Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England

By Natasha Korda

Shakespeare's Domestic Economies explores representations of female subjectivity in Shakespearean drama from a refreshingly new perspective, situating The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, and Measure for Measure in relation to early modern England's nascent consumer culture and competing conceptions of property. Drawing evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, marriage sermons, household inventories, and wills to explore the realities and dramatic representations of women's domestic roles, Natasha Korda departs from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been "trafficked" as passive objects of exchange between men.

In the early modern period, Korda demonstrates, as newly available market goods began to infiltrate households at every level of society, women emerged as never before as the "keepers" of household properties. With the rise of consumer culture, she contends, the housewife's managerial function assumed a new form, becoming increasingly centered around caring for the objects of everyday life—objects she was charged with keeping as if they were her own, in spite of the legal strictures governing women's property rights. Korda deftly shows how their positions in a complex and changing social formation allowed women to exert considerable control within the household domain, and in some areas to thwart the rule of fathers and husbands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9780812202519

Book preview

Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies

Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies

Gender and Property in Early Modern England

Natasha Korda

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Korda, Natasha.

Shakespeare’s domestic economies : gender and property in early modern England / Natasha Korda.

    p. cm.

Contents: Housekeeping and household stuff—Household Kates : domesticating commodities in The taming of the shrew—Judicious oeillades : supervising marital property in The merry wives of Windsor—The tragedy of the handkerchief : female paraphernalia and the properties of jealousy of Othello—Isabella’s rule : singlewomen and the properties of poverty in Measure for measure.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8122-3663-7 (alk. paper)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Views on sex role. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Women. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Views on property. 4. House furnishings in literature. 5. Housekeeping in literature. 6. Property in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Women in literature. I. Title.

For Reva Korda

Contents

Note on Spelling and Editions

Introduction

1    Housekeeping and Household Stuff

2    Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew

3    Judicious Oeillades: Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor

4    The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello

5    Isabella’s Rule: Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure

Conclusion: Household Property/Stage Property

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Note on Spelling and Editions

While I have used early modern editions of the texts cited in this book wherever possible, I have slightly modified spelling, orthography, and punctuation to make these citations more legible to a wide audience of readers. Thus I have silently expanded contractions, given the modern equivalents of obsolete letters, and transliterated i/j and u/v where necessary.

Introduction

The theater of property which we have inherited is particularly limited in women’s parts.

—Donna Dickenson, Property, Women, and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (1997)

The history of the word household reflects early modern England’s growing preoccupation with stuff, with the goods required to maintain a proper domicile in a nascent consumer society. In addition to the more familiar and still contemporary definition of a household as The inmates of a house collectively; an organized family, including servants or attendants, dwelling in a house, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the following obsolete definition, which refers not to domestic subjects (husbands, wives, children, servants, etc.), but to domestic objects: The contents or appurtenances of a house collectively; household goods, chattels, or furniture. To illustrate this usage, the OED cites Caxton’s 1484 phrase, Dysshes, pottes, pannes, and suche other houshold. The early modern conception of what constituted a household was thus defined as much by objects as it was by subjects. In the sixteenth century, the English language gave birth to a new term to designate The goods, utensils, vessels, etc. belonging to a household: household stuff. One might wonder why such a term was needed. It was, after all, synonymous with the latter definition of household; the suffixed stuff appears merely redundant, reiterating the act of possession, of keeping or holding, already latent in the latter term. An answer presents itself if we consider the increasing value and proliferation of household moveables during the period, which rendered it necessary to distinguish the household-as-container from the stuff it contained. Such a distinction helped to avoid confusion, among other things, in the transfer of property. Thus, whereas an early fifteenth-century will states simply, Also I will that my wyffe have all my housholde [w]holy (indicating a bequest not of the house itself but of its moveables), two centuries later Henry Swinburne’s A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes, the first standard English guide to ecclesiastical probate procedure, specifies that the proper term to be used in bequests of moveables (such as Tables, Stooles … Chaires, Carpets, Hangings, Beds, Bedding, Basons with Ewers, Candlesticks; all sorts of vessell serving for meate and drincke, being either of earth, wood, glasse, brasse, or Pewter, Pots, Pans, Spits, etc.) is Housholdstuffe.¹

If Swinburne’s enumeration of the variety of things classifiable as household stuff points to the increasingly diverse supply of household goods during the period,² the tremendous popularity of his treatise points to the increasingly diverse demand for them. Addressed to every Subject of this realme, though hee bee but of meane capacity and written in our vulgar tongue so that it may be understood of all,³ his treatise went through two editions before Swinburne’s death in 1623, and another eight posthumously. The growing need for clarification of the laws governing the disposition and bequest of household stuff is likewise visible in Swinburne’s emendations to the second edition of his treatise: claiming to be Newly Corrected and augmented, the 1611 edition incorporates sundry principall Additions to the 1590 edition, including some twenty-one pages classifying at length the various species of moveable property, such as household stuff. The lexical emergence and increasing currency of this term during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would thus seem to answer to a historical exigency to specify as a distinct category of property the material things held by the household and kept by the housekeeper, an exigency linked to England’s rapidly expanding market of consumer goods.

