The Representation Market of Early Modern England

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Representation Market of Early Modern EnglandDouglas BrusterDouglas BrusterUniversity of Texas at Austin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCensure will not drive a Trade, or make the Jack go.—John Heminges and Henry Condell, 1623How should we respond to a monumental collection of literary and theatrical documents packaged with this imperative: “But, whatever you do, Buy”?1 To keep art separate from commerce is impossible, as John Heminges and Henry Condell’s prefatory letter to the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays tells us. In their account, the propulsive force of the market remains manifestly a part of what made, and needs to make, the First Folio. Less clear today is how we should explain the dynamic of desire and exchange that Heminges and Condell describe. What models of agency and value could help us understand the trade in which Shakespeare’s wares (among so many others) were bought and sold? If we have grown used to calling the theater a market, and to recognizing the economic realities of the playhouse and bookstall, we have for too long proceeded on the assumption that market forces unfolded at some distance from the form and content of the texts themselves—behind and around rather than in, through, and with them.This assumption ignores the ways in which the language of the market both conditioned the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and was deployed about these same works. Further, it removes the exigencies of value not only from the period itself but from its expressive forms. A third and related difficulty caused by such a separation is that by overlooking questions of profit and loss, we miss the consequences (long and short term alike) of publication and performance. Books and performances succeed and fail, something that affects producers as well as the markets on which their productions are offered. What would it mean, then, to see literary and theatrical relations of this time as constituting an established, consequential economy with particularized values, profits, and losses? To see this economy as not only a source of attractive metaphors but a structure in and of itself?To address these questions, this essay posits a representation market for early modern England, a market for which the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were composed and on which they were retailed, purchased, and evaluated. An enabling agency for artistic commodities of early modern England, the representation market was also a conditioning one: during the late-Elizabethan era, the busy market in representations lent these goods the compressed multivalence as well as the expressiveness that we have come to understand as the products of a “golden” cultural age. While the term golden conveys the intensive value these works offer, that value traces its origins and manifestations more specifically to the highly competitive market conditions under which they were produced.A Market for RepresentationVarious interventions regarding the market have contributed to early modern studies in the past three decades. These include approaches through philosophy, history, cultural institutions, language, and the history of ideas.2 Such arguments have joined a long-standing willingness on the part of scholars to grapple with the specific economic realities of printing, publishing, and acting.3 But if these more recent interventions have helped demonstrate the truth of Linda Woodbridge’s understated claim that “money, commerce, and economics make a good deal of difference to English Renaissance literature,” they also reveal, in their disparate treatments, one reason such understatement is all too common.4 Typically, when we do not operate as though texts or persons were outside or critical of the market, we see them entering it selectively or with some reluctance. Such critical hesitancy is often presented as a judicious concern over anachronism. Ideas regarding what English society at this time should be like have made scholars reluctant to believe that early modern subjects meant it when they described themselves as buyers and spenders, makers and sellers, and when they defined their goods as commodities. Most comfortable associating commerce with publishers and playhouse investors, and relegating profit to the sphere of cheap print, critics have typically resisted acknowledging the business of representation in early modern England.5To better understand this business, we need a working model of the market in representations within which Shakespeare and others labored. Connecting and thereby amplifying the insights of recent market studies, this model may help us grasp the specific contributions that the economic made not as a background to cultural works but as a structuring principle and force in them. For the outlines of such a model, we could return to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In works like Distinction and The Rules of Art, as well as in a variety of foundational essays, Bourdieu sought to explain how and to what end symbolic goods were produced, circulated, and valued within a society.6 These explanations came in the service of a political commitment that, as we will see, complicates any appropriations of his work. But they also extended in sometimes dazzling ways Bourdieu’s core intuition regarding the usefulness, even necessity, of thinking the symbolic dimensions of culture through economic language and models—something evident in his best-known term and concept, “symbolic capital.”7 Throughout his career, a dedication to the scientific analysis of culture led Bourdieu to speak more earnestly of “symbolic goods” and “cultural production” than “art” (which he saw as a game and fetish). In Bourdieu’s writings, what surrounds, motivates, and qualifies these cultural goods is power—itself a product of the structure of class relations. To grasp the outlines of Bourdieu’s sociology of art, then, we have to envision a series of boxes within boxes, starting with the field of class relations, which encompasses a field of power, which surrounds the artistic field. Within this artistic field—on which can be mapped such features as genres, institutions, even reigning ideas—writers and other artistic agents strive to take “positions” within a “space of possibles.”8 Just as each field is structured by those that encompass them (art by power, power by class relations), so are these artistic agents and their actions structured, or disposed, by the particular positions they occupy in relation to