'Good Tricks of Youth':

1. The notion of a 'generation gap' became a catch-phrase of popular culture in the period 1955-1975, but is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. In Renaissance England, 'youth versus age' was a distinct cultural motif. Steven Marx has written a book on Elizabethan poetry called Youth Against Age in which he states:

   The dichotomy of youth and age is one of those conceptual polarities, like body and soul and nature and art, that Renaissance writers thought with as much as they thought about. (Marx 1985, 107)

   At the very beginning of the seventeenth century this dichotomy had particular social relevance. London was a city dominated by the young: forty percent of the English population was under twenty-one in 1600 (Sharpe 1996, 188). As a result of this, as social historian Paul Griffiths tells us, 'the greater visibility of youth at a time of prolonged socio-economic difficulty raised sharper anxieties about young people and orderly socialisation' (Griffiths 1996, 5), rather as it did – one might suggest – in English cities in the 1970s–80s. 'Adolescents and youths,' add Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson,

   were seen by many as the primary instigators of disorder [in early modern England]. Youthful illicit sex and other aspects of personal misbehaviour that could produce a breach of the peace, were regarded as a sign of the failure of household discipline. (Fletcher and Stevenson 1985, 33)

   Plus ça change, a modern reader might venture. And while the notion of 'youth culture' is anachronistic in considering Elizabethan England, it is fair to say that the younger generation – particularly apprentices and law students – defined themselves against adult society in terms of their corporate solidarities and leisure pursuits. This, I would argue, makes generational politics essential to an understanding of the life of the community in Elizabethan England. Indeed, in recent years there has been a new interest shown in the sociology of early modern youth. Paul Griffiths and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos have attempted to understand the experience of being young in early modern England. Both have asserted the importance of age relations in social history, pointing to the paucity of scholarship on the subject. 'Historians,' comments J.A. Sharpe, 'must recognise that age is one of the variables to be built into their models of social relations [along with gender, race and class]' (Sharpe 1996, 189). In this essay I will be attempting to use generational politics to interpret the way that late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean drama used and adapted some specific stylistic influences.

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2. I have said that young people defined themselves against the adult world in their leisure pursuits – as indeed they do still. Apprentices formed a major part of the audience in the public theatres of the Shakespearean period, in spite of the fact that they were nominally working in the afternoon: 'In defiance of authority and common sense, there they were' (Leggatt 1992, 30). 1

3. It is not unreasonable to suggest that those young people – apprentices, law students from the Inns of Court, young artisans, younger sons and journeymen – who were 'without' any kind of culturally accepted status felt a certain affinity with the players in the early decades (1570-1610) of the professional theatre – and vice versa. Players were an underclass – and therefore subjugated to the wishes (imagined or otherwise) not only of their paying audience but also of their quasi-patriarchal patrons and the local and national government. Like law students and apprentices, players 'dressed up' in defiance of opprobrium from the older generation: they engaged in the kind of topsy-turvy ritual inversions and scold-tamings that young people enjoyed on holidays; and they had corporate loyalties. Above all, through their very occupation, players recognised the need for leisure and recreation – especially in the lives of young people – against a backdrop of a culture which configured an ideal of thrift and hard work.

4. This cultural conflict between the generations, and specifically between the self-indulgence of youth and the self-sacrifice of adulthood, can be seen at work in the handling of two major influences on the drama of the Shakespearean period: the Prodigal Son narrative, and the Latin New Comedy of Plautus and Terence.

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5. While youth is associated with bravery and idealism in some chapbooks and plays of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era, others present young people as deviant, manipulative and cynical. Frequently they outwit masters, parents or governors by underhand means, especially in Jacobean texts (Ben-Amos 1994, 27). This shows the influence of the Plautine-Terentian depiction of generational relations, and the extent to which Elizabethan-Jacobean literature was affected by classical literary decorum, 'whereby a character is required to do and say only those things appropriate to his age and station in life' (Beck 1973, 113).

6. It is worth remembering that Terence was actually on the curriculum in grammar schools and his dramaturgy – in its original language – was held to be a source of moral information. The German Protestant reformer Philip Melanchton saw Andria as exemplifying the way moral virtues might be absorbed from classical literature: 'Here are depicted the sage old men […] the young man Pamphilus endowed with an honest and pious mind; almost all things more moderate than either age demands or love permits' (Altman 1978, 132). Andria is, after its type, also a youth-against-age comedy in which youth triumphs through a combination of wit and virtue. Behind Melanchton's commentary lies a sense of the inaccessibility of this kind of human ideal: but the aspiration arguably had a great effect on young readers.

