SOURCE: Hutson, Lorna. “Festivity and Productivity.” In Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 72-99. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

We have seen how the need to inculcate responsible social attitudes through literature produced a schematically pre-fabricated or compendious style of discourse which could not but frustrate a writer whose special talent was, as was Nashe's, for improvisation. Prompted by his dissatisfaction with the costive, rhetoric-laden style of academic writing, Nashe initially located the opportunity for a more spontaneous creativity in the position of a commercial writer such as Robert Greene, who could respond flexibly to the market and, as Nashe wrote in the preface to Menaphon, ‘hath liued all dayes of his life by What doe you lacke?’ (iii. 314). Nashe soon found out, however, that the literary market place was as dictatorial in its demand for a providential moralizing style of discourse as the academic pedagogues had been. His solution was unequivocal; he identified the source of discursive plenitude with the figure of the carnival trickster who was also a spendthrift: Will Summers the wastrel, Pierce Penilesse the bankrupt, or such mock-patrons as the tavern-haunting Henry King, to whom Lenten Stuffe was dedicated (iii. 147-50). There is nothing particularly extraordinary in this identification of financial improvidence and plentiful wit. Not only was the association traditional, but it had, thanks to the humanist emphasis on discursive productivity, a newly acquired social and intellectual relevance. For the discursive productivity aimed at in the educational programme outlined by Erasmus in his De copia was based on the idea of the trope (the effective changing of word or phrase from one signification to another) which discovers new resources of meaning by transforming the figures of speech. Considered merely as an exercise pursued for the pleasure of discursive virtuosity, this capacity to produce meaning endlessly by means of figurative transformation becomes licentious and prodigal, and its tricksterish affinities become apparent. In Rabelais's Pantagruel, for example, it is the improvident trickster Panurge who is richest in languages and who, although unable to render to Pantagruel any account of how he has dissipated his enormous revenues, resourcefully discovers an inexhaustible wealth of arguments in defence of his own prodigality, merely by transforming the figurative terms appropriate to the discourse of thrift and solvency.¹ Such a dissipation of ingenuity in the pleasure of producing discursive variations for their own sake is a kind of linguistic festivity; hence its association with the hedonistic self-dissipation of the improvident trickster. The ideal writer and speaker, however, was supposed to have mastered this festive improvisatory facility as a means of serving his own productive ends. Erasmus's De copia aimed at schooling writers and speakers who were able to improvise, to exploit ‘festively’ such discursive opportunities as emerged in the actual circumstances of speaking, without abandoning themselves utterly to the pleasures of improvisation and (in a Panurgian way) losing sight of the scope and aim of the whole discourse. Such an ideal required a combination of disciplined preparation and tricksterish flexibility. Indeed, it was the preparative work of reading, imitating other authors, and gathering discursive resources which made effective improvisation possible, for preparation enabled the speaker or writer to depart effortlessly from his intended scope to take advantage of circumstantial opportunities to improve the discourse, returning to his original path without hesitation or loss. Quintilian wrote that improvisation was the crown of premeditative study, for ‘although it is essential to bring with us into the court a supply of eloquence which has been prepared in advance in the study and on which we can confidently rely, there is no greater folly than the rejection of the gifts of the moment … our premeditation should be such that fortune may never be able to fool us, but may, on the contrary, be able to assist us’.² An element of tricksterish licence is suggested by the departure from prepared argument into the realm of inspired improvisation, for the trickster's good fortune relies on exploiting the opportunities latent in error and transgression. But provident foresight ensures that this error is calculated and remains merely an agency; where the trickster pays his tribute to fortune in festive self-dissipation the orator masters such festive opportunism as one of his many resources. The productive end of his discourse is thus not made a fool to fortune, though it is able to exploit all fortune has to offer.

A strikingly reflexive image of this discursive ideal, with its combination of providently plotted end and errant improvisatory means, had been newly made available to European thought in the humanist rediscovery of Roman New Comedy.³ New Comedy differed most radically from the sacred or satirical traditions of European drama in its rhetorical exploitation of time. The popular satiric comedy of Europe had no interest in securing the conviction of the audience; it was subversive, provocative of scornful laughter. Sacred drama and the dramatized legends of romance, assuming faith in miracles and wonders, simply represented time in a linear sequence, chronicling the hero's or saint's life as it happened. But New Comedy disclosed events according to an artificial order of time, which exploited the rhetorical end of arousing desire in the audience, thereby reserving the power to satisfy this desire by the (otherwise unconvincing) contrivance of the happy end. In the sense that this happy outcome is the aim of the whole plot, comedy resembles the scope of a premeditated discourse. But just as discourse becomes effective by erring from its own premeditated path to take advantage of the benefits of fortune, so comedy, proceeding as it does by way of error to its fortunate conclusion, becomes an image of provident discursive festivity. The transgressive luck of the trickster is mastered by the plot as its chief rhetorical resource, since the deception of audience expectation and the exploitation of every possibility for error is an agency for arousing audience anxiety so as to secure conviction by the pleasure of relief.

In the humanist exposition of Terentian comedy to schoolchildren this analogy with the rhetorical mastery of resources was made explicit.⁴ The comedies of Plautus, however, gave more scope for pedagogic disquiet, since in these the strategic deception of audience expectation was less easily identified with the provident mastery of plot resources than it was with the self-dissipating improvisations of tricksterish parasites and slaves. The parasites and slaves of Plautine comedy express a traditional tricksterish association of fortune with the generative ripening of seasonal time. Plautus's slaves become the errant agents of good fortune because their lives have no path, or because they are ready to discard the full purse in their keeping in order to receive the feast offered by the luck of the moment. Their commitment is to the facility of the action and, celebrating the outcome of their own festive virtuosity, they secure no productive end for themselves. But they dramatize most explicitly the fact that good fortune is the product not of cautious calculation alone, but of calculation combined with a flexible abandonment to the opportunities offered by the moment. In Plautus's Pseudolus, for example, Pseudolus unhesitatingly abandons the perfect plan ‘stored up his chest’ when a letter comes his way by chance, offering a wealth of unforeseen ways to achieve his ends. It is Pseudolus's self-mocking readiness to abandon his pretensions to providence and foresight that fills the moment so full of generative potential for him; the letter becomes festively inexhaustible, ‘a perfect cornucopia’⁵ offering everything he needs to get the mistress for his young master. All Pseudolus asks for himself, however, is freedom which, in tricksterish tribute to fortune, he dissipates on stage in drunken festivity. In the system of Plautine comedy time is seasonally generative; requiring in its exhaustion, the participation of a tricksterish festivity to disclose, or bring to birth its potential good fortune. In Plautus's Menaechmi it is the Syracusan twin's uninhibited abandonment to the opportunities for festivity offered by hazardous confusion in a foreign city which brings about the happy discovery of his twin; an identification which Shakespeare's adaptation of the play The Comedy of Errors (1594) significantly refuses to make.

