Reviewed by: A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London by Scott Oldenburg Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (bio) A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London Scott Oldenburg Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. vii + 275 pp. $99.95 cloth. William Muggins is far from a canonical poet, and Scott Oldenburg's absorbing study of his life and work serves as a powerful argument for the value of investigating obscure authors and marginal texts. A weaver by trade, Muggins authored a 1603 printed pamphlet called London's Mourning Garment, comprised of a 679-line elegiac poem about plague-time London, a prose prayer, and a list of fatalities by parish for four months in 1603. Oldenburg ends the book with a short profile of one of Muggins's early readers, a soldier living during the Great Plague of 1665–1666, and notes that this reader must have found comfort in Muggins's pamphlet despite medical and social advances since the early seventeenth century. Little did Oldenburg know how relevant a work written in quarantine during a time of widespread illness would be once again in 2020. Limited evidence makes Oldenburg hesitant to call A Weaver-Poet and the Plague a biography. Instead, he considers it to be "part literary criticism, part microhistory" (38). It indeed attends to the micro: one little-known writer, one short text, and one brief period of time (1595-1603). Yet the book uses its narrow focus to cover much broader terrain, offering important insights into the lives of craftsmen, early modern London, a radically Protestant parish, lived experiences during the plague, and the middling sort. For Oldenburg, Muggins is only one example of a class of writers he calls "weaver-poets" (15) including John Careless and Thomas Deloney. He argues that the early moderns associated weaving with poetry and weavers with poverty and zealous Protestantism, making Muggins and other weavers uniquely appropriate spokesmen for social reform. Oldenburg's introduction includes a helpful section on methodology that could serve as a model for future scholars interested in uncovering less-documented lives. Oldenburg uses parish records, wills, records of the lay subsidy, and records of the Company of Weavers to track the activities of Muggins and those in his networks. One particularly interesting section in the introduction analyzes available evidence to ascertain what Muggins might have read. At several moments in the book, Oldenburg discusses not only what he has found, but also what has been lost and what the archives do not reveal. Each of the book's chapters identifies one element of Muggins's life that [End Page 216] offers important context for London's Mourning Garment. While Oldenburg guides readers through these four readings of the poem, the book's structure implicitly claims that London's Mourning Garment is rich with interpretive possibilities. The first chapter argues that Muggins's brief time in prison informed the poem's class consciousness. Together with fourteen other dissatisfied silk-weavers, Muggins petitioned for greater enforcement of the company's ordinances in 1595. These men's complaints primarily targeted the influx of immigrant weavers, whom they claimed were compromising the company's integrity. The petitioners presented their document to the ministers of the French and Dutch churches, who took offense. In response, the mayor of London had Muggins and his co-petitioners arrested. I would have liked Oldenburg to analyze further the petition's "animosity toward strangers" (70)—a xenophobia he does not find in London's Mourning Garment—but I appreciate how clearly he describes the livery company's history and the divisions between its leaders and rank-and-file members. The next two chapters move to the social bonds and personal tragedy that underpin Muggins's poem. Chapter two examines social issues in Muggins's neighborhood around the time he composed London's Mourning Garment, including childbirth, mortality rates, and debt. Chapter three explores Muggins's personal experiences with grief. Three of his children and three of his apprentices died between 1598 and 1603. These histories are interspersed with close reading of the poem, which Oldenburg interprets as semi-autobiographical. The book's fourth...
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