7. Plautus and Terence were a significant influence on Renaissance drama. In their comedies, witty young heroes triumph over the greed, lechery and conservatism of patriarchs. Terence's comedies were on the curriculum of grammar schools principally for their usefulness in the teaching of Latin (Altman 1978, 131-2). In his Book Named the Governor Thomas Elyot found positive moral instruction in Plautus and Terence, but Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster found their plays lacking in gravity. 2 Their influence on the work of the University Wits and the early work of Shakespeare and Jonson shows an acceptance of the centrality of the youth-versus-age paradigm in comedy. 3

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8. The Prodigal Son story was the subject of many didactic plays, interludes, tapestries, pamphlets and chap-books, and is mentioned more times in the work of Shakespeare than any other Christian parable. The Prodigal Son paradigm is important in any study of Elizabethan cultural politics, and it had as much effect on fiction and poetry as it had on the drama: Richard Helgerson identifies a sub-genre of Elizabethan fiction based on the prodigal son pattern (Helgerson 1976, 1-15 and passim). 'The pattern of the Prodigal Son' writes one critic, 'may be said to permeate Elizabethan drama' (Craig 1933, 41). These fictions encode the constancy of generational difference, along with an assurance that the 'son' will destroy himself if he continues along the road of filial disloyalty. Although these are presented as edifying models of repentance and confession, it is quite obvious that the selling point of these works was the transgressions of the hero or author-figure. Fiction writers and playwrights therefore capitalised on the predilection of young readerships for youthful transgression.

9. The parable's interpretation in the Tudor era differs from St. Luke's Gospel in one crucial respect: rarely does it include the ultimate reconciliation. In this foreshortened portrayal, filial disobedience is made to appear far more disastrous than it is in the parable (Helgerson 1976, 2-3).

10. Attempts were made to harmonise the traditions of Prodigal Son drama and Latin New Comedy and create a 'Christian Terence'. 4 However, as George E. Rowe points out, 'the responses called for by New Comedy and the parable of the Prodigal Son are incompatible'. New Comedy endorses youth defeating age: 'in the decidedly more conservative prodigal son story, however, our sympathies lie on the side of the parents'. In New Comedy, fathers must change: in the Prodigal Son story, the children must change (Helgerson 1976, 34-5 and Rowe 1977, 91, 94).

11. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the blame for generational conflict is often placed on the absence of the parental forgiveness which is central to the original Prodigal Son story. This model implicates the older generation by accusing them of forgetting – or in psychoanalytic terms, suppressing – their memories of what it is to be young. For Gerald Strauss, this had been a catalytic factor in the rise of youthful Protestantism during the Reformation:

    Attitudes toward youth were shaped by a received wisdom that had little to do with the lives of actual children. They did not seem to remember what it was like to be young; nor did they wonder whether young people's personal and social needs were being met, and, if not, with what consequences for their development (Strauss 1978, 85).

    Yet this problem of denial is also central to depictions of youthful folly: young people are at their most dangerous when they ignore their heritage and live solely in the present (Beck 1978, 110). As we will see, this is a condition of the feckless young men in Jacobean city comedy, whose freedom is not healthy, as it signifies a 'lack of responsibility and tradition' (Rowe 1977, 103). 5 What young people do with the freedom that New Comedy grants them largely depends on the position the drama takes with regard to the existing Tudor Prodigal Son paradigm.

12. The 'Christian Terence' and Prodigal Son interludes and plays of the Tudor era were a retort to the endorsement of youth in New Comedy: indeed, a lot of the late Elizabethan literature which deals with generational conflict is a response to both of these models. Reacting with scorn to the censuring of youth in the Prodigal Son play, John Marston satirised the form in Histriomastix (c. 1600) to his young coterie audience at the Middle Temple, making mock of the hypocrisy of plays which claimed to condemn vice while exploiting it for dramatic purposes. 6 Tapestries depicting the Prodigal were common, and a rejection of their message was to some extent a rejection of middle-aged bourgeois values. So Tarquin in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece reasons: 'Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw/ Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe' (244-5). The easy certainties of youthful prodigality and ruin are challenged by young writers who write for young audiences – as did Chapman, Middleton, Marston and Jonson in the years 1599-1605.

