Dr. Nina Levine
Performing Consumption in Early Modern London
March 28, 2003
 

Introduction:

Nina Levine is the current Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of South Carolina.  She received her Ph.D. from Tulane University in 1991.  Her critical works include “The Case of Eleanor Cobham: Authorizing History in 2 Henry VI,” “Accursed Womb, the Bed of Death: Women and Succession in Richard III,” “Lawful Symmetry: The Politics of Treason in 2 Henry VI,” “To Play the Amazon: Patterns of Female Domination in Shakespeare’s History Plays,” and “Extending Credit in the Henry IV Play,” which was published in Shakespeare Quarterly in the year 2000.
In 1998, she received the English Departmental teaching award in which Larry Rhu was the runner-up, and in 2001 she was honored among thirty faculty members to receive the Mortar Board Teaching Award.  Currently, she can be found on the Women’s Studies Affiliate Faculty at the University of South Carolina.
 

Summary of Levine’s Presentation:

The Setting: At the end of 15th century, London is experiencing an upsurge of material goods.  Products once just for kings are now widely available for prosperous London citizens, and even for the middle classes.  The effect in society of such an upsurge is twofold: while on the one hand it is good that more people are now exposed to more goods, this exposure at the same time threatens the hierarchy of the State as class lines become increasingly blurred.

Emulation Theory vs. Performative or Use Theory: The previous theory underlying consumption holds that the driving force behind consumption is emulation.  According to emulation theory, a top-down model of operation exists.  Only the elites of a society have the culture, and all middle classes can do is copy them.  Dr. Levine says that to accept this top-down model limits our understanding of the true nature of consumption.  She presents a new model – Performative or Use Theory.  It holds that as middle class Londoners buy these newly available goods they define their own social meaning.  By emphasizing the “use” of the goods, we bestow an agency on the consumer that has been overlooked in emulation theory.

Her Source: While all sorts of scholarship exists, Levine focuses on Claudius Holyband’s French language instruction manuals, the French Littleton and the French Schoolmaster, specifically written to aid English merchants in learning French by translating everyday dialogues on facing pages. (This link goes to scans of both books, which we made from facsimile editions published by Scolar Press in the 1970s).  In short, how one learns from these manuals is to read the lessons and rehearse them – like performing a script.  We must remember here that learning a different language was once exclusively the domain of the English elite, and that the method of the learning particular to these manuals is for the English merchant to emulate himself after one of the elite “characters” in the instruction.  Scripts?, elite characters?, emulation? – don’t these manuals prove the emulation theory then?

The Performance: According to Levine the answer is no.  We must remember that these dialogues are not fixed.  Give the consumer some agency – he chooses how he wants to use this manual as there is no teacher standing over his shoulder.  The consumer/actor makes the lesson/performance his own.  Performance is a moment to moment action that the text could never have anticipated.  Thus, consumption and language are alike in that the intent of a good or a word may not necessarily be how it is actually used.

Advertising, Choice, and Pleasure: In addition to the performative aspect of the manuals, Levine argues that these manuals are “compendiums of material goods and consumption practices.”  The manuals require the performer to exercise his choice in the dialogue (e.g. “give me white, wheat, or stale bread”).  The manuals advertise what is available to consumers and “normalize” the idea of choice, then, in an age in which numerous sumptuary laws prohibit such acts.  The manuals also provide people with a sense of, and a chance to rehearse, pleasure (e.g. a huge feast scene), and that personal pleasure, of course, cannot be described as pure emulation.

How is This Useful to the ENGL 4340 Class?

With all this talk of consumption, we should automatically be thinking about Bartholomew Fair and Shoemaker’s Holiday.  We should hear those calls of London - see Bartholomew Fair Act II, scene iv - and know now that they are more than just selling tactics but advertisements of goods and the encouragement of choice that people in the middle classes had never really known before.  Also, we can now see that when Eyre and Margery don the proper clothing of a Lord Mayor they are not imitating that class level, but they are solely bringing to it all the particulars of their personalities; the clothes do not change them, but they certainly change the image which the clothes represent like the performative model of consumption argued for by Dr. Levine.  “Prince I am none, yet am I princely born” (Shoemakers’ Holiday 1.1.19-20).  With the emulative garment, he gains agency and promotes his socio-economic status.  Indeed, through Levine’s conception of consumption we can begin to see every little act of purchase, every act of selling, as more than people just getting along in life, but the steps in shaping a more democratic English society.

    Dekker, Thomas.  Shoemakers’ Holiday.  In Renaissance Drama.  Ed. Arthur Kinney.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999: 243-286.