Middleton and the New Social Classes
[In the following essay, Knights examines Middleton's comedies and finds the writer overrated, particularly in respect to the "realism" Eliot and others had praised so highly.]
The assimilation of what is valuable in the literary past … is impossible without the ability to discriminate and to reject. Everyone would admit this, in a general way, but there are few to undertake the essential effort—the redistribution of stress, the attempt to put into currency evaluations based more firmly on living needs than are the conventional judgements. To disestablish certain reputations that have 'stood the test of time', to see to it that the epithet 'great' does not spill over from undeniable achievement to a bulk of inferior matter in the work of any one author, is not incompatible with a proper humility.
Sharp discrimination is nowhere more necessary than in the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan period. It is not—emphatically—a minor nuisance that young men who are capable of an interest in literature should be stimulated to work up a feeling of enjoyment when reading the plays of Dekker and Heywood, or A King and No King. There is of course such a thing as an historical interest, but it is as well we should know when it is that we are pursuing and when we are engaged in a completely different activity. It is as well that we should realize—to come to the subject of this [essay]—that our 'appreciation' of The Changeling is something different in kind from our 'appreciation' of The Roaring Girl, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Phoenix, Michaelmas Term and all those plays which have led Mr Eliot to assert that Middleton is 'a great comic writer'.
The reference to Mr Eliot is deliberate. His essay [in the Times Literary Supplement, 30 June 1927] on Middleton is, it seems to me, a good deal nearer to Lamb than Mr Eliot would care to admit. It does not of course show the exuberant idolatry of Romantic criticism, but it encourages idolatry (see the unusually generous provision of 'great's' in the final paragraphs) and—what is the same thing—inertia. Now that The Sacred Wood and its successors are academically 'safe' it is all the more necessary to suggest that certain of Mr Eliot's Elizabethan Essays (those, I would say, on Middleton, Marston, Heywood and Ford) are in quite a different class from, say, the essay on Massinger, and that to ignore the lapses from that usually taut and distinguished critical prose is not the best way of registering respect for the critic. Middleton, then, is an interesting case—for various reasons.
As the author of The Changeling, perhaps the greatest tragedy of the period outside Shakespeare, Middleton deserves to be approached with respect. It is, however, as a comic writer that I wish to consider him here, and a careful re-reading of the dozen comedies by which he is remembered suggests that the conventional estimate of him—the estimate that Mr Eliot has countenanced—needs to be severely qualified.
In the first place, it is usually held that Middleton is a great realist. 'He is the most absolute realist in the Elizabethan drama, vying with the greatest of his fellows in fidelity to life'—that is the text-book account [Schelling, Elizabethan Drama]. Miss Lynch remarks that, 'As the greatest realist in Elizabethan drama, Middleton is a hearty observer of life at first hand' [Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy], and Mr Eliot, endorsing her verdict, says: 'There is little doubt … that Middleton's comedy was "photographic", that it introduces us to the low life of the time far better than anything in the comedy of Shakespeare or the comedy of Jonson, better than anything except the pamphlets of Dekker and Greene and Nashe'.
'Realist', of course, means many things, but what these critics are asserting is that Middleton accurately reflects the life of a certain section of Jacobean London, of gallants and shopkeepers, of lawyers, brokers, cheats and prostitutes. But, reading his comedies as carefully as we can, we find—exciting discovery!—that gallants are likely to be in debt, that they make love to citizens' wives, that lawyers are concerned more for their profits than for justice, and that cutpurses are thieves. Middleton tells us nothing at all about these as individuals in a particular place and period. (Turn up any of his brothel scenes—in Your Five Gallants, say—for examples of completely generalized conventionality: The Honest Whore does it better). And the obvious reason, it seems to me, is that he was not interested in doing so.
If we take A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a typical comedy, neither one of Middleton's worst nor his best, we find after a second or third reading that all that remains with us is the plot. That certainly is complicated and ingenious. The only fortune of Sir Walter Whorehound, a decayed Welsh knight, lies in his expectations from his relative, the childless Lady Kix. He plans to better his fortunes by marrying Moll, the daughter of Yellowhammer, a goldsmith, and he brings to town a cast-off mistress whom he represents as an heiress and a fit match for Tim, the goldsmith's son. Moll, however, is in love with Touchwood Junior, whose lusty elder brother has had to part from his wife since he begets more children than he can maintain. In London Sir Walter visits the Allwit household, where the husband, Master Allwit (=Wittol—the joke is characteristic) is well paid to father the illegitimate children of Sir Walter and Mistress Allwit. Alarmed lest the knight's marriage should cut off his livelihood Allwit reveals the existence of Sir Walter's children to Yellowhammer, just as the news arrives that Touchwood Senior has procured an heir for Lady Kix, and Sir Walter's creditors are ready to foreclose. The true lovers are united by the well-worn device of feigning death and going to church in their coffins, and the only unfortunates are Sir Walter and Tim, now married to the Welsh-woman.
