Plotting Early Modern London

New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy

Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, Angela Stock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.

PART I:

BOURGEOIS DOMESTIC DRAMA

Chapter 1

Middletonian Families

Alan Brissenden

He that doth his youth expose

To brothel, drink, and danger,

Let him that is his nearest kin

Cheat him before a stranger.¹

Theodorus Witgood’s little rhyme near the beginning of A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), one of Thomas Middleton’s city comedies written between about 1602 and 1607, shows that the young country gentleman has no delusions about his relationship with his uncle, Pecunious Lucre, to whom he has mortgaged his lands, and spent the proceeds. While he stands ruminating on how he dare not go up to London to pursue Joyce, the virgin he loves who has a dowry of £1000, because of the creditors awaiting him there, Witgood is approached by his long-time mistress, Jane Medlar; she inspires in him a plan to turn the tables on Lucre, to ‘uncle’ him in fact, since one meaning of the word was to ‘cheat or swindle’. They will present Jane (who is both intelligent and faithful, as it happens) as a rich widow Witgood is courting. The presumption is that Lucre, sensing more profit, will once more help his prodigal nephew, who will thus secure both funds and the return of his land.

For his part, Lucre considers himself a virtuous uncle on whom it is better for a dissolute nephew to bestow his money, in the form of fifty per cent interest, than one of his aunts, that is his whores. Although Witgood has a reputation for whoring, he and Jane have been in modern terms a de facto couple for some years, and she becomes a key player in the grand deception which, of course, works wonderfully well. The sex-money nexus which Middleton makes such a potent plot device in so many of his plays drives the action as the reportedly rich Widow Medlar becomes the desirable goal for city gallants, for Lucre’s foolish stepson Sam, and for the usurious Walkadine Hoard, who is not only Lucre’s great enemy but also Joyce’s uncle.

There are, then, three main family units in A Trick to Catch the Old One, and little or no love in any of them. Witgood’s first reaction to his courtesan, who greets him with ‘My love’, is to reply, ‘My loathing!’, and continue with stock remarks about whores – ‘the secret consumption of my purse […] round-webbed tarantula, / That dryest the roses in the cheeks of youth!’ (1.1.24-9). However when she stands her ground, pointing out that she has been true to him and that while mortgaged land may return, virginity never can, he asks her forgiveness – the prodigal’s reformation has begun. Even though he does not love her, he calls on her love for him to support him in his plan. They work together as a well-practised team, sharing jokes, pooling ideas, looking after each other. And when Witgood learns that old Hoard is one of the ‘widow’s’ suitors, he urges her enthusiastically to accept him, finishing his encouragement by saying, ‘marry him,’ twould ease my conscience well to see thee well bestow’d; I have a care of thee, i’faith’ (3.1.103-5).

As Shakespeare’s Lucio laments, ‘Marrying a punk […] is pressing to death, whipping and hanging’ (Measure for Measure [1604], 5.1.520-21), and when the truth is revealed, the newly-married Hoard is at first of a similar view; but when his bride points out that he will have no fear of being cuckolded, as an old man marrying a young virgin would, that, having been a sinner, she ‘knows best how to hate sin’ (5.2.140) and that she is reformed, he accepts that he has been duped and invites everyone to the wedding feast. Hoard’s is the second family of the play. He is in loco parentis to his niece Joyce, who appears only three times, but is the mainspring of the plot, being the reason for Witgood’s need for money. As the head of the family, Hoard tells her, ‘I’ll have a husband for thee shortly; put that care upon me, wench, for’, he goes on with fine Middletonian irony, ‘in choosing wives and husbands I am only fortunate; I have that gift given me’ (3.2.2-5). Hoard also has a merchant brother, who is significant because he is the first wedding guest to recognize his new sister-in-law for what she has been.

The most extensive family in the play is Lucre’s. He stands in the same relationship to Witgood as Hoard to Joyce, but has completely renounced avuncular responsibility by exploiting his nephew for gain through the mortgaged land. He damns himself out of his own mouth when he hears that Witgood is suitor to a wealthy widow, but has mortgaged his lands to his uncle, by asking his informant how the young man could be ‘ever so simple [as] to mortgage his lands to his uncle, or his uncle so unnatural [as] to take the extremity of such a mortgage’ (2.1.106-8). Hoard has recently been married, to a widow whose first husband had married her when she was a cook – so she has risen socially. Her doltish son Sam is also a suitor to Joyce, but when the Widow Medlar arrives, Mistress Lucre sends him off to her with a diamond and a chain of gold, her aim being revenge against Lucre, who has taunted her with his nephew Witgood’s success with the widow, when he is less wealthy than her son.

Applying the common contemporary meaning of family as a household, not necessarily a group of related people, there is a fourth family in A Trick to Catch the Old One, headed by yet another money-lender. This time, however, Middleton is not in jocular mood. An Act of 1571 had made interest rates of up to ten per cent permissible in England, and developing capitalism needed loan money, but rates well beyond ten per cent were common, and many usurers were despised and hated for their profit-taking. London became a centre for money-lending, and ‘between 1580 and 1620, almost all of the principal citizens of London began to lend money at interest’.² Where Lucre and Hoard, like many such business people, lend out money at interest on occasion, Dampit is a professional usurer. As his name suggests, Harry Dampit (damn pit), referred to more than once as ‘Old Harry’ (= the Devil), represents the usurer as Satan and so is opposed to Theodorus (= God’s gift) Witgood, who has nevertheless borrowed from him in the past. Dampit is a foul-mouthed drunkard who is cared for by the family servant, Audrey (= nobility and strength), despite his beastliness. His connection with the main plot is tenuous, and he serves principally as a moral exemplum.

