Abstract
The prologue to A Tale of a Tub (c.1633) takes pains to stress that the playtext does not engage with state affairs:
No state affairs, nor any politic club, Pretend we in our Tale, here, of a Tub, But acts of clowns and constables today Stuff out the scenes of our ridiculous play.
(Prologue, 11. 1–4)
But the question must surely be posed whether by emphasizing the absence of allusions of a contemporary, politicized nature, the text does not draw attention to their presence, subversively suggesting the potential for just such topicality on and about ‘state affairs’.1 Martin Butler argues, in a related vein, that the drama’s happy and harmonious ending transcends the social tensions otherwise regis-tered in any given performance, thus consolidating rather than subverting Caroline rule in the 1630s.2 For me, though, the play’s close merely constitutes a theatrical veneer, a ‘happy ending’ that barely conceals the political and social problems revealed elsewhere in the text.
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Notes
Ann Hughes discusses the ‘burgeoning genre of county surveys and histories’ at this time; see her ‘Local History and the Origins of the Civil War’, in Cust and Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 224–53. See also Ann Hughes The Causes of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 20
and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Martin Butler, ‘Private and Occasional Drama’, in A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 127–60. Of course, this ‘Motion’ is a comic version of the masque achieved by means of shadow-puppetry although, as Butler stresses in ‘Stuart Politics’, the social ranks and hierarchies of quotidian life are scrupulously maintained in the seating of the audience (p. 27). See also the puppet-play admissions scene in Bartholomew Fair V.iii. 1–45.
Valerie Pearl, ‘Social Policy in Early Modern London’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 115–31 (p. 116).
The phrase is Joan Kent’s from The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 65.
Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, is at pains to stress that although the House of Commons was made up of elected representatives, it was nevertheless a far from public forum. See also Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 21–46 (p. 26).
Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order’. On Essex, see also William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Hughes, in ‘Local History and the Origins of the Civil War’, offers the counterbalancing suggestion that case studies of localities should not be used to generalize outwards to the nation, but rather as unique and distinct examples (pp. 237–9).
John Lemly, ‘“Make Odde Discoveries!”: Disguises, Masques and Jonsonian Romance’, in A.R. Braunmuller and J.C. Bulman (eds), Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition (Newark, NJ and London: Associated Universities Press, 1986), pp. 131–47, regards Hugh as an example of ‘beneficent authority’ subjected only to a ‘genial unveiling’, like that of Adam Overdo’s, but I find him far more equivocal and his statements far more spurious than that reading would imply.
Annabel Patterson, ‘Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneitÿ’, in Neil Freistat (ed.), Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 95–118.
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© 1998 Julie Sanders
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Sanders, J. (1998). Local Government and Personal Rule in A Tale of a Tub. In: Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_10
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