The material emphasis of the term household stuff is one that this book shares; this is a book about stuff, about the material objects that came to redefine the household in early modern England.⁴ Yet the literary analyses elaborated herein are equally concerned with the stuff of language, with the material signifiers through which this redefinition of the household took linguistic shape. The term household stuff provides an exemplary example of the inseparability of these two registers of analysis, for it materially reproduces (through its superfluous, superadded stuff) the material redundancy of things that transformed domestic life and domestic relations during the period. This book thus aims to illuminate both the symbolic dimension of household things and the historical dimension of household words.

The inseparability of the symbolic and material economies that redefined the household is likewise evident in Swinburne’s treatise, which seeks, through a specification of terms, to avoid uncertaintie respecting the thing bequeathed. Dispositions or bequests of household property, he warns, are often overthrowne … when anything is bequeathed under such generall words, that the meaning of the testator is unknowne. In the interest of clearing doubts and avoiding suites, which otherwise might ensue about the meaning of the testator by those generall words, he maintains, I have thought good to deliver the[ir] severall signification[s].⁵ Swinburne’s classification of moveable property includes no less than nine categories and subcategories: goods, chattels, moveables (including the subcategories moventia and mobilia), fruits (both industrial and natural), and household stuff. Far from delineating clear and fixed boundaries between these categories, however, his definitions reveal how unstable and subject to dispute they in fact were.⁶ It becomes clear that the linguistic instability he aims to fix arises from a material excess, from the increasing volume, value, and variety of goods available for domestic consumption. In attempting to define the precise parameters of the term household stuff, for example, Swinburne acknowledges the material instability of its referent: Writers are at variance, he admits, as to whether plate (a category of household object that had undergone a dramatic material transformation in households of the lower and middling sort in the period immediately preceding his treatise) should be included, Some setting it downe for law, that nothing which is made of silver, or golde, is to be accounted houshold stuffe, and some the contrarie.⁷ Swinburne ascribes this discrepancy to the increasing refinement of household stuff: for such was the severity and frugality of olde times, he says, that

vessels of gold or of silver being then very rare, were not comprehended under the name of household stuffe. But afterwards in latter times, when men began not to be contented with the simplicitie of their Grandsires, but … did furnish their houses with vessels of gold and silver and precious stones Upon this change of mens manners, did the law also begin to change, and to reckon these vessels of silver, gold and precious stones, as Bason and Ewer, Bowles, Cups, Candlesticks, &c. for part and parcell of houshold stuffe, yet not indistinctly or absolutely, but with this moderation, so that it were agreeable to the testators meaning, otherwise not. That is, if the testator in his lifetime, did use to reckon them amongst his houshold stuffe, in which case they are due to the legatarie, by the name of household stuffe. But if the testator did esteeme them, as ornaments rather then utensills, and did use them for pompe or delicacie, rather then for daily or ordinarie service for his house. In this case they doe not passe under the legacie of houshold stuffe.⁸

Swinburne’s effort to fix the proper signification of household stuff is thwarted by the category’s material and linguistic superfluity: by the increasing diversity and sumptuousness of goods that were coming to shape what constituted a proper household, and by the term’s unstable and multiple referents (one testator’s utensill is another’s ornament). Swinburne acknowledges, while at the same time attempting to contain, the uncertaintie that this linguistic and material flux introduces into the testator’s meaning: Superfluitie is to be avoided, he warns, especially in a testament, for it stretcheth the word … to the comprehension of whatsoever is thereby signified, not only properly, but also improperly.⁹

Yet Swinburne acknowledges that it is neither possible nor desirable to extirpate rhetorical superfluitie from property relations entirely. For while such superfluitie introduces error, fraud, conflict, struggle, and dispute into property relations, it also introduces desire, social aspiration, and affective bonds among household subjects. The rhetorical dimension of property relations, he recognizes, is as much a part of domestic concord as it is of domestic discord. In his section on Testaments made by flatterie, Swinburne thus argues that it is not unlawfull for a man by honest intercessions and modest perswasions … even with faire and flattering speeches, to move the testator to make him his executor, or to give him his goods, although it is impudent … not to be content with the first or second deniall.¹⁰ The rhetorical dimension of language (faire and flattering speeches), he contends, even when it stretcheth the word beyond the bounds of honesty and modesty, forms an integral part of domestic property relations, and is perfectly acceptable as such, so long as it serves to cement, rather than to sever, those relations. It is not easy, however, for Swinburne to have it both ways, to simultaneously embrace the superfluitie of faire and flattering speeches, and eschew the uncertaintie that it introduces into property relations. For, as Carol M. Rose argues in Property and Persuasion, once one accepts the rhetorical dimension of property claims (the notion that the claim of ownership [i]s a kind of assertion or story, told within a culture that shapes the story’s content and meaning), such claims or stories are thereby rendered unstable, open to interpretation, and therefore subject to dispute.¹¹ These instabilities, and the disputes over household property that they occasioned, are crucial to the present study, insofar as they often became the grounds upon which women (whose property rights were severely restricted by law) asserted property claims, and insofar as they make, as Shakespeare demonstrates, great drama.

