Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda

climb.”³⁸ The lesser gentry could make it into the ranks of the elite only by being “cautious, thrifty, canny, and grasping, creeping slowly, generation after generation, up the ladder of social and economic progress, and even at the end only barely indulging in a life-style and housing suitable to their dignity and income.”³⁹ If conspicuous consumption functioned as a necessary (though not always sufficient) means to elite status for the mercantile classes, for the lesser gentry it was an unwished-for consequence of it.⁴⁰

      In marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Petruchio exposes his frugal household economy to the threat of superfluous expenditure. Arriving at their wedding in tattered array and astride an old, diseased horse, Petruchio proclaims: “To me she’s married, not unto my clothes. / Could I repair what she will wear in me / As I can change these poor accoutrements, / ’Twere well for Kate and better for myself” (3. 2. 115–18). As if to prove his point that Kate’s extravagance will leave him a tattered pauper, his self-consuming costume seems to wear itself out before our eyes: his “old breeches” are “thrice turned” (3. 2. 41), his boots have been used as “candle-cases” (3. 2. 42), his “old rusty sword” has a “broken hilt” (3. 2. 44–45), etc. His horse is half-consumed with diseases: it is “begnawn with the bots” (3. 2. 52–53) (“bots” being parasitical worms or maggots), and, even more appropriately, “infected”—as, he insinuates, is his future wife—“with the fashions” (3. 2. 50). The term fashions (or farcin, as it was more commonly spelled), which derives from the Latin farcire, meaning “to stuff,” denotes a contagious equine disease characterized by a swelling of the jaw. Kate’s taste for fashionable cates is likened to this disease of excessive consumption, which threatens to gnaw away at her husband’s estate.

      Following their espousal, Kate’s excessive consumption seems to result in her swift reduction to the status of “chattel.” After professing to have no time for “chat” (3. 2. 119), Petruchio whisks his bride away, announcing to the stunned onlookers:

      I will be master of what is mine own.

      She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house,

      My household stuff, my field, my barn,

      My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything,

      And here she stands. (3. 2. 227–31)

      Petruchio’s blunt assertion of property rights over Kate linguistically performs the very act of domestication it declares; reduced to the status of an object of exchange (“goods and chattels”), Kate is abruptly yanked out of circulation and sequestered within the home, literally turned into a piece of furniture or “household stuff.” The speech follows a domesticating trajectory not unlike the one outlined by housework theory: it circumscribes Kate within a matrix of use-value production. For within Petruchio’s particular “class grammar,” the relationship of “household stuff” to “household cates” would appear to be that of mere use-values to exchange-values, or commodities properly speaking. The OED defines stuff as “the substance or ‘material’… of which a thing is formed or consists, or out of which a thing may be fashioned.” In this sense, it may be identified with the use-value of the object: it is “the physical body of the commodity,” according to Marx, “which is the use-value or useful thing.”⁴¹ Entering into the process of exchange “ungilded and unsweetened, retaining their original home-grown shape,” commodities are split into the twofold form of use-value and value proper, a process Marx calls Stoffwechsel—literally, the act of (ex)change (Wechsel) that transforms mere stuff (Stoff) into cates.⁴² In transforming Kate from an object of exchange into the home-grown materiality of mere stuff, into a thing defined by its sheer utility, a beast of burden (“my horse, my ox, my ass”), Petruchios speech seeks to reverse the processes of commodification. Reducing Kate to a series of increasingly homely things, it finally strips her down to a seemingly irreducible substance or stuff, whose static immobility (“here she stands”) puts a stop to the slippage of exchange evoked by his list of goods. The self-evidence of her deictic presence seems to stand as the guarantee of an underlying, enduring use-value.

      As a member of the gentry, Petruchio stands for the residual, land-based values of a domestic economy that purports to be “all in all sufficient” (Othello, 4. 1. 265). The trajectory traced by his index of goods moves not only from exchange-value to use-value, but from liquid capital, or “moveables” (“good and chattels”)⁴³ to the more secure form of landed property (“house … field … barn,” etc.). Yet Petruchio’s portrait of an ideally self-sufficient household economy in which the value of things is taken to be self-evident and not subject to (ex)change, is belied by the straightforwardly mercenary motives he avows in marrying Kate. Paradoxically, in order to maintain his land-based values, as we have seen, Petruchio must embrace those of the marketplace.⁴⁴ (In this sense, his career follows a logic not unlike that of Gervase Markham, discussed in the previous chapter.) In seeking to arrest the slippage of exchange, his speech implicates its speaker in an expanding network or maze of equivalent value-forms (“goods … anything”) whose unending slide threatens to destabilize the hierarchy of values he would uphold, insofar as any single thing in the series may stand for anything else (“my any thing, / And here she stands”). If Petruchio succeeds in mastering Kate, his position as master is nevertheless qualified by his own subjection to the exigencies and uncertainties of the new market economy. In his endeavor to domesticate the commodity form, one might say, Petruchio is himself commodified, himself subjected to the logic of commodity exchange. As Gremio so eloquently puts it (in response to the above speech): in taming Kate, Petruchio is himself “Kated” (3. 2. 243).

      The contradictions inherent in Petruchio’s class status make his task as shrew-tamer a complex one: he must restrict his wife’s consumption without abolishing it entirely, must ensure that it adequately bears testimony to his own elite status without simultaneously leading him to financial ruin. The difficulty, yet urgent necessity, of maintaining a proper balance between expenditure and thrift in the elite (or would-be elite) household and the perceived danger of delegating this task to the housewife are underscored in the following mid-seventeenth-century letter of advice, written by the Marquis of Halifax to his daughter:

      The Art of laying out Money wisely, is not attained to without a great deal of thought; and it is yet more difficult in the case of a Wife, who is accountable to her Husband for her mistakes in it: It is not only his Money, his Credit too is at Stake, if what lyeth under the Wife’s Care is managed, either with undecent Thrift, or too loose Profusion; you are therefore to keep the Mean between these two Extreams…. when you once break through these bounds, you launch into a wide sea of Extravagance.⁴⁵

      At stake in the housewife’s proper management of money or economic capital, Halifax suggests, is her husband’s credit, or symbolic capital. “Symbolic capital,” Bourdieu maintains, “is always credit, in the widest sense of the word, i.e. a sort of advance which the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees”.⁴⁶ It is not simply that economic capital serves to buttress symbolic capital when it is spent on “material and symbolic guarantees” such as status objects. Symbolic capital in turn attracts economic capital: “the exhibition of symbolic capital (which is always very expensive in economic terms), is one of the mechanisms which (no doubt universally) make capital go to capital.”⁴⁷ Yet symbolic and economic capital are not always mutually reinforcing. Indeed, insofar as “symbolic capital can only be accumulated at the expense of economic capital,” the two are often at odds.⁴⁸ In the case of the upwardly mobile gentry in early modern England, the effort to balance the two was an ongoing struggle.