SOURCE: Bonahue, Edward T., Jr. “Social Control, the City, and the Market: Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.” Renaissance Papers (1993): 75-90.

[In the following essay, Bonahue discusses the role of Heywood's play in providing a forum for debate on the more controversial aspects of the changing culture of the city in early modern England.]

Until recently, scholars describing the economic and social history of early modern London assessed the dominant cultural paradigm as one of continual “crisis,” a series of political, economic, and social problems that grew more and more volatile until they finally launched the civil war.¹ Focusing on those cultural forces that provided some measure of stability, however, revisionist historians within the last decade have demonstrated that despite its succession of so-called “crises,” early modern London in many ways prospered. The city increased dramatically in wealth, and sanitation and public works were improved; periodic food riots over shortages and high prices never erupted into full-scale revolution.² Of course, London also periodically faced high inflation, a decline in real wages, and rising unrest among the working population, but somehow, despite such challenges, “the city managed to contain the tensions which many historians believe were their inevitable consequence.”³ How did London manage to preserve itself, then, along essentially medieval geographic and social boundaries as long as it did, especially when facing the problems coincident with a burgeoning free market? Just what cultural forces were at work to contain, or at least to mitigate, every new danger?

Many historians have explored those official mechanisms of the city, ward, parish, and precinct that provided occasional public relief during periods of extreme destitution and that offered Londoners some modicum of political participation. Yet to a significant degree, social tension was also contained through more informal means, including public debate in those public spheres of discourse “where gentry, shopkeepers and artisans not yet segregated into separate clubs, mingled freely,”⁴ including the public theatre. Specifically, in his exploration of the idea of the marketplace and its ideological interpenetration with the London theatre, Jean-Christophe Agnew argues persuasively that London's recently established permanent playhouses became important vehicles for all kinds of social negotiations, especially because they provided a discursive stage on which an anxious London could interrogate and, if possible, recuperate new proto-capitalist economic realities, among them, high profits, monetary exchange, and impersonal transaction.

What rhetorical devices or forms of address could accommodate the new and unsettling confusion over personal distance and intimacy that perplexed those brought together in commodity transactions? What image of the individual could take adequate measure of a self no longer, or at least not fully, authorized within the traditional religious, familial, or class frame? And if such conventions, devices, and imagery were available, where might they develop freely enough to coalesce into an intelligible, formal analogue of the increasingly fugitive and abstract social relations of a burgeoning market society?⁵

The answer, Agnew proposes, is the public theatre, that marginal institution whose ambiguous relation to official authority licensed a certain freedom for debating the most controversial, even dangerous, issues circulating throughout the city.⁶

As a text overtly concerned with representations of commercial activity, Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 (1605), an unwieldy congregation of vaguely related dramatic scenes, holds an important position within the discourse of London's struggle to describe and legitimize new social and economic realities. Like many city comedies, 2 If You Know Not Me is vitally concerned to reconcile disparities between the alienating effects of the new commerce and inherited notions of communal organization and obligation. The play engages not with the sprawling geographic and demographic expansion of London itself, which was clear to all Londoners, but rather with “economic change that called older social assumptions into question.”⁷ As certain London citizens began to see vast increases in wealth and power, Heywood's play attempts not only to show merchants and mercantilism in the best possible light but also to legitimize and celebrate their activities and existence within the city. The play constructs a hierarchy of London citizens and attaches a specific economic problem to each character in order to stage the possibility of some crisis at each level, and then to show that crisis averted. By delving beneath Heywood's celebratory moments, however, we can uncover those strategies of containment in the play that not only mask the problems of London's new economic order but also rewrite English economic and social history.

Let us begin where the play would least have us begin, at the bottom of the hierarchy, with the working-class figure of John Tawnycoat, who appears first as a poor country peddler and then as an urban laborer. His most bitter speech, near the end of the play, depicts far more miserable conditions, and a far more mercenary society, than the rest of the play admits.

Hard world, when men dig liuing out of stones,
As wretched miserable I am inforc't:
And yet there liues more pittie in the earth,
Then in the flinty-bosomes of her children,
For shee's content to haue her aged brest
Mangled with matrocks, rent and torne with spades,
To giue her children and their children bread,
When man more flinty then her stonie Ribbes
That was their mother, neither by intreates,
Teares, nor complaints will yeeld them sustenance,
But tis our ages fault the mightier,
Teare liuing out of vs, we out of her.

