London's Early Modern Creative Industrialists

Mid-twentieth-century analyses of the income streams of early modern professional writers came to three conclusions that still seem judicious: first, that drama was largely the only writing activity to yield a living income (and then generally only when the writer was also an actor or company sharer); second, that non-dramatic writers depended more on patronage by court, gentry, or church than on support from merchants, assignments to publishers, or authorial sales of personal copies; third, that income was more often received either in kind or in the offer of other economic opportunities than as cash and can rarely be allocated to a specific text.¹ These positions depended on accounting records from key court patrons, authors' biographies, publishers' prefatory material, the Philip Henslowe and Richard Robinson papers, and, inevitably, on anecdote, often from within the body of the text being offered to a patron. They could perhaps now be supplemented after three advances in bibliography and historiography: the publication of early English books online, recent substantial editing of London corporation and livery company records, and (in the move away from new historicism's court-based narrative) a growing interest in alternative social capitals.

The city did not feature largely in the earlier studies, despite its prominence in accounts of the development of the mystery play.² Gabriel Harvey's sigh that the court was "the only mart of preferment and honour" is a perspective scholars have continued to assume. Merchants figure in critiques of city and citizen comedy as subjects of satire or praise and as pageant consumers in the theater of London's topography, not as able readers on their own account. There has been a general reluctance to ask how texts might hail the different trading ranks. While literary critics are tremulously careful about dérogeance in general, deferentially maintaining exact distinctions between high and low at court, such delicacy is not shown to coarse businessmen—merchant princes like Horatio Palavicino or Lionel Cranfield get lumped in with petty traders.

This category error has been rebutted by Laura Stevenson and Mark Thornton Burnett, both of whom show an historian's sensitivity to economic context in their studies of how petty traders and apprentices appear in drama.³ The following article is a minor complement to theirs: it looks at payments made by the livery companies and members of the aldermanry (that is, by the higher ranks) for verbal products other than drama (thus, outside the concern of the London theater historians).Two sets of evidence have been used: published livery company warden and renter accounts (supplemented by minutes from the companies' courts of assistants) and printed dedications to merchants, in both cases limiting the search to transactions between 1580 and 1620. The "purchasers" include many who are new entrants to the commissioning market, so their payments are often in cash and more easily allocatable to specific activities.⁴ Moreover, the distinction between patron, who supports a service stream (nicknamed the "author"), and purchaser, who commissions or is offered a product, is more easily made with payments by a corporate body that must discuss the transaction in public. Thus the information presented here may inform hypotheses about a move from patronage to purchase in the literary market of the seventeenth century, and in particular, shape the debate over whether there is a stable price-product relationship. Focusing on drama, Katherine McLuskie has persuaded many that, in Alexander Leggatt's words, "paying for a play is not the same as paying for a cabbage." She deems the literary market too diverse in demand and in product specification to allow standard pricing; it is its "moment by moment negotiation that makes it differ radically from the single encounter at the cash register when goods are exchanged for money."⁵ The difficulty with her position is its dependence on a capitalist model of the market transaction, being a one-off exchange using a symbolic medium such as cash, and indeed this was the model explored by economic historians up until the late 1980s. However, more recent descriptions of the early modern market put forward by...