Radical Comedy in Early Modern England

Contexts, Cultures, Performances

Rick Bowers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754663805
• eBook ISBN: 9781317071976
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the "Shepherds' Play," Thomas Dekker's pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. Farce, absurdity, excess, over-the-top characters, unremitting irony, black humor, toilet humor, and tricksters of all types - such features and more combine to satirize medical, religious, and political authority and to implement necessary social change. Written with a narrative ease, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England shows how comic interventions both describe and reconfigure prevalent authority in its own time while arguing that, through early modern comedy, one can observe the changes in social behavior and understandings characteristic of the Renaissance.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Comic Performance

In a moment of critical reflection Jerry Lewis once observed, “The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble” (197). His performance observation is as accurate as his unintentional sexism. A woman “in trouble” might not seem so comedic. Yet, as Audrey Bilger argues in Laughing Feminism, even the polite comedy of women authors in eighteenth-century England reveled in the subversion and surprise of “escaping from confinement, of breaking down barriers, and of turning the tables on those who attempt to suppress them” (15). In performance, comedy usually combines perceived distress with clever extrication and ironic reversal that is shared with others. As that twentieth-century performance diva Cher declared in her 1999 A&E Biography special: “I connect with my audience at a really deep superficial level.” Ben Jonson couldn’t have put it better. And John Marston wouldn’t have tried, allowing his characters instead to demonstrate that self-consciously ironic performance ensures complicated connections with audiences and authorities. In early modern comedy, women and men are mutually implicated in a social world where powerful institutions of authority and repression get reduced to “human” scale where personal freedom reigns and all the comic clichés are true: all’s well that ends well; the more the merrier; it’s just a joke; life goes on.

Such seemingly facile perceptions, however, do not come without trouble in the performance culture of early modern England. This study focuses on comic representations that assert themselves in loud, sexist, messy, rude, tender, intimate, and disorienting conflicts of interaction, authority and, subversion. At its basics, such comedy represents a form of disagreement, a pre-institutional form of cultural and political opposition rooted in seeing things from the “other” perspective. Usually ironic and often triumphant, this oppositional perspective might be the “sudden glory” that Hobbes perceived as fundamental to laughter itself within human nature, “arising,” Hobbes insists, “from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (“Human Nature” 46). More generous in terms of self and other, Bakhtin declares laughter to be a precondition of human freedom, describing comedy as: “The right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available” (Dialogic Imagination 159). Like all rights, this radical comic right emerges out of conflict and must be actively claimed. While the situation of comic performance is basically social in terms of contacts, categories, and life possibilities, the assertion of comic performance twists and resists all impositions through a power rooted in resistance to authority, assertion of unprivileged culture, and insistence on the endurance of human discourse.

Aristotle in his Poetics linked comedy to character: low characters, ridiculous characters, characters who sang “phallic songs.” The individualist characters who I study are relative latecomers who paradoxically vivify and recreate comic forms within, and in opposition to, early modern English culture. As comic heroes they unknowingly partake of the erotic, idiotic, and irrationally insistent assertions of early Greek satire. But they are all as politically oppositional as they are determinedly English. Mak, Moll, Barabas, Antonio, Subtle, Face—all perform their comic rages in terms of dismay, protest, and performance, and all are implicated in a newly emergent sense of professional theater.

Socially dispossessed, these comic heroes maintain a clear sense of their own significance as personally special even unusual. Often painfully aware of class limitations to be destroyed, they also have a radically new idea, perspective, effect, or plan that may be crazy, or maybe not, but will definitely lead to change and restructuring within their society. Likewise in the alternative genres of Dekker’s jest book storytelling about plague and Harington’s extended metaphor of installing toilets—both trade on the grotesque complications of comic extrication and accommodation conveyed through popular print. As clowns, rogues, fools, jesters, and ludicrous commentators on the impossibilities of their times, these unwashed figures (literally in Dekker’s plague pamphlets and Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax) smear the pretentious cleanliness of upper class figures who would dominate them. Politically, these characters shock the complacent and puncture the pompous, reforming from below in the Bakhtinian sense of ironic reversal along with internally generated opposition against external restrictions.

