Commodity and Commonwealth in Gammer Gurton's Needle

Abstract

Though Gammer Gurton's Needle (1550-53) is frequently anthologized and routinely taught in surveys of nonShakespearean drama, it has received comparatively little critical attention. 1 The reasons for this neglect are not difficult to intuit: the play is ostentatiously trivial at the level of plot (a needle is lost, lamented, and found), and its comic style is crude and scatological.2 Written for the entertainment of students at Christ's College in Cambridge, the play is self-evidently schoolboy's farce, and has typically been dismissed as a college-man's indulgent laugh at unlearned country folk.3 Perhaps because the play's slapstick charm seems timeless, however, more topical aspects of the farce have gone unnoticed. In particular, the basic elements of the play's story-poverty, unruly vagabondage, clerical incompetence, and the greedy hankering after trifling commodities-are also ubiquitous social concerns provoked by the economic crisis of the 1540s and '50s.4 The symptoms of this mid-Tudor crisis were self-evident to anxious contemporaries. Inflation-already problem throughout the early sixteenth century-accelerated to an intolerable degree. Unprecedented increases in poverty and vagrancy challenged traditional attitudes toward both neediness and its relief, calling into question the ideals of social reciprocity with which contemporaries understood the relationship between rich and poor.5 Peasant uprisings -and Kett's rebellion in particular-made the disorderliness of poverty inescapably vivid for anxious contemporaries. A large body of reform-minded writing from the pe-