2 - The Sacred Wholsome Lore: Aristotle and Prodigality

Summary

I praye the what hath Aristotle to do wyth Christe?

In Charles Schmitt's excellent article on the development of the image of Aristotle as a cuttlefish, Schmitt explains how anti-Aristotelians came to frequently criticise and mock Aristotle for his supposed self-obfuscation, a habit they likened to the inky defence system of the cuttlefish. The great irony, Schmitt tells us, is that everything these critics knew about the cuttlefish came from Aristotle himself. The anti-Aristotelian contingent of the humanist movement were so unaware of how deeply the writer they attacked had come to influence their own thought patterns that their very methods of attack were learned from that writer. Such is the extent of the Aristotelian influence during the Renaissance. Even among modern scholars, the extent of the Aristotelian influence on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought remains under-estimated, and this has had a problematic effect on our understanding of prodigality. Because of this neglect, prodigality is understood as a semantically wobbly metaphor rather than how it functioned practically: a critically specific ethical concept rooted in Aristotelian theory.

In this chapter, I will demonstrate how financial misspending and prodigal sons in early modern drama can be better understood by contextualising them in relation to the Nicomachean Ethics. The Aristotelian schema is detectable within many dramatic formulations of the parable and prodigality, and by understanding it we can gain a clearer understanding of how financial excess, filial disobedience, and the understanding of oneself as an individual moral actor developed during this period. I treat the theme chronologically, selecting those adaptations of the parable that most evidently engage Aristotelian ethics. The selection of plays in this chapter ranges considerably, encompassing works from both public and private stages, classical and more pedestrian themes, prose and verse, early and late drama. While some works engage with the Nicomachean Ethics explicitly, such as those by Jonson and Randolph, in other cases these influences only emerge when we approach them with a ready awareness of the early modern English understanding of Aristotelian ethics. There are certainly examples of prodigal son drama that appear uninfluenced by the schema, and the Aristotelian theme was by no means a hegemonic lens through which prodigality was understood, but no other single text – save Luke 15.11–32 – had an influence comparable to that of Aristotle on prodigality.