Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Early Modern C ultural Studies Ivo Kamps, Series Editor PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 by David Hawkes Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England by Bruce Boehrer Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place by Rhonda Lemke Sanford Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture by Jennifer A. Low Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India by Pompa Banerjee Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn by Douglas Bruster England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism by Mark Netzloff Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean by Daniel Vitkus Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism edited by Linda Woodbridge Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe edited by David Glimp and Michelle Warren The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World edited by Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and its Double by Ian Munro Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays by John Michael Archer Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama by Denise Walen

Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer Re-Mapping the Mediterrranean World in Early Modern English Writings edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton by Benedict S. Robinson Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain by Catharine Gray Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng

Global Traffic D iscourses and Practices of Trade in E nglish L iterature and C ulture from 1550 to 1700 Edited by

Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng

GLOBAL TRAFFIC

Copyright © Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60473–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–60473–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Global traffic : discourses and practices of trade in English literature and culture from 1550 to 1700 / edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng. p. cm.––(Early modern cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–230–60473–0 1. English literature––Early modern, 1500–1700––History and criticism. 2. Commerce in literature. 3. Economics in literature. 4. Globalization in literature. 5. Great Britain––Commerce––History–– 16th century. 6. Great Britain––Commerce––History––17th century. I. Sebek, Barbara, 1964– II. Deng, Stephen, 1970– PR428.C635G58 2008 820.9⬘3553––dc22

2007036170

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Series Editor’s Preface

xi

Notes on Contributors

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Global Traffic: An Introduction Barbara Sebek

1

Part I Emergent Epistemologies of Trade 1 “The Common Market of All the World”: English Theater, the Global System, and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period Daniel Vitkus 2 “Ill luck, Ill luck?”: Risk and Hazard in The Merchant of Venice Ian MacInnes 3 Salvation, Social Struggle, and the Ideology of the Company Merchant: Baptist Goodall’s The Tryall of Trauell (1630) David J. Morrow 4 The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought: Or, a Merchant’s Map of Cymbeline Bradley D. Ryner 5 “Not every man has the luck to go to Corinth”: Accruing Exotic Capital in The Jew of Malta and Volpone Lea Knudsen Allen

19

39

57

77

95

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CONTENTS

Part II Transforming Home through Trade 6 “Absent, weak, or unserviceable”: The East India Company and the Domestic Economy in The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife Ann Christensen

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7 The Flowers of Paradise: Botanical Trade in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England Amy L. Tigner

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8 Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England Kristen G. Brookes

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9 “A Foreigner by Birth”: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English Marketplace Gitanjali Shahani

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Part III Trade and the Interests of State 10 The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery Edward M. Test

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11 “Mysteries of Commerce”: Influence, Licensing, Censorship, and the Literature of Long-Distance Travel Matthew Day

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12 Global Œconomy: Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News and the Ethics of Mercantilism Stephen Deng

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13

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Afterword: Accommodating Change Jean E. Howard

Index

275

L ist of Figures

7.1 Frontispiece, Thomas Hariot, A brief and true report (1588) 7.2 “Apples of Love,” John Gerard, Herball (1597) 7.3 Frontispiece, John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole (1629) 8.1 Frontispiece, Richard Brathwait’s The smoaking age. In Multibibus, Blasius. Disputatio inauguralis theoretico-practica . . . (1617) 8.2 The armes of the tobachonists (1630)

140 146 151

158 164

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Acknowledgments

D

espite the decentering of Shakespeare in the current volume, its genesis was a Shakespeare Association of America seminar in Bermuda, 2005: “Global Trade: Discourses and Practices,” cochaired by Roze Hentschell and Barbara Sebek. The format of the SAA seminars in fostering dynamic scholarly exchange proved invaluable. Warm thanks to all of the participants in that lively discussion, especially our collegial invited participants Jonathan Gil Harris and Jean Howard. Thanks also to Ivo Kamps, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Julia Cohen, and all the people at Palgrave. For much needed support at various stages, Sebek thanks Roze Hentschell, Richard Wheeler, Michael Shapiro, Ann Christensen, Carol Neely, Jyotsna Singh, Ellen Brinks, Sarah Sloane, and John Gerlach. Deng adds to this list Richard Helgerson, Patricia Fumerton, Mark Rose, Alan Liu, Ling-I Deng, and all his generous colleagues at Michigan State.

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S eries E ditor ’s P reface

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he Early Modern Cultural Studies series is dedicated to the exploration of literature, history, and culture in the context of cultural exchange and globalization. We begin with the assumption that in the twenty-first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiography, and cultural studies have become so interwoven that we can now think of them as an eclectic and only loosely unified (but still recognizable) approach to formerly distinct fields of inquiry such as literature, society, history, and culture. This series furthermore presumes that the early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transculturation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that set into motion a process of globalization that is still with us today. The purpose of this series is to bring together this eclectic approach, which freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political boundaries, with early modern texts and artifacts that bear the traces of transculturation and globalization. This process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and the books in this series are dedicated to both. It is just as concerned with the analyses of colonial encounters and native representations of those encounters as it is with representations of the other in Shakespeare, gender politics, the cultural impact of the presence of strangers/foreigners in London, or the consequences of farmers’ migration to that same city. This series is as interested in documenting cultural exchanges between British, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch colonizers and native peoples as it is in telling the stories of returning English soldiers who served in foreign armies on the continent of Europe in the late sixteenth century. IVO KAMPS Series editor

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Notes on C ontributors

Lea Knudsen Allen is finishing her doctorate degree in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cosmopolite Subjectivities and the Mediterranean in Early Modern England,” argues that representations of the Mediterranean provided early modern English poets, playwrights, and travelers with the means to imagine a metropolitan identity. Lea has taught several courses at Brown University and has been a guest lecturer at such universities as the University of Liverpool, UK. Kristen G. Brookes, an independent scholar, has published articles on Don Quijote and on La Celestina. Brookes earned a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2002. Her essay on the Virgin Queen and the “virgin” New World appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Criticism. She is currently completing a manuscript on race in early modern England. Ann Christensen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston, Texas. She has published essays on such topics as gender, domesticity, space, food, and early modern drama and poetry and is working on a study of home, work, and drama in early modern England. Matthew Day is Head of English at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, UK, with research interests in early modern print culture and travel literature. He has published articles in Journeys on early modern notions of empire, and in Studies in Philology on the involvement of Richard Hakluyt in the Nashe-Harvey dispute. His forthcoming work includes a reception study of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (Ashgate, 2009). He recently completed a Caird Short-Term Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Stephen Deng is an Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, East Lansing. He has an essay on money and mystical kingship in Macbeth: New Critical Essays (Routledge, 2008) and on the circulation of foreign coins in the forthcoming A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 1550–1660, ed. Jyotsna Singh (Blackwell, 2008).