(ll. 1577-88)⁸

In his account, the “flinty-bosomed” Londoners are devoid of community and of generosity. The “mightier” extract or “tear living” out of the “enforced” laboring poor, yet return nothing. Moreover, this is “our age's fault,” a problem of a contemporary society estranged from the natural world, “their mother.” And the peddler's plea for “bread” resonates within the context both of England's successive crop failures in the 1590s and of London's consequent food riots, which reached their height in 1595, threatening civic stability with famine and mob violence.⁹

Tawnycoat's complaint cries out from the world If You Know Not Me is taking pains to silence. The presence of poverty and starvation within the environs of London, if allowed to go unchecked, would imply the failure of its wealthy inhabitants to meet their neighborly duties. Although the administration of poor relief was assumed regularly by both the city and its parishes, London's highly visible poor were a source of serious concern and an additional financial burden on all rate-payers.¹⁰ The play therefore quickly devises a remedy for this scene of misery, as it does for almost all of the play's moments of class conflict and disparate wealth. In this scene, the rich haberdasher Hobson vows to alleviate the poverty that drives men to such wretched circumstances.

Alas the while, poore soule I pittie them,
And in thy words as in a looking-glasse,
I see the toyle and trauell of the countrey,
And quiet gaine of citties blessedness. …
No God forbid, Old Hobson nere will eate,
Rather then surfet vpon poore mens sweat.

(ll. 1678-94)

While Hobson's speech would seem to demonstrate his sympathy with the poor, his concern is highly ironic because, distancing himself from the immediate sight of Tawnicoat, he attempts to locate such “toil and travail” in the country, preserving for the city a life of “quiet gain.” Commenting on the “morbid growth” of England's capital city, F. J. Fisher argues that Tudor and Stuart social observes largely believed that “London waxed fat at the expense of the outports, and grew rich only by sucking the wealth of the country to itself.”¹¹ So the play does not actually deny the presence in the city either of poverty or of the “flinty” rich who refuse to render aid. But it displays fine examples of the conscientious rich, who come sympathetically and voluntarily to the aid of the poor, in compliance with conscience and Christian charity.

Moving from the impoverished Tawnycoat to his benefactor, Hobson, takes us up the socio-economic hierarchy to the level of the well-to-do London citizen. Like Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, Hobson is a blustery but likeable shopkeeper who makes good, and his colorful speech and demeanor make him the play's most comic figure. The problem figured within his character is that his commercial interests at times outweight his concern for the well-being of his community and neighbors. For example, when Sir Thomas Gresham asks him to employ a prodigal nephew, Hobson cagily replies that he will do so “partly for your love, / And chiefly to supply my present want” (ll. 297-98, my emphasis), skillfully combining his personal and professional relationships, and actually placing the commercial above the social. That is, his duty to his neighbor is dictated only incidentally by neighborly “love,” and mostly by economics, the law of “supply” and “want.”

Hobson also mentions that he has undertaken some opportunistic price gouging, yet the context is designed to be humorous, not threatening:

                                                            in Edwards dayes,
When Poperie went downe, I did ingrosse
Most of the Beades that were within the Kingdome,
That when Queene Marie, had renewed that Church,
They that would pray on Beades were forc't to me:
I made them stretch their purse-strings, grew rich thereby,
Beads were to me a good commoditie.

(ll. 458-64)¹²

Although the play is clearly taking this opportunity to poke fun at the lavish Catholics, it is equally significant that Hobson brings the profit motive even to religious artifacts. And, again, the problematic fact that Hobson's religious commodity might well have proven sacred to the “golden world” of his father, so recently idealized as a more honest and carefree milieu (ll. 266-69), is covered beneath the citizen's charming bluster.

