Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England
320
Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England
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Overview
This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays—the anonymous Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women (1590s), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (ca. 1613), and Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife (1632)—offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms “the tragedy of the separate spheres.” Feminist scholarship has identified the fruitful gaps between theories and practices of household government in early modern Europe, while work on the global Renaissance attends to commercial expansion, cross-cultural encounters, and colonial settlements. Separation Scenes brings these critical concerns together to expose the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England.
Separation Scenes argues that domestic plays make the absence of husbands for business the subject of tragedy by focusing not on where men traveled but on whom and what they left behind. Elements that critics have rightly associated with domestic tragedy—adultery, sensational murders, and the lavishly articulated operations of domestic life—define this world, which, Christensen argues, was equally shaped by the absence of husbands. Her interpretations of these domestic plays invite us to historicize and further complicate the seemingly universal binary between a feminine “private sphere” and a masculine “public sphere.”
Separation Scenes demonstrates how domestic drama played an active, dynamic, and critical role in deliberating the costs of commercial travel as it disrupted domestic conduct and prompted realignments within the home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803296657 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2017 |
| Series: | Early Modern Cultural Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Separation Scenes
Domestic Drama in Early Modern England
By Ann C. Christensen
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9665-7
CHAPTER 1
Housekeeping and Forlorn Travel in Arden of Faversham
Alice: Be not afraid, my husband is now from home.
Greene: I am sorry that your husband is from home Whenas my purposed journey was to him.
Mosby: I hope now Master Arden is from home, You'll give me leave to play your husband's part.
Arden: My house is irksome; there I cannot rest.
— Arden of Faversham
Business travel in Arden of Faversham separates spouses and "spheres," leaving the home vulnerable to incursion and the unpartnered wife Alice able to assume a place as the de facto household head. Meanwhile her husband comes home only long enough to leave again, attending to a succession of business obligations, yet he is also unwilling to transfer power at home. Alice misuses marriage and domesticity, committing adultery and murder, but in the end she receives theatrical and public punishment. These dramatized separations and vulnerabilities within and between (absent) husband and (present) wife reveal the contradictions within and between the prescriptive discourses of household conduct and business. The troubled dynamic between what Arden himself calls "home" and "not at home" (4.31) is the dynamic that structures Arden's plot and setting, both of which pivot on his itinerant business obligations — a fact eclipsed in the criticism by Arden's "gentle" landowning status as well as Alice's adultery. The chapter title alludes to a metaphor in the play, that of "the forlorn traveller," whose longing for water matches the ravenous desire of Black Will to kill Arden (3.93–96). Will is himself literally one such traveler — a demobilized soldier and highway robber, who is bereft of family ties and at once longs for and derides a settled life. This ambivalence makes Will a suggestive double of the restless domestic hero, Arden. Likewise on the road (though not on the lam), Arden complains that wherever he is — "at home or not at home" — he "cannot rest" (4.31, 27).
Arden's failure to "rest" depends in part on his own restlessness, although his knowledge of his wife's infidelity also poisons his content. Merchants in the early modern period were a group with a "special reputation for anxiety." The fact that Arden is only rarely "at home" conditions his own habitus or "durable disposition" and also affects the conduct of Alice's housewifery, the reputation of their household, and the workings of their marital and domestic life in general. Tellingly, when Arden proclaims, "My house is irksome; there I cannot rest," it is while he is away from Faversham — on this occasion, in London (4.27). In the same speech, Arden exclaims that his rival, Mosby, "makes his triumph of my being thence" (4.29–30). "Being thence" in pursuit of one or another business obligation characterizes Arden, determines the plot, and ultimately renders the domestic tragic.
