Public Houses and Licensed Governance

Habermas originally envisioned the rise of the public sphere in England and France as characterized by “forces endeavoring to influence the decisions of state authority” which appealed “to the critical public in order to legitimate demands before this new forum.”Footnote ²³ This was a period of time—initiated in the seventeenth century and fully actualized by the turn of the eighteenth century in England and France—in which public opinion was not “mere opinion” or “deceptive mere appearance” but rather “collective mores and customs” expressed in an “informal web of folkways whose indirect social control was more effective than the moral censure under threat of ecclesiastical or governmental sanctions.”Footnote ²⁴ For Habermas, the metropolitan coffeehouse exemplified this refinement of “mere opinion.”Footnote ²⁵ The town was, Habermas explains, “the life center of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies).”Footnote ²⁶ In addition to its “equality of status,” the public established by the coffeehouses was notable in its attention to domains of “common concern,” which previously had been the preserve of church and state authorities.Footnote ²⁷ The circulation of printed texts (newspapers, periodicals, journals, and other products of the press) played a central role in allowing this sphere to detach itself from the intimacies of home. The issues discussed became “general,” Habermas explains, “not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate.”Footnote ²⁸

Such discourse, according to the familiar Habermasian narrative, was intended to place matters for discussion in a sober and rational way among equals. As the historian Brian Cowan comments, coffeehouses were places “for like-minded scholars to congregate, to read, as well as to learn from and to debate with each other” and “generally understood as places ‘too civil for a debauched humour.’”Footnote ²⁹ “Right reason,” he notes, “and not social rank, was supposed to determine who won and who lost in debate.”Footnote ³⁰ To be sure, coffeehouse discussions could be lively and animated. As Habermas himself points out, governmental proclamations in the 1670s described coffeehouses as “seedbeds of political unrest,” “endeavouring to create and nourish an universal jealousie and dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects.”Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, by and large, Habermas tends to skim over these strong emotions of jealousy, dissatisfaction, and agitation. Instead, he focuses the bulk of his attention to the rational-critical function of the coffeehouse as a “little senate,” where “earnest” and “critical attention” has been “conspicuously cleansed” of “unreliability” and members employ “tact benefitting equals” to allow “a political consciousness developed in the public sphere of civil society which, in opposition to absolute sovereignty, articulated the concept of and demand for general and abstract laws and which ultimately came to assert itself (i.e., public opinion) as the only legitimate source of this law.”Footnote ³²

The most significant absence in Habermas's account is the broader context and history of public houses in England, which presaged and heavily influenced later Georgian coffeehouse operations and culture. “Coffeehouses were regulated,” Cowan explains, “through the same system of licensing used for public houses that specialized in the sale of alcoholic drinks, such as alehouses and taverns.”Footnote ³³ Addressing the history and operations of public houses in more detail allows us to understand not only the complicated conceptions of sobriety and intoxication in the period, but also the ways in which these contributed to affective, bodily, and performative practices of politics.

Alehouse, tavern, and other drinking cultures flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. Especially in the period between 1600 and 1660, drink had a highly charged status in England. During the late sixteenth century, the rural poor in England often turned to ale making to supplement their incomes in depressed economic circumstances and the number of alehouses expanded enormously by the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁴ Beer consumption, in the hundred years after 1541, rose from 2.7 million to 5 million, and beer eclipsed ale as the metropolitan staple of choice.Footnote ³⁵ There was vigorous debate in print and from the pulpit between the 1600s and 1630s on the social disorder caused by the rise in the number of alehouses.Footnote ³⁶ For some, indeed, drunkenness was not just a matter of criminal mischief or disorder; it was often treated as the most heinous of possible sins. In 1604 James I called “drunkenness” the “root of all evils,” while in 1622 the minister Samuel Ward claimed that drunkenness was “‘all sinnes' because it fostered them all.”Footnote ³⁷ By the middle of the seventeenth century, as literary scholar Joshua Scodel notes, “Puritan attacks on drunkenness and Parliamentary policy in the 1640s and 1650s responded to this fear, which was increased by concerns about the alehouse as a meeting place both for radical separatist groups preaching antinomian freedom (as well as the joys of alcohol and tobacco) and for rebellious Royalist sympathizers.”Footnote ³⁸ Even though alehouses, by the end of the seventeenth century, garnered a more respectable status, they were still, especially in the cities, often seen “as ‘receptacles of sots, and the scum of the Earth’ and tavern clubs were all too often mere ‘suck-bottle Assemblies' bearing a closer resemblance to gatherings of ‘swill-belly'd wine-porters, than a formal body of… reputable members.’”Footnote ³⁹

Nonetheless, despite the vigor of seventeenth-century antialehouse rhetoric, the alehouse was—and remained for the first half of the seventeenth century—a central space for community and culture. While alehouses were associated with some theft and prostitution, their association with serious crime was overstated both by Puritans and elites.Footnote ⁴⁰ But what they did often provide, according to historian Peter Clark, was the very basic needs of the destitute, which included providing credit, mail, lodging, and entertainment.Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, the church had lost some of its position as the “hub of communal life as the result of concerted action by godly ministers and Puritan justices,” and the alehouse provided an important alternative forum for communal activity—hosting games and entertainment and serving as a local site for christenings, weddings, churchings, and elaborate toasting rituals.Footnote ⁴²

