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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
As we have seen, such xenophobic arguments about the foreign origin and manufacture of many fripperies, the money spent on them, and the perceived loss of domestic employment were deployed by projectors to promote the expanded production of these luxury commodities within the realm.
Awareness of the increasing refinement of the goods necessary to maintain a “civilized” household also surfaces in travel literature of the period, which excoriated “barbarous” cultures for the rude simplicity of their household stuff. Pieter de Marees thus comments of the inhabitants of Guinea: “Their Houses are not very curiously made, but altogether slight, much like to a number of Hogsties, and I am of opinion, that in many Countreys, there are better Hog-sties then their Houses are…. Their houses are not very full of House-hold stuffe.”32 The importance of household stuff as a sign of civility likewise features prominently in Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie of Africa. Of the people of Hea in Morocco, Leo remarks:
With them tables and table-cloathes are quite out of use, in stead whereof they spread a certaine round mat upon the ground, which serveth among this rude people both for table, cloth, and all…. The seats whereon they sit, are nought else but certaine mats made of hayre and rushes. For beds they use a certaine kinde of hairie flockbed or mattresse…. [0]ne part of these mattresses they lye upon insteed of a couch, and with the residue they cover their bodies as it were with blankets and coverlets Likewise of such base and harsh stuffe they make their cushions…. The women … us[e] for their huswifery turned vessels and cups of wood: their platters, dishes, and other their kitchin-vessels be for the most part of earth.33
The rudimentary materials, forms, and functions of their “base and harsh [household] stuffe” is viewed by Leo as a self-evident sign that the inhabitants of Hea are a “rude people.” Of the people of Fez, he similarly comments:
The table whereat they sit is lowe, uncovered, and filthie: seats they have none but the bare ground, neither knives or spoones but only their ten talons. The said Cuscusu [couscous] is set before them all in one only platter, whereout as well gentlemen as other take it not with spoones, but with their clawes five. The meat & pottage is put al in one dish; out of which every one raketh with his greasie fists what he thinkes good: you shall never see knife upon the table, but they teare and greedily devoure their meate like hungrie dogs…. [T]o tell you the very truth, in all Italie there is no gentleman so meane, which for fine diet and stately furniture excelleth not the greatest potentates and lords of all Africa.34
Their dirth of household stuff has the effect of transforming the Moroccan diners, first into birds of prey (their fingers become “ten talons”), and then into a pack of “hungrie dogs.” Their devolution, by negative example, makes clear the civilizing function household stuff had assumed with respect to the body; in its absence, men rake and claw their meat like beasts. The refinement of material objects does not simply offer an occasion for the exercise of civilized manners; rather, it is the objects themselves that bring this bodily civility into being. When tables are “lowe, uncovered, and filthie,” those who eat at them, even if they are “gentlemen,” become vile and “greasie” and are forced to stoop down and lower themselves. Without knives, they must “teare” their meat. Without separate, apportioning dishes, they must “greedily devoure” what is laid out for all indiscriminately. The description makes clear the way in which material objects served to create and maintain status hierarchies: the communal nature of the couscous platter blurs the social distinctions of those who partake of it. Household stuff had become a means of measuring European civility against the relative refinement of other cultures: the meanest Italian gentleman is greater than the “greatest potentates of all Africa” because he has more “stately furniture.” In Leo’s eyes the “civilizing process” clearly begins with the refinement of objects and ends with the refinement of subjects, and not vice versa. Such descriptions of the dearth of household stuff that characterized “barbarous” cultures aimed to make European readers grateful for their own commodious customs and goods.
I
[Concerning the] keeping of a house … you have now seene howe it turneth and returneth to the wife.
—Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband (1553)
With the expanding market of consumer goods appeared an expanding market of domestic literature designed to educate household subjects in “domesticall duties” that increasingly centered on the acquisition, maintenance, display, and safekeeping of household stuff. The ideas expressed in these treatises were not in themselves new; the concept of household management as an activity that involved the governance of objects, as well as subjects, may be traced back to Xenophon and Aristotle, whose writings on the subject of oikonomia—or “oeconomy” as the term was Englished—were recycled again and again in early modern treatises, where they were merged with Biblical sources, in particular the Pauline Epistles on marriage.35 It was not the ideas themselves that were new; rather, the market into which they were received imbued them with new significance. As Louis B. Wright has argued, such treatises responded to the interests of a “middle-class culture” that had come to recognize “the positive service rendered by so important a functional unit as the home to the organization of that society which made [their] goods safe and gave [their] accumulated possessions continuity.”36 The enormous popularity of the genre, Kathleen M. Davies argues, was tied to “the publishing explosion of the sixteenth century and the growth of a middle-class lay reading public.”37 As householders of the middling sort began to furnish their houses with the new luxuries described above, they found new significance in the trope of the household as a hold, not simply in the sense of a “property held; a possession, holding,” but of “a thing that [itself] holds something … a receptacle” or repository of goods, analogous to a “ship’s hold” (OED).
An early instance of this trope may be found in Xenophons Treatise of Householde, translated into English by Gentian Hervet in 1532, in which Socrates’s interlocutor, Isomachus, likens the household to a merchant “shyppe” that is “laded” with “great abundance of implimentes … stouffe and goodes [oikia],” all “well sette in good order.”38 In discussing the “settyng in order of the householde stouffe,” Isomachus states:
Fyrste me thought best to shewe … what a house properly was ordeyned fore. For … it is builded for this purpose & consideration, that it shulde be a profitable vessel for those thi[n]ges, that shulde be in it [alla ta oikemata okodometai pros auto touto eskemmena, opos aggeia os sumphorotata e tois mellousin en autois esesthai]. Wherfore in a maner it byddeth the dwellers, to lay up every thyng, where it is most mete to put it. The inner privey chambre, bicause it standeth strongest of all loketh for to have the jewels, plate, and all suche thynnges as be moste precious. The drye places loke for the wheate, the colde for the wyne. And bryght places do desyre … thynges, as require lightsomnes.39
The house is here figured as an empty vessel whose purpose or end is to be filled with household stuff. Its spaces are shaped and organized around the needs of its objects. The role of household subjects is to fill the empty vessel, to ensure that each space receives what it “wants,” in the sense not only of what it “lacks,” but