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'Devils Liquore' and 'Virgins Milke':Fashion, Fetishism and Jonson's Line
Many observers of the nascent consumer culture of early modern London asserted that fashionable consumption encouraged the creation of ephemeral identities at the cost of the family line. Ben Jonson had a particular interest in fashion's corrosive effect upon the line, given his sense of his own patrilineal literary inheritance. His satires of fashion, notably in Epicoene (1609), The Devil is an Ass (1616), and many poems, allow us to consider the precise mode of perception by which consumption may destroy the line – a barren, fetishistic mentality which displaces generative appetites from bodies to objects.
I. Fashion and the Line
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, English satirists and moralists produced a considerable anti-fashion discourse. Modern and post-modern analyses of fashion tend to proceed on the premise that a person gains an identity on assuming the latest style. Yet many early modern observers instead consider what is abandoned and effaced: the family line. There is a strong sense that families are destroyed in economic terms by excessive consumption and, as a result of the perceived promiscuity of fashionable women, may be wasted biologically as well. 'The Funeral Obseques of Sir All-in-New-Fashions'1 distils exactly this sense that fashion may erase a family: the modish corpse of Sir All-in is mourned by tailors and spurriers, but no heir.2 Ben Jonson is only the most eminent satirist to show an interest [End Page 141] in such matters of fashion and lineage in his Discoveries, his poetry, and in The Devil is an Ass (1616) and Epicoene (1609).3 It is unsurprising that he should do so, given that he considered himself heir to a patrilineal literary inheritance stretching back to antiquity, yet worked in a literary marketplace which reduced plays to fashions of choice. Mode, in its Jonsonian incarnation, encourages its adherents to confuse separate moral and ontological categories: to treat people like things and to treat things like people. And on occasion, Jonson represents this mentality in explicitly sexual forms as idolatry (or, in modern terms, fetishism) by which desire is displaced from fecund bodies to barren commodities; the inevitable casualty is the line.
It is well known that a bourgeois consumer culture came to full bloom in the eighteenth century in England.4 Only now, however, are we coming to understand that this culture's first intimations were evident in early modern times.5 By the turn of the seventeenth century, London boasted many public arenas in which the conspicuous display of modish attire was a daily phenomenon: the centre aisle of St Paul's, the Royal Exchange (which housed merchants as well as up-market stores), the New Exchange (a sort of Renaissance shopping mall), and the public and private playhouses. Such arenas of fashion were understood to share a mode of performative selfhood typical of the conspicuous consumer.6 Thomas Dekker offered satirical advice to one of his 'fashionate gulls': after your fifth turn around St Paul's, 'make your selfe away, either in some of the Sempsters' shops, the new Tobacco-office, [End Page 142] or amongst the Booke-sellers, where, if you cannot reade, exercise your smoake, and inquire who has writ against this divine weede, &c'.7 Jonson aligned the theatrical metaphor with artistic form when he staged such gallants in Every Man Out of His Humour, whose entire third act takes place in St Paul's. However, the very insistence with which this surface-depth paradigm is deployed to debunk pretension and aspiration suggests that there are other ways to understand the relationship between people and their garments.
As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have brilliantly argued, attire could be understood to constitute identity:8 'We need to understand the animatedness of clothes' say Jones and Stallybrass, 'their ability to … mold and shape [subjects] both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their power as material memories'.9 Such 'material memories' encompass present allegiances to a household or guild. However, for my purposes, it is important to note that a material 'memory' of necessity invests its wearer with a past, including a collective and hierarchical identity founded on the bloodline. Thus, Elizabethan nobility tended to purchase luxuries on behalf of the collective status of the family, rather than on an individual's behalf,10 while other practices, such as livery and investiture, materialized a family line in attire and constituted individual identity as an emanation of the line.11 It was common, too, for testators to bequeath clothing to their relatives. For instance, in 1569, Thomas Myldmay, a squire, left to his brother 'one of my gowns, one of my jackets and one of my doublets' and 'a ring of gold price 30s. with the scripture on the same Remember me'.12 Clothing was also [End Page 143] pawned, hired, and sold secondhand, so many people would have worn attire well used by others.
Yet in the early modern period garments circulated in increasing numbers as commodities13 and a commodity, by its very nature, lacks a history or stable essence.14 According to the famous Marxian formula, the process of exchange strips an object of its past, as that object changes into money on exchange and resumes commodity form when a new purchase is made.15 Many seventeenth-century commodities must have seemed devoid of history for this, as well as other, reasons. Fashionable objects were often imported from abroad, their makers unknown. When John Stow catalogued the luxuries on display in London shops circa 1580, he included: 'Gloves made in France or Spain, Kersies of Flanders Dye, French cloth or Frizado, Owches, Brooches, Agglets made in Venice or Milan.'16 Such exotica17 evokes foreign lands with no connection to history or home; indeed, that may be its allure. If heirlooms move down the line, looking to the past, commodities circulate without origin or destination, springing to life in the present and carrying with them the promise of future mutation in exchange.
This absence of history in the commodity form is matched, on occasion, by the ephemeral quality of its purchasers. No matter how much the man of mode desires individual pre-eminence, he also joins a group – those in style.18 A fashionable milieu, however, has no essence or history; it is by definition evanescent – distinguishable from and, in some respects, a substitute for, the original collective of the family. In The Staple of News (1626), Jonson's prodigal young heir, Penny-boy Junior, creates an adult identity sui generis [End Page 144] through the sartorial repudiation of his father:
There, there, drop my wardship,[He throws off his gowne.]My pupill age, and vassalage together.And Liberty, come throw thy selfe about me,In a rich suite, cloake, hat and band, for nowI'le sue out no mans Livery but mine owne.
(I.1.15–19)19
Penny-boy enjoys such liberty in part because mode was understood to thrive in the city and, as such, enjoys a special capacity to wipe clean the slate of history: who recognizes lineage on the streets of London, where thousands of city dwellers were deracinated rural people and, for the most part, strangers?20 Urban subjectivity (unlike familial identity cultivated across time in a rural community) need not defer to the past but may result from sheer self-assertion in the present moment.
