Chapter 4 - Tough Talk

Summary

Irregular in its rhythms, inventive in diction, and rebarbatively directed against some hapless target, tough talk flourishes in verse satires of the period before making its way onto the stage, enjoying special prominence in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and John Marston’s Malcontent. In these plays no less than in the poems that precede them, tough talk remedies the alienation of public life in a crucial respect: Through its insistently corporeal language, tough talk gives a virtual body to a public that, as an imaginary entity, necessarily has none of its own. Because it compels vicarious identification by attacking people for their absurdities of comportment, tough talk is a style, but it is also the denuded expression of that judgment we recognize as taste. The vicarious relationship that tough talk, as judgment and style, coordinates between absent witness and present speaker finds its surprising culmination in the figure of the celebrity, a figure of taste whose insistent embodiment likewise invites vicarious identification from a bodiless public, often through pointedly antagonistic means. Early modernity’s great emblem of celebrity is Mary “Moll” Frith, the outspoken, cross-dressing pickpocket who found herself depicted as the outspoken protagonist of The Roaring Girl.