Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda
things held by the household and kept by the housekeeper, an exigency linked to England’s rapidly expanding market of consumer goods.
The material emphasis of the term household stuff is one that this book shares; this is a book about stuff, about the material objects that came to redefine the household in early modern England.4 Yet the literary analyses elaborated herein are equally concerned with the stuff of language, with the material signifiers through which this redefinition of the household took linguistic shape. The term household stuff provides an exemplary example of the inseparability of these two registers of analysis, for it materially reproduces (through its superfluous, superadded stuff) the material redundancy of things that transformed domestic life and domestic relations during the period. This book thus aims to illuminate both the symbolic dimension of household things and the historical dimension of household words.
The inseparability of the symbolic and material economies that redefined the household is likewise evident in Swinburne’s treatise, which seeks, through a specification of terms, to avoid “uncertaintie respecting the thing bequeathed.” Dispositions or bequests of household property, he warns, are often “overthrowne … when anything is bequeathed under such generall words, that the meaning of the testator is unknowne.” In the interest of “clearing doubts and avoiding suites, which otherwise might ensue about the meaning of the testator by those generall words,” he maintains, “I have thought good to deliver the[ir] severall signification[s].”5 Swinburne’s classification of moveable property includes no less than nine categories and subcategories: goods, chattels, moveables (including the subcategories moventia and mobilia), fruits (both industrial and natural), and household stuff. Far from delineating clear and fixed boundaries between these categories, however, his definitions reveal how unstable and subject to dispute they in fact were.6 It becomes clear that the linguistic instability he aims to fix arises from a material excess, from the increasing volume, value, and variety of goods available for domestic consumption. In attempting to define the precise parameters of the term household stuff, for example, Swinburne acknowledges the material instability of its referent: “Writers are at variance,” he admits, as to whether plate (a category of household object that had undergone a dramatic material transformation in households of the lower and middling sort in the period immediately preceding his treatise) should be included, “Some setting it downe for law, that nothing which is made of silver, or golde, is to be accounted houshold stuffe, and some the contrarie.”7 Swinburne ascribes this discrepancy to the increasing refinement of household stuff: “for such was the severity and frugality of olde times,” he says, that
vessels of gold or of silver being then very rare, were not comprehended under the name of household stuffe. But afterwards in latter times, when men began not to be contented with the simplicitie of their Grandsires, but … did furnish their houses with vessels of gold and silver and precious stones Upon this change of mens manners, did the law also begin to change, and to reckon these vessels of silver, gold and precious stones, as Bason and Ewer, Bowles, Cups, Candlesticks, &c. for part and parcell of houshold stuffe, yet not indistinctly or absolutely, but with this moderation, so that it were agreeable to the testators meaning, otherwise not. That is, if the testator in his lifetime, did use to reckon them amongst his houshold stuffe, in which case they are due to the legatarie, by the name of household stuffe. But if the testator did esteeme them, as ornaments rather then utensills, and did use them for pompe or delicacie, rather then for daily or ordinarie service for his house. In this case they doe not passe under the legacie of houshold stuffe.8
Swinburne’s effort to fix the proper signification of household stuff is thwarted by the category’s material and linguistic superfluity: by the increasing diversity and sumptuousness of goods that were coming to shape what constituted a “proper” household, and by the term’s unstable and multiple referents (one testator’s “utensill” is another’s “ornament”). Swinburne acknowledges, while at the same time attempting to contain, the “uncertaintie” that this linguistic and material flux introduces into the testator’s meaning: “Superfluitie is to be avoided,” he warns, “especially in a testament,” for “it stretcheth the word … to the comprehension of whatsoever is thereby signified, not only properly, but also improperly.”9
Yet Swinburne acknowledges that it is neither possible nor desirable to extirpate rhetorical “superfluitie” from property relations entirely. For while such “superfluitie” introduces error, fraud, conflict, struggle, and dispute into property relations, it also introduces desire, social aspiration, and affective bonds among household subjects. The rhetorical dimension of property relations, he recognizes, is as much a part of domestic concord as it is of domestic discord. In his section on “Testaments made by flatterie,” Swinburne thus argues that “it is not unlawfull for a man by honest intercessions and modest perswasions … even with faire and flattering speeches, to move the testator to make him his executor, or to give him his goods,” although it is “impudent … not to be content with the first or second deniall.”10 The rhetorical dimension of language (“faire and flattering speeches”), he contends, even when it “stretcheth the word” beyond the bounds of honesty and modesty, forms an integral part of domestic property relations, and is perfectly acceptable as such, so long as it serves to cement, rather than to sever, those relations. It is not easy, however, for Swinburne to have it both ways, to simultaneously embrace the “superfluitie” of “faire and flattering speeches,” and eschew the “uncertaintie” that it introduces into property relations. For, as Carol M. Rose argues in Property and Persuasion, once one accepts the rhetorical dimension of property claims (the notion that “the claim of ownership [i]s a kind of assertion or story, told within a culture that shapes the story’s content and meaning”), such claims or stories are thereby rendered unstable, open to interpretation, and therefore subject to dispute.11 These instabilities, and the disputes over household property that they occasioned, are crucial to the present study, insofar as they often became the grounds upon which women (whose property rights were severely restricted by law) asserted property claims, and insofar as they make, as Shakespeare demonstrates, great drama.
A visual representation of the copia or superfluity of household stuff in early modern England, and of the desire to bring order to that superfluity through systems of classification, appears in the chart of household goods included in Randle Holme’s nine-volume, encyclopedic compendium of heraldic iconography, An Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon of 1649 (see Figure 1).12 Holme’s grid, Lena Orlin observes, stuffs one hundred and twenty items into its ninety-five squares, as if testifying to a “superabundance” that “strain[s] the clearly articulated borders and bel[ies] the numbering system” of his chart.13 Not satisfied with depicting one of each type of household object, Holme includes multiple subspecies of each type; there are, for example, no less than six different kinds of stools (see nos. 71–76) and baskets (see nos. 59, 83–87) and seven different kinds of cooking pans (see nos. 11, 34, 35, 45, 54).14 The descriptions that accompany the chart likewise testify to the new variety of household stuff available to early modern householders, repeatedly drawing attention to changes in the materials out of which such goods were made, and in the form of their fashioning. Thus, no. 20 depicts a simple “Low footed candlestick,” which Holme describes as “the old way of making the candle holder,” whereas no. 21 depicts “the candle stick as are now in use,” which is adorned “to sett it the more splendidly forth: whithere by raised worke, corded, or Twist worke, or by making the bottome and flower part round, square, Hexagon, or octagon like, with chased worke, &c.”15 This material superfluity gives rise to a semantic superfluity in Holmes text; the diversification of things requires a diversification of terms that renders his system of classification inherently unstable. The temporal flux of fashions produces semantic slippages in terminology, as in the description of item no. 6 (“a viall, or viniger bottle … being a Glasse bottle But in our dayes, it is generally called a cruet, or cruce It may be also termed an ewre, or ewer”), or of the “Sorts of combs” accompanying nos. 63 and 64 (“Horse or Mane comb … Wiske combe … Back tooth comb … Beard comb … double comb … Merkin comb … Peruwick comb … smal tooth comb