Business and Travel: Arden's Absence
Arden's business travel occurs in the imperative mood. Arden's initial interaction with Alice onstage illustrates the constant state of tension between "at home," where Alice performs her housewifery, and "not at home," where Arden's mandatory business travel transpires. Only a few lines into the play, after Franklin invites him to "presently take horse, / And lie with me at London all this term," Arden immediately plans to depart: "I'll try it / And call her [Alice] forth, and presently take leave" (1.50–52, 54–55). Three times in act 1's series of brief morning exchanges between the Ardens, he repeats that he "must" depart: "I must to London. ... For yet ere noon we'll take horse and away" (81, 92, also 299, 399). Sestina-like, Alice's next line repeats Arden's and adds her villainous conclusion: "Ere noon he means to take horse and away! / Sweet news is this" (93–94). Franklin chides his friend for lingering in the kitchen when a decisive departure is wanted: "Come, leave this dallying, and let us away" (1.396), sounding a bit like the author of The Tryall of Travell in disdain for hearth drones and chimney crickets. In short, from the outset, Arden's business is coded as both urgent and "not at home."
What was Arden's business? The main historical source that the playwright used, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, 1587), and the play text both represent Arden as a landowner and a public figure (famous or notorious). The historical Thomas Ardern's career was not unusual for his time and place: he served under Sir Edward North in the Court of Augmentations, a post that managed revenue and litigation relating to the Tudor dispersal of monastic lands; he married North's stepchild Alice Mirfyn; attained the position of controller of the customs for Faversham port; obtained the Abbey of Faversham (its land and revenues) and other abbey lands and wealth over time; and served as church warden and a brief stint as mayor in 1548.
Although actions associated with these positions are not dramatized in Arden of Faversham, it is true that travel is required by Arden's business ventures — not only because Faversham's waterways formed a hub for traffic to London, but also because every business venture of Arden's is a venture indeed. The court session or "term" he will attend with Franklin, of course, convenes in the capital. But a little-observed detail of this trip is that as Arden himself tells Alice, he will stay "no longer than till my affairs be done," requiring as much as a month-long absence (1.83, emphasis added). Further evidence that Arden's time in London is at least in part related to his own business appears when he and Franklin successively castigate the servant, Michael: "Stand you here loitering, knowing my affairs, / What haste my business craves to send to Kent?"; "do ye slack his business for your own?" (3.17–18, 21, emphasis added).
Arden's stated "business" back in Kent might be personal, but not necessarily so; dealings in merchandise or customs collection also call him away from the house, "down unto the quay," where he has "certain goods ... to unload" (1.89–90). Further business abroad takes the form of a summons to dine with his patron, Lord Cheiny (Sir Thomas Cheyney, historically the lord warden of Faversham) on the Isle of Sheppey (9.98–115). The details of their business are never made explicit, though Cheiny refers to "divers matters to talk with you about" (9.114). Yet another type of business interposes as Arden admits (or invents?) a prior engagement to postpone his Sheppey excursion: "The occasion is great, or else I would wait on you," he tells the nobleman (9.111). The motives for Arden's home leaving have engendered critical disagreement: are his absences retreats from his unhappy home or abdications of authority or power; is London an urban diversion from his usual land grasping in Kent, a spree, a tryst with Franklin? These possibilities notwithstanding, the most basic fact about all of Arden's travel is that it always originates in business "occasions" and "matters."
Orlin argues that, given Thomas Ardern's history of financial and professional success — his elected and appointed posts and his intimacy with the powerful local Lord Cheiny — the play rather marginalizes what Orlin has called his "ambition, useful affiliation, advancement through office and marriage, accumulation of land, alleged corruption and political disgrace, and on-going quest for place and status." She further observes that the play and chronicle accounts alike keep focus away from these professional dimensions and on domestic catastrophe to complete "a four-decade process of purging the story of its extradomestic elements."