Most of all, in this period, the alehouse was “the single most important locale where people engaged in political discussion,” as Tim Harris and others have noted.Footnote ⁴³ It frequently served as a site of oppositional speech, or “alebench talk,” on “the principles of succession,” “administration of justice,” loyalty, and obedience. Some of this “talk” took the form of railing and debating on issues of theology. Others took the form of “seditious outbursts,” as historian Mark Hailwood notes in his examination of court records: “In 1641 one Thomas Stafford was indicted for speaking seditious words at an alehouse in the Yorkshire village of Youlthorpe, where he was accused of declaring Charles I ‘fitter to be hanged than to be a Kinge’ and ‘the Kinge and Queene was at masse together.’”Footnote ⁴⁴ In other cases, frustrations were cast in more rebellious tones as laborers complained of how “rich men” starved the poor and fantasized of the day when “poore men woll speke one daye.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike the ideal highlighted by Habermas, these were not protected spaces of calm and measured deliberation, where a variety of perspectives could be freely expressed and engaged through reflective discussion. Instead, “alebench talk” was both more emotive and more judgmental in its intoxicated outbursts, complaints, and criticisms.

At the same time, the alehouses were also not simply places of fractious discontent. “Alebench talk” illustrated the central political place of the public house in England's “unacknowledged republic.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although nearly half of alehouses in the late sixteenth century were unlicensed, by the middle of the seventeenth century a majority operated under license and with the toleration, permission, and regulation of landowners, elites, and police.Footnote ⁴⁷ The forms of political association and sociability facilitated not only by alehouses but also by taverns, inns, and drinking societies were an influential feature of both urban and rural politics and they set the groundwork for the later emergence of coffeehouse culture.Footnote ⁴⁸ Much of the earlier historical literature on alehouses described them as alternatives (as in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century) or t exceptions to elite political and social institutions (middle to late seventeenth century).Footnote ⁴⁹ However, as a number of recent studies have shown, the alehouse was intimately connected to the “emerging” coffeehouse in important ways. Throughout the mid-seventeenth century, there was a strong structural and affective connection between the alehouse and the coffeehouse—a state of affairs that expands and revises the popular characterization of the coffeehouse as a place of sober deliberation. Namely, the bourgeois coffee house, Beat Kümin explains, was built on the foundation laid by “traditional” drinking establishments.Footnote ⁵⁰ Most critically, alehouses and inns were a central part of the semiautonomous and self-governing political cultures of the period, where magistrates and local office holders had a critical role in the “practical day-to-day regulation of the coffeehouse” and other public houses in their jurisdictions.Footnote ⁵¹

Even though various Acts and Proclamations (i.e., the 1606 “Act for repressing the odious and loathsome sin of drunkenness”; the 1604 ”Act to restrain the inordinate Haunting and Tipling of Inns, Alehouses, and other Victualling Houses”; the Royal Proclamation of 1619) were passed to set up a protonational regulatory framework for public houses in the early seventeenth century, alehouse regulation and licensing were still largely localized and “bottom-up” in operation.Footnote ⁵² Surprising perhaps to more modern sensibilities, the governance of taverns, alehouses, and inns was part of nuanced practices of character in which personal attributes of “discretion,” “honesty,” “judgment,” “decorum,” and “moderation” were expressed in the procedures and practices of local governance. As part of the “unacknowledged republic,” “governance,” Mark Goldie clarifies, “was not something done from on high to the passive recipients of authority, but something actively engaged in by the lesser agents of government; and every citizen was in some measure a lesser agent of government.”Footnote ⁵³ For example, alehouses and other public houses participated in the discursively dynamic and interactive political processes of the city commonwealths that flourished in the period after 1620.Footnote ⁵⁴ These were multiform and local civic cultures. Shaped in part by the Aristotelian sense of rule by the meritorious and “best” rather than by blood and inheritance, they embraced some elements of the idealized moderation and civility in the Restoration revival of civic humanism. Alehouse licenses were granted or revoked by local county magistracies, and, as Mark Hailwood aptly notes, these justices were often heavily petitioned by both supporters and opponents who identified themselves not just as “inhabitants” of their community but as “men of best quality,” or “the better sort,” equipped to speak on behalf of the collective body about the risks or benefits posed by the presence of alehouses in local communities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Brewers, tiplers, supporters, and opponents saw themselves as local officeholders concerned with providing provisions and services for their constituents, determining regulations dealing with the origins and effects of crime, and conducting trade.Footnote ⁵⁶

