Performing cross-class clandestine marriage in The Shoemaker's Holiday

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring, 2005 by Amy L. Smith

A year before The Shoemaker's Holiday was performed, Sir John Spencer, his daughter Elizabeth, and her suitor enacted a courtship closely resembling the main marriage plot in the play. (1) In 1598, Elizabeth, the unmarried and well-dowered daughter of a former Lord Mayor of London, was wooed by an indebted courtier, Lord Compton. Sir John, not intending to see his fortune "spent on clearing off the gambling debts of a spendthrift courtier," was dismayed to see his daughter "dazzled by her extravagant and lordly suitor." (2) After his failed attempts to hide her away and allegedly beat her into submission, he was briefly imprisoned at the Fleet prison and she was removed from his custody. The marriage took place surrounded by rumors that it was achieved only by "Lord Compton disguising himself as a baker's boy and smuggling Elizabeth out of the parental house in a basket." (3) In this brief account of the circumstances surrounding one enactment of early modern marriage, we are bombarded with a sense of conflicting interests: the wills of the child and of the parent in choosing a spouse, the emotional investments of each party, and their differing views on economic and class interests--specifically the transfusion of mercantile money and blood into the aristocracy.

This prelude to a clandestine wedding suggests that while early modern marriage is in some ways a conservative institution designed to reiterate and reproduce patriarchal arrangements, it is by no means monolithic. The varying interests and the wooing and wedding that enact them highlight the fact that even powerful institutions cannot and do not absolutely determine the outcomes of those who perform their rituals. Indeed it is those very performances that make room for agency. While Judith Butler explores the theory of performativity through her analysis of gender itself rather than a gendered institution such as marriage, the concepts can be usefully extended to such institutions. To call gender performative means to Butler that "the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established." (4) Butler's theory thus provides for alterations by arguing that because performed categories (and rituals) require repetition, they make room for change and leave space for resistance. While I use Butler's formulation of agency through reiteration as a starting point, my work considers the historical and material contexts and receptions of specific performances that Butler's abstract theorizing often neglects. By contextualizing agency and focusing on the specific cultural meanings and critiques enabled by the close examination of particular performances, this essay explores the possibility that the performances of early modern marrying subjects might challenge the institution of marriage in a variety of ways. Each couple's marriage is a "doing" as well as a "thing done"; and, as such, each couple's marriage opens patriarchal gender ideologies to re-signification by the couple and re-examination by audiences. (5) The marriage of Elizabeth and Lord Compton, for example, does not smoothly induct them into a world where children obey their elders or where marriage merely reinforces social endogamy. Thus while rituals such as weddings are often understood as a ceremonial interpellation into a patriarchal society, in practice they reveal that even an avowedly patriarchal society is riddled with ideological fissures. In the example above, the presence of these different investments is highlighted by the intrigue and secrecy accompanying what was often, although not here, a public ceremony--the wedding itself. Because Elizabeth was "smuggled" out of the house and married without her father's permission, this enactment of marriage draws our attention to conflicts over choice, emotion, and status more explicitly than a more typical and public ceremony, approved of and attended by family and community, may have.

While I maintain that cultural enactments are a valuable site to examine how performing marriage allows for re-signification. I focus primarily on dramatic enactments because they call attention to their re-signification in ways cultural performances may not. Each performance of wooing and marriage on the stage is a reiteration of cultural performances off the stage and thus subject to those same conflicting interests. Yet because drama cites and re-cites culture, it inevitably revisits the ideological cruxes and fissures made visible in "real" weddings, often framing them in ways "real" weddings do not. For example, a wedding in drama is already in some way a performance within a performance, calling attention to itself as a cultural ceremony re-presented within a theatrical framework. And that theatrical framework has layers of its own: each wedding ritual performed in a play can be said to cite not only offstage weddings, but also the same wedding in other performances of that play, as well as weddings in other plays. Dramas such as The Shoemaker's Holiday thus set cultural performances in a rich web of self-conscious theatrical conventions and thereby highlight social conventions and ideological cruxes in ways even weddings such as Elizabeth and Lord Compton's cannot.