserved it: sixpence a day in Pyramus, or nothing” (4.2.21–24). Whether justified in reality or not, the mechanicals imagine theatrical performance as a forum in which their labor will be validated and appreciated. The theater is a space in which the economic and social value of labor can be fantasized, elevated above the daily toil and hardship of laboring existence.

The intersection of acting and laboring establishes theatricality as an artisanal undertaking, with the mechanicals’ dramatic activities consistently encompassed by their artisanal identities. When Quince, after assigning the roles for the interlude, declares that “here is a play fitted,” he directly implicates the mechanicals’ skilled labor in the theatrical performance (1.2.60–61). Quince’s wordplay is more than a clever pun, as it suggests the transferability of an artisanal or laboring perspective into the world of drama. Theatrical performance, from a laboring viewpoint, must be actively constructed, its component elements carefully fitted together in the same way that a joiner fits wood or a weaver ties fabric. Bottom’s desire to play every role, in this way, reflects not his clownish disposition but his artisanal perspective, as he seeks to “weave” together the disparate elements of the interlude. Similarly, the mechanicals’ endless revisions to the interlude, from Bottom’s prologue designed to put the audience “out of fear” to the last minute decision that “some man or other must represent” a wall on stage, point up their reflexive artisanal labor (3.1.20–21, 63). The interlude is in a perpetual stage of construction.

Skill is also directly involved in the performance of Bottom’s role. While Puck might deride Bottom and his companions as “hempen homespuns” and “rude mechanicals,” the actual ability to perform the part of a clown required immense talent.^[37] Demanding excellent comic timing and a penchant for improvisation, the clown was undoubtedly one of the more challenging roles that an actor could play. Famous clowns such as Tarlton and Kemp were popular because of their incomparable talent for performing “rudely” on stage, a sentiment expressed by Richard Baker in 1643, writing that Tarlton, “who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have.”^[38] In an ironic twist, then, the more the audience is compelled to laugh at Bottom for his clownishness, the more it acknowledges the talent of the actor playing him. One person’s rude mechanical is another’s dear actor. Here, the irony of skilled rudeness extends to Shakespeare himself, who was famously insulted, along with other theatrical upstarts, for daring to imitate the talents of London’s more respectable playwrights: “it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subiect to the pleasure of such rude groomes,” wrote Robert Greene.^[39] According to the complaint, Shakespeare is only an actor pretending to be a playwright.^[40] Shakespeare’s lack of gentle learning, of course, enabled him to appeal to a heterogeneous audience, and thus, his rudeness is directly linked to his success as a playwright. Like Puck’s denigration of the artisans, the insult about Shakespeare’s rudeness ironically points up the playwright’s talent.

At the level of the text, moreover, Patricia Parker shows that there is a conceptual link between joining as a material, skilled practice and the symbolic joining involved in logic and rhetoric, and this link is employed in the play to emphasize the mechanicals’ sociopolitical centrality. Joining was “the foundation of the construction of order both in grammar, rhetoric, and logic and in the social and political hierarchy their ordering reflected.”^[41] Indeed, the mechanicals’ joining results in the restoration of normative hierarchy — a rejoining of social and political power through the imposition of prescribed marriage relations. For Parker, this return to normalcy is demystified by the mechanicals’ various “disjunctions and parodic deformations” throughout the play, which have the effect of exposing the play’s marriage closure “as the exercise of closure, the mechanical production whose ‘rule’ brings about its sanctioned matrimonial end.”^[42]

Parker’s reading is insightful and persuasive, though it places the artisans in a somewhat passive position relative to the work of the theater, suggesting that it is only by merit of the artisan-actors’ rudeness that they are able, ironically, to expose the constructedness of social and political order. In this reading, the play is still making fun of the laborers. There is a way, however, that the relationship between the artisanal performers and the aristocratic audience during the interlude complicates the relegation of the artisans’ performance to the margins. Specifically, the ability of the interlude to serve as an occasion for the return to normative order and marital closure rests in the dialogical dynamic between performers and audience. Theseus implicitly acknowledges the inextricable relationship between noble identity and the putative rudeness of the artisan-actors, when he informs Hippolyta that

Nobility is shown to be performative, something that must be actively constructed and staged like the interlude itself. Implicit in Theseus’s disparaging observation is an acknowledgment that nobility is visible only when it defines itself against its lower-class opposite.

Theseus’s remark also suggests that the construction of order and the return to social normalcy at the play’s conclusion is possible only with the participation of both players and audience. In the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, this interactive dynamic centers on the players’ bodily impropriety and awkward manner of speaking. Theseus remarks on the unruly speech of the performance when he criticizes the staging of the wall, which is played by Snout. Responding to Pyrmus’s cursing of the “wicked wall” for “thus deceiving me,” Theseus notes that the wall, “being sensible, should curse again” (5.1.180–81). Importantly, however, this critique of the wall’s absurd ability to speak invites a riposte from Bottom, who interrupts the performance to explain: “No, in truth sir, he should not. ‘Deceiving me’ is Thisbe’s cue: she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see it will fall pat as I told you: yonder she comes” (5.1.182–85). Wall’s speech becomes the site of interpretative contestation: where Theseus sees this “sensible” wall as an absurdity, Bottom sees it as a logical and necessary component of the performance, central to the interlude’s plot. In an ironic turn, Theseus, despite his pretensions to noble superiority, finds himself drawn into the performance of the interlude in the very process of critiquing its impropriety. In these moments of dialogue between the players and the audience, aristocratic identity and order is placed on the stage and de-essentialized. The construction of meaning is represented as a process of joining the meanings of lower-class players and the aristocratic audience, as both groups become coparticipants who jointly fashion the meaning of the interlude, and by extension set the contours of Athenian society’s return to order. Although Theseus uses the interlude as an opportunity to reassert aristocratic nobility and superiority, the theater itself, and the artisans in particular, become active participants in this reconstruction, with the performance serving as an arena for the dialogical constitution of social stability. The representation of the mechanicals as active makers of the story, their theatrical performance helping to join together the elements of the marriage plot, thereby situates labor as a foundational element of theatrical performance and, by extension, the social order that it preserves.

