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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
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THOMAS Heywood's often strangely named, definitely oddly plotted plays clearly call attention to themselves, but often because they seem so generically uncontainable. Yet whether we call some of them romances, others history plays, and still others city comedies, the fact remains that they all address the complex class issues present within early modern English society as a result of economic shifts from a feudal to a precapitalist, precolonialist society. The Royall King and the Loyall Subject (ca. 1603) is no exception. The play's main plot involves an examination of the nobility of the Lord Martiall (Marshal) of England. After his return from waging a successful war in which he personally saves his monarch's life, the Martiall is shown to be a character who is totally devoted to the king and absolutely aware of the services he must provide his monarch, even if such service means putting himself in grave danger. Such devotion naturally produces jealousy within court circles, and the other nobles poison Martiall's reputation with the king. Consequently, the loyal soldier must endure a series of humiliating setbacks until his true nobility--and the nobles' plots--are revealed. The subplot involves a Captain Bonvile who returns from the same war seemingly impoverished. Profligate in his youth, the captain uses the war to "show" that he is now completely poor in an attempt to discover who among his friends values him for his personal qualities and who solely for his money. While these two plots seem completely unrelated to the economic shifts in early modern English society, I argue that they are both implicated in issues of class identity exacerbated by movement toward a capitalist/colonialist economy. Indeed, I will argue that The Royall King and the Loyall Subject--along with Eastward Ho!--engage with, as well as reflect upon, contemporary arguments/discussions of changing class roles in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.
The Royall King and the Loyall Subject raises a number of issues I particularly want to examine. In it Heywood seems to be redefining the concepts of "nobility" and "gentry" at least partially within the context of the marketplace. Such a redefinition could suggest that the playwright is flattering his middle-class, primarily non-noble audience by demonstrating that the hierarchichal wielders of political power may be less capable than his hardworking audience members. I would go even further and argue that Heywood's plays often demonstrate that, in contrast to "received wisdom," successful occupation of any class position is not simply a question of birth, but a result of economic prowess or the possession of a specific talent. Since money is revealed as necessary both to appear at court and to marry well, nobles and gentlemen can be viewed as "tradesmen" consistently engaged in economic transactions by "selling" themselves--through self-fashioning--or "buying" the regard of their overlords. (1) The laws of the marketplace, therefore, do not only govern the dealings of the London merchant. Heywood suggests they also govern the operations of court life and the very nature of nobility in the early modern precapitalist state.
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"Class" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not mean exactly the same thing it does in the early twenty-first century. Our understanding of "class" has been highly influenced by Marx's presentations of the nature of classes under and produced by capitalism and highly mediated by how those understandings were employed by other Marxist/socialist or capitalist theorists. For us today, "class" is not a simple notion. The highly mediated term carries such vast freight that it is almost impossible to move it out of its primarily economic sphere, much less out of its eighteenth- to nineteenth-century capitalist origins. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "class" was more category than concept. Medieval philosophers and theorists strove to make sense out of their world by ordering it into various categories. While we may question both the legitimacy and the efficacy of E. M. W. Tillyard's "Great Chain of Being," the fact remains that such ordering systems did exist in the Middle Ages and did carry forward into the early modern period. We can argue as to the reasons why and the degree to which such systems developed, but I want to focus here on the fact that they did develop and to stress/suggest that they developed as a way to try to make order out of chaos. I don't want to suggest that medieval or early modern society was necessarily disordered. I do want to suggest, however, that trying to make order out of chaos is a way of trying to control cultural, social, or even personal upheavals that appear to be uncontrollable.
William Harrison's The Description of England (1577, 1587) and Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum (1583) are two of many early modern works that model this "Great Chain of Being" preoccupation with ordering. What I am particularly interested in examining in these texts is their practice of organizing society into hierarchical rankings. These authors have no problems when it comes to ranking the nobility, the landed gentry, merchants, and serfs (villeins). As a result, the sections of their works dealing with these classes are predictable and repetitious. Where they become confused--and where the works in consequence become very interesting--is in dealing with the "new" classes that developed in the late sixteenth century as a result of changes in the English economy resulting from the beginnings of capitalism and colonialism and the creation of the great trading companies. Suddenly, a "gentleman" was not always a man whose birth was "gentle." And there were huge categories of professions--barristers, agents and factors, merchant adventurers, traders, moneylenders, ship owners and leasers, and so on--that were impossible to categorize within existing, primarily feudal structures. As a result, works that recorded the social order also recorded the fears and exasperations of writers who were trying to chronicle the actual lived experience of a society in almost constant flux. Playwrights like Thomas Heywood recorded the traumas attached to these transitional times with a humor that almost covered over social fear. Perhaps authors of class manuals, like Harrison and Smith, were less successful in doing this and more clearly replicated the confusion they saw within their societies. While such confusion is fearful and traumatic, examinations of the crux of the transition, the place where the "rubber" of an ordered feudal class system meets "the road" of a burgeoning precapitalist empire that is in the process of creating its own class structure allows us not only a sharper insight into Heywood's plays and the society they represent, but a justification for the use of more twentieth-/twenty-first-century concepts of class as a modality of analysis for the precapitalist, precolonialist plays of the early modern period.
