[fragmentary] Chapter 2
Elizabethan Drama Disdains the Bourgeoisie
Under the heading Part I. What Needs to be Explained: The Rhetoric of the Aristocratic and Bourgeois English
Something happened to the standing of a bourgeois life in England between 1600 and 1848. With whom? How to prove? Where exactly? In what respects exactly? A sheer, material, Marxist “rise of the bourgeoisie” does not seem to explain it.
fragmentary Chapter 2:
Elizabethan Drama Disdains the Bourgeoisie
{{Contempt for the market is very old. Aristotle quotes.
Aquinas made excuses for profit, but Chaucer is hostile to merchants. . . or is he? Give analysis of that. But certainly in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. . . ., and here we should start.}}
And so let us examine the rhetoric in 1600 and 1848. Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 and editions down to 1651):
What’s the market? . . . . A turbulent troop of impurities, a mart of walking spirits, a shop of knavery, a nursery of villainy, the scene of babbling . . . . in which kill or be killed, wherein every man is for himself, his private ends, and stands upon his own guard. No charity, love, friendship, fear of God, alliance, affinity, consanguinity, Christianity, can contain them. . . . In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonam [this can't be right] is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affection, all. . . . It is not worth, virtue, . . . wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling.
Burton,
reprinted in Gross,
The New Oxford Book of English Prose, pp. 76-77.
Lisa Jardine notes the parallels between market deals and medieval fealty. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta the Jew “Barabas’s ability to generate wealth with apparent effortlessness, leading to a kind of intimacy based on dependency upon access to that wealth.” Think of fair-weather friends clustering around your local millionaire. “Although ultimately this inevitably gives way to dislike and bad faith, it briefly simulates the kind of ‘friendship’ which was the basis for peer bonding and service of a more customary kind.” That is, it looks liked feudal clientage, made sacred by oaths given and received. We can’t help but feel that a business deal is a bond of trust. Humans are that way. We may know better in our more cynical moods, but “at the point of dissolution of such a bond, both parties experience the breakdown as betrayal,” as though a purchase-and-sale agreement were a blood bond of fealty (Jardine, 1996, p. 102).
One strange feature of both Barabas in The Jew of Malta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is their great eloquence before their social superiors. As Lynne Magnusson points, comic effect in Shakespeare is often achieved by the middling sort trying to speak posh, and disastrously failing (Magnusson 1999, p. 120). Barabas and Shylock have no such problem, and speak in blank verse [check].
It is by now widely realized that the 16th-century in Europe, with its increasingly literate and even rhetorically cultivated elite, came to view the keeping and finding out of secrets as a suitable occupation for a nobility recently disemployed by the invention of peasant armies with guns. Compare the making over of the samurai in Japan a century later into a Confucian bureaucracy in support of the Tokugawa state —though the samurai was a bureaucracy with swords and the right to use them on commoners at will, the peasantry having in the meantime been disarmed. In Japan and especially in Europe talk became the chief weapon of class. The English gentleman by 1600 is eloquent, not a mere fighter. . NNN speaks of the “displacement of masculine agency from [military] prowess to [diplomatic and political] persuasion” in the 1560s and 1580s in England and France. [Usurer's Daughter, p. 89].
The commoner by contrast stumbles comically in speaking to social superiors—or so at least Shakespeare seemed to believe, in characters like Dogberry [check] in Love’s Labor Lost [check]. Lisa Jardine notes the suspicion generated if the intelligence is in the wrong hands: “The figure in the [Elizabethan] drama of the diabolical merchant-usurer-intelligencer is. . . a consolidated cultural manifestation of such an unease concerning mercantilism and deferred profit” (Jardine 1996, p. 103)
Alan Stewart (quoted in Jardin 1996, p. 105) summarizes it as “there were in early modern England dramatic uncertainties about the power of information and those who possessed it. ” Literally “dramatic”: they were the impulses behind Elizabethan plays.
“The taint of usury constrained mercantile activities” (Jardine 1996, 107).
Lynne Magnussson 1999, p. 124:
“Such a narrative is fleshed out in fascinating detail by Jean-Christophe Agnew, who argues that, between 1550 and 1750, “a volatile and placeless market” triggered a “crisis of representation” that “transfigured” social relations, a crisis in which he sees the theater as also implicated. Agnew emphasizes how the “liquidity” of the money form radically changed the nature of the exchange transaction, extending the immediate exchange between two people in time and space by splitting it “into two mutually indifferent acts: exchange of commodities for money, exchange of money for commodities; purchase and sale. ” This material condition of the market exchange, with its deferral of face-to-face negotiation, marked the merchant’s relations and his emerging discourse as impersonal, and in Agnew’s theatricalized reading, increasingly dissimulative: as mis-representation, the secretive holding back of private meanings. In this narrative, the transformation occurring is unidirectional: “commodity exchange was gravitating during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries toward a set of operative rules that fostered a formal and instrumental indifference among buyers and sellers. ” The market, this argument goes, has no place for reciprocity as a new “logic of mutual indifference” comes to define the exchange transaction. 21 I”
This is quite mistaken, depending on a “competitive” reading of capitalism, Contrary to all this, “David Sacks’s interpretation of the changing environment within the merchant community over the course of the sixteenth century, it comes to seem less strange. Sacks accents how ‘[t]he new forms of commercial organization that emerged in Bristol during the sixteenth century depended … upon the existence … of close personal ties and the mutual trust they engendered among overseas merchants’” (Magnusson 1999, p. 129). Among gentlemen the “pleasuring style” of letters used a rhetoric of asked favors, granted instantly out of noble friendship. But merchants, too, used it most vigorously: there may have been a “logic” of mutual indifference, but like Hobbes’ “logic” of the war of all against all it was a mere logic, not an actual practice of properly socialized merchants with complicated and risky deals in mind. As the historian of the Bristol Merchant Venturers, David Sacks, puts it, “nothing could be further from the truth . . . [that] the mercantile profession . . . [was] composed of isolated individuals, each single-handedly confronting the pitfalls of the marketplace.” [quoted in Magnusson 1999, p. 130] “Rather than plying their trades alone,” Sacks continues, “Bristol’s merchants habitually aided one another by dealing in partnership, by serving as factors and agents, by acting as intermediaries in the delivery and receipt of coin or goods, and by jointly transporting merchandise” (61).