This book addresses the comedy of early modern England where role reversals abound, identity is fluid, unlikelihood insists on setting terms, and confusion enjoys license at the same time as it tests new senses of personal and political assertion. In this regard overstatement represents the usual mode of address, and any form of received authority represents a target. Within these comedies a “heroic” character protests, insists, cheats, ridicules, pummels, and energetically performs a modicum of comic freedom. Such actions are in some sense “licensed” as jest, but they also thrive on mental agility, moral flexibility, and a variety of perspectives open always to possibilities from the unusual to the bizarre. Herein, irony itself represents new political ascendancy and appropriation of power that is at once decentered from authority while central to performance. In fact the radical comedy of early modern England performs the “intellectual vandalism” (li) mentioned by Jonathan Dollimore in the “Introduction to the Second Edition” of his influential book Radical Tragedy. Radical comedy likewise pierces to the root of cultural authority by asserting meaningful and playable incoherence through forms of defiance to which the average person can aspire and with which the average person can triumph. I agree largely with Dollimore’s assertion that “the aesthetic has become an anaesthetic” (xxii), but I hope that my treatment of radical comedy will help in some small way to revivify and change things.

My study begins with the incongruous comic grace of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play of the Wakefield mystery cycle. Mak’s emergence as comic hero represents surprise within its own context as well as deep significance for later English comedy. Above all, Mak is an actor, a masker, an improviser, a strongly defined oppositional other to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Moreover, Mak performs his “otherness” both as energetic comic variety and as fundamental plot necessity within the play. His interactive performance at once nourishes fellow actors involved in his contrivances as well external audiences involved in the deep epiphany of his comic realization. At all points Mak presents a ridiculous perspective, destabilizing acceptable terms of Christian behavior, and injecting the drama with ludicrous energy while providing vicarious thrills. Because the drama is a performance, no sheep will really be stolen, and no offense will really be taken. But opposition will exhibit itself as a distinct performance possibility and signal the necessity for change. Such comic empowerment energizes later English comedy in terms both of mythic proportion and irrational sense. The wise fool emerges with a license, a loose script, and a carnivalized occasion.

As wise fool and radical “other,” the comic hero renegotiates the world in terms of freedom. The “World” itself—figured usually as the external authority of parents, politicians, politeness, and precedent—resists such challenges and complications in the name of stability and of received, realistic authority. However, confronted with the unleashed joy of carnivalized assertions—with all of its innovations, from simple reversal to chaotic destruction—authority must inevitably reconsider its own assurance. Comic freedom represents itself in overcoming limitations, attacking authority, and instigating reversals of fortune. Herein, the “rule” of misrule features a bloodless revolution that gives everyone a chance to see from the others’ perspective and perhaps learn something as a result—for example: empathy. Hobbes wouldn’t recognize empathy within the rigid social hierarchies of his own day; but he might recognize it now in terms of idealized democracy, a democracy of fearless interaction among people who laugh together.

The freedom offered through comedy surpasses Freudian conceptions of psychic release, Bergsonian observations about the mechanized and the humane, even Hobbesian senses of overcoming our former inferiority. In each case, freely accepting ourselves liberates us to accept others. Comic heroes—relentlessly, shamelessly, and with reckless vigor—show the way. Touching on aspects of improvisation and self interest that are central to comedy in a serious world, Robert Torrance advances a loose definition of the comic hero that is informative for my study:

He is too protean a character to be delimited by any prior definition, since he is forever extemporizing his essence. He does not conform to a single character type at all, be it fool or knave, eiron or alazon, but evades fixed categories of every kind by adopting whatever posture suits his imperious ends. What is constant is the potential or actual antagonism between his ways and those of the world. He is comic (in the root sense of komos, the “revels”) primarily by virtue of the festive values that he celebrates and embodies: values of biological life and imaginative freedom, of dogged humanity and belligerent selfhood. (The Comic Hero viii)

The heroes of early English comedy likewise assert festive protest at the same time as they assert their own selves. The truly comic hero asserts fundamental innocence, committed self certainty, and an unshakable belief that anything can be accomplished. Audiences and readers experience vicarious recognition, involvement, and even liberation.

Of course Foucault’s shrewdly noted “repressive hypothesis” declares that authority actually licenses rather than liberates festivity, and it does so for its own repressive ends. But once the comic freedom of carnival has been permitted, subversion becomes a possibility and monologic authority can never be the same again. Indeed, through permission (perhaps involving a deep and misunderstood complicity) authority enters into dialogical relativity, which represents a form of subversion in itself. Things get out of control—dangerously, joyously, inevitably. Remember that first kiss? that first overnight party? that first solemn vow never to get drunk again? Even repressive hangovers get reconfigured through time. In her classic study, Susanne Langer argues for an irresistible life force replicated by comedy itself through a “deep cruelty” of assertion (Feeling and Form 349) that is perhaps more Hobbesian than Langer intended. As will be seen, control can shift radically within the state, as in The Jew of Malta, within the household, as in The Alchemist, and within personal relationships, as in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Previously unprivileged positions discover, and consequently declare, meaningful possibilities both within and without authoritative structure. Through sharp wit, high coloring, irrational defiance, and physical rudeness, comic heroes broadcast their innovations and unsentimentally assert life forms in a weltering variety of possibilities.

