Reading nascent capitalism in Part II of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-SEP-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

Part II of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, while continuing the biography of Elizabeth begun in Part I, gives most of its attention to Sir Thomas Gresham and the founding of the Royal Exchange. The three scenes involving Elizabeth may originally have been scenes in the play published as Part I of If You Know Not Me, with the remaining Part II scenes taken from an earlier play devoted entirely to Gresham, perhaps "the Life and Death of Sir Thomas Gresham with the building of the Royal Exchange" mentioned in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Clark, 31-34; Doran, xvii-xix). Whether the product of such rearrangement or not, Elizabeth's presence in Part II has the effect of placing Gresham's career in a celebratory and elegiac context in the years just following her death (both parts appeared in the Stationers' Register in 1605). Gresham, as the central figure in a play ending at Tilbury with reports of the Armada's defeat, shares history with Elizabeth, and his Royal Exchange becomes a national achievement, recognized as such in its name, contributed by Elizabeth herself in the one scene in which both she and Gresham appear. With the play's nostalgic resurrection of Elizabeth evoking idealized imaginings of "her" age, many modern commentators have accordingly taken as a given Heywood's desire to mythologize Gresham as the ideal merchant prince, fabulously wealthy and wholly devoted to the national interest. At the same time, he has represented something more than heroic commercialism, for he has been taken as a portrait of "the 'new man' that came into power with the rise of capitalism in the last half of the sixteenth century" (Baines, 34-35). In Michel Grivelet's words, Gresham "n'est pas seulement une grande figure nationale, c'est aussi un symbole, la personnification de l'epopee capitaliste dans une societe que l'evolution economique est en train de transformer" (140). Gresham is thus at once a heroic individual and a symbol of the rise of individualism, celebrated by a playwright recognized at least since Louis B. Wright's 1935 Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England as "the greatest theatrical spokesman of the bourgeois ideals of his age" (650).

Finding triumphant bourgeois values in 2 If You Know Not Me requires a series of assumptions about Gresham, about early capitalist formation, about the capacity of writers like Heywood to perceive economic change, and about the play's "middle class" audience. These complex matters involve numerous issues contested in the early seventeenth century and numerous factors in material history which remain subject to debate. Complexities have been masked, however, by the critical practice, dominant in the period when Heywood's twentieth-century reputation took form, of defining distinctive voices for playwrights presumed to have individual perspectives on the world around them. Also contributing to perceptions of If You Know Not Me as an "inconsequential, but interesting illustration of Heywood's characteristic bourgeois sentiment" (Ribner, 221) has been a deep-rooted tendency to see popular plays as formulaic appeals to simple emotions and widespread beliefs. A 1993 essay, for example, though committed to examining "conflicts and tensions" in If You Know Not Me, called it "a palatable lozenge for citizen consumption" (Bonahue, "Social Control," 90). In 1995 a reviewer of Kathleen McLuskie's book on Dekker and Heywood wondered "how many [general] readers find themselves needing to assuage their curiosity about either writer" (Maus, 403), and another reviewer found the book a very slight thing, a "spit on the pavement" which (in the tradition of Dekker and Heywood themselves?) "does not mean to be elegant or lasting" but only "to claim attention for a pair of streetwise Elizabethan playwrights" (Rutter, 177). A passage in a 1995 essay on The Shoemakers' Holiday strikes an equally light note while continuing the tradition of finding in popular drama

the voice of a new bourgeoisie:

Certainly in Dekker's source, Deloney's The Gentle Craft, Eyre is an unabashed hero in his author's eyes, and Dekker acknowledges his hommage to Deloney by his refrain-like references to "the Gentle Craft." What's more, paying members of Dekker's audience presumably read their Deloney with a straight face, much as they flocked to Thomas Heywood's quaintly revisionist plays (If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, etc.) that presented the building of the Royal Exchange, the rising of the prentices and similarly bourgeois events as the milestones of a new view of British history. (Bevington, 107)

In the face, then, of stubborn habits of reducing audiences to "paying members" who "flocked" like sheep to plays summarized by a handy "etc." (in amphitheaters where words like hommage were seldom heard), I wish in this essay to describe Part II of If You Know Not Me as more problematic in its presentation of economic issues than conceptions of Gresham as "prototype of business virtue" (Leggatt, 22) allow for. (1) In doing so, I follow the lead of writers like Kathleen McLuskie, who has demonstrated repeatedly how "the complex richness of the political culture of early modern drama" includes popular plays ("Politics," 234), and J. R. Mulryne, who argues that such plays "may contribute more fully to the circulation of social energy, and the redefinition of political norms ... than more sophisticated and canonical theatre-pieces" (20). Several writers, like Julia Gasper, have warned against regarding popular drama in "a patronising, dismissive way" ("Reformation," 190) or, like Jean Howard, have shown how imposed conceptions of structural and ideological unity paper over signs of conflict and complexity which can "be read as traces of ideological struggle, of differences within the sense-making machinery of culture" (7). Margot Heinemann, Martin Butler, and Ivo Kamps are among others who have found in popular plays what Butler, writing of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, calls "engagement with the stresses and conflicts of [a] moment of production" (194). (2)

