The history of the word household reflects early modern England’s growing preoccupation with “stuff,” with the goods required to maintain a proper domicile in a nascent consumer society. In addition to the more familiar and still contemporary definition of a household as “The inmates of a house collectively; an organized family, including servants or attendants, dwelling in a house,” the Oxford English Dictionary lists the following obsolete definition, which refers not to domestic subjects (husbands, wives, children, servants, etc.), but to domestic objects: “The contents or appurtenances of a house collectively; household goods, chattels, or furniture.” To illustrate this usage,...

Recent historical research on domestic industry and patterns of consumption in early modern England has largely substantiated the account found in William Harrison’s Description of England (1587) of the newly available consumer goods that were infiltrating households at every level of society:

The furniture of our houses also exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy; and herein I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only but likewise of the lowest sort.... Certes in noblemen’s houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, silver vessel, and so much plate as...

Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has frequently noted that the play’s novel taming strategy marks a departure from traditional shrew-taming tales. Unlike his predecessors, Petruchio does not use force to tame Kate; he does not simply beat his wife into submission.¹ Little attention has been paid, however, to the historical implications of the play’s unorthodox methodology, which is conceived in specifically economic terms: “I am he am born to tame you, Kate,” Petruchio summarily declares, “And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2. 1. 269–71). Petruchio likens...

If the housewife’s role as a keeper and caretaker of household cates in The Taming of the Shrew remains in the wings, in that it is merely prepared for, in The Merry Wives of Windsor it takes center stage and is rendered fully—and quite literally—visible. Not only is the housewife’s active, managerial role in domestic affairs staged as a pivotal part of the play’s action, it is spoken of throughout in specifically visual terms. Housewifery, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is depicted as a task requiring a particular kind of gaze, one that is both vigilant and...

The seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer has exasperated generations of Shakespeareans with his suggestion that Desdemona’s downfall in Othello results from nothing more than her negligence as a keeper of household stuff: “Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?” he asks, foregrounding what is in his view the tragedy’s inappropriate preoccupation with a mere “trifle.”¹ Yet it may be that Rymer’s assertion has been so provocative because there is an undeniable grain of truth in his claim that the play manifests an obsessive concern with the whereabouts of a hankie (“So much ado, so much stress, so much...

In Act 1, scene 4 of Measure for Measure, Isabella stands poised on the threshold of a nunnery, learning of the “strict restraint[s]” to which she must succumb if she is to join the “votarists of St. Clare” (4–5).¹ Yet the Rule that defines and structures the Clarissan Order is left unarticulated in the play. The scene begins in medias res, just after a nun named Francisca has explained it to her. We are told only of Isabella’s desire to submit to the Rule—or, more precisely, to submit to “more”—which within the Clarissan oeconomy, as we shall...

The emergent topos of the housewife as keeper, as we have seen, became an apt metaphor in the early modern period to describe the wife’s various, often contradictory, duties with respect to the new market goods that were infiltrating the home. This dominant topos presented an image of female subjectivity as constituted in relationship to objects, objects that wives were charged with keeping as if they were their own. As such, it clearly worked to buttress a patrilineal property regime anchored in the English common law doctrines of coverture in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance. Yet the contrafactual legal fiction...