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He is currently completing a book manuscript about coinage in relation to early modern English state formation and is beginning a second project on cultural impacts of early modern business technologies. Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York, where she teaches in the English Department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare and author of several books including Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (U of Illinois P, 1984), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (Routledge,1994), Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (with Phyllis Rackin, Routledge, 1997), and, most recently, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (U of Pennsylvania P, 2006). The recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, she is writing a new book on the development of town culture in Caroline England. Ian MacInnes is Associate Professor of English at Albion College, Michigan, where he teaches courses in Elizabethan poetry, Milton, and early modern women writers. He has published essays on human and animal bodies in Shakespeare and is at work on a larger project on animal bodies and national identity in early modern England. David J. Morrow is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, New York. He has an essay on Pericles and capitalism in the forthcoming A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 1550–1660, ed. Jyotsna Singh (Blackwell, 2008). His essay on Thomas Deloney and communal ideology appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Textual Practice. Bradley D. Ryner is an Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is working on a book that examines the conventions used by mercantile writers and dramatists to represent economic systems c. 1600–1642. He has published an essay in English Studies on systems of exchange in The Battle of Maldon (PUBLISHER NAME, YEAR), and he has an essay on commodity fetishism in Richard Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Matched forthcoming in Early Modern Literary Studies. Barbara Sebek is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She has published essays on drama, women, and transglobal trade in The Tempest: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2001), Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in Renaissance Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1998), Shakespeare Studies, Journal x, and Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar. Forthcoming essays will appear in Early Modern Emissaries, 1550–1700, eds. Brinda Charry and

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Gitanjali Shahani (Ashgate, 2008) and A Companion to the Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna Singh (Blackwell, 2008). Gitanjali Shahani is a PhD candidate at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She will be joining the faculty at San Francisco State University as Assistant Professor. Her research interests include early modern crosscultural encounters, women’s writing from the early modern archive, and postcolonial studies. She has taught courses on Shakespearean and nonShakespearean drama as well as contemporary South Asian literature. Her coedited volume, Emissaries in the Early Modern World: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (with Brinda Charry), is forthcoming (Ashgate, 2008). Edward M. Test is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is writing a dissertation on the influences of the New World on Early Modern English literature. Edward has a forthcoming essay entitled “New World Gardens” to come out in the book collection A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 1550–1660, edited by Jyotsna Singh and to be published by Blackwell (Oxford UP, 2008). Edward is also coauthor of three translations of poetry (English to Spanish) and is author of Fata Morgana (El Tucan de Virginia, 2004), a book of poems that was published in a bilingual edition. Amy L. Tigner recently finished her PhD in English Literature from Stanford University, California, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Arlington. She has published work concerning Shakespeare’s use of garden imagery and discussing the recent play The Laramie Project as a Western operating in the pastoral mode. She is also working on her manuscript “England’s Paradise: Horticultural Landscapes in the Renaissance,” which investigates the Renaissance literary obsession with gardens. Daniel Vitkus is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Palgrave, 2003), and he has edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia UP, 2000) and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia UP, 2001). He is currently completing a book on Islamic culture and the English Renaissance.

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Global Traffic: An I ntroduction Barbara Sebek

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ecent years have witnessed among scholars of early modern literature and culture an intense interest in economic history, mercantilism, and the emergence of capitalism, as well as in the relations between “culture” and “economy” as broad categories.1 Increasingly, critics have worked to explore the place of England in the emergence of what historian Immanuel Wallerstein calls a “world system” of global exchange. The chapters in this volume consolidate much of this earlier scholarship, bringing new topics and texts to the discussion and modelling innovative ways to construe the relation between the literary and the economic. Premised on the idea that trade was formative in spurring and structuring English forays abroad, Global Traffic bears out William Sherman’s assessment that most English travel in our period “was carried out (explicitly or implicitly) in the name of trade” (25). The volume therefore redresses what Walter Cohen refers to as a “collective underestimation of economics by contemporary criticism” and a need to come to terms with the “probably decisive role of economics in overseas expansion” (128). At the same time, this volume follows the critical axiom that economic practices must be understood as complex cultural and discursive phenomena. While the vast scale of England’s commercial expansion can be discerned numerically—“modern” facts such as the tonnage of London shipping trebling between 1582 and 1629 (Vitkus below), customs revenues at chief English ports more than quintupling from 1614 to 1687 (Minchinton 33), or the pound value of London imports nearly trebling between 1621 and 1700 (Davis 55)—we can also glimpse the increasingly global purview of English trade by juxtaposing two texts offering practical advice to overseas merchants and their factors: The marchants avizo (1589), by the Bristol-based merchant John Browne, and The merchants mappe of commerce (1638), by Levant and East India merchant Lewis Roberts. In the fifty years or so separating the first editions of these texts, we move from Browne’s slender quarto volume

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of seventy pages aimed at the “sons and servants” of merchants venturing “to Spain or Portingale or other countries” (Browne title page) to Roberts’s hefty folio of nearly 700 pages presented to “all Merchants or their Factors that exercise the Art of Merchandizing in any part of the habitable World” (Roberts title page).2 Roberts echoes this sweeping promise to encompass the entirety of the “habitable world” in his dedicatory epistle to “the merchants of England in General.” He claims to offer an exhaustive account of “all the fit instruments and materials as at this day is [sic] found practised in the Art of Merchandizing in all parts of the habitable world” (sig. A5v). Admiration for the global scope of Roberts’s tome—which includes five lavishly illustrated maps, 450 pages of prose surveying general trade topics and commodities and conditions around the globe, almost 200 pages of currency conversion tables, and a detailed alphabetical list of the latitude and longitude of the principal cities he surveys—is uttered repeatedly in the commendatory verses that preface the first edition. One admirer says that readers shall “live indebted that thou has brought hither / To us, the Trade of all the World together” (sig. A2v). Another marvels that “here that Massy Ball and all its traffique / At once is seene, as through a perfect optique” (sig. A4v). Yet another celebrates how Roberts “bringst us traffique home from every Coast . . . from every forreigne Soyle” (sig. A5r). Awed by the prospect of such a global commercial vista and the potential profit it entails, Roberts’s admirers express a debt of gratitude for his labors in bringing the world of trade home. For this discourse community, at least, the influx of the foreign on English soil is anything but maligned or reviled. Throughout our period of study, 1550–1700, the promotional strain that we see in the prefatory materials to The merchants mappe jostles against virulent opposition to the practices and consequences of global trade. Many of the chapters in Global Traffic address writers who register the cultural ambivalence, if not outright condemnation, prompted by the period’s unprecedented commercial expansion. This volume as a whole takes up—sometimes illustrating, sometimes challenging—what Jonathan Gil Harris describes as “an ambivalent conception of transnationality that works to naturalize the global even as it stigmatizes the foreign” (Sick 2). By attending to specific commodities, texts, structures, or economic debates, these chapters particularize the discursive operations by which the abstract and distant world of trade was rendered meaningful and intelligible to contemporaries. Taken together, these chapters offer a methodological blend: premised on a larger narrative of economic expansion and the emergence of capitalism, Global Traffic also offers what Lee Patterson calls “a plurality of micronarratives” (90).3 The volume therefore resists how the “global” paradigm can assume or imply homogeneity across different