And yet, despite the mechanicals’ fantasy of the theatrical validation of labor, it is tempting to discover the precise opposite dynamic playing out during the actual staging of the interlude. Indeed, it is possible to interpret the final act as disempowering the mechanicals. Barbara Freedman makes this argument most forcefully, contending that the relationship between the Duke and the mechanicals is “tailored along the lines of an idealized pact between feudal lord and gratefully submissive servant.”^[43] Certainly Theseus seeks to represent theatrical performance as a politically and socially marginal activity, explaining to Hippolyta that the artisans’ lower-class rudeness is in fact a sign of respect:

Like the mechanicals who stage it, the interlude is rude, an unrefined expression of “tongue-tied simplicity” in need of noble patronage and refinement (5.1.104). The political power of the state is the active partner in the theater–state relationship, investing performance with the meaning it deems fit.

Theseus thus seeks to perpetuate the logic of translation, exchanging the mechanicals’ rude performance for a noble entertainment. If at the level of explicit content the Duke is in control of interpretation, however, at a formal level the mechanicals set the framework in which the interlude is received. With the performance, discursive class markers are inverted, as the mechanicals speak in verse and the aristocratic audience speaks in prose. This contradiction between the final act’s explicit content and its formal organization complicates Theseus’s pretensions to interpretative authority, because in the very act of interpreting the interlude he is compelled to adopt a lower-class prose style. The mechanicals thus establish the contours of the final act’s discursive environment. Furthermore, in structuring the verse dialogue in a way that retains the mechanicals’ “rudeness”—for example, “To show our simple skill, / That is the true beginning of our end”—the play is careful to avoid reproducing the fairy world’s identity-erasing translation (5.1.110–11). Although the mechanicals abandon their usual prose for verse, their actual identities as lower-class laborers is still present on stage, which in turn allows the aristocratic audience to self-fashion its own sense of superiority. The mechanicals’ skill may be simple in its theatrical refinement, but it is advanced to the extent that it provides the occasion for the return to Athenian order.

This connection between performance and order is suggested most explicitly by the play’s allusion to the Midsummer Watch. Although the Watch appears to have ended in 1539, it remained a part of England’s cultural memory, as demonstrated by Stow’s account of the Watch in 1598. Stow describes a festival designed to establish “good amity amongst neighbors that being before at controversy, were there, by the labour of others, reconciled.”^[44] The labor referred to came first and foremost from the London livery companies that supplied funding and talent for the event. But overall, the Watch was a collaborative event that combined the efforts of livery companies, city government, and, according to Stow, some two thousand men, poor and wealthy, who participated in the march through London’s streets. With its joining of festive comedy and the seriousness of Athenian political and social order, Dream captures the tone of the Watch, while emphasizing the labor that underpins festive celebration. Like the London of Stow’s account, we are presented with a community that has been reconciled by the labor of others.

Although the mechanicals’ service to the Duke and Duchess marks the return to normative order, suggesting a future of political and social stability, the emphasis on reestablished order and marital closure also recalls the fairy world’s regime of destabilizing translation and exchange which continues to haunt the “real” world of Athens. And to this extent, the interlude episode connects the aristocratic plot to England’s tumultuous economic context. The reality of laboring existence, which could be profoundly difficult in the economically depressed 1590s, is not erased by the play’s festive comedy. Indeed, the economic turbulence that forms the play’s historical context was often identified precisely with those elements of the protocapitalist economy—the liquidity of social relations, the instability of normative order—that inform the logic of the green world. References to the consequences of a rapidly expanding market system are common in early modern discourse. John Wheeler expresses satisfaction with the rise of England’s exchange economy, explaining that “all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth after marts, markets, and merchandising, so that all things come into commerce.”^[45] Thomas Nashe, on the other side of the discussion, associates exchange with London society’s decay. Exchange is a fundamentally destabilizing system, because “[h]ee that buyes must sell, shrewd Alcumists there are risen vp, that will pick a merchandise out of euery thing, and not spare to set vp their shops of buying and selling euen in the Temple.”^[46] Whereas Wheeler interprets the mutability characteristic of exchange as a positive social force, Nashe sees it as undermining the most sacred of principles. Both accounts, positive and negative, anticipate Marx’s observation that with capitalism, where all things are reduced to their abstract exchange value, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”^[47] Thomas Dekker applies a strikingly similar analysis to the theater: “The theater is your poets’ Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses, that are now turned to merchants, meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words—plaudits and the great beast which, like the hreatening of two cowards, vanish all into air.”^[48]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream can thus be read as a response to the early modern theater’s commercial context. Dream actively resists the reduction of theatrical performance to an impersonal economic logic by drawing on the traditional relationship between laboring identity and drama. The mechanicals point nostalgically to the medieval past, formulating a mode of theatricality in which theater is inextricably bound to the practicalities of laboring existence. At the same time, however, the play is not willing to disavow the performative proteanism and flexibility afforded by the commercial context of the theater. In this hybrid version of the theater, performance is not determined exclusively by market forces—dramatized in the play by the fairy world’s magical powers of translation—but is also the product of labor.

