Producing Early Modern London by Stage Kelly J.;

Producing Early Modern London by Stage Kelly J.;

Author:Stage, Kelly J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004120 Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
ISBN: 5143284
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00


Coming from La Foole, the assumption that place defines quality becomes a joke. Living in the Strand cannot make La Foole less foolish, and not living there cannot make Clerimont less refined. While La Foole may have the “right” address, he does not know how to act. Clerimont explains, “He does give plays and suppers, and invites his guests to ’em aloud, out of his window, as they ride by in coaches” (1.3.24–26). The image of La Foole with his head out the window shouting to desirable passers-by clearly paints him as a noise polluter. Adam Zucker’s assessment of La Foole bears repeating: his shouts, along with his excess verbosity and attention-seeking, “distance him from social power by marking him as tasteless,”64 and this is Jonson’s brand of class satire. The play condemns the materialism and self-aggrandizement of such behavior, and La Foole and Sir Jack Daw represent a grotesque figure of the town residents that Stow, Merritt, and Dillon index.

The staging of Daw’s household complicates the reading of the noisy town by further inundating his place with the aural clutter of foolish prattling.65 As Truewit explains about Daw, he is “the only talking sir i’th’town!” (1.2.57), and Clerimont needs only to nudge gentleman Jack to comment on anything—like the classical poets, for example—and this provides Daw with a perfect opportunity to show his shallowness: “Homer, an old tedious prolix ass, talks of curriers and chines of beef. Virgil, of dunging of land, and bees. Horace, of I know not what” (2.3.53–55). He admits he “know[s] not what” of Horace, but truly he “knows not what” of anything and yet holds himself in high regard.66 The wits dismiss such stupidity. Others, such as the Ladies Collegiate (an academy of town women who pride themselves on their independence and learning), are amused by La Foole and Daw. Truewit describes the ladies as entertaining town men while feeling free to “cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditical, authority” (1.1.61–63). They illustrate the separation of the town’s practices and ideology from London’s norms. Their “hermaphroditical” status, like Moll’s gender ambiguity, marks the town and its ambivalence between London and Westminster. The town that La Foole, Daw, and the Ladies populate begins and ends with shouting coming from La Foole’s window and the crying of fashion as proclaimed by Lady Haughty and her followers.

The town in the wits’ rendering resists such noisiness; rather, they reproduce an idea of leisurely life and balance the undefined qualities of the town with a fluid way of being. Their town attempts to challenge the space of the city and of trade, carving a niche for idleness. They counter the city’s overwhelming, economically determined, expanding space by avoiding direct competition in the streets, and they are not entities asserting social power. They are, rather, attached to an idea of the town as a place. From the beginning of the play, their behavior and attitude model this intellectual position.



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