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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
Early modern scholars have rightly focused a great deal of attention on the way in which clothing served in the period both to make and to unmake the social identity of the subject and on the sumptuary laws that attempted, with little success, to fix or stabilize once and for all the proper place of such sartorial status-markers within the social hierarchy.22 Philip Stubbs’s indictment of the “abuse” of “sumptuous attyre” in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) is frequently cited as evidence of the importance of clothing as a tool of social mobility:
now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in Ailgna [read Anglia, or England], and such preposterous excesse therof, as every one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparell he lust himselfe, or can get by anie meanes. So that it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall have those, which are neither of the nobylitie, gentilitie, nor yeomanry, no, nor yet anie Magistrat or Officer in the common welth, go daylie in silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties, and such like, notwithstanding that they be both base by byrthe, meane by estate, & servyle by calling. This is a great confusion & a general disorder.23
Clothing, however, was but one form of moveable property used to signify social distinction. Less attention has been focused on the ways in which moveables generally, and household stuff more particularly, worked to place subjects within status, gender, racial, and other hierarchies during the period, or the ways in which such objects worked to destabilize those hierarchies.
Stubbs himself importantly turns his attention to the status-function of household stuff in the passage immediately following the discussion of sartorial extravagance cited above. In response to Spudeus’s reasoned rebuttal, “If it be not lawfull for every one, to weare, silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, taffeties, gold, silver, preciouse stones, & what not, wherfore did the Lord make & ordein them?” Philoponus replies:
I denie not, but they may be worne … of [i.e., by] the nobility, gentilytie, or magistracy, … but not of every proud fixnet [i.e., swaggerer] indifferently…. And yet did not the Lord ordeane these riche ornaments and gorgiouse vestments to be worne of all men, or of anie, so muche as to garnish, bewtifie, and set forth, the majesty & glorie of this his earthly kingdome: For, as cloth of gold, Arase [i.e., arras], tapestrie, & such other riche ornaments, pendices and hangings in a house of estate, serve not onely to manuall uses and servyle occupations, but also to decorate, to bewtifie & become the house, and to shewe the riche estate and glorie of the owner: so these riche ornaments and sumptuouse vestments … do not onelie serve to be worn of them to whome it doth appertaine … but also to shew forth the power, welth, dignity, riches, and glorie of the Lord, the Author of all goodnesse.24
Stubbes clearly invokes the “rich ornaments” that adorn “house[s] of estate” in order to secure a divinely ordained hierarchy of “power, welth, dignity, riches, and glorie” against the “mingle mangle” brought about by upstart consumers; as we have seen, however, “Arase, tapestrie, & suche other riche ornaments, pendices and hangings” were no longer confined to the estates of the “nobility, gentilytie, or magistracy,” but had begun to appear in the households of those whom Stubbs disparagingly terms “base by byrthe, meane by estate, & servyle by calling.” Like “sumptuouse vestments,” household stuff had come to “serve not onely manuall uses and servyle occupations, but also to decorate, to bewtifie, & become the house, and to shewe the riche estate and glorie of the owner”—as outward signs, that is, not only of inherited, but of acquired, social distinction.
The dressing up of the household, like the dressing up of the subject, was clearly a source of ambivalence in the early modern period, an ambivalence tied to the sense of confusion brought about by both the social ubiquity and mobility of status objects. The power of luxury goods in particular to breach previously entrenched social boundaries (e.g., between high and low) and conceptual categories (e.g., between the necessary and the merely superfluous) made them the focus of controversy.25 The mid-sixteenth-century A Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England, attributed to Sir Thomas Smith,26 develops a system of classification that seeks to redefine the distinction between necessary and superfluous goods; yet this distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of changing standards of living. For as Harrison’s Description makes clear, yesterday’s luxuries had become today’s necessities. Smith divides commodity production of the day into four categories. The first are “substaunciall and necessarie” wares produced in England, such as “cloth, lether, tallow, beare, butter, [and] cheise” (67). The second are imported goods essential to the nations economy, such as “yron, salt, tar, rosin, pitch, oile, [and] steile” (61–62). The third are imported luxury goods considered necessary for a “civilized” life, such as “wynes, spices, linnen cloth, silkes, and collers” (62). Lastly, there are the luxurious, imported “trifles,” which, Smith claims, are “more to serve pleasure then necessitie” and might well be “clean spared.” Among these items he enumerates “glasses, as well lookinge as drinckinge,… glasse windowes, Dialles, tables, cardes, balles, puppetes, penhornes, Inckehornes, toothepikes, gloves,… pouches, broches, agletes, buttons of silke and silver,… pinnes, poyntes, haukes belles,… and a thowsand like thinges” (63, 67).27
Smith’s taxonomy of goods reflects his ambivalence towards luxury commodities, an ambivalence that initially appears to center on the disparity between their exchange-value and their use-value within the home. His treatise voices a nostalgic desire to return to an economy in which substantial home-grown wares were produced to satisfy the immediate needs of the household, and goods were exchanged “ware for ware, without coine” (72).28 Yet, despite his wish that men might “devise a waie howe to live withowt” these superfluous “trifles” of the market, Smith concedes that such a thing is “impossible,” holding certain luxury goods to be necessary for the maintenance of a “civilized” household (47–48).29 “Withowt sume therof of the said commodities,” he allows, the English nation “wold live but grosslie and barbarously” (42). The latter category reveals the ideological work being done by the former: by classifying certain commodities as superfluous, as lacking in substance and utility, Smith may deem others necessary, substantial, and inherently valuable.30
Accepting the consumption of certain unnecessary wares as a necessary evil, Smith goes on to promote their expanded production within the realm. It becomes clear that the prejudice he harbors is not toward luxury goods per se, but rather toward their importation from abroad. Complaining that “Nowe the porest yonge man in a countrey can not be contented either with a lether girdle, or lether pointes, gloves, knyves, or daggers made nighe home,” but must “have theire geare” from “beyonde the sea,” Smith asks:
Were it not better for us that our owne people should be sett aworke with suche thinges then straungers?… I thinke these thinges might be wrought here … as all kinde of clothe, Carseyes, worsted and coverletes and carpetes of tapestrie, knitte sieves, hosen and peticotes, hattes, cappes; then paper, both white and browne, parchmentes, vellam, and all kind of lether ware; as gloves, pointes, girdells, skinnes for Jerkins; and so of our tinne, all manner of vessell; and also all kinde of glasses, earthen potes, tennis balles, tables, cardes, chestes, sins we will nedes have such kinde of thinges…. Might not we be ashamed to take all these thinges at straungers hands, and set suche a multitude of worke of other people … wher all this might be saved with in the Realme? (125–27)
What “roused burning indignation” in Smith and his contemporaries, according to Thirsk, was the fact that such wares were made from materials cheaply bought in their country of origin and cost their producers almost nothing but their labor. A deep prejudice lurked, she maintains, against goods that held value only “by virtue of the labor applied to them.”31 This prejudice was particularly acute when that labor was executed on foreign soil with materials or “stuff” of English origin, as is apparent in Smith’s description of the foreign manufactured wares that were flooding London’s shops and mesmerizing its shoppers: