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Festivity and satire in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Festivity and satire in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his Time. Thomas Middleton. Born 1580, son of a wealthy London bricklayer; Studied at Oxford, though did not graduate;

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Festivity and satire in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

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  1. Festivity and satire in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside EN301: Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his Time

  2. Thomas Middleton • Born 1580, son of a wealthy London bricklayer; • Studied at Oxford, though did not graduate; • Wrote numerous city comedies over the early 17th century, including A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1604), A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1605), and Michaelmas Term (c. 1605), often for boys’ companies. • Also wrote some notable tragedies, including Women Beware Women (c. 1621), The Changeling (with William Rowley, c. 1622) and (probably) The Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1606). • Probably collaborated on or adapted several of Shakespeare’s plays (possibly Macbeth, Timon of Athens, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure). • A Chaste Maid in Cheapside was written and performed c. 1613.

  3. The changing city • Social and economic change • Growth of international trade • Expansion of mercantile middle class • Migration from the countryside, massive growth in population: • Yellowhammer mentions that he came from Oxfordshire, “though now a citizen” (4.1.186); • Dutton notes that “…the play realistically depicts provincial women sucked into prostitution in London” (317).

  4. The changing city • Swiss physician Thomas Platter on visiting London in 1599: • “Most of the inhabitants are employed in commerce; they buy, sell and trade in all the corners of the globe, for which purpose the water serves them well, since ships from France, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries land in this city, bringing goods with them and loading others in exchange for exportation. … In one very long street called Cheapside dwell almost only goldsmiths and money changers on either hand, so that inexpressibly great treasures and vast amount of money may be seen here.”

  5. Cheapside c. 1561

  6. Goldsmiths’ Row on Cheapside during the coronation of Edward VI, 1547

  7. The changing city • Susan Wells notes that the vogue for city comedy lasted “roughly from 1605 to 1630”, and that plays by Jonson, Middleton, and Marston tended to be “distinct in tone and structure from older romantic treatments of the city” (1981: 37). She sees it as marking a crossroads in urban culture: • “In the city comedy, two contradictory aspects of the marketplace, a central urban institution of the pre-industrial city – commerce and celebration – confront each other dramatically. Thus, the city comedy is an attempt to recover, by stating in new terms, that harmony between the commercial and the communal organization of the city which chroniclers like Stow imaginatively portrayed as part of its recent past, but which was being compromised by the rapid growth, commercial development, and royal domination of the city during the Jacobean period.” (Wells 1981: 37-8)

  8. Carnival and Lent (Pieter Bruegel, 1559)

  9. A goldsmith’s shop, 1576. Engraving by Étienne Delaune, France.

  10. Chaste Maid as satire • As we saw last week, “city comedy depends less than other kinds of plays on any requirement for communal renewal and more on an emphasis on individual, mostly economic, survival” (Liebler 2005: 254). • In his discussion of Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, Paul Yachnin observes that every character in city comedy tends to be “a petty capitalist, driven by social and mercenary self-interest to commodify his or her intelligence, wit, or sexuality” (1997: 74).

  11. Chaste Maid as satire • In drawing attention to the play’s Cheapside setting, Middleton is clearly making some sort of commentary on the role of commerce in contemporary London life. • As Leonard Tennenhouse argues, the “acquisitive desire” that motivates capitalism was seen as neither commendable nor natural by the Jacobean audience: • “…‘covetousness’ was neither represented as man’s natural legacy nor understood as the agency for his success. The Renaissance understood it to mean a purely destructive hunger that led to rapaciousness” (1986: 167).

  12. Chaste Maid as satire • “Yellowhammer” is not only colloquial for a gold coin, but also for “fool”. • When Touchwood Junior says “’Twerea good mirth now to set him a-work / To make her wedding-ring” (1.1.155-6), going so far as to order his prospective father-in-law to engrave “Love that’s wise / Blinds parents’ eyes” (1.1.186-7), he is enacting a classic trope of city comedy: the witty young gentleman getting one over on a mean-spirited “citizen”. Except, of course, that it doesn’t quite work…

  13. Chaste Maid as satire • For Joanne Altieri, Chaste Maid exposes “the extent to which purported kinship relations are in fact economic relations” (1988: 176). • Moll is described as a “jewel” (4.4.24), and compared to “gold” which has turned “into white money” (5.2.16); her brother thinks of her elopement as equivalent to the theft of his father’s “plate”, “[b]esides three chains of pearl and a box of coral!” (4.2.3-4). SIR WALTER. …ere tomorrow noonI shall receive two thousand pound in goldAnd a sweet maidenhead worth forty. (4.4.48-50)