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13. The return of the children's companies in 1599 changed the nature of English theatre. The indoor playhouses were patronised by well-heeled young men – gentry law-students, young lawyers, gallants and those identified by Mark Curtis as 'alienated intellectuals' (Curtis 1962). Blackfriars was 'next door' to the Middle Temple: St. Paul's was only a few streets away, so both were far more convenient for law students than the public playhouses across the river (Harbage 1941, 80).

14. In the plays performed here, realism and irony replaced romanticism and emotionalism, and social commentary was refracted through self-conscious satire. Where the Rose, the Fortune and the Globe offered tolerance and inclusiveness, Blackfriars and Paul's offered aloof, sardonic scepticism (Finkelpearl 1969, 73). Pseudo-medievalism after Sidney, Spenser and Greene was replaced by (ironic) pseudo-classicism after Ovid and Juvenal, the satirists favoured by the Inns of Court-men of the late 1590s (Bennett 1982, 82). Central to the dramaturgy of the children's companies was a challenging of the populist certainties represented in the public theatres, and the concomitant citizen values of thrift and philanthropy: the indoor theatres favoured 'cultural dissidence' (Tricomi 1989, 60).

15. That said, elements of the New Comedy pattern of youth defeating age remained. In Middleton's The Phoenix, produced at Paul's in 1604, the ethical superiority of young people is total. At the start of the play the old Duke of Ferra presides over a corrupt administration, and favours stepping down in favour of his son Phoenix. The Proditor resists this move, as the young man has ambitions to 'clean up' Ferra. Middleton is well aware of the need to commend the aspirations of the Inns-men, so the Phoenix' enemies are the lawyer Tangle, an 'old, busy, turbulent fellow: [a] villainous law-worm, that eats holes into poor men's causes' (I.iv.42-3) and old Falso, a Justice of the Peace. Falso makes sexual advances towards his (nameless) niece, who repels him using his own legal terms: 'Be like an uncle of these latter days / Perjur'd enough, enough unnatural' (II.iii.86-7). Falso's words on her exit confirm this estimation: 'I do not fear but I shall have the conscience to keep you poor enough, niece, or else I am quite altered o' late' (II.iii.94-6).

16. To the law students in the audience, Tangle and Falso represent the degenerate old lawmen whose practice will be swept away, New Comedy style, by the new generation. Further, as New Comedies featured in the standard grammar-school training of Tudor boyhoods, the young characters in Renaissance drama seize on the real or imagined sexual depravity of the old as refracted through their expectation, conditioned as it is by depictions of aged lechery in Terence and Plautus. 7 This is a tacit admittance of the social function of literature (and specifically comic drama) as a source of instruction. It is also a mirror-image of the way that older characters react to young people with reference to the pessimism of the Tudor Prodigal Son paradigm. What is interesting is that on the Renaissance stage, the young people (like the Niece and the Phoenix) tend to be in the right.

17. Similarly, elsewhere in The Phoenix young Fidelio labours to prevent his gullible widowed mother Castiza from marrying a pirate Captain. The Captain plots with Tangle to secure himself a quick and profitable divorce from Castiza, but with the help of Phoenix, Fidelio foils the pirate's machinations. 8 Meanwhile the Proditor plans to implicate Phoenix in a murder plot against his father the Duke, principally as an excuse to have this dangerous young man killed. At this point both the young men are defending gullible parents from unscrupulous members of their own generation. Disguising himself as the Proditor's hired murderer, the Phoenix returns to his father with him. Having maintained the disguise long enough to be sure of his father's love (in believing his own written testimony against that of the Proditor), he unmasks himself and the Proditor is exposed. In the same scene, the Niece bravely speaks against Falso – and the moral victory of youth at all levels of society is secure. The old Duke resigns: 'To thee let reverence all her powers engage,/ That art in youth a miracle to age!' (V.i.176-7). The Phoenix is, as his name suggests, a successful prodigal, returned to his father: such optimistic responses to the paradigm are rare in private theatre plays.