Such performances are underwritten by the spectacular nature of luxurious commodities themselves, understood by Walter Benjamin to create a 'phantasmagoria'
where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning, and purely representation value came to the fore. Everything desirable, from sex to social status, could be transformed into commodities as fetishes-on-display that held the crowd enthralled even when personal possession was far beyond their reach.21
Although Benjamin was describing nineteenth-century Paris, many observers of early-modern London intuit that city's similar propensity to catalyze identities founded solely on representational value.22 Jonson's own 'fetish-on-display' takes human form in 'On English Mounsieur', a fashionable man about town [End Page 145] likened to 'The new french-taylors motion, monthly made,/Daily to turne in Pauls, and helpe the trade' (15–16).23 Urban identity may be nothing more than a fantasy of material display, purchased on credit or hired secondhand. In the playhouse, in particular, 'young men were identified neither by pedigree nor by social standing but by "a mode of perception" whereby they made clothes "the object of an arrested or fetishistic scrutiny"'.24
Fashionable people, then, seem to be stripped of their past and to live metamorphically from moment to moment. In 1589, Philip Gawdy reported to his sister-in-law on the latest styles of hood, and we can hear his exasperation still: 'Some weare crispins some weare none. Some weare sattin of all collors with their upper border and some weare none … I fynd nothing more certayne then their uncertaynty.'25 Patrick Hannay's fictitious knight (whose 'chiefe care' is 'to tricke him neatly up') is not much better, worthy of a place amongst 'Ovids changlings',26 Such denunciations of fashion reflect in pejorative terms a belief held by modish people themselves: commodities carry a transformative charge so that associations derived from one context may be conjured up in new milieux.27 The boundary between a person and his garments comes into question: 'In fashion, the phantasmagoria of commodities presses closest to the skin.'28 As the commodity is metamorphic by nature, and fashions change, is it any wonder that the man of mode is mutable? If heirlooms are a way of remembering; fashions are about forgetting.29
No matter how frivolous or unthinking any individual act of mode might [End Page 146] have been, the practice is hardly innocent of ideology. Fashion challenges the feudal virtues of hierarchy, stasis, and above all, lineage. These values were already distended to breaking point by nascent capitalism30 and mobility, both upward and downward, in the gentry.31 Gentility, the fundamental status distinction, was determined by criteria including lineage, leisure, and land but also by conspicuous consumption.32 And although lip service continued to be paid to a divine hierarchy of rank and calling, most aspects of gentility could be acquired rather than inherited:33 land was bought, noble lineages were invented,34 and by 1615, James I's inflation of honours extended to the sale of peerages.35 Attire becomes an especially unreliable marker of status: in London, 'you shall meete with sir Lawrence lack-land, in a Cloake lined through with Velvet'.36 Modish people, it appears, accept the power of materiality to constitute identity but trust that the commodity form liberates that power from the containment of the line and turns it to the ends of self-fashioning. Such challenges to social order were abhorrent to social conservatives: 'every one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparell he lust himselfe … So that it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is gentleman, who is not.'37
This effacement of history and lineage reaches its apogee in the outright destruction of the family. If one believes that gentility can be attained purely through its signification, a family's economic resources might be dissipated by an heir sufficiently ambitious or insecure. Faddish devotees of tobacco vent 'more Smoke at their noses, then is in their Chimneyes … making … a puffe of all that their fathers so carefully purchast'.38 Jonson's image of self-consumption of this type is redolent of unnatural inversion: the 'court worme' first appears in white silk, 'Where, afterwards, it grew a butter-flye:/ [End Page 147] Which was a cater-piller. So't will dye' (34).39 The acme of the wasteful aspirant is the man who has 'a Farme clapt upon his feete … a Mannor wrapt about his body … the Tythes (Christs patrymonie) … turn'd to a Cap'.40 Land, symbol of familial fertility and nobility, is turned to trinkets. Given the macrocosmic significance of the family, it is no wonder the Puritan, Philip Stubbes, denounced starch as the 'devils liquore'.41
It is clear, then, that fashion depletes the economic resources of the line. Yet the higher cost may be biological – a product of the supposed carnality of the fashionable lady. Mode is imagined consistently as a female preoccupation:42 'who is it but … Lady new fashions, that setteth a worke these new fangled Tailers, these Body-makers, these Perfumers … and all the rest of these inventers of vanities'.43 There is some truth to the notion that women enjoyed shopping for novelty.44 Yet the femininity of fashion is at base an ideological observation, informed by the classical critique of luxury and its personification of that vice as a woman.45 There is no question that the birthplace of many fashions was the court – a milieu over which King James presided with a lively appreciation of the well-dressed courtier – yet the court itself was troped as feminine in its indulgence of appetite at the expense of reason in the form of feasting, music, dancing,46 and, I would argue, fashion.47 [End Page 148]
Nevertheless, once mode is understood to be a feminine vice, terrible sexual hazards ensue. Barnabe Rich's social climber, 'my Lady New fashions', in her previous social incarnation was 'a common Strumpet'.48 The demarcation between modish women and 'whores' is at best porous, at worst non-existent; it was only too easy for country maidens to undergo a sexual and sartorial transformation into city 'whores'.49 The putative promiscuity of modish ladies is more likely to reflect patriarchal anxiety than female behaviour, but women certainly did display themselves in the theatres, the Exchanges and St Paul's,50 and it is clear that human beings, as well as objects, may become commodities. Many who traduce the fashionable lady intuit an erotic force in the marketplace which transforms 'everything that is for sale into an object of desire, and all that is desirable into an object of exchange'.51 Critics of fashion repudiate the notion that attire transforms social status, yet have no doubt that mode entails real reification: 'in London she buyes her head, her face, her fashion'.52
Thus, modish women are both consumers and sexual commodities53 and their dual capacities adulterate the line in both biological and economic terms. The figure of the fashionable lady often evokes the displacement of carnal appetites from bodies to objects: a woman who 'buyes her head' is reduced to a barren constellation of objects. The flip side of the figure – the fetishized object – has similarly disastrous consequences for the line. Thomas Dekker personified the deadly sin of pride as a 'Lemman' [prostitute], impregnated by [End Page 149] a tailor to produce 'Phantasticality and Fashions'. Such novelties 'no sooner came into the world, but the fairest Wives of thy Tennants snatcht them up into their armes, layd them in their laps and to their brests'.54 Illegitimacy here figures conspicuous consumption, with its power to dissipate a family's wealth through the fetishism of objects, yet the flesh-and-blood carnality of the modish woman underlies the trope. Bastards, like fashions, are a paradox – a generation which contaminates, and so depletes, the line.
In short, where the commodity enables individual ascent,55 it erodes familial and historical allegiance, replacing linear subjectivity with disjunctive self-fashioning.56 Modish people – solipsistic and reified, barren or bastardized – efface the past and consume the future. This is the end of the line.
II. Ben Jonson – Fashion and Nobility
Ben Jonson displays a keen interest in matters of attire, including fashion, and one attitude recorded in his commonplace book, Discoveries, serves as a pithy summation of his sartorial conservatism: 'Would you not laugh, to meet a great Counsellor of state in a flat cap … and yond Haberdasher in a velvet Gowne, furr'd with sables?'57 Although the disjunction between the haberdasher and his attire is a metaphor for linguistic abuse and deceit,58 it also evokes the real material practice of dress as one aspect of a general tendency to value the superficial, sensuous, and material over the deep and intangible.59 Jonson himself is depicted in the well-known portrait by Abraham van Blyenberch (c.1617) in a style befitting a Puritan – dressed in sober black and sporting no accoutrements or marks of lineage or social status.60 A key [End Page 150] aspect of Jonson's apparent distrust of materiality is the capacity for attire, including fashionable attire, to simulate and to debase the currency of 'true nobility', and with it, the line.
The classical notion of 'true nobility' was rearticulated in the sixteenth century in an attempt to 'match noble birth and political responsibility'. However, it was clear that 'signs of aristocratic status may ascribe a nobility that members of the aristocracy do not possess'61 Jonson's ideal of social order coincided largely, although not precisely, with a noble bloodline and his notion of true nobility comprehended intangible qualities of the self,62 such as humanistic learning.63 While clothes should reflect one's birth, rank, and accomplishments, Jonson is concerned with the 'transformation of speech and clothes into signs intended to declare one's putative virtues, and to hide from others – and oneself – the fact of their nonexistence'.64
If all attire entails the potential to lay false claim to nobility, fashion poses additional challenges for Jonson in light of the other component of his ideal subjectivity – the 'centered self' who attains moral stature by eschewing mutation: 'Good men are the Stars, the Planets of the Ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times … For though the most be Players, some must be Spectators.'65 Those who repudiate change attain a moral stature denied to people who, like players, transform themselves at will.66 These complementary models of the 'truly noble' and the 'centered' coincide in Jonson's celebration of exemplary individuals whose virtue throws into sharp relief (and is defined against) the deficiencies of the fashionable subject.
Thomas Greene's seminal discussion of the Jonsonian 'centered self' acknowledges that several of these tributes 'come to rest at their conclusions upon an image of rooted stability, typically situated in an actual residence, a house or estate'.67 Thus To Penshurst imbricates the centered, noble self of [End Page 151] Sidney with its material expression:
Thou art not, PENSHURST, built to envious show,Of touch, or marble: nor canst boast a rowOf polish'd pillars, or a roofe of gold…Thou joy'st in better markes, of soyle, of ayre,Of wood, or water: therein thou art faire.
(1–3, 7–8)68
Sidney repudiates solipsistic or modish expressions of status and embraces acts of communal and familial hospitality of the type praised as an 'ancient custom of this realm of England … [by which] all nobleman and gentleman … did continually inhabit the countries, continuing from age to age, and from ancestor to ancestor, a continual house and hospitality'.69 In the practice of hospitality, land and line sustain a permanent community; indeed, the passage of time was regarded by Coke as the 'efficient cause' of a family estate.70 Fashion opposes these values almost exactly: individual consumption is oriented to the present moment, heedless of the past and destructive of the future. By contrast, Penshurst, with its bountiful soil, air, woods and water, is a landscape of enduring plenitude: 'Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,/Fat, aged carps, that runne into thy net'(32–33).
