SOURCE: Prager, Carolyn. “Heywood's Adaptation of Plautus' Rudens: The Problem of Slavery in The Captives.” Comparative Drama 9, no. 2 (summer 1975): 116-24.

[In the following essay, Prager maintains that Heywood's play has been underestimated by critics because of the difficulty of dealing with the the subject of slavery issue in dramatic form.]

Scholarly inability to localize the problem of slavery outside of anachronistic translation from the classics has resulted in a critical underestimation of Thomas Heywood's adaptation of Plautus' Rudens in The Captives (1624). Transported by Heywood to a contemporary European terrain, the slave elements of the play trouble the modern judgment of those prepared to accept the normalcy of chattel bondage in the world of antique Roman comedy but not in English Renaissance drama. The absence of informed perspective on the relationship of institutional slavery to the slave figure in the drama is apparent from a review of the critical writing on Heywood's The Captives. A. H. Gilbert, the first extensively to assess Heywood's debt to Plautus in the play, circumvents the question of slavery by ignoring it. A. C. Judson, the first modern editor of the play after Bullen, naively finds the question out of phase with the sociology of Renaissance Europe. Subsequent allusions to the slave problem follow this critical path of avoidance. A. M. Clark speaks of an “incompleteness of translation into modern conditions” and G. E. Bentley of the “material from Plautus … so incompletely adapted as to leave anachronisms in the play.”¹

The main plot of The Captives (poorly linked to a sub-plot which does not concern us here) centers about the rescue from prospective sale by a pimp. In Heywood as in Plautus, the girls are clearly slaves being sold into slavery in societies where trade in slaves is legitimate commercial enterprise. In each play, they fortuitously escape their owner during a storm and shipwreck. Plautus' Greek slave girls land off the coast of Cyrene, Heywood's Englishwomen off Marseille. Palaestra, the daughter lost in infancy in either play, is rescued along with her female fellow slave by an unknowing father who violently opposes—though for significantly different reasons in the Roman and the English play—the procurer's right to repossess his human property. The contents of a trunk hauled from the sea in the net of a fisherman (a slave to the father in the Rudens; a countryman in The Captives) reveal the true natal identities of the girls. After the recovery by their parents, Plautus' and Heywood's Palaestras are joined by their lovers who have followed after them on their forced odyssey.

Aside from similar mechanical contrivances of plot and character pairings, there are startling differences, mainly of moral scope, in the two plays. In the Rudens, Daemones, the father, aids the escaped girls because they have taken sanctuary in a Temple of Venus. To preserve the integrity of the sacred place, he violently rejects the attempt by the pimp Labrax to recover his slaves from the sanctuary by force. In the traditional resolution of New Comedy, Daemones frees his witty and resourceful fisherman slave (after cheating him of his money), and then invites the pimp home to dine with him. Moral censure, if any, is directed against the contemporary evil of child-stealing. Chattel slavery and its moral ramifications are not controversial issues in the play.

The portion of Heywood's adaptation which so troubles modern readers—namely the enslavement, prospective barter, and redemption of the two girls—explores the contemporary abuse of slavery, a fact of life affecting Caucasians, Asians, and Africans alike in the Renaissance world.² The father, transformed by Heywood from Plautus' lecherous recluse to a virtuous English merchant, reacts with horror at the thought that Christian women might be held as common capital. Ashburne challenges their procurer with the innate right of free-born Englishmen to freedom: “I tell thee pesant / Englands [not] no broode ffor slaves” (11. 1536-37).³ Mildew, “a damable hee bawde” (1. 155), “ffather of ffornication,” and “duncart off diseases” (1. 194), plans to emigrate from France with all his capital, including “these shee chattyles” (1. 271), the two English girls. A survey of the geography of most of Western Europe and its neighbors indicates that he can turn the girls, unequivocally his slaves, to good profit in any part of the known world:

England they say is ffull off [marchandyse], whore maste
there [ffor] will be vent ffor such comodityes.
there strompett them where they … weare borne
elce you in spayne maye sell them to the stewes.
Venyce or any place, off Italy,
they' are every where' good chaffer                    Iff not these
what saye you to Morocko …
tush these are wares in all parts vendible. …

(11. 272-79)

English benevolence rescues the two girls after a providential shipwreck out of Plautus. Ashburne overhears them singing of the plight of the recaptured—“No favours knwne no pittyes showen / To them that ffly there Maysters” (11. 1490-91)—and obtains their freedom, at a price.

