Previous articleNext article FreeThe Mechanics of Virtue: Quicksilver’s “Repentance,” the Test of the Audience, and Social Change in Eastward HoMaren L. DonleyMaren L. Donleyindependent scholar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAct 1, scene 1, of Eastward Ho, the early-seventeenth-century city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, presents the audience with a moral binary between acceptable and unacceptable business practices. As William Touchstone, a goldsmith, and Francis Quicksilver, his gentle-born apprentice, discuss business and ethics, Touchstone works diligently to establish a difference in the conduct of the two men. Given that the play opens with Touchstone’s insistence that there is a fundamental difference in the way he and Quicksilver do business, and further, a morally right way to conduct business, it is perhaps small wonder that most criticism on Eastward Ho follows what appears to be the play’s lead: it acknowledges the economic and moral binary Touchstone sets forth and explores the tensions between legitimate and illegitimate business practices through those apparent in the relationship between Touchstone and Quicksilver.1This critical focus, however, has had the effect of obscuring the play’s fundamental interest in satirizing how the norms of Touchstone’s merchant community—and by extension those of its audience—are established and maintained. In exploring this question, Eastward Ho suggests a complex and evolving relationship among the economic, social, and religious practices that help constitute merchant subjects. It plays at presenting Quicksilver as a model for emulation and emphasizes theater’s role in effecting social change. After Quicksilver’s arrest for felony theft from Touchstone, his successful redemption back into his apprenticeship and the merchant community depends on his deployment of specifically theatrical “skill.” Quicksilver’s repentance for his economic sins against his master takes the form of a publicly performed repentance ballad and procession through Cheapside streets, reminiscent, Quicksilver claims, of the Lord Mayor’s inaugural pageant and progress. In his procession, Quicksilver presents himself as “a spectacle, or rather an example, to the children of Cheapside” (5.5.216–17),2 enacting in his description a cleansing transformation similar to that of the processing merchant who became London’s Lord Mayor. Through the satire on both performer and audience, merchant and customer, manifest in Quicksilver’s keen understanding of theatrical mechanisms and their effects, the play suggests to the audience its involvement in and complicity with economically interested identity-transforming theater and, consequently, ever-changing, ever-flexible social norms. By satirically exposing and then adopting the theatrics of merchant virtue, Quicksilver expands the range of practical referents for each merchant performance and emphasizes the importance of the audience in crediting merchant subjects and as a force in social change. As Quicksilver progresses through Cheapside, and across the stage, he becomes the new merchant subject—the product of effective theatrical performances inseparable from evolving economic and religious practices.I. Eastward Ho establishes its central plot conflicts (1.1.1–175), in part, through allegorical reference to the pseudo-science of alchemy. In its opening scene, we meet Touchstone, the self-righteous goldsmith and apparent moral exemplar; Golding (gold), Touchstone’s gentle-born and ideally virtuous apprentice; and Quicksilver (mercury), Touchstone’s gentle-born and morally shifty apprentice, who constantly looks for opportunities to make money. From the very beginning of the play, the allegory and the relative values within it appear secure: Touchstone is, as his name implies, the play’s moral and ethical touchstone; Golding is the ideal substance; and Quicksilver has potential, but may never really amount to anything. The story of the play will apparently turn on the issue of Quicksilver’s transformation into an acceptable substance, or social being. However, as quickly as the play establishes its allegory and our expectations, it complicates the allegory and the lessons that might follow from it. The opening conversation between Touchstone and Quicksilver demonstrates the similarities between the men, rendering useless the allegorical identities indicated by their names. The alchemy the play presents concerns the transformation of Quicksilver into gold, or a Golding-type, only as part of its larger concern with exposing and exploring the myriad theatrical processes of creating social and economic exemplars.3 The question for the play is not really how to transform Quicksilver into an ideal Golding, as defined by Touchstone. Rather, the play engages the theatrical processes of identity creation to explore how social norms change, thus complicating the very idea of a singular, constant