Abstract
‘Antiquities’, wrote Francis Bacon in 1605, ‘are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time’.1 His characterisation of those ‘industrious persons [who] by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation … do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time’ appears tailor-made to describe, just as it drew to a close, the lifetime of labour devoted by Stow to discovering the remains of London.2 Where the author of the Survey had dedicated himself to recovering the materials of London’s history, however, the work of the newly-emergent author Thomas Middleton put itself forward as a study of civic forgetting. The forces of forgetting, cast by Bacon as elemental and material threats to the project of history, find themselves dramatised as central players in Middleton’s theatre of London life. The man who would penetrate the networks of civic patronage to become the first City Chronologer, began his literary apprenticeship by anatomising onstage London’s memorial crisis.
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Notes
Gary Taylor (1993) ‘The Renaissance and the End of Editing’ in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (eds) Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 121–49.
See David J. Lake (1975) The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); MacDonald P. Jackson (1979) Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik); R. V. Holdsworth (1982) ‘Middleton and Shakespeare: The Case for Middleton’s Hand in Timon of Athens’ (Unpublished Phd thesis, University of Manchester).
Suzanne Gossett (2002) ‘Major/Minor, Main Plot/Subplot, Middleton/and’ in The Elizabethan Theatre XV, ed. Cecil McGee and Lynne Magnusson (Toronto: Meany), pp. 21–38, p. 24. On the theorisation of collaboration see Jeffrey Masten (1997) Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Douglas A. Brooks (2000) From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modem England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 140–88; Heather Hirschfeld (2004) Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst: University of Massachussets Press). For a recent counterblast, see Jeffrey Knapp (2005) ‘What is a Co-Author?’, Representations, 89, 1–29. For recent studies that give Middleton’s collaboration due prominence see Mark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham (2008) Middleton and his Collaborators (Hornodon: Northcote Press); Michelle O’Callaghan (2009) Thomas Middleton: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Garret Sullivan, Jr. (2005) Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 15. See also Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (eds) (2004) Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies (London: Routledge).
George Rowe Jr. (1979) Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), p. 64.
Marcel Mauss (1969) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen & West), p. 40. Amongst the many critics to have considered Mauss’ theory in relation to Timon see particularly Coppélia Kahn (1987) “‘Magic of Bounty”: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage and Maternal Power’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38, 34–57; Ken Jackson (2001) “‘One wish” or the possibility of the impossible: Derrida, the gift, and God in Timon of Athens’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52, 34–66.
Mary Thomas Crane (1993) Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 161–2.
Thomas Tusser (1604) Fiue Hundreth points of good husbandrie, p. 19. On the development in Tusser’s credit advice across successive editions of this bestselling work as a marker of the changing practicalities of credit in the period see Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, pp. 161–6.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox, ed. Brian Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
Paul S. Seaver (1985) Wallington’s World: a Puritan Artisan in seventeenthCentury London (London: Methuen), p. 53. For examples of mock funerals within enclosure protest see David Underdown (1985) Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 110–1; John Walter (2006) Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 23. There is no evidence from England for the kind of examples of a ritual burial of winter or burial of Carnival found in central Europe. Peter Burke (1999) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate), revised reprint, pp. 122–3. Robert Scribner (1987) ‘Ritual and Reformation’ in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press), p. 118.
See E. S. Miller (1946) ‘Roister Doister’s “Funeralles”’, Studies in Philology, 43, 42–58; Tobias Doring (2006) Performances of Mourning in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 166–80.
Michael Neill (1992) “‘Feasts Put Down Funerals”: Death and Ritual in Renaissance Comedy’ in Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (eds) True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 47–74; Reavley Gair (1982) The Children of Pauls: the Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 153.
John Marston, The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Phoebe Spinrad (1987) The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Ohio: Ohio State University Press), pp. 223–6.
Cyrus Hoy (1980) Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to texts in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 5 vols, 2, p. 15.
Hans Sachs, Nine Carnival Plays, trans. Randall W. Lesterman (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1990). For a jestbook version see Tales and quicke answers, very mery and pleasant to rede (1532?), sigs. H2v—H3r.
Tobias Doring, Performances of Mourning, p. 135. Daring explores the uncertainty of tears as theatrical signs, on the one hand accepted as certain tokens of inwardness, on the other the virtuoso marks of a consummate performer.
Lorna Hutson (2007) The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 16.
Wilfrid R. Prest (1991) The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 296–7. See also C. W. Brooks (1986) Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 48–111.
J. H. Baker (1990) An Introduction to Legal History (London: Butterworth), pp. 63–110.
W. J. Jones (1967) The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 177–235.
Alan C. Dessen (1966) ‘Middleton’s The Phoenix and the Allegorical Tradition’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6/2, 291–308, p. 302. The scene is modelled on the purgation of Crispianus in Jonson’s Poetaster.
A. A. Bromham (1984) ‘The Contemporary Significance of The Old Law’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 24, 327–39. See also Swapan Chakravorty (1996) Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 118–20.
Davies, ‘Preface Dedicatory’, Le Primer Report des Cases, f. 2r. See Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, pp. 48–57.
Jeffrey Masten (1995) ‘Family Values: Euthanasia, Editing, and the Old Law’, TextualPractice, 9/3, 445–58.
Helkiah Crooke (1615) Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, p. 502. See also Sullivan, Memoly and Forgetting, pp. 45–6; Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, pp. 260–1.
Mark Eccles (1931) ‘Middleton’s Birth and Education’, Review of English Studies, 7, 431–41, pp. 433–4.
John Bedell (1999) ‘Memory and Proof of Age in Medieval England, 1272–1327’, Past & Present, 162, 3–27; William S. Deller (2011) ‘The First Rite of Passage: Baptism in Medieval Memory’, Journal of Family Histoty, 36, 3–14.
Tracey Hill (2010) Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 310.
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© 2013 Andrew Gordon
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Gordon, A. (2013). Credit History to Civic History: Thomas Middleton and the Politics of Urban Memory. In: Writing Early Modern London. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294920_5
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