Shakespeare, Molly House Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Abstract

To please some Friends--and draw the Vulgar I. Local Constructions Literary and Cultural Authority In the early months 1716, after word leaked out from the rival play house at Drury Lane that Charles Johnson was at Work on The Cobler Preston, a two-act farcical afterpiece adapted from Shakespeare's Induction in The Taming the Shrew, Christopher Bullock, in an effort to upstage the playwright at Drury Lane, rushed to the stage Lincoln's Inn Fields his own farcical afterpiece, also based on the Induction from The Taming the Shrew, and also titled The Cobler Preston. James Spiller, the actor who portrayed Bullocks Christopher Sly character, may have helped Bullock pull off such a coup. According to George Akerby's pamphlet, Spiller's Jests (1729), Bullock received news Johnson's project through illicit means when Spiller picked the pocket William Pinkethman, an actor at the rival playhouse, thus obtaining a copy the lead role in Johnson's farce. (1) Akerby's account Spiller and the purloined playscript is widely held to be spurious, however, in part at least because other stories about Spiller--such as the claim that he delivered an epilogue while riding an elephant--remain unsubstantiated, but also because Bullocks farce bears little to no resemblance to Johnson's, which is predominantly concerned with the class and political aspirations early-eighteenth-century Jacobites. Bullocks farce makes no reference to the 1715 Jacobite uprising in Preston. Rather, Bullock uses his adaptation Shakespeare to ridicule the notion that men can tame their wives, burlesque companionate marital relations by suggesting that spousal affections can be cheaply bought and sold, and demystify dominant, heteronormative assumptions about sex, gender, and desire by employing a nearly all-male adult cast that replicates the same-sex subculture the early-eighteenth-century molly house. Bullocks Cobler not only burlesques, in typical farce-like fashion, traditional notions about marriage and sexuality, but it also embraces its status as a segment lower-class culture, unabashedly announcing its position in the marketplace when it explicitly states in its prologue that its aim is To please some Friends--and draw the Vulgar in, and suggesting, in its enthusiasm for that status, that lower-class culture is not, as cultural elitists would have us believe, a denigrated culture. (2) Building on Laurence Senelick's claim that, in order to ensure its own respectability, the eighteenth-century English stage gradually leached sexuality from its depiction sodomites, I argue that Bullocks farce equates heteronormative interests with elite culture and attacks them both. At the same time, Bullock explicitly attributes to Shakespeare an ownership interest in the intellectual property his text not in order to try to elevate the literary and cultural status the farce, but to convince the eighteenth-century theatergoing audience that he did not steal from his rival, Charles Johnson. Rather, Bullock claims in his preface, he made use of Shakespeare. (3) Instead relying on Shakespeare's literary and cultural authority to prop itself up, then, The Cobler Preston locates Shakespeare's literary authority in the popular and constructs his cultural authority against the heteronormative politics the elite and in line with the sexual identity and desires the molly house. In this instance, we can say that Shakespeare's literary and cultural authority expanded during the eighteenth century neither because his texts spoke to any sort universal human condition nor because they were necessarily appropriated by dominant nationalist interests, but rather through the local concerns with the politics sex, gender, and desire, as well as the questions about literary and cultural authority that his Shrew was used to address. II. Hussies, Whores, and Saucy Queens Bullocks hero, renamed Toby Guzzle, is a drunkard cobbler who is first seen muttering to himself while stumbling home after a night revelry. …