A visual representation of the copia or superfluity of household stuff in early modern England, and of the desire to bring order to that superfluity through systems of classification, appears in the chart of household goods included in Randle Holme’s nine-volume, encyclopedic compendium of heraldic iconography, An Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon of 1649 (see Figure 1).¹² Holme’s grid, Lena Orlin observes, stuffs one hundred and twenty items into its ninety-five squares, as if testifying to a superabundance that strain[s] the clearly articulated borders and bel[ies] the numbering system of his chart.¹³ Not satisfied with depicting one of each type of household object, Holme includes multiple subspecies of each type; there are, for example, no less than six different kinds of stools (see nos. 71–76) and baskets (see nos. 59, 83–87) and seven different kinds of cooking pans (see nos. 11, 34, 35, 45, 54).¹⁴ The descriptions that accompany the chart likewise testify to the new variety of household stuff available to early modern householders, repeatedly drawing attention to changes in the materials out of which such goods were made, and in the form of their fashioning. Thus, no. 20 depicts a simple Low footed candlestick, which Holme describes as the old way of making the candle holder, whereas no. 21 depicts the candle stick as are now in use, which is adorned to sett it the more splendidly forth: whithere by raised worke, corded, or Twist worke, or by making the bottome and flower part round, square, Hexagon, or octagon like, with chased worke, &c.¹⁵ This material superfluity gives rise to a semantic superfluity in Holmes text; the diversification of things requires a diversification of terms that renders his system of classification inherently unstable. The temporal flux of fashions produces semantic slippages in terminology, as in the description of item no. 6 (a viall, or viniger bottle … being a Glasse bottle But in our dayes, it is generally called a cruet, or cruce It may be also termed an ewre, or ewer), or of the Sorts of combs accompanying nos. 63 and 64 (Horse or Mane comb … Wiske combe … Back tooth comb … Beard comb … double comb … Merkin comb … Peruwick comb … smal tooth comb … Wood combs … Box combs … Horn combs … Ivory combs … Bone combs … Tortois combs … Cocus combs … Lead combs).¹⁶

The linguistic and material economies of words and things in these texts are clearly inextricably intertwined. My approach to the topic of household stuff in this study thus weaves back and forth between linguistic and material economies and the transformations of household words and things they produced. At once textual and contextual, my methodology is in this sense deeply indebted to insights of the new historicism. Yet the matter of household stuff at times eludes the kinds of contextualizing texts traditionally regarded by new historicist critics; I have thus found it necessary to pursue sources of evidence that are concerned with accounting, as well as with anecdotal recounting. What gets lost when we read contexts solely as texts, histories as stories, is often quite literally the matter. Such matter matters. For without taking it into account, it becomes impossible to distinguish ideological from material change, much less to try to grasp the relationship between them. This is not to suggest that there is some real, graspable, thing that exists beyond, and untouched by, the textuality of history and ideology. The shape of things is itself historical, molded in and through discourse. What we grasp of the matter at hand is neither immanent nor immediate, but informed in and by the questions we ask, the stories we tell. As its locution suggests, however, the matter at hand may also resist or evade the grasp of ideology, remaining at hand, though never quite in hand. Indeed, it is because matter is not entirely malleable, because its movements do not always obey prescribed paradigms of ownership and exchange, that it does matter. For it is often the forms of resistance or agency to which these movements point that produce ideological change.

Figure 1. Chart of household stuff, from the second (unpublished) volume of Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (1649), British Museum Harl. MSS 2026-35. This illustration from the Roxburghe Club facsimile edited by I. H. Jeayes. By permission of the British Library.

