Parsing the City

Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy's London as Language

Heather Easterling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135863258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Parsing the City updates our understanding of Jacobean city comedy's discursive role in its London society. Working with three major plays by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, thisbook develops an updated reading of Jacobean city comedy as a dramatic subgenre whose engagement with early modern London was centrally linguistic and semiotic-- its plays staging and interrogating the city as a series of languages and language problems.

Chapter One

“Noise of a Thousand Sounds”: Anxious Plenty, Language, and London

This chapter aims to establish London c. 1610 as a setting and society self-consciously experiencing great change with a distinct, accompanying ethos of proliferation and fragmentation. Language historians like R.F. Jones and Richard Bailey have taught us to understand the early modern period as one during which “consciousness of the vernacular was so keen and widespread that it is manifested in all kinds of writing … [but] the potentialities of the language were in large measure concealed.”¹ I see a crucial relationship between this concern for the vernacular and its authority and the problem of encompassing the increasingly urban world of London in the same period. Jacobean London’s preoccupation with the urban and the excessive overwhelmingly focuses on the linguistic itself. In text after text, we may witness the extent to which the vernacular is not only a trope of the particular copiae of seventeenth-century London, but is a central concern of the society; words are as much the root as the symbol of the society’s sense of proliferation and fragmentation. The instability of such urban copiousness is signaled by the alternate celebration and condemnation observable in any survey of works from the period. The combination of exuberance and anxiety with which London’s burgeoning variety and modulating identities are discussed is striking, as is the diversity of discursive sites animated by this ethos of proliferation. Social and political concerns are language concerns; the discourses of fashion, of decorum, of nationalism, of sexual roles and differences, of political hierarchy, are all self-conscious vocabularies—what makes London London, in this period, is its representation via a profuse vernacular. It is a ubiquitous topos of the period, holding distinct implications for reading urban literature like city comedy.

It is important to foreground this climate within which seventeenth-century city comedy evolved in England. This connection between the urban, perceptions of the profuse, and the still-stabilizing vernacular is key to understanding both the genre’s taking up of the linguistic and discursive as modes of considering its society, and its plays’ preoccupation with language by virtue of their embedded-ness in the daily life of the city. Urbane, satiric comedy has a long, classical history—in its focus on city life Jacobean city comedy is not unique; as well, many writers in other modes in this period express a corresponding interest in questions of the vernacular. The city comedy of the early seventeenth-century is nonetheless a unique phenomenon in its explicit imbrication of language and the city in the culturally potent forum of the theater, and in its consistent situation in the contemporary city, not a foreign or ancient locale. A significant element of English city comedy’s work, according to Jean Howard, consisted of “posing and providing imaginary solutions” to the problems of the city and of city life.² The problem most consistently and diversely confronted in city comedy, I contend, is the vernacular and its ability to cohere an increasingly incoherent world. Jacobean city comedies are self-conscious responses to their society’s coincident preoccupation with proliferation and with language.

The work of this chapter first will consist of surveying a range of materials and events from the period, and discussing each one’s reflection of the issues sketched above in order to establish the climate within which city comedy’s language-project developed. Beginning with such an obvious source as the language and word-guides that began to appear in great numbers for the first time in the period, it will move to consider the antitheatrical tracts of Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson, John Stow’s Survey of London, some educational institutions, and the influence of a Scots king. Following this, the chapter concludes by focusing such a spectrum of vernacular concern more directly in terms of the three playwrights whose selected plays are the focus of this study: Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker. All three wrote non-dramatic works for publication; Middleton, for example, was as well-known for his authorship of civic pageants, particularly the annual Lord Mayor’s installation, as for his stage-drama. A brief reading of Jonson’s Discoveries and Grammar, selections from Dekker’s numerous pamphlets, and the range of Middleton’s focus on London all offer insight into these writers’ interest in language and the city, and into their use of city comedy as a distinct means of thinking through this interest.

