Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England

Paola Pugliatti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351760522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

This title was first published in 2003. In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Starting with English vagrancy statutes and in particular from the fact that, from 1545 on, players were listed as vagrants, the book discusses from an entirely new perspective the reasons for the equation, in the early modern mind, of beggary with performing. Pugliatti identifies in players' aptitude for disguise and in the fear raised by their proteiform skills the issues which encouraged the assimilation of beggars and players; she argues that at the core of provisions against vagrancy was an attempt to marginalize people who, because of their instability in location and role (that is, in their theatrical quintessence), were seen as embodying potential for subversion. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. Finally, by carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.

Part One
The Facts

Of Poor there are two sorts: Gods poor and the Devils: impotent poor and impudent poor ...

Richard Younge, The Poores Advocate, 1628

Chapter 1
Vagrancy and Beggary in Europe

An non vides et mendicorum plurimos inter pressuras ipsas et angustias innumera perpetrantes scelera, quorum tarnen omnium causa non afflictio paupertatis est, sed sola nequitia?

John Chrysostom¹

The Corpus iuris civilis of Emperor Justinian already introduces the idea of validi mendicantes and the suspicion of incerta mendicitas prescribing that all beggars should be searched and that those found to be idle and therefore unworthy of compassion because able-bodied should be given as slaves to the diligent searcher ('proditor studiosus et diligens') who has unmasked them.² The one in the Corpus probably constitutes the first specimen of the perception, on the part of the law, that beggars, in some cases, simulate their state of indigence and dejection through disguise and guile. The Justinian constitution was followed throughout the Middle Ages by other legislative measures, all tending to deracinate, or at least limit, what had become a phenomenon of huge proportions. The idea that begging may be a fraudulent way of living at the expense of the labouring part of society appears in the writings of some of the Church Fathers as well and for centuries it constituted a counterpoint to the prevailing evangelical attitude which prescribed almsgiving and the relief of the poor as one of the principal duties of a good Christian. 'Date elemosynam et omnia munda sunt vobis', the Gospel intimates; almsgiving, Christian morals enjoined, extinguished sin and should be practised indiscriminately, without examining the person on whom it was exercised, even though that person was an impostor, for it is not for us to examine and judge the life and morals of other people. The same John Chrysostom, who was conscious of the innumera scelera perpetrated by some beggars, felt at the same time the Christian imperative of almsgiving as absolute: 'Da omni petenti; et eum, qui velit mutuo accipere, ne averseris: extende manum tuam, ne sit contracta. Non sumus vitae examinatores .... Benignitatis et clementiae est tempus, non accuratae et exactae examinationis; misericordiae, non ratiocinationis ... The poor were construed as the image of Christ and as the instrument of human salvation. The Italian anthropologist Piero Camporesi says that in the Middle Ages 'the poor represented a sort of social medicine for the rich, and an inexhaustible exercise of charity for the less poor; not only almsgiving annulled sin, but ... it was also believed that the miserable beggars heaped at the churches' doors were the soul's healers' (the expression which recurs in works of the Church Fathers is 'medici illi sunt vulnerum nostrorum');⁴ more trenchantly, Christopher Hill says that to be generous to the poor was 'at once ostentation and a form of social insurance ... ' (Hill, 1964, p. 259).⁵