For it was this very association of good fortune with the improvisatory abandonment of the trickster to festive opportunity which caused English educationalists to be distrustful of Plautine comedy and its Italian imitations. English pedagogues were inclined to prefer the extremes of cautious inflexibility dramatized by Dutch education drama, which translated the error-based plot of New Comedy into the context of the prodigal son parable, thereby identifying the deception of audience expectation with an admonitory image of the prodigal beguiled by his trust in fortune and ruined by parasites and slaves.⁶ This English unease about the humanist advertisement of the social and discursive advantages of festive opportunism in urban life must be explained in terms of the government's need to combat customary attitudes of opportunistic improvidence among the people. Emerging from a predominantly natural economy in which money was rare, the English people tended to respond to the seasonal potential of time rather in the manner dramatized by Plautine comedy, identifying the security of future prosperity with a festive dissipation and redistribution of organic wealth. This improvising response to labour and its fruits was entirely appropriate to an economy of natural subsistence in which every harvest was a gamble dependent on the caprices of English weather.⁷ But as artificial labour became economically significant, and the exchange of goods became more prevalent, opportunities for festivity increased, without being complemented by any internalized commitment to productive labour. The reformers who drew up and implemented the 1563 Statute of Artificers in an attempt to standardize the conditions of artificial labour, commented in 1573 that one of the reasons for non-observance of the statute was an utter lack among the people of any sense of obligation to provide for the future, or any compulsion to undertake regular work. Artificers, adapting the traditional opportunism of seasonal labour and festivity to the conditions of hire in towns, turned into shiftless urban parasites of the New Comedy variety:

many of theim yf they worke one daye or weeke will playe twoe for it, wherby thei do not only earne less by their lawfull trades then else they should do, but also fall into lewde and excessive expenses and other vices … viz.:—hauntinge of ale howses, using of unlawful games, runninge and shiftinge from towne to towne … and so growe to such ydlenes that divers of theim cannot continewe at their occupacions, but practise to get their livinges by unlawfull games, cosenages, deluding of mens wifes … wher of great misery and encrease of Roges and vagabonds groweth.⁸

Such a hand-to-mouth lifestyle may have been appropriate to a people living at subsistence level when the surplus of goods was minimal, harvests uncertain, and money itself a rare sight. However, the ‘decay of housekeeping’—that is, the turning over of much land from tillage to pasture—was commercially linked, as we saw, to an influx of foreign imports, so that as the sixteenth century progressed, Englishmen were aware of goods and cash being exchanged with increasing rapidity and ostentation.⁹ Opportunities for ‘play’, previously dictated by the season, were being commercialized on an unprecedented scale. City life offered the plenitude and material well-being previously associated with rural festivity in the form of regular entertainment, feasting, drinking, sex, gorgeous apparel—all in such a context of commercial anonymity that the temptation to improvise a living by participating in ‘unlawfull games, cosenages, deluding of mens wifes’ came to be regarded as a serious social threat.

Given this social context, it is hardly surprising that while Italian humanists sought to imitate and surpass the tricksterish comedy of Plautus and Terence, English protestant-humanists remained dubious about the results. Italian versions of New Comedy celebrate the dramatic scope offered by the commercial anonymity of urban life, emphasizing that the qualities needed to exploit such possibilities (the ‘errors’ and ‘deceits’ aggravated by disguise, discursive virtuosity, strategic arousal of expectation or anxiety, and so forth) resemble the dramatist's own techniques. Thus, for example, Ariosto's innovative imitation of Plautus, La Cassaria or The Coffer (1508), goes further than Pseudolus in identifying virtus (the successful overcoming of fortune) with flexible improvisation rather than with cautious calculation and providence. Ariosto insists on this point by having his veteran servant-trickster, Volpino, falter at a crucial moment, so that his promise to the young masters that they will have the girls in their arms by nightfall has to be fulfilled by another servant, Fulcio, who is inexperienced in plots and intrigue. Despite being nearly overwhelmed by the anxiety of having to take over from the masterly Volpino, Fulcio rallies and enacts a series of breathtakingly triumphant improvisations. His ingenuity is such that crises and obstacles themselves become his resources, the ‘tributaries of his treasury’, thus reversing the comedy's opening emphasis on the frustration of the young master, dying like Tantalus of thirst amid his father's inaccessible stores of merchandise.¹⁰ Fulcio's hazardous negotiation of the passage from discipleship to aesthetic mastery is anticipated by the play's prologue, which draws attention to the hazards faced by Ariosto in attempting to prove Italian equal to the dramatic standards set by Plautus; the dramatist thus explicitly links the virtus of his own aesthetic achievement to the economic accomplishment of his tricksterish protagonist. But Ariosto felt no compulsion to represent Fulcio as economically provident; like Pseudolis before him, the Italian trickster acknowledges the collaboration of his virtus with the vicissitudes of fortune by celebrating fortune in a drunken spree. In this sense Ariosto's conception of the trickster is traditional; luck involves utter abandon and is incompatible with coffer-bound caution about the future. Ariosto's later play I Suppositi (1509) is interesting because it appears not to identify the discursive virtus of the playwright quite so overtly with the deceptions of a single trickster; at a more sophisticated level of identification, however, it is clear that the good fortune of the outcome is causally linked to the opportunities for deception and conversational disclosure which are exploited as a way of life by the parasite Pasifilio, for it is Pasifilio's double-crossings that broach a plot solution in the form of a relationship that might otherwise have lain undiscovered among household secrets. Gascoigne's translation of this play was presumably well received at its first Gray's Inn performance in 1566, but, as we saw in the previous chapter, his revision of the printed text in 1575 suggests that the government had serious reservations about the public promotion of such Italian models of discourse and behaviour. Indeed, Gascoigne's next play, the Glasse of Government (1576), took pains to contrive an elegantly plotted action based, in the humanist manner, on deception, without identifying any economic good fortune in the outcome with such deliberate exploitation of opportunities for deception and disclosure as had constituted the ‘supposes’ of his last play. The Glasse of Government adapts the notion of deception-as-plot in the interests of moral and economic reform by identifying the action not with deception but with a magisterial detection of deception which brings about the downfall of the tricksterish young prodigals (for it is a ‘prodigal son’ play, and the witty young men are duly consumed by their riotous indulgence in commercial festivity). Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578) is another of these magisterial detective plots, which self-consciously adapts the intrigue structure of the humanist comedy in the interests of moral reform, aware that the linear time of traditional English drama held no rhetorical power, and yet unwilling to identify such power with an Italian-style urban intrigue.¹¹ The stylistic enterprise of Whetstone's play can be linked to his treatment of the threat of commercial festivity in the Mirour For Magestrates of Cyties, where again he promotes the idea of magisterial detection of the deceptions and cozenages for which commercialized festivity—taverns, dicing houses, ordinaries—offered such ample scope in London, much to the loss of ‘the Marrow & Strength of this happy Realme (I meane the Abilitie of the Gentlemen)’.¹² Whetstone deals with the opportunities for exploitation offered by dining houses and taverns rather than theatres, because theatres have, he explains, received enough civic attention in the last few years; but it was indeed the question of commercial theatre that condensed all the authorities' fears about the temptations of an opportunistic, improvising lifestyle for the unwary and their would-be deceivers. Commercial theatres, or inns in which plays were presented on a commercial basis, not only offered opportunities for dubious financial and sexual contracts; they actually represented such contracts as entertaining plots, their staple commodity being the deception of audience expectation. As early as 1574 (before the first commercial theatre was opened) the city fathers attempted to regulate commercial plays in inns because these created opportunities for financial exploitation of the poor and fond; thereafter they constantly linked their objections to the ‘lascivious devices, shifts of cozenage’ that plays might represent with the opportunities for exploitation that performances created for ‘whoremoongers, coozeners, conny-catching persones’, leading young men into ‘vain & prodigall expenses’.¹³