18. Chapman's All Fools, produced by the Children of the Queen's Revels at Blackfriars in 1601, parodies Elizabethan romantic comedy, and has the concomitant New Comedy theme of sons outwitting fathers. Valerio, son of the country knight Gostanzo, has secretly married the dowerless Gratiania. His friend Rinaldo suggests that there will be grave consequences if he is found out. Valerio replies:

    My father? why my father? does he thinke
    To rob me of my selfe? I hope I know
    I am a Gentleman; though his covetous humour
    And education hath transform'd me Bayly,
    And made me overseer of his pastures,
    Ile be my selfe, in spight of husbandry. (I.i.135-140)

    Valerio does not especially resent his father's choice of his profession. What he resents is the coercion and restriction in the filial relationship. This is a feeling shared by his sister Bellanora, who complains later that her beloved Fortunio cannot appear to her at 'My Fathers house, where I as in a prison/ Consume my lost dayes […]/ My Father guarding me for one I hate' (I.ii.12-14). Of course, Valerio and Bellanora are self-romanticising and exaggerate their misfortunes. Nonetheless, these opinions on Gostanzo are well founded.

19. Rinaldo tests the ground by gulling his own father, Marc Antonio, into believing that his older brother Fortunio has married Gratiania. This immediately shows up the differences between the two old knights, besides the suggestibility of at least one of them. We are presented with alternative visions of fatherhood: tolerance (Marc Antonio) and severity (Gostanzo). Gostanzo tells Marc Antonio that he should reject and disown his son Fortunio ('Cast him off, / Receive him not') on the basis that the survival of the family itself should take precedence.

    No let him runne into the warre,
    And lose what limbes he can: better one branch
    Be lopt away, then all the whole tree should perish:
    And for his wants, better young want than olde. (I.i.311-315)

    This is an extreme, satirical version of the covetousness of age, expressed supposedly out of hearing of the young people. It comes when, at the crux of the Elizabethan/Jacobean eras, the 'overproduction' of graduates by the universities and the expansion of the gentry class was producing a social sub-group of expectant young men who saw the materialism of the older generation as a brake on their ambitions. This group, even if they were not genuinely significant in the wider community, were certainly highly visible in both public and private theatres. Private theatre comedy often refuses to flatter its young audience, presenting instead an extreme and stylised picture of common generational tensions.

20. So All Fools seizes upon the irony of young men practising the avarice which they condemn in their fathers; and in this response to the privileging of youth by the New Comedy paradigm, both it and the Prodigal Son motif are implicitly satirised. It also calls into question the moral imperatives of young men who seek not the renewal of society but merely the renewal of their credit at the ale- or bawdy-house. One is reminded of Thomas Nashe, writing a good decade earlier, on the subject of a 'Prodigal Young Master':

    hee have playde the waste-good at the Innes of the Court or about London, and that neither his Students pension, nor his unthrift's credite will serve to maintaine his Collidge of whores any longer. (Nashe 1958, vol.1, 170)

    And just as Nashe contrasts the diligence of scholarship with the indigence of a dissipated wastrel, All Fools provides an example of the 'double life' motif – itself a direct appeal to the sensibilities of the young gallants in the audience. Gostanzo's son Valerio leads a life of rustic ignorance for his father, and the life of a trickster-gallant to his friends. This presents a comic contrast to Gostanzo's boasting of the fear and subjection in which he holds his son. Valerio is one of a series of young people in comedy who present an entirely different identity to their parents from that presented to the rest of the world, and it is inevitably the parents who are being deceived. 9 Gostanzo's fear of being deceived is a fear of growing old: 'Honest Credulity/ Is a true Loadstone to draw on Decrepity' (IV.i.30-1). And this seems entirely consonant with his general mistrust of compassion. Thinking to dissuade Valerio of the merits of forming generational alliances, Gostanzo at one point attacks friendship itself ('Tush, Friendship's but a Terme, boy', II.i.79-85). 10