At the top of the play's socio-economic hierarchy sits its hero, Sir Thomas Gresham, a fictionalized version of the actual Elizabethan merchant, whose lavish wealth and commercial profits the play transforms into public beneficence and religious philanthropy.¹³ Although Brian Gibbons finds the play's portrait of Gresham “a piece of banal mercantile hagiography,” this character nonetheless carries the specific socio-economic burden of legitimizing both the accumulation of wealth and the desire for more.¹⁴ Like the actual Gresham, Heywood's hero is fabulously rich, and the play's first scene shows him negotiating a patent to the Barbary sugar trade for sixty thousand pounds (an immense sum, given the calculation that the income of titular peers in 1602 averaged just over £1,600, and by 1641 had risen only to about £5,000).¹⁵ Gresham provides the play's most revealing touchstone, in an exchange with a foreign merchant who tries to sell him a wondrous pearl. Priced at fifteen hundred pounds, the gem proves too expensive for either a Russian prince or even the King of France. But when the fantastically wealthy Gresham asks the merchant whether his price is firm, the merchant responds, significantly, “I cannot bate one crowne and gaine by it” (l. 1481). It is the rationale of “gain,” here, and Gresham's tacit endorsement of the merchant's motive, that embodies the controlling ethos of the entire play. When the merchant declares his need for profit, he suggests not only that it is a just need, but that a merchant of Gresham's stature will approve of his gain. Thus the profit motive, the drive to accumulate greater and greater riches, although historically viewed with some anxiety and suspicion,¹⁶ is here reconstituted through Gresham as one of honor and distinction.

As Laura Stevenson notes, 2 If You Know Not Me praises Gresham not for his business acumen, diligence, or thrift, but rather for his “ability to spend, even to lose, money”; “Gresham can make extravagant gestures in the best tradition of aristocratic conspicuous expenditure.”¹⁷ For example, when confronted first with the floundering of a fleet of his ships and next with the loss of his sixty thousand pounds on Barbary sugar, Gresham mutters, “Birlady a deare bargaine,” and the play builds suspense toward his likely financial and emotional collapse. An anonymous lord believe that “this will plague him” and wonders, “how will he take this newes, losse vpon losse” (ll. 1523-25). But to everyone's immense surprise, Gresham calls again for the jeweler and his pearl, pays him for it, and orders it ground into dust, so that he may drink it in his wine. Everyone is amazed at his extravagance, but Gresham quickly reassures the company, “I doe not this as prodigall of my wealth,” but simply to show how “A London Marchant / Thus tread on a kings present” (ll. 1559, 1561-62). Of course, such larger-than-life tales of extravagance were not uncommon amid a society whose wealthy elite were growing more and more conspicuous in their consumption, but the play wants to assure us that this particular rich man is simply making a gesture of citizen class pride.¹⁸ Any wastefulness in his gesture is immediately hidden under the praise of Lady Ramsay, who declares him “an honour to all English Merchants[,] / As bountifull as rich, as Charitable / As rich[,] as renowned as any” (ll. 1556-58). In order to make his wealth less imposing and less threatening, the play prudently attempts to describe Gresham, the ideal London merchant, as an honor to the nation, both bountiful and charitable. Yet the emphasized word, which is repeated twice and which defines his other characteristics, names him “rich.”

We have seen, then, that 2 If You Know Not Me constructs a social and commercial hierarchy that poses the possibility of a major crisis—poverty in general, the exploitation of the poor, the uncertainty of impersonal transaction, the commodification of religious articles, the excesses of the rich—and then demonstrates the problem solved, the crisis contained. All of the play's problematic social dynamics come together at London's new Royal Exchange, one of the early modern capital's most prominent landmarks and the center of its domestic and foreign trade.¹⁹ Figures from every level of the play's hierarchy congregate here, from the laborers who build it, to the citizens and merchants who occupy it, all the way up to the monarch who sanctions its operation. Historically, one of the most important and visible of London's new commercial sites, the Royal Exchange was constructed from 1566 to 1568 and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1570. The Exchange, or Burse, as it was also called, provided English commerce with a new forum, geographically and conceptually, for the transaction of business. It would gradually replace Lombard Street and St. Paul's as England's chief business center, where merchants and foreign traders conducted international commerce, while shopkeepers and peddlers attended to domestic trade.

The actual Royal Exchange of London offers itself as a site of real, historical social and economic conflict, both in its building and in its reception. To begin with, the minutes of the London Court of Aldermen for 1566 report that Gresham was determined to employ “strangers,” or foreigners, in the construction of the Exchange.²⁰ Foreign workers had been present in London for years—a thriving cloth trade brought immigrants from Holland and France—and Gresham evidently sought to make use of this cheap labor. The minutes report that on 13 June 1566, six days after construction began, the London aldermen, most likely under pressure from the citizens, resolved “to petition [Gresham] in favour of the English workmen.”²¹ Evidently, Gresham ignored them, because the minutes from 13 September 1566 further report that “the bricklayers of the city had been guilty of many misdemeanors, ‘both in words and deeds,’ towards Sir Thomas Gresham,” jealous, no doubt, of the foreigners working on his project.²² Whether or not English labor was finally employed is not clear, but it probably didn't much help the case of the English that the bricklayer William Crow was cited for “very lewde demeanour towards Henrick, the said Sir Thomas Gresham's chief workman.”²³