Valuing the Theater in The Tempest

There has been a good deal of attention to the representation of labor in The Tempest. These important readings are linked by a tendency to interpret labor through the lens of domination and exploitation. Daniel Vitkus suggests that Prospero is like “a theatrical impresario controlling and exploiting the players and playwrights whom he has hired to put on plays.”^[49] Douglas Bruster reads the play as a “playhouse allegory” of theater working conditions that explores Shakespeare’s resistance to “the uncontrolled, traditionalistic energy of Will Kemp.”^[50] Andrew Gurr finds a similar dynamic of labor management at play, with Caliban and Ariel giving form to the “potent moral fable” that juxtaposed “the idle and the industrious apprentice.”^[51] These readings frame the play’s depiction of labor in terms of master–servant relationships, suggesting that the play depicts a certain tension within the theater about ways to control laborers. In doing so, such readings reflect a broader critical move that sees playwrights and other members of the theatrical community struggling with their relationship to work and identifying instead with more dignified activities and associations. Paul Yachnin, for instance, argues that playwrights were caught in an unfortunate bind, because “a person who needed to earn a living and who wanted to count for something in his society could not be a poet without also being a laborer.”^[52] The result was that playwrights attempted to invest their art with other sources of “foundational value” that could compensate for the indignity of labor that haunted the theatrical profession.^[53] Within this framework, labor has fundamentally negative connotations.

But what if labor could itself serve as a source of foundational value for the theater? Certainly the theater’s intimate connections to traditions of skilled labor and craftsmanship suggest that labor was a readily available source of legitimacy for the theatrical profession. The idea that labor is a noble and dignified undertaking that possesses value in itself could function as a counterpoint to concerns about the social and cultural debasement deriving from the theater’s commercial impetus. Indeed, appreciation for the labor of dramatic production and performance was an important enough quality that Thomas Dekker focuses on it in his dedication to If It Be Not Good, The Devil Is In It. In a dedication to the company performing the play, the Queen’s Men, Dekker expresses thanks for the support he has received: “Acknowledgment is part of payment sometimes, but it neither is, nor shall be (betweene you and me) a Cancelling. I haue cast mine eye vpon many, but find none more fit, none more worthy, to Patronize this, than you, who haue Protected it.”^[54] He goes on to take a swipe at Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune, who had declined to produce the play, noting that “When Fortune (in her blinde pride) set her foote vpon This imperfect Building, (as scorning the Foundation and Workmanship) you, gently raizd it vp.”^[55] This emphasis on acknowledgement as a payment for one’s dramatic workmanship is especially revealing in the context of Dekker’s well-known characterization of the theater as the “poet’s Royal Exchange,” where the only acknowledgment that dramatic labor encounters is the blind forces of the market which cause words to “vanish all into air.” These two characterizations of the theatrical profession suggest a tension between market forces and a mode of artistic production based on models of labor. The workmanship of drama is depicted here as a touchstone—a “foundation”—that pushes against the insecurity of the dramatic marketplace.

Prospero’s description of his artistic labor as “a baseless fabric” that will “dissolve” like an “insubstantial pageant” echoes Dekker’s anxiety about the vanishing of dramatic craft in the cash nexus of the market (4.1.151, 154–55).^[56] Prospero’s own magical theatricality is directly linked to the market, when the epilogue equates the success of the play with the “good hands” and “indulgence” of the paying audience. The play explores the intersection of two models of theatrical value: on one hand, there is an emphasis on the labor of the theater, of the work that goes into the making of performance; at the same time, theatrical production is explicitly linked to commercial forces. This section argues that The Tempest is heavily invested in thinking through labor as a source of legitimizing value for the theater. Just as Dekker defends the foundational value of his dramatic workmanship, Shakespeare fashions a farewell to the stage that acknowledges the labor of theater. The play accomplishes this acknowledgment of theatrical labor by drawing on discourses of magical and colonial power, both of which stress the constitutive and foundational value of labor.

Prospero’s theatrical performance on the island is grounded in the same foundation of labor that Dekker identifies. Despite Prospero’s dependency on the “meaner ministers” that serve him and facilitate his magic, however, many critics read the play as Shakespeare’s utopian desire for an ideal and frictionless theatrical performance, a vision of “an almost ideal theater on a magical island where the playwright’s powers were seemingly limitless.”^[57] From this view, the play’s magical elements express the creative power of the playwright who, like the successful magician, fashions the world in accordance with his unique creative and artistic vision. David Bevington has recently claimed that The Tempest constitutes the culmination of Shakespeare’s dramatic development, contending that the play presents a world “in which the great arbiter of human behavior and the great presider over human destiny is the dramatist himself.”^[58] In these accounts, the play becomes an exercise in artistic omnipotence, an assertion of Shakespeare’s own world-making poetic and dramatic authority.

The opening scene, however, establishes a fraught dynamic between laborer and spectator that informs the play’s larger exploration of labor as a source of foundational value for the theater. In the opening moments of the play, as the sailors endeavor to save the ship while their aristocratic passengers look on, the desires of the spectator enter into conflict with the practical need to perform labor. While it is true that the sailors’ labor fails to save the ship from the storm, the scene nevertheless manages to stress the value of their labor. It is indeed the prospect of failure, of utter destruction in the storm, that highlights the importance of skilled physical labor. The boatswain explicitly opposes his crew’s labor to aristocratic privilege: “You mar our labour. Keep your cabins—you do assist the storm,” he tells his meddling aristocratic passengers (1.1.13–14). The opening scene throws into relief a tension between symbolic appearances, such as the roles individuals play and the power differentials inscribed within the aristocratic status system, and the brute necessity of survival. In response to Gonzalo’s call that the Boatswain “be patient,” the boatswain replies, “When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin; silence! Trouble us not” (1.1.15–18). The boatswain suggests that social convention must be adapted to the dictates of reality. In the context of the storm, physical labor is more valuable than aristocratic privilege.

