Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda

       Introduction

      The theater of property which we have inherited is particularly limited in women’s parts.

      —Donna Dickenson, Property, Women, and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (1997)

      The history of the word household reflects early modern England’s growing preoccupation with “stuff,” with the goods required to maintain a proper domicile in a nascent consumer society. In addition to the more familiar and still contemporary definition of a household as “The inmates of a house collectively; an organized family, including servants or attendants, dwelling in a house,” the Oxford English Dictionary lists the following obsolete definition, which refers not to domestic subjects (husbands, wives, children, servants, etc.), but to domestic objects: “The contents or appurtenances of a house collectively; household goods, chattels, or furniture.” To illustrate this usage, the OED cites Caxton’s 1484 phrase, “Dysshes, pottes, pannes, and suche other houshold.” The early modern conception of what constituted a household was thus defined as much by objects as it was by subjects. In the sixteenth century, the English language gave birth to a new term to designate “The goods, utensils, vessels, etc. belonging to a household”: household stuff. One might wonder why such a term was needed. It was, after all, synonymous with the latter definition of household; the suffixed stuff appears merely redundant, reiterating the act of possession, of keeping or holding, already latent in the latter term. An answer presents itself if we consider the increasing value and proliferation of household moveables during the period, which rendered it necessary to distinguish the household-as-container from the stuff it contained. Such a distinction helped to avoid confusion, among other things, in the transfer of property. Thus, whereas an early fifteenth-century will states simply, “Also I will that my wyffe have all my housholde [w]holy” (indicating a bequest not of the house itself but of its moveables), two centuries later Henry Swinburne’s A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes, the first standard English guide to ecclesiastical probate procedure, specifies that the proper term to be used in bequests of moveables (such as “Tables, Stooles … Chaires, Carpets, Hangings, Beds, Bedding, Basons with Ewers, Candlesticks; all sorts of vessell serving for meate and drincke, being either of earth, wood, glasse, brasse, or Pewter, Pots, Pans, Spits,” etc.) is “Housholdstuffe.”¹

      If Swinburne’s enumeration of the variety of things classifiable as household stuff points to the increasingly diverse supply of household goods during the period,² the tremendous popularity of his treatise points to the increasingly diverse demand for them. Addressed to “every Subject of this realme, though hee bee but of meane capacity” and written “in our vulgar tongue” so that it “may be understood of all,”³ his treatise went through two editions before Swinburne’s death in 1623, and another eight posthumously. The growing need for clarification of the laws governing the disposition and bequest of household stuff is likewise visible in Swinburne’s emendations to the second edition of his treatise: claiming to be “Newly Corrected and augmented,” the 1611 edition incorporates “sundry principall Additions” to the 1590 edition, including some twenty-one pages classifying at length the various species of moveable property, such as household stuff. The lexical emergence and increasing