Global Traffic: An Introduction

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cultures, trades, or social groups, or how it can erase the specificities of local conditions. Read as a group, the chapters here offer a point of entry to the early formation of economic and cultural processes that many consider the crisis of our own age. As Immanuel Wallerstein points out, the 1990s were “deluged with a discourse about globalization. We are told by virtually everyone that we are now living, and for the first time, in an era of globalization. . . . The processes that are usually meant when we speak of globalization are not in fact new at all. They have existed for some 500 years” (Globalization 251–52). Wallerstein’s reminder, aimed at an audience in the social sciences, comes as no surprise to those familiar with his work or to scholars of the early modern period, particularly those who study global trade and its cultural consequences. Global Traffic shows how the early processes of globalization must be viewed as intertwined economic and cultural phenomena. The phrase “discourses and practices of trade” in our subtitle signals this relationship between cultural meanings and economic activities while also implying some distinction between the discursive and actual practice. Thus, the chapters here are working in proximity to materialist problematics. Introducing his collection of nearly two decades of materialist Shakespeare criticism, Ivo Kamps calls attention to what by then was already a “heterogeneous proliferation of its methods and practices” (1). By claiming that materialist critics had yet to offer sufficiently “hard-core economic analyses” (16), Kamps points to some necessary correspondence between materialist and economic analyses. The proliferation of work in the material or economic vein has only increased in the past decade, with concomitant efforts to offer labels characterizing it, among them the “new new historicism,” “the new materialism,” “material culture studies,” and “the new economic criticism.”4 Recent critiques of work that falls under these various umbrellas note a recurrent tendency to evade or euphemize Marxist categories of analysis. Addressing the larger “explosion of historical and political criticism” of the early modern period, Howard and Shershow observe that “much of it seems an active evasion of Marxist modes of inquiry even when Marxism’s conceptual tools could prove of use” (3); they lament the “evasion of the specifically Marxist roots of these avowedly ‘materialist’ or ‘political’ projects” (4). Others likewise regard the potential of the newer criticism to be diluted when it fails to engage specifically Marxist traditions of materialist thought. Guillory insists that the “new economic criticism” is obliged to “establish a relation, if only implicit, to the old economic criticism, formerly known as ‘Marxist’” (223). Bruster offers a symptomatic reading of “new materialist” collections from the early 1990s, studies characterized by “an attention to physical things, ‘matter,’ that is, interpreted literally” (191). In place of class

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struggle, hegemony, or ideology, Bruster observes, the new materialism attends to objects in the world. He argues for more careful incorporation of the history of materialism itself. Harris also notes recent deployments of the word “material” in which “its residual Marxist baggage has been more or less emptied: the ‘cultural materialism’ of the eighties, with its vestiges of the dialectic of social struggle and transformation, has given way in the nineties to ‘material culture,’ with its whiff of the dialectic of renunciation and allure” (“Wunderkammer” 113). Harris discerns “a nostalgia for some kind of material terra firma as an antidote to the textual mises en abime of a generation of post-structuralist criticism . . . the object seems to provide reassuringly safe ground upon which to acquire a more or less unmediated access to the real” (114).5 Most recently, David Hawkes notes the dodging of Marxism—“the less fashionable M-word”—that seems to be at work in the frequent invocations of materialism (“Materialism” 116). Also, like the critics discussed above, Hawkes laments the tendency to focus on literal, tangible objects in the works he surveys, one of them being, interestingly, Harris’s own materialist account of stage properties. “‘Materialism,’ as currently practiced,” Hawkes argues, “endorses and supports” the fetishizing of objects.6 Richly contextualized and theorized, the chapters in this volume that do indeed focus on specific commodities (Brookes, Shahani, Test, Tigner) show that commodities can be the object of analysis without the assumption that objects provide unmediated access to the “real.” The collection as a whole considers the role of commodities in social processes—the systems and structures that make the movement of things meaningful—rather than studying objects for their “thingness.” Though engagement with Marxist conceptual tools is not salient in the collection as a whole, both Christensen and Test foreground the dependence of commercial expansion on the exploited labors of those at home and abroad. Even when not the primary focus, attentiveness to the economically disenfranchised or class-specific concerns threads through the analysis of trade in Morrow, Shahani, and Tigner. Race is a central concern to Brookes, but engagements with differences that intersect with or complicate emergent ideologies of race emerge in the chapters by Vitkus, Allen, and Shahani. In assembling these chapters, we have been conscious of the pitfalls of what Guillory calls literary criticism’s “peculiar” openness to deracinated economic concepts, its tendency to transform notions borrowed from economics into “merely thematic preoccupations, into ‘new subjects for criticism’” (224).7 We have tried to be thoughtfully literalminded about what counts as “trade”—the buying and selling or exchange of commodities for profit (OED 8a)—all the while recognizing that economic activity can hardly be isolated from political, religious,

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and other discourses, especially in our period, and especially given our disciplinary orientation, its refusal to read texts, literary or otherwise, as transparent historical records. Taken together, the chapters here might be said to follow the “intermediate” perspective that Cohen adopts in his chapter on Shakespeare’s mercantile geography, navigating between a kind of criticism “that would swallow up everything into the thematic preoccupation at hand—in this case trade—and a conservative scholarly approach that would confine the impact of economic imperialism to indisputable representations and allusions” (154–55). Given the diverse array of their theoretical engagements, the chapters here go beyond a mere thematics of trade while also collectively retaining trade as a focal point. They tap into or intersect with scholarly interest in travel, exploration, emergent nationalism, protoimperialism, and emergent colonialism in the early modern period.8 We have organized the chapters into three sections: “Emergent Epistemologies of Trade,” “Transforming Home through Trade,” and “Trade and the Interests of State.” The chapters in the first section, “Emergent Epistemologies of Trade,” are concerned with the conceptual shifts ushered in by the conduct of commerce over vast distances and protracted periods of time.9 Daniel Vitkus provides an account of the larger sweep of England’s commercial expansion during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, showing how, in this first phase of merchant capitalism, linkage with the Ottoman world-empire was a key step toward England’s integration in the global capitalist system. Though England’s successful trade in the Mediterranean was a crucial part of its movement from the periphery to the core of this world economy, Vitkus draws on global systems theory to show how this trade was only part of a complex and sprawling interstate system. Vitkus lays out the dynamics of this systemic shift as older feudal notions of plunder or conquest jostled against new economic structures such as joint-stock companies and capital investment. These emergent capitalist structures brought with them a new sense of mobility, mixture, and global venturing that was pointedly non-Eurocentric. At the same time, Vitkus considers the interplay of distinctly national interests and transglobal forces. He then argues that, just as the English were improvising in order to position themselves more profitably in the global marketplace, so they were adapting culturally. The London theater crucially intervened in the process of sorting and sizing up information about the larger world of long-distance trade, particularly the might and wealth of Islamic empires. Vitkus turns to Jonson’s The Alchemist to exemplify this theatrical engagement with Islamic wealth and power. Through his historicized reading of Sir Epicure Mammon and other dramatic figures, Vitkus shows how wealth did not reside in the possession of particular objects

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but in the ability to control capital transfers, especially when capital was abstracted and manipulated by those whose ventures were measured in mercantile letters of credit. Furthering our understanding of early modern reconceptualizations of economic practices, Ian MacInnes explores the ambivalent and rapidly changing attitudes toward financial risk in the late sixteenth century. He shows how the emerging mathematics of probability and statistics enabled a view of “hazard” as a calculable entity, a view that profoundly unsettled attitudes toward fortune and providence. As something that one owns or manages rather than something one does, risk becomes a way of knowing and controlling the world that is detached from divine providence. But because the concept of risk functioned in multiple contexts as a way of distinguishing between licit and illicit economic activity, debates about risk remained imbedded in theological discourse. MacInnes reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in the context of these developments, replacing the usury debates with nascent practices of maritime insurance, including the 1601 formation of the Court of Assurances, as the topical events resonating in the play. MacInnes argues that the assessment and management of risk is the central economic concern in the play as it systematically turns “hazard” into the basis of both economic and social practice. If newly reconfigured notions of risk concomitant with the expansion of long-distance trade challenged providential design, David Morrow’s chapter shows how religious discourses could coalesce with or be appropriated by the discourses of global trade. Morrow offers a reading of the merchant Baptist Goodall’s “The Tryall of Travell” (1630), an 80-page poem in heroic couplets that celebrates monopolistic overseas trade. Morrow teases out the overlapping, multiple senses of travel, labor, and difficulty condensed in the polysemic homonym “travell,” a concept that resonates in Christian, existential, and mercantile frames. Even as Goodall exploits Christian tropes and imagery to insist that long-distance trade is harmonizing, even salvific, Morrow argues that the ideology of “travell” is decidedly inflected by his era’s social conflicts and its struggles for access to power and revenues. Morrow discerns how Goodall’s appeal to Christian typology constructs longdistance trade in specifically classed and gendered terms. Goodall defends embattled merchant privileges by creating an ideal of vigorous, manly mercantile comportment that neither artisans nor noblemen could carry off. Rather than construing voyaging merchants as the redemptive agents who redress the dispersals of Eden and Babel, the mercantile writers Bradley Ryner discusses try to offer a panoramic, godlike vantage point from which the sprawling world of trade could be viewed at a glance. These writers engage the conceptual challenge of representing emergent

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economic relationships that were simultaneously personal and alien, individual and systemic, material and abstract. Deploying de Certeau’s notion of the “strategic model” or “map,” Ryner reveals the urge toward systemic thinking at work in writers such as Malynes, Kayll, and Misselden (an urge that illustrates contemporary engagement with the emergent world economy that Vitkus discusses). Ryner contrasts their efforts to represent trade in its totality to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a play that insists on the subjective and shifting nature of value, thwarting the totalizing perspective mercantile writings strive for. In stressing the messy particulars of value-formation and the retrospective nature of knowledge, the play deconstructs the contested poetics of mapping at work in mercantile treatises. Lea Allen’s chapter elaborates on Ryner’s discussion of how long distance trade stimulated contemporary awareness of the vagaries of value, as characters, coins and commodities moved from one context to another. Focusing on the importance of spatial movement and exotic places as means of marking and generating value, Allen challenges the common critical assumption that the expansion of foreign trade necessarily elicited xenophobic anxiety. Allen reads what de Certeau calls the “magic of proper names” in the rhetorical performance of wealth’s increase in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Jonson’s Volpone, nuancing how we conceptualize the relation between domestic and foreign spaces. Reading the plays’ telescoping of the “whole world” and the “little room,” Allen reveals how home spaces, whether street, market, or bedroom, become transformed and enriched by exotic capital. Allen extends this reading of the plays’ rhetorical enactments of exotic capital to London itself, discerning how the discourse of value at work in the drama becomes materialized in St. Paul’s, the central aisle of which was nicknamed the Mediterraneo. She thus shows how international trade and representations of “things in motion” are central to the production of (a) cultural capital. As a group, the chapters in the next section, “Transforming Home through Trade,” could be said to extend or tweak Allen’s corrective to the assumption that foreign trade’s transformation of domestic spaces was met with automatic or unmitigated alarm. They reveal a complex dynamic of fascination and fear, celebration and denunciation, that marks early modern understandings of the impact of transglobal trade on England. Ann Christensen’s chapter opens this section with a discussion of a little known play, Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife (1624). Written on Mountfort’s return voyage from East India, the play registers conflicted attitudes toward the East India trade as both enriching the nation and depleting resources at home. Modelling productive ways to think about the relationship of the

