Tobacco In Early Modern England Tobacco In Early Modern England Author Taya Velikajne Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Taya Velikajne, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Tobacco Gender Men Published page. Changed Folger and MoEML links. Moved JSTOR articles into print sources. Removed colons from head elements. proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Taya Velikajne Taya Velikajne

Taya Velikajne was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/

The introduction of tobacco to the European continent took early modern society by storm. This controversial herb quickly became incorporated into an average English person’s life by the 17th century. Some believed it was a panacea, the cure to illnesses within the body. Others warned of its evils and claimed the devil himself was the first to discover tobacco.

The Introduction of Tobacco

Tobacco was new for Europeans, first imported into England by Sir Walter Ralegh in 1586. Since Europeans did not have words to describe the act of smoking, it was often called drinking tobacco or drinking smoke. Tobacco soon became a staple in England with 25,000,000 pounds being sent yearly from North America to England by the 1680s.

The Effect of Print and Popular Opinion
Positive Views on Tobacco

Print was a key player when it came to the tobacco market in early modern England. Some writers during this period used print to advertise the many wonders the herb offered. Spanish physician Nicholas Monarde was a top advocate for tobacco, stating it could fix men’s and women’s health imbalances. Physicians came forward, including Roger Marbecke, who concluded it could cure dropsies, and waterish diseases, and rheumes, and scurvies, and cold, and weak stomackes (Romaniello 161).

Negative Published Opinions

One of the most influential published works against tobacco was by King James the I of England. His 1604 pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco claimed many downfalls of tobacco, such as the use of it by Native Americans (who were believed to be savages). He claimed that by smoking tobacco Englishmen might as well deny god and adore the devill as they doe. He also claimed that smoking was lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black and stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

Even with such an influential voice taking a stand,ntobacco did not stop spreading throughout this period.

Social Rules Surrounding Tobacco
Smoking Tobacco

English people developed etiquette and laws regarding smoking. In Norwich, smoking in public was outlawed. In other places, when men and women mixed in social settings, it was expected that a man wait for women’s permission to smoke or ask if it was acceptable. Tobacco was also not to be smoked around any royal figure.

In some parts of London such as Ram Alley, which was known for its criminal presence, tobacco use was prevalent. It was reported that men would be up all-night wreaking havoc on their neighbours with the stench of tobacco and illegal sales of the leaf.

Snuff

Snuff is a ground-up and treated tobacco that is ingested orally or nasally. Using snuff was more widely accepted than smoking tobacco since it could be enjoyed anywhere without impacting others. By the 18th century, snuff was widely integrated into elite society in England. Additionally, during this time, it was considered bad manners to refuse someone’s offer of a pinch of snuff. Elaborate snuff boxes, often works of art or encrusted with precious stones, became a status symbol.

Tobacco’s Influence in Early Modern Drama

Tobacco is represented in poetry and drama in the early modern period. One poem by Raphael Thorius in a book titled Hymnus Tabaci notes Of harmlesse Bowles I mean to sing the praise, And th’Herb which doth the Poets fancy raise Fill me a Pipe (boy), of that lustie smoke That I may drink the God into my brain And so inabled, write a buskin’d strain.

The Roaring Girl

Within early modern drama, tobacco was used as a symbol of risk and questionable morals. A great example occurs in the 1611 play by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl. Tobacco is used to emphasize Mary Frith’s oddities and disobedience to society’s expectations. Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, breaks social boundaries with her smoking habit, as it was common in other plays for women to express strong aversions to men smoking tobacco.

Tobacco is used to show not only Mary Frith as morally suspect, but also as a cause to question the morality of the other characters, such as the young men who plot alongside her. Sir Davey Dapper is concerned about his son Jack Dapper’s actions and comments on the type of activities that go on alongside smoking tobacco: A noise of fiddlers, tobacco, wine, and a whore, these horse leeches suck my son. He being drawn dry, they all live on smoke. (3.3.59–66).

Key Print Sources Cannon, J. A. Ralegh, Sir Walter. The Oxford Companion to British History. Oxford University Press, 2009. Mancall, Peter C. Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Environmental History, vol. 9, no. 4, 2004, pp. 648–678. doi.org/10.2307/3986264. McShane, Angela. Tobacco-Taking and Identity-Making in Early Modern Britain and North America. The Historical Journal, vol. 65, no. 1, 2022, pp. 108–129. Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl. Ed. Kelly Stage. Broadview Press, 2019. Romaniello, Mathew P. Who Should Smoke? Tobacco and the Humoral Body in Early Modern England. Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, Summer 2013, pp. 156–173. Craig Rustici. The Smoking Girl: Tobacco and the Representation of Mary Frith. Studies in Philology, vol. 96, no. 2, 1999, pp. 159–179. Working, Lauren. Tobacco and the Social Life of Conquest in London, 1580–1625. The Historical Journal, vol. 65, no. 1, 2022, pp. 30–48.
Key Online Sources Introduction of Tobacco to England. Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Introduction-of-Tobacco-to-England/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2023. Watson, Jacqueline, and Joey Takeda. Ram Alley. The Map of Early Modern London, v.7.0, 5 May 2022, https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/RAMA1.htm.
Image Sources Middleton, Thomas. The Roaring Girle. Or Moll Cut-Purse. 1627. Folger Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img46618. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026.