In this moment of crisis, the social hierarchy is suspended. The boatswain’s comments indicate that political authority and class distinctions function normally to conceal the social import of labor. The boatswain remarks that he will yield to Gonzalo’s meddling advice, “if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present,” in which case “we will not hand a rope more—use your authority” (1.1.21–23). The force of the boatswain’s remark hinges on the tacit recognition that political and class authority lacks all practical meaning in this life and death situation. The boatswain answers Sebastian’s onslaught of complaints and curses with a simple rejoinder: “Work you, then” (1.1.42). Antonio can only respond with further insults: “Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson insolent noisemaker!” (1.1.43–44). The irony is that Antonio and Sebastian, and not the Boatswain, are the useless noisemakers, their class privilege reduced to meaningless critique and pontification when faced with the imperative to labor.^[59]

The boatswain attends to the determining forces of reality—the storm and the need to engage in physical labor for survival—rather than normative dictates of political and class identity, an attitude that contrasts sharply with Gonzalo’s utopian perspective. On the ship, Gonzalo takes comfort in the fact that, despite the raging storm, the boatswain “hath no drowning mark upon him—his complexion is perfect gallows” (1.129–30). In direct contrast to the boatswain’s practical concern with performing physical labor, Gonzalo measures the severity of the situation in terms of the abstraction of “good Fate” (1.1.30). Once on the island, this idealism manifests as a utopian vision of a society in which abundance is enjoyed “[w]ithout sweat or endeavor” (2.1.158). The similarity between Gonzalo’s utopia and Montaigne’s account of the new world has been widely noted.^[60] In particular, Gonzalo echoes Montaigne’s description of the explorers’ discovery “that societies of men could be maintained with so little artifice, so little in the way of human solder.”^[61] That Gonzalo’s vision of a society free of labor meets with immediate scorn—all the subjects will be so idle as to be “whores and knaves,” claims Antonio—suggests that Shakespeare is attempting to point up the absurdity of a society without labor (2.1.164).^[62]

To this extent, Shakespeare, as playwright, is also aligned with the boatswain, critiquing idealist pretentions and affirming the social importance of labor. Indeed, the play makes a distinct effort to associate Prospero’s magical/theatrical labor with the skilled physical labor performed by the sailors. The wedding masque that Prospero stages for Ferdinand and Miranda parallels the conflict of the opening scene. In response to Ferdinand’s comment that he hopes to “live here ever,” Prospero requests silence, “[o]r else our spell is marred” (4.1.129). Just as the boatswain castigates the aristocrats for marring the sailors’ labor, Prospero attempts to prevent the marring of his magical/theatrical labor. The emphasis on marring suggests a correlation between the skilled physical labor of the sailors and the magical performance of the wedding masque. The frustration of the workers who feel that their skilled efforts are not adequately appreciated has implications for the theater. As Bruster has noted, this interaction between laborers and aristocratic passengers mirrors the “annoyance which actors undoubtedly felt when spectators at the Blackfriars marred their theatrical labor.”^[63] In chastising the passengers, the boatswain indirectly asks for the audience’s appreciation. Far from establishing a dichotomy between the sailors’ physical labor and Prospero’s immaterial labor, then, this parallel suggests that Prospero is to an extent another version of the boatswain. Prospero and the boatswain occupy a similar space relative to their audiences, linked by their mutual effort to prevent the marring of their labors.

Likely performed at the Blackfriars, the play is justified in chiding the audience for its rudeness. The private theaters were known for their contemptuous and disruptive audiences, and plays composed for the theaters often used prologues or inductions to urge audience members to behave.^[64] The prologue to Eastward Ho! asks that the audience “[b]ear with our willing pains, if dull or witty” (Prologue, 13). The opening scene on the boat functions very much like a censorious prologue, although Shakespeare incorporates his reproach more completely into the fabric of the play. That this incorporation is accomplished by coding the actors and playwright as laborers warrants further examination.

And yet little critical attention has been paid to the mariners and their labors, an oversight that is perhaps due to their abrupt disappearance after the opening scene. Ariel informs Prospero that the mariners have been “all under hatches stowed . . . with a charm joined to their suffered labour,” while the other passengers have been brought ashore (1.2.230–31). It is, perhaps paradoxically, the mariners’ absence from the remainder of the play that makes them such a significant presence. Why, after all, are the mariners alone sheltered from Prospero’s scheme? Unique about the mariners is that, unlike their aristocratic passengers, they are profoundly sensitive to the social and existential importance of labor. In an earlier romance, Pericles, the relationship between labor and social insight is articulated in a scene that closely resembles the opening scene of The Tempest. Pericles expresses appreciation for a group of mariners who are especially forthcoming in their critique of social conventions:

I would suggest that a similar appreciation of the mariners’ incisive social perspective is also the basis of Prospero’s decision to exempt the mariners from the plot he has constructed on the island. Prospero extends and develops the mariners’ formulation of labor’s importance. In the aftermath of the storm, Prospero will draw on the mariners’ practical attention to labor, in the process highlighting the laboring dimensions of theatrical performance.

In realizing his theatrical undertakings, Prospero repeatedly draws attention to the labor that underpins it. Immediately following the successful staging of the banquet, Prospero praises Ariel’s diligent work: “Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Performed, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring” (3.3.83–84). In the next scene, Prospero announces the performance of the masque, emphasizing the stage mechanics that make it possible. Again he praises Ariel and “thy meaner fellows” for their work, asking him to “bring the rabble” to the masque, where Prospero will “[b]estow upon the eyes of this young couple / Some vanity of mine art” (4.1.35, 40–41). In having Prospero announce the masque, the play invites the audience to consider the varied meanings of Prospero’s “art.” Within the world of the play, his art indicates the practical application of magic in staging the masque; for the play’s audience, however, art also denotes the skilled artifice of theatrical performance. The result, as Melissa D. Aaron puts it, is that “the theatrical illusion is exposed, usually before it is executed.”^[66] Indeed, Prospero’s continual acknowledgment of his spirits’ efforts not only demystifies magic, exposing it as a practical endeavor dependent on labor; it also represents the theater itself as something that is actively constructed. If Prospero is a stand-in for Shakespeare, as he is so often read, then Shakespeare is directing the audience’s attention to the labor of his theatrical endeavors.