The response of the magistrates in terms of the English adaptation of Italian humanist comedy is telling. On the one hand the deceits and errors which gave the comic ending its emotional conviction were central to the discursive power of which comedy was an image, on the other, representing power as the outcome of the deliberate exploitation of opportunities for error was emotionally and morally problematic unless the dramatist could make some admonitory distinction between provident and improvident manifestations of such opportunism. It is for this reason perhaps that, despite their appreciation of the aesthetic advance represented by Italian comedy, English sixteenth-century dramatists tend to exploit the exhilarating effects of intrigue with reservation, at least until the last decade of the century, as if trying to avoid associating the rhetorical achievement of a fortunate ending with the improvised deceptions required to bring it about. In Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1552) the intrigue which delays and delights the audience into anticipation of a comic ending swerves aside at the last moment to bestow the prize of the rich widow not on the improvising intriguers, but on a merchant called Gavin Goodluck whose steady providence has not been compromised by participation in the dramatic action. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (1594) adapts the plot structure of its Plautine model but allows the deceptions of the action to disclose good fortune as if of their own accord, without permitting any one of the deceived characters to participate festively in the opportunities offered by his or her errant situation. Indeed, it is remarkable how in Shakespeare's comedy the threat of insolvency is exploited to arouse an apparently gratuitous sense of identity crisis. In Mother Bombie (c.1590) Lyly similarly dissociates the good fortune of the denouement from the truant tavern-haunting slaves whose improvised deceptions effectively bring it about, for the titular Mother Bombie serves no other dramatic purpose than to foresee all, and the security of her provident knowledge foregrounds the dramatic providence of the plot itself.

It was not until 1598, and the first performance of Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, that an improvising participation in the festive opportunities offered by the commercialized leisure of contemporary London was overtly identified with good fortune brought about by a comic plot. In Every Man In Jonson elaborately ridicules the old-fashioned, admonitory image of commercialized urban leisure as the locus of prodigal corruption, crawling with parasites and thieves. Instead, his play offered both the urban reality and its fear-inducing moralized image as a hilarious, exhilarating source of entertainment and economic enterprise for articulate young men. The relation between wit and the city has changed; far from threatening to ‘consume’ him, the cultivation of a disreputable and opportunistic urban lifestyle becomes the mark of the young gentleman's social and financial providence. In this innovatory and specifically English version of humanist urban comedy, festivity is dramatized in all its overwhelming social and discursive potential as a plotless confluence of humours to be productively channelled and exploited by the ablest and most resourceful of the characters. Like Quintilian's affluent orator, Jonson's successful protagonist achieves his own ends by a combination of the self-mastery resulting from solitary premeditative study and a flexible social responsiveness to the gifts of the moment; a festive lifestyle offers him the opportunity of exploiting its sociable encounters and chance disruptions without threatening to immerse him totally. In Every Man In the exhilarating sense of opportunity offered by the urban confluence of heterogeneous languages, temperaments, weaknesses, and desires is reinforced by an imagery of flux and incontinence, as if the idle running on of tavern discourse and the impure mingling of bloods and linguistic registers were being divested of their old, pejorative associations with prodigal waste and promiscuous social loss to become (in the travestying figure of Cob the water bearer, for example) an extraordinary evocation of city life in the positive terms of its liquid assets—the refuse of kennels translated into an inexhaustible flow of overlooked social and financial opportunity. In the quarto of 1601 the city is Florence, not London, and the heroes' names—Prospero and Lorenzo di Pazzi—suggest the combination of discursive providence and tricksterish flexibility required to achieve the intended fortune, which in the closely guarded form of a wealthy merchant's sister is aptly named Hesperida. Jonson ensures that Prospero's emotional reserve makes his improvising witty eloquence compatible with long-term financial providence. Prospero and Lorenzo are able to enjoy and exploit the festivity of verbal incontinence, rendering down the obsessions, desires, and irrelevancies of their companions into a currency of humours with which to meet the contingent demands of their own plot. The 1601 quarto contrasts an older generation's cautious and outdated respect for the written text as a space in which to try and prove the productive resources of knowledge, with a younger generation's provident ability to discover the resources they need in the flow of action and conversation about them. Lorenzo senior is outraged by Prospero's dissipation of his discursive abilities in a conceitful letter inviting his son to town, but when the old man himself attempts to conceive a plot which will thwart his errant son his anxiety to preserve the integrity of thought as if it were a written text makes his plot an ineffectual labour of intention and reason.¹⁴ Prospero, on the other hand, plays skilfully on the anxieties and desires of the people around him, thereby identifying his discursive providence with that of the dramatist Jonson himself. Both the dramatist and his creation display a consciousness that it is delay, the deception of expectation, that creates power by securing the emotions and anxieties of other people as ‘humours’ to be resourcefully channelled to productive ends. ‘Wee'le prorogue his expectation a little’, Prospero says when he hears that Lorenzo senior is in town. Where Udall in Roister Doister felt obliged to make a moral distinction between the providence of mercantile calculation and the expedient improvisations of dramatic intrigue, Jonson can emphasize the underlying similarity between the two modes of operation. His merchant Thorello, who bargains on the Exchange, reveals that he as well as Prospero knows the value of the emotional reserve which acts as a ‘persuading spirit’, channelling the anger or emotional weakness of others into the ‘ready money’ of compliance.¹⁵ In a sense, the only difference between the merchant and the gallant in Jonson's play is that the latter is more resourcefully opportunistic, less likely to be hindered from his enterprise by any literature-induced anxiety about the prodigal loss and promiscuous devaluation of property (marital or financial) through the exchanges of commercialized urban festivity. Jonson's play marks the end of the moral distinction drawn between festive improvisation and solvent self-mastery by which Nashe was forced to deny himself the status of author and adopt that of improvident self-dissipating trickster. In Jonson's dramatic world (which was to form the basic of a distinctly English comedy of manners) participating in an improvised style of life and dialogic style of discourse (repartee) amid the opportunities for round-the-clock festivity offered by the metropolis becomes more sensationally productive than steady self-improvement by solitary reading or financial calculation; the tavern of Every Man In (appropriately called the ‘Windmill’ in the 1616 folio) offers a no less respectable opportunity for the productive channelling and financial exploitation of discursive exchange than does the nerve centre of urban prosperity, London's Royal Exchange itself.

