Subordinate Subjects

Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688

Mihoko Suzuki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351897075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents, and material culture, this interdisciplinary study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in seventeenth-century England, and their use of discursive and literary forms in advancing an imaginary of political equality. Subordinate Subjects traces to the end of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in the 1590s the origin of this imaginary, analyses its flowering during the English Revolution, and examines its afterlife from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. It uses post-Marxist theories of radical democracy, post-structuralist theories of gender, and a combination of political theory and psychoanalysis to discuss the early modern construction of the political subject. Subordinate Subjects makes a distinctive contribution to the study of early modern English literature and culture through its chronological range, its innovative use of political, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, and its interdisciplinary focus on literature, social history, political thought, gender studies, and cultural studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Apprentices and the National-Popular

London apprentices first made their mark in English history through their rioting against “strangers” on Evil May Day, 1517. Their more widespread and extended rioting against governmental authority during the 1590s built on this tradition of political protest. In this chapter I begin by discussing the representation of the apprentices’ political activity by proclamations and government directives as one that stresses the rioting apprentices’ position outside the legitimate social order. What emerges, however, is the performative and camivalesque nature of their protest, which the officials interpreted and reinterpreted according to political exigencies. Yet the official, negative interpellation of the apprentices as disorderly and illegitimate is countered by the more sympathetic accounts of Evil May Day in Holinshed’s Chronicles and The Book of Sir Thomas More, which clearly have implications for the apprentices’ political activity in the 1590s – as indicated in the censorship of Sir Thomas More. The rest of the chapter takes up literary and discursive representations of apprentices from Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, apprentice plays culminating in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and finally, Edmund Bolton’s treatise, The Cities Advocate., Because authors such as Deloney and Bolton were sympathetic to the subject position of apprentices, and London playwrights were also writing for a sizeable apprentice audience, they counter the official, negative representations of apprentices as lawless and criminal to affirm their identity as productive members of the social order. The apprentice plays cater to their audience by representing apprentices as, on the one hand, adventure-seeking heroes (The Four Prentices of London), and on the other, merry and obedient, if rambunctious workers (The Shoemaker’s Holiday). Eastward Ho includes in the character of Quicksilver the negative stereotype of apprentices as irresponsible perpetual adolescents, but deploys it in order to establish a legitimate political identity for Golding, who successfully matures into a civic role. The Knight of the Burning Pestle in turn significantly counters these prior representations as fantasy-driven and parodies the genre of the apprentice play from the perspective of the apprentices themselves. Bolton, like Deloney, closely associates the political identity of male workers as representatives of the English political nation with the subject position of apprentices. To this end, both writers suppress the apprentices’ association with disorderly rioting and prosecutions for treason; Deloney constructs and validates the identity of male workers in opposition to “strangers” and women, and Bolton celebrates “London apprentices” in opposition to country gentry.

London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s

Historians have described the last decade of Elizabeth Tudor’s reign as an exceptionally volatile period, which experienced “high prices, food shortages, heavy taxation and major wars against Spain and Ireland.” (Power, 371; see also Outhwaite, P. Clark). Economic historians have found that the years 1594–97 witnessed the most sustained and severe inflation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the lowest real wages in English history in 1597 (Power, 371n). Even when gainfully employed, workers in handicrafts earned not much more than subsistence wages: for example, a 1589 proclamation, Regulating London Wages, prescribes for London linen weavers 6d a day with meat and drink, or 10d a day without meat and drink (Hughes and Larkin, 3:42). Steve Rappaport describes a London in which a “fabulously wealthy elite liv[ed] cheek by jowl with a thoroughly destitute majority” (3).

Given this polarization, it is not surprising that the 1590s were especially marked by social disorder and protest. The language of Elizabeth’s proclamations against apprentices from 1590 to 1595 is instructive in this regard. The 1590 proclamation, Enforcing Curfews for Apprentices, states:

Where the Queen’s most excellent majesty, being given to understand of a very great outrage lately committed by some apprentices and others being masterless men and vagrant persons, in and about the suburbs of the city of London, in assaulting of the house of Lincoln’s Inn and the breaking and spoiling of divers chambers in the said house … hath therefore thought good for the better avoiding of suchlike outrages hereafter (by advice of her majesty’s Privy Council) straightly to charge and command all such as be any householders … that they and every of them do cause all their apprentices, journeymen, servants, and family in their several houses … to tarry and abide within their several houses and not to be suffered to go abroad after nine of the clock at night, upon pain of imprisonment. (3:60)