Yet even though Arden's business is not dramatized, the function in the plot of his business trip is dramatically crucial, and his business dealings keep him "extradomestic," that is, away from his house. It is true that the stage Arden does not hold public office or broker deals onstage, unlike, for example, Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600). In Arden the potentially revealing meeting with Lord Cheiny transpires offstage, and we never see Arden's merchandise. Both Holinshed and the play refer to Arden's tenants, real estate deals, and the letters patents for "All the lands of the Abbey of Faversham" (1.5). While this land-owning dimension of Arden's business is widely discussed by scholars, the playwright uses Arden's absence to strongly imply his commercial activity as well (if also suggesting the fine line between landowning and commerce after the Reformation). Arden's business activity is represented through such details as his handling of "goods," his frequent departures in answer to different summonses, an extended stay in London, and his attendance at a fair (1.90, 14.75–76). One particularly telling detail concerns the treatment of the annual St. Valentine's Fair. The play deviates from Holinshed's Chronicles, which presents Arden primarily as a greedy landowner rather than a merchant: "the fair was wont to be kept partly in the town and partly in the Abbey, but Arden for his own private lucre had this year procured it to kept wholly within the abbey ground which he had purchased." By omitting the detail of Arden's profit by renting out land for the fair, the play presents Arden not as its proprietor, but as a regular attendee, that is, in his capacity as a merchant. Moreover, as noted, the historical Ardern held "the lucrative post of Controller of the Customs of the port of Faversham" — a royal appointment that followed his marriage to Alice, and allotted him customs on the goods that flowed through Faversham. In contrast the play never mentions this post, and thus "the goods ... to unload" at the quay must be related to his own business. Indeed Alice promises her lover that these same "goods ... shall be thine" (1.222). In sum both Holinshed and the play depict Arden's social mobility, but the play dramatizes his physical mobility that is spurred explicitly by business.
"Business" was not limited to merchants, but it encompassed a set of activities that the gentry and landed aristocracy engaged in, too, though these upper-class men might not self-identify as men of business. Joyce Appleby and other economic historians make clear that "the merchant class" was not the distinct homogeneous group that we sometimes imagine and that men — from "improving landlords" to patent-holding noblemen and commercial investors — had many irons in the fire beyond collecting rents. In addition, as Alan Macfarlane argues, the increase in intermarriages between gentry and artisan or merchant families testifies to the fluidity of occupational identifications within commercial milieus. Appleby notes that England's aristocracy embraced commercial ventures, unlike their European counterparts who spurned merchandizing: "a large swath of the English elite with seats in Parliament — improving landlords, members of trading companies, clothiers — discovered their common interests." Arden embodies the "busy-ness" of householders and landed gentlemen with multiple "interests" and associates, and many occasions to leave home.
Depicted by more than one character as "a niggardly bourgeois," in Michael Neill's apt phrase, Arden's money habits fall somewhere on a continuum between greedy and miserly, on the one side, and acquisitive and "saving" on the other — the full continuum associated with merchants in the period. A neighbor, Master Greene, accuses Arden of "wring[ing] me from the little land I have," proceeding to report what sounds like common knowledge, or at least common talk, about Arden:
Desire of wealth is endless in his mind, And he is greedy-gaping still for gain. Nor cares he though young gentlemen do beg, So he may scrape and hoard up in his pouch. (1.470, 474–77)
Like the merchant-husband of the proverbial "harlot," his "bags of gold" define him in the community. (And Alice is like the harlot herself, who grasps absence as opportunity, "For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.") Another of Arden's neighbors and critics, Dick Reede, similarly complains of having been cheated by the "carl" or churlish Arden, whose purchase of land leaves the Reede family "needy and bare" (see 13.9, 17).
Each business activity, from land market to law court, significantly, keeps Arden in motion, absent from the stage, or on the brink of returning and departing again. After first announcing his plan to "take horse" to London, more than once Arden indicates that his "goods" and "business" "affairs" require his attention, and hence sanction his departure(s) (1.50, 54–55; 1.89–90, 83; 3.17–21). Alice reports matterof-factly, "'Tis now high water, and he is at the quay" when Mosby asks his first question of the play, "where is your husband?" (1.183, 182). Another exchange between Alice and Arden makes his departure appear quite quotidian, in line with William Perkins's sense of "requisite" travel:
Arden: I must to London, sweet Alice, presently.