As Phil Withington notes, “civic licensing” in the public houses ”served as the primary means of civic governance.”Footnote ⁵⁷ More specifically, tavern and alehouse keepers negotiated pub licenses, regulated tavern operations, and managed company operations by using precedent and arguments that relied on the Restoration's civic humanist conceptions of rights and liberties.Footnote ⁵⁸ These responsibilities were part of a broader early modern understanding in which participation in community was understood as a matter of office. “An office,” Conal Condren explains, “was an identifiable and discriminate constellation of responsibilities and subordinate rights, or liberties asserted to be necessary for their fulfillment, manifested in a persona and regarded as in some way socially necessary or acceptable. … It affirmed a social being analogous to human corporeal identity of flesh, fluids, bones, and humours.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Office was multifaceted and performative: it required responsiveness to a variety of constituents—superiors, peers, subordinates. As tasks of membership practiced by middle-class and upper-class citizens, these were not part of a static assemblage of rights and privileges, but rather processes of “talking and acting” in which the “discreet,” “better,” “able,” and “honest” members of the community were expected to assemble, advise, and act according to their “wisdoms” and “discretions.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Even though tiplers and brewers often did not have a formal company to regulate the trade, they were nonetheless under significant pressure to employ their discretion to produce “sureties for good behaviour, making tiplers as obligated to neighbours, friends, and kin who provided them with credit as they were to the civic magistracy.”Footnote ⁶¹

What is at stake in this fleshing out of office is not simply renewed attention to the public house as a significant space for governance but also a distinctive articulation of the processes of participation. The early modern rhetoric of licensed privilege expands conventional conceptions of the public sphere, allowing political theorists to see some of the ways in which office holding and civic values were at work in the protocommunities of the various public houses of early modern England. Indeed, these protocommunities possessed some of the features of “self-created” society, as in Jason Frank's suggestive phrase: they were spaces that fostered dissent and disagreement and, although they were nominally authorized by national authority, they were also made up of people who persistently fulfilled, negotiated, and challenged governmental power.Footnote ⁶² The “discretion” needed to attend to the interests of constituents required a persistent evaluation and reassessment of the forms of “talking” and “acting” needed for “better” and “best” performance. As we will see next, feeling, in the form of affect and emotion, played a critical role in the sensitivity and capacity of subjects to “talk” and “act”—to reason—with others.

Alternative Societies and the Emotional Politics of Drink

Traditionally, early modern drinking and intoxication have been described as panaceas for the poor and plebeian, those left behind by the forces of civility.Footnote ⁶³ Even when theorists look to recuperate the alehouse as a site of political resistance, they still view it as a dissident site opposed to the mainstream: a central place where “control, surveillance, and repression of the dominant are least able to reach.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In James C. Scott's account of the alehouse, for instance, subordinates in societies with a profoundly unequal distribution of power rarely risk an open challenge to elite hegemony, reserving their criticism for expression in situations that were free from the usual constraints of power—“sequestered social sites.” These are “locations in which the unspoken riposte, stifled anger, and bitten tongues created by relations of domination find a vehement, full-throated expression”—what Scott evocatively describes as the “hidden transcript of power relations.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By contrast, I will argue here that intoxication also served a more mainstream and, at times, even elite role in shaping early modern political culture. In particular, taverns and alehouses traversed distinctions of plebian and bourgeois and they hosted a gestural and performative political discourse of healths, ballads, and songs in which (1) feelings of wit and pleasure were seen as crucial elements in shaping political attachments and identities, and (2) a form of affective political reason emerged as relevant to the claims of “self-created” societies.

Notably, in the early seventeenth century, taverns hosted drinking societies that debated politics, created poetry, and exercised the creative imagination.Footnote ⁶⁶ Members of the Inns of Court met at the Mitre and Mermaid taverns in the 1610s and 1620s and formed a “convivium philosophicum,” which was, in Michelle O'Callaghan's fitting description, “a self-conscious revival of the Roman convivium. By combining convivia and amicitia, the convivium cultivated an idealised space of social equality in which social boundaries could be relaxed, permitting liberties of speech and the enjoyment of pleasure, although not to the extent that conviviality degenerated into the incivilities of drunkenness.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In these spaces, civil conversation was created not merely by setting aside a space for deliberation, pace Habermas; such dialogue was more messily and more affectively established through “rituals of social intimacy and identification,” which included the practice of various arts of expression, creativity in the form of poetry and wit, and special rituals of drinking.Footnote ⁶⁸

As Hobbes's remark in the epigraph reminds us, early modern England had an ambivalent stance on intoxication and the heightened form of consciousness associated with it. Intoxication was seen as the facilitator of unruly passions but also, at times, as necessary to access the emotional and affective states needed for reason and political engagement. By contrast, to be sober did not mean simply to abstain from drink, as in our more modern conception. Rather, according to period understandings, sobriety reflected a particular relationship toward enthusiasm, or more specifically, unregulated and reactive beliefs. Particularly in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, to be sober referred to appeasement and pacification, freedom from harshness or violence, as well as to the moderation and quieting of one's feelings by “the exercise of self-control.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Most importantly, intoxication and sociability were deeply intertwined. Taverns were seen as valuable spaces for the dramatization of social interaction because they were, like other drinking houses, “indispensable social agencies”: “places where people met to trade news, to discuss business and politics and to be sociable, taking pleasure in company and performing social rituals that contributed to a sense of belonging within a community.”Footnote ⁷⁰ As David Zaret explains, “inns and taverns were nodal points for dissemination of news and political discussion.”Footnote ⁷¹ Less regulated than alehouses, taverns such as the Mermaid and the Mitre were also self-consciously elite spaces, in which private rooms were set aside for the meeting of drinking societies, such as “the right Worshipfull Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen.”Footnote ⁷² But while these drinking associations occupied a private room, they were still nestled within a largely public arena and available for public entry. Moreover, as O'Callaghan notes, “the convivium enabled the creation of communities organized by horizontal relationships, epitomized by friendship, rather than the vertical hierarchies of status and rank.”Footnote ⁷³

