Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Introduction: The Body at Play in Early Modern Texts
- 1 Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It (1611)
- 2 Walking Without God – (Mis)Learning Through the Gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622)
- 3 Plain Plasticity – Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714)
- 4 Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the Bound and Loosed Body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c. 1600)
- Index
3 - Plain Plasticity – Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Introduction: The Body at Play in Early Modern Texts
- 1 Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It (1611)
- 2 Walking Without God – (Mis)Learning Through the Gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622)
- 3 Plain Plasticity – Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714)
- 4 Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the Bound and Loosed Body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c. 1600)
- Index
Summary
It is 1659 and Thomas Ellwood has stolen out of the family home to attend a Quaker meeting in secret, spending the night with the Quaker John Rance and his wife. Finding Thomas’s bedroom empty, as Thomas relates in his autobiographical The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714), his violently anti-Quaker father Walter falls into ‘a Passion of Grief’, weeping and fearing that Thomas has been harmed. The following day, Rance calls at the Ellwood household in Oxfordshire to distract Walter, so that Thomas can slip in at the back door. Walter is annoyed to see Rance, a Quaker, in his home, and to learn that Rance knows Thomas. Just as Walter is showing Rance out, Thomas creeps in and runs straight into Walter. Like any good Quaker, Thomas believes all humans are equal and refuses to doff his hat to anyone, including Walter. A respectable mid-seventeenth-century non-Quaker father, Walter expects his son to doff his cap to him. Thomas writes,
The Sight of my Hat upon my Head made him presently forget that I was that Son of his, whom he had so lately lamented as lost; and his Passion of Grief turning into Anger, he could not contain himself; but running upon me, with both his Hands, first violently snatcht off my Hat, and threw it away; then giving me some Buffets on my Head, he said, Sirrah, get you up to your Chamber.
I forthwith went; he following me at the Heels, and now and then giving me a Whirret on the Ear; which (the way to my Chamber lying through the Hall where John Rance was) he, poor Man, might see and be sorry for (as I doubt not but he was) but could not help me.
Born in 1639, Thomas is here around 20 years old: between man and boy in Walter’s eyes. Walter sends Thomas to his room; excruciatingly, this occurs in front of Rance.
Thomas’s description of his walk of shame past Rance seems to elongate out of Thomas’s control. The parentheses fail to contain Thomas’s words as distinct grammatical units, suggesting that the walk through the hall under Rance’s gaze felt embarrassingly drawn out. Though Thomas clips Rance into parentheses, the subsequent reference to Rance, ‘he, poor Man’, escapes and exceeds this punctuation.
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- Information
- Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature , pp. 58 - 80Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022