Shakespeare's Domestic Economies. Natasha Korda

standard of comfort amongst the occupants of the humbler cottage, measured in terms of their linen cupboards, their clothing and their ‘luxuries,’ which were not strictly necessary to survival, like cushions and bed and window-curtains,” continued to rise dramatically during the seventeenth century.⁷ Christopher Husbands’s Warwickshire study finds that the percentage of wealth in consumer goods rose sharply in this period, constituting 27 percent of wealth early in the century and 48 percent at the end. The rise in spending among peasant laborers was smaller but still impressive (a 10 percent rise between 1560 and 1640).⁸ Rachel Garrard’s study of consumption patterns in Suffolk in the periods 1570–1599 and 1680–1700 documents an astonishing rise in spending on linens among the lower ranks of society (those with median wealth of £7 for the earlier period and £13 for the later); while the personal wealth of this group rose in value by 85 percent, the value of their linens rose 271 percent.⁹ Similar figures are cited in Victor Skipp’s study of the Arden region, where wealth in household goods among the wealthy increased by over 289 percent, among the middling sort by 310 percent, and among peasants by 247 percent.¹⁰ Carole Shammas, who has studied consumer spending patterns in England and America between 1550 and 1800, agrees that “there appears to have been a considerable increase in the real amount spent on consumer goods between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth century.”¹¹

      While it has long been recognized that London, as a hub of foreign trade, served as a center of conspicuous consumption,¹² Thirsk details the expansion of domestic industries or “projects” across England between 1560 and 1630, which “set the wheels of domestic trade turning faster, encouraging the making of yet more consumer goods, spinning an ever more elaborate web of inland commerce.”¹³ These projects spurred expanded domestic production and consumption of a “bewildering variety” of commodities beyond the staple necessities of life, including glass, iron, copper, and brass wares, stockings (of worsted, jersey, and silk), buttons, pins, starch, soap, fine knives and knife handles, liquorice, tobacco, tobacco pipes, pottery, ribbons, gold and silver thread, lace, linen, toys, new lighter “draperies” (bays, tufted taffeties, cloth of tissue, wrought velvets, braunched satins, silks, etc.), and “innumerable fashion goods for women,” including ruffs, masks, busks, muffs, fans, periwigs, bodkins, and gloves.¹⁴ Spufford has documented the distribution of such wares throughout England through an intricate network of (male and female) petty chapmen, peddlars, trowmen, hawkers, and higglers and credits this network with bringing about “a revolution in soft furnishings [such as window and bedcurtains, sheets, tablecloths, napery, wall hangings, etc.] among the poor.”¹⁵

      William Harrison’s Description takes particular note of the latter change, which is claimed to be among the most significant “things to be marvelously altered in England” by the “old men” dwelling in his village: “for (said they) our fathers, yea, and we ourselves also, have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hapharlots [coarse, shaggy material] … and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster or pillow.”¹⁶ The men go on to express bemusement that they were once “so well … contented … with such base kind of furniture.” Another aspect of the “amendment of lodging” they consider remarkable is “the exchange of vessel, as of treen [wooden] platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. For so common were all sorts of treen stuff in old time that a man should hardly find four pieces of pewter … in a good farmer’s house,” whereas a present day farmer owns “a fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessel going about the house, three or four feather beds, so many coverlets and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowl for wine (if not an whole nest), and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit [set].”¹⁷ While such furnishings will undoubtedly seem sparse to modern consumers, they clearly appeared quite copious to these early modern consumers, who emphasize the quantity (“so much more … three or four … so many … a dozen”) as well as the quality (“treen platters into pewter … wooden spoons into silver or tin”) of newly available household stuff. The nesting of multiple bowls in the above description metonymically suggests the household’s transformation into a nest in which objects, as well as subjects, nestle.

