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Abstract
This article examines the connection between inheritance and confidence schemes or other forms of financial speculation (such as gambling) in early modern English drama. Considering plays including Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1604-6), John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), and Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605-6), I explore the cultural work done by dramatic narratives in which inheritance becomes a site of risk or speculation. I argue that the inheritance scam in early modern drama fulfills a cultural fantasy that extends well beyond the monetary, at times modeling or testing out new forms of socioeconomic behavior or injecting the possibility of fluidity into otherwise restrictive systems of wealth transfer and social mobility.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Jakob Ladegaard, Beth Cortese, Douglas Clark, Andrew Counter, an anonymous reader, and all the participants at the “Passing On: Property, Family and Death in Narratives of Inheritance” conference at Aarhus University for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 On this point see Jennifer N. Arthur, Robert J. Williams, and Paul H. Delfabbro, “The Conceptual and Empirical Relationship between Gambling, Investing, and Speculation,” Journal of Behavioral Addictions 5, no. 4 (2016): 580–91.
2 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 87; Amy Louise Erickson, “Family, Household, and Community,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. John Morrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 93.
3 On the doctrine of primogeniture and the challenges it faced in the early modern period, see Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2004), 113–39; Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, abr. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
4 See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 43. On the rise of England’s consumer economy, see also Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); and Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 171–81.
5 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: St. Martin’s, 1998), 96–7.
6 See Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); and Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
7 See Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 27–8.
8 For discussions of how drama of the period negotiated England’s increasingly credit-based economy, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 68–113.
9 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Richard Dutton, in vol. 3 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.1.73–6. All citations are from this edition.
10 See Michelle M. Dowd, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 209–38.
11 Thomas Middleton, Michaelmas Term, ed. Theodore B. Leinwand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1.2.56–7. All citations are from this edition.
12 See also Quomodo’s self-directed fantasy of ownership in Act 3: “Whither is the worshipful Master Quomodo and his fair bedfellow rid forth? — To his land in Essex! — Whence comes those goodly load of logs? — From his land in Essex! — Where grows this pleasant fruit, says one citizen’s wife in the Row. — At Master Quomodo’s orchard in Essex. — O, O does it so? I thank you for that good news, i’faith” (3.4.13–19).
13 On the commodity scam in the play and in rogue literature from the period, see George R. Price, “Introduction,” in Michaelmas Term and A Trick to Catch the Old One, ed. Price (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 15.
14 For a detailed analysis of the bond, see Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 75–96.
15 Linda Woodbridge, “‘He Beats Thee ‘Gainst the Odds’: Gambling, Risk Management, and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats (New York: Routledge, 2005), 193–211, esp. 196. On gambling and social status, see also Adam Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 67–86.
16 Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling,” 71. Zucker also notes that plays from the period “that thematize the exigencies of merchant capital [such as William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice] … often explicitly liken “venturing” to gambling” (71). On the connections between venturing and risk in drama of the period, see also Theodore Leinwand, Theater, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17 It is not clear whether Michaelmas Term or Volpone was written or performed first. For a general discussion of the similarity between the two plays and the uncertainty of the dating, see Gail Kern Paster, “Introduction,” in Michaelmas Term, ed. Paster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8–16.
18 And he later tells the Judge: “having gotten the lands, I thirsted still / To know what fate would follow ‘em” (5.3.39–40).
19 On the strict settlement, see Spring, Law, Land, and Family, 33; Erickson, Women and Property, 102–3; and Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 62–95.
20 As Robert Markley argues, “In another sense, the entail reveals the ways in which eighteenth-century property law placed structural obligations on landowning families that, as Macpherson suggests, had the effect of subordinating ideas of individual will to a logic of obligation.” See “The Economic Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 79–96, esp. 85.
21 John Cooke, Greene’s Tu Quoque, or, The City Gallant (London, 1614), B3v. All citations are from this edition.
22 Woodbridge, “‘He beats thee ‘gainst the odds’,” 195.
23 Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling.”
24 Zucker, “The Social Stakes of Gambling,” 68.
25 Similarly, I would suggest that the enormous current popularity of genetic testing kits (such as “23andMe”) to determine DNA “ancestry” may indicate a similar cultural desire.
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Michelle M. Dowd
Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, and of The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, 2015). In addition to co-editing several volumes, she has published articles in such journals as Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Studies. She is currently editing a new book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, with the University of Alabama Press.