My method and manner of proceeding brought many things to my minde, which otherwise might have slipped by. For by method sundry and severall points appertaining to one matter are drawne forth, as in a chaine one linke draweth up another…. As method is an helpe to Invention, so also to retention. It is as the thread or wier whereon pearles are put, which keepeth them from scattering … In which respects method is fitly stiled the Mother of the Minde, and Mistresse of Memorie. If you well marke the order and dependence of points one upon another, you will finde as great an helpe in conceiving and remembring them, as I did in inventing and disposing them. (sigs. ❡4v–A1r)
Just as the husband brings in goods, which the wife is charged to keep, so too Gouge here imparts the pearls of knowledge to be internalized by the wife. Female subjectivity itself becomes a form of internalized oeconomy. To be a good housekeeper, she must re-collect or internalize via memory the objects she is charged with keeping, and the places in which they are kept, so that she always knows where they are and has them ready to hand. The woman who orders her household goods, and thereby “keep[s] them from scattering,” must become the “Mistresse of Memorie,” who keeps her disciplined thoughts from scattering.107
Yet the threat of the household’s goods “slipping” away or “scattering” through the wife’s inattention or disobedience lurks just at the threshold of Gouge’s doctrine of domestic discipline and begins to surface in his description of the vices that correspond to the virtues of wifely self-discipline. In such cases, he says, a wife “take[s] on her to doe what she list, whether her husband will or no, either not willing that he should know what she doth, or not caring though it be against his minde and will” (312); as an example, he offers the following:
Such as privily take money out of their husbands closets, counters, or other like places where he laieth it, never telling him of it, nor willing that he should know it: likewise such as after the like manner take ware out of the shop, corne out of the garner, sheepe out of the stocke, or any other goods to sell and make money of: or to give away, or otherwise to use so as their husbands shall never know…. Such wives herein sinne heinously…. They shew themselves no better then pilfering theeves thereby. All that can be justly and truly said for their right in the common goods, cannot defend them from the guilt of theft: they are the more dangerous by how much the more they are trusted, and lesse suspected. (312)
Insofar as female subjectivity was defined as a mode of self-discipline, or self-oeconomy, it carried the threat of a “more dangerous” form of keeping. The mind of the housewife is likened to the privy places or locked chests in which wives like Margaret Phillips keep or withhold goods from their husbands. The housewife’s role as keeper of household stuff, in instituting a new mode of female subjection, likewise gave rise to new modes of resistance as well.
My analysis here of the shifting relations between disciplinary regimes, legal systems, political economy, and female subjectivity and subjection is predicated on the belief that Foucaultian, materialist, and feminist frameworks may profitably supplement one another in a relation of “mutually critical complementarity.”108 It is my hope that the wedding of these theoretical paradigms will help to account for the complex forms of coercive self-discipline governing women’s property relations with the rise of capitalism, while at the same time allowing for diverse forms of female agency, appropriation, and resistance, and thereby, perhaps, provide a historical and theoretical ground on which to rewrite the “unhappy marriage” of historical materialist and feminist criticism.
Chapter 2
Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew
Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has frequently noted that the play’s novel taming strategy marks a departure from traditional shrew-taming tales. Unlike his predecessors, Petruchio does not use force to tame Kate; he does not simply beat his wife into submission.1 Little attention has been paid, however, to the historical implications of the play’s unorthodox methodology, which is conceived in specifically economic terms: “I am he am born to tame you, Kate,” Petruchio summarily declares, “And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1. 269–71). Petruchio likens Kate’s planned domestication to a domestication of the emergent commodity form itself, whose name within the play is identical to the naming of the shrew. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cates are “provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production).” The term is an aphetic form of acate, which derives from the Old French achat, meaning “purchase.” Cates are thus by definition exchange-values—commodities properly speaking—as opposed to mere use-values, or objects of home production.2
In order to grasp the historical implications of The Shrew’s unorthodox methodology, and of the economic terms Shakespeare employs to shape its novel taming strategy, we must first situate more precisely the form of its departure from previous shrew-taming tales. For what differentiates The Taming of the Shrew from its precursors is not so much a concern with domestic economy—which has always been a central preoccupation of shrew-taming literature—but rather a shift in modes of production and thus in the very terms through which domestic economy is conceived. The coordinates of this shift are contained within the term cates itself, which, in distinguishing goods that are purchased from those that are produced within and for the home, may be said to map the historical shift from domestic use-value production to production for the market.
I
Prior to Shakespeare’s play, shrews were typically portrayed as reluctant producers within the household economy, high-born wives who refused to engage in the forms of domestic labor expected of them by their humble, tradesmen husbands. In the ballad “The Wife Wrapped in a Wether’s Skin,” for example, the shrew refuses to brew, bake, wash, card, or spin on account of her “gentle kin” and delicate complexion:
There was a wee cooper who lived in Fife,
Nickety, nackity, noo, noo, noo
And he has gotten a gentle wife …
Alane, quo Rushety, roue, roue, roue
She wadna bake, nor she wadna brew,
For the spoiling o her comely hue.
She wadna card, nor she wadna spin,
For the shaming o her gentle kin.
She wadna wash, nor she wadna wring,
For the spoiling o her gouden ring.3
The object of the tale was simply to put the shrew to work, to restore her (frequently through some gruesome form of punishment)4 to her proper, productive place within the household economy. When the cooper from Fife, who cannot beat his ungentle wife on account of her gentle kin, cleverly wraps her in a wether’s skin and tames her by beating the hide instead, the shrew promises: “Oh, I will bake, and I will brew, / And never mair think on my comely hue. / Oh, I will card, and I will, spin, / And never mair think on my gentle kin.”5 Within the tradition of shrew-taming literature prior to Shakespeare’s play, the housewife’s domestic responsibilities are broadly defined by a feudal economy based on household production, on the production of use-values for domestic consumption.6
As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, with the decline of the family as an economic unit of production the role of the housewife was beginning to shift in late sixteenth-century England from that of skilled producer to savvy consumer. Household production