21. This is a young gallant's code put into the mouth of an old country knight. His code of dissembling used against him, he surrenders to the ingenuity of the young people. This happens frequently in comedies of this period: and every time it does, with the father's anger dissolving into good humour, it validates the original resistance to paternalism. Yet Gostanzo's change of heart ('Good tricks of youth, I'faith, no indecorum') is implausible in the context of his boisterous severity up to this moment (Altman 1968, 175). This is a parodic treatment of the ideal comedy world in which arrogant old country knights are brought up sharp by their sons, and the (nominally) powerful older generation is publicly humbled by the wit and energy of youth. Early Jacobean comedy makes a particular point of the demystification of paternal power, and this in itself follows the example of Plautus (Sutton 1993, 85-6). However, the wit and energy is, as we know, deceit and cynicism – not the New Comedy-style moral superiority and regenerative spirit of young people in 'straight' romantic comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It. To the end Gostanzo trusts his proverbial self assurance: 'Young men thinke old men are fooles; but old men know young men are fooles', he says, referring to the sexual jealousy of Cornelio. 11 But the play has also shown that mild (Marc Antonio) and severe (Gostanzo) fathers alike are apt to be gulled by the young, and that the future belongs to the trickster. The trickster is, of course, a descendant of the Vice of the moralities where, 'So long as the serious note is duly emphasised at the beginning and end of the play, almost any quantity of fun, often of the most unseemly nature, was allowed and expected during the intervening scenes' (Wilson 1943, 20). Tudor fiction (of the kind Helgerson describes) often conflated the trickster with the Prodigal Son, for similar reasons. Except that the early seventeenth-century city comedies and satires presented by private theatres dispensed with the moral framework altogether, and instead modernised the 'victorious youth' aspect of New Comedy. 12

22. The lasting impression of the play – and most of the comedies presented by the childrens' companies – is that of an unscrupulous younger generation whose materialism is out of control. 'The times,' writes Anthony Esler, 'favoured the man of easy conscience' (Esler 1966, 7). It is a carnivalesque nightmare of filial disorder only mentionable in the youth-dominated environment of the indoor theatre. Such a grim impression of human relations echoes Machiavelli's analysis: 'Men forget more quickly the death of a father than the loss of a father's estate' (Machiavelli 1965, 63). 13 Similarly, the contemporary chapbook Pasquil's Jests (1604) includes the tale of a young man who, having secured his father's estate, allows the old man to die of 'grief and sorrow' in the house. This, like All Fools, is a comic treatment of the perennial theme of filial ingratitude; but at its heart is uneasiness at the idea of allowing young people to inherit too early.

23. However, this is mitigated by what we know about younger sons at the time. Denied an adequate portion, they looked for advantage wherever they could. This was particularly true of the gentry apprentices who would have been in public and private theatre audiences: and many of the Inns of Court men were younger sons (Griswold 1983, 674-5). In a sense, All Fools was the ultimate expression of that 'realism' which was a reaction to romantic pastoralism at the end of the 1590s, particularly in the literary milieu of the Inns of Court.

24. So as the Elizabethan era closed, the use of the Prodigal Son and New Comedy paradigms by comic dramatists was changing. No longer were young people blameless – or at worst foolhardy in their battles with a corrupt or older generation. The energies released in New Comedy are shown to be just as destructive as the paternalism they supplant: and prodigality is to be viewed with scepticism rather than indulgence. The possibility of idealistic youth is compromised by venal materialism.

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25. As the early plays produced for the children's companies ridiculed the sentimentality of Elizabethan public theatre, Marston, Chapman and Jonson's Eastward Ho! (produced by the Children of the Queen's Chapel in 1605) satirises citizen comedy, and particularly the glorification of apprentices in plays like Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Heywood's The Four Prentises of London and Edward IV.

26. Playhouses – along with alehouses and brothels – were extensively patronised by the apprentice population, attesting to their relative freedom from responsibility, not to mention the irrelevance of their indenture contracts to real life (Hirst 1986, 83). Apprentices were the hard-core of the public theatre audiences. Unsurprisingly, many playwrights took to their defence partly for commercial reasons. Yet it is not too trifling to suggest that the censuring of the apprentice class formed unlikely generational alliances between the public playwrights and their principal 'constituents'.

27. During the Shakespearean period there was also an increase in printed literature which was specifically concerned with giving social and moral instruction to apprentices. These worked by exploiting the increasing literacy of the apprentice populace, and appealing to their corporate pride. However, the volume of these exhortations to obedience and hard work arguably indicates that apprentices were perceived to be an unruly and unpredictable section of the populace, and 'the impression they yield is of ideological uncertainty' (Burnett 1991, 29). In other words, the difference between reactions to youthful transgression – represented by the generational paradigms of New Comedy (positive) and Tudor Prodigal Son (negative) – were recognised as irreconcilable.

