Commodity and Commonwealth in Gammer Gurton's Needle

Though Gammer Gurton's Needle (1550-53) is frequently anthologized and routinely taught in surveys of non-Shakespearean drama, it has received comparatively little critical attention. ¹ The reasons for this neglect are not difficult to intuit: the play is ostentatiously trivial at the level of plot (a needle is lost, lamented, and found), and its comic style is crude and scatological. ² Written for the entertainment of students at Christ's College in Cambridge, the play is self-evidently a schoolboy's farce, and has typically been dismissed as "a college-man's indulgent laugh at unlearned country folk." ³ Perhaps because the play's slapstick charm seems timeless, however, more topical aspects of the farce have gone unnoticed. In particular, the basic elements of the play's story—poverty, unruly vagabondage, clerical incompetence, and the greedy hankering after trifling commodities—are also ubiquitous social concerns provoked by the economic crisis of the 1540s and '50s. ⁴

The symptoms of this mid-Tudor crisis were self-evident to anxious contemporaries. Inflation—already a problem throughout the early sixteenth century—accelerated to an intolerable degree. Unprecedented increases in poverty and vagrancy challenged traditional attitudes toward both neediness and its relief, calling into question the ideals of social reciprocity with which contemporaries understood the relationship between rich and poor. ⁵ Peasant uprisings—and Kett's rebellion in particular—made the disorderliness of poverty inescapably vivid for anxious contemporaries. A large body of reform-minded writing from the period survives to testify to this anxiety. And indeed, since many of these writers—often grouped together under the rubric "commonwealth men"—were themselves affiliated with Cambridge, there is every reason to believe that Gammer Gurton's Needle's intended audience would have been aware of any allusions to such discourse. ⁶ It stands to reason, then, that the play's comic effects would have seemed somewhat richer to its original audience than they have to us. At the very least, Hodge's hunger, Diccon's masterless vagrancy, and Dr. Rat's ineffectiveness would have seemed like comic re-enactments of serious social problems. ⁷ And, as I will argue here, the comic spectacle of Gammer Gurton's affection for her needle is designed to allude to contemporary reformist invective against an emergent commodity culture.

Recovering this register involves discussing the refraction of this allusive material into a play that is in no way high-minded. For, though I will argue that it is structured by its engagement with the ideals of the commonwealth men, Gammer Gurton's Needle seems simultaneously to adopt and to parody them. To some degree this apparent tension can be understood generically: it is not at all uncommon for farce to glance at serious subject matter, but the mode tends to be aggressively de-idealizing in its depiction of human relations and so fundamentally hostile to pieties. On the one hand, much of the play's action reflects contemporary rhetoric about avarice and greed, exploring through farce the dehumanizing effects of economic individualism. On the other hand, the play's insuppressible irreverence implicitly de-idealizes such reformist rhetoric, treating it finally as nostalgic and unworkable. Looked at in this way, the play combines its mockery of "country folk" with a more sophisticated but equally unsentimental parody of the reform-minded writing of its day.

Though such reformers emphasize a number of moral and economic problems, concern with trade imbalance figures prominently in their analyses of poverty and dearth in England. Sir Thomas Smith, whose Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England (1549; published 1581) offers an unusually thorough discussion of England's economy, is typical of the commonwealth men in his emphasis upon domestic production of small commodities as a means to employ the poor and enrich the realm. It is hard to miss the indignation that Smith—a prominent figure at Cambridge, as Regius Professor of Civil Law...