Adam Smyth, ed. A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. xxv + 214 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84384-009-1.

Reviewed by David Clemis (Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta)
Published on H-Albion (February, 2007)

Drink, Identity, and Ambivalence

This engaging collection of essays represents an important new strand in the study of early modern English drug and alcohol history. The largely literary studies gathered together in A Pleasing Sinne focus neither upon state regulation nor the evidence of the social or public order effects of the production and distribution of alcohol. Instead, they take a more cultural turn in their efforts to elucidate key values, attitudes, and beliefs that are apparent in various seventeenth-century English texts concerned, in one way or another, with alcohol consumption.

As Adam Smyth observes in his introduction to this collection, "the great wealth of texts that reflected and shaped seventeenth-century culture contested the moral, social and political significances of alcohol" (p. xiv). A key theme that runs through most of these essays is what Smyth calls "a larger cultural ambivalence about alcohol that is, to this day, unresolved" (p. xiv). For seventeenth-century writers, this ambivalence was fostered by broadly inconsistent conceptions of drinking. On one hand, drink promoted conviviality, bonds of friendship, loyalty, and artistic creativity (so it was said of wine), and it was strengthening and refreshing (especially English ale). But the evils of drink were also seen in its promotion of sin and arrogance, as well as the destruction of reason and dulling of the wits (so said royalists of ale-swilling commonwealthmen). Drinking was also thought to undermine the natural social order and, for some, the drinking of claret was simply unpatriotic. For the contributors to this volume, this ambivalence, or at least the strong contests between understandings of the nature and effects of alcohol (or different types of alcohol), often turns on the place of drinking in the assertion of one or more forms of identity. Thus, we find essays about drinking and political association, gender, national stereotyping, and social rank.

Throughout the mid-seventeenth century, writers of popular broadsides and aristocratic poets made strong connections between particular drinking practices and political affiliation. As Angela McShane Jones observes in her impressive essay: "From 1649 ... broadside balladeers took a political stance on drink and drinking. They politicised drink and then drunkenness, personified radical political leaders in terms of drink and drunkenness and, in so doing, depicted the social and cultural landscape in which 'political drinking' took place" (p. 72). In her study of the writing of royalist exiles, Marika Keblusek shows the strength of the association between a particular drinking culture and a political identity. Drinking healths or toasting with their trademark cups of wine can be seen as epitomizing royalist exiles making defiant, if symbolic, resistance to the much mocked parliamentarians surreptitiously sipping their ale. But Keblusek suggests that perhaps the greater significance of royalist drinking was as a means of finding comfort and solidarity in difficult times. McShane Jones shows how, from the 1670s, broadsides politicized drunkenness with claims of excessive Tory binging and hypocritical, secretive Whig tippling. This would only abate when the great seventeenth-century political crises passed. McShane Jones describes a new image that appears after 1688: that of William III drinking beer with common folk. As he tried to rule with Whig and Tory, so his willingness to mix drinks diminished the significance of wine and beer as political markers.

Charles Luddington's article suggests that the political significance of drink remained after 1689, but it assumed different forms. He charts how, between 1680 and 1703, the strategically motivated trade policies of the parties resulted in the association of French claret with the Tories and Portuguese port with the Whigs. Luddington is quick to point out that this division was purely one of political symbolism--it was no reflection of the fine palates of Earl of Shaftesbury and his followers. The Whig policy might have driven up the price of claret for political reasons, but it did not stop rich Whigs from stocking their personal cellars with great quantities of superior French wine. Indeed, Luddington argues, perhaps the more important signification made by the claret/port divide was between the wealthy who could afford costly French claret and the middling sorts forced to resort to port on account of Whig trade policies. Other contributors to this volume consider the place of drink in the inscription of social identity. In their essay on medical understandings of wine and beer, Louise Hill Curth and Tanya Cassidy note one seventeenth-century text in which various social groups are assigned their appropriate form of alcohol: "wine is for wits and scholars (improving mental health), beer is for the urban bourgeois (imparting a diet of strength and solidity), and ale is for the countryman (as an early morning pick-me-up)" (p. 144). In "Drinking Cider in Paradise: Science, Improvement, and the Politics of Fruit," Vittoria Di Palma observes that, like ale, the marketing of cider suffered from the product's "local and rural connotations" which "needed to be combated before the drink could become prized by the nation's gentry" (p. 175).

