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Article Excerpt
Emerging in the late 1590s, English city comedies satirized merchant-citizens and gentlemen-gallants alike. Rejecting the idealizing celebration of the London citizen in earlier plays by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood, the city comedy used materializing bathos and frank sexuality to represent the city to itself. Following the rogue pamphlets and coney-catching broadsheets of Robert Greene, city comedies represented a range of notorious character types (e.g., the "tearcat," the "ruffler," the "doxy," the "upright man"), producing a rogues' gallery of tricksters defined by their methods of deceit. (1) But the antiacquisitive humor of city comedies by Ben Jonson. John Marston, and Thomas Middleton sits uneasily with the overt commercialism of the popular playhouses in which they were performed. This essay will suggest how several of Middleton's city comedies apply the logic of the commercial theater to the economic and theological problem of credit in early modern England. In the topsy-turvy world of Middleton's city comedies, it is the self-conscious deceivers who achieve credit, measured less by their honesty or their ability to repay outstanding debt than by their potential to create believable fictions around themselves. This credit has specifically theological connotations, since Middleton integrates a Calvinist process of "reclamation" in his depiction of early modern finance.
Though scholars typically associate city comedies with realism, especially in their focus on economic relations, we should also be aware of the enduring elements of popular romance and New Comedy that allow the genre simultaneously to celebrate and critique urban trickery. (2) Beneath the creaking plots and "cheap conventional intrigue" of Middleton's plays, for instance, T. S. Eliot found "a quiet and undisturbed vision of things as they are ... the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature." (3) Characters such as Dampit and Quomodo invoke a world that scholars tend to describe as irredeemably material. (4) Middleton satirizes the gullibility of bankrupt gallants who lose their lands to city merchants, but he downplays the possibility of restoring moral order through the punishment of his tricksters. Instead, his plays favor shifting satire over the stabilizing ballast of classical comedy and its attendant gestures of moral correction, rejecting the types of formal closure that a playwright such as Jonson preferred.
But Middleton's city comedies also differ from those of his contemporaries by applying Calvinist principles of spiritual examination in depicting the necessity of "character" as part of the economic life of London. (5) Plays such as A Trick to Catch the Old One (ca. 1605), Michaelmas Term (ca. 1605), A Mad World, My Masters (1605), and The Roaring Girl (ca. 1609) all feature characters who create believable fictions in order to survive in an expanding credit economy in early modern England. Take the plot of The Roaring Girl, as revealed by Sebastian to his betrothed early in act I:
There's a wench Call'd Moll, mad Moll, or merry Moll; a creature So strange in quality, a whole city takes Note of her name and person: All that affection I owe to thee, on her in counterfeit passion I spend, to mad my father: he believes I dote upon this Roaring Girl, and grieves As it becomes a father for a son That could be so bewitch'd. (6)
In characteristic speech mixing sex with money, Sebastian outlines his "counterfeit passion" for the "Roaring Girl" Moll--a passion that, if rendered believable, will make Sebastian's father consent to his son's marriage to his secret fiancee, Mary Fitzallard. Sebastian's performance of passion is explicitly theatrical: both character and actor playing that character seek to make an audience believe in their personas. In both cases, success is measured in terms of monetary payment. Middleton employs a specifically theatrical language of playacting, fashioning, and changing "countenance" to depict interpersonal relations as structured by credit and debt. The explicit connection between credit and countenance emerges in the plays, as in this exchange between Witgood and Lucre in A Trick to Catch the Old One:
WITGOOD. You that know my danger i' th' city, sir, so well, how great my debts are, and how extreme my creditors, could not out of your pure judgment, sir, have wished us hither. LUCRE. Mass, a firm reason indeed. WITGOOD. Else, my uncle's house! why, 't had been the only make-match. LUCRE. Nay, and thy credit. WITGOOD. My credit? nay, my countenance: push, nay, I know, uncle, you would have wrought it so by your wit, you would have made her believe in time the whole house had been mine. (7)
Witgood's main fiction in the play--that he is engaged to a wealthy widow who is really his courtesan--depends on the capacity of such men as Lucre and Hoard to believe in fictional narratives and characters. The passage also plays on the double meaning of credit as both an economic relationship and a form of belief. The associated word "countenance" has a similar compound meaning as both the physical traits of one's face and the figurative content of one's character. (8)
The fictional "plots" at the center of many of Middleton's plays work to "reclaim" a penniless gallant from debt and riotous behavior, a process that is simultaneously financial and spiritual. In addition to Sebastian in The Roaring Girl and Witgood in A Trick to Catch the Old One, Mistress Low-Water dresses as a male suitor to win the widow Lady Goldenfleece in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (ca. 1615), and Follywit and his companions impersonate first merchants and then an acting troupe in order to steal from Sir Bounteous Progress in A Mad World, My Masters. In one sense, Middleton's city comedies give audience members an opportunity to cultivate personas necessary for success in financial transactions. These plays link the London stage with economic instruments such as double-entry bookkeeping that were necessary for constructing credibility in an age before systematic methods of risk assessment. As Mary Poovey suggests in The History of the Modern Fact, the very act of recording profits and losses using the double-entry method of bookkeeping produced the appearance of good credit that was essential for success in commerce: "It was necessary ... for the merchant to represent himself as solvent even if he was not in order to establish the credit necessary to make himself so." (9)
Such self-actualizing fictions of solvency helped early modern men and women to navigate complex economic circumstances, especially those involving credit. Europe witnessed an expansion in the scale and complexity of credit during the sixteenth century, spurred in part by Charles V's legalization of twelve percent interest on loans starting in 1541. (10) In England, the government of Edward VI outlawed all forms of interest in 1552, but the Elizabethan parliament of 1571 revoked that regulation and revived an act of 1545 that set legal interest at ten percent. (11) An international business in lending money gave the English crown access to the bourses of Antwerp and Lyons, where they could secure large sums of money at moderate interest rates. (12) Large-scale investments drew on a range of capital investments from England's wealthiest citizens. The Mines Royal and Mineral and Battery ventures, for instance, were structured as joint-stock companies, dividing capital into one-pound shares that were sold to subscribers. (13) Moreover, new alliances between the Tudor monarchy and London's chief merchants, symbolized by the unity between the crown and merchants in organizing joint-stock companies engaged in overseas trade, suggested that, as Edward Misselden noted, "Matters of State and Trade" were "involved and wrapt up together." (14)
Credit and debt relations pervaded the economic life of ordinary men and women in early modern England. Increasing circulation of gold, silver, and copper coins from the New World caused both steep inflation and currency debasement in sixteenth-century Europe. Ensuing currency destabilization led to a greater reliance on credit relationships in everyday transactions. (15) Deferred payment and sales credit made transactions possible at the local level while bills of exchange allowed merchants and wholesale tradesmen to survive periodic gold and silver shortages. (16) Credit relations spread to a broader section of the population than ever before as a byproduct of what Joan Thirsk describes as a new "consumer society" in early modern England. (17) Thirsk argues that numerous "projects" in the sixteenth century--small-scale industries such as knife and tool making, soap making, salt making, pin and anvil making, and stocking knitting for sale to domestic consumers--expanded the scope and degree of indebtedness by forcing small-scale entrepreneurs to borrow money in order to purchase raw materials. (18)
In an era before formal methods of financial risk assessment were established, but when traditional notions of reputation, honesty, and honor were revealed to be problematic as guarantees of creditworthiness, new pressures emerged to define individual character--that amalgamation of words, behavior, and appearance that produces stable fictions of a coherent self. Systematic forms of credit assessment were possible in England only after the...
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