I have summarized the plot since it may be evident even from this where the interest centres; it centres on the intrigue. Swinburne's praise [in his Introduction to The Best Plays of Middleton] is significant:
The merit does not indeed consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean creation or Jonsonian invention of humours or of men: the spendthrifts and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed from the common stock of stage tradition: it is the vivid variety of incident and intrigue, the freshness and ease and vigour of the style, the clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the action, that the reader finds most praise-worthy.
The style is certainly easy and, for its purpose, vigorous enough, but incident, intrigue and action do not make literature, nor are they capable of presenting a full-bodied, particular impression of any kind. Some of Jonson's comedies are the best of farces, but in each of them it is what is said that remains in the memory rather than what is done. A Chaste Maid, however, is thoroughly representative. Middleton's comedies are comedies of intrigue (in spite of the occasional professions of moral intention), and they yield little more than the pleasure of a well-contrived marionette show. One need hardly say that the charge is not that they fail to present full-bodied, three dimensional 'characters' (neither does Volpone or The Alchemist), nor that they suffer from the 'invraisemblance choquante' of which M. Castelain once found Jonson guilty (the impressionistic scenes are often very good), it is simply that they present neither thought, nor an emotional attitude to experience, nor vividly realized perceptions. They stake all on the action, and that which made them successful on the stage makes them rank low as literature.
To say this is to suggest their limited usefulness as 'social documents'—and it is as social documents 'introducing us to the low life of the time' that they are often praised. They do not embody the thought and opinion of the time, since that is irrelevant to the intrigue. They do not seize on, clarify and explore particular aspects of the social scene, since general counters are all that the action demands. Their value in this connexion lies almost entirely in what Middleton takes for granted, in the indications provided by the situations—situations to which he thought the audience would respond sufficiently for the action to be got under way.
Indirectly, then, but only indirectly and within these limitations, Middleton does reflect some important aspects of the social scene, and we should be grateful to Miss Lynch for telling us where to look. The background that he implicitly asks his audience to accept is a world of thriving citizens, needy gallants and landed gentlemen, and fortune-hunters of all kinds—a world that had sufficient basis in actuality to provide some theatrical verisimilitude for his thoroughly improbable plots.
His shopkeepers and merchants are all of the kind described in The Roaring Girl—'coached velvet caps' and 'tuftaffety jackets' who 'keep a vild swaggering in coaches now-a-days; the highways are stopt with them'; who have 'barns and houses yonder at Hockley-hole', and throughout Surrey, Essex and the neighbouring counties. The gallants, on the other hand,
are people most uncertain; they use great words, but little sense; great beards, but little wit; great breeches but no money,
[The Family of Love]
and most of the country gentlemen in Town are like Laxton of The Roaring Girl:
All my land's sold;
I praise heav'n for't, 't has rid me of much trouble.
For all of this class a wealthy widow or a citizen's daughter is an irresistible bait, and if they cannot manage a 'good' marriage they intrigue with citizens' wives for maintenance.
The numerous kindred of Sir Walter Whorehound are all fortune hunters, and a good deal of the amusement they provided, when their intrigues were successful, must have been due to their showing the tables turned; the underlying assumption is that as a rule the city preys on the country:
Alas, poor birds that cannot keep the sweet country, where they fly at pleasure, but must needs come to London to have their wings clipt, and are fain to go hopping home again!
[Michaelmas Term]
It is not merely that the city is the home of the usurer, or that individual merchants 'die their conscience in the blood of prodigal heirs' [A Chaste Maid], Middleton assumes a major social movement—the transference of land from the older gentry to the citizen middle class.
You merchants were wont to be merchant staplers; but now gentlemen have gotten up the trade, for there is not one gentlemen amongst twenty but his land be engaged in twenty statutes staple.
[The Family of Love]
In A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1605?) Witgood, having sunk all his 'goodly uplands and downlands … into that little pit, lechery', resolves to mend his fortunes. He takes a former mistress to London, introducing her to his uncle, Lucre, as a wealthy widow whom he is about to marry. The trick succeeds as only the tricks of comedy prodigals can. Lucre holds the mortgage of Witgood's lands, and to improve his nephew's prospect's with the 'window' temporarily—as he intends—hands over the papers. Hoard, another usurer and Lucre's lifelong enemy, also pays court to the widow, finally marrying her. Both Lucre and Hoard realize that they have been duped, whilst Witgood, freed from his debts, marries Hoard's niece.