touchstone for moral and economic behavior.Quicksilver’s opening conversation with Touchstone exposes the similarities between the two men and begins to erode Touchstone’s position as the play’s moral and economic exemplar. Quicksilver insists that clipping coins and lending money at interest to supply the “humours” of gentlemen is no different morally than Touchstone’s (never fully explained) daily business practices, and imagines the two as interdependent parts of the same economic process (1.1.38–40). He exposes the manipulations behind the creation of profits to suggest that the customer never receives all of that for which he pays (presenting deceit in trade as a natural part of business) and justifies his moneylending and coin clipping as legitimate activities within the paradigm he sets forth.4In Touchstone’s self-righteous response, he justifies his own practices and attempts to establish the difference between acceptable and unacceptable commerce. Touchstone distances himself from Quicksilver’s descriptions of business when he objects that he did not gain his wealth through the taverns, or “by exchanging of gold” (1.1.53–54). However, Touchstone is a goldsmith: his business presumably consists of (ex)changing raw gold and silver into hollow ware, plate, and articles of jewelry and then exchanging these products for profit in the form of money. Although Touchstone undoubtedly refers to Quicksilver’s usury and coin clipping in his rejection and denial of exchanging gold as a profit-making mechanism, his refusal to articulate how his profit is made is significant for (and I would argue, necessary to) the establishment and performance of his moral and economic identity.Touchstone works hard to establish his difference from Quicksilver but fails to distinguish effectively between them because he neglects to specify exactly how his business activities generate profits. Styling himself a virtuous exemplar, Touchstone recalls that he “hired [himself] a little shop, bought low, took small gain, kept no debt book” (1.1.54–56). He describes some of his past activities, but not the actual mechanism of profit generation in either the past or the present. In addition, he does not effectively counter Quicksilver’s assertion that merchants make money feeding and perpetuating the “humours” (40) of their customers.5 Touchstone provides no reference point for what it means to buy “low,” or any limit to that which constitutes “small gain,” and even fails to specify on what products he took, and presumably still takes, “small gain.” Instead, Touchstone presents his success as natural in a way entirely different from Quicksilver’s naturalized deceit in and as trade. To end his rebuttal to Quicksilver, Touchstone notes, “and I grew up, and, I praise Providence, I bear my brows now as high as the best of my neighbours” (1.1.66–68). The natural process of aging, the gradual (and passive) arising of Touchstone’s current economic and social situation, and the mysterious workings of Providence substitute for a discussion of actual business practices and for the extensive knowledge required to generate profit in the Jacobean goldsmith’s trade.6 In Touchstone’s grand narrative, he elides the capital that funds his rise in status and wealth, his own general business savvy, and his dependence on the labor of apprentices, emphasizing instead his effective and ongoing performance of economic and social success.7When Touchstone describes how he has made money, maxims that signify and reinforce a communal identity substitute for the mechanisms of profit generation. Fleming observes, “the proverb is a community resource. It has no single origin: wherever it appears, it seems to have ‘fallen from the sky.’”8 This communal origin naturalizes the speech and its implicit morality as social and cultural orthodoxy, enabling, in Touchstone’s case, the reproduction of a community in which exploitation of others for one’s personal gain hides behind obfuscating social norms and a performance of economic and moral virtue.9 Touchstone’s maxims ensure that he never has to see himself as a greedy, self-interested capitalist. Quicksilver, in contrast to Touchstone, is the consummate, self-aware capitalist. He unabashedly breeds money from money—as in his descriptions of his business practices and also his processes for sweating coins (removing some of the metal by washing them in acid)—and overtly declares his dependence upon the exploitation of others in trade.10 The tension that arises between Quicksilver and Touchstone stems from disparate visions of economic and social systems, where Touchstone misrepresents the nature of his economic practices and relations, and Quicksilver makes uncomfortably explicit the exploitations involved in Touchstone’s economic rise and continued profit.11Quicksilver’s apparent departure from Touchstone’s model moral performance demonstrates, according to Touchstone and numerous literary