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economic and the literary, Christensen identifies the play as a hybrid city comedy in which two plots coexist: a “defense plot” that quotes extensively from Thomas Mun’s Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies (1621) and a “domestic plot” that details the trials of the virtuous wife of an absent seaman. The drama of the labors and hardships endured by the wife rubs against the defense plot’s attempts to exonerate the company of those hardships. Thus, even as the play offers a celebratory defense of the company’s ventures, it gives voice to a critique of the costs overseas trade entailed for those who remain at home. In attending explicitly to questions of labor and gender in the processes of a developing global market, Christensen shows how home, represented by its imperiled yet virtuous wife—and an imagined community of working wives—appears as both a heroic source of national identity and a vulnerable space endangered by the requirements of the nation’s economy. Christensen’s interest in the vexed relations between the domestic and the global continues in the next three chapters that turn to traffic in particular commodities. Amy Tigner explores how the trade in exotic flora—though in itself ancillary to more mainstream wares—had an enormous imaginative and ecological impact, transforming aristocratic English gardens into literal microcosms on English soil. She details the channels through which flora were procured and transported, as well as the shift in horticultural perspective from importing plants for their practical, medicinal uses to acquiring them primarily for their beauty and exoticism. The cultivation of plants from around the globe—venerated for their rarity—was seen as a recreation of Paradise in England (akin to Goodall’s view of the redemptive role of voyaging merchants that Morrow discusses in Section I). Teasing out the ideological and imaginative functions of herbal manuals, Tigner uncovers how these Edenic fantasies and celebrations of aristocratic abundance efface the dependence of the botanical trade on the slave trade. She reads the iconography of Ben Jonson’s masque Chloridia (1631) to show how, on the stage and in estate gardens, botanical art promoted a newly forming imperial ideology originating from the English court, while also providing imagery that was exploited by puritans and republicans for their own political purposes. Glossing over the botanical trade’s dependence on African slave labor, the herbalists Tigner studies construct fantasies of imperial possession that hinge on the veneration of the exotic and the successful incorporation of the foreign. Kristen Brookes analyzes antitobacconist treatises that yoke the New World weed with Africa, deploring the seeming transformation of English bodies from the inside out. Despite its New World origins, in both promotional and alarmist discourse, tobacco was so frequently associated with Africa and Moors that

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a drawn or carved “black boy” was the sign of a tobacconist’s shop. Given a cultural view of a characteristically (and paradoxically) English predilection to take on the habits and habiliments of foreigners, arguments in favor of tobacco as a panacea disrupted notions about corporeal differences between the English and other peoples. Brookes explores the discursive operations of a range of texts that present a nightmare of alien intake in which English bodies become the receptacle and vent of foreign waste. She compares the antitobacco discourse to later seventeenth-century broadsides and treatises on coffee, which reveal the persistence of the racialized image of the African or Turk insinuating himself into English bodies through their economic and corporeal consumption of imported goods. Brookes helps us see how these associations, formed well before the systematic use of slaves in the tobacco colonies, provided a language onto which slavery was later added. In developing this symbology, writers and graphic artists often swerved away from the specificity of a product’s place of origin. Continuing the previous chapters’ interest in early modern responses to the importation and consumption of foreign wares, Gitanjali Shahani traces the complex and ambiguous processes by which the local negotiates the global as the two coalesce onto Indian calicoes in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Shahani takes up Arjun Appadurai’s formulation that “commodities, like people, have social lives” to examine how an inanimate object such as cloth acquired a heathenish and foreign character in public perception, while also being tied to protocolonial fantasies of possessing the East. Initially a “piece trade” tacked onto the importation of spices and bullion, over the course of the seventeenth century, a rage for chintzes and calicoes erupted among both the middle class and the elite—and even the dead. Both on the backs of Englishwomen and in the interiors of English homes, Indian calicoes came to render the Indies an inescapable part of the minutiae of everyday life in seventeenth-century England. Like Brookes, Shahani notes the longstanding view of an English penchant for the garments and gewgaws of strangers, which tirades against calicoes regard as a monstrous dilution of national identity. Shahani analyzes intertwined constructions of “fashion” and foreignness, examining how Dorothy Distaff’s The Female Manufacturers Complaint (1720) accords both power and blame to the lady of fashion, construing fashion as a uniquely female crime that threatens female autonomy. Echoing Christensen’s analysis of Dorotea’s vocal plaints and others’ attacks on the East India Company in Mountfort’s play, Shahani reads how writers such as Defoe depict India swallowing up all, leaving England an exhausted, wounded, and bleeding entity. In analyzing the complex interplay between home and away, local and global, the chapters in Section II reveal a continuum of attitudes

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about the expansion of trade: from hysterical opposition to trade as a source of contamination, feminization, or destruction of England, to the veneration of the exotic and the celebration of trade as harmonizing, redemptive, and vital to the stability of the English nation. As economically based conceptions of the nation emerged in our period, long distance trade increasingly became identified with the interests of the state, which is the subject of the final section. Edward Test begins Section III, “Trade and the Interests of State,” with a study of a trade that received more attention and aid from the throne than any other: north Atlantic salt-dry cod, or “Poor John.” Test examines how the lowly codfish contributed to the highest concerns of the nation-state—domestic stability, national security, and foreign trade—and how it served as a focus for debates about the changing nature of trade in the early seventeenth century. Test explores the exploitation of what he calls the “poorer” half of John—the destitute laborer—and his subservience to England’s commercial pursuits, especially the fishing industry, which the seventeenth-century mercantilist Edward Misselden dubbed England’s “nursery of trade.” Test then elucidates the obscure “finny half” of Shakespeare’s Caliban, reading his materiality as both laborer and product, suggesting how England’s market relied upon a mobile, transitory labor force, a distinctly unsettled economy based on the trade of the New World fish and its return commodity, sack wine. According to Test, England’s early modern Ship of State depended upon the codfish trade to keep afloat, and international trade depended upon employing at sea a vast sector of unsettled and masterless men. Test shows how the island of The Tempest is not conceived as a permanent colony or traditional plantation; rather the magical isle represents the new economics of global exchange, stressing the dependence upon uncolonized foreign spaces for the growth of the early modern nation state. Matthew Day’s chapter attends to the specific practices at work in bringing accounts of travel and trade into print. Exploring the commercial sensitivity of early modern travel literature and the interaction of private enterprise and state censorship in its publication, he details the complex mechanisms by which the interests of the state and those of trading companies intersected or clashed. Day demonstrates that great trading companies such as the Muscovy Company and the East India Company actively sought to suppress texts either directly or through appeal to the state. In terms of the practice of censorship, such companies were able to use the possibility for employment, the offer of charity, or the threat of unemployment—rather than direct censorship—as methods to achieve their ends. Nevertheless they were also prepared to take such action. No overarching principle governed what was regarded as commercially sensitive; Day reveals how commercial