Alice: But tell me do you mean to stay there long?
Arden: No longer than till my affairs be done. (1.81–83)
Alice turns to melodrama after Franklin assures her that they'll be back within the month: "A month? Ay me! Sweet Arden, come again / Within a day or two or else I die" (1.85–86). We might consider Alice's response as evidence that she is not the "phlegmatick" wife that Alexander Niccholes advises for "a marchant, mariner, or a termer." In fact Arden "will lie at London all this term" (1.358, emphasis added) and seems to continue business dealing between London and Faversham, as noted above when he reminds Michael his "business craves [haste]" (3.17–18). In addition to this correspondence presumably with factors in Kent, Franklin and Arden appear to conduct some business-based employment in London — whether of a commercial or legal cast — since they "walk in Paul's," the middle aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral in London where international and local merchants and others conducted business, and a locale that the play repeatedly mentions. In all cases Arden seems a mover in the late sixteenth-century Faversham that was a hub of trade, where "the volume of port traffic with the capital increased steadily," according to Peter Clark and Paul Slack.
All the murder attempts occur abroad, and success happens only once Arden occupies his own house, the significance of which critics have rightly observed. Less noted but as important as that irony is the fact that it is business travel in particular that supplies the settings for those attempts. In fact the eventually completed attempt also points to business in some interesting ways, as I shall demonstrate. Once Arden leaves his property to unload goods, Alice sets in motion her plot to poison his broth; while he is in London for legal business, she enlists the hired killers who try two times to kill him there. Next the route from London back to Kent, Rainham Down, provides the opportunity for both another murder attempt and another business concern — Arden's invitation to discuss "divers matters" with Lord Cheiny. Later pursuing that invitation, Arden escapes another attempt on his life as he travels by ferryboat to the Isle of Sheppey, north of Faversham, where Cheiny hosts Franklin and Arden (scenes 11 and 12). One more attempt finds him returning from that dinner, walking back home (scene 13).
Numerous spatial details accentuate the fact that Arden's business occurs always away from home. Furthermore these spaces are dangerous, or perceived so. For example blinding fog and perilous ditches surround the Thames (scenes 11 and 12); St. Paul's propels a potentially thieving crowd or "press" of people (3.48); and the Faversham Fair is bustling enough for a murderer to disappear (14.75–76). More neutral local color is seen when Arden explicitly directs his man to Billingsgate in the city to garner tide reports for the return trip to Kent (6.1–4); this water gate, a port and trading area, is as familiar terrain to Michael as it would be to London playgoers, so those details are not vital to the plot. Furthermore the fact that Faversham was a "major link after Dover to London" makes routine and familiar to the audience Arden's movements dockside, in the ferry, and around London. As Richardson notes: "The play's geographical specificity is relentless," concerning what she calls "[j]ourneys of commerce and service," such as the road to London, the Isle of Sheppey, even the Continent (Boulogne, Flushing). Richardson continues:
These are culturally familiar journeys. They were made by soldiers, merchants, peddlers, men seeking the professional services London offered, groups of traveling players. ... The high geographic mobility which saw individuals traveling the length and breadth of the country for work, moving between the provincial towns of Britain and from the provinces to the capital ensured that such journeys were familiar to the play's audiences, locating events within a known and imaginable context.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Separation Scenes by Ann C. Christensen. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Absent Husbands and Unpartnered Wives in Early Modern England,
1. Housekeeping and Forlorn Travel in Arden of Faversham,
2. The Doorstep and the Exchange in A Warning for Fair Women,
3. One Man's Calling in A Woman Killed with Kindness,
4. Women, Work, and Windows in Women Beware Women,
5. The East India Company and the Domestic Economy in The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman's Honest Wife,
Epilogue: John and Anne Donne and the Culture of Business,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,