Jonson's trickster gentlemen have absorbed the lessons of providence, and while they participate in worlds of urban festivity which they themselves may find time-wasting, distasteful, contaminating (Bartholomew Fair and the consumerized female social world of Epicoene are both ambivalently presented in this way) they strenuously preserve a sense of private self, resisting moral insolvency, precisely because they justify their participation in festivity by a productive exploitation of the resources it offers; they command the emotional and discursive flux it releases about them.¹⁶ The achievement of such dramatic figures, reconciling as they do attitudes which had been mutually incompatible for half a century of pedagogic and propagandist discourse, is remarkable and extremely relevant to the ongoing transformation of economic attitudes in the seventeenth century. It is important to try and appreciate the depth of the conceptual change required to bring about a situation in which the discursive and social opportunities made available by a kind of festive insouciance—the improvising responses of wit—cease to be conceived as a threat to self-mastery and economic enterprise, and become its characteristic social properties. Reading Nashe in the context of this conceptual change enables us to understand how, by contrast, the improvisatory energy of Nashe's writing utterly resists absorption to any such productive end. Where Jonson makes the opportunities offered by festive gathering of people into a productive resource for certain witty individuals (just as on a commercial basis festivity inevitably becomes a resource of economic individualism) Nashe counters this tendency with an older, festive system of imagery in which discourse, people, and even time all resist being absorbed or exploited as productive resources because they are all conceived as existing in a vital, mutually generative relationship, capable of disintegration and decay. This system of imagery, traditionally associated with the promotion of fertility by the disintegrating agencies of laughter and mockery, was by no means obsolete or even ancient; it was as contemporary as the newer imagery of individualism. The extent and rapidity of the social change brought about by the humanist emphasis on individual providence and by a specifically English application of this emphasis to the urgent demands of economic recovery made enormous conceptual demands on Englishmen over little more than a generation. The social relations of a household economy, preserved in the discourse of popular festival, were neither absorbed by Nashe in Jonsonian style as the resources of individual productivity nor revived in the manner of Robert Herrick in a spirit of patrician nostalgia. Rather, their disruptive potential enables Nashe's writings, from Summers Last Will and Testament to Lenten Stuffe, to pit the changing discourses of moral and social values inconclusively against one another, making the moment of social transformation itself available for contemplation.

In her book on economic ideology and thought in the seventeenth century, Joyce Appleby includes a chapter on the poor considered as a productive resource.¹⁷ That it was possible to conceive of the poor in this primarily economic way in the seventeenth century was, as we have seen, the result of a sixteenth-century discursive training which facilitated such resourceful transformative thought. It is both witty and provident to conceive the causes and effects of economic adversity as discursive commonplaces—avarice, poverty—so as to be able to transform them into the resources of prosperity. Before the sixteenth century Englishmen would have been largely incapable of conceiving of people in terms of productive resources. But this discursive facility which enables the conceptual transformation of people into labour and resources had, as Appleby observes, social implications which remained concealed through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by an outward conformity to the older socio-economic relationship of lordship and service. Indeed, in England the transition from the feudal lordship-service relation to the capitalist relationship of individual and resources was so imperceptible that ‘the categories of thought associated with capitalism appeared to the English as timeless forms imprinted on the very stuff of the human brain’.¹⁸ Such an impression, of course, belies the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century situation, for, as Appleby insists, men could not respond positively to opportunities for further economic development without abandoning customary ways of holding and working the land. Ideological adjustment was required: ‘the endorsement of new values, the acknowledgement of new occupations and the reassessment of the obligations of the individual to society … Before there could be new modes of behaviour, there had to be ideas to explain them’.¹⁹

The educational developments of the sixteenth century were responsible for encouraging the individual to become aware of the resource potential of the material and temporal environment as well as instilling in him a new moral obligation to provide for the future and to remain solvent. The premium on resourcefulness is evident in the specific direction taken by the economic policy of the Elizabethan government, which aimed at promoting national solvency through the issuing of incentives to enterprising individual projectors. A project was, as Joan Thirsk defined it, ‘a practical scheme for exploiting material things’.²⁰ But the definition of ‘things’ here must be extended to cover temporal and human resource potential too. For financial profit was less essential to the worth of a project than its ingenuity—one could almost say its wit—in discovering concealed resource potential. Projectors were characteristically ingenious in their ability to realize the potential of material, temporal, and human resources which would otherwise be defined as idle (vagabonds, offcuts of cloth, ‘dead’ or unproductive seasons of the year). J. U. Nef has pointed out that this preoccupation with the ingenious discovery of resource potential was peculiar to the development of the English economy: nothing like it was to be found on the Continent. It was at the end of the sixteenth century, he remarks, ‘that men began to attach a value that was novel to inventive ideas whose only purpose was to reduce labour costs and to multiply production’.²¹ Initially, as Joan Thirsk has shown, this premium on the exploitation of overlooked resources was linked to the reformers' concern over the wasteful exchange of valuable raw materials and the sacrifice of their productive potential for mere haberdashery items from overseas. They objected to paying for what it might profit them to produce within the realm, since fashionable and expensive items such as Spanish gloves were in fact made from otherwise unusable offcuts of leather. The earliest monopolies took the form of patents granting the right to individuals to gather material which would otherwise go to waste, rather in the way that the De copia style of education created wits which were capable of gathering and exploiting hidden opportunities disclosed by timely utterance. There were monopolies granted on the collection of ‘lists, shreds and horns’ and ‘ashes and old shoes’.²² Idle people became the equivalent to idle material in the resourceful projecting terms; John Spilman's paper-making monopoly granted him the right to employ vagabonds to gather rags from London streets. Seasonal time—which in the terms of a natural economy dictates the prosperity of human endeavour and continuance of human life—could now be conceived of as contributing to a productive human enterprise, such as Robert Payne's project for the manufacture of coloured woollen goods which proposed to exploit the enforced idleness of seasonal labour by having the woad cultivated and the wool dyed using the same employees at alternative seasons.²³ It is clear that although the project itself was a practical scheme, at the level of social relations it became a solvent of the conceptual structure of the traditional economic unit of the household which, whether manorial or belonging to a crafts guild, was based on ties of kinship and service, and prospered in accordance with the seasonal yield of non-transactable land. The new economic unit was not the household but the individual whose life became central, not so much in terms of personal fulfilment as in the sense of an enterprise undertaken on society's behalf, a way of mastering the idle present and realizing its potential as a prosperous future. The need to adjust to a new concept of individual survival as a kind of premeditated enterprise to produce the future (rather than as an improvising collaboration with disintegrative and regenerative energies of seasonal time) emerges from endless sixteenth-century admonitions against improvidence and idle living. Shakespeare's sonnets contribute to this discourse, preoccupied as they are with the need to combat the devastating effects of time by labouring to produce oneself. Simply living is not enough; it is merely heading into ‘the wastes of time’. One of the theses of the sonnets is a playful reversal of admonitions against prodigality and expenditure, arguing that apparent self-expenditure (in begetting children, or writing poetry) is in fact more provident than a retentive self-possession: ‘For shame deny that thou bear'st loue to any, who for thy selfe art so vnprouident’ (X). The teasing arguments of the sonnets depend throughout on an acceptance of the premise that what endures, what is productive for the future, is more valuable than prosperity beheld and enjoyed in the present; the poems consistently oppose the ephemeral outward wealth of the flowering rose to the distillation of the rose's scent, which becomes, because of its productivity for the future, a figure for substantial truth. True substance becomes that which is capable of producing and of being stored up to produce the future.