In the play, as construction of the building begins, there is no mention of any contested foreign labor, but rather a celebration of Gresham's generosity. Gresham himself is present to lay the first stone, and on it he places a gold sovereign, asking other wealthy citizens to do the same and declaring, “the gold we lay, due to the workemen is” (l. 1194). Since Gresham has agreed to build the Exchange “at [his] owne charges” (l. 1179) and consistently refers to the workmen as “my worke men” (l. 1182), the pieces of gold could represent his payment for labor; yet the drama of the gesture and the ceremony surrounding the action push this remuneration toward the category of a gift, as if the gold were more than was expected. In their surprise, the grateful workmen cry out, “O God blesse M. Gresham, God blesse M. Gresham” (l. 1195), invoking divine benediction upon the honorable philanthropist. In this interesting scene, mentioned in Stow's Survey but generally deemed fictional,²⁴ Heywood covers over a revealing moment in actual history, an episode of economic as well as civic conflict.

After its completion, the real Exchange did not immediately become a symbol of national pride, and may actually have met with a fair amount of ambivalence. Agnew asserts that London's anxiety regarding notions of a cash economy and profit-taking were projected onto the marketplace, and, indeed, there may have been some cause, since the Exchange evidently became a common haunt of London's idle riff-raff. The inquest book of Cornhill Ward, a neighborhood where poverty and wealth were closely intermingled, reflects in 1574 some trepidation regarding the influence of the Exchange on the neighborhood, especially on days when Christian citizens ought to be minding their God:

The Exchange was presented that uppon the Sondaies and holy daies there mete greate number of boyes and children, and younge roges; who, as well in the forenoone as in the afternoone, make such shoutinge and hollowinge, that neither the honest citizens who walke there for theire recreation can quietly walke, nor one heere another speake: neither can the parishioners in the church of St. Bartholomewe, neer adjoyninge to the Exchange, or such others as come to the sermands.²⁵

If we look for twentieth-century parallels, our best counterpart for the Exchange might be the modern shopping mall, complete with “boys, children, and young rogues,” not the dignified financial brokerage.

In Heywood's play, however, the completed Exchange is consistently troped as an emblem of England's national pride and a symbol of God's blessings upon the country. Two anonymous lords enter with the sole purpose of positioning the Exchange among the great European landmarks; as they say, “all the world has not his fellow,” even in Constantinople, Rome, Frankfort, the Venetian Rialto, and Antwerp (ll. 1350-72). Gresham predicts that his work will be praised not only by the City, but by two other important coteries of English society: “I dare say both the Countrey and the Court, / For wares shall be beholding to this worke” (ll. 1159-60). (Although “country” sometimes denotes the nation as a whole, it probably indicates here the country gentry and squirearchy, while “court” signifies the aristocracy and the royal officers surrounding the queen.) Whereas Hobson points out the schism between country and city life, Heywood here connects them in order to invoke the praise of the whole nation.

Moreover, Gresham declares that his philanthropy constitutes a pious response to the generosity of Divine Providence. After learning how previous rich London citizens donated generously to the betterment of their city, he meditates:

Why should not all of vs being wealthy men,
And by Gods blessing onely rais'd, but
Cast in our mindes how we might them exceed
In Godly workes, helping of them that need.

(ll. 846-49)

The Exchange is quickly subsumed within the ideal of charity, not a profit-making venture for merchants so much as a “Godly work” to help “them that need.” Gresham asserts that his building will be “like a parish for good Cittizens / And their faire wiues to dwell in” (ll. 1231-32), a Christian community for London's tradesmen, founded as a pious response to God's material blessings. In fact, the Exchange is clothed in a vestment of religious veneration from its inception, when Gresham was spurred on to the deed by the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. In the same way that Queen Elizabeth created and preserved political power through the quasi-religious ceremonies that Roy Strong calls the “liturgy of state,” the rhetoric surrounding the Exchange surely constitutes some contribution toward a liturgy of the market.²⁶

The play celebrates the Exchange in one more way, deploying an equally powerful legitimizing force, namely, the mythical power of the late Queen Elizabeth, who arrives ceremoniously toward the end of the play to preside at the Exchange's opening and nominate it the “Royal” Exchange.²⁷ Roy Strong reminds us that during Elizabeth's reign, the liturgical calendar of public holidays gradually came to include celebrations of the queen's accession, birthday, and other important events in her reign. He notes that the myth that “started as propaganda became, in time, a reality,” a reality so potent that Heywood could still invoke it in 1605 for its political and religious strength.²⁸ And this is why the founding of the city's chief financial and business center is contained within the two-part hagiographic review of Elizabethan success stories that comprises both Part 2 and Part 1 of If You Know Not Me.