the power relations of their society.So strongly are these fields shaped by dominance, for Bourdieu, that when he theorized the workings of the “linguistic market,” he saw the primary, if not absolute, agency of evaluation to consist in a speaker’s relation to structures of prestige and power. As one of his essay’s more memorable phrases has it, “une langue vaut ce que valent ceux qui la parlent” (a language is worth what those who speak it are worth).9 It is perhaps safe to say that we would never imagine claiming this about a song, poem, play, actor, or writer, and to his credit Bourdieu did not. Yet the axiom here hints at an emphasis on domination that characterizes his work. It also reveals the almost Olympian distance that Bourdieu prefers to take when describing the cultural field: because what is really being spoken is power (he seems to suggest), it is better to stand back from the words of the conversation in order to grasp what actually determines its outcome.10 Thus, he typically places himself too far above, and too critical of, the workings of the market in symbolic goods to concern himself closely with the day-to-day significance that those workings may have had for those engaged with its operations.Bridging this distance presents some difficulties even as it solves others. In leading us to view the exigencies of the cultural field as they most likely appeared to those engaged in producing and consuming its goods, market pragmatics could threaten to misunderstand Bourdieu’s work, or at the very least postpone its implications by focusing primarily on a middle level of action and activity.11 It will be vital to note, then, that to pursue an understanding of the market in representations of early modern England on the level of its producers, consumers, goods, and venues is not to rule out investigations that might seek to place such an understanding within the context of larger arguments about early modern culture and society. It is, instead, to provide a theoretical and historical account of how the marketplace for cultural goods developed, operated, and changed, as well as how it may have felt to those involved with it. It is also to seek a realm of freedom in which the value of cultural products may differ from the value attributed to their producers. An account of such freedom may clearly be expanded in relation to the necessities imposed by power, institutions, history, and social class. Alternately, as we will see, it may be scaled back to examine particular individuals, works, time frames, and verbal formations. However provisional our model, then, constructing it is a necessary first step in determining whether, or how, Bourdieu’s self-described “barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption” might possess relevance for the representational goods of early modern England.12Defining the Representation MarketThe representation market of early modern England was simultaneously an area, logic, set of values, agents, and forces associated with its representational goods. Regularized physical objects like literary and musical texts and the visual arts joined such events as theatrical and musical performances to make up this representational field. Let us look at figure 1 for a visualization of these cultural goods as existing in the overlap of entertainment and representation. The circle on the left stands for entertainments of all kinds, including but not limited to such physically intensive attractions as animal-baiting shows, wrestling matches, feasts, and prostitution.13 In this context, such entertainments are defined by being largely (though not uniformly) ephemeral, dynamic, and, because dynamic, somewhat unpredictable. The circle on the right depicts the objects of conventional linguistic, musical, performative, and visual representation, including songs, stories, shows, sermons, and pictures. These are largely (though not uniformly) tangible, durable, and world-picturing.14 Because such representations are frequently written, printed, or engraved, they—unlike entertainments in the form of events—can be repeated with predictability and exchanged indefinitely. The middle area in this diagram forms the space of the representation market. To one side of this middle space are bodily centered entertainments that do not seek to represent the world; to the other, representations that do not especially aspire to entertain (and thereby have less claim to commodity status). The overlap in this diagram thus conveys not only the family resemblance between representations and entertainments, but also the hybridization that items and events from both spheres undergo in the process of becoming vendible commodities.Figure 1. The overlap of entertainment and representationView Large ImageDownload PowerPointNot every representation was sold, of course, or was intended to be. Yet the market had an uncannily centripetal force, one that leveled many distinctions as it pulled hitherto elite and otherwise unavailable representations within public view. The great attractiveness of Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumously published works—“scribbled,” as Fulke Greville put it, “rather as pamphlets for entertainment of time and friends than any account of himself to the world”—was if anything increased by their coterie origins.15 That publishers heeded demand even more than social rank, however, becomes clear when we consult the preface to Henry Smith’s Sermon of the Benefite of Contentation: “There came to my hands (gentle Reader) the copy of a Sermon, which entreateth of covetousness, which though it were not the author’s mind or consent that it should come forth thus in market … I thought good to commit it to the press, preferring the profit and utility of many in publishing it, before the pleasure of the Author in concealing it.”16Smith, a puritan preacher, was newly famous in London for his moving if simple eloquence. As its preface hints, his Contentation sermon was said to have found its way into print (“in market”) not through the author’s volition but by being transcribed (“Taken by Characterie,” as its title page alleges) by an admiring parishioner. An immediate best-seller, it saw five editions in 1590 alone. Thus, even as the overlap of the circles above symbolizes resemblance and hybridization, it also stands for the powerful space of desire. Consumers of representations—the “many” in the sermon’s preface—fueled the commerce in cultural goods with their increasingly sophisticated demands.At the same time this market pulled, representational entrepreneurs pushed. Aspiring writers, actors, and artists in all kinds of media