"The quarrel is between our masters and us their men": Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots

English Literary Renaissance

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 154-183

  Fitter, Chris ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950227653     PISSN: 00138312     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.2000.tb01168.x     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. All references to and citations of Romeo and Juliet are from the Arden edition, ed. Brian Gibbons (London, 1980).
2. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Toward a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 1981), p. 126.
3. Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford, 1989);
4. Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (New York, 1998).
5. Eagleton, Benjamin, p. 126.
6. See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988).
7. Jill Levenson, " 'Alla stoccado carries it away': Codes of Violence in Romeo and Juliet" in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," ed. Jay L. Halio (Newark, 1995), p. 86.
8. Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances 1509-1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 200, 208.
9. Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, England, 1991), pp. 3-4.
10. Charles Edelman, Brawl Ridiculous: Swordfighting in Shakespeare's Plays (Manchester, 1992), PP- 35, 173.
11. Manning, p. 191.
12. Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, 1993), pp. 34-39.
13. Manning, pp. 208-09. On hatred of Mayor Spencer, see also Archer, p. 56.
14. C. S. L. Davies, "Popular Disorder," in The European Crisis of the 1590s, ed. Peter Clark (London, 1985), p. 244;
15. M.J. Power, "London and the Control of the 'Crisis' of the 1590s" in History 70 (1985), 371.
16. Archer, pp. 10, 13.
17. Manning, p. 187.
18. Joyce Youings, Sixteenth Century England (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 270.
19. Wheat prices rose from 17.61 to 36.56 shillings per quarter between 1592-1594, and thence to 40.34 in 1595, and 47.61 in 1596,
20. as R. B. Outhwaite, "Dearth, the English Crown and the Crisis of the 1590s" in The European Crisis, ed. Peter Clark, shows in his table on p. 28.
21. In Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978), Andrew Appleby details the price increases during these years of cereals eaten by the poor: rye, for instance, had risen by 1596 to 5.68 times its price in 1593 (p. 6).
22. Quoted in Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529-1559 (London, 1970), p. 53.
23. Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York, 1996), p. 232.
24. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (Wokingham, 1980), p. 21.
25. Manning, pp. 204, 315.
26. George Abbot, An Exposition unto the Prophet Jonah (1600), p. 204;
27. in Appleby, Famine, p.- 141.
28. Outhwaite, p. 28.
29. Manning, p. 205; Archer, p. 6. On food riots elsewhere in England in 1595-96 see Appleby, p. 142.
30. Manning, p. 205.
31. Archer, p. 6.
32. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971) 76-136;
33. Archer, pp. 6-7;
34. Buchanan Sharp, "Popular Protest in Seventeenth Century England" in Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Barry Reay (New York, 1985), pp. 271-88.
35. Manning, pp. 204-05, 209, 314.
36. Manning, p. 202.
37. Manning, pp. 209-10;
38. see also Breight, p. 88.
39. Manning, pp. 178-85;
40. Power, p. 380.
41. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965, rpt. 1967), p. 112.
42. In Edelman, p. 174.
43. In Stone, p. 120.
44. Levenson, pp. 84-85.
45. The dramatization of a right of popular intervention is not unique to this play. Richard Strier demonstrates that King Lear endorses political resistance theory of the most radical type, in "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience" in The Historical Renaissance (Chicago, 1988), pp. 104-33.
46. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 82-103;
47. Marianne Novy, "Violence, Love and Gender in Romeo and Juliet" in Romeo and Juliet, Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (New York, 1993), pp. 359-71.
48. Most recently, Robert Appelbaum in "'Standing to the Wall': The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet," in Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (Fall 1997), has sought, in ahistorical and depoliticized terms, to link the play's representation of violence to "masculinity" as a fixed if contradictory "regime of gender performance" (p. 254), and can thus write of "citizens harmoniously toiling under the prince's law" "within a town where history seems to have temporarily come to an end" (p. 271).
49. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, third edition (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 182-84.
50. Alan Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 191, 194-95.
51. Alan Dessen, "Qi, Romeo and Juliet and Elizabethan Theatrical Vocabulary," in Halio, p. 113.