  14. Chaste Maid as satire • The play’s motto might be Sir Walter’s line, “A goldsmith’s shop sets out a city maid” (1.1.99). • Opening: “Enter Maudline and Moll, a shop being discovered.” • Discovery space as theatrical “shop front”? MAUDLINE. I hold my life you have forgot your dancing – When was the dancer with you? MOLL. The last week. MAUDLINE. Last week? When I was of your bord he missed me not a night;I was kept at it; I took delight to learn, And he to teach me; pretty brown gentleman, He took pleasure in my company… (1.1.14-19)

  15. Chaste Maid as satire • Comic inversion: SIR WALTER. Yet, by your leave, I heard you were once off’ringTo go to bed to her. ALLWIT. No, I protest, sir! (1.2.94-5) WAT. God-den, father. ALLWIT. Ha, villain, peace. NICK. God-den, father. ALLWIT. Peace, bastard! (1.2.103-4)

  16. Chaste Maid as satire • Several characters comically (and hypocritically) attempt to adhere to two mutually contradictory sets of social norms: • Sir Walter claims to shun Touchwood Junior “like pestilence / Or the disease of lust” (3.1.51-2) YELLOWHAMMER. Well, grant all this, say now his deeds are black,Pray, what serves marriage but to call him back?I’ve kept a whore myself, and had a bastardBy Mistress Anne, in anno – […]The knight is rich, he shall be my son-in-law;No matter, so the whore he keeps be wholesome,My daughter takes no hurt then; so let them wed:I’ll have him sweat well ere they go to bed. (4.1.237-47)

  17. Chaste Maid as satire • It is possible to read the play’s satire as potentially subversive: for Altieri, “the play consistently reveals the customs and rules attendant upon primogeniture as hollow, foolish, and in conscious or unconscious league with the monetary values that plague the characters” (1988: 182). • Indeed, Touchwood Senior is “poor” because he is “a younger brother” (2.1.87-8); the Kixes’ desire for a child is driven primarily by their need to secure their inheritance; Sir Walter’s way of life is funded by his (eventually thwarted) expectation of inheritance. • Problems of illegitimacy: Sir Walter frets about what to do with his illegitimate children when he is married (1.2.110-11); the Wench abandons her fifth child with the Promoters; the play’s resolution hinges upon the necessity of nobody ever finding out that Sir Oliver Kix’s heir is not, in fact, his own child after all.

  18. Chaste Maid as humoral comedy • Touchwood Senior observing the Kixes: “to say which of their two humours hold them / Now at this instant, I cannot say truly” (3.3.39-40). • French philosopher Nicolas Coeffeteau: • “there were some which have believed that as there were four chief winds which excite divers storms, be it at land or sea; so there are four principal Passions which trouble our Souls, which stir up divers tempests by their irregular motions” • Gail Kern Paster argues that • “Middleton’s drama provides vivid examples of the early modern understanding of emotions as material events—bodily in origin, humoral in nature, and influenced by social and environmental factors inside and outside the embodied self. … For the early moderns, explaining human behaviour was often a matter of recognizing the action in the body of the four elements (fire, water, air, and earth) and the four qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry) that defined them.” (2012: 150-1)

  19. Chaste Maid as humoral comedy • It may help to think of “humours” as the attitudes in which particular characters are stuck. • French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) argued that humour arises from “automatism” and “inelasticity” in characters: • “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.” (1900: 97); • Laughter is usually accompanied by an “absence of feeling” and “is always the laughter of a group” (1900: 63, 64); • “In laughter we always find an unavowedintention to humiliate, and consequently correct our neighbour” (1900: 148).

  20. Chaste Maid and comic structure • The play juggles four plots: • Moll’s intended marriage to Touchwood Junior and proposed match with Sir Walter Whorehound; • Tim’s arranged marriage with the Welsh Gentlewoman; • The Allwits’ unusual domestic arrangements; • The Kixes’ procreationaldifficulties. • These plots interweave and mirror each other throughout: TOUCHWOOD SENIOR. Some only can get riches and no children,We only can get children and no riches! (2.1.11-12)

  21. Chaste Maid and comic structure • I concluded last week’s lecture on Measure for Measure by quoting Leslie Smith on some of farce’s defining features: • “…the accelerating pace of the action, the multiplication of misunder­standings, reversals, and confusions of identity, and often also […] the inventive prodigality of the playwright, a juggler’s ability to keep a great many balls in the air at once.” (1989: 207) • Middleton brings all four plots together brilliantly in the final act: the Touchwood Junior and Kix plots climax at once to thwart Sir Walter, one leading to his arrest and the other his disinheritance (though both, of course, are charades), which in turn resolve the Allwit plot.

