Shakespeare's Domestic Economies
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Shakespeare's Domestic Economies explores representations of female subjectivity in Shakespearean drama from a refreshingly new perspective, situating The Taming of the Shrew , The Merry Wives of Windsor , Othello , and Measure for Measure in relation to early modern England's nascent consumer culture and competing conceptions of property. Drawing evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, marriage sermons, household inventories, and wills to explore the realities and dramatic representations of women's domestic roles, Natasha Korda departs from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been «trafficked» as passive objects of exchange between men. In the early modern period, Korda demonstrates, as newly available market goods began to infiltrate households at every level of society, women emerged as never before as the «keepers» of household properties. With the rise of consumer culture, she contends, the housewife's managerial function assumed a new form, becoming increasingly centered around caring for the objects of everyday life—objects she was charged with keeping as if they were her own, in spite of the legal strictures governing women's property rights. Korda deftly shows how their positions in a complex and changing social formation allowed women to exert considerable control within the household domain, and in some areas to thwart the rule of fathers and husbands.
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Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies
Gender and Property in Early Modern England
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Nature … hath geven unto man a noble, a high, & a diligent minde to be busye and occupied abroade, to gayne & to bring home to their wives & familie, to rule them & their children, & also all their houshold. And to the woman nature hath geven a feareful, a covetous, & an humble mind to be subject unto man, & to kepe that he doeth gayne.52
In the latter treatise, directed to husbands rather than wives, the wife’s role as “keeper” is not surprisingly taken to be a sign not only of her “feareful” and “covetous” feminine disposition, but of her natural “subject[ion] unto man.” Any suggestion that her active, managerial role within the household economy may pose a threat to her husband’s authority, much less to his property, has been entirely effaced. We have come a long way indeed from the “manlye stomach” of the housewife who “overse[es] the stuffe, vessell & implementes of [her] house none other wise than the capitaine of a garison overseeth and proveth the soudiers.” While it seems clear that the woman’s role as keeper of household stuff had become central to conceptualizations of female subjectivity in domestic treatises of the period, it is equally clear that these conceptualizations were highly contradictory, suggesting first activity then passivity, labor then leisure, spending then receiving, profligacy then frugality, courage then fearfulness, lusty assertiveness then timid humility, sexual largesse then chary chastity, “manlye” forms of governance and then “subject[ion] unto man.”53
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