LANGUAGE ANXIETIES IN PRINT, CITY, COURT

City comedy takes up the vernacular as its means of examining urban society at a time when London, and especially its burgeoning variety, was being widely noted. Statistically and historically, early modern London was the site of enormous growth and change in the period from 1580 to 1640, and particularly following the accession of James I in 1603.³ People flocked to the city’s economic opportunities from outlying regions; the city’s traditional guild structure and governance, though still in place, increasingly were inadequate to the contemporary realities of new populations, new civic needs and pressures, and the growing predominance of wealthy merchant-trade interests. London was unrivalled as an urban setting, both within England and without. It was “the Epitome and Breviary of all Britain,”⁴ according to William Camden, the period’s great historian and chorographer, a description whose implication of orderly significance was more wishful than actual, for there was heightened concern among officials regarding the “problem of order,” according to historian Keith Wrightson. “The times seemed out of joint,” even to contemporaries.⁵ London life had no comparable equivalent elsewhere in England, and its singularity rested not simply on its size, but on its accompanying mutability and questionably coherent setting.

We can observe in a range of Jacobean works a marked response to this question of coherence in the form of varying methods and targets of ordering and classification. If, as Richard Helgerson has argued, Elizabethan writers collectively engaged in the “writing of England, ”⁶ the early Jacobean climate focused on the scrutinizing and organizing of England, specifically London. And just as with Helgerson’s Elizabethans, the central component of any English work was English itself. Camden, for example, whose Brittania (1587) Helgerson sites as an important component to the Elizabethan generational project of England, published a distinctly different kind of book in 1605, Remaines Concerning Britain.⁷ The Remaines is an encyclopedic study of the language, not the land, of Britain. Tracing the Remaines’ origins, its editor R.D. Dunn characterizes it as a work “born of the same patriotic impulse which lies behind so much of Elizabethan culture” (xvi), but the same editor later notes that the Remaines in fact proceeds differently than Brittania:

In the Brittania Camden was interested in languages as the ‘surest evidence of the original of a nation’ … This preoccupation with national identity has given way [in Remaines] to a … consideration of languages in general, their characteristics and development, beginning with the ‘confusion of languages out of Moses.’ (xxii)

This, I would argue, is a Jacobean project, exhibiting desire for an ordered vernacular simultaneously with self-consciousness of a variety resistant to order. In the same text, Camden complains, “I may be charged by the minion refiners of English, neither to write State-English, Court-English, nor Secretary-English, and verily I acknowledge it. Sufficient it is for me, if I have waded … in the fourth kinde, which is plain English” (Remaines 36). Making sense of a city and society in flux depended on making sense of a vernacular widely perceived as itself changing and as profuse an emblem of Englishness as London. A broad range of texts, whether explicit or implicit in their treatment of the language, establish this context for Jacobean city comedy in which societal order and disorder become questions of the linguistic or discursive.

The First Dictionaries—

Sixteenth-century precursors like William Bullokar’s Booke at Large, for the Amendment of Orthographie for English Speeche (15 80) and Richard Mulcaster’s Firste Part of the Elementarie (1582) already were in circulation, but when the first true dictionary of vernacular Englishwas published in 1604—Robert Cawdrey’s “A Table Alphabetical”—it ushered in a flurry of additional efforts which mark the early seventeenth-century as a period of particular concern for vernacular standardization.⁸ Language historian John Earl Joseph, argues that the crucial vernacular development phases of expansion and stabilization fairly exactly correspond with the latter sixteenth-century and the seventeenth-century, respectively. Joseph is summarized by Juliet Fleming:

In the first phase, attention to the perceived “inadequacy” of a native tongue gave rise to a period of rapid elaboration, during which structural or lexical elements were added to make the language adequate to new needs. In the second or restrictive phase of standardization regulations were introduced to stop unsupervised elaboration and make variation less a matter of choice than of fixed rules.⁹

The vernacular elegance of Elizabethan poets ‘proved’ the eloquent potential of English by 1600, but the language remained unruled. The transition of English into the second and restricting, “standardization” stage “can be plotted by the gradual yielding of sixteenth-century works on rhetoric to the grammars, orthographies, and dictionaries of the seventeenth-century” (Fleming 184). The language and word guides of the seventeenth-century were a direct response to a perceived abundance, even over-abundance, of the lexicon. Their project, whether implicitly or explicitly announced, was the ordering and containing of such linguistic excess. The very proliferation of these same guides, however, had the ironic effect of amplifying vernacular concerns and the impression of copiousness. In the brief survey here, I will suggest that such an epochal project of reform, if ultimately it produced the sought-for coherence, mainly belied significant doubts about its subject, English itself, as a language of stability, much less of privilege.

Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical is presented as: “conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, etc., with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillful persons” (Blank 20). Cawdrey’s presentation of English in terms of its legion new words from foreign tongues is striking. In his Preface, Cawdrey renders this problem in more intimate terms: “Some men seek so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers [sic] language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell, or understand what they say” (Fleming 195). There are several problematic layers to this figuring of language-change in familial terms. Most obvious is the anxiety of a newly unnatural vernacular that distances its speakers from their home and identity, but there is also the anxiety of an outdated but native language (that of an older, mother’s generation) that has been abandoned for a more elusive, unstable medium. If Cawdrey’s goal in such prefatory words is to critique the influx of foreign, “hard” words, what his Table in fact accomplishes is a codification, or attempt at ordering—at “Englishing”—such words. His project, echoed by those that followed him, reveals the coinciding enthusiasms for a certain copiousness and for coherence (for language as a cohering system) in the period. Cawdrey’s Treasury or storehouse of similies (1600), a text that predates the Table by four years, makes this vivid in its figuring of a storehouse for similes “for all estates of men in general.” This is systematized knowledge for all to use, made available by way of a vast receptacle for quantities of an explicit commodity. Apart from the striking mercantilist terms, what is emphasized, I would suggest, is sheer quantity for consumption.

Cawdrey’s Table was followed, and copied, by John Bullokar’s English Expositor (1616), Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionary: or an Interpreter of hard English words (1623), and Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656), each one typically crediting its predecessors while also announcing its own innovation.¹⁰ Thus, the complete title of Cockeram’s Dictionary reads:

The English Dictionarie: or An Interpreter of hard English Words. Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewoman, young Schollers, Clarkes, Merchants, as also Strangers of any Nation, to the understanding of the more difficult Authors already printed in our Language, and the more speedy attaining to an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing. Being a Collection of the choicest words contained in the Table Alphabetical and English Expositor, and of some thousand words never published by any heretofore. (title page, italics mine)

The melodramatic flourish of the last phrase curiously contradicts the earnest, taxonomic quality of the title up till that point; the urge to standardize and the titillating inclusion of yet more and more words once again coincide to place in relief the anxieties and pleasures of the transitioning vernacular. If Cockeram’s title suggests a text that alternately orders and expands, his predecessor Bullokar’s English Expositor accomplishes both at the same time. In his “Instruction to the Reader,” Bullokar clarifies his purpose in focusing only on “the hardest words used in our language,” making explicit that his text is not a guide to common usage. Instead, “if a word bee of different signification, the one easie, the other more difficult, I onely speake of interpretation of the hardest, as in the wordes Tenne, Girle, Garter, may appear” (title page “Instruction”). In apparently organizing and codifying these hard words, Bullokar also succeeds in multiplying the different words’ possible significations, a provocative if accurate practice that seems guaranteed to augment popular perception of vernacular change and slipperiness, not contain it.¹¹

These and several other early English dictionaries explicitly invoke a female readership in their dedications, which Juliet Fleming reads not simply as good patronage-politics, but in fact as evidence of “gender difference … provid[ing] a conceptual grid within which the English vernacular came of age as an authoritative tongue” (178). By such regular appeals, the female reader and speaker comes to represent problems of the vernacular, a key assertion of Fleming’s that re-frames early modern discourse itself, and discursive constructions of women, particularly urban women.¹² Cultural and feminist critics, for example, have long noted commonplace conflations of the extravagant or excessive with the feminine. Excess, whether sartorial, cosmetic, libidinal, or—significantly—rhetorical, has been identified a...