critics, failure to learn his social role in an essentially humanist pedagogical system. The goal of the education masters provided was to bring children into “willing bondage, teaching them self-control and loving obedience to parents, monarch, the law, and the norms of civil society.”12 Touchstone desires to make his apprentices into versions of himself, into men who have internalized his moralistic sentences as rules for living.13 Quicksilver’s substitution of lines from plays for more pedagogically appropriate answers in the play’s opening acts seems to indicate that the apprentice fails the most basic humanist test of understanding—the ability to repeat the lesson in response to prompts.14 However, in responding to Touchstone and Golding with theater, Quicksilver demonstrates his understanding that Touchstone’s lessons are less about morality than they are about the performance of morality. Becoming like Touchstone involves acquiring superior performance skills, not the exemplary economic scruples seemingly indicated in Touchstone’s sentences.Quicksilver is not the manifestation of a failed apprenticeship, but rather a product of effective instruction. The play opens in the space of “social conversion” identified by Janelle Jenstad, and Quicksilver, the gentleman’s son, has clearly learned the Jacobean goldsmith’s trade from someone.15 Interestingly, though, Quicksilver does not seem to have learned how to make items of jewelry or plate. Instead, he has mastered his craft’s other methods for generating profit. This demonstrated mastery makes him rather more like Touchstone, not less: the master never discusses or displays his craft skills in Eastward Ho. In addition, the play repeatedly emphasizes not Quicksilver’s independence from his larger political, social, and economic communities, but, as with Touchstone, his dependence upon them and his recognizably proper performance of various roles as a means to economic and social success. Quicksilver’s business practices are intimately related to Touchstone’s and may even derive from them. 16The issue in the play is that Quicksilver has apparently not learned the social language of his new profession: for Touchstone, Quicksilver is too crass and open in his discussion of his business and the methods of generating profit. This openness on Quicksilver’s part does not indicate his failure to learn from Touchstone. Rather, in a nod to the autonomy eventually accorded the well-trained humanist subject, Eastward Ho presents the process of social change through Quicksilver’s modified imitation of Touchstone’s model.17 As the apprentice learns and performs the language of his master, he alters its meaning for both himself and the play’s audience. Quicksilver’s language and his virtuous social performance explicitly connect to his profit-generating economic practices: his moral self-presentations signify interested economic dealings, even as these performances also serve as the cleansing cover for self-interested practice. In Eastward Ho, Quicksilver manipulates Touchstone’s models of moral performance to become a new, socially current thing—the admittedly and ostentatiously economically self-interested and publicly virtuous merchant subject.II. The play’s interest in the theatrical mechanisms of successful social and economic interaction is nowhere more apparent than in Quicksilver’s repentance. In it, Quicksilver uses established connections between economics and religion to perform a socially acceptable merchant identity and to alter what constitutes that particular way of being in the world. The public manifestation of his repentance, Quicksilver’s “Repentance” takes as its topic his life, his apparent regret for his behavior toward Touchstone, and his supposed neglect of his moral and economic education under Touchstone’s tutelage. In it, Quicksilver acknowledges that part of the purpose of his apprenticeship was to become of one “mind” with Touchstone, presenting Touchstone’s maxims (not plate) as that which he was to “work upon” in fashioning his sociopolitical identity (5.5.55–56). Quicksilver presents Touchstone’s maxims as worthy material, of which he made bad morality—“I knew not what” (5.5.57)—and thus began his descent into prodigality and away from the merchant community. Quicksilver expresses a wish that Touchstone will make him “current”—no longer Quicksilver, but silver (5.5.88)—and asks, in effect, to be reinstated and to have Touchstone try, once again, to make him a moral member of the merchant class. To be successful in trades, gentle apprentices had to learn to “debase themselves—and … to do so believably”: they had to learn a new class identity and be convincing in its public performance.18 In the “Repentance,” Quicksilver presents himself as ready to learn.Quicksilver’s “Repentance” is effective: Touchstone is “ravished” on hearing it and agrees to take Quicksilver back as an apprentice. He believes the song demonstrates