As Larry Shiner has shown, “art” did not signify an autonomous creative process in the early modern period. Shiner argues that “despite important steps in the modern direction, the normative practices and concepts of the artisan/artist in the Renaissance were still far from modern ideals of the autonomous creator.”^[67] Instead, art still retained its basis in craftwork, and the artist was typically seen as a skilled artisan, often working in collaboration with other artisans. When Prospero describes the spectacle of Juno’s chariot as art, he is highlighting the skill of both his magic and the theatrical creation. Within the play, the spectacle is a work of magic; in the reality of the theater, attention is drawn to the elaborate stagecraft of the scene. Indeed, as John G. Demaray has argued, the staging of the pageant suggests that the play was designed to take full advantage of the technology at Whitehall, where it was performed on Hallowmas Night, 1611—a theater that was known for its advanced use of pulley systems, stage engines, and levitation machines.^[68] The complexity of the stage effects indicates that Shakespeare’s play was constructed with the most sophisticated and complex staging techniques of the day in mind.

For Prospero, magic is itself intimately connected to labor. His manipulation of Ariel, who along with Caliban facilitates life on the island, is depicted as a delicate manipulation of labor. After the storm, Prospero informs Ariel that “thy charge / Exactly is performed; but there’s more work” (1.2.237–38). In compelling Ariel to perform this additional work, Prospero strategically contrasts Ariel’s current state of servitude with his life with his former master, Sycorax. The contrast hinges not so much on the quality of the servitude—Prospero, like Sycorax before him, is the master of Ariel’s labor—as the way Prospero and Ariel register this servitude. Whereas Sycorax attempted to force Ariel “[t]o act her earthly and abhorred commands,” there is a semblance of mutual respect that informs the relationship between Ariel and Prospero (1.2.273). When faced with the prospect of more work, Ariel reminds Prospero that “I have done thee worthy service” already (1.2.247). In response, Prospero threatens to punish Ariel, but not before reminding him of “[w]hat torment I did free thee” from (1.2.251). While it is tempting to interpret Prospero’s response as an exercise of tyrannical will, the dialogue between Prospero and Ariel articulates a certain intersubjectivity. As Derek Cohen explains, “Ariel, like Hegel’s bondsman, seems to discover in his labour a form of self-expression and, in this narrow sense, of freedom,” although ultimately “Prospero, the slavemaster, determines what Ariel will do.”^[69] Both Prospero and Ariel, however, strive to explain their respective motivations and behaviors in terms of the other. As David Schalwyk puts it, because Ariel acts as a bondsman to Prospero and serves in a contract, his “service is therefore conditional and to a degree rational.”^[70] Prospero’s and Ariel’s relationship is also rational in that it entails dialogue and disagreement. The current situation on the island is not assumed to be transparently objective but is treated, instead, as something open to negotiation, even if this negotiation is fraught.

Readings that see Prospero’s magic as an expression of his absolutist or authoritarian disposition overlook this contested quality of Prospero’s power. Richard Strier, along these lines, suggests that Prospero’s magic encodes his colonial agenda, arguing that “the Renaissance idea of magic and the idea of colonial administration have the same fantasy content: namely, the idea of omnipotence.”^[71] Early modern discourses on magic, however, tend not to endorse omnipotence, instead focusing significant attention on the practical constitution of magical power. As has been long established by Frances Yates, early modern magic was a precursor to modern science, employing a similarly practical orientation to the external world.^[72] Recently, Genevieve Guenther has explored the overlap of magical and aesthetic discourse to formulate a theory of “instrumental aesthetics,” which was a “producer of effects . . . and a discourse explicitly interested in the instrumental ends such effects might have in social and political life.”^[73] Guenther applies her framework to The Tempest to demonstrate how Shakespeare “neatly turns magic into a metaphor for theatre.”^[74] What is left out of this reading, however, is the materiality of Prospero’s instrumentalism. Early modern discourses on magic do not translate instrumentality into metaphor, but instead stress the materiality of magical practice. Giordano Bruno’s practical magic, for instance, formulates a conception of instrumentality that at times suggests not only the materiality of magic but its basis in relations of labor. The process of bonding of and between spirits is “where the whole teaching of magic is to be found.”^[75] Bruno continues:

Magic, as formulated by Bruno, is not only a thoroughly practical art, but this practicality also hinges on a relationship in which the active power to perform magic must account for an equally important passive power in the bonded subject. The concept of bonding stresses the relational nature of magic: it is a process of give and take, a strategy produced through the interaction of multiple agents.

Prospero’s exercise of magic follows the Renaissance model that frames magical power as practical and relational in nature, dependent ultimately on the bonding of labor. This is not to suggest that Prospero does not harbor a desire for omnipotence. Instead, I am suggesting that this fantasy is consistently exposed as just that: an ideal as insupportable as Gonzalo’s labor-free utopia.^[77] We are repeatedly reminded that Prospero’s magic is only possible with the aid of his laborers. As Goran Stanivukovic remarks, it is “as if Shakespeare is reminding us of the limitations of Prospero’s humanity and proficiency in magic.”^[78] Thus, following the banquet, before he declares that Alonso and his party “now are in my power,” Prospero first praises Ariel for following his “instruction” so carefully (3.3.85). Prospero’s “high charms” and power depend, he acknowledges, on the service of his “meaner ministers” (3.3.87). That Prospero’s magical power is ultimately dependent on the labor of his servants is revealed most clearly in the concluding moments of the play. In Prospero’s final words before the epilogue, he gives Ariel the final “charge” of creating calm seas for the journey back to Milan (5.1.317). This final command occurs after Prospero announces that his “rough magic / I here abjure” (5.1.50–51). After abjuring magic, Prospero is left with only his ability to bind agents to his will, a circumstance suggesting the essential laboring basis of magic. Echoing Bruno’s logic of magical bonding, the play’s depiction of magical power articulates a dynamic of bondage. Although Prospero appears to give up magic, he cannot give up the relations of labor on which his authority depends.

