Written by William Gaddis in the mid-1940s, “Faire Exchange No Robbery” is a short, mock-Elizabethan play in verse, about early poetry anthologies and the death of Christopher Marlowe. Jeffrey Severs brings this unpublished document to light, finding in it the germ of Gaddis’s career-long interests in art’s relationship to commerce, and in the significance of contracts.
Various materials from the Gaddis Archive by William Gaddis, Copyright © 2024 The Estate of William Gaddis, used by permission of the Wylie Literary Agency (UK) Limited
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Among the unpublished works contained in William Gaddis’s archive at Washington University is a piece titled “Faire Exchange No Robbery, or ’Twere No Bargaine Either,” a parodic play written in quasi-Elizabethan style, only ten pages long but still five acts, set in 1593 and proposing a wild solution to the enduring mystery of who killed Christopher Marlowe (spoiler: Gaddis says it was anthologists of Elizabethan poetry and drama). The play’s typescript is dated 1947 on the title page, and the alleged publisher, “Wold Grunter,” is playfully named for the Gaddis family dog, Old Grunter.1I thank Steven Moore for this biographical tidbit, as well as help with some other points in this essay. Thanks as well to Joel Minor (who as the keeper of the Gaddis Archive at Washington University pointed me to this text) and to Ali Chetwynd and Crystal Alberts—both far more expert than I in Gaddis’s unpublished works and sources—for some ideas herein. The full title page goes on: “Being an account of sundry and knauish doings in the world of literature / With the Death of Marlowe / As it was plaide by the right honourable the Lord high Admirall his Seruants / Written by Will Gades” (“Faire Exchange”).2Gaddis has not numbered the play’s typescript pages, so for ease of reference, after this title page I have numbered the ten pages of text consecutively and give in-text parenthetical page numbers for subsequent quotations. See the entry on "Faire Exchange" in Ali Chetwynd, "William Gaddis's Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & TV, and Poetry: An Archival Guide". There isn’t any clear evidence for when exactly Gaddis wrote it, but it probably dates back to or is connected to his time writing for the Harvard Lampoon, where he published burlesques and pieces in this mock-historical style before being expelled from the university in his senior year in 1944 after an altercation with police. Like most of those works, “Faire Exchange” seems meant as a merely “hypothetical” piece of dramatic art, not intended for performance. Indeed, the play seems like something only a mischievous undergraduate humor writer in the Lampoon vein, destined for future form-breaking, would find worthy of all the effort – and perhaps in contemptuous response to a fixture of the undergraduate English survey course then and now: the anthology of literature.
For all its juvenile quirkiness, though, “Fair Exchange” also portends some key developments in Gaddis’s more mature work. After necessarily summarizing the plot and other key features of a work unavailable to even the most dedicated Gaddis completists, I will demonstrate here that the events of the play are significant to the Gaddis novels to come, specifically The Recognitions, J R, and A Frolic of His Own, in three primary dimensions: first, the way in which the early Gaddis uses anthologies as a stand-in for all that is wrong with the contemporary publishing business; second, the model provided by the particular rebellious qualities of the Faustian artist, Christopher Marlowe, who resists his anthologizers’ commercial designs; and third, and perhaps most powerfully, the abiding Gaddis theme of the critique of contracts, in capitalism generally but especially for artists, crystallized in the play’s riveting image of Marlowe’s sword stabbing a sheaf of contracts.