Those "stresses and conflicts" are visible in 2 If You Know Not Me, as we might expect of a play performed in theaters which, as Douglas Bruster argues, were themselves "institutional participants in the cultural milieu of a commercial London" (11). Celebrating neither Gresham nor commerce without complication, the play includes serious disruptions of the capitalist myth-making widely identified as Heywood's central project. Its "reading" of changing economic structures is nothing so clear as has been claimed--and may not be a "reading" at all. The understanding of Gresham as prototypical capitalist results, after all, from a retrospection which risks what Jonathan Dollimore describes as "the naive error, common in literary studies, of describing the inception of a particular movement in terms of its subsequent historical development" while "ignoring elements contemporary to the inception which were working against, perhaps even contradicting it" (7). Heywood's play emerged from a world where, in Jean-Christophe Agnew's words,

Britons could be described as feeling their way around a problematic of exchange; that is to say, they were putting forward a coherent and repeated pattern of problems or questions about the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency, and reciprocity in commodity transactions--the who, what, when, where, and why of exchange. (9)

"[P]roblems or questions" in If You Know Not Me indeed evidence its role in a developing "problematic of exchange." Its many points of direct intersection with material life make it, not a coherent story of beneficent cultural change, but a complex and sometimes self-contradictory record of a many-stranded cultural process.

1. The Law of Capitalist Accumulation: "so much Cash" (3)

The defining element in the portrayal of Gresham is his enormous wealth. Its sources seem of little interest, for the play ignores Gresham's career in the cloth trade and his extensive service as royal financial agent. His financial acumen, his mastery of "[c]are how to get, and fore-cast to encrease," is mentioned (line 15), but only an unsuccessful attempt to secure a patent in Barbary sugar is actually dramatized. The result is a focus on wealth itself, on wealth as accumulation, not as capital per se. As Theodore B. Leinwand observes of the merchants generally in the play, "they give away money or they lose it, but they do not make profits" (City, 201). Gresham thus seems less like the merchants of other plays than the rich men of other plays, and his actions invite an audience to recall all aspects, admiring and contemptuous alike, of contemporary attitudes toward wealth. A scene midway in the play memorably raises the issues (lines 1460-1574). After buying for [pounds sterling]1500 a pearl "too deare" for the Russian ambassador and the French king, Gresham learns of two disasters: the ship bearing "all the Kings pictures ... in white marble" for the Exchange has sunk, and the new king of Barbary has rejected Gresham's agreement with the old king, refusing to grant him a sugar patent but keeping the [pounds sterling]60,000 which Gresham had paid and sending instead of money a "costly dagger, and a paire of slippers." Gresham laughs at his losses--"On slippers ile daunce all my care away"--and then orders the pearl he has bought to be "[b]eate ... to powder" and mixed into wine:

Here 16000. [sic] hundred pound at one clap goes. In stead of Sugar, Gresham drinkes this pearle Vnto his Queene and Mistresse: pledge it Lords, Who euer saw a Marchant brauelier fraught, In dearer slippers or a richer draught?

Alert to disparaging readings of his extravagance, Gresham quickly neutralizes them by declaring his "real" motive: "I doe not this as prodigall of my wealth, / Rather to shew how I esteeme that losse / Which cannot be regain'd." Although the justification might satisfy those moralists identified as commerce-friendly by Wright and others because they condemned not wealth, but excessive devotion to it (174-76, 254-57), other reactions are surely possible to the consumption, literal and conspicuous indeed, of a pearl worth a little more than the whole necklace of pearls that Queen Anna had sent as a welcoming gift to the wife of the Constable of Castile the year before the play was published ([pounds sterling]1400--Barroll, 51).

Audiences might have reacted, moreover, not only to the pearl itself but also to its being ground into wine "[i]n Stead of Sugar." Wine, of course, was expensive. As Stow had written, "quaffing ... is mightily encreased, though greatlie qualified among the poorer sort, not of any holy abstencie, but of meere necessitie, Ale and Beere being small, and Wines in price aboue their reach" (1:83). Sugar was also costly (as Falstaff knew), a luxury beyond most Elizabethans except in small quantities. Not for a craftsman, writes T. S. Willan,

was the sugar loaf, weighing anything from 3 to 14 lb., which was the form in which the rich bought their sugar, or at least some of it. Before it could be used, the loaf had to be broken into pieces, and the pieces were often in turn ground into powder. (Studies, 325) (4)

Powdering the pearl, then, provides a provocative analogy to a practice widespread by the end of the sixteenth century for those who could afford it. The analogy effectively reduces Gresham's wealth to manageable form: if dissolving a pearl has mythical proportions, its resonances...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.