By 1580 the exploding commercial scene in London created careers for professional authors, who thereafter dominated playwriting for the popular stage. As already observed, the extant homiletic interludes on economic issues of the previous two decades had been written largely by Protestant clergymen. That some of these preacher-playwrights now lost faith or interest in the stage is illustrated by Stephen Gosson, who forsook writing plays in favour of penning polemical tracts against them and settling into a parochial ministry. Moreover, the Queen’s Men acting company, formed in 1583, ushered in the age of the large-cast play. Where groups of four to seven actors were typically involved in staging the early Elizabethan interludes, plays now called for as many as eighteen actors, making it possible to present thirty or more characters engaged in more complex plot lines (MacLean and McMillin 1998). If these changes brought an end to those plays we now call interludes, their extended critique of economic issues, as well as the sophisticated dramaturgy developed to explore those issues theatrically, survived in countless city comedies. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the post-interlude tradition, but let me close my discussion with reference to a pair of plays by the Elizabethan actor-playwright Robert Wilson, The Three Ladies of London (c.1581) and The Three Lords and Ladies of London (c.1589), which most faithfully extend the aims and methods of the economic interludes of the early Elizabethan period, and which represent a transitional phase between the moral interludes and the later ‘money plays’ of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Jonson, and Massinger.
In The Three Ladies of London, which Wilson probably penned as a member of Leicester’s Men in the early 1580s, the city is seduced by Lady Lucre through her corrupt servants Dissimulation (a farmer), Fraud (a ruffian), Simony (a churchman), and Usury (a merchant). The other ladies, Love and Conscience, are evicted from their homes by Usury; the former becomes a monster with two faces, while Conscience, reduced to selling brooms for a living, is further humiliated when Lucre spots her face with ink from ‘the boxe of all abhomination’ (Wilson 1592: E1r). Faring no better are the virtuous countryman Simplicity, who is whipped by Fraud (a respectable burgess), and his penniless cousin Sincerity, a godly minister, who ends up in the parish of St Nihil (Nothing) because he cannot bribe Simony (read bishop). Wilson comes down hard on foreign immigrants, who crowd into port cities and cause housing rents to soar, and whose poor-quality goods sold at cheap prices put skilled English craftsmen out of business. Imported luxuries (the very goods the Norwich Grocers’ traffic in) should be restricted. Wilson is both daring and specific in his attack on the economic abuses of the powerful in Three Ladies: Usury has been ‘seene at the Exchange very lately’; Simony ‘seene walking in Paules, having conference & very great familiaritie with some of the Cleargie’ (F3v). However, he moderates his position somewhat in his post-Armada sequel, Three Lords and Ladies of London (1590), a Queen’s Men play. In celebrating London’s success in the wake of victory over Spain, the city’s commercial prowess is treated favourably in this play. Lady Lucre, the villain of the previous play, bans her former suitors (who now flourish in Catholic countries) and, at the play’s conclusion, marries Lord Pomp, himself abandoning his former usurious ways. By 1590, this more favourable Protestant view of the commercial world receives increased attention.
Precisely because they intersect with important developments in late Tudor drama, print culture, and religion, the early Elizabethan interludes on economic reform merit further study. Clearly, most of the plays we have examined here reflect the profound anxiety with which many English reformers greeted the rapid expansion of commercialism in early modern England, particularly in London. In pamphlet after pamphlet, sermon after sermon, the reformers decried the social injustice and spiritual dangers of commercial practice and protested government policy on usury. By way of the interludes, the theatre provided them with the ideal vehicle through which to convey the duplicity, deception, and social destructiveness they associated with the culture of the marketplace. At the same time, plays such as the Norwich
Pageant of Paradise and The Three Lords and Ladies of London embody that spirit of capitalism that Weber and Tawney linked directly to Protestantism; how many other plays reflected this generally sympathetic view of urban commerce and its positive link to religion in early Elizabethan England is impossible to say, since so few of them are extant. The Three Lords and Three Ladies in particular looks ahead to Thomas Heywood’s extended panegyric to Sir Thomas Gresham and the opening of the Royal Exchange in 1569, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody II (c.1603), which celebrates England’s mercantile strength as a sign of providential favour. At the opposite end of the spectrum (and drawing extensively on the dramaturgy and ethos of the earlier interludes) is Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which condemns this conflation of religious sentiment with commercial gain by having Barabas justify his massive accumulation of riches as ‘the blessings’ due to Abraham and his offspring. Even if Barabas, in his role as Vice, or villain, eventually dismisses this belief and all religion, there is enough correspondence between it and the conviction that English prosperity is a clear manifestation of England’s ‘elect nation’ status for audiences at the Rose playhouse to have grasped Marlowe’s point.
PRIMARY WORKS
Bale, John (1986), The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Brewer).
Calvin, Jean (1582), The Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton. Fulwell, Ulpian (1909), Like Will to Like, ed. J. S. Farmer (London: Jack).
Harsnet, Samuel (1603), A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.
Lupton, Thomas (1910), All for Money, ed. J. S. Farmer (London: Jack).
Marlowe, Christopher (1997), The Jew of Malta, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Norwich (1970), The Norwich Grocers’ Play, in N. Davis (ed.), Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, s. s., 1.
Perkins, William (1608), Workes, 3 vols.
Smith, Henry (1599), Three Sermons Made by Maister Henry Smith.
Stow, John (1908), A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Trial (1908), The Trial of Treasure, ed. J. S. Farmer (London: Jack).
Wager, William (1566), The Cruell Debtter.
-(1920), Enough Is as Good as a Feast, ed. S. de Ricci (New York: Huntington Library).
Wapull, George (1910), The Tide Tarrieth No Man, ed. J. S. Farmer (London: Jack).
Wilson, Robert (1590), The Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London.
-(1592), The Three Ladies of London.
Wilson, Thomas (1584), A Discourse upon Usurie.
CHAPTER 34
OVIDIAN REFLECTIONS IN GASCOIGNE’S STEEL GLASS
World History