Land is the absolute value which founds this order;71 its abundance a prophylactic against the market's invitation to exchange objects and social positions, to dissipate an inheritance. The fertility of earth both guarantees and figures the vitality of the line:
That taller tree, which of a nut was setAt his great birth, where all the Muses met. [End Page 152] There in the writhed barke, are cut the namesOf many a SYLVANE, taken with his flames.And thence the ruddy Satyres oft provokeThe lighter Faunes, to reach thy Ladies oke.
(13–18)
As Donaldson points out, 'The trees of this forest figure, and almost seem to be, the people whose names they carry. The "tops" of the wood are "fertile" … in their apparent fostering of, and identity with, the Sidney family itself.'72
Female centred selves, such as Katharine, Lady Aubigny,73 with her changeless face and mind (123–24), have a special role to play in the sustenance of the noble line and the estate. Katharine's great virtues, as an authentic self 'not fashion'd for the court, or strangers eyes' (115), are defined against milieux greedy for change and visual spectacle:
wisely you decline your life,Farre from the maze of custome, error, strife,And keepe an even, and unalter'd gaite;Not looking by, or backe (like those, that waiteTimes, and occasions, to start forth, and seeme)Which though the turning world may dis-esteeme,Because that studies spectacles, and showes,And after varyed, as fresh objects goes,Giddie with change …
(59–67)
Katharine, unlike those modish people giddy with change, walks 'alone', 'without companions' (55–56). As the antithesis of a fashionable clone, she revels in her singularity, following no-one, eschewing all groups and standing aloof from other women's wastage of the sustaining sources of the line – their bodies and the land:
Let who will follow fashions and attyres, [End Page 153] Maintayne their liedgers forth, for forraine wyres,Melt downe their husbands land, to poure awayOn the close groom, and page, on new-yeeres day.
(71–74)
Katharine, instead, ensures that her family flourishes by 'the glad encrease/Of your blest wombe, made fruitfull from above' (94–95).
A woman of such chaste privacy entails no threat to a husband's line – unlike those gaudy ladies whose 'brave sinne' (like their brave attire) is to have 'gone wrong to man' (84–85). Centered female selves are valued, above all, for their generative capacity, a biological counterpart to the fecundity of the land. Thus Jonson, though echoing a broader preoccupation with fashion's challenge to the hierarchy of rank, centers his critique on the reification of nobility: bloodline, land, and stasis oppose self-fashioning, dissipation and disorder.
III. Fashion and the Playwright
Yet Jonson the playwright found himself working in milieux highly attuned to the imperatives of fashion: the patronage economy, the court, and, above all, the theatre.74 Players were exempt from sumptuary laws and thus enjoyed a 'metasocial' status which allowed them to be clad on stage in the hand-me-downs of real aristocrats and courtiers.75 The private playhouses, in particular, were in turn understood to be arenas of fashion in which ambitious playgoers mounted their own sartorial displays. And plays themselves were commodities to be taken up or dropped at whim. Jonson understood and resented his own economic dependence on such fickle tastes:
Expectation of the Vulgar is more drawne and held with newnesse, then goodnesse; wee see it in Fencers, in Players, in Poets, in Preachers, in all, where Fame promiseth any thing; so it be new, though never so naught, and depraved, they run to it, and are taken.76
The choice to attend a play by Jonson could be a fashion-conscious expression [End Page 154] of social status77 – a truth acknowledged by the Induction to Bartholomew Fair which mocks the playgoers at the Hope with their moth-eaten Tudor tastes: 'Hee that will sweare, Jeronimo, or Andronicus are the best playes, yet … a man whose Judgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie yeeres.'78
Jonson's immersion in this economy of fashion casts in a different light his famous anti-theatrical tendencies. Fearful that audiences will be distracted by the gaudy materiality of the stage, Jonson directs them to cover their eyes and attend to the author's meaning, lodged at the heart of immaterial words: 'Words, above action; matter, above words.'79 The admonition rearticulates a Christian, Stoic, and Platonic distrust of impermanence and illusion,80 yet it is also a quite contemporary rejection of those playgoers who assume that the price of a ticket has purchased the right to recode the work of art. To buy a play is an expression of self by which the object yields to the shaping will of the Ego.81 When censuring a play, or praising it, audiences construct a public identity82 and impose 'new meaning and definition to the cultural productions themselves'.83 If a play is fashionable, the modish status of its interpreter is confirmed; conversely, the modish nature of an audience makes the play itself au courant. Jonson chafes against exactly this knowledge that interpretation (or misinterpretation) can be a shaping act of ownership – an act performed in odious style by the 'Caprichious gallants' who 'sit disperst, making faces, and spitting, wagging their upright eares, and cry filthy filthy'.84
The most sustained Jonsonian evocation of a fractious, fashionable audience [End Page 155] occurs in The Staple of News (1626) and it is notable that the rebels are female. The play begins with four 'Gossips' taking their seats on the stage, 'persons of quality … and women of fashion' who 'come to see and to/be seene' ('Induction', 8–10). Their self-fashioning extends to acts of gleeful interpretive violence on the play itself. Having been disappointed by various turns of the plot, their rage boils over when, in Act V, an ostensibly deceased patriarch returns from the dead and thwarts the consumptive excesses of his heir. This is no return of the prodigal son but an irksome resurrection of the frugal father. The playwright, they determine, should be placed in the pillory. Jonson's 'Note to the Readers' complains: the 'purpose of the Author hath hitherto beene wholly mistaken, and so sinister an interpretation beene made … [by] these ridiculous Gossips that tattle betweene the Acts' ('To the Readers', 3–5, 6–7). The Jonsonian distrust of audience interpretation appears, at least on this occasion, to constitute a rejection of the feminized consumer culture which adopts interpretive liberty as a mode of self-fashioning.
Jonson is implicated in the fashionable monde on other grounds, too, and these go to the heart of his creativity. As an imitative artist in the humanist mould, he called upon the example of classical forefathers as teachers, models, and sources of moral authority. Following Quintilian, Discoveries noted approvingly that those writers who 'are familiar with the best Authors, shall ever and anon find somewhat of them in themselves'.85 The imitator must:
convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use. To make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very Hee: or, so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall.86
This passage exhibits a 'contradiction between total self-surrender to the other … and total assimilation of the other'87 and the notion poses obvious dangers to a poet who sought to impose his authority as poetic producer on mere reader-consumers. Imitation might appear to be mere copying88 analogous to the modish man's aping of his superiors. Indeed, the charge of plagiarism [End Page 156] was levelled at Jonson during his lifetime and posthumously.89 Imitation also sits oddly with the Jonsonian 'dialectic of selfhood' by which the morally centred figures are opposed to the negative and 'absolutely protean' ones90 as well as with the Discoveries' suggestion that the imitation of others leads to the loss of an authentic self.91
A partial resolution to this apparent incoherence lies in the fact that imitatio, as opposed to other modes of copying, places the humanist writer within a patrilineal tradition. Thomas Greene has described imitative texts as having the 'intent of reanimating an earlier text';92 though indebted to history and memory, imitation is no mere replication. The 'heuristic' mode of imitatio (that is, the mode identified with Jonson) proceeds by choosing from 'the indefinite number of texts stretching behind it in endless regression … one text as its putative genesis and it defines itself through its revisiting, its "modernizing" … of that text'.93 Thus true imitatio entailed an act of transmutation and individual expression, rather than simple mimickry:94 a writer rearticulated classical authorities but spoke within the tradition in a unique voice.95 Indeed Jonson was the 'first [English poet] to practice the method in his work in a thoroughgoing way…in the great line of descent from … Cicero, Horace, the two Senecas, Quintilian, and others'.96 The patriarchal nature of this enterprise is obvious. In Seneca's terms, the imitator resembles his forebears 'as a child resembles his father'.97 Jonson takes his place as a living son to classical antecedents. This attachment to lineage is unsurprising in a man who was the posthumous son of a minister. Throughout his life, Jonson 'sought his true paternity outside the family' in men such as Ralegh and Hoskyns,98 in part, it seems, because of the social decline he suffered [End Page 157] upon his mother's remarriage to a bricklayer.99 However, if the weight of an exalted classical lineage lends moral authority to the heir, it also excites fears of being subsumed by one's textual fathers,100 thus 'Jonson sought to represent his poetic autonomy in two ways: a struggle against discursive fathers, and a fathering of his own sons'101 – the Tribe of Ben.