Laughter itself, as Bakhtin affirms, suggests a form of freedom, a freedom that unifies people. Of course laughter is not always pleasant, but then comedy is not always safe. Cognitive theories of laughter usually bypass the fact that crying comes more naturally in this world. As a self-willed response to external situation, laughter is rooted deeply in social and cultural practice. In his classic essay on the topic, Henri Bergson observes that “laughter is always the laughter of a group” (“Laughter” 64). A powerful group laughs at the expense of subordinates; powerless groups laugh at the pretensions of their superiors; laughter always signals pleasure and consolidates relationships. In Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History, Barry Sanders links laughter etymologically to conspiracy where, in Latin, to conspire is to breathe together—as in shared laughter. By contrast, Hobbes’s intellectual perception about laughter as “sudden glory” linked to relative superiority—while deeply perceptive in its early modern context—operates in a somewhat personal vacuum. After all, laughter is most powerful and desirable when shared. Television laugh tracks mindlessly insist on it. Serious negotiations are deeply nourished by it. Laughter eases tension even as it facilitates change. Shared laughter both facilitates and suggests shared understanding. Bergson even referred to laughter as “a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary” (64), adding: “It must have a social signification” (65). To experience laughter is to experience a form of unity that is related to understanding and that suggests a kind of liberation. The radical comedy of early modern England asserts such reckless freedoms.

Liberation of course comes in for much relativist treatment in a post-liberal, postmodernist context. Thinking of traditional comic theories in relation to postmodern concerns, philosopher H. Peter Steeves observes suggestively:

Thomas Hobbes’s insistence that all humor stems from a sudden sense of superiority—that jokes bring pleasure precisely because someone is in pain and it is not me—might explain why it is funny to watch the Three Stooges, why it is funny (for some) to tell ethnic jokes, or why it is hilarious to note that Hobbes is dead and you and I are not. (262)

But such an observation gets caught up in its own anachronistic determinism by collapsing emphasis with regard to the polymath author of Leviathan and contemporary theorists (“you and I”) who might disavow all contact with the Three Stooges, or ethnic jokes, or even teaching college subjects in North America. Similarly, when Steeves remonstrates against Bergson:

Henri Bergson’s claim that humor arises from involuntary actions, that we expect to find adaptability and pliability in human beings but when met with a stumbling block—literally or metaphorically—we often still stumble, speaks to the human condition. But in a world where stumbling has become the norm and the possibility of a universal human condition is continually under question, tripping is not as funny as it used to be. (262)

However stumbling will always be the norm in the academy, that place of constant second-guessing where everything—especially such easy essentialism as human nature—is continually under question, automatically subject to reconsideration, and very Bergsonian in its constant questioning and reconfiguration. (It depends what you mean by is.) In fact, such perceptions shade into the embarrassed, self-consciousness of political correctness and comedy of manners. No such manners are effective within the radical comedies of early modern England. Manners are for the “toffs,” kings, counselors, university dons—anyone in authority—and for those comic heroes who would adopt authoritative mannerisms to forward their alternative agendas.

Losers cry; winners laugh. Losers find ways—creative, outrageous, unsentimental, and anti-essentialist—to become winners. Consider the “losers” that assert themselves within the radical comic texts treated in this book. Mak distinguishes himself both as a sheep stealer and as a conduit for Divine possibilities. Barabas appropriates his own stigmatization as a Jew and transgressively transforms his outrage into theatrical empowerment. Sir John Harington, lightly disguised aristocrat bereft of public office, finds authority along with surprising significance in the political possibilities of the public “office” of toilets. Antonio simultaneously plays the role of an anally fixated child and of a high class lover and revenger. Perhaps most radically of all Death, in the form of unremitting plague, discovers that people will develop the immunity of laughter. The grimy complexities of urban London are no match for the schemes of an inner city goldsmith. And finally London itself in Ben Jonson’s vision totters under the civic irresponsibility of carnival queens, working class poets, and confidence tricksters as diverse as Subtle, Face, and Justice Overdo. Contingency trumps morality. These radical comic heroes assert constant change, morphing from low to high and often back again, even as those “moral” antagonists who would curtail change find themselves grappling with misunderstood variety, losing contact with preconceived authority, and impotently wishing that things could return to the way they were.

