‘Who is More Scorn’d than a Poor Scholar Is?’: Academic Precarity and the Early Modern Theatre

Abstract

Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton’s Patient Grissil (1603) depicts the trials of a lower-class woman whose aristocratic husband subjects her to a series of bizarre tests to affirm the quality of her love.¹ Faced with verbal abuse, the banishment of her family, her own expulsion from court, and forcible separation from her two children, the eponymous Grissil consistently refuses to complain to or criticize her husband. The tale was a familiar one, having appeared in both The Decameron (1353) and the Clerk’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), as well as a number of later incarnations.² But this particular stage version contains a significant addition: Grissil’s brother Laureo, a scholar whose poverty has driven him home from university to live with his father. The differences between the two are immediately apparent. Where Grissil is defined throughout by a stoic endurance of her plight, Laureo delivers a succession of complaints. Returning to rural obscurity, he laments:

The characterization of Laureo springs from the specific conditions of early modern England: the period was defined by both a significant growth in university graduates and the absence of suitable employment available to them.³ Yet his words acquire a particular resonance to the modern reader, in our own age of academic precarity. To read the text in these terms is, of course, in an important sense to misread it. But that misreading is, I want to suggest, a potentially productive one: an experience of precarious relevance that informs both Laureo’s crisis of the humanities and our own.

Laureo’s predicament is most immediately evident as an act of temporal waste. He has laboured ‘these nine yeares at the University’ (1.2.135), while his present situation has ‘all those daies and nights to beggerie solde’ (1.2.136). Laureo has laboured long, yet ‘reaps naught but pennurie’ (1.2.143). One reading of this wasted time is to interpret it as a product of the social irrelevance of Laureo’s knowledge. The family servant, for instance, enjoins him to acquire ‘a trade, a trade, follow basket-makeing’ (1.2.150): the early modern equivalent, one can only assume, of coding. The plight of the scholar emerges as the embodiment of tensions within the education system as a whole: a reflection of the fundamental disproportion between the number of graduates produced and the number of positions available. Nevertheless, the play is far from conforming to the notion that Laureo’s learning is unnecessary or irrelevant. Throughout the text, he provides an ironic commentary on the action. Where his sister dutifully asserts the values of loyalty and obedience, Laureo criticizes both her husband’s capricious behaviour, and Grissil’s spineless acceptance of it. In this regard, it is notable that this scholarly character is being introduced into a narrative that would have been familiar to much of its audience. The presence within the text of a figure born of the specific conditions of early modern England serves as a self-conscious intrusion of the playwrights’ present into a narrative that was, by the sixteenth century, already old. Laureo, in other words, provides a means for the playwrights to critique the story that they themselves are telling: he is a dramatization, we might say, of a form of early modern literary critic. In placing this character onstage, however, the playwrights also articulate the radical side to precarity: the extent to which a lack of material security entails a lack of social ties, an exclusion from the chains of duty and reciprocal hierarchy which constituted a central guarantor of early modern social stability. Laureo, in other words, has nothing to lose. The lived experience of detachment provides a distance from the established hierarchies of early modern society.

At the same time, there are clear limits to Laureo’s radicalism. While he is at various moments defined by a capacity for critique, at others he is characterized by an unscrupulous desire for advancement. He embarks for the court with no shortage of avaricious joy, and it is in large part his own mistreatment, rather than that of his sister, which prompts his disdain for power. Laureo’s character, therefore, might be said to embody the duality of precarity. On the one hand, it is an experience of detachment which breeds a desire for sweeping change. On the other, it is a condition defined by isolation, with the iron force of necessity imposing an atomizing condition on being, whereby only one’s immediate needs and desires are accorded to. The temptation, perhaps, is to see the former tainted by the latter. Laureo, in this sense, emerges rather obviously as a hypocrite. As such, the play might appear to deploy the figure of the scholar precisely in order to valorize the tolerance and obedience espoused by his sister. Indeed, it is certainly true that by the conclusion of the play, Laureo is left chastened and humbled by the triumph of his sister’s humility. Yet Patient Grissil, by yoking together naked self-interest and radical critique, is also a play which demonstrates the ambiguity of the boundaries between the two. In doing so, it serves as a useful antidote to either too optimistic or too pessimistic reading of precarity. The play freely acknowledges the extent to which the consequence of precarity can be self-interest, desperation, or greed. But it also hints at the possibility that a lived experience of precarity can lead us to conceptualize society as a whole in terms of the same instability which defines our own conditions of existence.

Footnotes