In Bruno’s philosophy of magic, the most important mechanism of bondage is love or Eros, which he labels the vinculum vinculorum, or chain of chains. As Ioan P. Culianu explains, Bruno uses this concept to denote the magician’s “deft exploitation of individual propensities and attitudes in order to create lasting bonds with the purpose of subjugating the individual or the group to the will of the manipulator.”^[79] The magician’s ability to manipulate others is ultimately a matter of manipulating the bonds of love that unite multiple subjects. It is thus significant that Prospero’s most seemingly arbitrary exercise of power involves the establishment of a love match between Ferdinand and Miranda. In a near literalization of Bruno’s concept of the bonding power of love, Prospero arranges a dynastic marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda by putting Ferdinand to work gathering logs. In this arrangement, love becomes inseparable from the performance of labor. Ferdinand explains that his “mean task” would be a burden, but his love for Miranda “makes my labours pleasures” (3.1.4, 7). Moreover, there is a very physical connection between Ferdinand’s love for Miranda and his labor. He explains that his “sweet thoughts” of Miranda “do even refresh my labours, / Most busil’est when I do it,” suggesting a mutually constitutive relationship between his performance of labor and his passion for Miranda (3.1.14–15).

With the enslavement of Ferdinand, the logic of magically bonding spirits is extended and articulated through the drama of love. In orchestrating the love match between Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero forces Ferdinand to think about love in terms of labor. Thus, Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s attempt to express their mutual love is complicated by the practical concern of labor. Ferdinand complains: “The sun will set before I shall discharge / What I must strive to do” (3.1.23–24). This wooing scene is focused as much on the performance of labor as it is on the establishment of a dynastic marriage:

Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s ability to develop their romantic relationship is predicated on the performance of labor. The imperative to labor is inescapable, establishing the very parameters of the lovers’ expression of affection.

What is interesting about Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s relationship is the fact that Prospero has arranged a dynastic marriage that is based on the recognition of practical limitations rather than unbounded aristocratic privilege. Indeed, even the marriage does not offer Ferdinand a complete escape from his slavery. By marrying Miranda, Ferdinand will be freed from his slavery at the hands of Prospero, but he will enter into a different kind of servitude, although one that is mutually defined by husband and wife:

This dialogue plays on different understandings of service: both lovers commit to a freely chosen and mutual servitude, which Ferdinand likens to an escape from bondage. More than a metaphor, Ferdinand is literally escaping his bondage to Prospero by marrying Miranda. As David Schalkwyk puts it, “[w]ith this vow in the name of freedom, Ferdinand binds himself forever, transforming constraining bondage into sustaining bond.”^[80]

Ferdinand’s experience as an enslaved laborer will also inform his marriage, with the constraint of labor transformed into sexual restraint. This sentiment is suggested when Ferdinand, evoking his recent slavery, promises to resist sexual temptation by imagining that “Phoebus’ steeds are foundered, / Or night kept chained below” (4.1.30–31). The result is that Ferdinand emerges as a different kind of political figure than Naples has hitherto known. As a husband and a ruler, Ferdinand will be sensitive to the material limitations and determinants to his actions. If the marriage is one of political reconciliation, it also reconciles Ferdinand, the future king of Naples, to the practicalities of life. Forcing Ferdinand to perform labor seems to be part of Prospero’s larger plan to rectify the political situation in Naples. Perhaps if Ferdinand is attendant to the practical limitations of political life, he will not be like Antonio, who having “no screen between this part he played / And him he played it for, he needs will be / Absolute Milan” (1.2.107–8).

Prospero’s attention to labor as a limiting constraint on the political will is most clearly articulated through the play’s engagement with colonial discourse. Mark Netzloff has recently offered a provocative take on the play’s exploration of colonial labor: “The Tempest refers to one of the most dominant ideas expressed in the colonial promotional literature of the early modern period: the use of colonialism as a means to rid England of its poor, masterless, unproductive, and potentially mutinous laboring classes.”^[81] Indeed, as Netzloff notes, early modern colonial discourse is unique in its attention to labor. Whereas the other dominant global economic discourse of the period, mercantilism, often obscures the practical and economic value of labor, locating value primarily in the circulation of commodities and bullion, colonial discourse is, of necessity, sensitive to the role of labor in the construction of social and economic order. Thus, in The Generall Historie of Virginia, John Smith repeatedly returns to the question of labor. He explains that, on arriving in the new world, the colonists “found onely an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of the knowledge of gold or silver, or any commodities, and carelesse of any thing but from hand to mouth, except bables of no worth; nothing to incourage vs, but what accidentally we found Nature afforded.”^[82] In a reversal of Montaigne’s utopian vision of a labor-free new world, Smith depicts the lack of industriousness as a hindrance to social development. In response to an inquiry into improving the colonial process, Smith explains that the prosperous cultivation of the new world

In contrast to the mercantilist reification of value, colonists are forced to acknowledge the practical necessity of labor, engendering an early version of the labor theory of value. The success of the colonial enterprise hinges on the proper training and administration of labor, since “debaushed” laborers can only yield an equally undesirable commonwealth. Empty promises of prosperity and industry are confronted by the practical need to perform labor in order to achieve these goals.