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interest depended on the particular historical, political, and geographical circumstances prevailing at the time of publication. Comparing manuscript sources and published accounts of particular voyages, Day demonstrates that the desire for commercial advantage was a key factor in the restrictions placed on texts, and that financial considerations should be added to our understanding of the causes of early modern censorship. Stephen Deng delineates the specific contours of England’s fiscal crisis in the 1620s. He explains how mercantilists and playwrights— especially Thomas Mun and Ben Jonson—responded to this crisis by appropriating Aristotelian ideas on the right use of wealth to suit the needs of the state in an international market economy. Much of this discourse aligns the interest of the state and English households against conspiring foreigners, both the exchange dealers spreading “banker canker” and evil merchants who have manipulated the English into an unfavorable balance of trade. Yet Deng insists that commentators also perceived a significant threat within England itself that must be held in check by a strong ethical approach to national and household economy. In fact, he shows how Mun’s principles of investment and arguments for a favorable balance of trade actually veer from the proclivity to blame foreigners for England’s economic woes. Deng reads Jonson’s depiction of Lady Pecunia in The Staple of News as a figure for this state-oriented ethical approach. The implicit international context of Jonson’s play, which emerged from late morality plays instructing the right use of money, suggests similar concerns with international finance. Both Jonson and Mun are ultimately concerned with England’s economic position within the world, and both prescribe a policy of moderation in monetary flows, contrary to the traditional perception of capitalist excess. Personal choices about how one uses wealth become linked to the national balance of trade, especially to the importance of investment. Deng calls this linking of the household balance sheet and the national balance of trade “global œconomy.” A number of concerns that thread through the volume reemerge in Deng’s chapter: the early modern preoccupation with the causes and consequences of an influx of foreign commodities; wavering between blaming foreigners and scrutinizing domestic practices; English habits of consumption and the particular associations of women as desiring consumers and objects of exchange; the general relationship between domestic economic practices and global ones; and the continuities between economics, morality, and politics. The chapters in Section III bring into relief how an increasingly global economy led to highly variable formulations of English national interests. They work with the volume as a whole in complicating a simple or straightforward narrative of overseas expansion as an economic or cultural phenomenon.

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I conclude with a brief nod to three examples that illustrate how unevenly the English “moved toward” an understanding of the nation as a global economic player in the period we are studying. I began with reference to John Browne’s manual of practical and moral advice for factors engaged in the Iberian trade. First published in the year after Spain’s unsuccessful naval invasion, Browne’s text is pointedly devoid of the chauvinistic zeal so characteristic in the aftermath of the Armada attack. Browne’s muteness on this score attests to how out of sync merchants’ concerns could be with “nationalist” ones. Not only does Browne fail to evince animus against the Spanish, but, as McGrath notes, he even enjoins factors to defer with courtesy and lowliness to the Spaniards with whom they deal (19). Here, national and religious conflicts are subordinated to promoting the harmonious conduct of profitable traffic. Not quite a century later, Carew Reynel’s The True English Interest (1674) contrasts Browne’s Avizo by conceiving of economic interests in distinctly national terms, as its title alone indicates. Moreover, Reynel privileges internal trade. According to him, England’s collective prosperity hinges on stimulating domestic trade and manufacture: “trade is to be advanced every way at home and abroad, but especially the home as being of more consequence than the foreign” (qtd. in Thirsk 142). Reynel’s insistence on the relative inconsequentiality of foreign trade contrasts tellingly with an early passage cited by Vitkus in the first piece below. Vitkus concludes his study by pointing to Thomas Smith’s 1549 Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England (first printed in 1581), which conceived of England not as a separate body politic or isolated national economy. Rather, Smith sees England as part of a global whole, the “common market of all the world.” I have isolated these bits from Browne, Reynel, and Smith in order to offer a quick snapshot of the multiple and competing views of foreign trade available during the period covered in Global Traffic. The following chapters fill out the story.

Notes 1. In her introduction to a recent collection that exemplifies such work, Linda Woodbridge surveys the explosion of mathematical and commercial publications in Renaissance England, as well as the spate of recent literary scholarship that engages economic concerns. In addition to the works Woodbridge cites, we can add Harris, Sick Economies; Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace; Leinwand; Netzloff; and Turner. 2. Demand for the sort of guidance that Browne offered is evidenced in the appearance of five more editions in 1590, 1591, 1607, 1616, and 1640. For more on Browne, see McGrath, Stevenson 43–44 and

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4.

5.

6.

7.

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141–44, and Sebek, “After My Humble Dutie Remembered.” Initially published in 1638, Roberts’s Mappe was reprinted in 1677, 1690, 1700, and 1719. For more on Roberts, see Ryner in this volume and Sebek, “Strange Outlandish Wealth” and “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandizing.” Howard and Shershow discuss how focusing on the local and the particular can fail to account for larger patterns of historical change. On the issue of periodization, see Turner and Dolan. Dolan helpfully enjoins scholars to revisit continually the vexed problems of periodization on a project-by-project basis. Fumerton uses the phrase “new new historicism.” Harris adopts this term (“Wunderkammer”), while also addressing “material culture” studies. Bruster uses “new materialism.” “New economic criticism” is the paradigm adopted in Woodbridge’s collection. The label was coined by the Society for Critical Exchange, which hosted an inaugural conference in 1994 and has subsequently sponsored panels at the national and various regional MLA conventions. While “economic” and “material” often go hand in hand (and in fact, according to the complaint of those discussed below, they should), there is a distinction between the new economic criticism, which explicitly deals with the category of the economic (although it does not necessarily deal with material objects) and the new materialism (new new historicism, material culture studies), which is not necessarily economic, and in fact rarely is according to critical complaints. Given their focus on trade, all of these chapters might be construed as falling under the new economic criticism rubric—although they are not necessarily influenced by critics such as Marc Shell or Jean-Joseph Goux, which is how Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee perceive the new economic criticism (21). Interestingly, then, Harris sees some materialist work as dodging both the historical materialism of the Marxist tradition and the sophisticated accounts of textuality ushered in by post-structuralism. Though beyond the scope of this introduction, revisiting this theoretical terrain is important for those debating the relation between “symbolic” and “real” economies, as well as for those interested in theorizing the relation between discursive and material domains. As we have seen, Harris himself shares Hawkes’s concerns, discerning in “material culture” studies an abandonment of the dialectic of social struggle and transformation. In “Shakespeare’s Hair,” Harris argues that by restoring diachronic considerations, scholars might “rematerialize ‘material culture’ in its Aristotelian or Marxist sense and thereby restore to it an understanding of materiality as process” (485). Cohen likewise asserts that, though overseas trade influenced Shakespeare more than is routinely recognized, one must be wary of the “slippery slope” by which “anything can be seen as metaphorically or allegorically related to mercantile expansion” (154).

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Barbara Sebek 8. Burton’s discussion of the term “traffique” in the sixteenth century (15–16) captures this interplay between specifically trade-oriented activity and wider discourses of exchange. 9. Although the sense of trade as buying and selling of commodities for profit was dominant by the mid–sixteenth century, the oldest sense of the word—“a course, way, path”—perhaps entered English originally in nautical language for the course or track of a ship (OED 1a). This older meaning reveals how intimately discourses of traffic were bound up with spatial movement and overseas enterprise.