"Class" has always been a problematic term to employ when discussing social hierarchies in England either before or during the early modern period. Some may object to using the term to refer to social groupings in early modern England because the country was not fully capitalist. While I would argue that England's protocapitalist economic situation--irrevocably moving toward a full-fledged capitalist/imperialist formation--allows one to begin considering social groups by the term "class," I also acknowledge that there are some problems to using such a designation. According to Stephen Edgell, for example, "[t]he modern vocabulary of class is inextricably associated with the total reorganization of society that followed the industrial revolution" (1). Consequently, class as a social/economic category was not thought to exist prior to the eighteenth century. Additionally, many twentieth-century notions of class are closely tied to Marxist analysis, which is based on nineteenth-century social formations. Thus, those of us in early modern studies who have been studying those social formations that are known in the twenty-first century as "classes" have often been forced to use vague, only partially helpful terms--like "gentry," "middling sort," "commoners," "artisans," and so on--to discuss groups that, in later centuries, would more easily be analyzed in class terms. In this essay I want to argue for the use of class as a legitimate modality of analysis in the early modern period. Specifically, I want to consider how classical Marxist analysis, as well as later twentieth-century expansions of this analysis, can be helpful for understanding the social/economic conditions in the early modern period. To do this, I want first to explore some problems attendant upon the use of existing terms for social organization and proceed to consider that the beginnings of "class identity" and "class characteristics"--as reflected in the drama of the period--justify the use of class as a modality of analysis. However, since I do realize the problems inherent in the use of "class" to refer to early modern social formations, I will also gesture toward these in the course of this essay.
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In classical Marxist analysis, as Richard Breen and David B. Rottman indicate, an individual's class is determined by his/her relationship to the means of production, especially when the relationship is exploitive (27, 24). (2) While Barry Hindess does not deny this observation (15), his analysis of class encompasses broader social/economic/political relations: "classes are regarded as major social forces that arise out of fundamental structural features of society and they are supposed to have significant and wide-ranging social and political consequences.... In Marx's view, classes are the main contending forces in society and they provide the key to the understanding of politics and to the identification of the forces promoting or resisting social change" (1, 3). Further, groups become classes "only as a consequence of the members' growing awareness of a community of interests" (22). Hindess's expansion of Marx's initial concept of class is characteristic of the work of many late twentieth-century Marxist theorists who use Marx as a springboard from which to proceed to an analysis of social formations never conceived of by the nineteenth-century theorist. In taking Marxist theory forward and modifying it for use as a means to explore late twentieth-century social formations, these current thinkers grant Marxism both a power and a flexibility that classical Marxist theorists shy away from. I am particularly interested in Christine Delphy's modifications of Marx because I want to use a method similar to hers to read Marxism back to the early modern period in an attempt to open up difficult late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century social formations for deeper consideration.
But before I proceed to Delphy, I want briefly to consider how Jack L. Amariglio, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff expand upon the definition(s) of class posited by Hindess and Breen and Rottman. The former group states that "class functions in the social totality, neither as the determinant 'in the last instance' of the processes that make up a central concept of Marxist theory from which all other concepts are derived or to which they must always defer" (488). They also indicate that, in Marxist theory, "the concept of class serves as an initial position or thesis," yet "its meaning changes as its political, economic, and cultural conditions change.... The ceaseless and mutual interaction between the concepts of class and nonclass processes is precisely how Marxist discourse develops" (488). (3) I want to call attention to the critics' contention that the concept of class changes and that its meaning is constructed through discussion and interactions between various concepts of class. Further, Amariglio, Resnick, and Wolff maintain that "Class position does not refer to always already contested class agents. Rather, agents participate and are located in class processes in contradictory ways;... class struggles refer, then, to struggles over fundamental and subsumed class processes by agents who occupy different class and nonclass positions; they do not refer to 'classes of individuals' struggling" (491). Thus the concept of class is not only always contested, but individuals may hold many, even contradictory, class positions.
Delphy's basic notion of class as coming about specifically through the relationships between classes is very Marxist: "The concept of class ... implies that each group cannot be considered separately from the other because they are bound together by a relationship of domination;... Groups are no longer sui generis, constituted before coming into relationships with one another. On the contrary, it is their relationship that constitutes them as such" (266). Yet her use of Marxist theory represents a clear example of the flexibility employed by late twentieth-century Marxists. In her article "Patriarchy, Domestic Mode of Production, Gender, and Class," Delphy makes two important points I wish to acknowledge. The first is her reflection upon the way definitions and understandings of social formations vary and differ over time: "Many people think that when they have found the point of origin of an institution in the past, they hold the key to its present existence. But they have, in fact, explained neither its present existence nor even its birth (its first appearance), for one must explain its existence at each and every moment by the context prevailing at the time; and its persistence today (if it really is persistence) must be explained by the present context" (261). The second is her acknowledgment of the problem(s) implied in trying to analyze late twentieth-century women's relationships to the patriarchal society of which they are members but usually not beneficiaries. She justifies her use of the term "class" to refer to women in her analysis of their place within the patriarchal hierarchy because it "works" in terms of allowing the analysis to proceed in an understandable, if not absolutely perfect, way. She defends her very untraditional use of "class" in the following way: "Thus one of the objections that has been made to my use of the concepts 'mode of production' and 'class' has been that these concepts were created to describe other situations and that in using them I deny the specificity of our [women's] oppression. But analysis proceeds by a kind of logical 'butchery.' To understand a phenomenon, one begins by breaking it down into bits, which are...
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