Prodigal Heirs and Their Social Networks in Early Modern English Drama, 1590–1640

Abstract

This article combines computational social network analysis and contextualized close reading to study 20 English plays from 1590 to 1640 that draw for their main plot on the Biblical parable of the prodigal son. Often viewed as an inherently conservative comic subgenre that ends with the restoration of patriarchal authority, recent literary critics argue that many plays portray the prodigal heirs in a positive light, linking prodigality to risky economic speculation and the improvisational skills needed to navigate London’s expanding commercial economy. For the earlier plays in our corpus (ca. 1590-1610), we find evidence for this view in our analysis of two clusters of understudied minor characters related to the pleasures and punishment of prodigality. However, these clusters all but disappear in the later plays (ca. 1610-1640). Instead, we see a group of weightier, more individualized servants and stewards rise to structural prominence. Informed by close reading of plays like Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller (1624) and Phillip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1626), we interpret this as a shift towards a more moralistic censure of prodigality as a threat to the patrilineal succession of elite households and the social hierarchy it buttressed.

Keywords:

• early modern drama
• prodigal son
• inheritance
• credit economy
• debtor’s prison
• social network analysis
• minor characters
• stewards
• Thomas Heywood
• Phillip Massinger

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank Jonas Kirk Dejgaard and Karen Kam Wium Pedersen for invaluable help in preparing our text corpus. We are grateful for the feedback we received on presentations of this work at conferences and helpful comments on the manuscript from Michelle Dowd, Gordon McMullan, and an anonymous reviewer.

Notes

1 Ladegaard wrote the article; Kristensen-McLachlan did the data extraction, computational analysis, visualizations, and co-authored the section “Materials and Methods.”

2 Alex Davis, Imagining Inheritance From Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2.

3 For the increase in population and commerce, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 1998), 15–36. For the unequal wealth distribution, see Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68–70. For estimates of London’s population growth, see Phil Withington, “Urbanisation,” in A Social History of England, 1500-1750, ed. Keith Wrightson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 174–181.

4 Luke 15:13 (King James Version).

5 Ervin Beck, “Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy,” Renaissance Drama 6 (1973): 107.

6 Ibid., 112.

7 See Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation.

8 Dates throughout are the “best guess” of the date of first performance in Martin Wiggins, British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

9 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 49.

10 Michelle M. Dowd, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162.

11 Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1–4.

12 Ibid., 4; 117–122.

13 Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 (1999)), 49–50; Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 99–105.

14 Ezra Horbury, “Performing Repentance: (In)sincerity in Prodigal Son Drama and the Henry IVs,” Renaissance Studies 32, no.4 (2017): 583–601.

15 Howard, Theater of a City, 104–5; Horbury, “Performing Repentance.”

16 Two recent studies illustrate the method’s potential for early modern studies: Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach,” ELH 82, no. 1 (2015): 1–33; Anupam Basu, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Witmore, “The Professional and Linguistic Communities of Early Modern Dramatists,” in Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres, ed. Roger D. Sell, Anthony W. Johnson, and Helen Wilcox (London & New York: Routledge, 2018), 63–94.

17 Our approach thereby differs from qualitative studies of early modern drama inspired by Bruno Latour’s Actor-network theory such as: Bradley E. Ryner, “The Cosmopolitical Economies of The Merchant of Venice and A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” Renaissance Drama 42, no.2 (2014): 141–167; and Kelly Stage, “Networking with Middleton and Jonson: Theater, Law, and Social Documents.” English Literary Renaissance 46, no. 1 (2016): 60–92.

18 Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis”, New Left Review 68 (2011): 82.

19 For more on SNA as a supplement to reading and performance analysis, see James Lee & Jason Lee, “Shakespeare’s Tragic Social Network; or Why All the World’s a Stage,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017).

20 Working on a corpus of that size, we steer a course between previous SNA studies on a single play, for example, Victor Hugo Masías et al., “Exploring the prominence of Romeo and Juliet’s characters using weighted centrality measures,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. 4 (2017): 837–858, and large scale studies like Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage, 1550–1900,” New Literary History 48, no. 4 (2017): 751–782.

21 Alan Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays: A Theatrical Fashion of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979).

22 The latter goes for John Fletcher’s Wit without Money (1614) and Monsieur Thomas (1615) as well as Thomas Randolph’s The Drinking Academy (1629).

23 For all non-Shakespearean plays, we used texts from Early Print, an online corpus of plays sampled from EEBO-TCP, but annotated and curated by Martin Mueller and his team at Northwestern University (https://earlyprint.org/). For Shakespeare’s plays (which were not in Early Print at the time of data collection), we used Folger Shakespeare digital editions (https://shakespeare.folger.edu). Our student assistants manually corrected any transcription errors and irregular spellings of character names. The majority of the data curation and analysis was implemented in Python. Related code can be found at: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/ProdigalNetworks

24 We computationally excluded turns across Act or Scene divisions.

25 Lee & Lee, “Shakespeare’s Tragic Social Network,” 17.

26 Another potential source of minor inaccuracy is our decision to remove rare plural speakers such as “all” and “both”, since they disproportionally improve the metric scores of adjacent speakers.

27 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, “Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks,” Proceedings of the Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, San Jose, California, May 17–20, 2009, https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/09/paper/view/154/1009

28 Density is the ratio of the number of connections in a given network to its maximum number of possible connections. The density is 0 if no nodes are connected; 1 if all nodes are.

29 See Tore Opsahl, Filip Agneessens, and John Skvoretz, “Node centrality in weighted networks: Generalizing degree and shortest paths,” Social Networks 32 (2010): 245–251; and Masías et al. “Exploring the prominence”.