that Quicksilver has become “penitent” and embraces him, styling himself Quicksilver’s “father and friend” (5.5.131, 136–37). The play encourages audience acceptance of this happy ending (the prodigal son/apprentice come home), and, true to the generic form of comedy, the ending seems to promise social reproduction without significant deviation or difference.However, a critical reading of Quicksilver’s “Repentance” demonstrates that the play’s seemingly traditional (one might even say biblical) ending to the story of a wayward young man does not merely reproduce the merchant society of the play’s opening. Instead, Quicksilver’s very public, effective performance of repentance paradoxically calls into question the very idea of his waywardness and provides insight into the play’s exploration of theater—successful, profitable imitation—as integral to the formation and maintenance of the merchant subject and a force in social change.The first thing to observe about Quicksilver’s “Repentance” is that it is a calculated performance: Quicksilver makes the most of his prison “stage” and its available costumes and props, he is not “curious to anybody,” and “would that all the world should take knowledge of his repentance” (5.5.11, 12–13).19 Quicksilver is prodigal even in his repentance and might be “hoarse with the often repeating of it” (5.5.17). Quicksilver rehearses his “Repentance” so that it will “appear the heartier, and the more unfeigned” (5.5.36), and this opens the possibility of its “true” feigned nature, one that rehearsal and repetition mask effectively.20 The potentially fraudulent, or counterfeit, nature of the repentance is further demonstrated in Quicksilver’s actual lack of apology. Nowhere in the course of the song does he apologize, regardless of what his apology on behalf of Sir Petronel, “who now is sorry for the same” (5.5.72), leads a listener to believe. In fact, Quicksilver’s easy substitution of Petronel’s apology for his own mimics an age-old merchant’s trick of substituting one commodity for another and may be a theatrical version of the “cunning secondings” (1.1.42)—or lesser quality goods—Quicksilver discusses as a legitimate means of generating profit at the beginning of the play.In further recognition of the contrived nature of the song and the self in it, Quicksilver acknowledges that a repentance ballad by a criminal named Mannington was the model for “my project for my invention” (5.5.96–7). In the “Repentance,” Quicksilver essentially invents himself, a repentant self, after a new humanist model, while simultaneously presenting himself as a model for emulation. The distinctions among his invention of himself, his imitation of another’s invention, and stage acting disintegrate to such an extent that it is impossible to credit fully Quicksilver’s presentation of his acquisition of virtue, implicitly defined through Touchstone’s merchant values. In his song, Quicksilver expresses a desire to cut off the horse-head of Sin,And leave his body in the dustOf Sin’s highway and bogs of Lust,Whereby I may take Virtue’s purse,And live with her for better, for worse.(5.5.104–9)He expresses his eventual possession of virtue and economic resources through a dual metaphor of marriage and highway robbery in which he comes to possess “Virtue’s purse.”21 Virtue’s purse functions metonymically for virtue, indicating that Quicksilver imagines even virtue as capital one can possess and redeploy “for better, for worse.” In the process of virtue’s acquisition and redeployment, the virtue Quicksilver dispenses after the death of sin is not his own and does not originate with him. It is, instead, a valuable social currency he obtains by somewhat dubious means and uses to economic advantage—“for better”—but which does not transform his fundamental character. In presenting virtue as useful capital, Quicksilver gestures toward the possibility of his virtue as counterfeit and the impossibility of distinguishing between the real and the counterfeit when both prove current and effective. He suggests that the “visible signs of trustworthiness”—used by early modern men and women to establish creditworthiness—are simply signs, or shows performed to profitable effect, and that they circulate independent of any moral connection with the person who deploys them.22Quicksilver’s presentation of virtue’s acquisition and deployment critiques Touchstone’s method of rising in the world and his accompanying morality. Quicksilver gets his virtue, and the means to economic success, through metaphorical marriage and theft. His performance of virtue depends upon and emerges as a product of economic extractions. The boundary between symbolic and material capital is fluid for Quicksilver, and his newly acquired virtue is symbolic capital that, unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of this form of capital, never “conceals the fact that it originates in ‘material’ forms of capital”:23 