“Thou Trade which didst sustaine my poverty”: Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London and the Emergence of a Rhetorical Counterpublic

This essay investigates how the depiction of apprenticeship in Thomas Heywood's early play The Four Prentices of London participated in the formation of a marginalized rhetorical community on the Elizabethan stage. Contributing to a larger early modern counterpublic, this play publicized the private discussion of the outspoken if disenfranchised apprentices of Renaissance London by placing the marginalized concerns of these young men in direct conversation with the public's aspirational understanding of the guilds' training system. In his young and dynamic protagonist Eustace, Heywood stages a direct challenge to the narrow understanding of a riotous apprentice and offers a nuanced take on the institution itself – one that honors the possibility of social mobility but recognizes the cost of pursuing it. In The Four Prentices, Heywood uses the rhetoric of this marginalized urban cohort to theatrically refashion the Elizabethan public sphere and makes room for the apprentices in the public deliberations of the early modern city. In this essay, I argue that Heywood brings attention to the concerns of London's apprentices and, thus, recognizes the authority of this counterpublic within the larger urban public sphere.

The Polis as Rhetorical Community

Although “community” has become an important critical concept in contemporary rhetoric, it is only implicit in ancient rhetorics. In the rhetorical thought of the sophists, Plato, and Aristotle, the polis stands as a presupposition that was both fundamental and troublesome. Various relationships between the faculty of speech and the social order are revealed in different tellings of the history of civilization by Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as in more formal discussions of rhetoric and politics. These ancient disagreements about the nature of community can help us reformulate the current debate between liberalism and communitarianism. A rhetorical community as a site of contention can be both pluralist and normative.