The customary location of marketplaces near places of worship, the seasonal cycle of festive celebration, and the eventual development of religious processional, civic pageantry, and guild ceremony are all testimony, of course, to the importance of ceremonial and redistributive gestures to the legitimation of class power and authority. But these practices bear witness as well to the felt powers of that social and spatial construction which required such expansive and expensive rites to contain it: the market.²⁹

The exchange of commodities and money, the rationale for and workings of a market, dominate 2 If You Know Not Me but also point to the need for the Elizabethan myth. The opening of the actual Royal Exchange certainly marked a significant milestone in the slow and tortuous development of English proto-capitalism, one which, as we have seen, was not without its coincident conflicts and tensions. But when recast under the legitimizing auspices of charity and of the monarch, the event becomes a triumph equal to the other great accomplishments of 1 & 2 If You Know Not Me: the accession of the Queen, the extinction of Catholicism, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

The juxtaposition of Heywood's play against actual history, then, raises an important point for scholars entering the debate over crisis and order in early modern London. Specifically, revisionist historians attempting to show a consistent pattern of stability, like their forebears who focused exclusively on crisis, must not ignore the local aberrations that permeate both trends. If London actually did maintain a general pattern of stability over half a century, such a trend precludes the presence of neither real pressure on older social institutions nor popular anxiety over new cultural and economic formations. Similarly, an addiction to twentieth-century arguments that London's theatres worked exclusively either to “contain” or to “subvert” dominant forms of power will invariably polarize our historical and literary scholarship into absolute narratives so static and rigid that they lose their value as reliable studies of the culture.³⁰ Researchers concerned with the details of London's social and cultural formations, then, if they are to make truly useful distinctions about the emergence of London as a proto-capitalist metropolis and to read those distinctions back into its cultural productions, need to engage in careful microhistories of specific cultural sites, including the marketplace and the theatre.

Certainly those two institutions are closely linked in the case of 2 If You Know Not Me. That the play's celebration of Elizabethan history was devised as a palatable lozenge for citizen consumption seems undeniable. Andrew Gurr reminds us that this play, together with Rowley's roughly contemporary When You See Me You Know Me (1604?) and Dekker and Webster's Sir Thomas Wyatt (1604?), amounted to a calculated celebration and endorsement of citizen values.³¹ Although both 1 & 2 If You Know Not Me may amount to aesthetic failures by conventional measures of dramatic prowess, to dismiss them as imperfect literary artifacts is to miss an extraordinary opportunity to observe how the city wanted very badly to see itself and its activities.

In light of this desire, Laura Stevenson proposes that early modern English writers constantly “found themselves running into clashes between theory and reality … as their fiction explored economic and social ideas they could not quite articulate.”³² As a text confronted with problems that continually disrupt or question the celebration of commerce and wealth, 2 If You Know Not Me attempts to revise history in such a way that masks problems of the present. Heywood's play rewrites the historical narrative of the Exchange's founding while simultaneously erasing the social problems most often associated with the wealth and transactions of the city. As a response to London's burgeoning free market, the conflicted purpose of 2 If You Know Not Me is to celebrate commercial success, while containing the consequent problems. To do so, it deploys the rhetoric of nationalism and charity, and even conjures the legitimizing ghost of Gloriana, in an attempt to ritualize commerce within civic celebration, and to reconcile Tawnycoat's poverty and Gresham's pearl.

Notes

1. Modern views of London's (and England's) early modern history as a series of crises began with Sir Walter Besant's London in the Time of the Tudors (London: A. & C. Black, 1904) and continued with E. P. Cheyney's A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth (New York: P. Smith, 1948). Recent studies embracing the “crisis” model include those of Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972); Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), esp. pp. 1-56; Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., English Towns in Transition 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. press, 1976); A. L. Beier, “Social Problems in Elizabethan London,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (1989), 203-221.

