Reading Nascent Capitalism in Part II of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody

Part II of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, while continuing the biography of Elizabeth begun in Part I, gives most of its attention to Sir Thomas Gresham and the founding of the Royal Exchange. The three scenes involving Elizabeth may originally have been scenes in the play published as Part I of If You Know Not Me, with the remaining Part II scenes taken from an earlier play devoted entirely to Gresham, perhaps "the Life and Death of Sir Thomas Gresham with the building of the Royal Exchange" mentioned in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Clark, 31-34; Doran, xvii-xix). Whether the product of such rearrangement or not, Elizabeth's presence in Part II has the effect of placing Gresham's career in a celebratory and elegiac context in the years just following her death (both parts appeared in the Stationers' Register in 1605). Gresham, as the central figure in a play ending at Tilbury with reports of the Armada's defeat, shares history with Elizabeth, and his Royal Exchange becomes a national achievement, recognized as such in its name, contributed by Elizabeth herself in the one scene in which both she and Gresham appear. With the play's nostalgic resurrection of Elizabeth evoking idealized imaginings of "her" age, many modern commentators have accordingly taken as a given Heywood's desire to mythologize Gresham as the ideal merchant prince, fabulously wealthy and wholly devoted to the national interest. At the same time, he has represented something more than heroic commercialism, for he has been taken as a portrait of "the 'new man' that came into power with the rise of capitalism in the last half of the sixteenth century" (Baines, 34-35). In Michel Grivelet's words, Gresham "n'est pas seulement une grande figure nationale, c'est aussi un symbole, la personnification de l'épopée capitaliste dans une société que l'évolution économique est en train de transformer" (140). Gresham is thus at once a heroic individual and a symbol of the rise of individualism, celebrated by a playwright recognized at least since Louis B. Wright's 1935 Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England as "the greatest theatrical spokesman of the bourgeois ideals of his age" (650).

Finding triumphant bourgeois values in 2 If You Know Not Me requires a series of assumptions about Gresham, about early capitalist formation, about the capacity of writers like Heywood to perceive economic change, and about the play's "middle class" audience. These complex matters involve numerous issues contested in the early seventeenth century and numerous factors in material history which remain subject to debate. Complexities have been masked, however, by the critical practice, dominant in the period when Heywood's twentieth-century reputation took form, of defining distinctive voices for playwrights presumed to have individual perspectives on the world around them. Also contributing to perceptions of If You Know Not Me as an "inconsequential, but interesting illustration of Heywood's characteristic bourgeois sentiment" (Ribner, 221) has been a deep-rooted tendency to see popular plays as formulaic appeals to simple emotions and widespread beliefs. A 1993 essay, for example, though committed to examining "conflicts and tensions" in If You Know Not Me, called it "a palatable lozenge for citizen consumption" (Bonahue, "Social Control," 90). In 1995 a reviewer of Kathleen McLuskie's book on Dekker and Heywood wondered "how many [general] readers find themselves needing to assuage their curiosity about either writer" (Maus, 403), and another reviewer found the book a very slight thing, a "spit on the pavement" which (in the tradition of Dekker and Heywood themselves?) "does not mean to be elegant or lasting" but only "to claim attention for a pair of streetwise Elizabethan...