Drama and the culture of commercial hospitality in early modern England (William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood)

As alehouses, taverns, and inns are seen to displace traditional domestic hospitality in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, they induce both anxiety and creativity. This particular form of marketplace development inflects a wide variety of texts, which coalesce within and contribute to a discursive culture. Chaucer and Erasmus had earlier added a quality of ethical innovation to drinking house culture, a quality confirmed in English and Italian conduct texts which use images of taverns and other public entertainments to mark the limits and anxieties of cross-status socialization. Broadside tavern ballads of the period celebrate charity and comfort in the tavern, and allow low-status drinkers to claim higher status based on their commitment to fellowship. Ben Jonson's poems of entertainment and hospitality normally privilege traditional grand hospitality, but in "Inviting a Friend to Supper" Jonson innovatively deploys images of food and wine from the Mermaid tavern to enhance his poetic authority.; While drinking houses provoke many moralizing rebukes in late Tudor and Stuart England, dramatic representations of taverns and inns explore the ideological relations between marketplace behavior and religio-political conceptualizations, particularly the Reformation emphasis on joy and charity. Fellowship, charity, and joyfulness can either comically resist anxiety and inflexible decorum, or refashion, open-up, and make palatable the discipline of the marketplace. In Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry IV, tavern culture allows Shakespeare to investigate the social, political, and theological intersections of indebtedness and anxiety in ways that reflect the joyful perspectives of broadside ballads of the period. In The Fair Maid of the West, by contrast, Thomas Heywood aligns credibility with tavern-keeping and acting in order to defend both theater and tavern as ethical, socially valuable marketplaces. Finally, in The New Inn, Jonson develops the inn as a space commensurate to the Church. In contrast to the Caroline Church riven by theological conflict, Jonson's inn provides opportunities for social inclusion based on joyful behavior and civil conversation.