William Strachey’s account of the Bermudas and Virginia, often thought to be a primary source for Shakespeare’s play, similarly distinguishes between idle labor and the skilled and knowledgeable labor required to mount a successful colonial enterprise. Strachey complains that Virginia will never be properly colonized if “a hundred or two of debauched hands . . . must be the carpenters and workmen in this so glorious a building.”^[84] The reference in Smith and Strachey to “debauched” laborers is echoed in the play, when Trinculo describes Caliban as a “debauched fish” for suggesting that Trinculo is not as valiant as Stephano. The irony is that Stephano and Trinculo, and not Caliban, embody the “debauched” laborers for which Smith and Strachey have such disgust. Trinculo even tries to prove his valor by asserting his drinking prowess: “Why, thou debauched fish thou, was there ever man a coward, that hath drunk so much sack as I today” (3.2.26–29). While Stephano and Trinculo drink sack, Caliban promises to “dig thee pig-nuts” and “bring thee / To clustering filberts” (2.2.162, 164–65). Caliban shows that he is aware of the value and importance of his labor, as when he responds in frustration to Ariel (who is pretending to be Trinculo) by threatening that Trinculo “shall drink naught but brine, for I’ll not show him / Where the quick freshes are” (3.2.64-65). Just as Smith’s and Strachey’s realistic emphasis on labor as the motive force of colonial expansion counters utopian and idealist fantasies of the new world, the play draws on colonial discourse in order to highlight the constitutive value of skilled and knowledgeable labor. Thus, when Prospero notes that “[w]e cannot miss” Caliban because he “serves in offices / That profit us,” he reproduces a central element of colonial logic: the exercise of colonial power is ultimately dependent on the skilled labor of colonial subjects. Caliban’s belief that he must obey Prospero because “[h]is art is of such power, / It would control my dam’s god Setebos” is thus somewhat illusory, because Prospero’s art requires Caliban’s material service and support, which can be revoked (1.2.371–72). Indeed, when Caliban later urges Trinculo and Stephano to murder Prospero, he begins to recognize how central he is to Prospero’s power, telling them “First to possess his books,” because without them Prospero is “but a sot, as I am, nor hath not / One spirit to command” (3.2.90–92). Without his spirits’ service, Prospero is entirely powerless.

Prospero’s reliance on both Ariel and Caliban to perform labor is central to his ability to craft the elaborate island performance that will allow him and Miranda to return to Milan. The translation of colonial dynamics into a theatrical medium recalls Said’s observation that the colonizing power places the colonized “schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe” (70–71). The theatrical rendering of the colonial power relation is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this play, in which Prospero, in the role of playwright and director, engages in a colonial endeavor that involves mastering Caliban. But this theatricalized depiction of the colonized is complicated within the play, as the staging of the other is shown to be dependent on the other’s labor and knowledge. This is suggested when Prospero says of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.274–75). It is significant that this acknowledgment of Caliban occurs after Prospero has promised to abjure his magic, suggesting that in the very act of giving up magical and theatrical power Prospero is compelled to acknowledge the material basis on which this power has depended all along. The incorporation of the colonial discourse on labor into the play makes possible a certain demystification of the magic of theater, serving as an overt reminder that power — magical, theatrical, or colonial — must be materially constructed.

The play’s effort to situate theatrical performance as an act of labor culminates in the epilogue that immediately follows this acknowledgement of Caliban’s labor. In a twist, magic becomes directly equated with consumer demand, as Prospero asks the audience to “release me from my bands, / With the help of your good hands” (5.1.327–28). The reference to bands places the erstwhile magician in the position of the spirit who has been bonded into service by magical power. Indeed, when Prospero asks the audience to “set me free,” he echoes his previous promise to Ariel: “I’ll set thee free for this” (1.2.443). In doing so, the epilogue suggests a correlation between the labor relations as they have appeared throughout the play and the audience/actor/playwright relationship. In the play’s final moments, magic is identified with the power of market consumerism and the actor with the laborer endeavoring to be acknowledged. The epilogue thus serves to remind the audience of the work of the theater and drama, extending the mutual relation between Prospero and his laborers to the relationship between the actors/playwright and the commercial audience.

By linking theatrical performance to discourses on magic and colonialism, the play is able to draw on the explicit acknowledgement of the constitutive value of labor that informed these discourses. As Prospero stages his elaborate theatrical pageant on the island, the audience is consistently reminded that the performance they are witnessing is being materially constructed, that it is the product of labor. In this way, The Tempest complicates the consumerist organization of the theater in which theatrical value is determined largely by the paying audience, which has the power to deprive a theatrical work of value by refusing to attend performances. The fact that performance must be actively created and supported through material work is represented as the touchstone of performance, investing the theatrical with the kind of foundational value that could seem to be missing from the commercial marketplace. In this context, Prospero’s farewell to the “insubstantial pageant” of his magical/theatrical endeavors takes on new import (4.1.155). This speech is often read as Shakespeare’s fond farewell to the theater, his acceptance that his own theatrical legacy is like an intangible and “baseless fabric,” or “such stuff / As dreams are made on” (4.1.151, 156–57). Prospero’s farewell to the “insubstantial pageant” of magic/theater runs counter to the play’s continual emphasis on the material support of labor. As we have seen, even after he gives up magic, Prospero remains dependent on the labor that made it possible to begin with. And as history has proven, Shakespeare’s own “revels” and “pageants” are far from insubstantial, preserved in the materiality of actors, production companies, and theaters.

Notes

All references are to William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979).

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “shadow, n., 6, b,” http://www.oed.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/177212?rskey=nBwg0i&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid accessed March 2013.

David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 20.

David Landreth, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in Renaissance English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33.

This term comes from Fredric Jameson and denotes the process by which the aesthetic act responds to capital, which seeks “to accommodate content that must radically resist and escape artistic figuration.” Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 279.

Tudor Economic Documents, ed. Richard Tawney and Eileen Power (London, 1961), 326.

Anon., The Humble Petitoin of the Artizan Cloth-workers of the Citie of London (London, 1624), 1.

Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), 60.

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), 55.

10.

Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004), 47.

11.

For discussions of the relationship between theatrical performance and commercial forces, see in particular Steven Mullaney, License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

12.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 183–84.

13.

David Marshall, “Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” ELH 49, no. 3 (1982): 568.

14.

Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 24.

15.

Bruce Boehrer, “Economies of Desire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2004): 99.

16.

Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursetors (London, 1567), C1r.

17.

Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London (London, 1608), H1r–H1v.

18.

Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1665), B2.

19.

Anon., Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory (London, 1590), 2.

20.

Puck himself makes this connection when he refers to Oberon as the “King of shadows” (3.2.347).