Nor is it the literary heir alone who is subsumed in the Jonsonian line. The Discoveries praises the (masculine) author who aspires to leave an almost paternal imprint on his readers: 'How he doth raigne in mens affections; how invade and breake in upon them; and makes their minds like the thing he writes.'102 And of course, most famously, Jonson figured his late son as his 'best piece of poetrie'(10). The dead boy is a poem, but conversely, Jonson's works are themselves intellectual offspring:103
The poem's rhetorical coup is to convince us … that what we hear in this language is a chastened father's diffidence toward art … And yet On My First Sonne is Ben Jonson's best piece of poetry … In this sense the lost boy really is buried in, and by, his father's language.104
In short, whether the progeny are poets, poems, or readers, 'no other writer in English … is more firmly associated with the notion of literary paternity'.105
If imitatio, properly practised, is generative and patrilineal, a failure of imitatio entails depletion, even theft.106 Yet this is not the random misappropriation of the cozener; rather, it constitutes an act of violence against the line. Jonson was 'the first English writer … to give to the literary thief [End Page 158] the special name of "plagiary", from Martial's plagiarus, or kidnapper'.107 Plagiarism 'is like the theft of a living thing, indeed of a child from its father'108 as evidenced by the Jonsonian warning 'To Proule the Plagiary': 'Forbeare to tempt me, PROULE, I will not show/A line unto thee, till the world it know.'109 Proule's tendency to snaffle a 'line' suggests both a depletion of the true poet's resources and an abbreviation of his literary posterity. And the violence done to a patrilineal literary structure by plagiarists is allied, tellingly, to fashion. Just as a pawnbroker chooses secondhand garments to purchase and resell,110 'Poet-Ape' scavenges amongst the choice off-cuts of others' literary labour:
Poore POET-APE, that would be thought our chiefe,Whose workes are eene the fripperie of wit,From brocage is become so bold a thiefe,As we, the rob'd, leave rage, and pittie it.111
Women participated to a disproportionate degree in the clothes trade (as brokers, agents, and customers)112 and so Poet-Ape's own trade in secondhand literary goods marks him as effeminate. Rather than take his place as the latest emanation of a masculine tradition stretching back to antiquity, Poet-Ape trades in his own 'fripperie', depleting the works of his peers while bringing forth nothing of any value.
The highest and most enduring expression of Jonson's sense of his own patrilineal inheritance is the publication of his Folio Workes (1616) in imitation of the Opera of Horace and Virgil.113. The Workes thus elevates the plays above [End Page 159] a literary and theatrical marketplace,114 effacing the occasions of theatrical performance115 and instead sets the plays in amber, allowing them to enter libraries as immutable, timeless, and permanent works of art.116 Thus when Jonson sets out to circumscribe the consumptive liberties taken by playgoers and Poet-Apes alike, he does so by placing himself in a lineage of authors and laureate poets stretching back to antiquity. 117
IV. Fashion and Fetishism
The discourses of fashion thus illuminate one aspect of Jonson's cultivation of his role as a patriarchal poet laureate, but Jonson in turn illuminates a mode of perception which propels fashion's destruction of the line. The Devil is an Ass (1616) and Epicoene (1609), I shall argue, crystallize Jonson's preoccupations with attire, line and nobility. The Devil centers upon an ambitious squire, Fabian Fitzdottrel, who wishes to ennoble himself through the making of money and the conspicuous display of his material success:
To day I goe to the Black-fryers Play-house,Sit i'the view, salute all my acquaintance,Rise up between the Acts, let fall my cloake,Publish a handsome man, and a rich suite.
(I.6.31–34)
Although Fitzdottrel lags one step behind the latest fashions, buying secondhand items from pawnbrokers, he 'thinkes/Himselfe still new, in other men's old' (I.4.24–25) and forces his virtuous wife, Frances, to dress in similarly modish style. When he meets a projector who promises to make him rich and noble through various monopolistic (and entirely imaginary) schemes, his appetites [End Page 160] know no bounds.
This is familiar territory, but uniquely in Jonsonian comedy, The Devil invests London with a satanic presence. Occult matters were of considerable topical significance118 in 1616 and The Devil begins in hell, where Satan acknowledges his 'trade' in vices of 'quality' and 'fashion', such as 'yellow starch' (I.1.109–13). Fashion, it seems, is a vice, just as vice is fashionable. Yet the allusion to yellow starch brings to mind its most infamous exponent (the accused witch Anne Turner, executed for the murder of Thomas Overbury in 1615) and suggests that the sins of London will give the Devil a run for his money.119 When Pug, a demon, begs Satan to allow him to foment corruption on earth (taking with him a Vice figure from the old Tudor Interludes) we see that the Devil, too, has his doubts:
… But Pug,As the times are, who is it will receive you? …they are other thingsThat are receiv'd now upon earth, for Vices;Stranger, and newer: and chang'd every houre…Tissue gownes,Garters and roses, fourscore pounds a paire,Embroydred stockings, cut-worke smocks, and shirts,More certaine marks of lechery, now, and pride,Then ere they were of true nobility!
(I.1.88–89, 100–02, 126–30) [End Page 161]
It seems that the city's special sin is a preoccupation with materiality and mis-signification. Yet Pug prevails and comes to earth incarnate in the corpse of a freshly executed cutpurse. When he materializes before Fitzdottrel and duly announces his true name and nature ('devil') the squire and his circle cannot credit the demon's provenance. In London, signs have no reliable connection to referents: Pug must be a Norman – more 'De Vile' than 'devil' (IV.4.187–190).
By coincidence, Fitzdottrell has been trying to conjure the Devil for some time, and the practice provides the first intimation that the squire's worst vice is his incapacity to continue the line. The 'Divell-given Elfine Squire' (I.6.95) leaves the long-suffering Frances alone at night, in 'cold Sheetes' (I.6.91–92), so that he may conjure and find hidden treasure. This manifest neglect of his issue reaches its apogee in the squire's love-struck plea to Satan: 'Pray thee, come,/I long for thee. An' I were with child by him,/And my wife, too' (I.2.30–32). The squire's bizarre wish is that both he and his wife might be impregnated by the Devil – in effect, producing a parodic anti-incarnation. It is scarcely possible to imagine a more corrupt form of generation and it is one which hardly constitutes a continuation of Fitzdottrel's line. Its inevitable concomitant is the prostitution of Frances, by which the squire would lend to Satan:
my wives wrought pillowes:And as I am an honest man, I thinke,If he had a minde to her, too; I should grant him,To make our friend-ship perfect. So I would notTo every man.
(I.2.47–51)
In this easy elision of some 'wrought pillowes' with his wife as equivalent sources of comfort we first sense Frances's abjection and reification.
In short order, Fitzdottrel grants Frances to someone else entirely – the young gallant, Wittipol, who is struck by Frances' beauty and is well aware that she is married to a fool. The squire will exchange a quarter of an hour of his wife's attention to Wittipol, in exchange for a sumptuous cloak. Frances herself must remain silent (I.6.48–49). The silence of a woman was understood, [End Page 162] typically, as a form of patriarchal compliance,120 yet here, Fitzdottrel's gagging of his wife both figures and enables her objectification, and compels her to enter the sexual marketplace he later frankly acknowledges in his description of her as 'a fruite, that's worth the stealing' (II.1.159). Similarly, Fitzdottrel propels Frances into a circle of modish ladies so that she may become a paragon of faddish behaviour, ripe for ennoblement:
Fitz-dottrell: … yo'are come into the Schole, wife,Where you may learne, I do perceive it, any thing!How to be fine, or faire, or great, or proud…Bend this stubborne will; be great.
(IV.4.110–12, 127)
What Frances is more likely to learn from this fashionable circle is how to be a 'whore' (IV.4.96–98) as, unbeknownst to Fitzdottrell, the group has been infiltrated by the 'Spanish Lady' – an English widow supposedly returned from Spain, but in reality the transvested Wittipol, still intent on seducing Frances. The squire cheerfully consigns his wife to the 'Lady':
Do with her what you will!Melt, cast, and forme her as you shall thinke good!Set any stamp on! I'll receive her from youAs a new thing, by your owne standard!