Their emancipation is accomplished, however, less by ready willingness to pay for their release (which he eventually does in the case of his niece) than by stubborn refusal to return them to the pimp. Ready to defend them with stave and halbert, if necessary, he contests Mildew's legally valid claim to his property with morally chauvinistic argument. Mildew insists that “these are myne / my chattells and my' goodds”:

Nor can you Cease the …
lett mee possesse myne owne, these' are my slaves
.....… my vtensills my moove ables: and bought,
wth myne owne priuate coyne. …

(11. 1515-16; 1524-26)

To this argument based on the right to retain capital, Ashburne opposes one of nationalistic origins essentially hostile to the notion of chattel bondage:

none is bredd wth vs,
but such as are ffree borne. and christian Lawes
do not allowe such to bee bought or' sould, …
to Comon prostitution. …

(11. 1544-48)

Whether or not hypothetically Ashburne could win his case on points of law in any European court of Heywood's day⁴ is extremely doubtful, “christian Lawes” generally sustaining the right of property in the defense of slavery. The Ashburne-Mildew debate illustrates the basic contradiction in Western laws of slavery still prevalent in Renaissance Europe. Systematically formulated from the Justinian code, contemporary statute recognizes the slave as both person and thing, though, in practice, the slave's status as res with limited civil rights predominates.⁵ Although the girls have taken refuge in a chapel, under canon law which requires the return of all runaway slaves⁶ (except the Christian slaves of Jewish masters), they would, ironically, receive less protection than their Athenian counterparts in a pagan temple in the Rudens. Juridical argument, however, in The Captives occurs in the theatre not the court and Ashburne's pro-English defense easily wins the case with the audience.

Heywood argues not the inalienable right to freedom of mankind under natural law but the constitutional liberty of freeborn Englishmen heralded by the Tudor propagandists. In so doing, he alters the Plautine material into a qualified examination of the legitimacy of bondage in the contemporary world. The simple fact that Marseille remains a thriving center of a multi-ethnic slave trade well into the seventeenth century invalidates the argument that the circumstances of slavery in the play defy the logic of historic transplantation to France, c.1550.⁷ The story's locus near Marseille, a port from which Mildew knows he can sell his human goods throughout the Renaissance world—“tush these are wares in all parts vendible”—geographically verifies Heywood's knowledgeable examination of the question of chattel bondage as a fact of contemporary rather than of pagan life.

Other selective modifications of the Plautine story point to Heywood's conscious artistic effort to lift the matter of the Roman play into the context of recent history. By reducing the number of slaves to the two English bondwomen, he limits the moral thrust of the play to the nationalistic argument exempting English citizens from the degradation of bondage, without need to consider the larger question (not debated until the Enlightenment)⁸ of the morality of the institution of bondage itself. Gripus, the manumitted slave of the Rudens, performs the stock service of his classical counterpart in The Captives while remaining a poor fisherman. Mildew like Labrax is unreservedly censured for impious offense to God and God's house:

Downe wth these Sacraligious salsaparreales. these vnsanctiffied sarlaboyses: that woold make a very Seralia off the sanctuary and are meare renegadoes to all religion. …

(11. 1509-12)

More important, he is denied the redemptive communal embrace of forgiveness that concludes the Latin play.

