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The Usurer in Elizabethan Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Jeremy Bentham in his iconoclastic Defence of Usury offers this plausible if somewhat cynical explanation of the well-nigh universal unpopularity of the money lender: “Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake, are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs.” And similarly he explains the unhappy rôle that is almost as universally meted out to the money lender of drama. “It is the business of the dramatist,” he says, “to study and to conform to, the humors and passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for his success… Now I question whether, among all the instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have been brought together upon the stage, from the days of Thespis to the present, there ever was one, in which the former was not recommended to favour in some shape or other—either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to all three;—and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to infamy.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1916
References
1 Defence of Usury. Letter x, John Bowring's edition of Bentham's Works, vol. m, p. 17.
2 Ibid.
3 Forty-five of the seventy-one plays that I have found containing or seeming to contain usurers are mentioned or described in one connection or another in this paper. In the remaining twenty-six, either the usurer is an unimportant character or his usuriousness is incidental or even doubtful.
4 Page 75.
5 For a discussion of the indebtedness, see Cunningham's edition of Gifford's The Works of Ben Jonson, 1875, vol. vi, pp. 328, 345, 350.
6 See Reinhardstoettner's Plautus, especially pp. 469-474.
7 L. c., p. 70.
8 Compare, for example, Lodge's Wits Miserie, pp. 27, 28, Hunterian Club edition, and The Vision of Piers Plowman, Skeat's edition, vol. 1, B Text, Passus v, p. 146, 11. 190-199, and The Romaunt of the Rose, 11. 207-246. These partial parallels were brought to my attention in Professor E. D. McDonald's An Example of Plagiarism among Elizabethan Pamphleteers, Indiana University Studies, vol. ix, no. 8.
9 Der Wucherer im älteren englischen Drama. Halle Dissertation, 1907, p. 6.
10 Act iii, sc. vi.
11 Unless the main outlines of it have been preserved in The Merchant of Venice, we can know nothing of the nature of The Jew, which was being acted at The Bull in 1579, beyond Stephen Gosson's description of it as “representing the greediness of worldly choosers, and the bloody minds of usurers” (School of Abuse, Shakespeare Society edition, p. 29).
12 Dodsley's Old Plays, Hazlitt's edition, vol. vi, p. 381.
13 See Professor Schelling's Elizabethan Drama, vol. I, p. 63.
14 Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, R. B. McKerrow's edition of Nashe's Works, vol. ii, p. 100.
15 Act i, sc. i.
16 There are no contributions to the usurer plot or to the portrayal of the usurer in two plays of 1592, A Knack to Know a Knave, and Nobody and Somebody, in both of which appear characters who are, quite incidentally, usurers.
17 Note, however, Lorenzo's description of himself as “an unthrift love” (v, i, 21).
18 Malone Society Reprint, p. vii.
19 Proverbs, xxviii, 8.
20 So far as I can discover, no source has been found for any one of these plays, or at least for the portions of them that would thus seem to reveal a natural evolution of the rebellious daughter device. What Marlowe may have called upon beyond his own fertile imagination is not known. Curiously, the Jessica-Lorenzo episode is not a part of the Italian novel, Il Pecorone, usually regarded as the ultimate source of The Merchant of Venice; and, though a fairly close analogue of the episode has been pointed out in Massuccio di Salerno's Fourteenth Tale—page' 319 of the New Variorum edition of The Merchant of Venice—there is no other evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with the work of that author. The editor of the Malone Society reprint of A Knack to Know an Honest Man thinks that the name of one of the characters “suggests the possibility of an Italian source” (p. xi); and the editor of the same Society's reprint of Wily Beguiled does no more than point out certain obvious imitations of The Merchant of Venice. Dr. Albert C. Baugh, of the University of Pennsylvania, after a most painstaking search, is unable to find a source of the main plot of Englishmen for My Money. The “possibility of an Italian source” of any or all of these plays is strong, but thus far I have found none, nor have the several scholars, intimately familiar with the Italian literature of the period, to whom Dr. Baugh and I have appealed. Of course the prodigal, and the rebellious daughter, especially the daughter who refuses to marry the man of parental choice, are old and persistent characters in literature. It may not be too much to credit the slight if dexterous modifications of their rôles to meet the exigencies of the usurer play to a combination of English inventiveness and eclecticism.
21 Act i, sc. i.
22 See Simpson's School of Shakespeare, vol. ii, p. 208.
23 It has been suggested that Morecraft owes something to Demea of the Adelphi. See Variorum Edition of the Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, edited by R. W. Bond, vol. i, p. 360.
24 Wyclierley also gives this name to a usurer. See his Love in a. Word.
25 For a discussion of Massinger's indebtedness see E. Koeppell, Quellen-Studien, p. 138. Brander Matthews, however, says “it is not at all unlikely that Massinger may have owed nothing to Middleton's play” (C. M. Gayley's Representative English Comedies, vol. iii, p. 316).
26 Cf. iii, i, 58 of the latter play with ii, i, 2-48 of Massinger's.
27 Cf.
… and when mine ears are pierced with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold,
(New Way to Pay Old Debts, iv, i, 127-128) and
You lothe the widow's or the orphans tears
Should wash your pavements, or their piteous cries
Ring in your roofs.
(Jonson's Volpone, I, i, 50-52).