Abstract
김태원 Taiwon Kim: Markers of Difference and Sense of Englishness:
Language and Geography in1 William Haughton’s Englishmen for My
Money Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Volume 24
No. 2 (2016) 1-26
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.
Keywords
Englishmen for My Money, Sense of Englishness, Foreigners and
Aliens, Immigration, Cultural Geography, Early Modern London,
Theater and the City, City Comedy, The Royal Exchange