Success the Whitefriars Way: Ram Alley and the Negative Force of Acting

Although Ram Alley has enjoyed a small critical renaissance in recent years,¹ criticism has rarely been kind to the play, to its author Lording Barry, or to the short-lived company that performed it in a theater just around the corner from seamy Ram Alley itself, the Children of the King's Revels. Harold Hillebrand characterized this company as "a parasitic growth on the Jacobean theatre."² In his book on Jacobean city comedy, Brian Gibbons lists Ram Alley among "Conventional Plays 1604-7" and enthuses rather left-handedly that "it is an indication of the sustaining richness reposing in the genre's conventions that Barry's wholly undistinguished conventional play should be so manifestly actable and effective."³ Mary Bly's book on the Children of the King's Revels works toward the climactic and persuasive assertion that "Whitefriars plays . . . emphatically deserve an escape from disrepute," but her study gets under way by saying that "no great claims can be made for the literary merit of any Whitefriars play" and, after quoting Hillebrand, Michael Shapiro, and C. W. Wallace in support of this view, she promises, "I shall not try to rehabilitate the plays' aesthetic value."⁴ In an excellent article on the theatrical transmutation of morality-play figures of wealth into Jacobean city-comedy widows, Elizabeth Hanson calls Ram Alley "plotty, conventional, and a pretext for endless sexual innuendo" and argues that whatever it achieves in terms of "geographical and social specificity" is largely in spite of (or incidental to) its having been "cranked out" by a second-rate dramatist working in a company of "fly-by-nights."⁵ And in their 1999 article attributing The Family of Love to Barry and arguing against the traditional attribution to Middleton, Gary Taylor, Paul Mulholland, and MacDonald P. Jackson feel compelled to add to their considerable evidentiary argument an argument about relative literary value: "Middleton's career begins with ironic social satire . . . not sectarian bigotry, scatology, and literary parody."⁶

For contemporary literary criticism, then, Ram Alley is a kind of black hole. On the one hand, it is present to critical consciousness only in the negative: it does not represent a social reality, its author is not a satirist, it is not a promising start to a playwriting career, and whatever aesthetic value it might once have had cannot be recovered. On the other hand, its vacuous identity is constituted chiefly by its ability to devour the matter around it—its thoroughgoing absorption of the conventions of city comedy exerts an annihilating pressure upon those conventions. The play is at once totally representative of its genre and precisely the play one would wish to avoid when considering that genre seriously. In Theodore Leinwand's remarkable formulation, in Ram Alley the "clichés of the genre . . . fail to suggest their own triteness":⁷ it fails even to achieve the negatively constituted generic identity of ironic city comedy. Leinwand's analysis is based upon an assumption about the aesthetic superiority of theatrical naturalism, which, while in tension with his notion of self-reflexive irony as the defining characteristic of city comedy, is nevertheless a fundamental assumption underlying most criticism of "conventional" drama, and one I will be concerned to dismantle in this chapter: Ram Alley, says Leinwand, gives us "neither characters with whom we can fully identify nor characters to consider as such."⁸ I agree with this claim, but I believe that one way to arrive at a serious consideration of Ram Alley (and perhaps any number of other "minor," "obscure," or "conventional" dramas of the period) is by articulating its opposite—by defining what the play does give us.

It is true that Ram Alley does not give us characters with seemingly realistic, transparent identities and behavior ("characters as such") onto whom spectators can project fantasies of their own identities and behavior ("characters with whom we can identify"). It does give us, however, sharply drawn characters situated within a highly conventional and somewhat arbitrary structure of action. Such characters demand and enable virtuosic acting, and this acting, with the simultaneous...