Cedric Brown's comparative study of two seventeenth-century poets, Robert Herrick and Leonard Wheatcroft, is a fascinating account of the possibilities for the assertion of social identity "through the meanings of drink in the cultural practices of the period" (p. 17). Herrick, a royalist "gentleman priest" and notable author of Hesperides (1648), and Wheatcroft, "a yeoman or artisan church clerk," both wrote poems celebrating the social bonding engendered by alcohol on festive occasions. Nonetheless, Brown observes, their respective social identities inevitably produced different perspectives. Herrick's view is thick "with affections of superiority.... Only wine supports the Muse.... Both poetry and wine are signs of an exclusive society, and the Sons of Beer can have no pretensions to refined understanding" (p. 7). For Wheatcroft, Brown suggests, "it was often the companionship of ale or beer that led to the occasions, even sometimes gave inspiration, for verse" (p. 18). Where Wheatcroft remarks upon the social inclusivity of festive drinking, Herrick emphasizes its reinforcement of social order.

Stella Achilleos considers how the Anacreontea--a collection of short Greek lyrics devoted to love and wine--was reappropriated by young elite men of the early seventeenth century and informed the literary expressions of their exclusive and sophisticated conviviality. The sociability of the upper ranks is also the subject of Michelle O'Callahan's essay on London tavern culture. A picture, familiar to scholars of the early modern tavern on the continent, emerges here of flourishing early seventeenth-century London tavern societies that were sites of conviviality, wit, and common interest.[1]

While male sociability features prominently in this volume, the themes of drinking, identity, and ambivalence are also richly explored in several contributions concerned with women and drink. Karen Britland incisively examines gender roles and identities in early seventeenth-century dramas through the lenses of drink and hospitality. In "empirical," property-oriented, and virile Rome, male drinking supported conviviality and fellowship that affirmed men's identity and authority. In decadent, feminized Egypt under Cleopatra, wine led to delusion and decadence. In John Marston's The Wonder of Women, or the Tragedie of Sophonisba (1606), Britland finds that there is "an equation to be made between strong wine's potency and a woman such as Sophonisba who has the capacity, even against her own will, to undermine a man's reason" (p. 123). In these early seventeenth-century dramas, Britland sees that when dispensed and partaken by men, drink leads to conviviality and solidarity. Yet when women are associated with drink, masculinity and the social order are undermined.

Susan Owen's examination of the libertine figure in two Restoration comedies uncovers different ambiguities relating to drink and gender. Owen notes that women, like men, drink in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), and are not taken advantage of as a consequence of their drinking. Moreover, Owen holds that "drink is the agent of women's emancipation and self-expression" (p. 139). It is through drink that they are able to escape the power of men and, indeed, turn the tables on men like the character Mr. Horner, who become their creatures. Owen acknowledges the "ironic social reflexiveness of the play," suggesting the importance of the power of drink to create the remarkable social relations found within the world of the play. It is interesting that, as Britland sees pre-Civil War dramas that present the mysterious, analogous powers of women and drink that threaten the masculine power and the social order, so Owen finds in Restoration comedies the amazing transformative power of alcohol that helps create a comic world which mocks society's gender relations.

Several essays explore the relationship between drink, or its production, and national identity. Vittoria Di Palma found that seventeenth-century writers extolling the virtues of cider played the familiar nationalistic card. The cultivation of apples and pears was seen as having benefits for the poor, was good for the general economy, and promoted the general virtues of Englishness. Charlotte McBride notes that nationalistic perspectives related to alcohol engage not only patriotic sentiments and economic interests in the production of ale or beer, but also the notion of a people's inclination to drunkenness. McBride joins others in noting that, from the early seventeenth century, excessive English drinking was a great concern amongst puritans.[2]

While most of these essays look at drink in relation to one or more types of group identity, some consider it broader social contexts. Curth and Cassidy note that the wide availability of alcohol and the great number of texts endorsing its medicinal properties facilitated a "broadening access to the science of healthcare" thus enabling "more people than ever before to manage their liquid diet in an empoweringly responsible way" (p. 159). Curth and Cassidy make an important observation about the anachronistic imposition of recent medical and psychological categories upon early modern texts. They observe that "terms such as 'medicine', 'intoxicant' and 'social lubricant' lose something of their clarity in the context of a holistic 'humours'-based medical philosophy. Given that the mind and the body act on one another, the distinctions between 'life preserving', 'life affirming' and 'cheering' are hard to define" (p. 159).