virtue and her purse are inextricably related. Quicksilver’s formulation of symbolic capital’s origins affords a way of reading Touchstone’s very public virtue as the product of economic exchanges (some more moral than others). Touchstone’s sentences, as theatrical expressions and manifestations of virtue, demonstrate his economic capital, result from its accrual, and serve as a cover for continued acquisition. It is specifically “for want of plate” that Touchstone decorates his shop with “good wholesome thrifty sentences” (1.1.56–59). His language functions both as a substitute for plate, decorating the shop instead of silver and gold wares, and as a mysterious and apparently efficacious means to the satisfaction of his desire for plate—as something he does or performs in order to obtain plate. The citation and continued performance of proper language—where proper language signifies moral virtue and stands in for profitable economic conduct—appears to guarantee economic success. Merchant success in the play is the product of effective theatrics: Quicksilver’s “flamboyant theatricality”—his quotation of lines from plays and his admitted dependence on Mannington’s ballad—differs from Touchstone’s public presentation and his own dependence on prior texts only in Quicksilver’s degree of self-awareness as an interested performer.24The “Repentance” stages the new, virtuous Quicksilver and his repentance as products to be consumed by the listening audience. Touchstone’s reception of Quicksilver’s performance demonstrates simultaneously the transformative power of effective theater and the currency of the counterfeit in a system where truth is relative. Touchstone says, punning on Quicksilver’s name, “thou hast eat into my breast, Quicksilver, with the drops of thy sorrow, and killed the desperate opinion I had of thy reclaim” (5.5.137–40). This admission of substantive change in response to a theatrical performance—expressed through the metaphor of mercury’s corrosive power—reveals Touchstone as the ineffective moral touchstone he’s been throughout the play. Moreover, the admission demonstrates that Touchstone is not, in fact, an inert touchstone, but rather himself composed of corruptible, and perhaps corrupt, metal. Touchstone cannot distinguish the genuine from that merely functioning as current. While this is highly ironic given his profession, it also provides an implicit critique of the authority underlying his merchant morality and self-performance: virtue is relative to audience perception, not itself an absolute standard. The touchstone is not really a touchstone. In Quicksilver’s request, “Touchstone, touch me still, / And make me current by thy skill” (5.5.87–88), he seeks not an inner transformation, or even to be made silver, but a reassessment of himself as current by Touchstone and the larger community.25 His request recaps his earlier, uncontested assertion that what it takes to be a “good member of the City” is to be “well considered” (1.1.36–37). Quicksilver’s manipulation of social and economic currency exposes the relativity and theatricality of the authority guaranteeing and defining the merchant subject. I discuss this in more detail below with regard to the theatrical transformation of merchants into London’s Lord Mayor. For now, it is sufficient to note that Quicksilver’s performance stimulates change in Touchstone and illustrates how well Quicksilver already performs the merchant theatrics he ostensibly seeks to (re)learn from his master.After hearing Quicksilver’s “Repentance,” Touchstone’s language changes, demonstrating his transformation: not once after Quicksilver’s songs does Touchstone produce his trademark “Work upon that, now,” nor does he sprinkle his conversation with moralistic platitudes. When Touchstone says, “speak no more; all former passages are forgotten, and here my word shall release you” (5.5.144–5), this performative word of release and reincorporation effaces past conflicts and arguments.26 However, in this gesture, Touchstone also effaces the “good wholesome thrifty sentences” (1.1.57) that comprise his own “passages,” or remarks and observations, in the play.27 And, since Touchstone’s “very being is bound up and expressed in his mantra,” then in forgetting “all former passages,” Touchstone also loses a constituent piece of his own identity.28 The process of redeeming Quicksilver, a theatrical process of interaction between performer and audience, opens space for a new morality to emerge and for new performances of the self in response and relation to it. Ingram argues that Eastward Ho affirms a “community of performance” and that Quicksilver “perform[s] [his] way back in as a sign that [he] will rejoin the community.”29 My argument is that Quicksilver’s successful performance—his demonstrated mastery of the social language—helps create a community different from the one he left and demonstrates the processes through which social norms