Thus, while the drinking societies of early seventeenth-century London were styled as elite and urbane by participants and in period literature, they were also not entirely exclusive or based in fixed membership, but instead established through “well-confirmed habits of formal socializing among a wide section of friends and associates in the West End of early seventeenth-century London.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Drinking ritual lent process and stylistic form to the core of these “well-confirmed habits” of socialization. Expression—and creation—of affection was fostered through drinking healths and pledges, which sought to forge close social bonds and group solidarity in “reciprocal salutation, joining of hands, sociable and familiar conversation.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As one of Pepy's well-known ballads enjoined:

The giving of toasts and healths, along with other practices of revelry, such as verbal dueling, were all part of a complex habitus of stylized and self-conscious debauchery. As Pepys notes above, not only is drinking a prerequisite for a self-created social group of “all good fellowes,” it is also needed to sharpen the “wit” and opens up the possibility for embracing “true joy.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Here, intoxication was seen not as an exception to rationality, but instead as pivotal to the exercise of a “complex collective and convivial identity” which helped to “establish the foundation of the early modern public political sphere.”Footnote ⁷⁸ “A group of companions,” Rebecca Lemon explains, “would pledge to the health of one another, as well as to absent friends, loved ones, or superiors, often while kneeling or doffing a cap. Each drinker would pledge in turn. Obliged to respond, the pledger's companions would raise their drinks and either drain their glasses in unison or pass around a healthing bowl from which everyone would take a gulp.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In fact, ”these early tavern societies,” O'Callaghan further observes, “can be seen as early types of political clubs. They were vital spaces in which merchants, lawyers, parliamentarians, courtiers and men of letters could hold conversations on a range of issues.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In that way, this convivial state can also be viewed as an important component of the forms of office holding and civic governance discussed in the previous section, where the cultivation of discretion and the recognition of the activities of office needed the mobilization of both body and mind to “good fellowship,” camaraderie, and social belonging. Drinking and socializing were not just forms of entertainment or mere frivolity, but rather were conceived of as ways of attending to the needs and interests of others. Such fulfillment of “persona,” Condren notes, cannot be met with mere participation in a role by an autonomous and emotionally detached subject; rather, it involves “a field or range of responsibilities to others and to the office itself, and ideally, the persona needed to manifest a certain mix of virtues, capacities and technical skills of varying specificity to those ends.”Footnote ⁸¹

What did this entail? As we saw before, persona included responsibilities to and for patrons, as well as practices and skills of governance and civic participation. But there was also an emotive component to persona as well. Specifically, the pursuit and embrace of pleasure was central to convivial engagement. Wine, in particular, was strongly connected with one of the central pleasurable virtues of Restoration civic culture, namely, wit. Taverns were transformed into “a feast-place of the gods” not by food or wine but by “energeia of wit,” which, in taverns such as the Mermaid, intensified “pleasure into poetic rapture.”Footnote ⁸² Intoxication by wine was seen as key to the pursuit of wit because it freed the mind and tongue to stimulate liberty of speech and it also enabled an epicurean expansion of reason, in order to explore states of pleasure. This wit was not mere humor or even sarcasm. Rather, as noted by Hobbes, it was part of the “virtues intellectual,” which engaged various “abilities of the mind” and “go commonly under the name of a ‘good wit,’ though the same word ‘wit’ be used also to distinguish one certain ability from the rest.”Footnote ⁸³ In particular, in Hobbes's estimation, wit operated dialectically to negotiate between two capacities, fancy and discretion. Fancy referred to the “succession of men's thoughts,” the apprehension of like and unlike, and the observation of “what they serve for” or “how they serve to such a purpose.” Discretion, in contrast, required “distinguishing, and discerning, and judging between thing and thing… particularly in matter of conversation and business; wherein times, places, and persons are to be discerned.” For drinkers, Hobbes noted, “the effect of the wine, does but remove dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their passions.” Thus, in his account in the Leviathan, “the most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of mind, would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publically seen.” Intoxication enabled a crucial lifting of inhibition, which allowed not only the faster and more lively apprehension of phenomena but also importantly the ability to better discern “times, places, and persons.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Intoxication thus can release the body and the mind to pursue a kind of enlarged freedom, what Hobbes describes as removing “dissimulation,” in order to access a kind of guided passion, ”which is a confession that passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This is what we might consider a form of affective political reason, in which capacities of discretion, understanding, and action were stimulated by states of intoxication. While it would be easy to dismiss convivial revelry as simply the frivolous pursuit of pleasure in drinking healths and playful toasting, the convivium was more robustly social and political: it modeled an alternative community in which one exercised a “speculative liberty” guided by the tension between inhibition and apprehension, what O'Callaghan describes as “opposite physical and ethical states.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This liberty “required the participant to maintain a state halfway between sobriety and drunkenness; a moderate pleasure that did not descend into the riotous excesses of the barbarians, but was not restricted by the dull gravity of the sober.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Too much drink rendered men mad, Hobbes observed, “some of them raging, others loving, others laughing, all extravagantly, but according to their several domineering passions.” As a result, socialization was necessary to regulate intoxication. As Hobbes cautioned, “without steadiness and direction to some end a great fancy is one kind of madness.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Properly regulated, intoxication stimulates camaraderie and fraternal bonds among interlocutors and it also loosens inhibitions to enlarge the rational faculty to discern, understand, and engage alternative ideas, conceptions, and understandings.