This privileging of future productivity over the prosperity of the present, insisting on the present as an illusion, an outward show, is typical of sixteenth-century discourse, as we saw from Nashe's contrast between the old bard hutch which concealed an invaluable treasure of future productivity and the alluring newly painted box, gaudily concealing nothing but futurelessness, the certainty of extinction (i. 131). In a land centred economy it is difficult to think of wealth in terms of storage and transaction, because the most valuable entity is the land itself which is less a possession than an environment. There are similar problems with the conception of storing, or transacting, time, since land and time together make up the generative environment that produces prosperity. We naturally talk about saving, wasting, or employing time, thereby expressing our sense that time exists as a material factor contributing to the success of our enterprise rather than that our enterprise (life) simply has its being in time. Medieval expressions of time, however, imply something more like the latter conception. Such phrases as ‘pater noster wyle’, argued E. P. Thompson, are characteristic of an ‘attitude of submission and of nonchalant indifference to the passage of time, which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving’.²⁴ In traditional societies, according to Mircea Eliade, experience-laden time may only be ‘accumulated’ up to a certain point after which it becomes an intolerable and threatening burden which must be dissipated and renewed. Such a renewal may take the form of religious absolution, as in the Catholic tradition of the confession of sins, or it may take the form of an orgiastic ritual, such as is associated with the European Carnival.²⁵ Clearly there had always been a mercantile sector which made usurous transactions of time and a literate intellectual tradition which stored and made use of history. What was peculiar to the sixteenth century was a general diffusion of the idea that history and past experience were keys to survival in all the most practical spheres of life. The new idea that life was an investment of mental energy in the discovery of means to secure its own continuance and improvement must have had to struggle with the habits appropriate to an older way of life which acknowledged the necessity of destroying the impotent past as a ritualistic means of securing the fertility of the future.

The notion of providence as an individual responsibility, or even as a possibility open to the individual, was new in the sixteenth century. In writing on the moral virtues in the Gouernour, Elyot was careful to define the word providence: the concept was still strange in English. He identified it as a virtue proper to the individual, the capacity to exploit possibilities in order to determine as far as possible the outcome of one's labours. In a more traditional system of thought, however, dependence on ‘providence’ indicates almost the opposite. The providence of God forbids active exploitation of the environment in the interests of any individual; theoretically, landlords are stewards, distributors of God's plenty. When, in the early sixteenth century, this system was seriously disrupted by the changing patterns of trade which encouraged English landlords to become ‘possessioners’, exploiting land for grazing cattle and sheep, and enclosing commons, the reaction of mid-sixteenth-century preachers such as Latimer was to deplore the abomination of these ‘vnnaturall lordes’ who had upset the generative, distributive relationship of time and land, of lordship and service. The individual enterprise which Elyot would call providence was in this instance condemned by Latimer because it represented human interference in the providence of nature; ‘monsterous and portentious dearthis made by man, not with standynge God doeth sende vs plentifullye the fruites of the earthe’.²⁶

From Latimer's reaction it seems fairly clear that individual ‘providence’ had yet to be established as a moral responsibility. As yet there was no generally articulated doctrine that the individual has a social (and therefore moral) obligation to provide for himself. This doctrine was first established and widely disseminated in the sixteenth century; from aristocrats to artisans, young men were systematically taught the principle of regarding their lives as an expenditure to be balanced against an income that was not automatically self-renewing. England's Lord Treasurer wrote cautionary words to his son which give us some idea of how unassimilated were the basics of modern economic thought. Burghley proposes simple calculation as a check against the discomfort of insolvency: ‘Beware that thou spend not above three of the four parts of thy revenue, nor above one-third part of that in thine house … For otherwise shalt thou live like a rich beggar in a continual want.’²⁷ For the middle classes the moral obligation to remain self-sufficient was spelt out in William Perkins's exhaustive instructions for devout and blameless living: ‘Our riches must be imploied to necessarie vses. These are First, the maintenance of our owne goode estate and conditions.’²⁸ Even Nashe's idiosyncratically negative response to this kind of precept can only emphasize for us how new, how unassimilated, the imperative was. In 1593 he attacked the spreading of this new doctrine of providence: ‘Ministers and Pastors … beeing couetous your selues, you preach nothing but couetous doctrine … That Text is too often in your mouthes, Hee is worse then an infidel that prouides not for his wife and family’ (ii. 107).

The structure of the traditional household is intolerant of the conception of the individual as an economic unit with internalized anxieties about solvency and dreams of economic mastery, because its economy is dependent on the seasons. The source and continuance of prosperity is conceptually located in festivity, the distribution and consumption of wealth. The service traditionally rendered in return for the protection of lordship had etymological associations with festive distribution: the word lord in Old English is hlaford (loaf keeper), and servant is hlafæta (bread eater). But the providence of the loaf keeper is dependent upon the occasions of seasonal prosperity, and the obligations of mutual service were seasonally observed. There was no transaction of a quantity of benefits accorded by the lord against a quantity of rents and services rendered by the tenant, but ‘a series of particular benefits was given in return for a series of particular renders, and the memory was preserved of the association of each benefit with the corresponding render’.²⁹ Gifts of food offered ‘against Christmas’, for example, suggest a sense of contributing to the feast as much as to the lord who would distribute it. Perishable wealth—food and drink—inevitably belongs to the time in which it is freshest and best consumed; hence, in the festive system of imagery, the ludicrous associations of stale or dried foodstuffs, such as stinking red herrings, or foods that are soon rotten, such as tripes and the innards that are used to make puddings. Before the drink trade began to be commercialized in the sixteenth century ale was a perishable festive drink; it could not keep and so was brewed specially by tenants for the occasions of communal feasting, hence the association in bride-ales and church-ales.³⁰ This conception of prosperity as occasional and ephemeral was utterly incompatible with the emergent discourse of economic individualism; in his comedy Summers Last Will and Testament Nashe exploits the possibilities of this incompatibility. Ver, the figure of Whitsun revelry, can make no account to the Summer Lord of how he has spent his wealth; he explains, nonchalantly: ‘What I had, I haue spent on good fellowes; in these sports you haue seene, which are proper to the Spring, and others of like sort (as giuing wenches greene gownes, making garlands for Fencers, and tricking vp children gay) haue I bestowde all my flowry treasure, and flowre of my youth’ (iii. 240-1). The discourse of temperance and solvency intervenes, trying to translate Ver into an admonitory exemplum: ‘A small matter. I knowe one that spent in lesse than a yere, eyght and fifty pounds in mustard and another that ran in det, in the space of foure or fiue yeere, aboue fourteen thousand pound in lute strings and gray paper’; but it is uttered by a fool (iii. 241). Ver's wealth was proper to the Spring, as the oxymoronic ‘flowry treasure’ beautifully suggests. Even more striking in Nashe's play is the conceptual challenge offered by the personification of Harvest, who calls attention to the distinction between mastery and the traditional conception of lordship when he reminds the possessive Summer lord that it is in fact the harvest time itself that occasions hospitality and distributes the feast. Harvest thus embodies the traditional conception of the lord as loaf keeper, both extending and debasing its social implications: ‘I am the very poore mans boxe of pitie … there are more holes of liberality open in haruests heart than in a siue, or a dustbox. Suppose you were a craftsman, or an Artificer, and should come to buy corne of mee, you should haue bushels of mee; not like the Bakers loafe, that should waygh but sixe ounces’ (iii. 261).

