No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Wives, Courtesans, and the Economics of Love in Jacobean City Comedy Richard Horwich Several writers of Jacobean city comedy1 seem to have anti cipated the 19th-century axiom that marriage and money are the only subjects worth writing about, for many of these plays deal with little else, and in such a way as to make the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth virtually indistinguishable from one another. There is, of course, nothing startling about the coupling of love and money on the stage. Marriage-seekers in dramatic comedy have always sought wealth as well—the dowries of Glycerie in Terence’s The Woman of Andros, of Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World, and of Barbara Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara, for example, all figure prominently in the action of those plays, and are part of the conventions of the form. But the persistence with which certain Stuart playwrights dwelt upon economic theory and practice transcends those con ventions, and makes their plays unique commentaries upon the economic life of the society which produced them. It is not necessary to believe, as some scholars do, that such writers as Marston, Dekker, Heywood, Jonson, and Middleton intended to depict, or did in fact depict, anything so majestic as The Rise of Capitalism itself. We need only acknowledge that many of the participants in that vast and ponderous up heaval—substantial merchants, small shopkeepers, impoverished gentlemen, adventurers and entrepreneurs—are portrayed with some realism in city comedies, and almost nowhere else. And though Brian Gibbons is correct in maintaining that these works “do not present in any useful sense ‘a keen analysis in economic terms’ . . . of the actual conditions of the times,”2 it is well to keep in mind the fact that, if the plays do not analyze economic 291 292 Comparative Drama conditions, they certainly display them, filled as they are with the sights and sounds of mercantile practice. So much is generally agreed upon. What has not been as clearly recognized is that, in addition to dealing explicitly with the world of commerce (usually in the subplots), these plays also, albeit implicitly and metaphorically, concern themselves with economics in the main, or marriage plots as well; in fact, they employ the institution of marriage itself as a testing ground for many of the new economic ideas which were surfacing at the time. The marital relationship is often seen through an eco nomic prism, so that human transactions, as well as mercantile ones, come to seem matters of debit and credit, profit and loss. The potential for forming this connection has long existed, and still exists, embedded in the English language itself; certain ly the discourse of our own time is, to use an economic meta phor, rich in economic metaphors. We “win” or “lose” at love; an eligible bachelor is a “prize,” and a beautiful girl a “treasure”; popular psychologists tell us in newspaper columns that mature and well-adjusted love is the province of those who are capable of “giving” and “sharing.” Matters differed little in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to judge from the frequency with which figures of speech like “the riches of the soul” or “the goods of the mind” were employed by writers of expository prose. Indeed, for some moralists of the time, one’s attitude to ward love literally determined one’s attitude toward money: “O let matrimoniall love bee as able to command liberality, as whorish and adulterous affections to procure prodigalitie,”3 wrote the widely-read William Whateley. It was probably Shakespeare, more than any other dramatist, who organized such metaphors into a coherent system of values and established them as a characteristic feature of Jacobean theater, from which the authors of city comedies could (and did) freely borrow. John Russell Brown, in an excellent treatment of the subject, has shown that Shakespeare conceived of love “as a kind of wealth.” It was, for him, quite distinct from, and even opposed to, “the wealth of commerce,” which is “controlled by gain and rights of possession”; the wealth of love, on the con trary, is associated with “giving, generously and of a free will.”4 Thus...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.