Abstract
Samuel Sheppard’s play pamphlet series The Committee-man Curried (1647) satirizes Parliamentary agents as corrupt, drunken, lascivious, and generally hypocritical. Since Sheppard wrote for Royalist newsbooks and celebrated King Charles I in his literary works during the English Civil Wars, his scorn for these opposition figures is not surprising. But throughout the play, Sheppard insists that, above all other ills, these assemblymen, excise collectors, priests, and moneylenders waste time. He shows them running late and shirking their responsibilities, depicts their sexual exploits as a mockery of good scheduling, and he likens their usurious moneylending to sodomy: wasted time leads to poor governance. In this article, I show that Sheppard blends quotidian images of timekeeping and oracular language to critique rule by Parliament. I contend that Sheppard’s scenes of prophecy and wasted time not only decry the committeemen of his present, but also interrogate the future consequences of their actions.
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Notes
Sheppard composed these plays after the New Model Army’s victory over the King’s forces in the First Civil War, but before the Second Civil War. During this period, Parliament governed and conducted tense negotiations with Charles as well as its own army. George Thomason dated his copies of the plays ‘July 1647’ and ‘Aug: 14th’ respectively.
Jason Peacey explains that ‘a pamphlet was conceived within the book trade as anything in size smaller than a folio (i.e. quarto, octavo, duodecimo).’ Although they could contain a range of content, pamphlets were usually publications of 12 sheets or fewer and sold stab-stitched rather than bound (Peacey, 2011, 454).
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift show that timekeeping was ‘more public than private; and more aural than visual’ in premodern towns (2009, 141). They challenge dominant narratives about the rigid economic structures of modern life that we conventionally attribute to clock time.
See also Coleman (1977, 190–1).
In this era before a national bank or a national debt, Parliament ‘had mainly to operate through the only body in existence which was in a position to tap the savings of the London business class as a whole, that is the City Corporation, and through mercantile syndicates and combinations’ (Clay, 1984, 271).
Debates about lending money with interest in early modern England were rooted in the spiritual as well as the economic (Korda, 2009). Parliament did not legalize the practice in 1571 on religious grounds, but ‘the Parliamentary debate which legalized interest-bearing loans in 1624 treated the issue as purely economic, a purely secular matter’ (Hutson, 1994, 26–8).
Fisher suggests that if ‘coining and sexual reproduction were homologous, counterfeiting and sodomy were to be understood as equivalent perversions of them: just as counterfeiting was considered to be a false imitation of legitimate monetary production, sodomy was figured as a false imitation of heterosexual generation’ (Fisher, 1999, 10).
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I would like to thank the editors as well as Claire Falck, Carissa Harris, Joseph Malcomson, and Thomas Ward for thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this piece.
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Nicosia, M. Wasting time in The Committee-man Curried. Postmedieval 10, 68–81 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0115-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0115-1