Reinventing Mastery: Training and Mutuality on the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract

“Reinventing Mastery: Training and Mutuality on the Early Modern English Stage” pairs early modern English prescriptive literature with drama to argue that the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Lyly take part in a broader cultural project of reinventing mastery. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a growing body of printed texts about the management of subordinates circulated widely in England. Interested in making training processes less burdensome for their audiences, these household manuals, humanist pedagogical treatises, and animal training manuals introduce mutuality and love overtly into descriptions of effective rule. They promote the cultivation of reciprocity between masters and subordinates as a practical means by which to ensure obedience. However, the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Lyly confound the pragmatic optimism of prescriptive texts, showing how mutuality can also work against masterly ends. Situating drama within the discourse of household conduct literature, the first chapter argues that Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour show masters who identify with their servants – and in this sense perform affective labor assigned to their inferiors in prescriptive texts – to be lacking in authority because of their desire for reciprocal affection. The second chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in the context of period horse-training manuals to argue that Shakespeare’s references to horsemanship in the play call Katharina’s performance of loving submission into question. Shakespeare conflates Petruchio’s success with that of a trickster horse-courser, asking the audience to be skeptical of subordinate performances, which are central to claims of mutuality among successful gentlemen masters. The third chapter uses pedagogical treatises to argue that John Lyly’s 1584 pedagogical drama, Galatea, depicts humanist methods of mastery as effective for cultivating love and inspiring labor in trainees, but imagines how this effectiveness can also work against normative social order. The two main lovers in the play, Galatea and Phillida, while engaging with one another properly and successfully according to the precepts of pedagogical treatises, inadvertently work against their society’s hierarchies by selecting one another, rather than a suitable male master, as their tutor. In this sense, they use subordinate love to affirm their own systems of value. Using the discourse of benevolent rule established in the previous chapters, the fourth chapter reads The Tempest for how it condenses the training discourses of the previous chapters in the character of Caliban, grafting early colonial ideology onto the logic of training. It critiques Prospero’s mastery while simultaneously eliding the injustice of Caliban’s initial subordination to him. This chapter turns back to the ways in which mutuality, despite its difficulties, nonetheless works hard to secure hierarchical systems and masterly authority. Largely cynical about the functions of love and reciprocity across differences in social status, these plays encourage readers to view with skepticism the claims of prescriptive texts. This project intervenes in animal studies by cautioning against seeing all blurriness across species boundaries as indicative of progressive thinking in the period. Finally, it argues that mutuality’s integral role in the establishment of mastery, made apparent in references to training on the early modern English stage, demands that we resist any easy conflation of mutuality with equality, love with friendship, and submission with conformity in the past as well as the present.