(IV.4.253–56)
Frances is nothing but a 'new thing', 'any thing', an infinitely malleable property apt to assist her husband's imagined social ascent as a freshly minted noblewoman, severed from history and family. In truth, Frances may become the instrument of Fitzdottrel's destruction – a sexual consumable who causes the line to degenerate into bastardy. The travails of Pug (beaten, cozened, and variously harassed until Satan carries him home to hell) demonstrate that demonic intervention in London is not impossible, just [End Page 163] otiose, in the end a joke.
Fitzdottrel's tendency to reify women and to blight his line is adumbrated by Morose, an idiot of similar proportions, in Epicoene (1609). Morose is a wealthy member of the gentry who lives in London, but his horror at the city's pervasive noise leads him to lock himself away at home, in a street too narrow for carts or coaches (I.1.167–68) with padded doors, 'double walls, and treble seelings; the windores close shut, and calk'd' (I.1.184–85). Although noise was one of the undoubted disadvantages of urban living,121 in Epicoene it carries a broader significance. Much of the noise to which Morose is pathologically averse emanates from commerce. He enters treaties with fishwives and orange-women to silence their spruiking and 'cannot endure a Costard-monger, he swounes if he hear one' (I.1.154). It is London markets which intimidate Morose, a true agoraphobic, avant la lettre. And this implies a deeper fear: he cannot abide the city's overabundance of signification.
At one level, Morose cannot bear to hear words. More subtly, he fears other types of signification equally associated with the marketplace and strongly associated with femininity:122 the fashionable 'collegiates', who live apart from their husbands, dress up, gad about, and take lovers. The correlation of female promiscuity with female loquacity was a commonplace123 and when these talkative women invade Morose's home, he retreats to the rafters. An effeminate man who lives in a perpetual fear of violation by sound has no hope of resisting feminine consumption – too late he cries 'barre my dores! barre my dores!' (III.5.33). Morose, it seems, cannot process London's excess of verbal and sartorial signification, especially in its female modes: it is nothing more than terrifying and meaningless 'noise'.
Morose's unmanly fear of city women means that his opportunities to beget an heir have been severely restricted. Indeed, though he has formulated this wish, it arises, paradoxically, from a desire to repudiate biological [End Page 164] connection in favour of individual ascent. Morose wants to get an heir solely to disinherit his nephew, Dauphine – to 'thrust him out of my bloud like a stranger' (II.5.100–01) – in a fit of pique brought on by Dauphine's purchase of a knighthood which surpasses Morose's own status. Aware of his inability to control female signification (and the sexual license such powers imply) Morose therefore seeks a wife who cannot signify – that misogynous, oxymoronic wonder, the 'silent woman'. When he thinks he has found one in the shape of Epicoene, he delights in her silence (and metonymic chastity) but anticipates a scenario in which wilful female linguistic and sartorial signification might coincide:
How will you be able, lady, with this frugalitie of speech, to give the manifold (but necessarie) instructions, for that bodies, these sleeves, those skirts, this cut, that stitch, this embroyderie, that lace, this wife, those knots, that ruffe, those roses, this girdle, that fanne, the tother skarfe, these gloves?
(II.5.76–81)
'I'll leave it to you, sir', she answers (II.5.82). Of course, the wife's willingness to cede her powers of expression is too good to be true: Epicoene is a boy, a 'woman' constituted by objects, and a punishment engineered by Dauphine.124 Too late Morose learns the truth and ends the play without issue. This is a world which 'no longer revolves on a reproductive axis'125 – Morose, the accidental fetishist, marries a boy, the collegiates abort their foetuses (IV.3.56–61), the gallants are childless, and one of their number harbours an entirely non-reproductive interest in an 'ingle'.
If the line is faltering, both Epicoene and The Devil locate the principal source of its demise in men. Morose attains his reificatory imagination's desire – an object: 'Did you thinke you had married a statue?' (III.4.37–38) asks Epicoene. Similarly, the fashionable Mrs Otter is nothing more than a constellation of commodities in whom vendors retain a proprietary interest:126 'All her teeth were made i' the Blacke-Friers: both her eye-browes i' the Strand, and her haire in Silver-street. Every part o' the towne ownes a peece [End Page 165] of her' (IV.2.92-95). But an object, as opposed to a woman – or a woman treated as an object – is incapable of sustaining the line: 'You would be friends with your wife upon un-conscionable termes', Truewit tells Morose, 'her silence' (IV.4.45–46). Frances Fitzdottrel is subjected to similarly unconscionable terms: prohibited from managing domestic affairs, deprived of social engagement or children, she endures Fitzdottrel's 'objectifying jealousy'.127 The line can flourish only when men are sufficiently confident to take their place in the public realm and to marry women whom they feel no need to tyrannize or objectify.128
However, this impulse to treat women as things is only one half of the mentality which Jonson sets out to discredit. 'The corollary to treating people like property is to treat property like people'129 and Fitzdottrel is an excellent exponent of this complementary vice: fetishism. We know early on that Fitzdottrel is attracted to his wife's attire, rather than to her body: 'Himselfe be sordide, hee is sensuall that way./In every dressing hee do's study her' (I.4.17–18). When Pug, eager to experience his unfamiliar carnality, sets out to seduce Frances, Fitzdottrel confronts him: 'Would you be acting of the Incubus?/ Did her silks rustling move you?' (II.3.26–27). The squire's tastes are unique in the play, but hardly so in the Jonsonian oeuvre. In 'An Epistle to a Friend, to perswade him to the Warres', the poetic voice muses:
How much did Stallion spendTo have his Court-bred-fillie there commendHis Lace and Starch; And fall upon her backIn admiration, stretch'd upon the rackOf lust, to his rich Suit and Title, Lord? [End Page 166] ...To do't with Cloth, or Stuffes, lusts name might merit;With Velvet, Plush, and Tissues, it is spirit.130
The courtesan fetishizes the material expression of aristocratic status so thoroughly that 'Stallion' himself almost disappears, his identity not so much signified by his clothing as dissolved in it. Similarly, 'Sir Voluptuous Beast' has always been more interested in petticoats than the women inside them. He instructs his 'innocent' wife
In the past pleasures of his sensuall life,Telling the motions of each petticote,And how his GANIMEDE mou'd, and how his goate,And now, her (hourely) her owne cucqueane makes,In varied shapes, which for his lust shee takes.131
Such practices are not confined to the aristocracy. Nick Stuffe, the tailor in The New Inn, has sex with his wife while she wears dresses destined for her superiors, including Lady Frampul.132 Stuffe's fantasies are undoubtedly powered by a transgressive desire to possess women otherwise unobtainable by reason of rank and Fitzdottrel's fetishism is similarly ambitious, a heightened expression of every aspirant's faith in the transformative properties of cloth. Indeed, as mode enacts the urban phantasmagoria of commodities on a consumer's very skin, is it any wonder that fashion tips into fetishism?
We should remember that the Marxian and Freudian use of the term, 'fetish'133 is grounded upon a religious trope – the magical beliefs of 'primitive', non-European cultures which imagined objects to exercise supernatural power [End Page 167] over humanity. For many seventeenth-century Englishmen, however, fetishists existed far closer to home, in the form of idolatrous Roman Catholics.134 When Jonson depicts what we understand as 'fetishism', he displays to his own culture a form of sexual idolatry.
Idolatry is elaborated in various modes in the Judaeo-Christian tradition but its essence is 'an objective representation of something that is, in reality, subjective'135 or divine. The Hebrew Bible locates idolatry in specific practices such as the worship of gold, silver, and the products of human labour,136 while the Pauline and later Christian elaboration of the sin is more capacious, extending to a post-lapsarian 'carnal orientation' fixated on the things of this world.137 Augustine understood idolatry as a 'habit of mind' by which the idolater failed to comprehend that the material world refers beyond itself to the spiritual realm.138 This is a teleological problem. On the Aristotelian view that informs Augustine, the telos of any object is its cause and final end but 'idolatry … misconstrues the telos of the material sign, mistaking it for the spiritual referent'.139 The idolater thus embraces a 'fleshly' or 'fetishistic consciousness'140 and accords to mere materiality powers proper to man or God.