Here (as in the later proclamations), apprentices are linked with vagabonds and masterless men as criminal elements threatening the social order with violence.¹ They are interpellated – albeit negatively – as a group: they are not even answerable to the authorities in their own right, so that their masters must be held responsible for enforcing the curfew and will be punished if the apprentices violate it. The apparent failure of this proclamation is evident in the one issued the following year and reissued again in 1595, Prohibiting Unlawful Assembly under Martial Law, which refers to “sundry great disorders committed in and about her city of London by unlawful great assemblies of multitudes of a popular sort of base condition, whereof some are apprentices and servants to artificers” (III, 82–3, 143). The language of this proclamation is more concrete and forceful than that in the earlier one; here, rather than be subject to curfews, offending apprentices are ordered to be “execute[d] upon the gallows by martial law” – a threat which in fact was later carried out. These royal proclamations, moreover, were supported by local directives to control the apprentices. In December 1593, the mayor prohibited football playing “or other unlawfull assemblies,” and in June 1595, directed “pprentices and servants to be kept within their masters houses on Saboth dayes and holy dayes,” and “idle persons” to be committed to Bridewell (CLRO, Journals, XXIII, 225v; XXIV, 11). Also in June 1595, the mayor directed “apprentices to have open punishment for their lewd offences,” and “every householder to have a sufficient weapon at his dore for preservation of her Maiesties peace” (Journals, XXIV, 22v).

The Remembrancia and Journals of the city of London, as well as John Stowe’s Abridgement and Strype’s edition of Stowe’s Survey of London, record the actual incidents that both prompted these proclamations and were occasions of their defiance. Taken together, the proclamations and the disturbances can be read as a dialogue between the Crown and the city of London, on the one hand, and the “popular sort of base condition,” on the other. In June of 1595 alone London witnessed twelve instances of popular disturbances; apprentices instigated riots against the lord mayor, against food prices, and against imprisonment of their comrades. Roger Manning states that these riots and rebellions “constituted the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England between the accession of the Tudor dynasty and the beginning of the long Parliament” (208), particularly because they represented direct attacks on the authority of the lord mayor.

What is striking about these incidents of disorder is the apparent recognition by the apprentices themselves that they held common political interests as a collective. In the first riot of June 6, apprentices numbering two to three hundred rescued a silkweaver who had been committed to Bedlam after protesting outside the lord mayor’s house. On June 12 and 15, a group of apprentices forcibly bought fish and butter, protesting high prices and enforcing lower ones. On June 15, another riot took place against the imprisonment of apprentices; pillories in Cheapside and at Leadenhall were pulled down and gallows were set up outside the lord mayor’s house. On June 16, a group of apprentices, soldiers, and masterless men met in St. Paul’s to plot an insurrection against the lord mayor with the aim of “playing the Irish trick on him,” i.e., removing his head (Power, 379).

The apprentices’ riots followed the cultural form of carnival, for example in the debasement of authority figures such as the lord mayor. The apprentices’ enforcement of prices recalls the forcible purchase of cakes by Grandgousier’s shepherds in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,:²

On the 27 of June, certaine young men apprentises and other, were punished by whipping, setting on the Pillory, &c. for taking p500 of butter from the market women in Southwarke after the rate of 3 pence the pound, whereas the sellars price was 5. pence the pound. (E. H., Abridgement, 499)³

[the shepherds] caught the bakers up and took from them about four or five dozen cakes, for which they paid them the usual price, however, giving them a hundred walnuts and three baskets of grapes into the bargain.

(Rabelais, Book I, Ch. 25, p. 95)

Yet, just as the Rabelaisian carnival leads to war, so the next disturbance led to graver consequences. On June 29, two days after the incident described above, “unrulie youthes on the towerhill being blamed by the warders of towerstreete warde to sever themselves and depart from thence, threw at them stones and drave them back into Tower street” (Abridgement, 500).

Their punishment was much more severe than that of their comrades who had been whipped and pilloried: instead, “they were condemned, and had iudgement to be drawne, hanged and quartered, and were on the twenty foure of the same moneth drawne from Newgate to the Tower hill, and there executed accordingly” (Abridgement, 501). In his order of execution, the mayor directed each inhabitant of the ward “that they keepe within their houses all their men servants and apprentices to morrow from three of the clock in the morning untill eight at night, and the same householders be … all that time ready at their door … with a weapon in their hande” (Journals, XXIV, 37).