The fun that Middleton gets out of this is dependent upon three assumptions. The first is that a widow reputed to have land worth £400 a year will be 'mightily followed'; the second, that the gulling of usurers, lawyers and creditors is intrisically comic; the third, that the bait of a country estate will catch any citizen.
Michaelmas Term has a similar basis of reference. Easy, a gentleman of Essex, comes to London at the beginning of the Michaelmas Term. Quomodo, a grasping woollendraper, has seen and coveted Easy's lands, and sets one of his 'familiar spirits', Shortyard, to bring about his ruin. Easy is soon gulled; he enters into bond for the disguised Shortyard, standing surety for a supply of cloth worth less than a third of its nominal value, and finally forfeits his estate to Quomodo. The latter, however, overreaches himself. He spreads a false report of his death (so that he can enjoy the spectacle of his sorrowing widow), and so prepares the way for a stage trick by which Easy both regains his estates and marries Quomodo's wife. As usual there are subordinate figures who illustrate various 'foul mysteries'.
Here too the merchants and shopkeepers form part of a flourishing economy:
You've happened upon the money-men, sir; they and some of their brethren, I can tell you, will not stick to offer thirty thousand pound to be cursed still: great monied men, their stocks lie in the poor's throats.
The source of their gains is indicated—'Gentry is the chief fish we tradesmen catch', 'We undo gentlemen daily'—and Easy, Salewood, Rearage, as their names show, belong to the class whose incomes have failed to rise in proportion to prices.
In both these plays it is the manner in which citizen ambition is presented that is significant. Hoard, rejoicing at having obtained the widow, soliloquizes:
What a sweet blessing hast thou, Master Hoard, above a multitude! … Not only a wife large in possessions, but spacious in content…. When I wake, I think of her lands—that revives me; when I go to bed, I dream of her beauty…. She's worth four hundred a year in her very smock…. But the journey will be all, in troth, into the country; to ride to her lands in state and order following: my brother, and other worshipful gentlemen, whose companies I ha' sent down for already, to ride along with us in their goodly decorum beards, their broad velvet cassocks, and chains of gold twice or thrice double; against which time I'll entertain some ten men of mine own into liveries, all of occupations or qualities; I will not keep an idle man about me: the sight of which will so vex my adversary Lucre—for we'll pass by his door of purpose, make a little stand for the nonce, and have our horses curvet before the window—certainly he will never endure it, but run up and hang himself presently…. To see ten men ride after me in watchet liveries, with orange-tawny capes,—'twill cut his comb i' faith.
[A Trick to Catch the Old One]
Quomodo's ambition is the same as Hoard's; it is 'land, fair neat land' that he desires.
O that sweet, neat, comely, proper, delicate, parcel of land! like a fine gentlewoman i' th' waist, not so great as pretty, pretty; the trees in summer whistling, the silver waters by the banks harmoniously gliding. I should have been a scholar; an excellent place for a student; fit for my son that lately commenced at Cambridge, whom now I have placed at Inns of Court. Thus we that seldom get lands honestly, must leave our heirs to inherit our knavery…. Now I begin to set one foot upon the land: methinks I am felling of trees already; we shall have some Essex logs yet to keep Christmas with, and that's a comfort….
Now shall I be divulg'd a landed man
Throughout the livery: one points, another whispers,
A third frets inwardly; let him fret and hang! …
… Now come my golden days in. Whither is the worshipful Master Quomodo and his fair bed—fellow rid forth? To his land in Essex. Whence come those goodly loads of logs? From his land in Essex. Where grows this pleasant fruit, says one citizen's wife in the Row? At master Quomodo's orchard in Essex. O, O, does it so? I thank you for that good news, i' faith….
A fine journey in the Whitsun holydays, i' faith, to ride down with a number of citizens and their wives, some upon pillions, some upon side-saddles, I and little Thomasine i' th' middle, our son and heir, Sim Quomodo, in a peach-colour taffeta jacket, some horse-length, or a long yard before us;—there will be a fine show on's, I can tell you.
[Michaelmas Term]
There is an obvious difference between the tone and manner of these soliloquies and the handling of similar themes by Jonson or Massinger, and it is this difference that places Middleton as a social dramatist. The ambition of Hoard and Quomodo is not set in the light of a positive ideal of citizen conduct (something that we find, though fitfully, in the work of Dekker and Heywood, dramatists inferior to Middleton), its implications are not grasped and presented. (Contrast the way in which we are made to feel the full significance of Volpone's lusts, of the City Madam's ambitions.) Middleton is, I think, relying on what was almost a stock response, making a gesture in the direction of a familiar scene where those goodly decorum beards wagged in real life as their owners journeyed to their newly acquired manors in the country.