The Reformation critique of Catholic ritual locates such idolatry principally in transubstantiation, in which the priest stands accused of objectifying humanity as well as divinity, co-opting Christ to 'make him meat, when it pleaseth'.141 Relics evince a similar reduction of the subjective, as saints became 'novelties': 'Saint Annes thumbe … Saint Peters tooth … a peece of the fatte of Saint [End Page 168] Laurence.142 Jonson and other satirists proceed to transpose this religious paradigm into the commercial realm. Thus John Marston's gallant, 'Publius',
… laughs that Papists honor Images,And yet …I saw him court his Mistres looking-glasse,Worship a busk-poynt, (which in secrecieI fere was conscius of strange villanie.)…But if he get her itch-allaying [hair] pinne,O sacred relique, straight he must beginneTo rave out-right …Kisse, blesse, adore it, Publius, never linne,Some sacred vertue lurketh in the pinne.143
If Publius's putative mistress embraces the sexual mode of idolatry, the gallant has fetishism thrust upon him, enacting his unmanning through the worship of her dildo.
Fitzdottrel undergoes a similarly ridiculous abasement: he falls 'desperately enamoured' of the Spanish Lady, pronouncing her to be, 'The top of woman! All her sex in abstract!/I love her, to each syllable, falls from her' (IV.4.244– 45). It is appropriate that the Lady should attract a fetishist, given her own idolatrous association as an advocate of fashions drawn from Catholic Spain and of cosmetics, such as 'The Virgins milke for the face' (IV.4.52), which enjoy miraculous properties associated in popular belief with relics.144 The [End Page 169] squire is in fact in love with Wittipol in drag – a 'woman' composed entirely of objects and conceived in the projector's imagination from a gown (II.8.23– 24). Indeed, transvestism itself may be considered an instance of fetishism,145 so that the squire's infatuation validates his own proclivities. Fitzdottrel's fetishism is a sexual extrapolation of his general tendency to divorce signs from their referents (treating attire, or a tract of land, as a substitute for true nobility) so that finally, his love for the Spanish Lady is directed towards a referent which does not exist. It is London's nascent consumer culture which nourishes this mentality: femininity is a matter of commercial construction. In this sense, Fitzdottrel's love of objects expresses tacit proclivities which afflict every gallant in love with a fashionable lady.
The Spanish Lady therefore embodies two very serious threats to the line: 'she' inserts herself into the marital breach with an agenda of seduction but becomes in turn a fetishistic object of desire. Walter Benjamin's observation is apt: 'birth … the natural engendering of life [is] 'overcome' <aufgehoben> by novelty in the realm of fashion … [while] death … appears in fashion as [End Page 170] no less 'overcome' ... through the sex appeal of the inorganic'.146 The natural fertility of women, with its implication of inevitable death, is repressed in a ceaseless quest to be modish (that is, ageless)147 as fashion lures 'sexuality into the world of the inorganic'148 Fitzdottrel's unwitting passion for the Spanish Lady exemplifies exactly this displacement of desire. Another Jonsonian analogue is Sir Epicure Mammon, whose seductions, even in the idealized world of fantasy, play out to the virtual exclusion of the female body: 'she shall feel gold, taste gold, hear gold, sleep gold:/Nay, we will concumbere gold'.149 Sir Epicure imagines that gold itself will ensure his posterity, promising his intended bride that as Danaë received Zeus: 'it shall rain into thy lap, no shower,/But floods of gold, whole cataracts, a deluge,/To get a nation on thee!' (IV.1.125–28).
Fitzdottrel, bereft of heirs, has succumbed to a similar delusion and his biological failure is soon mirrored by economic dissipation. Wittipol engineers the passage of the squire's land to another gallant, Manly. The dispossession is a displaced cuckolding in the face of Frances's obdurate chastity, but Fitzdottrel, blind to his wife's virtue, laments:
Oh!What will the ghost of my wise Grandfather,My learned Father, with my worshipfull Mother,Thinke of me now, that left me in this worldIn state to be their Heire? that am becomeA Cuckold and an Asse, and my wifes Ward;Likely to loose my land.
(IV.7.73–79)
The squire, it seems, is trapped in the present, purchasing a noble past he never had, while wasting his posterity.
If The Devil demonstrates that fetishism kills the biological line, Jonson elsewhere employs the trope to evoke a threat to his patrilineal literary inheritance. Thus in 'An Elegie'150 a court poet who, like Jonson, lays claim [End Page 171] to a Horatian lineage, takes as his subject the poetic praise of female beauty. In this world, women are muses who inspire true poets to celebrate female beauty, but pseudo-poets, fixated on other objects, abound: 'Silke will draw some sneaking Songster thither' (26). Though the poetic voice itself is not immune to the lure of silk and whalebone (29–31), age puts him beyond such courtly appetites: 'It is not likely I should now looke downe/Upon a Velvet Petticote, or a Gowne' (37–38). By contrast, the fetishism of inferior poets is alive and well, akin to a servant observed as he
did make most solemne love,To ev'ry Petticote he brush'd, and GloveHe did lay up, and would adore the shooe,Or slipper was left off, and kisse it too,Court every hanging Gowne, and after that,Lift up some one, and doe, I tell not what.
(53–58)
As the 'poore wretch' violates, adoringly, the gloves of his betters, such deficiencies are replicated by the songster in literary terms:
Such Songsters there are store of; witnesse heThat chanc'd the lace, laid on a Smock, to see,And straight-way spent a Sonnet.
(65–67)
The songster overlooks the female body to praise mere lace,151 wasting his line in acts of barren and solipsistic composition. The true poet repudiates such fetishism, striking a balance between the celebration of female beauty and its material adornments: 'No face, no hand, proportion, line, or Ayre/Of beautie; but the Muse hath interest in:/There is not worne that lace, purle, knot or pin, /But is the poets matter' (14–17). A 'true lover is he whose poetry addresses the lady herself and not her clothes',152 while the false poet makes a fundamental mistake of teleology and arrests his line in both biological and poetic manifestations. [End Page 172]
Finally, it seems, the special contribution of Jonson's anatomy of fashion is his evocation of the psychological mechanism by which modish appetites erode the line. Fetishism, and its complementary mode, reification, are barren mentalities which conflate subjects and objects, laying waste to a family's collective resources and displacing sexual desire into non-reproductive materiality. Such corrupt modes of perception threaten Jonson's literary eminence and authority too. The works of great poets may be treated as mere commodities – objects to be plagiarized, pawned, or assimilated to the fashionable self by force of misjudgment. An obsession with materiality to the exclusion or diminishment of human subjects produces the same result in social, sexual, and poetic spheres: where objects become a locus of desire, where people are confused with things, the line must surely die. Fetishists have no heirs. [End Page 173]
Footnotes
1. F. P. Wilson, 'The Funeral Obsequies of Sir All-in-New-Fashions', Shakespeare Survey, (1958), 98–99. Wilson dates the engraving to c.1625–30.
2. Sir All-in New Fashions is laid out in the style of the mid-1620s, with wide-topped boots, a feather in his hat and beard gummed to a stiletto point. His fellow 'gallantes' lead the cortege, while behind them march the deceased's tailors, shoe-makers, spurriers, and haberdashers – an entirely acquired commercial community. In place of flags bearing the familial coat of arms, the gallants display Sir All-in's clothes, which strike lifelike postures on their journey to the pawnbrokers in Hounsditch or Longlane. Mode denies both history and posterity and instead, like the cortege itself, circulates in the present. The purpose of the heraldic funeral is 'to commemorate the deceased's role within society and to perpetuate this beyond the apparent dead end of mortality (Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003) p. 62), but Sir All-in's supine corpse and upright attire send a terrible message of disorder: objects are immortal, bodies are barren.
3. All references to the Discoveries, the plays and the poetry of Ben Jonson are taken from Ben Jonson, eds C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vols 1–10.
4. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997).
5. See Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).
6. I use the term 'conspicuous consumption' in the sense formulated by Thorstein Veblen as the most striking and excessive manifestation of 'pecuniary emulation' (The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1925, London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pp. 31-32).
7. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horn-Booke (London, 1609) in The Non-Dramatic Works Thomas Dekker, ed. A. B. Grosart, vol. 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), p. 231.
8. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3.
9. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 2.
10. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 13.
11. On livery and investiture see: Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, pp. 8, 18–21; David Starkey, 'The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the Arts c.1350–1550', in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 224–90 (pp. 264–65); Clare Gittens, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 176–77.
12. Elizabethan Life: Wills of Essex Gentry and Merchants, ed. F.G. Emmison (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1978), vol. 4, p. 114.
13. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 11.
14. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 8; Igor Kopytoff, 'The Cultural Biography of Things', in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91 (p. 69).
15. See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowlkes (London: Penguin, 1990), vol. 1, p. 200.
16. John Stow, A Survey of the cities of London and Westminster, And the Borough of Southward … Corrected, Improved, and very much Enlarged in the Year 1720 by John Strype … brought down to the present Time by Careful Hands (London: [n.pub.] 1754, vol. 2), pp. 278–79.
17. See Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor, pp. 347–53 on imports.
18. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1930) p. 140. See also Georg Simmel, 'Fashion', in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings by Georg Simmel, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 294-323 (p. 304).
19. Jonson, The Staple of News, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 6.
20. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 39, and Patricia Fumerton, 'London's Vagrant Economy: Making Space for "Low Subjectivity"', in Material London ca.1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 206–225 (p. 220).
21. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 81–82.
22. See, for example, John Earle, Microcosmography, ed. Alfred S. West (1633; rpt. Cambridge: The University Press, 1920), p. 68.
23. Jonson, 'On English Mounsieur', Epigram 88, Epigrammes, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
24. Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 44.
25. Quoted in Vincent, Dressing the Elite, p. 108.
26. A Happy Husband Or Directions for a Maide to Choose Her Mate (London: [n.pub.] 1618), B3v.
27. See Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 125–29.
28. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 97.
29. The implausible denouement of Jonson's The New Inn is a striking instance of attire effacing the past. The Frampul family, unknown to one other, spend the play in disguise and recognize one another only when items of misleading attire are removed. If heirlooms materialize the line in a way which reinforces biological identity, attire enjoys the opposite capacity to estrange a family.
30. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press: 1965), pp. 23–27, 35–36.
31. Stone, Crisis, pp. 36–39.
32. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 25; Stone, Crisis, p. 50.
33. Wrightson, English Society, p. 20.
34. Wrightson, English Society, p. 29. Stone, Crisis, pp. 23, 68–69.
35. Stone, Crisis, pp. 104–05.
36. Barnabe Rich, The Honestie of this Age (London, 1614), p. 8.
37. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1583, rpt. New York and London: Johnson Reprint Company, 1972), C2v.
38. Muld Sacke or The Apologie of Hic Mulier ([n.p.]: [n.pub.], 1610) rpt in Three Pamphlets on the Jacobean Antifeminist Controversy (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978), Cr.
39. Jonson, On Court-Worme, Epigram 15, Epigrammes, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
40. John Williams, A Sermon of Apparell (London, 1620; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Walter J. Johnson, 1979), p. 18.
41. Stubbes, F4v.
42. Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor, pp. 61–71; Elizabeth Moran, 'Hatching Fashion: Consumption, Femininity and Fashion in Early Modern London', in The Touch of the Real, ed. Philippa Kelly (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), pp. 125–42.
43. Barnabe Rich, My Ladies Looking Glass, London, 1616, p. 12.
44. Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor, p. 69.
45. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), Chapters 1 and 2, esp. pp. 44–45.
46. David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 61.
47. Anne of Denmark of course exerted a significant cultural role at court, principally through her involvement in court entertainments, including masques written by Jonson: see Clare McManus, '"Defacing the Carcass": Anne of Denmark and Jonson's The Masque of Blackness', in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, eds Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 93-113.
48. Rich, My Ladies, p. 11. See also Adam Hill, The Crie of England, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (London, 1595), for the cautionary tale of the 'Bactrians, whose wives fell from the pride of apparell to whoredome' (p. 42).
49. See Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 128–34.
50. Levy Peck also notes the sexual anxieties surrounding female consumption and provides examples of women who shopped independently in public spaces (Consuming Splendor, pp. 68–71).
51. Naomi Schor, 'Before the Castle: Women, Commodities, and Modernity in Au Bonheur des Dames', in Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), (pp. 149–55, p. 154).
52. Thomas Tuke, A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women (London: 1616), p. 60.
53. See Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and her discussion of early modern representations of women as good, and goods as feminine (p. 133).
54. Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London in The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Grosart, vol. 2, p. 36.
55. See Lawrence Stone's discussion of the growth of individualism in the seventeenth century in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 223–31 and C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 53–68.
56. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), discusses the fashionable self as frozen in time (p. 32).
57. Discoveries, eds. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, lines 2056–60.
58. See Jonson, Discoveries, lines 314–15.
59. 'If wee will looke with our understanding, and not our senses, wee may behold vertue, and beauty, (though cover'd with rags) in their brightnesse; and vice, and deformity so much the fowler, in having all the splendor of riches to guild them' (Discoveries, lines 1429–33).
60. The van Blyenberch portrait is held by the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 2752) and may be viewed at www.npg.org.uk/collections.
61. Michael McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 102.
62. McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations, pp. 68–69.
63. McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations, pp. 48, 121.
64. McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations, p. 103.
65. Discoveries, lines 1100–01, 1108–09. See Thomas M. Greene, 'Ben Jonson and Centered Self', rpt in Ben Jonson, Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 89–110.
66. Discoveries, lines 1093-99.
67. Greene, 'Centered Self', p. 93.
68. Jonson, To Penshurst, in The Forrest, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
69. Anon., Of Cyvile and uncyvile life (1579) STC 15589 quoted by R. Malcolm Smuts, 'Material Culture, Metropolitan Influences and Moral Authority in Early Modern England', in Material Culture and Cultural Materialism, ed. Curtis Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 203–24 (p. 205).
70. The Compleate Copy-Holder (1641) quoted in Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 16–17.
71. Georg Simmel attributes this belief especially to feudalism: see The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, ed. David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 240-41.
72. Ian Donaldson, 'Jonson's Poetry', in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, eds Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 119–39 (p. 129).
73. Jonson, Epistle to Katharine, Lady Aubigny in The Forrest, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
74. See R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1987), pp. 59–61.
75. Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 34, 37, 39.
76. Discoveries, lines 405-09.
77. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979; London: Routledge, 1989): 'Choosing according to one's tastes is a matter of identifying goods that are objectively attuned to one's position and which 'go together' because they are situated in roughly equivalent positions in their respective spaces, be they films or plays, cartoons or novels, clothes or furniture' (p. 232).
78. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 'Induction', 106–09, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 6.
79. Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, 'The Prologue', 20, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 4.
80. Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 143; Peter Carlson, 'Judging Spectators', ELH, 44 (1977), 443–57 (pp. 454–55).
81. Simmel, Philosophy, pp. 321–22.
82. Bourdieu refers to this process as a 'mode of appropriation' of a work of art (Distinction, p. 270).
83. Ann Bermingham, 'Introduction', pp. 1–22, in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, eds Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 15.
84. Jonson, The Case is Altered, II.7.74, 78-79, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 3.
85. See Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 274.
86. Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2468–71.
87. Greene, Light, p. 275.
88. Marjorie Swann, 'Refashioning Society in Ben Jonson's Epicoene', SEL, 38 (1998), 297-315 (p. 305).
89. Ian Donaldson, '"The Fripperie of Wit": Jonson and Plagiarism', in Plagiarism in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 119– 33 (pp. 129–30).
90. Greene, Light, pp. 276–77.
91. See the well-known passage in Discoveries, lines 1093–99.
92. Greene, Light, p. 37.
93. Greene, Light, p. 41.
94. See Seneca's 84th Epistle, cited in Donaldson, 'Fripperie', p. 122.
95. Jonson, Discoveries, lines 129–39.
96. Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 5.
97. Peterson, Imitation and Praise, p. 20, citing Epistle 84.8.
98. Ian Donaldson, 'Fathers and Sons: Jonson, Dryden, and Mac Flecknoe', in Jonson's Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 162–79, (p. 163).
99. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 9.