change.Quicksilver clearly understands the transformative power of theater. He expresses the desire to progress in his repentance through the streets of Cheapside as a “spectacle, or rather an example” (5.5.216). The implied difference between, and the progression in, the two forms of self-(re)presentation seems important; otherwise, it would be unnecessary to add “example” as a revision of the desire to be a spectacle—to cleanse morally the notion of spectacle and recast it as virtuous example. However, it is precisely the conflation of the two representations in Quicksilver that furthers the satirical problem of the play. In being an example, he functions as a spectacle, and, as antitheatrical texts of the period argue, vice versa.30 Remembering that one of the benefits of virtuous success is, according to Touchstone, to have “thy deeds played i’ thy lifetime” (4.2.87), one cannot help but acknowledge that Quicksilver manages to accomplish this. Not only are Quicksilver’s deeds represented—in other inmates’ amplified and exaggerated rehearsal of them—but he represents them, both in his “Repentance” and in his progress through Cheapside streets. In his fashioning of himself, Quicksilver plays himself in a performance that, according to the norms of the community, seems to emphasize and guarantee the virtuous self presented in it regardless of the reality of Quicksilver’s virtue (or lack thereof). The play’s satire consists, in part, of pointing out how the audience’s acceptance of the interpretive frame results in redefinitions of what constitutes moral and economic exemplarity: the performance is all.Howard argues that in contrast to the thrifty values of Touchstone, and the economic force of the London mercantile community manifest in the Lord Mayor’s pageant, Quicksilver’s performance “upholds the credit of actors and of the actorly opportunists of London’s performative culture.”31 While I in no way disagree with her assessment of Quicksilver, the play specifically does not separate moral virtue, economic might, and theatrical prowess: it refuses to distinguish Quicksilver’s performances and his credit from those of Touchstone and the Lord Mayor. This lack of distinction is part of the play’s point. Quicksilver’s epilogue explicitly connects economically interested theatrical performance and the mercantile communities of both Touchstone and the play’s audience. In the closing lines of the play, Quicksilver clarifies merchants’ dependence on effective performance and explores the audience’s role in creating both social change and the new merchant subject. As Quicksilver begins his Cheapside progress, he observes that “the multitude are gathered together to view our coming” (epilogue, 1–2) in reference both to those in Cheapside who will view him as an example and to those who compose the current audience for Eastward Ho. Quicksilver then observes that he will be such a draw that the streets and the fronts of houses will be stuffed with people, “as on the solemn day of the Pageant!” (epilogue, 5–6). Quicksilver’s penitent performance draws a crowd similar, if not identical, to that drawn by London’s Lord Mayor and the annual October 29th pageant celebrating his election. In order to understand how this comparison satirically suggests theater’s ability to sanitize economic self-interest, and how Eastward Ho exposes the mechanics of merchants’ moral self-representations to alter the meaning of these performances, it is important to know something about Lord Mayor shows.Perhaps the most important point is that the Lord Mayor’s pageant was a public, spectacular opportunity for London’s powerful merchants to present themselves to one another and the city’s populace.32 Leinwand deftly characterizes the pageant as “an elaborate and costly exercise in legitimation and back-slapping” and notes that these widely attended shows had two distinct audiences. For the Lord Mayor and his entourage, there was the pageant organized by members of the mayor’s company, full of themes and allegories emphasizing merchant virtue and the new mayor’s obligations to the city. For the masses, those who turned out at their windows and in the streets, there was the spectacle associated with the pageant. Only the Lord Mayor and his entourage would have heard the unfolding allegories and their justifications of merchant rule (though these allegories were often available in print after the performance). The pageants promoted “a mirror for magistrates and a mercantilist mythos”—the two sometimes shading into one another.33In equating Quicksilver’s progress and the Lord Mayor’s pageant, Eastward Ho plays with the notion of the virtuous Lord Mayor—the chief figure in Touchstone’s political community and that of the play’s audience—as a creation of theater in a system where the theater itself is predicated on collective creations.34 Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth (1613), the spectacular pageant celebrat