The play’s title is an English proverb dating back to the sixteenth century, a rarely heard phrase nowadays meaning that to trade two things of equal value – fair exchange – is always an honest deal for both sides. One hears in it justification of the kinds of robbery that actually do characterize both the plot we see and, by the lights of Gaddis the future novelist, much more complicated modern capitalist systems. In the five acts of “Faire Exchange,” the two anthologists at the heart of the drama, satirically named McSyrff and McNorff, meet up in 1593 London to discuss their plans to make money by getting various writers under contract for a planned anthology (Act I); they proceed to the Mermaid Tavern to make their case to Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe, who calls them “unlettered parisites” (“Faire Exchange” 3) and sends them away (Act II). In Act III, set in the King Henry Head Tavern, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, and others are enticed to sign at a cocktail party hosted by McSyrff and McNorff, whose plans are thwarted when Marlowe bursts into the party and throws their signed contracts in the fire. The incensed pair “plot industriously” after that, says the Act III-ending stage direction (6), and in Act IV, set in Eleanor Bull’s tavern in Deptford (the historical site of Marlowe’s mysterious murder), they take out their main foe by disguising themselves, getting him very drunk, and stabbing him to death. The play ends back at the Mermaid Tavern the following night in Act V with Marlowe’s fellow writers mourning his death and Jonson, taking up his friend’s position on the matter, kicking out McSyrff and McNorff as they try once more to have all the present authors sign anthology contracts.
“Faire Exchange” is marked by what some might call proto-postmodern techniques of pastiche, absurdity, and anachronism. On this last, for instance, when McSyrff and McNorff host their cocktail reception, it’s clear Gaddis is lampooning twentieth-century wining-and-dining of writers; the two literary businessmen even serve up a pitcher of martinis and have to explain what is in this bar staple from the future. As for absurdity, we get joking stage directions about the play’s unperformability, as when Marlowe on the night of his murder is said to “drink steadily for two hours,” thereby softening up the irascible and sword-wielding playwright for the murderous anthologists (6). We also see underscored historical inconsistencies that speak to the compressed view of an age or era that anthologies and the like always give: in the final scene, for instance, before all the writers’ contracts are cancelled and the anthologists dismissed, stage directions announce the entry into the Mermaid Tavern in 1593 of “Also John Webster, who is thirteen, leading George Wither, five, and carrying Robert Herrick, aged two” (7). These boys are writers definitive of the era, goes the anthology logic, so they must be present in a single moment of history, as they will be for posterity between book covers.
Anachronistic as well is the very premise that creators of things like the multi-volume, multi-edition Norton Anthology of English Literature were at work in the 1590s. McSyrff and McNorff have to explain the word’s meaning to the writers, from the Greek for “blossoms” and based in the fact that the earliest anthologies were called “garlands” and used florilegium to refer to each poet. While Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557 (its strong sales are cited in Act I as McSyrff and McNorff’s inspiration) is indeed regarded as the earliest anthology in English, the kind of historical-survey anthologies for classrooms that Gaddis’s characters are absurdly assembling in the midst of the Renaissance, with famous artists still at work and some still children, is a by-product of a much later era. For instance, the landmark and widely printed Oxford Book of English Verse, with poems from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries, is first published in 1900. In Act I, McSyrff and McNorff are introduced conspiring in “an obscure alley, near Houndsditch,” where McNorff says in response to McSyrff’s mention of Tottel’s sales figures:
We’ve got poets at our fingers’ tip
We’ll bring their stuff into the public eye
And let them go ill-paid.
McSyrff answers, “Aye, let them curse! / They’ll line our pockets from the public purse” (1). We can fill in the mustache-twiddling of villains of a different dramatic era ourselves.
Why anthologists as villains and somewhat absurd moral targets? Gaddis’s effort here might be to impugn particular anthologies and anthologists, perhaps a jab at someone anthologizing his own work (with poor remuneration?) or an inside joke about a particular Harvard English course or professor. As Steven Moore has pointed out to me, Gaddis had in his library at his death a textbook anthology of pre-Shakespearean writers from his days studying first-year English at Harvard, and some of the writers who appear in “Faire Exchange” are the source of section epigraphs in The Recognitions. Moreover, in that first novel the devilish art dealer Recktall Brown is not only a seller of Wyatt’s forgeries but an anthologist. He has produced a briefly mentioned anthology that Otto reads from, wackily titled “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand Madam, ‘An Anthology of Romantic Stories from Seven Centuries, by forty-six authors, gathered from thirty-one countries . . . Edited by Recktall Brown’” (Recognitions 209).