Works Cited Browne, John.The marchants avizo. London, 1589. Bruster, Douglas. “The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn. New York: Palgrave, 2003. ———. “On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 67–77. Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Cohen, Walter. “ ‘The undiscovered country’: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography.” Marxist Shakespeares. Ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow. New York: Routledge, 2001. 128–58. Davis, Ralph. English Overseas Trade 1500–1700. London: Macmillan, 1973. Dolan, Frances. “The Term Early Modern.” PMLA 109.5 (Oct. 1994): 1026–27. Guillory, John. “A New Subject for Criticism.” The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Ed. Henry S. Turner. New York: Routledge, 2002. 223–30. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects.” European Journal of English Studies 4.2 (2000): 111–23. ———. “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (2001): 479–91. ———. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Harris, Jonathan Gil, and Natasha Korda. “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties.” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ———. “Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 4.2 (2004): 114–29.

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Howard, Jean, and Scott Shershow. “Introduction: Marxism Now, Shakespeare Now.” Marxist Shakespeares. Ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow. London: Routledge, 2001. Kamps, Ivo. “Materialist Shakespeare: An Introduction.” Materialist Shakespeare: A History. New York: Verso, 1995. Leinwand, Theodore. Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. McGrath, Patrick. “Introduction.” The Marchant’s Avizo. 1589. Boston: Baker Library, 1957. Minchinton, W. E. “Introduction.” The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1969. Netzloff, Mark. England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Osteen, Mark, and Martha Woodmansee. “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Patterson, Lee. “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies.” Speculum 65.1 (Jan. 1990): 87–108. Roberts, Lewis. The merchants mappe of commerce. London, 1638. Sebek, Barbara. “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandizing: Conceptualizing Exchange in Early Modern England.” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 2 (2001). ⬍http://emc.eserver.org/1–2/sebek.html⬎. ———. “Strange Outlandish Wealth: Transglobal Commerce in The Merchant’s Mappe of Commerce and The Fair Maid of the West. ” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998. 176–202. Stevenson, Laura. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984. Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Turner, Henry, ed. The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Globalization or an Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World System.” International Sociology 15.2 (June 2000): 251–67. ———. The Modern World-System. San Diego: Academic Press, 1974. Woodbridge, Linda, ed. Money and the Age of Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

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Part I

Emergent E pistemologies of Trade

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Chapter 1

“ The Common M arket of All the World”: English Theater, the Global System, and the Ot toman E mpire in the Early M odern P eriod D a n i e l Vi t k u s

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, England’s religion was

Roman Catholic, its feudal economy was marginal to global trade flow, and its professional theater was itinerant and largely dependent on household or courtly patronage. At the end of the century, England was predominantly Protestant and its economy was becoming a capitalist economy with stronger ties to global trade; London was rapidly becoming a world city, and its theater, too, had become “global” and commercial. In 1599, at the newly opened Globe Theatre in London, when the actor playing Jaques declared, “All the world’s a stage,” these words glanced at a new sense of English identity as a role that was to be performed on the stage of the world, and performed for profit. The theatrum mundi trope took on new meaning when England’s place in the world was understood differently, as a staging point for action in a global marketplace. In Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, Jean-Christophe Agnew has shown how both market and theater pursued a parallel course of change, breaking free of local tradition to create new forms and functions that were oriented toward that far-flung process of exchange that

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sent English subjects and commodities back and forth, across the wide world.1 With the establishment of the commercial playhouses in London, morality plays and moral interludes gave way to new forms of drama that represented a much broader range of locations and a wider variety of cross-cultural interactions. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English domestic economy was already moving toward a capitalist form, just as foreign trade was developing an increasingly abstracted system that relied heavily on bills of credit and internationally transferable forms of capital. It is no coincidence that the earliest joint-stock companies in England were the London theater companies (including the owners of the Globe, in which Shakespeare owned a one-tenth share) and the early long-distance trading companies (including the Muscovy Company, the Turkey Company, and others). In both cases, investors took a shared risk in hiring others to carry out their ventures, and in both cases large profits were made. But for every profit-taking shareholder in the Globe, there were dozens of wealthy merchants making money in foreign markets. In this chapter, I want to describe how overseas, maritime trade, directed by investors in London, became a global enterprise, and how that new role for the English nation was imagined in various ways on the London stage. Because the first wave of systematically successful long-distance trade was established in the Mediterranean, my account will begin there, but it is important to keep in mind that the AngloMediterranean trade was only part of a larger whole. The global trade network that linked London and Constantinople also linked the eastern Mediterranean to other markets further east—to Persia, India, and beyond. During the first half of the sixteenth century, much of England’s overseas trade was carried back and forth by foreign merchants. This reliance on foreigners was in part the consequence of domestic problems. Political and religious turmoil, following in the wake of the Henrician Reformation, limited economic expansion. For more than a century, Italian merchants (from Florence, then Genoa, then Venice) dominated the import-export trade that linked the English economy to Mediterranean markets. This relative economic seclusion began to change, however, with the foundation of the Levant Company during the second half of the sixteenth century, and by the early seventeenth century, English merchant vessels were transporting woven cloth, tin, lead, rabbit skins, and other commodities to ports throughout the Mediterranean, and returning with currants and wine from the Greek islands, cotton and carpets from Turkey, raw silk from Persia, and drugs and spices from the East Indies.2 English merchants also took advantage of other opportunities for profit in the Mediterranean. Ottoman naval

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power had weakened Italian control over maritime trade in the islands and coasts of the eastern Mediterranean; the Venetians, in particular, struggled to maintain control over their holdings there. As outsiders and newcomers, with little to no territorial ambition in the region, the English did not pose a threat to Ottoman power. This, and the fact that English goods such as lead and tin were in high demand in Turkey, allowed English entrepreneurs to take advantage of the situation. They not only began to carry English export goods to Italy and Turkey, but English merchants also took over some of the intra-Mediterranean carrying trade from the Italians themselves. Halil Inalcik describes the effects of the English and Dutch interventions in the Mediterranean at that time: “The invasion of the sea by northern ships from the Atlantic marked a turning point in the history of the Mediterranean, with an impact on every dimension of the economic life of the region” (366). By 1622, Edward Misselden, an apologist for the Merchant Adventurers Company, could declare, The Levant Company . . . by their trade under Government, hath built a great strength of warlike, Tall & Lusty Shipping, which they employ in that trade: and by their industry have won from the Italians the trade of the Levant: the Commodities whereof were before brought into this Realme by Argosies to the encrease of forreine shipping, and at deare rates: and it is now reduced to the Natives of this Kingdome, to the encrease of Shipping, and the benefit of the Publike. (76–77)

