Elizabethan England Esteemed Elites

A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 33 “As Did Elizabethan England Generally”

Dr. McCloskey is continuing on with the thesis of last chapter, offering examples of Elizabethan writers other than Shakespeare, who valued hierarchy over the disruptive bourgeois virtues that will allow the trade tested betterment system to take off in the years to come.

Of writers like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Dekker, she observes,

What is admired…is honorable hierarchy and its stability, not the bourgeois upheavals, creative destruction, and wave of gadgets to be commended in the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth. (p. 306)

She notes these Elizabethan works are sometimes taken to be concerned with money and business but argues that people are not correctly seeing how the economy of that day is being characterized.

Referring specifically to Dekker’s play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, she notes the frequency of the stage direction, “giving money” appears only second to “enter.” (p. 308) Thus, surely this Elizabethan work shows a bourgeois concern with monetary transactions, right?

Not at all, McCloskey explains, because the money is not being given between two traders or a buyer and seller in a marketplace but instead is a way of reinforcing the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being she discussed last chapter.

…the middle class is held in its subordinate realm of prose, accepting the position with good grace. The money transactions in the play have nothing to do with ordinary business, much less with the financing of creative destruction. They reinforce status differentials, as a tip or a bribe given to lesser fold. (p. 309)

This is a time that viewed the world as a zero-sum game, where for one to get rich, another has to lose, not an inaccurate view of the economy before the growth of the trade tested betterment of the Great Enrichment.

Another cultural shift she discussed in an earlier chapter is seen in the shift of the word “honest” from being applied to aristocrats implying honorable as opposed to later when it applies to the bourgeois virtue of trustworthiness necessary for trade to succeed.

She notes in this chapter that the characters do not gain riches through efforts in the marketplace but in other, more genteel ways.

Honorable (that is, “honest”) riches are achieved by collecting rents on land, not by mutual dealing, and certainly not by inventing plate glass or dropped ceilings or a stock market. In an aristocratic society, as in a sacred society of Brahmins, or in a socialist society imagined by the modern clerisy, actual business deals are presumed to be dishonest, in both the old sense of “undignified” and the modern sense of “not fair dealing.” (p. 310)

This in contrast to the later Scottish writer Samuel Smiles in the 1800s who celebrated success in business, likely because he himself had been successful in business.

…he understood that riches came from substantive betterment tested by profit, not from the zero-sum luck of finding a Dutch wreck or being favored by a tip from the already-rich or by getting a hand up from an older man. (p.314)

Conclusion

A society cannot accept and adopt a trade tested system of betterment while simultaneously disapproving of virtues like prudence, temperance and justice.

By illustrating that England was still embracing the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being prior to 1700, we see why they still did not have the growing economy the Great Enrichment would bring a century later.

Next chapter completes her trilogy offering evidence that aristocratic England did not embrace the bourgeois virtues prior to the eighteenth century though at that same time, she will show in the following few chapters the Netherlands had already begun that cultural shift.

Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “As Did Elizabethan England Generally,” Chapter 33 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.