These features help complicate Habermas's familiar conception of the public sphere and they heighten both the emotional and political features of early modern drinking culture. In part, convivial drinking culture can be conceptualized in Habermas's terms as an “emerging” public sphere in which an “institutional facilitator”—the public house—provides a spatial arena, “an interstitial” space “between private relationships and the state” in which numerous participants are welcome.Footnote ⁸⁹ Owing to its largely elite membership, what emerges there is only incompletely public, although the convivium does provide some measure of shared social support in which “interlocutors” engage each other freely as equals within a protected space. Yet, drinking culture did not provide a neutral and uncontested space for political expression and critical engagement. Instead, intoxication offered the possibility of guided stimulus for the exercise of an affective political reason which could be used to discern an enlarged set of possibilities, to banter and converse more freely, and to engage in shared camaraderie.

As we will see next, tavern ballads and songs in the latter half of the seventeenth century illustrate how intoxication involved not only wit but also melancholy. Moreover, ballads and songs illustrated the emergence of a shared understanding of legitimacy and dissent characterized by specific forms of feeling.Footnote ⁹⁰

Performing Politics, Picaresque Publics

Despite Puritan and Whig efforts to turn proclamations against intoxication into performances of political power, criticized drinkers, of both the lower and upper classes, often responded by embracing—not denying—drink, and in doing so, sought to validate passionate and affective dimensions of politics. The politicization of intoxication took on an even more pronounced character by midcentury, which witnessed the greater polarization of the middle and upperclasses in tavern culture, and here, unlike the convivium, feelings of both pleasure and melancholy predominated. In particular, Royalist poems, songs, and ballads in taverns and inns in the interregnum years capitalized on the class differences between beer/ale and wine drinkers to launch political attacks.Footnote ⁹¹ Songs and ballads that defended Cavalier intoxication focused on their conviviality, wit, and boldness. Type of drink mattered. Wine was used “both to Quicken the Wit, and enliven the blood.”Footnote ⁹² By contrast, ale drinking was associated with Cromwell and the commonwealthsmen, and Royalist balladeers associated ale with a range of attributes, some of which were contradictory: ale “makes our spirits muddy” and was evidence for the Roundheads' “base behavior” and dullness and dreary sentiment. However, in other moments, ale also posed the risk of fostering rebellious, seditious, and “anarchic” behavior.Footnote ⁹³ As Marika Keblusek explains: “In his account of the destruction of Norwich Cathedral during the Civil Wars, Bishop Joseph Hall lamented the sacrilegious behavior of the soldiers who had turned the church into an ‘Ale-house,’ ‘drinking and tobacconing… freely.’ Getting them drunk was the only way to make parliamentary soldiers fight and ‘to pour out their blood in the act of rebellion,’ the royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus scorned.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Angela McShane Jones further notes, “The interregnum years were a time when the morale of the royalists was inevitably low. Defeated in battle; the King dead; deprived of their estates through sequestration (a theme consistently brought up in ballads during the period); their ‘natural’ position in society was gone and they had been replaced by socially inferior commonwealth men. Cavaliers feared that the king of their hearts, Charles II, would never be able to return.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Drink was seen as a balm that soothed, drove away melancholy, and lifted the spirits.Footnote ⁹⁶ During the Interregnum, when Cromwell had “the upper hand politically,” Cavaliers employed their affection for wine and camaraderie to bolster and soothe their spirits in a period of defeat.Footnote ⁹⁷