offered their wares to prospective vendors and customers (current as well as potential). Routinely fashioned for consumption were books, broadside ballads, civic pageants, dances, emblems, firework displays, jigs, magic tricks, masques, miniatures, plays, poems, prose fictions, sermons, songs, and wall hangings. Once sold on the retail market for cultural goods, these goods distracted, delighted, and—save for those texts and works of art that have survived—rapidly faded from view, disappeared from memory, or ceased to be enacted. As objects of human ingenuity and manufacture, what most defined these goods was not merely an element of social distinction (though commodities revealing apprenticeship in the arts of language, music, or illustration were especially prized).17 It was, instead, their ability to be adapted, repeated, and transported. Purpose-built for just such fabrication, the theater and printing house served as the factories of the early modern market in representation.A large and expanding urban center, London possessed a market for cultural goods that was not only national but also international in scope. A host of networks, trading routes, and demographic groups transcended the city and nation’s boundaries. Here deployed in the singular, the early modern market in representation (like all such markets) also asks to be understood in the plural—that is, as “markets.” If this plural sense allows us to extend the concept across times, places, and media, it also helps us to remember that markets of representation, like their financial counterparts, take shape from a combination of material realities and imagined contours. Among such realities we could note the number of customers and artists obtaining in any locale, as well as the tools, raw materials, venues, and seasons for the construction of representations and their sale. The imagined contours of a market, in contrast, help structure it by virtue of their relation to others’ sense of the demand for, supply of, and value on cultural goods. If the representation market set prices for objects and experiences based on their predicted value, such prediction, like anticipating profit and reckoning worth, involved more than a subjective determination of attractiveness or satisfaction (although this was important, in specific instances, to individual producers and consumers). Instead, these acts were carried out in strong relation to the history of evaluations regarding each product within that market.This conventionality helped establish a commercial “horizon of expectations” regarding not only the content and form of various cultural objects but also a general and related sense of their monetary equivalent: how much, that is, these objects could be sold and purchased for.18 The diachronic establishment of value did not preclude changes—even relatively sudden ones—to the representation market, for influential works could and did lead to transformations within specific markets for particular goods. Widely recognized among such transformative literary works were, for example, John Lyly’s Euphues volumes (1578/1580), which helped change Elizabethan prose style and prose fictions; Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), which sparked the Elizabethan vogue for sonnet sequences; and John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1609), which, although initially failing on stage, strongly influenced English tragicomedy in the years to come. That these volumes transformed not only subsequent works and evaluations, but previous writers’ works and styles (here Cicero, Petrarch, and Guarini, respectively), reminds us of the value attached to heritage in early modern literature. The subsequent vogue each of them helped to shape must also have been felt synchronically, with readers and writers becoming aware (some perhaps almost that the market for representation was around them. as the of a would the of other actors, and so too must these have led to of Bourdieu with and the of early modern MarketThe early modern was more aware of its representation market than we have one of many the concept is so in involved with the of cultural goods at the time possessed models of how these goods would be and they would not have the to the field on which they exchanged their cultural goods. But they it commerce, market, or the of cultural goods for had in the cultural by the Heminges and Condell’s sense of the that would a had by John as a of English a three before the First Lyly’s appeared just as Shakespeare his its the and for representation in so is the that for is for for for plays but before and before to the he is to the to how more may in the than can be in the the they will say their with at the must be for the for the for the for the our for their is for their is for are their and the of all into and made this like of which was of our our the but all to this that what been served in for a is in a for a If we a our is to be because the world is an as a for describing the of his cultural the of to the that the representational sphere of early modern England has is the and (a in to the of of all and its of this insights and about the representation market of the time have to for is how Lyly’s address separate and spheres of representation as constituting a but music, and theater and related as by the of their this as an by and has the field of this to in that just as or public that need a larger to respond to international so must plays their by various kinds of and all on the or of a also that these have to among representational to the he is to the to how more may in the than can be in the this he a himself from one in order to at how to the of that they do not in In to a of representational then, the involved as not only (like he that of demand and difference have their but also seems to to expressive from other to the attractiveness of their of a representation market that and various spheres of cultural in many texts of the and is in relation to a number of of cultural like Lyly’s the of might Lyly’s of to model from a in Shakespeare’s but his his of of have it in them to the like in his of English not just demand but supply and like in The of English the in representational or of for what would in his of and we speak of is to it by and which be the as it were, and that a his language by art, as the his and or of the of a or as the the his of works the representation market through their of the urban of The for example, would a number of highly city by and others in itself with within a market that itself through and the in forms the very o

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