Heywood's constrained patriotic response to the issue of institutional bondage reflects the ethical hesitations and confusions of the age unprepared to condemn chattel bondage on humanitarian grounds. Though infrequently posed in English thought, the question phrased by William Perkins in 1604 of whether or not “a Christian may with safe conscience, haue and vse a man as his slaue” indicates the troublesome nature of the problem little alleviated by the uneasy quality of the response. Perkins' answer echos the one worked out long ago by Roman jurists and Church Fathers that argues the authority of jus gentium in a fallen world: “the power and right of hauing bondmen, in the countries where it is established by positiue lawes, may stand with good conscience. …”⁹ Like Sir Thomas More who allows that if not fortunate enough to be born a Utopian, one is better off a slave in Utopia than a freeman elsewhere,¹⁰ theorists often insist upon the uplifting nature of Christian environment to improve upon the unfortunate predestined lot of the slave. “Lastly,” states Robert Pricke in The Doctrine of Svperioritie, and of Subiection in 1609, “the worst estate of seruants amongst such as are reputed Christians: is better and more tollerable, than the state of seruants amongst many nations: … as appeareth both in the Scripture, and in prophane Histories.”¹¹

By the middle of the sixteenth century, a political mythology of the sacred right to liberty of men and women born to breathe English air¹² runs counter to such legal and theological arguments. William Harrison declares in An Historicall Description in 1577 that “as for slaues and bondmen we have none, naie such is the privelege of our countrie by especiall grace of God, and bountie of our princes, that if anie come hither from other realmes, so soone as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterlie remooved from them.”¹³ Tudor political commentators, cognizant of the existence of chattel slavery among Christian and heathen, nonetheless condemn it as a non-Christian and, therefore, a non-English institution. Sir Thomas Smith argues in De Republica Anglorum in 1583 that it is Christian persuasion “not to make nor keepe his brother in Christ, servile, bond and underling for euer unto him, as a beast rather than a man. …” In a true commonwealth, law fosters liberty: “The nature of our nation is free, stout, haulte, prodigall of life and bloud: but contumelie, beatings, servitude and servile torment and punishment it will not abide.”¹⁴

The dramatic reflection of the realistic fear that Christians might actually buy and sell other Christians increases on the English stage in the years coincidental with those of expanding trade and travel to southern reaches of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Thematically concentrated in The Captives, the anxiety of a slave trade enfettering Europeans at the hands of fellow Europeans occurs in many contemporary English plays. Most frequent in those dealing with the prospect of captivity in Barbary where English and European renegades and pirates sell their human booty into the markets of the Levant,¹⁵ the danger of servile seizure within a European geography figures in a small group of plays. In a variation of the ancient story of the lost foundling found, Valentine in Beaumont and Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas (1610-16?) bemoans the loss of a son “among the Genoua Gallies” (I.i), only to rejoice when he finds that the boy was not enslaved but raised by a kindly old sailor.¹⁶ Severino in Philip Massinger's The Guardian (1623) calms a party captured by bandits outside of Naples. He assures them that they “need not doubt / A sad captivity here”:

                                                            … And much less fear
For profit, to be sold for slaves, then shipped
Into another country.(17)

(V.iv)

Rutilio and Arnoldo, two gentlemen of Portugal attacked by Italian pirates in Fletcher and Massinger's Custom of The Country (1619-20), jump into the ocean rather than “taste the bread of servitude” (II.i).¹⁸ Their female companion is made a “slave” and “bond-woman” (IV.i) to an Italian lady, released only by the happy circumstances of a treaty of accommodation newly negotiated between the two countries. In Heywood's A Challenge For Beauty (1634-35?), a Turkish captain prepares to sell his English captives at a “Male-Market” in Spain where they face life either as “slave to a Turke, or … the bloodie usage / Of an ambitious Spanyard” (II.i).¹⁹

The elevated dramatic image of the Englishman enslaved in general conforms to the popularization of Tudor political theory fostering the image of Britannic eleutherism. The figure of the resistant English “slave,” taken as a substantive of impossibility, implies conflict between an Englishman's accidental fortunes and his native condition of freedom. Heroic Britons in Jasper Fisher's pretentious academic Fuimus Troes (1633) rise to defend a heritage that denies slavery. The British slave in Dekker's The Virgin Martyr (1620?) rejects performing slavish acts to preserve a paradoxical freedom (IV.i.151-54).²⁰ In A Very Woman, a play distinguished for its graphic scene of slave sale in the markets of Palermo (III.i), Massinger burlesques the figure of a dandified Englishman—“The finest thing in all the world, sir, / The punctuallest; and the perfectest”—who defies occupation as a slave since, ironically, his very foppishness makes him useless for laboring service.