28. Further, instructional literature saw such transgression in purely generational terms, from which the affluent, literate apprentices of the Jacobean era saw themselves as exempt. Indeed, Jacobean dramas featuring apprentices seem to register the disquiet of the citizenry at the dissolute behaviour of apprentices from gentle backgrounds. Infractions were almost always petty, but their significance could be disproportionate. For instance, in 1603 three apprentices were imprisoned for refusing to have their hair cut (Pinchbeck and Hewitt 1969, 233). The symbolic anti-patriarchalism of such behaviour deepened popular distrust of the young – and the reaction to it sharpened youthful resentment of paternalistic authority (Brooks 1994, 80-1).

29. Social differences between apprentices would have been conspicuous in indoor and public theatres, where relatively wealthy youths flouted dress-codes, publicly presenting themselves as gallants akin to the fashionable gentry sons who also patronised the theatre. An awareness of these differences and, one could suggest, the vanity and selfishness of such young men, presented a contrast with the morally superior, youth-favouring idealism of the New Comedy paradigm – even though the paradigm's condemnation of arbitrary paternalism survived intact.

30. By 1605 what had been the defensiveness of playwrights in their depictions of apprentices now seemed decidedly quaint in comparison with the racy and satirical quasi-realism of the very late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean period. This is partly because of the tendency of those public theatre plays (Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday comes to mind) to ignore or 'sideline' issues of social difference within the apprentice population in order to appeal to some kind of notional citizen pride amongst apprentices (and perhaps young people in general) as a class. While Elizabethan depictions of apprentices – at least those aimed at an apprentice audience – are cheerily idealistic, attempts at social realism such as Eastward Ho! point to 'a system in disrepair' (Burnett 1991, 1605).

31. Eastward Ho! Pointedly satirises such cosy inclusiveness. Its principal character, Quicksilver, is a gentle apprentice. Irritated at serving a 'flatcap' merchant-citizen, Touchstone, he yearns for the life of the gentleman gallant – the kind of young man who would like to get into Blackfriars but can only afford the Fortune, the Red Bull and the Globe. So Quicksilver's drunken quotations from Marlowe and Kyd and Sir Petronel Flash's complaint about the closing of the theatres therefore associate the public theatre with proud but disreputable youth.

32. The play opens with a confrontation between the master and his apprentice; Touchstone is furious with Quicksilver for his riotous behaviour. Quicksilver responds that his free time is his own, and that as the son of a Justice of the Peace he has every right to behave as he wishes. Touchstone is unimpressed by this rank-pulling – as no doubt are the audience. When he leaves the stage, Quicksilver curses his master: 'Marry foh, goodman flat-cap. 'Sfoot Though I am a 'prentice I can give arms' (I.i.89-90).

33. To his fellow apprentice, the diligent Golding, he gives what amounts to a gallant's manifesto: 'Look not westward to the fall of Don Phoebus, but to the east: Eastward-ho!' (I.i.96-7). In other words, do not look to the older generation for direction, look to your own. These proud words are spoken by a doltish coward who, as Golding tells us, is as ragged as a beggar. Humiliated by Golding, he storms off to get drunk enough to fight him. As a result of his drunkenness he is expelled from Touchstone's service, who then confers upon Golding both freedom and the hand of his daughter in marriage. In the space of the play Golding goes from an apprentice to a wealthy justice, without any apparent effort other than his ostentatious virtue. The play reflects a sardonic mistrust of the idealised, reciprocal master-apprentice bond and the fantastical rags-to-riches myths of contemporary populist theatre and literature. Yet it is also based on both a contempt for the truncated Tudor Prodigal Son narrative and a real appreciation of the ambiguities and difficulties of the apprentice status: 14

    There must [. . .] have been a certain amount of tension intrinsic to [apprenticeship], a tension, if not outright conflict, generated by the difference between youth and age, servant and master, discipline and freedom, ambitions postponed and ambitions realised (Seaver 1992, 133-4).

    Meanwhile, Touchstone's daughter Gertrude marries the down-at-heel knight Petronel Flash. Her modest sister Mildred provides cautionary advice: 'Those that scorn their nest, oft fly with a sick wing' (I.ii.25-6). But Gertrude, like Quicksilver, is impervious to citizen homilies, later telling her mother that when she is married, 'my coach-horses must take the wall of your coach-horses' (I.ii.102-3). Later, when Mistress Touchstone complains about Gertrude having a young man (Hamlet) running by her coach, the daughter loses patience: 'Go, to, hold your peace, dame; you talk like an old fool, I tell you!' (III.ii.47-8). When Mildred is revealed as the bride of Golding, Gertrude angrily disowns her sister and father altogether: but we already know that her fiancé Sir Petronel is a broken fraud, with only his title to recommend him.