Dampit, who ‘came to town with but ten shillings in his purse, and now is credibly worth ten thousand pound’ (1.4.23-4), also represents the great population shift from the regions to London. Between 1550 and 1600 the metropolitan population more than doubled from some 70,000 to about 200,000. By 1600, 6000 migrants were pouring into London every year, 4000-5000 of them apprentices who became household members of their masters’ families.³ While apprentices are important characters in two plays, The Family of Love⁴ (1603-7) and the much later Anything for a Quiet Life (1620-21), Middleton’s aim of condemning cupidity through satire means that he is less interested in the apprentices than he is in avaricious merchants hungry for both money and land, in parents, particularly fathers, who are desperate for their children to marry into money and social advancement, and in provincial heirs who have spent their patrimonies and come to London seeking wealthy wives.

The destruction of families caused by greed, both for money and for sex, is a constant theme in Middleton, nowhere more plainly informing the moral framework of the play than in Michaelmas Term (1604-6), which begins with an Induction that introduces a family of unusual kind, the family of law terms. Though he says ‘I have no child’ (Ind. 21), but wealth instead, Michaelmas, as the longest term of the four, is presented as the father of the other three, Hilary, Easter and Trinity; he commences by exchanging his vacation white cloak of ‘conscience’ for a lawyer’s black gown of ‘evil’, beginning, as Gail Kern Paster notes, ‘the Induction’s sharp satire against the law as a mercenary system run for its own benefit’.⁵ More than that, it indicates the pervasive dark wickedness of London, the soil from which the play’s action grows. Michaelmas concludes by telling the audience the play is not to be about lawsuits, but ‘those familiar accidents [i.e. events] which happened in town in the circumference of those six weeks whereof Michaelmas Term is Lord’ (Ind. 74-6); ‘familiar’ had several relevant meanings, including ‘pertaining to one’s family or household’, ‘well-known’ and ‘common, current, ordinary’. Families are involved from the very first lines of the play proper, as Rearage and Salewood, two country gentlemen turned London gallants, discuss Salewood’s father, whom he dare not approach until the end of term, and cousin, who has failed to find a husband in the city and will have to go to the North Country, where men are less choosy. Richard Easy, ‘a fair free-breasted gentleman, somewhat too open’ (1.1.55), has recently lost his father, and come up from Essex to discover London life. He has already been marked out as prey by Ephestian Quomodo, a rich draper – London was by now the dominant centre of England’s cloth trade – who by trickery aims to get Easy’s land, ‘to murder his estate’ (1.1.105) and so become one of the landed gentry.

Quomodo’s family consists of his wife, Thomasine, whom he no longer satisfies sexually, his libido supplanted by his greed for money and land, their daughter, Susan, their foolish son, Sim, now at the Inns of Court, and two ‘spirits’, Shortyard and Falselight, who are either assistants or apprentices. These two are Quomodo’s instruments for the duping of Easy, and, since Modus and Modo were the names of a devil, a plausible case can be made for these vile assistants being supernatural agents out to catch Easy’s soul, not merely his land and money.⁶ Quomodo instructs Shortyard to corrupt Easy, to ‘ravish him with a dame or two […] Drink drunk with him; creep into bed to him; kiss him and undo him, my sweet spirit’ (1.1.127-9), which he succeeds in only too well, so that they are, according to Shortyard, posing as the city gallant Blastfield, ‘man and wife’ (2.3.168), thereby forming another family, albeit a same-sex one.⁷ Easy rapidly gets into debt and is then thoroughly gulled by a series of tricks into giving his ‘Body, goods, and lands’ (3.4.226) as security against a loan of £700, which he eventually regains when he recognizes ‘Blastfield’ for what he is and has him arrested. Quomodo meanwhile decides, Volpone-like, to feign death, disguises himself as a beadle and solicits opinions about himself as his funeral passes by. (It is uncertain whether Jonson’s Volpone preceded or came after Middleton’s play.) Furious at the truth about his own villainy that he hears from others, particularly his son Sim, he is further dismayed to discover his wife has married Easy and, revealing himself, takes them to court. There he finds he has been tricked into signing a memorandum returning all to Easy. At least the judge acknowledges Thomasine is still his wife (but he has to live with being a cuckold).

In two parallel subplots which connect to Quomodo’s family Middleton ferociously illustrates greed leading to corruption and blindness. Sir Andrew Lethe, a newly knighted Scot, has put behind him his father, the honest tooth-drawer Walter Gruel, to become a court gallant and a suitor to Susan Quomodo. Both Susan and her father favour him, her mother does not, considering Rearage a better match. Lethe is so blindly stupid that he writes telling her that because her disapproval of the match must be because she herself likes him, he wants to marry Susan only that he can become her, Thomasine’s, lover – an offer she scornfully rejects. In his court finery, Lethe is unrecognized by his old mother who has come seeking him, and he employs her as a servant. His pander, Dick Hellgill, brings him a Country Wench, who has been seduced by fine clothes into prostitution. Her father, a reformed prodigal, comes seeking her, does not recognize her and, disguised, becomes her servant. She becomes Lethe’s mistress and eventually his wife, despite his protests, when they are discovered in flagrante on the morning of his wedding to Susan. Susan marries Rearage who, although a gambler, at least has money coming in from his estates. She thus succeeds in joining the gentry where her father fails.

At the end of the play, Mother Gruel is brought to recognition of her son Andrew, but the Country Wench’s father is not present to see her success-cum-punishment, marriage to that same unpleasant son. (Perhaps the actor was needed for another role, maybe the Judge — there are fourteen, possibly sixteen, people on stage). Quomodo’s greed has broken his family apart; his spirits are bani...