Converting Froth

Conversion is movement under pressure. The Justice Escalus in Measure for Measure cautions the gentleman Froth not to frequent taverns. “Master Froth, I would not have you acquainted with tapsters: they will draw you, Master Froth”; and Froth himself allows that he never comes into any room in a taphouse but he is drawn in. This imagining of how a person can be transformed by the forces and procedures of a particular environment can stand as a comic model of how the play’s primary characters are subjected to forces external to themselves, or external to their idea of themselves, and how external pressure acts upon their mettle (both their character and material substance) by heating them, making them malleable, causing them to deviate away from who they thought they were and what they thought was their authentic life path.

In this paper, I focus on Measure for Measure and build on a paper presented last year at the SAA in order to think more deeply into the material,  corporeal, and ecological dimensions of forms of conversion in early modernity.