“For Michael Ferber, for example, the “conspicuous largesse” of such gestures belongs to the ideology of the nobility and “is of course the opposite of the calculation and curiositas associated with the poor and especially with merchants. ” In Ferber’s interpretation, Shakespeare brings together in Antonio’s portrayal a number of ideological discourses incompatible with Elizabethan realities in order to invent and celebrate an idealized version of mercantile enterprise separated from finance capital and consonant with Christian and aristocratic values.” {in Magnusson 1999, p. 134] Magnussson disagrees that fulsome rhetoric of friendship was foreign to merchants. Again, as with Agnew, our desire to see merchants as “rational” is getting in the way of seeing them as humans.
The merchant, especially abroad, was wise to use humility. John Browne’s The Marchants Avizo (1590) advises the young merchant “in any case show your self lowly, courteous, and serviceable unto every person: for though you and many of us else may think, that too much lowliness bringeth contempt and disgrace unto us: yet . . . gentleness and humility . . . will both appease the anger and ill will of our enemies, and increase the good will of our friends” (p. 3, sig. B2, quoted in Magnusson 1999, p. 127). This is not the advice that a young nobleman would get.
Showing how the elite formed in many societies is shown well in this chapter. Could there be more information about the elite in the rise of the fuedal instituions beginning in the 12th century in Japan. But maybe just showing the Tokugawa perios is evident enough. I would of liked to see some more information on the bourgeois in Japan in comparison with other countries.
Written by Allen Tanttari on April 23rd, 2007.Thoughts on Shylock: according to my copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, the full title is The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice. Is Shylock or Antonio the titular merchant? Also, Shylock speaks in blank verse some of the time, but also in pentameter, such as when he first meets Antonio. It is true that Shylock gets the best lines and still gets come-uppance. And also that of all the various merchants’ motivations (love, profit, revenge), his are the most deeply felt and profound and the most unrealized. I think the play could be read in two ways, both of which are anti-merchant. First that merchants are on a par with Jews, wihch in the Judeophobic ideology of the time was a bad thing. Second that in the world of the merchant the best and brightest can still lose out to trickery and bad luck.
Written by Paul Boucher on April 23rd, 2007.I am not sure about the strength of Barabas and Shylock as examples because they are Jewish characters. They are stereotyped as merchants and as Jews. Would they be different characters if they were non-Jewish merchants. As for the reason for “their great eloquence before their social superiors”, isn’t it part of Jewish culture to be as cultured as possible? I know that in the 1800s Eastern European Jews were literate even if they lived humbly, so it is possible that the difference in Barabas and Shylock’s speech compared to other middlings is a cultural difference?
Written by Iliana Perea on April 26th, 2007.Messrs. Tantarri & Boucher, and Mlle. Perea, merci bien.
Allen: Yes, the Japanese case is an important parallel. I work on it some in The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and will do more with it in this book. The reason it is an important parallel is that Japan under the Tokugawa looked so much like England, so ready for modernity—yet turned from it until 1867.
Paul: Good idea, that both merchant figures, Jew and gentile, come off badly, and that certainly the world of merchant speech is undermined. But all speech is undermined in Shakespeare. I need to study other Elizabethan dramatists, who are more flatfooted and therefore simpler to read than The Bard. I think Antonio is The Merchant of the title, as the first scene esablishes (and the dramatis personae, I recall, says).
Iliana: Shakespeare and Marlowe were just making up their Jews out of more or less ignorant prejudice and folk tale, since neither of them knew any, or many (Jews were still excluded from England). Yes, Jews were learned proverbially, but this did not recommend one in Christian folk ideology, not at all: see the persistent figure of the Evil Scholar (Faust, Frankenstein).
Written by Deirdre McCloskey on April 30th, 2007.Finally a more readable chapter. The language usage seems fine and the chapter follows a good and relative chronological order. Bringing in the Jewish merchants is a fine idea since all the merchants amd bankers were Jeewish. Good use of examples.
Written by pawel chrobak on May 8th, 2007.