34. In early modern England, religious writers reserved particular condemnation for those young people who, having risen in rank, were embarrassed by their parents (Ozment 1983, 151): and this social archetype is duly used for comedy on stage. When her husband's fraudulence is revealed, Gertrude becomes yet more hostile to her father – even while asking him for money. Her mother tells her to kneel: she refuses. Touchstone sarcastically tells her that she can rely on her social status from now on. Gertrude craves an independence which she realises is now inaccessible, a life where, 'We should never need to be beholding to our scurvy parents' (V.i.66-7). This bid for independence is doomed, just as Quicksilver's is doomed, and they too are literally brought to their knees.

35. Touchstone, with his wise saws and self-assurance, is the standard merchant-patriarch. He finally forgives Quicksilver and Petronel Flash in a way that expands his tolerance of youthful folly; 'The ragged colt may prove a good horse' (V.v.65). 15 Those who scorn his authority and his protection meet with disaster and are immediately identifiable as perverse and deluded. But elsewhere in the play Security represents another side of patriarchy – the covetous, sexually jealous old man. The play also closely ties social climbing with filial disobedience, and shows in its early stages a 'weakening of […] the household's symbolic functions' (Burnett 1997, 30).

36. As with Eastward Ho! social pretension divides the generations in Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term. Middleton, writes Gail Kern Paster, 'is preoccupied with the often disastrous effect of city life on family harmony and stability' (Paster 1973, 39). The crafty draper Quomodo describes his relationship with his son Sim, a law student, in terms of the social difference that has opened up between them.

    But some of our livery think it an unfit thing, that our own sons should tell us of our vices: others to make him a physician; but then, being my heir, I'm afraid he would make me away: now, a lawyer, they're all willing to, because 'tis good for our trade, and increaseth the number of cloth gowns; and, indeed, 'tis the fittest for a citizen's son, for our word is, What do ye lack? and their word is, What do you give? (II.iii.458-465)

    Meanwhile a (nameless) Country Wench has come to the city, and her disguised father comes in disguise to seek her. He is a version of the old man of pastoral poetry, who has seen the city and knows full well the danger it holds for his naïve daughter. Andrew Lethe, 'upstart adventurer', has changed his name from Gruel to avoid association with his poor parents. When Mother Gruel appears, she does not recognise him in his fine new clothes: neither does he recognise her, and employs her as a drudge. She accepts this employment in the hope of gaining sexual access to Andrew's young friends.

37. Middleton exploits these disordered filial relationships: the Country Wench's father unknowingly becomes her servant, and Andrew receives an embarrassing dressing down from his mother in front of his friends, notwithstanding their supposed social differences. Meanwhile, Quomodo begins to resent his son Sim's social climbing, having laughed at it before. As a kind of 'test', he fakes his own death and joins the funeral procession in order to overhear his son's reaction. Sim is relieved to have his embarrassing father out of the way: 'I am glad he's gone, though 'twere long first: Shortyard and I will revel it, i'faith' (IV.iv.45-6). Quomodo, shocked by this callousness, vows to disinherit his son.

38. In the end, neither Sim nor Andrew Lethe repent – making Michaelmas Term a satirically incomplete Prodigal Son play which invites us to despise most of its young characters. For George Rowe, this is a paradigm shift: Lethe's actions, 'Push comedy to the boundaries of the grotesque and transform prodigality from mere folly to a threat to the core of society' (Rowe 1977, 106).

39. What we can now see is that an incorporation of the Prodigal Son topos and the generational politics of New Comedy does not by definition solicit sympathy for the young characters: however, it almost always reproves the older generation. If we look upon these plays as a cultural response to both Tudor moralistic literature and the youth-favouring energies of New Comedy, we can see that while rejection of the pessimism of the Tudor Prodigal narrative remains constant, by the Jacobean era the 'superiority' of quasi-Terentian youth is regarded with perhaps equal derision.