This directive palpably expresses the anxiety that these executions, though intended as “an open and publique example to all others not to comitt the like” (Journals, XXIV, 22v), might nevertheless be the occasion of further disturbances; as Michel Foucault has suggested in Discipline and Punish, punishment marks the victim’s body as the vehicle of display for the sovereign’s power, but it can also subvert the sovereign’s authority by eliciting solidarity between the people and the victim. The urgency and frequency of these anxious directives clearly belies some historians’ assertion that London enjoyed social stability during this period (Power, 385; Rappaport, 19).⁴

Even the price-enforcing apprentices, though initially punished for the misdemeanors of riot and sedition, were retroactively charged in 1597 with treason, following the reasoning that the popular attempt to regulate prices constituted an attempt to alter the laws of the realm by force.⁵ The reinterpretation of the apprentice riots by the authorities signals the possibility of multiple interpretations of these political texts scripted and performed by the protesters, a multiplicity analogous to the ambiguity of the executions that I have already discussed. Both the authors and the readers of the texts of political protest exploited this ambiguity: the apprentices hoped to excuse their subversive acts through the license of carnival; the government would interpret – and at times reinterpret – the severity of the texts’ challenge to authority according to political exigencies.⁶

It must be acknowledged, however, that representations of this period of social unrest, in Elizabeth’s proclamations against apprentices and the records of the city of London describing the riots, derive from the perspective of governmental authority, not from the protesting apprentices themselves. It was not until the English Revolution, when apprentices began writing and signing their own petitions to Parliament, that they spoke for themselves and became an influential voice in the politics of the Commonwealth. Though predating by a few years the 1590s apprentice riots, the 1587 account in Holinshed’s Chronicles, of Evil May Day offers a significant middle-class perspective on political protest by the subaltern.

The marginal glosses to the first part of Holinshed’s narrative clearly indicate the chroniclers’ sympathy with the grievances against aliens: “The insolent sawcinesse of the Frenchmen against the English”; “The diuelish malice of the Frenchmen”; “Strangers outface Englishmen against all honestie, equitie, and conscience” (3:618). John Lincoln, a London broker, arranges to be published from the pulpit grievances that “Englishmen, both merchants and other are vndoone, for strangers haue more libertie in this land than Englishmen, which is against all reason, and also against the common-weale of this realme” (618). The narrative then goes on to recount in detail the dire effects on English workers of the economic competition posed by the aliens. The “secret rumour” of a May Day rebellion in which aliens will be slain prompts proclamations and precautions (620); nevertheless the “riotous people” engage in “outragious doings,” primarily destruction of property, although not murder (621). Here the perspective of the chronicle shifts from that of the protesters against alien misdeeds to one that upholds social order and property rights. To this end, it also includes the full text of the statute issued during Henry V’s reign, according to which any offence committed against foreigners constitutes a breaking of the truces concluded by English monarchs with their counterparts in other countries: this statute was used as the basis of the trial and indictment of the apprentices for high treason.⁷ The inclusion of the two texts – the sermon outlining Englishmen’s grievances against the aliens and the royal statute – appears to contribute to a balanced and impartial account of the incident from the perspective of both the authorities and the rioters.⁸

Yet in the end the chronicle’s sympathy for the rioters outweighs its affirmation of authority. In particular, it indicts Edmund Howard, knight marshall, for his part in the execution of the apprentices found guilty of treason: he “shewed no mercie, but extreme crueltie to the poor yoonglings in their execution: and likewise the dukes seruants spake manie opprobrious words, some bad hang, some bad draw” (624). In addition, the chronicle allows Lincoln to justify himself by asserting that he had called attention to the problems caused by the “strangers,” but was dismissed as “a busie fellow” (624). This account, then, shows sympathy toward the apprentices and their grievances, and criticizes their treatment by the authorities. The chronicle further calls attention to how during this period of unrest “proclamations were made, that no women should come togither to babble and talke, but all men should keepe their wiues in their houses” (622) – just as masters were repeatedly enjoined to keep apprentices indoors on Shrove Tuesday in order to prevent them from engaging in disorderly conduct. In effect, Evil May Day marks a time when criticism of the authorities from the commons was stifled and those who brought those, criticisms were excessively punished for assuming a prerogative they did not possess.⁹

If Holinshed is useful in expressing a middle-class attitude on popular unrest apart...