Gorboduc as a Tragic Discovery of "Feudalism"

Abstract

Renaissance literary studies have long depended on the master narrative of an "early modern" transition from "feudalism" to "capitalism": from a conglomeration of land-based, militarized, and politicized households to a nation of privatized households governed by a centralized "state." Like all such narratives, this one is a fiction, a questionable way of organizing disparate facts of social change and historical difference. 1 Yet still not completely explored is the extent to which the modern fiction takes its cue from discourses that thrived during the putative period of transition itself. True, historians of historiography have discussed the extent to which narratives of the decline of what we call "feudalism," if not the rise of a "market economy," may be attributed to Jacobean and even Elizabethan antiquaries. 2 But I want to suggest that this early modern sense of transition extends beyond the purview of the Jacobean antiquaries who introduced the word "feudal" into English, or of their late Elizabethan predecessors who may have had some concept, avant la lettre, of what we might call a "feudal" system of governing and householding. Early modern fictions of the decline of such a system occurred where fiction thrived most notoriously: in the theater--in plays staged in the great monarchical and aristocratic institutions that constituted the legacy of medieval domestic government during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, these fictions seem to predate the historiographical narrative of things "feudal" that was born in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and that developed into the full-fledged theory of a "feudal" social system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Doubtless, such precocious theatrical remembrances of "feudal" householding were not the primary purpose of early modern [End Page 199] playwrights; they were by-products of theatrical efforts to come to terms with immediate problems and crises. But even as accidents, they suggest important connections between early modern constructions of historical difference and the Elizabethan stage, along with its generic innovations and its complex and conflicting constructions of gender, authority, and ownership.