Ballads possessed an especially striking status as both discourse and performance. In both alehouses and taverns, political broadside ballads were cheaply and widely distributed, pasted or pinned to walls and posts in alehouses and taverns. Often printed on single sheets, with a popular tune title and a woodcut illustration, they were sold by “hawkers” who also sang them aloud, in the street or in alehouses and taverns. Single prints usually cost either a half or full penny, roughly the same as ale or a loaf of bread. Composed by drinkers or “pot poets,” largely for the purposes of earning drink money, ballads were part of the commercial dimensions of tavern business.Footnote ⁹⁸ In addition, because they were also “informally” distributed through performance and song, ballads were easily accessible to a large audience that included not only Cavalier elites, but also lower-class artisans, husbandsmen, maids, and apprentices, allowing those who either did not want or could not afford to purchase the ballad prints to participate in political performance.Footnote ⁹⁹ This slippage from material to performance made ballads a particularly slippery form to regulate because—with their propensity for oral transmission—they quickly left the realm of text and thus print censorship.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Ballads politicized drunkenness and made it clear that drink served a political purpose in driving away melancholy after political defeat (Royalists in the interregnum or criticisms of laborers by elite Puritans). Yet ballads did more than offer a medium for lodging criticism; they provided the terms by which the performance of politics would take place. In particular, ballads were used to coordinate social and political behavior, bringing together actors in rituals of song and collective practice. As Natascha Würzbach notes, ballads were not abstract representations of drinking rituals and practices; they were integral to practice in both content and material. Ballads on the subject of sociable drinking were in fact intended to be performed in the context of sociable drinking; they were passed around and shared by patrons singing over a jug of wine or a growler of ale.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, the broadside ballad, often decorated with woodcut images of tavern patrons engaged in song, also provided visual direction on its performance. As Patricia Fumerton comments, when the ballad broadside sheet was pasted on the walls, it served as “the poor man's oil painting” which surrounded patrons not just with the medium for performance but also public self-images.Footnote ¹⁰²

We might think of these drinking ballads as staging “dramatization,” to borrow Deleuze's phrase. “They are,” Deleuze notes, “dynamisms, dynamic spatio-temporal determinations, pre-qualitative and pre-extensive, taking ‘place’ in intensive systems in which differences in depth are distributed.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Deleuze's insight helps us to parse the ballad as functioning in myriad ways—as a performance that operates at the level of the individual and the group, as a script for political action, as a starting point for a burgeoning political identity. For example, one of the most popular ballads of the period, Alexander Brome's “The New Courtier,” highlights the centrality of intoxication as a feature of Cavalier identity and as part of the process for responding to political defeat.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In “The New Courtier” (cited above in this article's opening epigraph), drinking is described in affective and corporeal excess, as “eyes” “run over” and “sad souls” are drenched in “big-bellied bowls” when a personified “goblet” is crowned. The ballad evokes the disorder of a monarchy upended, but the excessive drinking also lodges a refusal to succumb to defeat: “Let the giddy-brain'd times turn round” because “our monarchy thus will recover.” In a period of occupation and monarchical disorder, “steeping” “sorrows in sack” is a kind of perverted “reason” in which drinking and singing are political actions that satirically recharacterize the conventional celebrations of a newly crowned king into a “mournival of healths.” Indeed, here, proving “it by reason” is itself a multifaceted performance—not just of drinking and singing but also of holding on to the specter of a “new crown'd King,” despite Cromwell's current reign. This is a form of reason that is affective in its sensitivity to feeling and it operates to link different individuals in a shared rationale in its political ambitions to respond to injury. Moreover, as the ballad conveys, political opposition mounts with “each successive drink”:

The song goes on to mourn the loss of possession caused by the Puritan confiscation of estates and it identifies the experience of imprisonment under Puritan rule. Yet the focus in much of the song is as much on melancholy as on refusal to succumb to fear. “Pox on this grief, hang wealth, let's sing / Shall kill our selves for fear of death?” The repeated calls to sing and to hope are all efforts to stir political animation in the face of defeat. When situated in the context of the tavern with its circulating broadsheets and collective singing, the ballad can be thought of both as performances of political identity and acts of political assembly. Drink is not the balm that soothes and enables a mournful withdrawal from politics. Instead, sorrow stimulates the capacity to drink and to sing and, in the course of intoxicated drinking and singing, creates political alliance and emphasizes political opposition.

In that way, there is something akin to the dynamics of melodrama at work in these drinking ballads. As Elisabeth Anker evocatively notes, melodrama designates political actors in Manichean terms as either “victims” or “evil Others” and it treats the experience of suffering as a moral mark of virtue.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This marshaling of melodramatic affect helps to create a more clearly drawn map of right and wrong which enables those who “are overwhelmed by forces outside their control” to find a way to move forward and put “an experience of powerlessness into a comprehensible, narrative form.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Melodramas, Anker suggests, “display gestural language and spectacles of unjust victimization that can cultivate heightened affective experiences of distress, terror, sorrow and pity, and anticipation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But, at the same time, it is precisely in making a more theatrical spectacle of political injury that this moral economy of good and evil becomes homogenizing, conveniently absolving “victims” of responsibility and rendering “illegible” certain causes and effects of political violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To be sure, in historical terms, ballads are not in the same genre as melodramas and they are part of very different theatrical traditions. Yet, especially in its attention to heightened feeling and the formation of political identity, Anker's assessment provides some useful prompts for better attending to the affective logic at work in drinking songs.

In particular, the dynamics of melodrama can help us to diagnose some of the features of political frustration and suffering at work in another popular ballad of the period, Brome's The Royalist:

Here, melancholy is again registered in the “sorrow” that “dares not show its face” as well as in the feeling of imprisonment as if “birds in a cage.” However, drinking here does not solely focus on an apathetic misery. The experience of intoxication allows Brome to gesture toward acts of freedom that can come in the midst of political frustration. This includes letting “cups go free” and singing “freely,” as well as the collective act of coming together in a “health.”