30 Mark Newman, Networks, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 159.

31 Linton C. Freeman, “A Set of Measures of Centrality Based on Betweenness,” Sociometry 40, no. 1 (1977): 35–41. See also Newman, Networks, 173–179.

32 This method was first used in Frank Fischer et al., “To Catch a Protagonist: Quantitative Dominance Relations in German-Language Drama (1730–1930)”, DH 2018 (2018): 193–200, https://dh2018.adho.org/?p=9362.

33 Tables are available at: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/ProdigalNetworks

34 The r-squared value of the trend lines of this and Figures 3 and 4 are quite low. 0 means no fit between the data points and the trend line, 1 is a perfect fit. This is not surprising: One would not expect a perfectly linear fall in the number of characters over time.

35 Several explanations for this trend are possible: a shift from outdoor public stages to more confined indoor theaters; a turn to a more classicist aesthetics among elite audiences, etc. But rather than explaining the development, we are interested in its meaning for the plays’ internal structures.

36 Algee-Hewitt, ”Distributed Character,” 765.

37 Partial exceptions are Thomas Dekker & John Ford’s masque-like The Sun's Darling and Heywood’s The English Traveller, which loosely connects a prodigal son comedy and a domestic tragedy plot.

38 Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 185.

39 William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV (The Folger Shakespeare), 2.4.18, https://shakespeare.folger.edu

40 Robert Davenport., A New Tricke to Cheat the Divell (London: Iohn Okes, 1639), 7. https://earlyprint.org/

41 Martin Butler, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts: Massinger's Grim Comedy,” in English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 119.

42 Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in Four Renaissance Comedies, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1.1.181-185. For easier referencing, whenever possible, we quote from scholarly editions of plays from Early Print.

43 Richard Brome, A Mad Couple Well Matched (Richard Brome Online, ed. E. Lowe), 1.1.14, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome.

44 Howard, Theater of a City, 111.

45 Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, 77–80.

46 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

47 Subha Mukherji, “‘Understood Relations’: Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies.” Literature Compass 6, no. 3 (2009): 710.

48 This seems to be part of a larger trend. In “The Prison in Early Modern Drama”, Literature Compass 9, no.1 (2012): 34–47, Ruth Ahnert categorizes a number of plays with prison scenes. Only one is later than Greene’s Tu Quoque.

49 This also goes for the three late comedies we excluded due to poor text quality (see note 22).

50 Bailey, Of Bondage, 118.

51 Massinger, A New Way, 4.2.101.

52 The scene was likely written shortly after Charles I’s succession and could have a political message about the state debts built up during James’s reign.

53 Ibid., 3.2.292.

54 Butler, “A New Way”.

55 Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, Society, 86.

56 Bailey, Of Bondage, 138.

57 Tables showing the edge counts of prodigal sons and father figures in the four plays are available at https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/ProdigalNetworks

58 We here adopt Latour’s distinction between “mediators,” who actively transform the relationship between two social actors, and “intermediaries” who act as faithful conduits of meaning. Bruno Latour, Reassambling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38–40.

59 Ezra Horbury, Prodigality in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019), 206.

60 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Scornful Lady in vol. 2 of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fred Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2.2.30-34.

61 Ibid., 2.2.120-2.

62 Ibid., 5.4.317-19.

63 For a comparable interpretation, see Richard Rowland, “‘Thou teachest me humanitie’: Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller” in English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145.

64 Dowd, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage, 158–9.

65 Ibid., 159.

66 Thomas Heywood, The English Traveller in A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays, ed. Martin Wiggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.6.287-9.

67 Ibid., 4.6.289-290.

68 Ezra Horbury rightly points out that the play also scapegoats young Lionel’s female companions. Prodigality in Early Modern Drama, 246.

69 For the “prodigality” of paternal forgiveness in the parable and early modern theology and drama, see Danielle N. Davey, Godly Prodigality: The Poetics of Excess in Reformation England (University of California, Santa Barbara: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017).

70 Heywood, The English Traveller, 1.2.3.

71 Davenport, A New Tricke, 15. In Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Matched, a similar ideal of the good steward is embodied in Saveall.

72 Massinger, A New Way, 5.1.338-40.

73 Ibid., 5.1.349-50.

74 Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 55.

75 Massinger, A New Way, 4.2.82.

76 See Bradley E. Ryner, “The Cosmopolitical Economies,” 166, for a similar observation.

77 D.R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward and his World in later Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3; 13.

78 Henry Swinburne, A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes (London: John Windet, 1590): 105–6; John Ap Roberts, An Apology for a younger Brother (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1641): 43–44.

79 In the later prodigal plays, only Brome’s Careless is disinherited, but he is “compensated” with a rich widow.

80 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin Books), 104.

81 Indeed, attending stage plays was often condemned as an act of prodigality by contemporary moralists (Horbury, Prodigality in Early Modern Drama, 34–38).

82 See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 287–298.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under Grant number DFF – 6107-00301.

Notes on contributors

Jakob Ladegaard

Jakob Ladegaard is an associate professor in comparative literature at Aarhus University. He mainly works on Early Modern English drama, using qualitative and computational methods. He is the director of a collective research project entitled “Unearned Wealth – A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600-2015,” supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. With Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, he has recently published “Selfish Bastards? A Corpus-Based Approach to Illegitimacy in Early Modern Drama,” Memoria di Shakespeare, no. 7 (“Stylometry”, ed. Hugh Craig), 2020. He has also recently co-edited Context in Literary and Cultural Studies with Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen (London: UCL Press, 2019).

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan is a Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Humanities Computing at Aarhus University, Denmark. He works with computational, cognitive, and corpus linguistic approaches to the study of register, genre, and style.