Encuestas 138

The law quickly spirals out of control once it expands throughout the country, something that was not part of the Duke’s plan. The episodes involving the courtier sons and their fathers occur in and around the court and privilege a proximity to the Duke and his center of law and power. When the execution of the law coincides with his physical presence to oversee it, the Duke can reasonably expect to maintain control over the

90 _{The Senate does not appear to have been privy to the Duke’s plot and it appears that the only other} official with knowledge of his test was the executioner, Cratilus (the Duke reveals at the end that “Only this gentleman we did abuse / With our own bosom; we seemed a tyrant, / And he our instrument” [5.1.616– 18]). See the Oxford edition for commentary on the possible significance of the executioner’s name. 91 _{A. A. Bromham writes on the play’s relationship to the conflict between James I’s royal prerogative and} English Common Law (“Contemporary Significance” 327–39). Ellis agrees that “At one level, The Old Law invites speculation as to whether one owes greater allegiance to familial or governmental authority” and that “The conflict in The Old Law evokes also the seventeenth-century English dispute over the legitimacy of the monarch’s capacity to override parliamentary legislation” (166). See also Taunton on how the “play pits the ‘old law’ of God and nature against the ‘new’ law which placed the king above the workings of the law, gave him the right to preside in the Star Chamber, and to interfere in trials” (Fictions 136). In another article, Bromham addresses a late-twentieth century adaptation of the play and potential early modern topical references to the Howard/Carr/Overbury scandal (“Is the Law Firm?” 117–27).

effects of his test. However, the playwrights also show what happens when the law goes into effect throughout the country—when it is administered by local powers—by

showing how the law affects characters who are distanced from the court in the subplot. Upon coming into his inheritance, the courtier Simonides immediately dismisses most of the servingmen of his father Creon’s well-run household: the tailor, butler, cook, and bailiff. Now masterless men without any means of livelihood, they become determined to seek out aged widows close to sixty with whom they can profitably marry and promptly outlive.

The dissolution of Creon’s household identifies Simonides as a destructive, anti- social force, for his actions threaten to transform the men into the kind of mobile,

unattached poor that the Vagrancy Laws and Poor Laws were meant to regulate, re-settle and set to work.92 _{The newfound vagrancy of the servingmen acts as a kind of unmooring}

of the play. Once they are evicted from the courtier world, they trace a path from the primary plot to the subplot, from the world of the court to the lower-ranking world of Gnothoes and Agatha, who may initially seem unconnected to the main plot. Indeed, Mark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham point out that the subplot “is not linked directly with the others” and that “This is surprising, and might be seen as a flaw in the play’s structure,” providing examples in performance where attempts are made to link the subplot’s characters more closely to the courtiers (80). However, for my purposes, the failure to link the subplot to the others is dramaturgically significant. It is the servingmen

92 _{See Paul Slack on the statutes that increasingly regulate the movement and behaviour of “vagrants” as} part of the establishment of the relief system and that also establish vagrancy as a concern and

who carry the law with them across this gap and expand it to the rest of Epire, allowing the law to produce consequences unimagined by the Duke.

The subplot introduces a bureaucratic source of power that stands in for the will of the Duke. The former servingmen converge with Gnothoes and Agatha at the site of the parish churchbook, where Gnothoes has arrived to bribe the clerk to antedate his wife’s birthdate and the servingmen have arrived to research the fifty-nine year old widows that they wish to wed for profit. The characters’ dialogue reveals a new social order, as the cook complains to the clown that “this is the end of serving-men” (3.1.115) and that they are all “out of request” (3.1.134). Gnothoes’s response reveals himself to be a character attuned to the times:

Nay, say not so, for you were never in more request than now, for requesting is but a kind of begging, for when you say, ‘I beseech your worship’s charity’, ’tis all one if you say, ‘I request it’, and in that kind of requesting, I am sure serving- men were never in more request. (3.1.135–40)

The Duke’s actions have set in motion a transformation in social relationships and produced a new way for these men to think about dependency: whereas earlier their masters were in need of their services, now the servingmen are the needy ones and must perform a new “kind of requesting” that is, in essence, begging. It seems likely that Epire will soon confront a rapid increase in beggars, should all the young men act as Simonides does.

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