Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda

Figure 1. Chart of household stuff, from the second (unpublished) volume of Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (1649), British Museum Harl. MSS 2026-35. This illustration from the Roxburghe Club facsimile edited by I. H. Jeayes. By permission of the British Library.

      The importance of interrogating the rift between ideology and material practice is particularly clear within the field of women’s history. For without such interrogation, as feminist scholarship has demonstrated, the story of history is too often simply his story. It is therefore crucial, in attempting to comprehend the significance of women’s changing historical relations to household stuff, to reach beyond such contextualizing texts as domestic manuals, conduct books, legal treatises, and so on, and consider as well sources of evidence that register the traces of material practice. Because such practices are notoriously scarce and difficult to recover, Joan Thirsk maintains, “every kind of ingenuity is needed to reconstruct” them.¹⁷ It may be, however, that our willingness to embrace what Penelope Johnson terms “documents of theory” has dulled our ingenuity in searching out “documents of practice.”¹⁸ Thus, for example, acceptance of the purported hegemony of the common law doctrines of coverture in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance has long perpetuated the assumption that women had no property rights to speak of in early modern England. Recent feminist scholarship, however, drawing on records of actual property ownership, has demonstrated that the forms of female control over household property during the period were far more varied and complex than the common law suggests, as I discuss at length in Chapter 1. Similarly, the long dominant image of the Elizabethan theater as an “all male stage” has begun to crumble under the weight of evidence suggesting women’s active participation in a broad range of performance and production practices.¹⁹ These revisionist histories of women’s roles within the household economy, on the one hand, and the playhouse economy, on the other, provide the framework for my analysis of Shakespeare’s domestic economies. Each of the chapters that follow foregrounds in various ways the complex convergences and divergences of domestic ideology and material practice with respect to early modern women’s property relations.

      While a study of the early modern household cannot ignore household subjects, it is a central claim of this book that, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relations between subjects within the home became increasingly centered around and mediated by objects. This claim is supported by a growing corpus of scholarship on early modern material culture that has documented, if not celebrated, the periods “new access to a superfluity of material possessions,” offering a “new history of the Renaissance” as a “world crowded with desirable consumer objects.”²⁰ Such scholarship has begun to consider what role this brave new world of goods might have played in the fashioning of subjectivity. Thus, the editors of the anthology Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture ask: “What new configurations emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?”²¹ The identification of the Renaissance with the emergence of the modern subject, or what Jacob Burckhardt famously termed “the development of the individual,” they maintain, has hitherto resulted in a slighting of objects.²² The field of Shakespeare studies has followed a similar trajectory, crediting Shakespeare in particular with the invention of modern subjectivity. Within this critical tradition, as its most recent avatar, Harold Bloom, argues, “the representation of human character or personality remains always the supreme literary value” and is “a Shakespearean invention.”²³ This privileging of character or subjectivity as “the supreme literary value” within Shakespeare scholarship has likewise resulted in relative inattention to the role that objects perform in his plays, an inattention contemporary criticism has only recently begun to redress.²⁴

      While I hope to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on early modern material culture, my more particular aim in this book is to situate the “stuff” of material culture in relation to broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations that have had profound and lasting effects on the social and economic status of women. My concern is thus less with household objects in their status as aesthetic artifacts than with the social, juridical, and economic structures that worked to define female subjectivity in relationship to them. I take seriously Jean-Christophe Agnew’s caution that the celebratory aspect of material-culture studies, drawn in by the sumptuous allure of the early modern world of goods, risks eclipsing the ways in which subjects are differentially positioned within this world in accordance with their gender, social status, race, religion, and so forth. “The very richness of that work—the thickness of its description and the detail of its maps,” Agnew maintains, “has at times submerged important questions … of power.”²⁵ With respect to gender differentiation, such questions might include the following: How did the transition from feudal to nascent capitalist modes of production impact upon the role of the housewife? In what ways did the expanding market economy and influx of newly available consumer goods within the home affect the social and economic valuation of housework? How did the increasing value of moveable property with respect to real property affect the laws governing women’s property rights? What disciplinary regimes were instituted to regulate female production, consumption, exchange and ownership of consumer goods? What discrepancies existed between women’s de facto and de jure control over household property? When did female consumption threaten, and when did it serve to buttress, patriarchal power? How did the contradictions inherent in women’s property relations form or deform female subjectivity? How did early modern conceptions of property shape representations of male and female desire? How did marital status affect women’s property rights and relations? What kinds of property did single women possess? How was female poverty and propertylessness managed by the state? This line of questioning guides the readings that follow.

      The early modern theater, Agnew argues, “furnished a laboratory of representational possibilities for a society perplexed by the cultural consequences” of nascent capitalism.²⁶ The particular consequences with which this study is concerned are those surrounding women’s domestic property relations. The theater had good reason to be preoccupied with such relations, in that the dilemma posed by women’s ad hoc economic activities and informal property arrangements was not unlike that posed by the theatrical “housekeepers” themselves. Not only did such activities and arrangements provide playing companies with thematic content, they also lent them material support; for women figured prominently in the cloth and clothing trades on which the theaters depended. When their economic activity was hampered by the licensed trades, they