52. It may also be that the marching, drumming and masquing activities of the Montague youths, so prominent in 1. 4 and 1.5, were designed and performed to suggest patrician counterparts to the rituals and parades of the apprentices.
53. The stage direction for 1.4 specifies, in addition to Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, "five or six other masquers and torchbearers," while that for 3.1 stipulates "Mercurio, Benvolio and Men," with line 34 introducing "Tybalt, Petruchio and Others."
54. Power, p. 379.
55. For traditional Christian teachings on stewardship, see Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Maryknoll, 1983);
56. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmonds-worth, 1922, rpt. 1980), chapter 1.
57. On state and church ideals and implementation of charitable relief of the poor, see Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1986).
58. British Library, Lansdowne MS 74/42; in Archer, p. 38.
59. Appleby, pp. 144-45;
60. Power, pp. 376, 385.
61. Bishop Gervase Babington was similarly to urge in 1604 the application in times of dearth and plague of the biblical redistributivist principle of Jubilee, by which debtors were to be released, and lands sold through pressure of poverty returned to their original owners (Leviticus 25.9-55).
62. The theme recurs throughout the seventeenth century among radicals and the distressed, yet there remains, as Hill comments, "much research to be done on the underground flowing of this tradition." The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1993, rpt. 1994), pp. 164-67.
63. Libel at Norwich, 1595, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury MSS, vol. 13, pp. 168-69; in Clark, p. 44.
64. The precise social rank of Capulet (and of Montague) appears impossible to pin down. Some editors such as Brian Gibbons in the Arden assume Capulet to be a nobleman, and give his wife as "Lady Capulet." Other editions deny them aristocratic status. The indeterminacy I suggest to be deliberate, permitting the characters to evoke both the feuding nobility (in the play's presentation of violence) and the wealthy city fathers (in the feasting theme).
65. See Francois Laroque's summary of the gender transposition of Romeo and Juliet in "Tradition and Subversion in Romeo and Juliet" in Halio, pp. 29-31.
66. See chapter 6 of Annabel Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120-53.
67. Shakespeare himself was particularly well placed to appreciate the pathos of an independent business man humbled in his workshop by the advent of penury, the wares of his "needy shop" now "thinly scatter'd to make up a show" (5.1.42, 48). Eight years earlier, following years of apparent financial precariousness, his father had been finally expelled from the borough council, and sued, too, for his brother Henry's debts. The sadness of the vulnerability of his father would not have been lost on the son.
68. Manning, p. 193.
69. Archer, p. 55.
70. The theme is briefly discussed without reference to Shakespeare by Frank Whigham in Ambition and Privilege: the Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 112-116,
71. under the heading "The concealment of exploitation" (pp. 112-16).
72. Henry V(4.1.265-74);
73. Richard II(3.3.146-54);
74. Elizabeth is quoted by Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (1983; rpt. New York, 1997), p. 399.
75. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1957), I, 277-78.
76. Jean MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres (Alberta, 1992), pp. 141-44.
77. Manning, pp. 208-09.
78. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, (Oxford, 1923) IV, 318.
79. Just before going to print, I discovered that Kirby Farrell has recorded a similar observation on the opening scene, recognizing a "volatile ambivalence" toward masters in the Capulet servants, and noting that the feud provided "a safety valve for aggressive feelings against masters."
80. See Farrell, chapter 8, "Love, Death, and Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet" in Play, Death, and Heroism in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), pp. 133, 135.
81. However, his essay exposits the drama's concerns with power on the psychoanalytic rather than the political level, focusing "patriarchy" rather than class relations, and characterizing the former as "a system of beliefs evolved to control poisonous anxiety about death" (p. 145).
82. Consequently, "the quarrel is between our masters and us their men" constitutes for the servants "an ambiguity too dangerous to be consciously faced" (p. 133).
83. Archer, p. 7.
84. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright (New Haven and London, 1995), postulates a Shakespeare assiduously propagandist in the monarchical cause, "the leading apologist for kings in his or any other time" (p. 95).
85. Archer, pp. 35-37; Manning, p. 207.