Comic reversals, complications, and debunkings of authority constantly suspend the usual rules of societal, moral, and sexual conduct. But gendered comic defiance in the early modern English sense does not involve the whispered, attenuated defiance of later middle class and sentimental comedy (especially in novels) where complacent femininity smiles in rebuttal of and collusion with confident masculine sneering. Instead, the early modern female comic (especially onstage) really is a male in disguise, capable of giving as good as s/he gets and laughing unselfconsciously at and with others. Realities go under erasure and possibilities write themselves into rude being as forms of comic improvisation. Things loosen up. Incongruities make sense. Whether in terms of family, marriage, religion, sex, politics, or business, (any one of which usually influences the others), comic complications move life in new and unprecedented directions where change is at once liberating and necessary. Bakhtin is insistent on the flexible comic integrity involved: “Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically” (Dialogic Imagination 23). Moreover, to be realistic about things in Bakhtin’s comic sense involves nonjudgmental entertainment of alternatives. Relax. Don’t get offended. Yes, things are crazy, but everything will be all right. Even the book of Ecclesiastes says as much in its wisdom. Such is the promise of comedy for the religious, the nonreligious, and the literary alike. As will be seen, commentators overstate the “death” of comedy in modern absurdist drama. Absurdity has been there all along, not in terms of transhistoric truth, but nourishing and reflecting forms of behavioral improvisation. If absurdity indeed represented the death knell of comedy, then Marston, Middleton, Harington—even Marlowe and the Ecclesiastes author—would have rung it long ago.

My book focuses itself on the radical comedy of early modern England. That complicated European cultural experience known formerly and as the Renaissance occurred over time and within different contexts, but it signaled massive change in social behaviors and understandings. Historically through art, science, astronomy, agronomy, navigation, personal travel and military adventurism, medical discovery and social reorganization, the Renaissance changed much about the way people aligned themselves to each other and to their own consciousnesses. If, according to Descartes, doubt was the new first principle, and “all coherence gone” was to be observed (as John Donne did famously observe), then a new world of dangerous but joyous possibility certainly presented itself. Cultural elites might well be nervous about doubt and incoherence, but the great silent unwashed majority of people might not be so worried. Doubt and incoherence are only too well known in the world. The dispossessed common folk usually take comfort when their “betters” get nervous about uncertainty. They might even experience that usually forbidden “sudden glory” that Hobbes mentioned.

As will be apparent by now, Bakhtin’s various theories of laughter, heteroglossia of voices, reform from below, and carnivalesque renewal relate suggestively to my argument for the prevalence and necessity of early modern radical comedy. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin links massive change in consciousness with comic possibility and creativity in Renaissance-specific cultural terms:

In the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal, and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture; it emerged but once in the course of history, over a period of some fifty or sixty years (in various countries and at various times) and entered with its popular (vulgar) language the sphere of great literature and high ideology. It appeared to play an essential role in the creation of such masterpieces of world literature as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare’s dramas and comedies, and others. (72)

Bakhtin’s powerfully metaphorical and unsystematic thinking is suggestive for any response to early modern culture. Shakespeare has enjoyed Bakhtinian treatment in critical works such as Siemon’s Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance and Knowles’s Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. Earlier book-length studies such as Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and Bristol’s Carnival and Theater considered Bakhtin’s work more generally in relation to English theater and culture. My project relates Bakhtin loosely to the oppositional comedy of early modern England, a radical comedy that registers itself against delusions of social harmony and order that are promulgated by received authority and against which the spirit of Carnival asserts itself. Herein, to take Bakhtin literally or reject his work as hist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Figures
• 1 Introduction: Comic Performance
• 2 Enter the Comic Hero: The Performance of Mak in the Second Shepherds’ Play
• 3 Wrestling with Comic Villainy: Barabas and other “Heels” in The Jew of Malta
• 4 Grinning and Bearing it: A Plague of Storytelling in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603)
• 5 Humor in High (and low) Places: Toilet Tales and The Metamorphosis of Ajax
• 6 Marston’s Absurd Theater: The AntonioPlays
• 7 Sex, Lies, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
• 8 “Of What Bigness? / Huge”: Ben Jonson’s Supersized Comedy
• Works Cited
• Index