It is Harvest who feeds dependants and keeps open house: ‘You obiect I feede none at my boord. I am sure if you were a hogge, you would neuer say so: for, surreuerence of their worships, they feed at my stable table euery day. I keepe good hospitality for hennes & geese: Gleaners are oppressed with the heauy burdens of my bounty: They rake me, and eate me to the very bones, Till there be nothing left but grauell and stones’ (iii. 261). From Harvest's words emerges a link between the conception of the lord as the distributor of hospitality and the primitive notion of the festive lord or trickster, participation in whose disintegrating body revives the community or generates the possibility of good fortune. This latter implies a further link with Nashe the trickster-writer, who refers to his readers as his dependent god-children, to feast whom he has distributed all, unconcerned to reserve authorial credibility or to make the festivity of discourse serve a productive purpose, Jonsonian style.³¹

The traditional association of prosperity with the festive consumption of the gifts of the moment became unimaginable when the new obligations of individual solvency and productivity simply defined such a conception as ‘waste’ and ‘excess’. Philip Stubbes in 1583 denied the festive conception of wealth altogether when he challenged the need to observe feasts on a communal and occasional basis. ‘I thinke it conuenient for one Freend to visite an other (at sometimes) as opportunitie & occasion offer it self’, he wrote, ‘but wherfore shuld the whole town, parish, village and cuntrey keepe one and the same day, and make such gluttonous feasts as they doo?’³² Yet in the older way of thinking wealth was conceivable only as the moment of prosperity; communal consumption of the feast was a means of expressing and of evaluating wealth. Excess, too, was appropriate; of the gargantuan quantities of food and drink consumed at the harvest dinner of the carpenters' guild at Coventry in 1524 a modern historian remarks on what appears to be ‘deliberate excess’ at a time when the town's economy was seriously threatened.³³ No doubt the excess was deliberate, part of the heritage of practices involved in the traditional sense of ‘economy’ as ‘keeping house’. Where wealth is perishable the conception of investment, transaction against the future, scarcely exists. The assumption is, rather, that liberal expenditure and festive consumption within the unit of the household guarantees prosperity and forms the basis of economy. Where a reformed commercial society stresses the dread of bankruptcy—the exhaustion of resources through over-consumption—traditional societies based on a natural economy emphasize the anxiety of rendering wealth sterile and infertile through hoarding, refusing to allow the disintegration and redistribution of material vitality. Thus the consequences of Harvest's imputed miserliness in Summers Last Will are automatically assumed to be the impoverishment of the generative earth:

Haruest, heare what complaints are brought to me.
Thou art accused by the publicke voyce,
For an ingrosser of the common store;
A Carle, that has no conscience, nor remorse
But doost impouerish the fruitfull earth

(iii. 259)

The social and religious ideals of a predominantly natural, subsistence economy were based on a seasonal understanding of wealth as regenerative through festive dissipation and distribution throughout the organism; that is, the household and its dependent neighbourhood. Thomas Lever, for all he abhorred monasticism, castigated the possessive individualism of the new style secular landlord by means of an almost grotesque image; new landlords absorb whole houses and neighbourhoods which the fat bellies of the monks had relieved through the dissipation and redistribution of hospitality. ‘For yf ye were not starke blynd ye would se and be ashamed’, preached Lever, ‘that where as fyfty tunne belyed Monckes geuen to glotony fylled theyr pawnches, kept vp theyr house and relyued the whol country round about them, ther one of your gredye guttes deuowrynge the whole house and making great pyllage throughout the countrye, cannot be satisfyed.’³⁴ Festivity and hospitality are celebrated in seventeenth-century poetry as alternatives to an urban lifestyle where constant expenditure of resources is superficially more apparent than the concentration of financial opportunities; so Jonson congratulates Sir Robert Wroth on being able to leave an expense-incurring urban life to live at home with ‘vnbought prouision blest’.³⁵ But where Jonson ingeniously figures the household economy with its festive conception of wealth as a resource to be mastered by the individual (it is the poet of ‘To Penshurst’ who suddenly emerges to absorb the feast he has made of it) Nashe tends rather to draw attention to the incompatibility of household and individual as moral and economic units. He brilliantly conflates the festive household and the individual struggling for solvency in the appropriately named landlord, Christmas, of Summers Last Will and Testament. As Christmas is both individual and household, the barred doors, the buttoned doublets fastening tight his home and body coalesce in a farcical exaggeration of the anxieties created by adjustment to the ideology of individualism. He glibly invokes all the arguments against hospitality: ‘Gluttony is a sinne, & too many dunghills are infectious. A mans belly was not made for a poudring beefe tub: to feede the poore twelue dayes, & let them starue all the yeare after, would but stretch out the guts wider than they should be & so make famine a bigger den in their bellies than he had before’ (iii. 285). For all his fear of unforeseen expenses Christmas is lavish in the distribution of classical exempla against prodigality: ‘The scraping of trenchers you thinke would put a man to no charges. It is not hundreth pounds a yeare would serve the scullions in dishclouts … O it were a trim thing to send, as the Romanes did, round about the world for prouision for one banquet. I must rigge ships to Samos for Peacocks, to Paphos for Pigeons, to Austria for Oysters …’ But the fool deflates this invalid rhetoric: ‘O sir, you need not; you may buy them at London better cheape’ (iii. 285-6). Christmas's house is a body sealed off (‘I haue dambd vp all my chimnies’, iii. 287), terrified of inadvertently releasing even its refuse as wealth. In bodily terms, as in the terms appropriate to a household economy, this behaviour is pernicious, impending vitality, impoverishing the neighbouring earth. Summer commands Christmas to ‘breathe’ his ‘rusty gold’ (iii. 287), recalling the imagery of the judgement day, in which the sin of avarice is associated with the decay and disease caused by the damning up of wealth. ‘You riches are corrupted’ in the words of the Bible, ‘Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be witness against you’ (James 5: 2-3). In Christes Teares Over Jerusalem Nashe figuratively ascribed the putrefied air of plague-ridden London to the stagnant principles of economic individualism which invested in money and time, keeping ‘gold and grain tyll it is mould, rusty, moath-eaten and almost infects the ayre with the stinche’ (ii. 158).