2. The first study to challenge the “crisis” narrative was Valerie Pearl's “Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London,” London Journal 5 (1979), 3-34, which was soon followed by Steve Rappaport, “Social Structure and Mobility in Sixteenth-Century London: Part I,” London Journal 9 (1983), 107-135; Rappaport, “Social Structure and Mobility in Sixteenth-Century London: Part II,” London Journal 10 (1984), 107-134; M. J. Power, “London and Control of the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” History 70 (1985), 371-85; Power, “A ‘Crisis’ Reconsidered: Social and Demographic Dislocation in London in the 1590s,” London Journal 12 (1986), 134-45; and Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).

3. Rappaport, “Social Structure and Mobility: Part I,” 108. See also Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structure of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

4. Pearl, p. 6.

5. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 10. “The theatre,” writes Agnew, “quickly became the terrain on which this struggle to redefine the grounds of exchange relations was most vividly and vigorously joined. Separated, like the market, from its ritual and hierarchical aegis, the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre furnished a laboratory of representational possibilities for a society perplexed by the cultural consequences of its own liquidity” (p. 54).

6. See Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1-25. The ambivalent “margins” of the city, Mullaney proposes, provided a forum “where the contradictions of the community, its incontinent hopes and fears, were prominently and dramatically set on stage” (p. 22).

7. Laura Carolina Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 37.

8. The only complete edition of Heywood's dramatic works dates from the mid-nineteenth century; for the sake of accuracy and consistency, all citations to the play are from the Malone Society edition, ed. Madeleine Doran, 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (Oxford: Malone Society, 1935).

9. On England's crop failures, see Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 14, 136-37; on the food riots of the same period, see ibid., pp. 11-15. On the general topic of rioting and disorder in the 1590s, see Archer, pp. 1-14.

10. For a description of London's poor laws and poor relief efforts, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York: Longman, 1988).

11. F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 30 (1948), 37-50, esp. pp. 37-38.

12. This anecdote may be loosely based on an actual historical model. Raymond de Roover (Gresham on Foreign Exchange [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949]), measuring Thomas Gresham's impact on English international trade policy and practice, notes that his father, Sir Richard Gresham, Lord Mayor of London in 1537, had “enriched himself considerably with the spoils of the monasteries” (p. 18). Since such mercenary maneuvering would be unseemly, of course, in the hero of the play, Heywood rewrites this bit of history so as to attach it to the lower caste figure of Hobson.

13. John William Burgon's nineteenth-century biography, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 2 vols. (London: Robert Jennings, 1839) remains the most thorough, if laudatory, source of information on the Elizabethan courtier and diplomat.

14. Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 118.

15. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 68. Stone proposes that “in the Early Stuart period, the wealth of the London merchants was dwarfing that of all but the richest peers and officials, their self-confidence and willingness to take risks were increasing” (p. 177).

16. See Agnew, pp. 18-56.

17. Stevenson, p. 145.

18. Alexander Leggatt accurately but understatedly characterized such special pleading as “slightly defensive” (Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973], p. 10).

19. Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving from 1644 gives some sense of the grandiosity surrounding this institution. While the merchants conduct their thriving business below, angels declare the edifice to be “the Modell of Magnificence.”

20. The minutes from the London Court of Aldermen are located in the Corporation of London Record Office but remain unpublished. The relevant material is found in Burgon, 2:500.

21. Burgon, 2:503. Andrew Pettegree finds that City authorities were often pressured to limit the economic activities of foreigners (Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], pp. 262-95, esp. pp. 286-87, 293).

22. Burgon, 2:503.

23. Burgon, 2:503.

24. See Stow's Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley, rev. ed. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1956), p. 173.

25. The Cornhill Ward Inquest Book is located in the Guildhall Library (GLMS #4069/1) but remains unpublished. The relevant material is found in Burgon, 2:355.

26. See Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 115.

27. Elizabeth actually did preside at the official opening of the Exchange, and Stow provides a few details about her visit: “after dinner [at Gresham's] her majesty returning through Cornehill, entered the burse on the south side; and after that she had viewed every part thereof above the ground, especially the pawn, which was richly furnished with all sorts of the finest wares in the city, she caused the same burse by an herald and trumpet to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called from thenceforth, and not otherwise” (Stow's Survey, p. 173).

28. Strong, pp. 114-15.

29. Agnew, p. 26.

30. Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15-36, esp. p. 22.

31. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 148. In testament to the popularity of the subject material with its citizen audience, it was reprinted four times between 1605 and 1633.

32. Stevenson, p. 38.