The health was an especially significant shared political act. In a period in which administering politico-religious oaths to the general public had “sensitized large swathes of the population to their religious and legal significance,” the loyal-health, as McShane Jones notes, became “an exclusive ritual that could be used to challenge the political or religious loyalties of strangers or neighbours gathered in a public place.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Both the Protectorate and Charles II had issued bans against loyal-healths and many ordinary people risked not drinking healths precisely because of the civic and religious weight of such oaths. Nonetheless, despite its at times illegal status, for much of the public the “loyal health” still remained a pivotal political practice. It was a public act of political consolidation in a context of insecurity and it helped to ground both Cavalier and Jacobite political identities as it was also later to prove critical to the Whigs and Tories in “demonstrating, determining, and even inculcating affection and allegiance.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Notably, with the Restoration, an intoxicated “pleasurable liberty” returned, arguably in an even more vigorous and combative culture of drink.Footnote ¹¹² As Scodel explains, “The celebrations that began on May Day (May 1) 1660, when Parliament invited Charles II to return as king, and continued with his entry into London on May 29 included fountains running with wine, a prodigious number of healths to the king, and symbolic expulsions of the killjoy ‘saints.’”Footnote ¹¹³ In fact, in this period, refusal to engage in convivial drinking became, at times, a questionable trait—evidence of a possible longing for a return to the Protectorate. In addition, Tory drinking songs were composed in the late 1670s and early 1680s in which Tory group drunkenness was contrasted with Whig sober and “rebellious sullenness.” For example, in the ballad “Merry Boys of Christmas”: “these hypocritick knaves / denounced our harmlesse joys / and silenc'd all the loyall staves / chorus'd by roaring boys.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Whigs were now cast as the “coffee house crew,” as McShane Jones explains; they were “doubly damned either as miserable misers who would not buy or enjoy a drink, or as the worst kind of drinkers, who did not drink to be merry or in good company but to be drunk and cause trouble.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Moreover, nondrinkers—and especially nonparticipants in toasting and drinking healths—were labeled traitors by both Whigs and Torys. During the Popish Plot and Exclusion crises, gangs of both Whig and Tory apprentices stopped coaches and passers-by to demand money for healths and they attacked pub signs and taverns.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Indeed, even if coffeehouses were self-consciously positioned as places of measured sobriety in theory, in practice they were often as rowdy as the taverns they replaced.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Coffeehouses are “alehouses,” Daniel Defoe would later remark, “only they think that the name coffeehouse gives a better air.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

These are features of politics and political life often difficult to see from the vantage point of more canonical treatises or philosophical essays. As Andrew Murphy suggests, an increased sensitivity to issues of genre, social life, and conflict enables us to develop a more grounded understanding of the generation of political theory in the mundane spaces of everyday political life. “These are part of the exercise of (and resistance to) political power,” Murphy clarifies.Footnote ¹¹⁹ By reading atypical texts such as broadside ballads, songs, poems, and conduct books of early modern English drinking culture for “gesture” and “action,” rather than “principle” or “tenet,” we can see that intoxicated forms of pleasure and melancholy were used dynamically to describe political positions and to spur political assemblies.Footnote ¹²⁰ Rather than a more formal conception of “right reason” which is exercised impartially to deliberate upon action or to petition for change, the affective political reason stimulated by intoxication mobilizes feelings and affects to generate action and response in the face of defeat. This version of reason takes place not in institutions and through more formal processes of deliberation, but rather in a shared understanding of legitimacy and dissent performed through song, gesture, and displays of affect.

For Whigs and Tories during Charles II's reign, ballads, songs, toasts, and pamphlets not only helped to consolidate mainstream and elite political identities but also increasingly pushed politics “out of doors.” As the historian Tim Harris notes, while Tories may have “condemned the rabble-rousing techniques of the Whigs” and the “dim-sighted” perspectives of the “multitude,” they nonetheless increasingly sought to craft a counterdiscourse to the Whigs in ballads, songs, broadsides, and “publick demonstrations,” all in an effort to better manage public opinion.Footnote ¹²¹ This was a vernacular and contested politics that was unlike the theatrical displays of Elizabeth and the remote Charles I. Despite Charles II's initial desire to end “political disputation out-of-doors,” it “proved impossible to silence the press, clamp down on public political debate, or stop those out-of-doors from expressing their political dissatisfaction with government policy.”Footnote ¹²² Moreover, unlike the deliberative forms of debate and reflection discussed by Habermas, these political practices and exchanges were considerably more unruly and raucous—performed in a loyal-health, exercised in an intoxicated discussion, sung in an overripe lament. Conspicuously, Restoration symposiastic poets freely associated drunkenness with liberty and resistance to the established order, as in Abraham Cowley's 1660 ode which associated loyalty to the king with drunken excess.Footnote ¹²³ By the late 1670s and early 1680s, the earlier political distinctions established between ale and wine drinkers gave way to a “politicization of drunkenness,” where “Whigs and Tories now attacked each other in terms of their consumption of drink, using established ballad-drinking discourses.”Footnote ¹²⁴