      Changing standards of comfort in tableware and bedding, and the increasing availability of such comforts to non-and would-be elite householders, rendered distinctions between “useful” or “necessary” goods and “superfluous” or luxury goods increasingly unstable and difficult to fix. Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory (1649) thus lists the following as “Things necessary for and belonging to a dineing Rome”:

      The Rome well wainscoted about, either with … panels or carved as the old fashion was; or else in larg square panel. / The Rome hung with pictures of all sorts, as History, Landskips, Fancyes, &c. / Larg Table in the middle, either square to draw out in Leaves, or Long, or Round or oval with falling leaves. / Side tables, or court cubberts, for cups and Glasses to drink in, Spoons, Sugar Box, Viall and Cruces for Vinger, Oyle and Mustard pot. / Cistern of Brass, Pewter, or Lead to set flagons of Beer, and Bottles of win[e] in. / A Turky table cover, or carpet of cloth or Leather printed. Chaires and stooles of Turky work, Russia or calves Leather, clothe or stuffe, or of needlework. Or els made all of Joynt work or cane chaires. / Fire grate, fire shovel, Tongs, and Land Irons all adorned with Brass Bobbs and Buttons. / Flower potts, or Allabaster figures to adorn the windows, and glass well painted and a Larg seeing Glass at the higher end of the Rome. / A Faire with-drawing Rome at the other end of the dineing Rome well furnished with a Table, Chaires and stooles &c.¹⁸

      His description of “Things usefull about a Bed, and bed-chamber,” likewise redefines luxury or superfluity as necessity:

      Bed stocks, as Bed posts, sides, ends, Head and Tester. / Mat or sack-cloth Bottom. / Cord, Bed staves, and stay or the feet. / Curtain Rods and hookes, and rings, either Brass or Horn. / Beds, of chaffe, Wool or flocks, Feathers, and down in Ticks or Bed Tick. / Bolster, pillows. / Blankets, Ruggs, Quilts, Counterpan, caddows. / Curtaines, Valens, Tester Head cloth; all either fringed, Laced or plaine alike. / Inner curtaines and Valens, which are generally White silk or Linen. / Tester Bobbs of Wood gilt, or covered sutable to the curtaines. / Tester top either flatt, or Raised, or canopy like, or half Testered. / Basis, or the lower Valens at the seat of the Bed, which reacheth to the ground, and fringed for state as the upper Valens, either with Inch fring, caul firing, Tufted fring, snailing fring, Gimpe fring with Tufts and Buttons, Vellem fring, &c…./ Hangings about the Rome, of all sorts, as Arras, Tapestry, damask, silk, cloth or stuffe: in paines or with Rods, or gilt Leather, or plaine, else Pictures of Friends and Relations to Adorne the Rome. / Table, stands, dressing Box with drawers, a larg Myrour, or Looking glass. Couch chaire, stoles, and chaires, a closs-stole. / Window curtaines, Flower potts, / Fire grate, and a good Fire in the winter, Fire shovel, Tongs, Fork and Bellowes.¹⁹

      While Holme’s treatise is aimed at the nobility and middling sort (those who could afford to purchase coats of arms), the comforts he describes differed not in kind, but only in quantity and quality, from those increasingly found in the homes of substantial yeomen as well. “A relatively wealthy household used the same items as its less well off neighbors to furnish its more numerous rooms,” according to Crowley, “it just had more of them and they were of better quality.”²⁰ This continuity in the types of available “comforts,” Crowley contends, spurred “social emulation” among the lower and middling sorts. Judging by Holme’s enumeration of “necessities,” it would also seem to have spurred elite householders to display ever greater quantities, and an ever more refined quality, of stuff in order to distinguish themselves from those beneath them in status.

      As householders of lower social status began to fill their homes with stuff, the function of objects, and the relationship of subjects to them, profoundly changed. For the role of objects within a household economy based on domestic production is to serve as use-values within and for the home. With the transition to a market economy, however, the value and significance of household objects was determined outside the home, by the market and by the culture at large. One of the effects of this shift is that household objects took on what Norbert Elias calls a “civilizing function”; they came to serve as what Pierre Bourdieu terms “signs of social distinction.”²¹