Abstract
Following Elizabeth I’s death, Dekker responded quickly to the growing fashion for staging the dynamics of city life in the Honest Whore plays (1604–5). It was a fascination which also marked Shakespeare’s only full-scale intervention into the contemporary milieu of the metropolis; into what the Duke in Measure for Measure calls ‘The nature of our people,/Our city’s institutions, and the terms/For common justice’ (I.i.9–11). With Middleton, Dekker began to chart the same tense relationship between people and government by throwing into relief certain institutions which characterized that tension. One such place was Bedlam, England’s first asylum for the insane. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this hospital, with its thirty or so inmates, had become symptomatic of the many changes which wrought London during this period.3 By staging the asylum so meticulously in The Honest Whore, part I the writers theatricalized the social vision and governmental forces which constituted it. Obviously, it was a popular play because a year later Dekker returned to the Fortune theatre with a sequel, The Honest Whore, part II. In this play Bedlam was replaced with the infamous Bridewell, the first workhouse or ‘house of correction’.
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The walls of confinement actually enclose the negative of that moral city which the bourgeois conscience began to dream in the seventeenth century; a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it, a city where right reigns only by virtue of a force without appeal — a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue (to this degree its own reward) is to escape punishment.1
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Notes
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965) p. 61.
A compact account of such changes is available in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds), London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London and New York, 1986).
see also Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London (London, 1935).
C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (Cambridge and New York, 1984).
Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge and New York, 1981).
Emrys Jones, ‘London in the Early Seventeenth Century: An Ecological Approach’, London Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (1980) pp. 123–33.
E. A. Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy 1650–1750’, Past and Present, no. 37 (July 1967), pp. 44–70.
Revd. E. G. O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital From its Foundation in 1247 (London, 1914) p. 112.
E. D. Pendry, Elizabethan Prisons and Prisons Scenes, 2 vols, for Dr. James Hogg (ed.), Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies (Salzburg, 1974) vol. I, p. 48.
Bridewell’s notoriety as a place of vicious sanctions was increased by the knowledge that many ‘prisoners were sent there with the sole purpose of extracting confessions from them by torture.’ Pendry, Prisons, p. 49. See also, Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge and New York, 1991) pp. 204–60.
See J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620 (New York, 1985), especially ch. 2 ‘The military reformation: techniques and organization’, pp. 46–74.
C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army (London, 1946) pp. 137–8.
Carol Thomas Neely, ‘“Documents of Madness”: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3 (Fall 1991) pp. 315–39 (p. 318).
A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London and New York, 1985) p. 116.
See especially Bouwsma, ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’; Dollimore, Radical Tragedy; Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos To Sovereign State (Oxford and New York, 1989).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge Mass., 1968).
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1985), cited in MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 34.
Joy Wiltenburg, ‘Madness and Society in the Street Ballads of Early Modern England’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 21, no. 4 (Spring 1988) pp. 101–27 (p. 113).
Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, 1982), pp. 139–56 (p. 149).
See the Sieve Portrait in Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977) p. 11.
Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, 1985) pp. 41–2.
Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York and London, 1986). These theatrical devices are part of what Tennenhouse calls the ‘new strategies for authorizing monarchy’ in ‘the face of a new political challenge’ (pp. 156 and 159).
For a detailed account of the term and use of ‘disguised duke’ in the context of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, see Rosalind Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure: A Historical Investigation (New York, 1975), pp. 125–96.
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), 4 vols, vol. IV, pp. 336–7.
For a sample, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983).
Tennenhouse, Power on Display; Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure’ in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester, 1985) pp. 72–87.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, first published 1930 (New York, 1958) p. 167.
Roy Baumeister, Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (Oxford and New York, 1986) p. 44.
Richard Horwich, ‘Wives, Courtesans, and the Economics of Love in Jacobean City Comedy’, in Drama in the Renaissance, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Giankaris, and John H. Stroupe (New York, 1986) pp. 255–73 (p. 264).
Jean Christophe-Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought 1550–1750 (Cambridge,1986) p.100.
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© 1998 John Twyning
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Twyning, J. (1998). Bedlam and Bridewell in the Honest Whore Plays. In: London Dispossessed. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333994757_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333994757_2
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