21.

Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 40.

22.

Katherine M. Briggs, in her meticulous account of Dream’s fairy background, overlooks this conflicted description when she characterizes Puck and his fellow hobgoblins as “rough, hairy spirits, which do domestic chores, work about farms, guard treasure, keep an eye on the servants, and generally act as guardian spirits of the home. Useful as they are, they are easily offended and often mischievous.” Katherine M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs amongst Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (New York: Routledge, 1959), 15. Puck is far more mischievous than benevolent in the fairy’s account.

23.

Sigmund Freud, “On Dreams,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 154.

24.

Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 199.

25.

Clifford Davidson argues that Shakespeare would have considered amateur guild acting to be “inadequate in comparison with the kind of highly professional work that was being done at the time by the dramatist’s own company.” Clifford Davidson, “‘What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here?’ Amateur Actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Coventry Civic Plays and Pageants,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 88.

26.

See Helen Cooper, “Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays,” in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture eds. Stuart Gillispie and Neil Rhodes (London: Arden, 2006), 18–41. See also Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

27.

Patricia Parker notes also that the mechanicals’ names are “simultaneously suggestive of the artisanal and the bodily.” More specifically, the mechanicals are “not only connected with forms of material joining or construction but furnished with names that suggest their erotic counterparts.” Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 96, 94–95.

28.

Sarah Beckwith, “Making the World in York and the York Cycle,” in Framing Medieval Bodies ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 265.

29.

Wally Seccombe shows that well before the industrial revolution, craft production underwent a process of proto-industrialization, with rural craftsmen especially dependent on merchants to supply raw material for production. This cheaper rural craft production, in turn, eroded the stability of the more expensive trades and guilds in England’s towns. See Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (London: Verso, 1992), 166–99.

30.

For discussions of stage properties and construction, see in particular the essays in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); see also Frances Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991).

31.

See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118–35.

32.

See Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 206–45.

33.

Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), 33.

34.

Eagleton, William Shakespeare, 25.

35.

Peter Happe, introduction to Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power, and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happe and Wim Huskin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 10.

36.

For a discussion of the class dimensions of Bottom’s dream, see Annabel Patterson, “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland, 1998), 165–78.

37.

For a thorough account of the stage clown, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

38.

Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1643), 120.

39.

Robert Greene, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (London, 1592), F2r.

40.

Greenblatt interprets the passage as describing Shakespeare as “merely a second-rate drudge, a ‘rude groom,’ who thinks he is an accomplished poet when he is only an ‘ape’ imitating the inventions of others.” Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 213.

41.

Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 89. See also Parker’s “Rude Mechanicals,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43–82.

42.

Ibid., 107. Italics in original.

43.

Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 155.

44.

John Stow, A Survey of London (London, 1598), 74.

45.

Quoted in Jill Phillips Ingram, Idioms of Self-Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in English Renaissance Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5–6.

46.

Thomas Nashe, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (London, 1613), 107.

47.

Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 248.

48.

Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-booke (London 1609), 27.

49.

Daniel Vitkus, “‘Meaner Ministers’: Theatrical Labor, Mastery, and Bondage in The Tempest,” in The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies and Late Plays, ed. Jean E. Howard and Richard Dutton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 41.

50.

Douglas Bruster, “Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 33, 53.

51.

Andrew Gurr, “Industrious Ariel and Idle Caliban,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 202.

52.

Paul Edward Yachnin, Stage-wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xii.

53.

Ibid., 62.

54.

Thomas Dekker, If It Be Not Good, The Devil Is In It, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. 3, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (London, 1873), 261.

55.

Ibid., 262.

56.

All references are to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

57.

Alvin Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 135.

58.

David Bevington, Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 221.

59.

For discussions of the class tension in the opening scene, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 245–247; and Linda Anderson, A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cranbury, NJ: Associated Universities Press, 2005), 191–94.

60.

See Arthur Kirsch, “Virtue, Vice, and Compassion in Montaigne and The Tempest,” Studies in English Literature 37 (1997): 337–52.

61.

Michel de Montaigne, “On the Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1993), 232–33.

62.

Richard H. Grove argues that the play depicts a utopian mode “that had moved away from a stereotyped concept of the island as a place where a redemption of European political economy might be tried out and towards a more empirical perception and one more closely reflecting the hard reality of the early American and Caribbean colonies.” Richard H. Grove. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34.

63.

Bruster, “Local Tempest,”39.

64.

For a full discussion of audience and stage dynamics in the private theaters, see Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

65.

William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: Methuen, 2004).

66.

Aaron, Global Economics, 106.

67.

Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 45.

68.

See John G. Demaray, Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 73–100.

69.

Derek Cohen, Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 59.

70.

David Schalwyk, Shakespeare, Love, and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 100.

71.

Richard Strier, “I Am Power: Normal and Magical Politics in The Tempest,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16.

72.

Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 144–56.

73.

Genevieve Guenther, Magical Imaginations: Instrumental Aesthetics in the English Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 9.

74.

Ibid., 105.

75.

Giordano Bruno, “On Magic,” in Cause, Principle, and Unity, ed. Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130.

76.

Ibid., 132.

77.

Gareth Roberts explains this dynamic nicely: “Throughout the late plays magic operates as a metaphor for both the aspirations and limitations of the poet’s power.” As I have been suggesting, this dialectic between aspirations and limitations extends to the political power that is encoded by magic. Gareth Roberts, “‘An art lawful as eating?’: Magic in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 142.

78.

Goran Stanivukovic, “The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism,” Philological Quarterly 85, no. 1–2 (2006), 100.

79.

Ioan P. Culianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 95.

80.

Schalwyk, Shakespeare, 107.

81.

Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern Colonialism (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 92.

82.

John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), 82.

83.

Ibid., 167.

84.

William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wracke, in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 68–69.

Labor and Theatrical Value on the Shakespearean Stage

Valuing Labor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Valuing the Theater in The Tempest

Notes