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Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda
Читать онлайн.Название Shakespeare's Domestic Economies
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isbn 9780812202519
Автор произведения Natasha Korda
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
Why focus on Shakespeare’s domestic economies in particular? This question leads me back to the question of the subject, and to the unquestionably powerful and distinctive “subjectivity effects” found in Shakespeare’s plays.28 Whether or not we grant the novelty of these effects, or their status as a Shakespearean invention, they have had an abiding after-life driven, at least in part, by their association with modernity.29 Yet this association, as mentioned above, has been surprisingly disassociated from the world of objects and, more broadly, from the processes of commodification that are one of the defining features of modernity. If “the exploding availability of consumer goods in the early modern period” represented a thoroughgoing “cultural preoccupation,” Shakespeare is too often seen as standing aloof from this preoccupation.30 For after all, it is argued, Shakespeare, unlike his contemporaries, wrote no city comedies—the genre most often associated with nascent consumer culture and the market. Shakespeare’s preoccupation, centuries of critics have maintained, is with the interior life of the subject, not with the world of goods; his play-worlds are constructed of words, not things, and the subjects who inhabit them populate an otherwise empty stage.
The conception of the Shakespearean stage as a bare, “wooden O,” as Jonathan Gil Harris and I have argued, however, founders under the weight of historical evidence.31 Contemporary theatrical spectators like Simon Forman took note of objects, as well as subjects, on the Shakespearean stage: a chair in Macbeth, the bracelet and chest in Cymbeline, and Autolycus’s “peddlers packe” in The Winter’s Tale.32 The seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer excoriated what he termed the “clutter” of Othello: “we have heard of Fortunatus his Purse, and of the Invisible Cloak, long ago worn threadbare, and stow’d up in the Wardrobe of obsolete Romances: one might think, that were a fitter place for this Handkerchief, than that it, at this time of day, be worn on the Stage, to raise every where all this clutter and turmoil.”33 In the Romantic period, critics responded to such stage-clutter by attempting to distill from its dross a “pure,” literary Shakespeare, whose work was best enjoyed on the page, not the stage. For the clutter of the stage, in the view of Romantic critics like Charles Lamb, rendered the Shakespearean sublime ridiculous: “The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the reading,” Lamb maintained in his discussion of King Lear, which he famously proclaimed to be unperformable; “to see Lear acted” was in his mind “to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick.”34 The animus of Lamb’s critique is clearly aimed at the stage-property, the walking-stick, which props up the tottering actor and, in so doing, seems to suck the sublimity out of Shakespeare’s character. Henceforth, the Shakespearean sublime would be located firmly in a subjectivity removed from the world of objects and the clutter of the stage to the pristine sanctity of the page.
The textuality of Shakespearean subjectivity has been increasingly sublimated—literally raised aloft from the world of substance or stuff—during the twentieth century, culminating, perhaps, in Joel Fineman’s notion of Shakespearean “subjectivity effects” as constituted in a sublimely empty world of words or hollowed-out (yet nonetheless hallowed) signifiers, such as “the sound of O in Othello.”35 My intention here is not to deny the textuality of Shakespeare’s subjectivity effects, but rather to link the symbolic economies out of which these effects are fashioned to the material economies in which they are embedded; for as I have argued above, these two economies are inextricably intertwined.36 Far from remaining aloof from material objects, these subjectivity effects, as Simon Forman recognized, are defined in relationship to them.
My more particular focus in this study is on the ways in which Shakespeare configures female subjectivity effects in relationship to objects of property (including, though not limited to, stage-properties). A crucial conceptual framework for my drawing together of the topics of gender, rhetoric, and property is provided by Patricia Parker’s analysis of the “intimate and ideologically motivated link between the need to control the movement of tropes and … [early modern] exigencies of social control, including, though not limited to, the governance of the household or oikos!’37 Parker’s analysis of gender and property differs from that found in this study, however, insofar as her focus is on the configuration of women as objects of male exchange. In her essay on “Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon,” for example, woman is configured as a feminized territory, discovered or opened to view by the male poet/blazoner; the woman’s body becomes “a passive commodity in a homosocial discourse or male exchange in which the woman herself, traditionally absent, does not speak.”38 By contrast, this book explores the configuration of female subjectivity primarily in relationship to moveable, rather than real, property; for moveables were the form of property most often owned and inherited by women in early modern England.39 In focusing on women’s relations to moveables, I am intentionally moving away from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been “trafficked,” as passive objects of exchange, between men.40 For this observation does little to explain the specific historical forms that women’s subjection assumes with the rise of capitalism and development of the commodity form. The notion of objectification does not, for example, adequately account for the housewife’s emerging role as a keeper and caretaker of household stuff. Structural shifts in domestic economy instituted by the rise of capitalism operated not simply through the objectification of women, but more subtly, through modes of subjection that ostensibly afforded women increasing control over the domestic sphere. At the same time, I argue, women’s de facto and de jure control over household property became important sites of struggle and resistance to England’s patrilineal property regime. My aim is thus to unfold the complex history and dramatic representation of women as subjects, as well as objects, of property. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that the theater of property we have inherited is not so limited in women’s parts.
The focus and methodology of this book are distinctly different from that of previous scholarship on early modern English domestic drama.41 While I share Frances Dolan’s interest in the home “as a locus of conflict, an arena in which the most fundamental ideas about social order, identity, and intimacy were contested,” my focus is on the subtle, coercive forms of power and resistance, discipline and self-discipline, that shaped female subjectivity during the period, rather than on the more “extreme, violent instances” and representations of domestic crime, such as “petty treason,” studied by Dolan.42 As its title suggests, Dolan’s Dangerous Familiars reveals the dangers posed to the household by “the familiar rather than the strange … the intimate rather than the invader,”43 a formulation that has been very useful in my thinking about the potential threats arising from the housewife’s role as keeper of household stuff. Yet I am equally interested in the domestic dangers posed by that which was perceived as unfamiliar or unfamilial; thus, in the second half of this book I examine the figure of the Moor, Othello, and the way in which Africans’ supposed propensity to excessive jealousy was attributed to their purportedly skewed property relations in travel narratives of the period. I then turn to the figure of the impoverished singlewoman in Measure for Measure, who functions as a kind of antitype to the figure of the housewife as keeper.
Through this shift in perspective, I seek to put critical pressure on the category of the domestic in early modern scholarship, rather than taking it as an a priori point of departure, as do genre studies such as Viviana Comensoli’s Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England. The main concern of such studies is to trace the formal and temporal contours of a literary genre (here the “domestic play”). In so doing, however, they risk a certain self-serving circularity, since the definitional attributes employed to delineate the genre necessarily determine the texts that are included in or excluded from it. More problematically, in the case of a politically charged topic such as domesticity, the orthodoxy of genre studies also risks ideological conformity, since one’s definition of the genre necessarily depends upon one’s conception of what constitutes a “proper”