This crisp collection of essays illuminates emergent ideas about capitalism and its relationship to work as these were staged during the English Renaissance and the first part of the early modern period. Different interests competed to frame the connection between wealth and alienated labor in ways that suited their divergent needs; the public theater was one arena in which this contest took place. The hegemony of monied interests was affirmed but also challenged by stage plays and playhouse companies. The popular theater became a means of subversively confronting usury’s tightening choke hold on the early stages of capitalism.
This volume weaves a loose Marxian framework against which its contributors test pamphlets, plays (both canonical and not), and the records of London theater companies. As Jean Howard notes in her afterword (itself an engaging survey of recent historiography on the early modern theater), the emphasis of the chapters in this volume is very much on production rather than consumption. The chapters tend to reference one another (and not always in mutual agreement), which helps with thematic coherence and is useful for researchers. Thirteen contributions plus the two editors’ essays make for a volume dense with lively ideas.
The theater could be both elegiac and forward-looking as it adapted to emergent global capitalism. Sara Mueller persuasively shows how Elizabethan progress entertainments featuring the enactment of domestic work performed labor ideology of a new and gendered kind. Similarly, Natasha Korda’s discussion of civic pageants reveals that alien women from the Low Countries secured their English reputations with fabric treatments that, in circular fashion, “influenced different types of theatrical production and shaped contemporary depiction of aliens” (54). John Michael Archer amplifies this argument by showing how the Londoners’ resentment of Dutch aliens’ craft production in turn saw representation in the public theater.
In this volume London is at the epicenter of the theater world, and its chapters naturally orient themselves toward the metropolis. Tom Rutter’s chapter in particular is a provocative microhistory of a moment in which the two principal London playhouses were both trying quite hard to appeal to the wide social range of their audiences, which entailed addressing class tensions through the performance of the same. Holly Dugan’s work on perfumers on the early modern stage compares “fears about the role of aliens and women in the marketplace to an emerging discourse about the scent of labor” (71), while Ronda Arab’s analysis of Kempe’s famous morris dance demonstrates that the sweaty but honest laborer was popularly portrayed as preferable to the perfumed courtier. Stage plays nevertheless hid ugly reality behind illusion. Michelle Dowd argues that stage plays portrayed female servants’ “fictions of desire” in an elision of “the real sexual coercion and economic imperatives that attended England’s increasingly commercialized labor market” (132).
Molly Hand’s study of women who “performed magic as labor both on and off the stage” (161) rounds out a discussion of magic that is a significant source of imagery in many of the volume’s essays. Elizabeth Rivlin’s essay, for instance, captures the staging of an emergent rule of mercantile capitalism wherein money can be understood to work for a person independently of that person’s labor, an idea represented in plays and in the economies of the London playing companies themselves. In an alchemical redefinition of work, comedic antiheroes “recreate themselves as gleeful agents in a burgeoning market economy of investment and profit” (115). Bailey’s description of the conversion of passion into interest (“the generic term for that which trumped destructive human impulses”) is key to her essay on staged representations of colonial indenture (199). As Crystal Bartolovich argues, plays showed how labor’s value was ultimately discounted (even as it was found to be socially affirming and unifying) because worldly success could only come from “merchant capital of obscure origins” (28).
Valerie Forman’s chapter shows how many theater companies and playhouses were organized as joint-stock companies in miniature imitations of the structure of the great East India Company. Her solid essay is a “study of the relationship between tragicomedy and the beginnings of global trade”; she anatomizes the contemporary debate over “how profit could be made in the face of so much loss” (209). Daniel Vitkus’s essay develops this idea further: “The London theater, like the joint-stock companies that invested in overseas ventures, created wealth through investment in the shares of a ‘company’ that exploited the surplus labor of its indebted and underpaid workers” (242).
As David Hawkes notes in his very strong thematic treatment of the performative representation of usury, the theaters of early modern London “provided a particularly apt venue for exploring the notion of alienated labor” and the problem of labor’s relationship to magical and financial representation (178): “Just as alchemy finally disappeared because its aim of creating financial value out of nothing was finally realized when money was allowed to breed, so magic ceased to be a crime because the performative power of symbols became a necessary and universal assumption in economic activity. When everyone is a magician, magic can no longer be regarded as satanic” (179).
This volume appears as part of Ashgate’s Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series. It is well to keep this remit in mind. Because the contributors write as literary historians and critics of the drama, they run up against the usual methodological problem of finding ways for close readings of texts to be substantiated through the deployment of other kinds of historical evidence. In thinking about literary texts and their performance, one also makes the leap to thinking about their reception, which is notoriously difficult to infer. The essays that consider stagecraft and production for the stage are therefore useful in anchoring the discussion. At the same time, there is little question that the English theater was very powerful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, first, as a metaphor and, second, as the locus of experimentation with new forms.