However, while good Christians continued to attribute value to the gesture of indiscriminate almsgiving and to the idea that 'Caritas ... omnia credit' (1 Corinthians 13:4), several legislative acts were issued in order to repress the growing phenomena of vagrancy and fraudulent begging. But, as Camporesi argues, laws and provisions such as the institution of hospitals and homes for the sick and poor 'could not effectively contrast a social marasmus which was bred by the very structures of society, by the spirit of the Catholic Church, by a certain kind of social psychology, by individual as well as collective feelings and by the strength of a centuries-old tradition' (Camporesi, ed., 1973, p. xix). The kind of social psychology of which Camporesi speaks was for a long time dramatically divided between the outlook that saw in the poor the figure of Christ and the contrary point of view which identified the poor with the Devil. But, as soon as considerations of economic advantage started to prevail, beggary became a social paradox: the new economic developments could not allow the permanence of a social group which not only was unproductive, but also constituted a threat to the private property of productive people. The praise of poverty and almsgiving on which the medieval system was based contradicted the compulsion to work which started to be seen as 'the new medicine for poverty'.⁶ The prescription of this medicine was universally presented as a moral measure (the Puritan morality considered 'idleness' as the worst of vices and work, it was said in innumerable tracts and sermons, was the only way to uproot this most odious vice); but, as has been convincingly argued, the real motivations were economic and political. Among others, Christopher Hill holds that the compulsion to work made of the poor a large cheap labour supply for the developing capitalism (see Hill, 1952 and a longer treatment of this issue in Hill, 1964, ch. 7). England was not alone in punishing idleness and prescribing work as a cure for poverty and, although unemployment was in many conjunctures endemic, the hostility towards beggary and nomadism spread quickly throughout Europe.⁷ However, the English statutes were probably the most aggressive and virulent and, together with the works of the English moralists and Doctors in Divinity, of the English pamphleteers, and even of a few English playwrights, had a prominent role in transforming the holy pilgrim of the Middle Ages into the pernicious 'professional vagrant': an individual, it was said, 'sine re, sine spe, sine fide, sine sede' (Dalton, 1635 [1618], p. 123). The very definition of vagrants as 'masterless men', an expression which by itself denotes a condition of freedom from a master-servant bond, connoted, in the context of early modern England, the far from desirable status of outlawry for those people who were not part of the social structure because not subjected to a master's control.

It was a dramatic change in attitude, the reasons for which have been variously interpreted by historians.⁸ Two are the main points that have been and are still being discussed: in the first place, whether the changed attitude towards the poor and the consequent organization of welfare provisions - and, conversely, the repression of 'professional begging' - derived (mainly) from the theological rationale of the Protestant Reformation; and, depending on this, whether there were substantial differences in the provisions taken in, and in the attitude expressed by, Protestant and Catholic countries; in the second place, whether at the root of those provisions was the need for a cheap labour supply that the rise and development of capitalist economy required. In most cases, those historians who contrast the idea that the change may have been determined (mainly) by economic motivations hold that its motor was ideological and strictly connected to the theological and ethical principles of the Reformation.⁹

The first systematizations of the provisions for the relief of the poor and the statements which established its rationale were produced in the years between 1522 and 1529. The earliest were issued in the Lutheran context of the cities of Nürnberg (1522) and Leisnig (1523; the text for Leisnig was Luther's Ordinance for a Common Chest; see Salter, ed., 1926, pp. 80-96). However the famous Ordinance of the Catholic city of Ypres, Forma subventions pauperum (ibid., pp. 32-79), followed at a very short distance, in 1525, and between 1527 and 1529 similar provisions were issued in the context of other Catholic cities like Venice (1528). Paris had an early perception of the necessity to reform health and social welfare, and as early as 1505 the Hôtel-Dieu started to be administered by a lay Commission (see Geremek, 1986, p. 125 Engl. trans.). The immediate reason which determined the welfare reform in Paris seems to have been the explosion of subsequent epidemics, which also suggested the adoption of measures against beggars and vagabonds: in 1516, the French Parliament established that all valiant beggars 'qui n'ont maistre ni adveu, et ne s'appliquent à gagner leur vies' (Bonnardot, ed., 1883-92, vol. I, p. 227) must leave the city within three days or else be subjected to corporal punishment; those who would not comply should be put to labour by the city authorities in works of public utility such as 'curer et nettoyer les boes et immondices que sont en grant quantité tant dedans que dehors la ville ...' (ibid., p. 228). However, as Geremek has argued, the point is not that of establishing a temporal primacy between Protestant and Catholic countries in starting provisions for the poor and the prosecution of vagabonds; what those few dates and the related facts show is rather that all those events 'happened at a critical moment in a time of social and economic crisis' (Geremek, 1986, p. 122 Engl. trans.).¹⁰

Looking at those facts mainly from the point of view of generalized economic developments, Karl Marx connected his analysis of pauperism and of the measures taken to contrast that phenomenon in all countries of Western Europe to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital, defined as 'the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production' (Marx, 1867, p. 355 Engl. trans.). One of the passages by which Marx introduces his analysis of what he thinks is the 'classic form' of proto-capitalism, that of the English situation, deserves a lengthy quotation:

... the historical movement which changes the producers into wage workers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen become sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

(ibid.)