The intoxicated excesses, affects, and rituals of the alehouse, tavern, and pub expand our conception of the early modern public sphere, rendering it in more dynamic, embodied, and affective terms. In contrast to more familiar narratives which situate drink as the “narcotic” for the poor, a sign of their desire to be anesthetized against the strains of contemporary life, it is clear from the examples that we have seen thus far that intoxication—and the forms of outburst, complaint, drama, and song that shaped practices of drinking—proliferated across distinctions of plebeian and bourgeois, royalist and parliamentarian, Whig and Tory. These are all groups that practice a form of “insurgent politics,” to borrow Frank's perceptive phrase, which employs “noise, theater, declamation, testimony, and protest” not simply to “gain attention” but to constitute themselves as self-created societies.Footnote ¹²⁵

In these exchanges, emotion, drama, and ritual possess an abiding influence within the emergence of the public sphere as the body and its feelings take center stage. In part, we might characterize these acts as part of a political theory in the vernacular, where gesture and song reveal reason as “performative” enactment—a common sensibility created through physical rituals and shared affective practices that mobilize political action. Reason, as we have seen, was shaped by somatic registers of feeling and sociability to a far greater extent than recognized by Habermas, even if it also tends, in certain cases, toward moralizing discourses of good and evil that were not particularly attentive to either political reflection or accountability. Additionally, these intoxicated “self-created” societies complicate the Enlightenment narrative offered by Habermas by offering up an alternative genealogy of the public sphere, one which more strongly emphasizes the role of affect, shared social ritual, and passionate feeling. Michel Foucault describes genealogy as a process of tracking the remainders of reason—the errors, the accidents, and the deviations from what is commonly narrated as reason's progressive development. In Foucault's characterization, “to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Tracing this history allows us to temper the oft-told progressive narrative of reason's dispassionate rise, as it also enables us to begin to cobble together an alternative conception of the public sphere and its affective rituals. For example, after the seventeenth century, there continued to be various examples of intoxicated sociability, as Stella Achilleos writes in her study of the Anacreontic Society, an eighteenth-century gentlemen's club that took Anacreontea (a collection of Greek lyrics that celebrated the pleasures of love and wine) as its inspiration. The Anacreontics appropriated the “symposium as a topos of polite sociability,” and they also instituted rules for intoxication.Footnote ¹²⁷ In this context, drink was still seen to have the “power to suspend life's care and grief” and arouse “the sacred madnesse” of the soul, but it was now also perceived as a more moderated indulgence that needed to be managed conscientiously to better promote conviviality and companionship.Footnote ¹²⁸ Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a culture of drinking and intoxication also played a significant role in politics. Tavern sociability, as the historian Peter Thompson argues, played a significant part in the political discourse of Philadelphians in the pre-Revolutionary period.Footnote ¹²⁹ Through drink and conversation, the creation of “notional and temporary equality” was attempted as “heavy drinking, toasting, and singing reduced, or elevated, rich and poor participants to a common moral place.”Footnote ¹³⁰ These Philadelphia taverns were not alternatives to mainstream culture, but rather ubiquitous and easily accessible. Yet, as Thompson notes, they were also not uncontroversial: there were “perpetual political struggles over management of taverns” and these made the tavern a locus of social and political contestation. These were, in many ways, agonistic spaces—performative and unpredictable, where “abstract personal characteristics, such as wit, gentility, or honesty lay in the eyes and ears of the beholder.”Footnote ¹³¹ The tavern was thus a site for display and observation in which individuals revealed themselves in gesture and action, cutting across various modern sedimentations of public and private, performance and politics.Footnote ¹³²

This speculative genealogy of an intoxicated public sphere also allows us to look at contemporary politics from a different vantage point, positioning affective politics not as an exception or challenge to the public sphere but as a more persistent feature in its operations. Intoxication here serves as an unexpected connecting thread that links the mainstream public sphere and various dissident counterpublics. The Occupy Wall Street movement offers a ripe example for consideration. The mainstream press has often critiqued the presence of alcohol and drugs in the Occupy encampments as evidence of the movement's frivolousness and its overall political and social failure.Footnote ¹³³ Theorists and scholars have also seemed to avoid the issue of intoxication in the Occupy movement, casting little attention to the drug use and drinking at work in the reclamation of public space and the dramatic actions of protestors. But the context of the early modern public sphere allows us to interpret intoxication in a different way—less as a failure of politics than as part of a range of practices which shape affective political reason. The sharing of food, music, and drink has been described as part of the counterpublic “lifeworld” established by protestors, where people can “meet, build trust and develop shared goals and strategies.”Footnote ¹³⁴ However, singing, eating, and drinking also have more than a functionalist role. Such practices and rituals help to “facilitate sociability among friends and encounters with strangers,” as Margaret Kohn explains, and, in their emotive and affective dimensions, they also help to make protestors “visible” in “polemical scenes… where the conflict between opposing interests is made visible and subject to dispute.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Intoxication helps to highlight the affective dimensions of these “performative enactments” in which political reason is mobilized by citizens who draw on theatricality, performance, and gesture in their practice of political power. Intoxication also calls on the mainstream public sphere to more fully acknowledge its affective, unruly, and ritualistic roots. Footnote ¹³⁶