Attitudes to servants were inevitably affected by the changeover from household to the individual and his resources. In the traditional household structure the lord did not master a labour force, but fed and kept house for numbers of kinsfolk and other dependants who rendered him various services and owed loyalty to his household and blood. A dialogue published in 1579 entitled Cyuile and Uncyuile Life revealed a complete transformation in attitudes towards the complex dependencies of the household. Urban life, with its demands on the individual's resources, transforms the dependent neighbour or god-child of the manorial lord into the employee of the substantial gentleman. The spokesman for what is traditionally understood by housekeeping and lordship contrasts the economics of his own household where ‘hospitalitie is liberally kept, and many Children and Seruaunts daily fed, with all other commers’ with that of his urban counterpart, whose criteria of solvency and efficiency demand that he keep ‘no number of Seruaunts, but those that for necessary vses are imployable’.³⁶ Rationalizing the wastefulness of the traditional scheme, the country lord makes it quite clear that lordship is defined by a capacity to feed and keep house. The lord who lives meanly and privately erodes his own support, the devotion of his people. If he should ‘bee no householder’, the dialogue explains, ‘nor keeper of seruaunts, you see that in his Countrey, neither the neighbours will loue him, nor y^e people do him reuerence’.³⁷

The real assault on the traditional household conception of economy, of course, came about by the willingness of English merchants and landlords to participate in a European commerce which required English raw materials, and which produced inflation, unemployment and poverty, and a demand among Englishmen for imported consumer goods. The economic response involved devoting all the educational and discursive possibilities offered by humanism to the crucial task of conveying the idea that wealth is far from being regenerative, that resources run out, and that opportunities to be exploited are not part of a ripening seasonal time which demands festive celebration, but exist only to the extent that the individual who wishes to prosper by them is sober and solvent enough to look to their productive possibilities for the future. The future becomes the locus of prosperity, and the experience of prosperity as well-being is translated into the exhilaration of productive investment. Within the discourse of antiprodigal admonition, the plainness and simplicity of the traditional English householder became a nostalgic commonplace, somewhat in conflict with complaints against traditional excess.³⁸ But before this commonplace took hold of the imagination it was clear that the household style of economy, with its obligations of festive expenditure, was no longer viable. In 1539 Thomas Cromwell received a letter from the Mayor of Coventry explaining that the costs of hospitality for citizens and strangers over the period of Candlemas alone would have been sufficient for him to ‘keipp his house half a yiere after’.³⁹ The households of the craft guilds were facing the same economic problems. ‘At Corpus Christi tide’, the Mayor continued, ‘the poore comeners be at suche charges with ther playes & pagyontes, that they fare worse all the yiere after.’⁴⁰

The century saw first massive cutbacks in traditional pastimes and housekeeping and then, more gradually, restraint on luxury imports and the beginning of a systematic policy to make England self-supporting in the manufacture of consumer goods. Thus in the course of the century there developed an increased awareness of the potential productive value of time and land; the entities ‘time’ and ‘land’ came to be seen less as vital creators of glut and scarcity than as inert resources to be invested in human enterprises which would guarantee future solvency or profit. Release of wealth on an unprecedented scale after the dissolution of the monasteries no doubt quickened a more general awareness of wealth in terms of quantitatively exploitable possibilities. In one anonymous treatise published at the turn of the century, we see how not only land, but also the other residual components of monasticism—time and labour—could be included in a calculation of potential resources for national solvency. The author makes such a calculation possible by considering all those who had previously been ‘idly’ occupied, as ‘Monkes, chanons, fryers, chauntrypriestes, pardonners, heremites’ and making these human resources equivalent to the temporal resources expended by the lay population in ritualistic activity: ‘the tyme which the residue … did bestow in going of pilgrimages, in caruing painting & gylding of Images, in making of torches, and wax candels, in keping of so many supersticious holydays’.⁴¹ Putting these human and temporal resources together, the author estimates the net result as being approximately a third of the total work resources (or man-hours) which the country might otherwise be expected to yield. Or, as he expresses it, ‘as thogh the thyrd part of y^e men of this realm had then continuallye lyued in Idelnes as touching any necessary busines’.⁴² Now that these man-hours have, by the dissolution of the monasteries, been diverted from ‘idelnes and idell works’ the author proposes that they be invested in the production of such necessary wares, ‘all things ready made of iron, sope, rape oyle’,⁴³ etc. as would make England independent of foreign imports.

At one level this treatise bears witness to a growing sophistication of economic awareness which manifests itself more generally in a new preoccupation with statistical calculation, both in the management of manorial estates (more to remain solvent than to realize profits) and as guides to economic policy. By the end of the century statistics are no longer a purely mercantile concern. J. U. Nef relates how in 1591 Lord Buckhurst confused the customs officers by asking for a year by year account of coal exports for the previous seven years. The officers misunderstood, returning a total for the seven year period with an average: ‘The distinction between the average traffic and the rate of increase was still meaningless to these customs officers’, observes Nef, ‘but the distinction was obviously clear to Buckhurst’.⁴⁴ Buckhurst of course was, like Smith, Burghley, Cobham, and others, a product of the mid-century humanist ‘revolution’ in education.

The breakdown of the household organization of the guilds, together with the movement of the aristocracy into business and civil service, resulted in traditional lordship being increasingly identified with mastery or employer-status. No longer a keeper of house and servants, the governor/lord now masterminded the investment of time, material, and labour in order to set people on work, securing their solvency and his profit. We can contrast Elyot's synthesis of old and new in his still organic conception of economic relations as mutual service and subsistence in the ‘body lyuyng’ of the commonwealth where ‘the husbandeman fedeth hym selfe and the clothe maker’,⁴⁵ or More's definition of the altruistically productive commonweal as ‘one big household’⁴⁶ with the more radical vision of Thomas Smith, who shifted the crucial emphasis from one of mutual service in an organism to one of mutual endeavour in non-organic production: ‘So in making of a house there is the master that would have the house made, there is the carpenter, and there is the stuff to make the house withal; the stuff never stirs till the workman do set it forward, the workman never travails but as the master provokes him with good wages, and so he is the principal cause of this housemaking.’⁴⁷ It is important, I think, to appreciate how neatly the intellectual providence of the entrepreneur or projector slotted into the old social paradigm of the lord as provider or bread giver. Thus Robert Hitchcocke's proposal for the establishment of a national herring fishery (which has already been quoted for the enthusiasm with which it envisaged turning the parasitical monster of vagrancy into a productive labour force) offered itself to readers as an act of intellectual hospitality, a ‘feast’ which would provide for the nation's future.⁴⁸ Real feasts fell into redundance as social expressions of prosperity; they were replaced by printed testimonies to the benevolence of the entrepreneur who ‘set so many thousands awork’.⁴⁹ The synthesis of good housekeeper and provident employer helped to bridge a conceptual gap between the old socio-economic relations and the new. Thomas Deloney blended the ideals in the figure of his benevolent entrepreneur Jack of Newberry, a clothier who keeps good house for his servant-dependants as well as setting them on work. As in the old tradition, superfluity rather than efficiency signifies the prosperity of the household and the honour of its lord:

Eachweeke ten good fat Oxen he
Spent in his house for certainty.(50)

Nashe's social vision is remarkable for the way in which it rejects this kind of synthesis, indeed provokes awareness of its spuriousness. ‘Lordship’, translated into Smith's scheme of master, labour, and material, might as easily be equated with the raw material as with the capital; it all depends to which one attributes the stimulus of industry. Nashe foregrounds this ambiguity when in Lenten Stuffe he praises Yarmouth's commodity, the red herring, as the ‘good Lord and master’ of the people, a provident pater patriae who ‘sets a worke thousands’ (iii. 180) without apparently claiming the exclusive social and economic privileges of men whose government is as thriftily self-interested as their patronage rights are lordly. This Yarmouth red herring, however, turns out to be a fantastic, festive displacement of the London government, which is exclusive enough in its absolute monopoly of discursive interpretation and economic opportunity.