  22. Chaste Maid and comic structure • Comic resolution? ALLWIT. What shall we do now, wife? MISTRESS ALLWIT. As we were wont to do. ALLWIT. We are richly furnished, wife, With household stuff. MISTRESS ALLWIT. Let’s let out lodgings then, And take a house in the Strand. (5.1.156-9) • The Strand was “the most fashionable quarter of Jacobean London”, but there is a hint “that Allwit has a high-class bordello in mind” (Dutton 347).

  23. Chaste Maid and comic structure • Communal renewal? • Aside from Sir Walter, everyone professes to be happy at the end, including the characters we might expect to have been humiliated: YELLOWHAMMER. I will prevent you all and mock you thus,You and your expectations: I stand happyBoth in your lives and your hearts’ combination! (5.4.57-9) TIM. I’ll love her for her wit, I’ll pick out my runts there;And for my mountains, I’ll mount upon—(5.4.111-12) • Sir Oliver Kix promises to bankroll Touchwood Senior’s continued over-procreation. • The play ends with Yellowhammer inviting everyone to feast with him at Goldsmiths’ Hall. So, is this a festive comedy?

  24. Carnival and the Elizabethan stage

  25. Carnival and the Elizabethan stage • Theatres in the Elizabethan period were distinctly carnivalesque spaces, as Michael Bristol argues: • “Theatre occupies a marginal space as well as a marginal time. This is pragmatically true of the earliest Elizabethan playhouses, which were situated outside the formal jurisdiction of the city authorities, although they remained de facto an integral part of the city’s economic activity.” (1983: 648) • Note Touchwood Senior’s praise for the “honest watermen”: “as they get their means by gentlemen, / They are still the forwardest to help gentlemen” (4.3.4-5).

  26. Bakhtin and Carnival • Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1896-1975) is a key theorist in the study of the “festive laughter” of the Medieval and Renaissance periods – the celebratory laughter of festivals, carnivalsand feasts. The central idea is that “festive laughter” allows the old, dying world to give birth to a new one. Laughter in this sense is fundamentally progressive. • Bakhtinidentifies the three key features of festive laughter: • It is “not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people.” • It is “universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants.” • It is “ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.” (1965: 11-12)

  27. Bakhtin and Carnival • While Bakhtin argues that the mockery and inversions of carnival show up “established authority and truth” as “relative” (1965: 256), he also argues that festive laughter is incompatible with satire: • “The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.” (1965: 12)

  28. Bakhtin and Carnival • We might ask, then, whether Middleton is satirising the grotesque city types he presents to us, or in some way celebrating them. • Susan Wells uses Bakhtin to argue the latter: • “Bracketed within contexts of moral ambiguity or licensed festivity, the commercial rogues of these plays allow the exchange relations of the city full entry into the arena of communal celebration. Buying and selling, living by one’s wits, changing one’s social role in pursuit of gold, become new skins for the old wine: celebration of the body, of the cycle of birth and death, in a space outside the direct control of laws and hierarchy.” (1981: 56)

  29. Lent and the repression of Carnival • In carnivalesque imagery, says Bakhtin, the human body “is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people”: • “The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes. […] To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth.” (1965: 19-21)

  30. Lent and the repression of Carnival • Chaste Maid is certainly full of grotesque bodies: its constant innuendo draws attention to the bodily and deflates the pretensions of the would-be intellectual (Tim, Tutor), refined (Maudline, Lady Kix) or religious (First Puritan). • Touchwood Senior is ludicrously promiscuous, not to mention fertile (“I had no less than seven lay in last progress / Within three weeks of one another’s time”; 2.1.62-3) • The memorable Christening scene makes much of bodily functions.