To say this is to say that the attitude presented at a given point does not emerge from the interplay of different pressures within the drama, and that it does not engage with other elements in the reader's response to form a new whole. In each case it is a purely local effect that is obtained (it is significant that prose, not verse, is the medium), and Hoard's mediation could appear equally well in any one of half a dozen plays. Middleton's satire, in short, is related to the non-dramatic prose satire of the period; more particularly, it has affinities with the 'Character', in which the sole and proposed is the exhibition of witty 'sentences' and ingenious comparisons, of a general self-conscious dexterity.
How many there be in the world of his fortunes, that prick their own calves with briars, to make an easy passage for others; or, like a toiling usurer, sets his son a-horseback, while he himself goes to the devil a-foot in a pair of old strossers.
[No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's]
What a fortunate elder brother is he, whose father being a rammish ploughman, himself a perfumed gentleman spending the labouring reek from his father's nostrils in tobacco, the sweat of his father's body in monthly physic for his pretty queasy harlot! he sows apace i' th' country; the tailor o'ertakes him i' th' city, so that oftentimes before the corn comes to earing, 'tis up to the ears in high collars, and so at every harvest the reapers take pains for the mercers: ha! why, this is stirring happiness indeed.
[The Phoenix]
… Then came they [gallants] to their gentility, and swore as they were gentlemen; and their gentility they swore away so fast, that they had almost sworn away all the ancient gentry out of the land; which, indeed, are scarce missed, for that yeomen and farmer's sons, with the help of a few Welshmen, have undertook to supply their places.
[The Family of Love]
Middleton constantly gives us such glimpses of a society in the process of rapid reorganization. Most of his characters assume that social advancement is a major preoccupation of the citizen class, and certainly the passages that I have quoted are amongst the most vivid in his plays; but Miss Lynch is, I think, wrong when she says that 'his comic intrigue is directed by the psychology of class relationships'. That would imply a far different distribution of emphasis within the plays themselves, and a far keener penetration; for Middleton only seizes on a few external characteristics—the velvet cassocks and gold chains of the citizens galloping into the country in their holiday clothes—and these, lively as the descriptions sometimes are, are merely incidental to the main intention. It is possible, that is, to assemble 'evidence' of a limited kind from Middleton's plays, but it is no use looking for the more important kind of illustration of the life of the period, for the kind of fact that is inseparable from interpretation and criticism of the fact. The isolated passages are not, in fact, unified by a dominant attitude, and one can only regret that the profound understanding of an essential human morality that one finds in The Changeling is nowhere displayed in the comedies.
That Middleton was a 'transitional' writer, not merely because he reflected social change, a single comparison may show. If we read, first, Jonson's satire on 'the godly brethren' in The Alchemist, then Dryden's description of Shimei, we shall be in a position to judge the quality of Middleton's satire on 'puritan' hypocrisy.
Dryfat. I do love to stand to anything I do, though I lose by it: in truth, I deal but too truly for this world. You shall hear how far I am entered in the right way already. First, I live in charity, and give small alms to such as be not of the right sect; I take under twenty i' th' hundred, nor no forfeiture of bonds unless the law tell my conscience I may do't; I set no pot on a' Sundays, but feed on cold meat drest a' Saturdays; I keep no holydays nor fasts, but eat most flesh o' Fridays of all days i' th' week; I do use to say inspired graces, able to starve a wicked man with length; I have Aminadabs and Abrahams to my godsons, and I chide them when they ask me blessing: and I do hate the red letter more than I follow the written verity.
[The Family of Love]
The Middleton passage is good fooling, but it has neither the drive and assurance of Jonson, on the one hand, nor of Dryden on the other. I have tried to indicate the source of Jonson's power; he is able to enlist the common interests of a heterogeneous audience, and to build on common attitudes; in the satire directed against Ananias the idiom and the method of caricature are alike 'popular'. Dryden provides an obvious contrast. The tone of the Shimei passage is one of cool superiority, and the manner is, characteristically, urbane. Dryden, that is, is sure of his code; it is the code of a homogeneous, though limited, society—'the Town'. Middleton has neither of these sources of strength. At times he betrays something like a positive animus against the citizens, but he has nothing to set against their standards, neither an aristocratic code nor a popular tradition. That he was an almost exact contemporary of Jonson warns us against a rigid interpretation of any period, and suggests the limits to which an enquiry into the effects of environment on personality can be profitably pursued. And we should do well, I think, to reserve the description 'great comedy' for plays of the quality of Volpone and The Alchemist—when we can find them.
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