'There's Meat and Money Too': Rich Widows and Allegories of Wealth in Jacobean City Comedy

Abstract

There's Meat and Money Too:Rich Widows and Allegories of Wealth in Jacobean City Comedy Elizabeth Hanson One of my favorite characters in the drama of early modern England is the rich mercer's widow Taffata in Lording Barry's city comedy Ram-Alley. Independently wealthy, in complete control of her household, endowed not only with sexual appetites but with the power to gratify them, and despite all this, never the subject of moral censure, Taffata seems to be on permanent holiday from early modern gender ideology. She first appears on a balcony with her maid, checking out passing men until she is sufficiently taken with one to drop her handkerchief, whereupon he is instantly smitten by her. But she quickly loses interest in him and seems bent on a socially advantageous marriage to an elderly courtier, Sir Oliver Smallshanks, only to throw him over at last for his bankrupt son, Will Smallshanks. It must be admitted that this outcome occurs only after she has been taken prisoner at sword point by Will, who informs her that her options are to marry him or to have her head cut off, after which he will kill himself because he would "rather dye / Then in a street live poore and lowsily."1 Yet what is remarkable about the scene is the way in which, despite the apparent coerciveness of the situation and Will's obviously mercenary motives, the power still seems to reside with Taffata. She gets what she wants, and Will's antics are represented as the necessary display of sexual potency which leads her to choose the "lusty lad / That winnes his widdow with his well drawne blade" (R, 2249-50) as Taffata affectionately calls her new husband, over an old man who, in his son's charitable words, "stinks at both ends" (R, 2214). Taffata is a favorite character of mine because she affords a pleasure rarely vouchsafed me by the drama of the period: I think it would be fun to be her. What's more, insofar as it is Taffata's choice that disposes the social order of the play's comic conclusion, she seems to me to hold out a utopian prospect, to shadow forth a world organized around women as powerful subjects of desire. [End Page 209] Thus it is with regret that I announce that this essay will argue that Taffata does not really represent a woman, at least not in quite the same way that Will Smallshanks represents a man. Rather, I want to suggest, she, and numerous characters like her in many other plays of the period—not just city comedy widows but also a character such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice—enjoy their extraordinary freedom and power because they are allegorical figures for wealth, survivals of morality plays and interludes in which money is frequently represented as a powerful woman. More generally, I want to explore the relationship, in the plays which use the rich widow figure, between two apparently antithetical mimetic modes, realism and allegory. My argument will be that the realism of city comedies like Ram-Alley, with its claim to show the actual texture of social life, is haunted by allegory with its implicit assertion that the literal level of representation stands for something else. If we must read these plays with attention to the historical position of women in the period, particularly with respect to the status of widows, we must also attend to representational traditions which urge upon us a hermeneutic of abstraction, a movement away from women as historical subjects and toward things which they can be made to signify. Any attempt to understand the way gender ideology functions in these plays must also consider the interplay of mimetic modes in their representation. In attending to the mimetic modes of these plays my intention is also to broach a larger theoretical question: in what ways can culture, understood as the material relations and ways of thinking and feeling which define a particular place and time and locate it in history, be present in a literary text? Over the last twenty years a critical consensus has been established that the purpose of explicating...