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of the genre itself (an assertion with which I entirely agree, although with the proviso that this resistance takes different forms in domestic comedies than it does in domestic tragedies). I certainly do not mean to suggest that we should ignore questions of genre, but rather that we need to ask ourselves what is at stake in our generic categories and whether such categories as the “domestic play” in the end serve to stabilize exclusionary and anachronistic norms. To this end, I conclude the present study with a “problem play,” Measure for Measure, which is not ordinarily considered in studies of domestic drama. Yet it is precisely because Measure for Measure is so devoid of familiar, familial forms of domesticity, and because the domestic dangers it explores dissipate the household so completely, I argue, that it throws the social and economic forces that shaped domestic ideology during the period into such sharp relief.

      The materialist emphasis of this book is shared in many respects by Lena Cowen Orlin’s Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, which has strongly influenced my thinking about the ways in which “the history of property is linked with the history of privacy” and with whose arguments I engage throughout this book.⁴⁴ Yet the form of materialist analysis I employ differs from that of Orlin, in its dual focus on symbolic and material economies. Orlin asserts that she considers the play-texts she studies to be “vehicles merely, mechanisms of expediency,” which function as “witnesses to the struggle of early modern English men and women” within the household; “my first interest,” she insists, “remains cultural history.”⁴⁵ Orlin’s methodology is thus in a sense the inverse of Comensoli’s; the latter privileges literary (or more specifically, generic) form over material history, the former material history over literary form.

      In seeking, by contrast, to elucidate the matrices or interconnections between symbolic and material economies in Shakespearean drama, I follow a line of inquiry first initiated by William Empson’s unfolding of poetic ambiguity and the structure of complex words. Empson’s analyses of the social, historical, and material dimension of words such as “choir” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (to cite perhaps his most famous example) indicates the way in which symbolic and material economies may become imbricated in a literary text. For the term, as Empson unloads it, bears the weight of wooden monastery pews carved into knots, of religious houses “colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves,” but “now abandoned by all but the gray walls colored like the skies of winter” for “various sociological and historical reasons,” which, he maintains, “would be hard now to trace out in their proportions.”⁴⁶ Empson tantalizingly points toward, while stopping just short of, a full-scale analysis of the profound reshaping of material culture effected during the dissolution of the monasteries. It is precisely the “proportions” of Empson’s implied reading, however, that fascinate me, linking as they do the linguistic and material minutiae of the microhistorical to the momentous transformations of the macrohistorical.

      Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, a book deeply influenced by Empson, brings us further down the path of what Williams terms historical—or more properly, historical materialist—semantics.⁴⁷ This mode of analysis, as Williams defines it, is not limited to the formal system of language itself, but rather “extends to the users of language and to the objects and relationships about which language speaks”; these speaking subjects, material objects, and the historical relationships between them, he argues, should be studied together so that the interconnections between them may be better elucidated.⁴⁸ William’s methodology thereby extends Empson’s analysis of complex words by linking poetic ambiguity to ideological contradiction and material change, and by attempting to trace out the “proportions” between them. My own methodology in the readings that follow traces the historical proportions of such complex words as “cates” in The Taming of the Shrew, “discretion” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and “extravagant” in Othello. In Measure for Measure, I take a somewhat different approach, focusing on key-silences in the text, silences that point, I argue, to absent things or missing properties.

      My aim in this study is modest in that I do not intend to offer an exhaustive survey of Shakespeare’s “domestic economies”; such an endeavor would require a very much longer book. Instead, what I offer here is the nucleus of an argument and a method. Because this method resists “substituting thematic reaction for reading,” the argument it produces is necessarily limited in scope.⁴⁹ It is my hope, however, that the cluster of plays I examine, and the at times startlingly new light cast on them by the prism of women’s property relations, will offer a template for future research.

       Chapter 1

       Housekeeping and Household Stuff

      Recent historical research on domestic industry and patterns of consumption in early modern England has largely substantiated the account found in William Harrison’s Description of England (1587) of the newly available consumer goods that were infiltrating households at every level of society:

      The furniture of our houses also exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy; and herein I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only but likewise of the lowest sort Certes in noblemen’s houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, silver vessel, and so much plate as may furnish sundry cupboards, to the sum oftentimes of £1,000 or £2,000 at the least, whereby the value of this and the rest of their stuff doth grow to be almost inestimable. Likewise in the houses of knights, gentlemen, merchantmen, and some other wealthy citizens, it is not geason [uncommon] to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and therto costly cupboards of plate, worth £500 or £600 or £1,000, to be deemed by estimation. But as herein all these sorts do far exceed their elders and predecessors, and in neatness and curiosity the merchant all other, so in time past the costly furniture stayed there, whereas now it is descended yet lower, even unto the inferior artificers and many farmers, who … have for the most part learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joint beds with tapestry and silk hangings, and their tables with carpets and fine napery, whereby the wealth of our country (God be praised therfor and give us grace to employ it well) doth infinitely appear.¹

      By the late sixteenth century, according to Joan Thirsk, England’s expanding consumer culture “embraced not only the nobility and gentry and substantial English yeomen, but included humble peasants, laborers and servants as well,” who for the first time had “cash and something to spend the cash on.”² The growth of consumerism among the lower and middling ranks, she maintains, “is readily demonstrated in any random comparison between the standard household goods of husbandmen living in the first half of the sixteenth century and those living in the later seventeenth century.” Before 1550, “their houses contained the basic furniture, benches, a table, stools, and beds, a small amount of domestic linen and essential cooking and eating vessels.” By the latter half of the seventeenth century, however, “people had a choice of so many different qualities of linen for domestic use and personal wear that it is impossible to count them; many more iron, brass, and copper pots lined the shelves of kitchen, buttery, and dairy,” and for apparel, “people could choose between a host of different colors, designs, and weights of knitted stockings,… lace, fine and course, in several colors, tape, ribbon, inkle.”³ Lena Orlin likewise maintains, “Household inventories support even the most radical of Harrison’s observations concerning the ‘descent’ of provision.”⁴ She compares the inventories of two generations of Oxfordshire husbandmen with farms of equal size; the mid-sixteenth-century inventories list “only the barest cooking equipment and tableware,” while those at the end of the century list chairs, joined tables, painted cloths, beds, several sets of bed linens, tablecloths, bolsters, pillows, and large amounts of pewterware and silverware.⁵ John E. Crowley, in his study The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and America, likewise maintains, “From the yeomanry up, there [was] a redefinition of physical standards of living” during the sixteenth century, mostly in the area of bedding and tableware.⁶

      Recent local studies of four Shropshire parishes, four Warwickshire parishes, thirteen

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