Indeed, parts of both the contemporaneous and more mature Gaddis corpus suggest that for “anthologist” in “Faire Exchange” and elsewhere we could actually read “the publishing industry in general with all its hangers-on, its bad taste, and its ignorance about real art, like my own.” In a letter from 1961, for instance, a half-dozen years after The Recognitions failed to gain recognition as a masterpiece, Gaddis writes to a fellow author about how those in publishing are “quite gone on what’s fashionable, what fits, as people who make their livings that way have to be.” They have as a “driving quality . . . curiosity, little more.” Note the inclusion of anthologists too, as he closes the letter with lines of historical perspective that echo both “Faire Exchange” and many interview comments across his career: “I suppose it’s never been any different though, we must carry them on our backs, the editors, anthologizers, like the hounds they are running for their lunch, while the writer of any substance like the fox is running for his life” (Letter to Tom Jenkins). Indeed, as Gaddis became a novelist in the late 1940s, such a vision of anthologists as hounds, along with the ideas and images of “Faire Exchange” (where Houndsditch, a real street, is well chosen for McSyrff and McNorff’s first scene), may have been more central to the development of The Recognitions and Brown as its rapacious villain than we know from the published novel: “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam” was the title of a first-person story that Gaddis sent out but did not succeed in having published in 1947-48 (precisely the date of “Faire Exchange”), a prototype version of Brown’s Christmas party scene in The Recognitions. In “In Dreams” (narrated in the first person), Recktall Brown is not named as such, and the emphasis falls less on what would become his art-dealing profile and more on satirizing the character’s publishing work and the title anthology, including an image of the book as a prison, full of “brief and, many of us felt, impertinent notes on the lives of the writers who were trapped between the covers.”3Harper’s reprinted the typescript story “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam” (under the heading “Juvenilia”) shortly after it was published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Ninth Letter. For Moore’s notes on Gaddis’s attempts to publish “In Dreams” in 1947-48, see Gaddis, Letter to Edith Gaddis.
Yet Gaddis’s satire of anthologists in “Faire Exchange” is also broad enough that it can accommodate the bigger, more momentous subject of rampant commodifying forces in postwar America that would become a key subject in his novels. A hint of that comes in a very fun bit in Act V when he turns Elizabethan writers into modern puns, often on trifling consumer commodities that will arise in a future when these writers will go largely unread, unappreciated, or known for only a work or two (or, as Gaddis will soon write, “still spoken of when . . . noted, with high regard, though seldom played” [Recognitions 933]). McSyrff makes this statement after all the writers, honoring their deceased friend Marlowe, have refused to sign up:
When people have more money and less time,
We’ll be respected tutelary saints:
Only through us will live your memories.
McNorff then adds:
When Nashe is but a common motor-car,
Raleigh a cigarette, and Kyd a child,
Lyly returned to name the Easter flower,
And Wither to the language as a verb,
Webster a book of unrelated words,
And Jonson but a stuff for waxing floors! (“Faire Exchange” 9)
Here is a nice workout for the beginning novelist who would later give us many wonderful made-up, satiric brand-names, such as my favorite, from A Frolic of His Own, a car company named Sosumi Motors. Embedded in these speeches is also Gaddis’s not-yet-fully-fledged attempt at another enduring theme: the seemingly inevitable degradation of art as it reaches broad audiences, like university classrooms across the land, or virtuosic music as it’s mechanically packaged into saleable, convenient form, without a living made for the living artist as a result. Player piano scrolls – which began to obsess Gaddis in this 1940s period and showed up in his later work, from J R to Agapē Agape – might be seen as some kind of loose analogue to the popularizing anthology. “When people have more money and less time,” the sellers of books will be not just moneymakers (among J.R. Vansant’s many products are some mass paperbacks) but “saints,” and the names of these great poets, calling to mind no literary achievements, will be reduced to ad language.
The most visually and rhetorically riveting moment in “Faire Exchange” occurs before this, though, in Act III, when the rebellious and still living Marlowe bursts into the King Henry Head Tavern and interrupts a line of Shakespeare, Spenser, Raleigh, Kyd, and others signing McSyrff and McNorff’s contracts. Marlowe bellows,
How doe you stand
To signing down your names, and losing there
Th’ identity you’ve worked so to declare?