The analysis of the process and of its concurring causes as it took place in England which Marx develops in the pages that follow the fragment quoted above deploys arguments which are, in my opinion, quite cogent and fully convincing. For the sake of the present discussion, it will suffice to mention the fact that Marx rightly locates the first statements about compulsory wage work in the 'Statute of Labourers' issued in 1349 by Edward III (23 Edw. III cc. 1-7; SR vol. I, pp. 307-8) and in the similar ordinance issued in 1351 by the French King John II ('the good'). Similar provisions meant to keep salaries down were issued in the same years in Spain by Peter III of Aragon. Marx says that on this point the 'English and French legislation ran parallel and were identical in purport' (p. 366 Engl. trans.). It is apt to recall that both those pronouncements were issued following the great epidemics of the Black Death, which cut by nearly one third the number of labourers, that both established the compulsion to work imposing a maximum salary ('on no account a minimum', Marx comments; ibid.), and that both contain the official distinction between false and real beggars. As Geremek argues, 'The fall in real wages was a general tendency in the sixteenth century', and 'The resulting "inflation of profits" became a driving force in the evolution of capitalism, and bears out the claim, further supported by the need for a free labour market, that poverty was inherent to early capitalist evolution' (Geremek, 1986, p. 120 Engl. trans.).

As the dates of those first pronouncements about wage labour show, it is in any case evident that the provisions for the poor and the repressive and compulsive measures which accompanied them were a matter of economic policy long before becoming a matter of Protestant ethics; the association of the repression of vagrancy with the organization of welfare provisions for the poor is in France 'already outlined in decisions concerning vagabonds and beggars in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries' (Geremek, 1971, p. 41 Engl. trans.)· It is sufficient to examine the history of the French legislation against vagrancy to see that the instability of vagrant beggars was disquieting and suspect in France no less than in England, and that it was disquieting in the first place because it jeopardized the economic stability of the feudal society. From the publishing of the ordinance of John II in 1351, which followed shortly after the issue of Edward III's 'Statute of Labourers', the French legislation repeatedly and explicitly stressed an immediate connection 'between the measures suppressing vagabondage and the state of the labour market' (Geremek, 1971, p. 33 Engl. trans.).¹¹ In a moment of crisis, in which shortage of labour was a fact, the mobility of (potential) workers or their refusal to work was obviously seen as an emergency that was in the first place economic but was also regarded as an issue of public order. Consequently, the repression of vagrancy by imposing compulsory work at low wages was considered to be the only cure to overcome the economic crisis as well as to solve the problems of public security.

Not only do the statutes, proclamations and ordinances issued in the cities of all countries of Western Europe bear striking similarities, but there is also a cluster of shared feelings as regards beggars, who are universally accused of troubling the public peace by thefts and other crimes, of constituting a moral threat by their disorderly and idle life and are even thought to be apt to stir social and political disorder. In all countries alike, the hostility towards the masses of unemployed determined a stigma of disrepute, that is, it helped to establish the equation between misery and deviance, which supplanted and wholly transformed the primitive Christian éthos of poverty into suspicion and even contempt of the poor and the praise of almsgiving into an act to be condemned in that it encouraged idleness and parasitism.

That 'the new medicine for poverty' implied in most places a shifting of the management of poor provisions from the hands of the Church to those of the civil authorities may show that in all contexts the prevailing interest was no longer moral, but political and economic. As Geremek remarks:

It was precisely the public nature of the reform of social aid, its institutionalization on the state level, that explains the widespread debates about poverty: in the century which formulated the concept and doctrine of raison d'état, the reform of charity became a political tool of the modern State and an integral part of its ideology.

(Geremek, 1986, p. 205 Engl. trans.)¹²

It might seem obvious, at this point, to conclude that to answer one of the questions I posed on p. 19 is to answer both; and indeed historians who, like Geremek, have argued for the economic motivations at the heart of the whole set of problems which determined the issue of the poor laws, have also held that the differences between Protestant and Catholic countries as regards the content of those provisions were negligible. This position, more or less directly inspired by Marx's analysis, is shared by some historians writing in the 1980s.¹³

A different position was held by H. R. Tawney in the 1920s and by Christoph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Documentation
• Introduction: mendicitas et mendacia
• Part One The Facts
• Part Two Philosophical and Religious Perceptions and Representations
• Part Three Literary Appropriations
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Index