Cheapside during Lent

TOUCHWOOD SENIOR
What shift she'll make now with this piece of flesh
In this strict time of Lent, I cannot imagine;
Flesh dare not peep abroad now; I have known
This city now above this seven years,
But I protest in better state of government
I never knew it yet, nor ever heard of;
There has been more religious wholesome laws
In the half circle of a year erected
For common good, than memory ever knew of,
Enter Sir Oliver Kix and his Lady.
Setting apart corruption of promoters,
And other poisonous officers that infect
And with a venomous breath taint every goodness.

In trying to figure out what the promoters were doing in Middleton's play, I found this speech by Touchstone Sr. in the scene before they appear. He's sincerely worried about the fate of the woman he's impregnated and just paid off, because, as he informs us for the first time, this is the "strict time of Lent." The eating of flesh is forbidden - as is whoring and babies out of wedlock. It's a time when all kinds of excess is supposed to be curbed, and according to Touchstone, it is. But his paean to London's "better state of governance" is completely out of touch with everything we've seen int he play.

Of course, this speech - particularly praising London's growing number of laws - sounds more than a little cheeky. Touchstone may be sincere, but Middleton is certainly not; when Touchstone declares his city "religious" and "wholesome," I can't possibly take him seriously. His praise of innumerate new religious laws is a particularly fun way of tweaking them - they don't seem to have had much effect in Cheapside. And of course, when the promoters themselves arrive, we see what seems to be the whole effect of attempts (presumably Puritan) to legislate virtue: people continue to eat meat, but now the promoters occasionally have an excuse to steal it or to obtain bribes.

If Middleton's Cheapside setting is critical for this play, the timing seems just as carefully chosen: what could highlight the hypocrisy of all this eating, drinking, and whoring more than setting the play at Lent? The downfall of the promoters, smack in the middle of the play, is one of the most satisfying scenes for me: a set-piece that could have gone almost anywhere, it has (1) hypocrites, (2) clever antagonists, and (3) the hypocrites getting their comeuppance. What makes the scene a little more complicated than that, though, is exactly who those clever heroes are. Allwit, triumphing over the promoters, is no more virtuous than they are - but at least, it seems, he's no hypocrite.

Possible Research Topic

I know this is (very much) a side thought, but I was fascinated by what someone brought up in class today about Shakesperean/Middletonian ideas about what we today would consider homosexuality. I hadn't before considered the possibility that homosexuality as an identity hasn't always been a widely-accept social norm for ages, and it might be interesting to explore how that's represented in the literature that we read. (Or not, since it's so straightforward.)

On another note, it's also always startling to me that the comedies we read don't consider the keeping of an ingle to be child abuse - was there no conception of consent on the part of women, children, or people of a lower class?

Goldsmiths

The original Goldsmiths' Company Hall -- where, we are told at the end of the play, Touchstone Junior and Moll Yellowhammer's wedding dinner will eventually take place -- is no longer standing. The same holds for the building that replaced it, which was torn down in the nineteenth century. But the Goldsmiths' Company still exists. Its website offers useful information on the Company's history here. Poke around a bit on the site if you have time; we'll talk more about the livery companies in class tomorrow.

Cheapside

Here is a link to the interactive map of early modern London that we consulted in class last week.

A brief but helpful account of the history of Cheapside, as well as a description of its socio-economic make-up, can be found through the same site here.

Hearing: Something to See

To the left are two very different seventeenth-century images of listening. The first, Peter Paul Reubens's Hercules and Omphale, was painted in 1606 and hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The second, by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, is entitled Portrait of the Mennonite Preacher Cornelius Anslo and His Wife, Aeltje Schouten, and is dated 1641 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Professor Andaleeb Banta in Amherst's Art History Department shared the Rembrandt image with us; take a look at the preacher's wife's headdress, which is shaped like a second ear.

We might want to think about the gendering of hearing in these images, as well as about the intentional vs. unwilling absorption of sound -- all interesting topics in light of Epicoene, certainly, but also in connection with Chaste Maid.

City Women

On Thursday, we'll spend some time getting our bearings in seventeenth-century London--learning what the city looked and sounded like, who lived and/or worked where, and so on. As you read through Epicoene, pay attention to where the play's action takes place -- which parts of the city do these characters move through and talk about? Try to get a feel for Jonson's London. It's as much a character in this play as Truewit, Morose, or Mistress Otter.

For further reading (if you have time), you might want to turn to Karen Newman's "City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonson's Epicoene," ELH 56 (1989): 503-18. The article is available through JSTOR, which you can access via the library's website here.

On an unrelated note: K, I found a collection of scholarly essays on chick-lit edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. We have a copy here at Frost (PS374.W6 C48 2006). I haven't looked at it yet, but it may provide useful fodder for thinking through the connections you drew last week between Shakespearean comedy, chick-lit, and generic expectations.

A Short Post on Epicoene

Already my favorite part of the play is Act II, scene ii where Truewit assaults Morose with a verbal waterfall, an unending description of "friends'" elaborate concerns about Morose's impending marriage. Morose's pain is inexplicably funny - possibly because I can't personally identify much with the cause of his agony.

Truly, Ben Jonson had something going for him.