Adam Smyth concludes the volume with a fascinating essay on conceptions of drunkenness in cheap, printed, popular works. The tensions Smyth identifies in these works reflects the broader ambivalence about drinking that appears to be evident across English culture in the seventeenth century. Of the texts condemning drink, he notes that "running through all of these discussions of the destructive potential of drink is, paradoxically, an emphasis on the seductive qualities of alcohol" (p. 201). Moralists, says Smyth, face the delicate task of describing the tempting appeal of drink without appearing to celebrate it.

Smyth finds another, different kind of tension in a text that unashamedly defends the practice of hearty drinking. In response to moralists' charges that drinking dulls the mind and undermines social hierarchy, John Cotsgrave's Wits Interpreter (1655, 1662, 1671), tries to show how the properly conducted drinking rituals of elite societies emphasize the use of wit and reason, and reinforce social hierarchy. Yet, as Smyth argues, in defending drinking to the public by reference to exclusive drinking rituals, Wits Interpreter encourages the adoption of those rituals by the public. Thus, the text "is celebrating a culture of restricted access and hierarchies by flinging open the doors to preserve it" (p. 209). The ambiguities or ambivalence that the contributors to A Pleasing Sinne find about drinking in seventeenth-century texts is complicated by a further consideration. These can be challenging texts for cultural historians to interpret. As O'Callaghan notes wit, humor, and merry-making were essential aspects of drinking culture: taverns "were as much places for convivial pleasures as rational deliberation" (p. 51). Grasping the particular wit, irony, and satire in these sorts of works can be a challenge for historians wishing to make inferences about widely held attitudes and beliefs. Reflecting on the libertine in Restoration comedy, Susan Owen acknowledges the debate amongst critics as to "how 'sexy' sex comedy is: how far does it promote or endorse the rakes' libertine values and how far does it anatomise them or hold them up to critical scrutiny or satire" (p. 127). The same might be said of drinking and drunkenness in the seventeenth-century literature. Citing Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1674), Smyth notes the disingenuous and "comically unconvincing" efforts of Cotton to deny that he is a gamester. O'Callaghan notes that the wit of tavern societies employed "in-jokes, formulae, codes, and rituals" which were only recognized by members (p. 50). This makes it difficult to know how closely we may infer social conventions as they were practiced from a text like Richard Brathwaite's Law of Drinking (1617). This is, after all, a text rich in satire and mockery as is evident in its account of the etiquette of drunken vomiting with its distinct requirements when one "casts up" in the presence of only men and or mixed company.[3]

Perhaps as more studies of the place of alcohol in English literature and culture are produced, we will develop a better sense of the tone and temper of these kinds of works. The essays in Pleasing Sinne, of necessity, analyze a relatively small number of texts. This, of course, inevitably imposes limits on the wider conclusions that can be drawn about drinking in early modern English society. Nonetheless, this volume raises important, new questions and constructs some key themes that point the way for future research. Moreover, these essays make clear the particular qualities of drug and alcohol history that make it so fruitful for those interested in early modern societies and cultures.

Notes

[1]. Beat Kumin and B. Ann Tlusty, eds., The World of the Tavern (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and the Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). See also Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983).

[2]. The work of Judith Bennett and Peter Clark on the social functions and transformation of drinking, as well as the authorities anxieties about ale houses are endorsed here. See: Clark, The English Alehouse; and Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

[3]. Blasius Multibibus [Richard Brathwaite], A Solemne joviall disputation, theoreticke and practicke; briefely shadowing the Law of Drinking... (London, 1617), 40-41.

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Citation: David Clemis. Review of Smyth, Adam, ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12837

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