He threads contracts on sword, and throws them into grate
Flee with your well-earned pride, nor dare erase
The trust that you’ve found threaten’d in this place! (5-6)
Marlowe’s emphasis on the artist’s contractual signature as the loss of the “identity you’ve worked so to declare” sounds like a nascent version of Wyatt’s trials in The Recognitions, where he cannot sign his actual name to the brilliant forgeries that declare his talent and in the course of the novel loses his name and identity altogether. The dual identities of the artist – on the one hand, he who has “worked so hard” and perhaps even sold his soul to “declare” his worth in the work, and on the other, the artist as a mere name fetching prices high or low in the marketplace that doesn’t necessarily care about truth – will go on preoccupying Gaddis till the end of his career. Perhaps Marlowe first delivers this message in Gaddis’s early work because, as the author of Doctor Faustus, he provides the novelist with a major model for Wyatt and the entire Faustian trajectory of The Recognitions, by now well known to critics as a governing structure of the book.4For what is still the most thorough critical account of the importance of the Faust legend to The Recognitions, see Moore’s chapter on the novel in William Gaddis, 19-74. Having dramatized his death in “Faire Exchange,” Gaddis will explicitly quote from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (written in 1592 or 1593, so just before the action of this play) when the Town Carpenter says to Wyatt, “‘Away to hell, to hell!’ Do you remember that? . . . ‘Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!’” (Recognitions 441). These lines in Doctor Faustus come as Faust dismisses the Seven Deadly Sins back to hell and expresses to Lucifer his desire to see the place (Marlowe 140).
Amid the parody, pastiche, and silly jokes, then, “Faire Exchange” does show a certain longing for an artistic past, rich with demonic, brilliant playwrights and great spiritual themes, that will be even more palpable in The Recognitions – and much more seriously explored there. Wyatt’s mission in painting exacting forgeries of artists from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries decontextualizes their works for modern lucre, and in broad terms, Recktall Brown works like McSyrff and McNorff if we see them as avatars of twentieth-century impulses: Brown identifies in Wyatt a way of raiding the past and decontextualizing it, thereby making deeply religious art, like any other product, into a new profit center.
That is the relevance of Marlowe as artistic example to The Recognitions, the Gaddis novel most invested in past centuries; later, in J R and after, it is the sword threaded with contracts in Act III that becomes Gaddis’s key weapon, an emblem of his central project of skewering not just the modern corporate system but the contract law that undergirds it. I mean here Jack Gibbs’s famous claim in J R: “Go to court with your judicial accounting, get your letters, get bonded, finally aren’t any God damned proceeds point the whole God damned problem’s the decline from status to contract” (J R 417). In such a world, Gibbs says later, an “atmosphere of mistrust” dominates all relationships (632), and remember that Marlowe says after burning the contracts, “Flee with your well-earned pride, nor dare erase / The trust that you’ve found threaten’d in this place!” I have plans to explore the Gaddis of contracts further in later critical work, but here, in the limited space of this archive-based piece, let me emphasize the counterintuitive aspects of Gaddis’s criticism of contract law in J R by referring to one of the novel’s most adroit readers. In a 2012 review of J R’s reissue by Dalkey Archive, Lee Konstantinou notes that Gibbs is citing nineteenth-century English jurist Henry Maine’s ideas, in Ancient Law (1861), about the movement from anchoring life in social institutions and their often hierarchical networks (Status) to grounding it in individual choosing and free enterprise decisions (Contract). Konstantinou writes,
In describing the move from Status to Contract as a “descent,” it seems unlikely that Gaddis is advocating a return to feudal relations, ancient slavery, or the Roman legal system, but Gibbs’s assessment of the transition between epochs highlights the cracks in Maine’s optimistic story of progress. . . . Just as the basis of life becomes contractual, Gaddis tries to demonstrate in J R, the supposedly freely choosing individual gets snowed under titanic social and economic forces. The individual may have the formal right to establish contracts, but he finds his range of freedom constrained by the market; finds his information limited or fallacious; finds that those with financial resources have tremendous power over those who, like him, have less or none.
