Markers of Difference and Sense of Englishness: Language and Geography in1 William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money

Markers of Difference and Sense of Englishness: Language and Geography in1 William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money

This essay attempts to analyze William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), one of the earliest city comedies on English stage, in terms of the early modern English attitudes towards the presence of strangers and thus its implication to the emerging sense of Englishness. As a rapid growing capital city and trading post, London in late 16th century became a nodal point of locality, nationality, and internationality of early modern England. Haughton’s city comedy points to and reflects on the ways in which early modern Londoners might have reacted to a new city of diversity driven by a huge influx of population both from the English countryside and from foreign nations overseas. I would make a claim that the play deploys the geographical sense of the city, in tandem with linguistic dexterity of the foreign merchants, as a marker of difference among the citizens and denizens of London. I try to investigate the ways in which the insufficient linguistic mastery exposes the inadequacy of foreigners and their geographical ignorance is invoked as a sign of alienation in the London society. In so doing, I would argue Haughton’s play signals the emergence of city comedy in late 1590s, along with such well-known plays as The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Every Man in His Humour, which mirrors the cultural anxiety of early modern Londoners over the conspicuous presence of strangers and foreigners and thus the nationalistic desire on instituting the markers of difference.

This essay attempts to analyze William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), one of the earliest city comedies on English stage, in terms of the early modern English attitudes towards the presence of strangers and thus its implication to the emerging sense of Englishness. As a rapid growing capital city and trading post, London in late 16th century became a nodal point of locality, nationality, and internationality of early modern England. Haughton’s city comedy points to and reflects on the ways in which early modern Londoners might have reacted to a new city of diversity driven by a huge influx of population both from the English countryside and from foreign nations overseas. I would make a claim that the play deploys the geographical sense of the city, in tandem with linguistic dexterity of the foreign merchants, as a marker of difference among the citizens and denizens of London. I try to investigate the ways in which the insufficient linguistic mastery exposes the inadequacy of foreigners and their geographical ignorance is invoked as a sign of alienation in the London society. In so doing, I would argue Haughton’s play signals the emergence of city comedy in late 1590s, along with such well-known plays as The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Every Man in His Humour, which mirrors the cultural anxiety of early modern Londoners over the conspicuous presence of strangers and foreigners and thus the nationalistic desire on instituting the markers of difference.