100. Douglas Lanier, 'Brainchildren: Self-representation and Patriarchy in Ben Jonson's Early Works', Renaissance Papers (1986), 53–68 (pp. 55–56).
101. Lanier, 'Brainchildren', p. 67.
102. Jonson, Discoveries, lines 791–93.
103. See Jonson, On My First Sonne, Epigram 45, lines 9–10, Epigrammes, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
104. David Lee Miller, 'All Father: Ben Jonson and the Psychodynamics of Authorship', Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 131–47 (p. 140).
105. Donaldson, 'Fathers and Sons', p. 165.
106. Peterson, Imitation and Praise, pp. 16-17.
107. Peterson, Imitation and Praise, p. 18.
108. Peterson, Imitation and Praise, p. 20. See also Peterson's discussion of Jonson's Old-end Gatherer, Epigram 53, p. 20.
109. Jonson, To Proule the Plagiary, Epigram 81, Epigrammes, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, lines 1–2.
110. Ian Donaldson notes 'fripperie' means to trade in secondhand clothes: Donaldson, 'Fripperie', p. 127.
111. Jonson, On Poet-Ape, Epigram 56, lines 1–4, Epigrammes, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
112. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 31.
113. Joseph Loewenstein, 'The Script in the Marketplace', in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 265-78 (p. 273).
114. Sara Van Den Berg, 'Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship', in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, eds Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press, 1991), pp. 111–37 (p. 121).
115. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 182–83.
116. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 76. See also Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 79.
117. See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 101-84.
118. In London c.1616, occult practices had become very fashionable indeed and the Overbury murder, with its allegations of witchcraft, was a current cause celebre (see Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defence of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 89–90). However, the source of the concern with the incarnation of devils derives from two works of the chaplain to the Bishop of London, Samuel Harsnett,. The title of the play refers to an incident recounted by Harsnett in which a demoniac spoke in the voice of Satan, rebuking a priest who had called him names: 'I am no Asse, I will not be mocked' (Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, in Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham, ed. F. W. Brownlow (London: [n.pub.] 1603; rpt. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1993), p. 290).
119. Anne Turner wore yellow starched ruffs as she went to her death, but not before renouncing pride, yellow bands and other courtly vanities (David Lindley, The Trials, pp. 179, 184).
120. Constance Jordan notes that 'A woman's "modesty" is linked to her silence, and a man's control of her to the forfeit of her sexual and her speaking self. Lacking expression for her self as subject, she becomes merely an object to be used' (Renaissance Feminism:Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 47).
121. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 488.
122. This sense of language and consumption as complementary modes of signification is reinforced by Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood's notion that commodities are a way of making sense of the world and 'sharing names' with other individuals and households who, in turn, comprise social groups (The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 75).
123. See Newman, Fashioning Femininity, p. 134, and an example of the speech/sex analogy in Rich, My Ladies: 'A harlot is full of words, shee is loude and babbling' (p. 44).
124. Swann notes that Dauphine is working both sides of the 'socioeconomic street, trying to maintain his position in a traditional hierarchy of status while also exploiting new opportunities for economic advancement' such as the purchase of a title ('Refashioning Society', p. 300).
125. Swann, 'Refashioning Society', p. 299.
126. Swann, 'Refashioning Society', p. 310.
127. Helen Ostovich, 'Hell for Lovers: Shades of Adultery in The Devil is an Ass', in Refashioning Ben Jonson, eds Sanders, Chedgzoy, and Wiseman, pp. 155–82 (p. 169).
128. In the shadow of these negative examples of failed masculinity, Jonson gestures towards a form of female subjectivity which avoids the evils of reification at the hands of fools. Frances' reward for repudiating Wittipol's advances is described by Helen Ostovich as a 'de-gendered friendship' (p. 175) rewarded, ultimately, with a life lived autonomously in a state of 'pseudo-widowhood'. Frances is the antithesis of the play's reified fashionable ladies, like the unfortunate woman who falls over to become a 'helpless erotic object' ('Hell for Lovers', pp. 177, 171 respectively).
129. Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 154.
130. Jonson, An Epistle to a Friend, to perswade him to the Warres, The Underwood 15, lines 47–51, 57–58, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
131. Jonson, On Sir Voluptuous Beast, Epigram 25, Epigrammes, lines 2–6, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
132. Jonson, The New Inn, IV.3.63–81. Compare Volpone, III.7.200–25 and The Underwood 42, An Elegie, eds Hereford and Simpson, vol. 8, lines 37–42.
133. For Marx's theory of commodity fetishism as an instance of false consciousness see Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 163–71. See also Sigmund Freud, who opines that an 'inanimate object' which replaces a person for sexual purposes is 'with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied' ('The Sexual Aberrations', in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905; rpt. London: Imago Publishing Company, 1949), pp. 13-50 (p. 32)).
134. See Jones and Stallybrass for instances in which the fetishism practised by colonized peoples were understood as akin to Catholic ritual practices (Renaissance Clothing, pp. 8–10).
135. David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 58.
136. Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, p. 54.
137. Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, pp. 56–57.
138. Katherine Eisaman Maus, 'Idol and Gift in Volpone', English Literary Renaissance, 35 (2005), 429–53 (p. 433).
139. Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, p. 53.
140. Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, p. 58.
141. Thomas Becon, 'The Displaying of the Popish Mass', in Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, ed. John Eyre (Cambridge: The University Press, 1844), pp. 251–85, (p. 259). See also William Tyndale, 'A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments' (1536) in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, At the University Press, 1848), pp. 345-85, (pp. 373-74).
142. Harsnett, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel (London, 1599), p. 220.
143. John Marston, The Scourge of Villainie, Satire VIII, in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (London: [n.pub.] 1598; rpt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), pp. 152–53, lines 85–86, 93–94, 100–02, 108–09. For further examples of the trope see Ester Sowernam, Ester hath hang'd Haman, in Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-hater, ed. Charles Butler (London: [n.pub.] 1617; rpt. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995), p. 23; Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women in Female Replies (London: [n.pub.] 1615, rpt in ed. Butler), p. 3; Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem in Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. 2, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910), pp. 7–175, (p. 136); William Prynne, The Unlovelinesse of Lovelockes (London, 1628; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Walter J. Johnson, 1976), pp. 5–6, 9, 58, 63.
144. It is possible that Jonson is alluding to Anne Turners occult and Catholic associations, having repudiated her Catholicism before her execution (Lindley, The Trials, p. 181).
145. Freud's theory of the fetish rests upon the notion that a male child begins by believing that his mother too has a phallus, and, despite evidence to the contrary, is not quite disabused of this belief, as the recognition of such a 'lack' implies the threat of castration; for the fetishist, an object comes to function as a substitute for the maternal phallus which he both credits and disavows. See Sigmund Freud, who argues 'the fetish is a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and … does not want to give up … for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger … It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up … Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute' ('Fetishism', in The Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), pp. 152–57 (pp. 152–54). Marjorie Garber, noting Freud's example of a fetish which conceals the genitals so that castration is both disavowed and affirmed (Freud, 'Fetishism', p. 156) argues that cross-dressing is itself a type of fetishization: 'a figure for the undecidability of castration, which is to say, a figure of nostalgia for originary 'wholeness' – in the mother, in the child. Thus the fetish, like the transvestite – or the transvestite, like the fetish – is a sign at once of lack and its covering over' (Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 121). The cross-dressed 'Spanish Lady' and Epicoene are fetishistic in this sense – women constructed of garments (signifying 'lack') who also reinstate the maternal phallus under those garments, as the plays metafictive jokes about the true sex of the player make plain.
146. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 79.
147. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 99–101, commenting upon Benjamin.
148. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 70.
149. Jonson, The Alchemist, IV.1. 29-30, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 5.
150. Jonson, Underwood 42, eds Herford and Simpson, vol. 8.
151. 'Verse in this perspective both articulates and displaces sexual activity, thereby doubling the displacement of female sexuality onto their clothes' (McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations, p. 125).
152. McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations, p. 123.
153. This article revises research originally conducted for my PhD thesis in English at The University of Western Australia, 1998: 'Phantasticke gallants and devill-comedians: fashion, theatre and subjectivity in early modern London and in two plays of Ben Jonson.