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Article Excerpt
The first section presents a schematic model of early modern citizenship, which emphasizes the multiple dispersed centres of authority and allegiance of which members of the Tudor commonwealth would be aware. It argues that political readings of texts from this period should take more account than they have in the past of the large number of synchronic and diachronic relationships inhabited by early modern agents and writers. The second section relates this model to the Gloucestershire scenes in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV, and shows how the scenes register anxieties about the conduct of justices in that county in the 1590s from the perspective of both commons and Privy Council.
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I am presently writing the Elizabethan volume for the Oxford English Literary History. This has led me to do a range of more or less archaeological (and more or less pleasurable) reading in past and not so past ways of interpreting the period. I re-encountered many different versions of the early modern subject, and a correspondingly diverse range of ways of reading Tudor literature politically. Most of these were familiar friends: subjects dialectically fashioned from their relationships with material culture, and subjects (rather a lot of them) who endlessly construct and perform their identities by fashioning and refashioning them against an Other. Several of these were also constructs of power, who simultaneously subverted and supported a theatre-state. Then there were the bold, articulate citizens (I preferred these ones), who stride into a public sphere and, directly or obliquely, perform articulate republicanism. These might be friends or clients of the Earl of Essex, and might have Tacitus and Livy as their bedtime reading. (1)
None of these different ways of thinking about early modern people and their politics quite seemed to fit the kinds of confusion and uncertainty that I repeatedly found in the writing of the period, or to explain how 'multiple and often contradictory intentions are present in the texts we read'. (2) The first section of this discussion presents a (highly) schematic model of early modern citizenship. Neither original nor subtle, it is intended to help explain why much early modern writing might appear in various ways confused and conflicted about its politics. (3) The second section is much narrower in its focus, but wider in its ambitions. It offers a detailed reading of the Gloucestershire scenes from 2 Henry IV. This emphasizes the divergent perspectives that operate within and around these scenes. It explores some of the local and national politics which may register in them, and which may shape both their larger concerns and the detail of their language. Although this may seem fine-grained, perhaps even marginal work, its aim is to show some ways in which many of the effects traditionally presented as literary--a multiplicity of partially reconciled aims, the production of divergent perspectives--might have arisen from the variety of structures simultaneously inhabited by members of the Tudor commonwealth.
To my model. Each person in this period (as, indeed, in most others) subsisted within a complex web of what might be called, for shorthand, 'networks and affinities', 'juridical structures', and 'projects'. These terms are not (with the exception of 'affinities') early modern ones, and are not intended to be either rigid or precise. 'Networks' encompass a range of phenomena. An inhabitant of London might be part of a livery company, membership of which was the enabling condition of full citizenship. (4) The same person would also be a member of a parish, and might or might not have a confessional allegiance that coincided with the predisposition of the incumbent of that parish. Inhabitants of towns and villages alike could be connected by a variety of ties (probably forged by a hybrid of economics, geography, and kinship) to someone who might or might not, in the language of the period, 'be good lord' to them by assisting them materially or by exerting influence on their behalf. Members of all early modern communities would also have friends, and would be a part of various processes for receiving information, which might include personal contacts for the exchange of gossip or manuscripts. Urban citizens might have a particular path through more 'public' structures, such as the market for printed books (they might have a favourite bookseller or printer, or belong to a small community who exchanged and copied manuscript materials). (5)
Membership of some of those networks might bring with it a set of beliefs in more or less coherent larger narratives or imaginary structures. These would include a sense of belonging to a nation, at the higher and, probably for most early moderns, more abstract and distant end of the scale. Local loyalties might also be linked to particular confessional ties, or to a loosely linked set of attitudes to royal or national policy. As a result, 'affinity' thus broadly conceived was far less distinct from the political as it is presently conceived than we might prereflectively imagine. Affinity should not, however, be instantly identified with that awkward term 'faction', which is probably best reserved for moments when a particular affinity seemed to be pressing disproportionately hard for its own interests. The affinities of the Earl of Leicester in the late 1570s or of the Earl of Essex in the 1590s are the most obvious examples of groups tied together by links of family and patronage who begin to exert pressure at a level that appeared to observers at the time to amount to faction. (6) Affinities might have relatively clear links to religious or other beliefs--as is the case with groups of reforming Kentish gentry in the 1530s, or northern Catholic landowners in the 1560s (7)--but they might also be tied together chiefly by a loose set of economic interests, or by a set of traditional privileges, like the groups of tin-miners whose interests Sir Walter Ralegh sought, in his capacity of Warden of the Stanneries, to defend against local Justices of the Peace. (8)
The early modern person also occupied a similarly complex and multilayered juridical sphere, which would have many points of contact with his or her affinity. When a citizen left piles of manure on the street, a local manorial or Bailiff 's court might impose a fine, as happened in April 1552 when John Shakespeare built up an unauthorized muck-heap in Henley Street. (9) A person guilty of a breach of the peace would (probably) be apprehended by a constable, who would be chosen from citizens in the locality. (10) The accused might then be bound over by a Justice of the Peace, who would probably be a member of the local gentry, and who might or might not choose to 'be good lord' to the accused by turning a blind eye to his or her offence. Those suspected of grand larceny might be tried at the next assizes at the nearest major town by rather more intimidating Justices from further afield, although more minor infringements were increasingly tried by two or more local JPs at petty sessions or quarter sessions. (11) Most citizens would also be aware that they were subject to a monarch, to statute law as prescribed by Parliament, and to common law as laid down by custom, but the experience of authority for the majority of inhabitants of England would probably not have a great deal in common with the theatricalized and courtly forms of power (the disembowellings, the highly dramatized pardons) that dominated literary criticism from the New Historicist heydays of the 1980s. It would instead have involved complex dealings with a number of smaller, often local, potentially competing jurisdictions--with Church courts, manorial courts, and courts leet, or city corporations, many of which had their own quasi-democratic structures and their own internal conflicts, and several of which had direct claims on the loyalty of our model subject. In some cases such regional authorities were structurally predisposed to conflict with each other: in the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge two separate corporations with distinct jurisdictions occupied substantially the same physical space. Where their interests diverged, each corporation would enlist a motley alliance of local gentry, court office-holders, and local customs to ensure that their cause prevailed. (12) The experience of power in Elizabethan England would have been inseparable from the operations...
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