As Konstantinou summarizes, “Maine’s optimistic theory of the evolution of legal justification becomes, for Gaddis, a pessimistic theory of the unfreedom of actually existing ‘free enterprise.’” While it travels to this point by an entirely original route, Gaddis’s use of Maine to express skepticism about freedom as defined by modern capitalism meshes with criticism of J R that sees it as a massive critique of burgeoning neoliberal ideology and its bedrock fantasies about how the apparatus of unregulated laissez faire capitalism, especially structures like the right to market contracts, guarantees freedom and autonomy. Ralph Clare, for instance, sees J R in 1975 documenting “the emerging neoliberal economy” and its “drastic changes in social, cultural, and political life,” as well as all the attempts of JR and others, through corporate speech and nostalgic myth-making, to give such economic chaos “ideological cover” (147).
Gaddis’s novel characters dwell deeply in and often must master the knotty and concealing languages of the law, finance, and contract, even in matters of familial intimacy and social trust, while expressing overall an inner yearning for an entirely different set of institutions and relationships. Gaddis, no sentimentalist, will never grant them that, even if they sometimes win the legal suits. In Frolic, Oscar Crease – the Gaddis artist character who is most thoroughly undone by a faith in legalisms – claims in court that the family history and writing behind his play Once at Antietam belongs to him; but the necessarily contractualized world of the court says no, he has no “‘property interest’” in his family story or the narrative he created from it: “notwithstanding the author’s alleged submission of his play to [Kiester],” the judgement in his lawsuit reads, “there was no evidence of any intent to contract with regard to said play by defendant and thus its alleged unlawful use could [not] form . . . any basis for action for breach of implied contract” (Frolic 355).
Oscar, as a playwright struggling with contracts, is a distant cousin to the Marlowe of “Faire Exchange.” But Oscar is at the same time no Faust, and no Marlowe; indeed, he has inherited none of Marlowe’s demonic ardor, Faustian possibilities, or (to return to the imagery of Gaddis’s 1961 letter) that taste for continuing to be the fox running for his life and doing decades of hard work when an early play (or an early novel) doesn’t meet with the desired reception. In fact, Oscar, who is so obviously desperate to have his very old play validated by an entertainment industry that is even more lamentably fashion-driven than publishers forty years earlier in Gaddis’s career, exemplifies the pathology Gaddis (as he says in numerous speeches and interviews, especially after taking on jobs teaching creative writing) saw in twentieth-century literature, that is, the desire to be called a writer eclipsing actually doing the work of being one. Enfeebled Oscar, more professor than playwright, has neither a signed contract nor a Marlovian sword, nothing that will give him secure standing in the legal system to which he entrusts his artistic worth. Moreover, decades beyond a young writer’s jocular vision of literary life four hundred years ago, with neoliberalism in full swing, there is no longer a way to simply burn all the contracts in the grate.
Works Cited
Chetwynd, Ali. “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & TV, and Poetry: An Archival Guide.” Electronic Book Review (June 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcent5-2
Clare, Ralph. Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014.
Gaddis, William. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Scribner, 1994.
—. “Faire Exchange No Robbery, or ’Twere No Bargaine Either.” Series 9, Box 86, Folder 5. The William Gaddis Papers. Washington University Special Collections.
—. “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam.” Harper’s, August 2008: 30.
—. J R. New York: New York Review Books, 2012.
—. Letter to Edith Gaddis, 15 January 1948. The Letters of William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
—. Letter to Tom Jenkins, 16 February 1961. The Letters of William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
—. The Recognitions. New York: New York Review Books, 2020.
Konstantinou, Lee. “Too Big to Succeed: On William Gaddis’s ‘J R’.” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 28, 2012. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/too-big-to-succeed-on-william-gaddiss-j-r/
Marlowe, Christopher. Marlowe’s Plays and Poems, ed. M. R. Ridley. Everyman’s Library. New York: Dutton, 1955.
Moore, Steven. William Gaddis: Expanded Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.