“Would I Were in an Alehouse in London!”: The Rhetoric of Drink in the Henriad

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article approaches the trope of the alehouse as a central social space in the negotiation of transitional and transformational early modern class relations, arguing that the metonymic representation of plebian drinking culture functions as an effort by state and moral reformers to delimit and maintain class boundaries. Drawing from Kenneth Burke’s influential formulation of metonymy as a mechanism of conceptual reduction, the paper will show how the alehouse metonymy enabled an ideologically reductive depiction of the lower classes. Workers and the poor were caricaturized through anti-drinking rhetoric, reduced to immoral degenerates and criminals. However, the paper will show that this metonymic trope was highly unstable and open to interpretive contestation. Shakespeare’s Henriad, in particular, complicates the reductive rhetoric in the process of dramatizing it in the figure of Falstaff and his companions. Whether intentionally or not, the plays humanize the lower-class patrons who populate the Boar’s Head scene, drawing out the complex socioeconomic reality underpinning class circumstances. In particular, these plays tap into a nostalgic moral economy grounded in feudal social relations and expectations.