The two English girls who leap into the ocean to escape a life of enslaved prostitution in The Captives must be viewed in the political context, however limited, of national celebration of non-servile British attribute in a world indulgent of the institution of bondage. Heywood's most significant adaptation of Plautus lies in the ethical focus, however conservative, he gives to the question of slavery in the Renaissance world. Marred by lack of plot cohesion, The Captives is hardly a seminal work in the development of Jacobean drama. Still, it deserves recognition for what it is, a partial examination of the legitimacy of a social institution ethically validated by Western laws of property, a justification a later age will declare reprehensible.

To continue to label Heywood's interest in the problem of slavery an anachronistic derivative of classical model obscures the moral and political distance separating his age and ours. The consequence for students of Tudor-Stuart drama is the critical failure to recognize and accommodate contemporary conceptions and sanctions of servitude in contemporary terms. Without inquiry into English Renaissance understanding of the thriving trade in souls, we cannot properly consider the thematic connection of slavery to the slave in plays as significant and influential in their day as Tamburlaine, Titus Andronicus, Lust's Dominion, Othello, The Tempest, The Bondman, A Custom of The Country, and The Royal Slave.

Notes

1. A. H. Gilbert, “Thomas Heywood's Debt to Plautus,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanie Philology], 12 (1913), 593-611, esp. pp. 597-99; A. C. Judson, ed., The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1921), p. 15; A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 120; G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), IV, 561.

2. Venetian tax records prove the sale of more than ten thousand slaves of all nationalities in the years 1414-23. See Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 30 1955), 329. For more detailed specifics of slavery in Italy, see E. Rodocanachi, “Les esclaves en Italie du xiii^e et xvi^e siecle,” Revue des Questions Historiques, 79 (1906), 383-408, and Alberto Tenenti, “Gli schiavi de Venezia alla fine del cinque cento,” Rivista storica italiani, 67 (1955), 52-69. Charles Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans l'Europe mediévale: Tome Premier, Peninsule-Ibérique-France (Brugge: De Tempel, 1955) explores the general extent of chattel slavery on the Continent in the period preceding and overlapping Anglo-Renaissance drama. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), esp. pp. 29-31, 37-46, and 98-103.

3. The Captives, ed. Arthur Brown, Malone Soc. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953). This edition is without act or scene number.

4. Verlinden, pp. 851-52, cites evidence, however, of general movement in France, the Marseille area excepted, to prohibit slavery on French soil.

5. Davis, pp. 32-34 and 55-56; Origo, p. 351; and, in more detail, R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in The West, II (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1927), Ch. IV, “The Political Theory of the Roman Lawyers: The Theory of Slavery,” 34-40.

6. Carlyle, II, 38; Origo, pp. 350-51.

7. Verlinden, pp. 838, 851.

8. Davis discusses the complex nature of the development of anti-slavery thought in the eighteenth century within the pattern of continuity that makes up the history of servitude. See esp. pp. 391-445. Wylie Sypher's Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of The XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942) is the major study of the literary effect of anti-slavery thought.

9. A Commentarie or Exposition, vpon Galatians, in The Workes of That Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ … M. W. Perkins, trans. Thomas Pickering (Cambridge, 1613), III, 687, 698.

10. The Yale Edition of The Works of Thomas More, IV (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 185.

11. Robert Pricke, The Doctrine of Svperioritie, … (London, 1609), sig. [M6^r].

12. The concept of freedom must be measured against severe experiments in restraint evident, for example, in the Tudor laws regulating vagabonds. See the standard work on the subject: Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), pp. 62-67. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 48-52, discusses the tendency toward liberty at variance with retarded traditions of villeinage in common law.

13. In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: J. Johnson, 1807-08), I, 275.

14. L. Alston, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse On The Commonwealth of England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1906), Lib. III, ch. 8, pp. 132-33; Lib. I, ch. 10, p. 20; Lib. II, ch. 24, p. 106.

15. See Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and The Rose: England and Islam During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937), pp. 340-86.

16. The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, IV (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1908).

17. The Plays of Philip Massinger, ed. William Gifford (London: Henry Washburne, 1850).

18. The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, I (1906).

19. The Dramatic Work of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd, V (1874; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964).

20. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, III (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958).