40. This is possibly because of the transition from the apparently gerontocratic condition of late Elizabethan England to the more youth-friendly regime of King James. The late Elizabethan writers perhaps felt more keenly the need to defend the younger generation – their audience – from the moral opprobrium of their elders, and to extol the energies and virtues of youth at a time of gerontocratic stasis and apprentice unrest. By 1605, playwrights were just as likely to be influenced by each other as by their ancient and medieval antecedents, and were just as likely to be writing about contemporary London as medieval Italy or France: and the glorification of youth, set against the rapacious materialism of contemporary London, by now seemed risibly misleading.

41. Also, the complaints of apprentices were set beside the fact that they had survived the 'hard times' of the 1590s better than most social groups because of the material protection provided by their masters (Beier 1985, 19). Taken with the Middletonian gallant and the ridiculous young malcontents of John Marston's comedies, in the drama of the first decade of the seventeenth century a view of youth emerges which was less indulgent than that provided by the New Comedy paradigm. Indeed, alongside the glorification of youth in the drama of the period 1599-1605 runs a continuous mockery, which ranges from good-humoured tolerance to full-blooded satire. That said, many playwrights of this era just as often seek to defend young people from paternalistic reproach: after all, this impulse is what their alterations of the Prodigal Son paradigm were based upon.

42. So comedy privileges youth, but in a way we might not have expected. In an extension of the logic of New Comedy, it foregrounds the spontaneity and creativity of young people, but frequently condemns them for exercising those qualities without moral understanding. The crucial element of being young, these plays tell their audience, is that one is incomplete, unformed, unfinished. Therefore, in a reassertion of the spirit of the Biblical Prodigal Son parable against its quasi-Calvinist Tudor variant, comedy encodes the notion that redemption in adulthood is possible.

43. This is why older generation figures who fail to exercise their moral understanding are seen as worse than their younger counterparts. In comedy the young may be amoral, but old villains are immoral. The difference between these two is an understanding of the way that a coherent and equitable society must operate if it is to survive: old villains, as in New Comedy, contravene that understanding, while young villains merely do not yet have it. In the war of the generations, those with the most to lose – the older generation – have the least excuse for prodigality.

Notes

1. See also Burnett 1997, 14-15 and Charles Whitney 1999, 433-58.

   

2. Terence was more ambivalent about the triumph of youth than Plautus had been, so yoking them together may be reductive. See Sutton 1993, 110.

   

3. See Miola 1994, passim. See also, for instance, Michael D. Bristol 1985, for a discussion of the New Comedy aspects of Dekker's The Merry Devil of Edmonton, produced by the Chamberlain's Men in 1602 (and therefore contemporaneous to the plays discussed in this essay).

   

4. See Rowe 1977, 93-5 for a discussion of these plays; also Doran 1963,162-6.

   

5. For refutations of this view of the young male heroes of city comedy see Shapiro 1977 56-7, and Tennenhouse 1977 167-171.

   

6. Ironically, a late example of a pro-father/'Christian Terence' Prodigal Son play is Old Fortunatus, by Marston's friend Dekker.

   

7. For a discussion of the paterfamilias figure in Plautus see Sutton 1993, 59-86 passim.

   

8. In the early life of Middleton, his widowed mother remarried: the marriage failed, and the couple subsequently sued each other. This may explain his interest in gullible widows being involved in cynical marriages. See Chakravorty 1996, 17-19.

   

9. See also, for instance, Lactantio in Middleton's More Dissemblers Besides Women, who appears as an innocent to his uncle the Cardinal, but is actually a rapacious wastrel.

   

10. 'But a Term' is a play on an academic or law 'term', meaning that the alliances formed in youth are brief, for example those formed among students.

    

11. In the tavern scene, Valerio mocks his father's remonstrance: 'Come come, wee shall haue you now thunder foorth/ Some of your thriftie sentences […] Fill the old man some wine' (V.ii. 96-104).

    

12. Beck points out that All Fools cannot be considered a 'prodigal son' play as the son's prodigality is tacitly endorsed, 120.

    

13. This works better as black humour in the original Italian: 'Gli uomini sdimenticano più presto la morte del padre, che la perdita del patrimonio', (Machiavelli 1820, 33).

    

14. See Barton 1984, 243.

    

15. In contrast, an intolerance of youthful misbehaviour is the most common misdemeanour of the Middletonian patriarch. Paster 1973, 41.

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