Notes from 10/25: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Class notes for L636 – 10/25/11

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Acts III-V

“Leaky Vessels” by Paster

Presenters: Abby & John

Presentations

John:

• Recap of the blog: the oddity of this play at a structural level; multiple plots and subplots, various appearing and disappearing characters; “episodic blips”
• The logic and rationale of the play, and the play’s discussion thereof, as it relates to games and chance; luck vs logic, rule vs hazard; how are these related?
• McLuskie says: the characters that win are the characters that can game the system
• End of scene IV and beginning of scene V: Tim and the Tutor’s discussion of transitive and analogous logic makes a travesty of the system
• Tim demonstrates the basic irrationality of the “rules” we game, a rationality McC seems to take for granted
• Ending of a play has no linear, teleological development; it is “chronic”; a number of developments and renegotiations
• As we’ve discussed, Changeling makes us question our complicity in the play’s action; perhaps Chaste Maid similarly draws our attention to a complicity in an usual, possibly “queer” illogical/logical system or society

Abby:

• Allwit’s motto about gamesters: this term could also refer to theater, while the “box” (“sure a winner”) could also refer to the audience; draws attention to the audience’s complicity in these games
• How does the house win? What does it mean to win or lose? What exactly is at stake?
• How does this relation between gaming and wobbly logic relate to the city environment of the play?
• Does, as Paster claim, the play reseal the leaky women, and reseal the wobbly logic, plaster the cracks in ideology? Or does it actually draw attention to these things? Does Middleton actually highlight the validity of fool as wise creature?

Class Discussion

• SEX
• So much sex
• Not even just marriage, constant talk of sex and procreation
• Bodies are meat, babies are a lamb
• Sex games – intrigue, cuckoldry, bed-tricks
• How does the play complicate the idea of having sex is winning?
• Allwit wins by not sexing his wife; he is her pimp; does the play undermine this idea?
• The wife wins; she wants sex, she gets it, she gets a lot of material recompense
• Teleology of sex: we need to have babies (or not have babies)
• But it’s interesting in how we have so many characters who just don’t WANT sex; no one is settled; there’s a disruption of the sexual disjunction common to comedy (people want to bone but can’t) and instead we have people maneuvered into positions where sex is demanded but not desired
• Women love sex, however; women desire greatly; men seem to benefit by abstaining
• Women not only want sex, they SHOULD want sex
• Control of the sex of daughters and wives; consider the lack of control of Yellowhammer over Moll, Allwit over his wife, Kix over his wife
• Maudlin gives Moll so much grief for not being lascivious
• Cuckoldry: Yellowhammer’s response to Whorehound’s behavior is not horror at W but horror at Allwit
• Middleton’s gambit in making the Allwits’ victory is perhaps to underscore the absurd horror of cuckoldry
• The “functional” Yellowhammers are catastrophic parents, public embarrassments, manipulative of their chidlren
• Allwits care for the children who are not really their “own” – the only actual affectionate relationship
• Ellen: ”Middleton gives us a shocking display of the carnality that makes patriarchy work”
• injustice of its dependence on reproduction, which cannot be guaranteed despite ethics or virtue
• The characters who really come out ahead by sacrificing nothing on their own behalf
• Comprehensive, holistic reading is difficult, since it is so much about the fractures of a civic environment, lapses in social performance
• Does not capitulate to its own carnivalesque tendencies, like Knight of the Burning Pestle; a sense of wholeness is here that does not come from Knight
• characters are not wholly bad or good; they can be foils or dupes depending on contexts, but never truly villainous
• Wit and winning seem to be bigger forces in the lives of characters than their social or gender scripts; rules are made to be broken
• Cf. the country wench comes out ahead despite her abject position
• Allwit’s position is similarly abject but he triumphs
• Both achieve these through wit, winning, trickery

• Chase Maid a city comedy: we have yet to see an unorthodox rep; Knight deconstructs
• Middleton expresses an concern with the increasing theatricality of city life in London
• Convention of the goldsmith and the goldsmith’s daughter
• Goldshops: women creep into early capitalist market by being vendors, displaying jewelry; luring in men, selling the jewelry; cf. the Yellowhammers’ “selling” of their daughter
• Aristocratic estates are expensive and unsustainable so many poor aristocrats attempt to infuse with money from the upper-middling sort
• Yellowhammers try to raise their son up like a gentlemen, but are inept; they can buy tutors education but they can’t make it work
• New social dependencies coming to light in a society attempting to preserve its aristocratic traditions
• In this play, the systems are brought out and put on display
• These are the ways by which you work! You the audience!
• The only way to win is to whore out daughter/wife, to let others shore themselves up by using the structures you’ve already put into place
• Social roles in the play are presumably reflected in the contemporary audience; affectionately mocked and bolstered by the play