It has not been the aim of this chapter to argue that Nashe's texts advocate a return to the festive opportunism of a subsistence economy or even to suggest that it is possible to compare the quality of the social relations fostered by such an economy with those which answer the needs of possessive individualism. Joan Thirsk has argued convincingly that projects actually helped to keep up traditional social relations when they were undertaken by local lords and gentry to employ their impoverished tenantry rather than simply as a means to realize the resource potential of the anonymous ‘poor’.⁵¹ My interest has been in the conceptual and moral adjustments required to make such economic adaptability possible. I have set the old and new economic units of household and individual side by side in order to suggest how the new might have been conceivable in terms of the old, and how the humanist emphasis on improvisatory, discursive resourcefulness helped to conceal a conceptual transition by endorsing the opportunism associated with a tricksterish response to seasonal time, while transforming the moral and economic significance of such opportunism. The tricksterish capacity to turn all things to opportunity has its place in the development of a productive consumer economy; hence the English humanists' concern to incriminate tricksterish ‘Italianate’ literary forms which celebrated their own ingenuity without representing its long-term ends. English humanists needed to promote the association between providence, industry, and ingenuity that Elyot had made when he wrote that ‘they that be called Industrious, do most craftily and depely understande in all affaires what is expedient, and by what meanes and wayes they maye sonest exploite them. And those thinges in whome other men travayle, a person industrious lightly and with facility spedeth, and findeth newe wayes and meanes to bring to effect that he desireth.’⁵² One moral and literary effect of this was the development, at a popular level of a ‘provident’ form of the traditionally amoral ‘Tyl Ulenspiegel’ style of jest book; in this provident form, which began with Elizabethan coney-catching literature and became the staple mode of popular English criminal narrative, the tricksterish jests which invited the reader's irresponsible complicity could be invested back into the promotion of long-term economic responsibility by hanging the trickster as a criminal. On a more sophisticated literary and social level, English dramatists developed a ‘humourous’ style of intrigue comedy in which gentlemen might display tricksterish affinities with impunity since their apparently gratuitous indulgence in rowdy commercialized festivity was a socially sanctioned way of maximizing urban opportunities to secure longer-term good fortune. One of the reasons why Nashe's writing is so interesting in this transitional period is that it adapts tricksterish techniques in ways which resist these impersonally productive implications. Nashe conceives of discourse itself in the vital conditions of utterance, which, as soon as it tries to operate with productive anonymity, becomes ‘stale’, communicating this staleness to readers by seeming to disintegrate and mock itself, as if mediated by a fool. So it is that, in the historical moment of the inception of a provident literature of roguery, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller turns such a literature into a series of utterances which are already stale, informing against themselves. In order to understand how this comes about, however, it is necessary to consider in detail the significance of festivity and popular pastimes in Nashe's writing.

Notes

1. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, pp. 292-303.

2. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, X. vii. 5-6; see also Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 126-35.

3. See L. G. Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, pp. 69, 76-88.

4. See J. B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, pp. 133-9.

5. Plautus, Pseudolis, II. 3. 670-4, in Works, with trans. by P. Nixon, vol. iv.

6. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, i. 238-9; C. H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 152-64.

7. W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder, p. 85.

8. ‘Memorandum on the Statute of Artificers, c.1573’, Tudor Economic Documents i. 360.

9. Hoskins, Age of Plunder, pp. 84-5.

10. Ariosto, La Cassaria, V. iv. 150-60 in Opere, iv. 63.

11. See Whetstone's explanation of his aim to adapt Italian plot structure in the interests of English civic reform, Promos and Cassandra, sig. Aii^r.

12. Whetstone, Mirour For Magestrates, sig. Aiv^r.

13. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, iv. 317.

14. Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, the quarto of 1601, II. i. 1-35, in Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, iii. 222-3.

15. Ibid. II. iii. 221; II. iv. 143; and III. i. 4.

16. See J. Haynes, ‘Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's “Bartholomew Fair”’.

17. J. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 129-57.

18. Ibid. 8.

19. Ibid. 4.

20. Thirsk, Economic Policy, p. 1.

21. J. U. Nef, Cultural Foundations of an Industrial Civilization, pp. 60-1.

22. W. H. Price, The English Patents of Monopoly, pp. 145, 151. See also Thirsk, Economic Policy, pp. 14-15.

23. R. J. Smith, ‘A Woad Growing Project at Wollaton in the 1580s'. See also Thirsk, Economic Policy, pp. 18-19.

24. E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, pp. 58-9.

25. M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W. R. Trask, p. 75.

26. Latimer, ‘The fyrst sermon of Mayster Hugh Latimer … before the Kynges Maiest.’, in Seven Sermons before Edward VI, ed. E. Arber, p. 39.

27. Advice to a Son, ed. L. B. Wright, p. 10.

28. W. Perkins, Works, bk. iii, p. 148.

29. C. G. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, p. 258; see also M. E. James's excellent studies of social and conceptual change in the sixteenth century, ‘The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising of 1569’, and Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500-1640, pp. 19-20, 183-7.

30. Homans, English Villagers, p. 268.

31. See Nashe's remarks in Lenten Stuffe, iii. 225, and Ch. 5 below.

32. Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, pt. I, p. 153.

33. C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, p. 110.

34. T. Lever, ‘A Sermon preached at Paul's Crosse, 13th Dec. 1550’, in Seven Sermons, ed. E. Arber, p. 119.

35. Jonson, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, in Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, viii. 97.

36. Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, sig. EI^v.

37. Ibid., sig. F4⁴; see also James, ‘The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising’.

38. See Smith, Discourse, pp. 20-2, 81-3.

39. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, p. 263.

40. Ibid. See also P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution, pp. 39-44.

41. Pyers Plowmans exhortation unto the lordes knights and burgoysses of the Parlyamenthouse (1549), sig. A4^r.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., sig. A8^r-v.

44. Nef, Cultural Foundations, p. 13.

45. Elyot, Gouernour, pp. 1, 5.

46. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. P. Turner, p. 85.

47. Smith, Discourse, p. 96.

48. Hitchcocke, Pollitique Platt, sig. ***^r.

49. D. C. Coleman, ‘Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’, p. 280.

50. The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. M. E. Lawlis, p. 27.

51. See J. Thirsk, ‘Projects for Gentlemen, Jobs for the Poor: Mutual Aid in the Vale of Tewkesbury, 1600-1630’, in Thirsk (ed.), The Rural Economy of England, pp. 237-307.

52. Elyot, Gouernour, p. 100.

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