  31. Lent and the repression of Carnival • Touchwood Senior elaborates on “this strict time of Lent” in 2.1: Flesh dare not peep abroad now. I have knownThis city now above this seven years,But, I protest, in better state of governmentI never knew it yet, nor ever heard of.There has been more religious wholesome lawsIn the half circle of a year erectedFor common good than memory ever knew of… (2.1.106-14) • (This is true – in 1613, recent laws had restricted the performance of plays during Lent…)

  32. Lent and the repression of Carnival • But are these strictures doing any good? • The Promoters are using their jobs as enforcers of Lent to celebrate their own private Carnival: ALLWIT. This Lent will fat the whoresons up with sweetbreads,And lard their whores with lamb-stones (2.2.62-3) • They also accept bribes, for example from the “wealthy merchant” Master Beggarland: FIRST PROMOTER. You know he purchased the whole Lent together,Gave us ten groats a-piece on Ash Wednesday. (2.2.125-6)

  33. Lent and the repression of Carnival • The “grotesque bodies” of the play puncture what Allwit describes as the “carnal strictness” of the city during Lent (2.2.71). • Meat-eating is linked with illicit sex throughout the play: • Touchwood Junior describes Sir Walter’s action of bringing the Welsh Gentlewoman to London as having “brought up his ewe-mutton / To find a ram at London” (1.1.132-3); • Touchwood Senior refers to his illegitimate baby as a “half yard of flesh” (2.1.84) • Maudline turns the conversation with Tim’s Tutor rapidly from philosophising to “goose-pies” (3.2.148) – and, it’s hinted, other pleasures of the flesh… • Allwitdescribes his domestic arrangements as “his living; / As other trades thrive, butchers by selling flesh, / Poultersby vending conies, or the like” (4.1.212-14).

  34. Lent and the repression of Carnival • The First Puritan, who we might expect to represent a Lenten force, also succumbs to Carnival, taking three lots of sweets (“I had forgot a sister’s child that’s sick”, 3.2.57) and downing several glasses of wine (3.2.77-88) with the excuse “I would fain / Drive away this--hup!--antichristian grief” (3.2.87-8). • When she falls over through drunkenness, she says: ’Tisbut the common affliction of the faithful;We must embrace our falls. (3.2.166-7) • It is significant that Middleton, always alert to a double entrendre, gives her the name “Mistress Underman”…

  35. Lent and the repression of Carnival • For a play set during Lent, it is particularly full of sports and games metaphors: • Touchwood Junior’s “game” with the ring; • Touchwood Senior’s curse “in that game / That ever pleased both genders: I ne’er played yet / Under a bastard” (2.1.53-6); • Touchwood Junior and Sir Walter’s duel (“being of even hand, I’ll play no longer”; 4.4.63); • Allwit’sconclusion that “There’s no gamester like a politic sinner, / For whoe’er games, the box is sure a winner” (5.1.168-9).

  36. Resurrection and renewal • Do we believe the news of Touchwood Junior’s apparent death (from a servant, then his brother?). Middleton plays his cards close to his chest in the text, though of course in performance the ruse may be clearer. • Easter-like resurrection and communal response: TOUCHWOOD SENIOR. Up then apace, And take your fortunes, make these joyful hearts;Here’s none but friends. [Touchwood Junior and Moll rise out of their coffins] ALL. Alive, sir? O sweet, dear couple! (5.4.27-9)

  37. Celebration or satire? • Jean E. Howard points out that aside from Sir Walter, Chaste Maid’s “unrepentant characters fluidly refashion themselves and escape punishment” (2007: 139). • Wells reads the play as a combination of both festive and satirical comic forms, suited both to the cynical audiences of the private playhouses and the popular audiences of the public theatres: • “Within the play, festive and communal forms are generally debased; they become, in the hands of the Yellowhammers or of the greedy gossips, transparent excuses for accumulation. But in the final image of the resurrected lovers, Middleton preserves the celebratory tone of the festal marketplace, an image of communal re-creation, of the pretence of freedom so intensely experienced that it becomes real.” (1981: 57-8)

  38. References • Altieri, Joanne (1988) ‘Against Moralizing Jacobean Comedy: Middleton’s Chaste Maid’, Criticism 30: 2, pp. 171-87. • Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. • Bergson, Henri (1900) ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher (1956) Comedy, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 59-190. • Bristol, Michael D. (1983) ‘Carnival and the Institutions of Theatre in Elizabethan England’, ELH50: 4, 637-54. • Howard, Jean E. (2007) Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. • Liebler, Naomi Conn (2005) ‘English Comedy, Elizabethan and Jacobean’, in Maurice Charney [ed.] Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, Volume 1, Westport, CT / London: Greenwood, 248-62.

  39. References • Paster, Gail Kern (2012) ‘The Ecology of the Passions in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Changeling’, in Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley [eds] The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, Oxford: OUP, 148-63. • Smith, Leslie (1989) Modern British Farce: A Selective Study of British Farce from Pinero to the Present Day, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. • Tennenhouse, Leonard (1986) Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres, London / New York: Methuen. • Wells, Susan (1981) ‘Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City’, ELH 48: 1, 37-60. • Yachnin, Paul (1997) Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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