• Re: Melissa Jones, do we see any expressions of sexuality unconfined by patriarchal norms of sexuality?
• Moll doesn’t seem to be greatly enfranchised by Middleton
• Whorehound, chosen by her parents, not as wealthy as he appears
• She ends up with another younger brother, similarly financially unstable, since older Touchwood has already collapsed his estate
• Is there anything to LIKE about Touchwood Jr?
• The… the ring part?
• A happy fraternal relationship with Touchwood Sr; join forces to game society, help each other out
• If Sr is poor, why bother killing him? Nothing to inherit, might as well be friends.
• Head over heels in babies; indicative of M’s sly approach to norms, we never see legitimate kids, just his bastards
• Tim and Tutor’s strange homoerotic partnership; mutually compatible and happy, as the tutor is given a “dowry” as his fees; homosociality of school system
• Cf. Gynosodomy in Daileader: “a wise man will seek every hole, my tutor knows it;” tutor and Tim very close, always together, speaking in Latin, wife inducted into the relationship at the end
• Tim like Humphrey from Knight, good willed if not bright or useful
• Happily professes his non-normative stances
• After the Welsh dirty song: a vow to carry on with his usual sexual practices (Act V)
• Associations with Welsh women as very lascivious, seductive
• Tim articulates without any apparent sense of embarrassment unusual sexual practices that he apparently takes as normative
• Moll escapes through room of easement: allied with anality and waste products; made ill by Thames; degradation of an idealized Juliet figure
• Her MacGuffin romance with T Jr is undercut, resulting in a defamiliarization of heterosexual, patriarchal norms
• Rutter and McLuskie’s take invisibility of the boy beneath for granted; the absurdity of the play’s treatment of Moll lets the boy player wink out at us, at the audience

• WHO IS THE CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE?
• Event he Allwit baby is immediately sexualized; also the mutton baby; mutton vs lamb, double entendre
• No sexual innocence in this play; origin of title is proverbial; finding a chaste maid in Cheapside is like a needle in a haystack
• No one seems particularly interested in remaining chaste in the normal sense, anyway

• Anomalous christening scene, at the edges of what patriarchy surveys; 4 weeks after birth of a child, lie in bed, nurses and gossips; ease of labor
• Bleedthrough of biological facts: childbirth is a risk; women who survive it and thrive in this economy have won out; women recognize that their social utility is contingent upon their ease of reproduction
• first thing to wish for upon the birth of a daughter: she’ll make it, she’ll be a breeder
• losing track of social decorum in their celebration
• cf. the Kix’s doling of payment, a successive clearing of hurdles
• this is a thing that patriarchal culture HAS TO REWARD, like it or not
• Despite all of the men are disgusted they must serve the food, wait on the women, etc
• Dionysian aspect to the laying-in room
• Middleton mocks it, but celebrates it; they are not mocked in the way eg, Jonson mocks people
• Jones/Porn/Lent/The piece of flesh
• Porn for women
• The gossips torture the men, they know it, and they enjoy it
• Middleton is willing to show us that there is something outside of patriarchal culture; there are pleasures taken that are not as visible, not as contingent on cultural approval
• Community of Tim and Tutor and the gossips are all unusual dramatic subjects; they live outside the normal patriarchal structures

• The play as a game; as a set of arbitrary rules we expect it to follow or (in some cases) not follow
• The play shows demonstrates that it is crazy or impossible to follow all rules; everyone cheats
• Cuckoldry is an illegal move; yet it is also a winning move
• Early capitalism; investment; theater itself becomes a very lucrative enterprise, Cheapside is very commercial
• you have to be know when to be all in and when to cut your losses – Cf. Allwit, who knows when to withdraw; but Whorehound misjudges, never thinks of himself as an object of predation
• Allwit’s severing of Whorehound coincides with a false dignity, a fabulous moment of social performance, and W knows he’s been played
• Kix never seems to pick up on his bargain, the rules of the game he plays
• Many games referred to are card games, which imply: knowing rules; conceiving, developing and deploying strategy; opens the possibility to interpret rules in particular effort to reach a particular goal
• Cf. A Woman Killed with Kindness, where games are considered authentic, elucidating, and overall more objective; the games in Chaste Maid are more solidly categorized as performances
• A Chased Maid in Cheapside: people being pursued, caught; catching diseases, catching pregnant; predation and prey
• A much more sophisticated account of prostitution: there are prostitutes, and then there are WHOLESOME prostitutes; not the completely diseased
• Women have more going on behind the scenes than what men can know

• The bastard baby in the basket
• Lenten period, officers charged with policing the sale of meat are part of black market, paid off by butchers
• The statutes against meat on Lent can never be an absolute law: women are not denied meat when pregnant; pregnancy/birth itself results in a sort of movable feast
• Weird secularization of a kind of Christian story
• the connection of Christ and the lamb; stealing a lamb, partly baking it, shepherds are tricked, woman was pregnant, was allowed to have meat; shepherds have second thoughts about horrifically ugly fairy baby lamb
• I don’t know exactly what is going on here but it sounds incredible
• Customs of a didactic religious drama infuse this play, but they are hollowed out; Lent is only an unfair moment of want; no larger understanding of meditation on sins, etc
• Whorehound’s understanding like that of Everyman and the reckoning of his sins, impending damnation, but utterly divested of religious éclat
• Whorehound is not a redeemed creature; he is dropped, and his droppers come out ahead
• Middleton makes them part of a larger alienation and mockery of patriarchal structure; success implicit in treating them as rules of game to be messed with

• Reminder to skim over Daileader, Varnado, etc. and keep them in mind for the future