The importance of interrogating the rift between ideology and material practice is particularly clear within the field of women’s history. For without such interrogation, as feminist scholarship has demonstrated, the story of history is too often simply his story. It is therefore crucial, in attempting to comprehend the significance of women’s changing historical relations to household stuff, to reach beyond such contextualizing texts as domestic manuals, conduct books, legal treatises, and so on, and consider as well sources of evidence that register the traces of material practice. Because such practices are notoriously scarce and difficult to recover, Joan Thirsk maintains, every kind of ingenuity is needed to reconstruct them.¹⁷ It may be, however, that our willingness to embrace what Penelope Johnson terms documents of theory has dulled our ingenuity in searching out documents of practice.¹⁸ Thus, for example, acceptance of the purported hegemony of the common law doctrines of coverture in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance has long perpetuated the assumption that women had no property rights to speak of in early modern England. Recent feminist scholarship, however, drawing on records of actual property ownership, has demonstrated that the forms of female control over household property during the period were far more varied and complex than the common law suggests, as I discuss at length in Chapter 1. Similarly, the long dominant image of the Elizabethan theater as an all male stage has begun to crumble under the weight of evidence suggesting women’s active participation in a broad range of performance and production practices.¹⁹ These revisionist histories of women’s roles within the household economy, on the one hand, and the playhouse economy, on the other, provide the framework for my analysis of Shakespeare’s domestic economies. Each of the chapters that follow foregrounds in various ways the complex convergences and divergences of domestic ideology and material practice with respect to early modern women’s property relations.

While a study of the early modern household cannot ignore household subjects, it is a central claim of this book that, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relations between subjects within the home became increasingly centered around and mediated by objects. This claim is supported by a growing corpus of scholarship on early modern material culture that has documented, if not celebrated, the periods new access to a superfluity of material possessions, offering a new history of the Renaissance as a world crowded with desirable consumer objects.²⁰ Such scholarship has begun to consider what role this brave new world of goods might have played in the fashioning of subjectivity. Thus, the editors of the anthology Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture ask: What new configurations emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?²¹ The identification of the Renaissance with the emergence of the modern subject, or what Jacob Burckhardt famously termed the development of the individual, they maintain, has hitherto resulted in a slighting of objects.²² The field of Shakespeare studies has followed a similar trajectory, crediting Shakespeare in particular with the invention of modern subjectivity. Within this critical tradition, as its most recent avatar, Harold Bloom, argues, the representation of human character or personality remains always the supreme literary value and is a Shakespearean invention.²³ This privileging of character or subjectivity as the supreme literary value within Shakespeare scholarship has likewise resulted in relative inattention to the role that objects perform in his plays, an inattention contemporary criticism has only recently begun to redress.²⁴

While I hope to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on early modern material culture, my more particular aim in this book is to situate the stuff of material culture in relation to broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations that have had profound and lasting effects on the social and economic status of women. My concern is thus less with household objects in their status as aesthetic artifacts than with the social, juridical, and economic structures that worked to define female subjectivity in relationship to them. I take seriously Jean-Christophe Agnew’s caution that the celebratory aspect of material-culture studies, drawn in by the sumptuous allure of the early modern world of goods, risks eclipsing the ways in which subjects are differentially positioned within this world in accordance with their gender, social status, race, religion, and so forth. The very richness of that work—the thickness of its description and the detail of its maps, Agnew maintains, has at times submerged important questions … of power.²⁵ With respect to gender differentiation, such questions might include the following: How did the transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production impact upon the role of the housewife? In what ways did the expanding market economy and influx of newly available consumer goods within the home affect the social and economic valuation of housework? How did the increasing value of moveable property with respect to real property affect the laws governing women’s property rights? What disciplinary regimes were instituted to regulate female production, consumption, exchange and ownership of consumer goods? What discrepancies existed between women’s de facto and de jure control over household property? When did female consumption threaten, and when did it serve to buttress, patriarchal power? How did the contradictions inherent in women’s property relations form or deform female subjectivity? How did early modern conceptions of property shape representations of male and female desire? How did marital status affect women’s property rights and relations? What kinds of property did single women possess? How was female poverty and propertylessness managed by the state? This line of questioning guides the readings that follow.

The early modern theater, Agnew argues, furnished a laboratory of representational possibilities for a society perplexed by the cultural consequences of nascent capitalism.²⁶ The particular consequences with which this study is concerned are those surrounding women’s domestic property relations. The theater had good reason to be preoccupied with such relations, in that the dilemma posed by women’s ad hoc economic activities and informal property arrangements was not unlike that posed by the theatrical housekeepers themselves. Not only did such activities and arrangements provide playing companies with thematic content, they also lent them material support; for women figured prominently in the cloth and clothing trades on which the theaters depended. When their economic activity was hampered by the licensed trades, they turned to London’s shadow economy to earn a living as second-hand clothing dealers, pawnbrokers, peddlers or hawkers, servicing the theaters in this capacity. Through such avenues of commerce, goods circulated between household and playhouse; housewives thus not only served as metatheatrical emblems of theatrical housekeeping, but were themselves participants in the work it entailed.²⁷

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 household. To her credit, Comensoli not only resists reinforcing the strictures of early modern domestic ideology but argues that such resistance is in fact characteristic 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