Thus, the 1570s were a crucial phase in the history of English overseas trade, but this expansion of English merchant capital came about in concert with other changes that were rippling through the global economy. The same year—1571—saw the inauguration of the trans-Pacific Acapulco-Manila trade route by Spain and the successful negotiation of a special commercial agreement between England and the Ottoman Empire. Buoyed by its successful intervention in the Mediterranean seagoing economy, by newly developed, superior technologies in shipbuilding and gunnery, by the culture of maritime aggression and plunder that grew out of competition and conflict with Spain, England began to take on a more ambitious identity in relation to the rest of the world: this was not the Continental adventurism, moved by the feudal ambition of the monarch, that had bankrupted Henry VIII (and of which his thriftier daughter Elizabeth was wary); rather, it was a new sense of mobility, mixture, and global “venturing” that was pointedly non-Eurocentric. Global systems theory makes clear that the tremendous commercial expansion of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century did not arise solely as a result of events in England or even in Europe. The

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expansion of international trade, and the corresponding burst of transcultural activity that began in Britain in the 1560s and 1570s, partook of a larger, systemic shift that was driven by a global system of supply and demand. World systems theorists, most notably Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank, and Kenneth Pomeranz, have traced and analyzed the complex commercial linkages and exchanges that, after 1492, began to constitute a truly global economy. Wallerstein’s work, in particular, offers a useful set of concepts for understanding the structure and development of the worldwide system of trade, which he calls the “world-economy.” This world-economy began with a core group of nations in Western Europe that competed and combined to bring about a global capitalist system.3 An essay authored by Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Resat Kasaba discusses the eventual incorporation of the Ottoman Empire within this world-economy dominated by Europe. Wallerstein argues in that essay and elsewhere that in 1500 the Ottoman Empire was an expanding “world-empire” on the border of the new European world-economy. A world-empire is “self-centered and self-responsive” or “economically autonomous” (89), as opposed to the interstate structure of the worldeconomy. The new European world-economy “was able to consolidate itself, and develop fully the capitalist mode of production and the interstate system which is the structural correlate of a world economy” (88), so that during the next two centuries, “the capitalist worldeconomy expanded and ‘incorporated’ the Ottoman world-empire” (88). According to Wallerstein, Decdeli, and Kasaba, “the production processes of the [Ottoman] region became part of the integrated division of labour of the capitalist world-economy, responding to the imperatives of the drive for accumulation of capital” (89), but that process of incorporation was not completed until the eighteenth century.4 It was during the century that followed Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India and Columbus’ arrival in the Americas that the global system grew to form an unprecedented ring around the world. The establishment of the Cape-trade route by the Portuguese and the opening of gold and silver mines in the new Spanish colonies supplemented the land-based trade routes that had already linked Asia with Europe. The British Isles, which had occupied a peripheral location in the global economy, suddenly took up a new position in the emergent worldeconomy. At this time, English merchants established fresh overseas connections by means of aggressive maritime venturing and successful negotiation with the Ottoman sultan. As early as the 1550s, a series of voyages sponsored by the English court and merchant elites began to search for a northeast or northwest passage to the East, in the hope that England could find a better situation in relation to the flow of goods from that region. While these efforts failed, they did produce a better

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sense of “global positioning” for English venturers.5 Following routes that were already known to the Spanish and Portuguese, Sir Francis Drake began his piratical circumnavigation of the globe in 1577, returning in 1580.6 While state-sponsored pirates such as Drake succeeded in making profit through plunder, it was a systematic trade in the Mediterranean, and then further east in India and Indonesia, that tapped into the global trade system more effectively.7 Leading merchant venturers in England knew that a mutually profitable exchange of English exports for foreign imports conducted by joint-stock companies in overseas markets, not parasitic looting in the form of “privateering,” was an enterprise worth the risk of investment. The economic historian Robert Brenner has shown how financial elites in early modern London, by forming groups of investors to underwrite overseas trade, succeeded in laying out the lasting foundations of English merchant capitalism.8 It is true that England’s ambitious new economic efforts retained a feudal conception of imperial aspiration and an ancient lust for gold and silver; as time went on, however, the English upper classes supplemented these older motives for expansion with an emerging understanding of new economic structures and methods—those of emergent capitalism. New systems of credit and debt helped to make possible the investment in overseas trade, and recently created joint-stock companies such as the East India Company and the Levant Company worked to organize and institutionalize the new economic initiatives.9 The yearning for precious metals and the desire to establish overseas colonies were powerful impulses, but at first it was not through plunder or conquest that the English were able to obtain an important role in the new worldeconomy. Rather, English expansion was sustained through unprecedented forms of capital investment by merchants whose primary concern was to harness the increasingly abstracted power of capital flow. During the last third of the sixteenth century, England suddenly found itself connected to the recently restructured global trade system through its great port city, London. The total amount of London-based shipping trebled its size in tonnage between 1582 and 1629.10 English subjects were becoming aware of their place within a vast commercial system, marginal to the great Afro-Eurasian land mass, protected by the sea from invasion and yet open to the sea routes that linked London with the commercial matrix. This growing awareness was sometimes disorienting and vertiginous, but already it included a sense that tremendous wealth and power were being produced along a chain of empires that stretched from the Habsburgs in Europe and the Americas, to the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, to the Safavid Persians, to the Indo-Timuri (or Mughal) empire in India, and on to China, Japan, and the Spice Islands in the Far East. At first, English activity was primarily

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at the Western end of this chain, but it was by no means limited to the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The success of the Mediterranean trade was a crucial innovation that led to further ventures. The Venice Company and the Turkey Company merged to form the Levant Company in 1592, and from the Levant Company the East India Company arose.11 The establishment of an alliance between England and Turkey in the 1570s was a political and economic linkage that should be understood in relation to this larger context of global trade. Luxury goods such as silks and spices moved from their sites of production in India, the East Indies, and other parts of Asia toward Europe, passing through Persia and Turkey (or alternatively, Egypt) before reaching the Mediterranean. As Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have shown in their important study, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, the Ottoman Empire was “a politically sensitive, problematic point of mediation between Europe and the markets to the east, rather than the shadowy limit at the boundaries of Europe” (60).12 The Ottoman Empire was positioned with the Spanish-Habsburg state on one side, and the Persian-Safavid empire on the other. The intermittent wars waged by the Ottomans against Spain and Persia began to put a strain on Turkish state finances because the timar-holding cavalry could no longer function effectively as the mainstay of the Ottoman campaigns. The last two decades of the sixteenth century were a time of financial, political, and economic difficulties for the Ottoman state.13 According to Suraiya Faroqhi, the seventeenth century was “a time of decreasing participation of Muslim merchants in long-distance trade” (515), but the role of Armenian, Jewish, and Greek merchant networks helped to preserve “the Ottoman realm from rapid absorption into the European-dominated world economy” (526). At its peak in the late sixteenth century, Spanish power was a menace that cost the Ottoman Empire considerable effort and resources. The rise of Spanish-Habsburg hegemony was a threat to both Protestant England and Muslim Turkey. The Spanish embargo and civil unrest in France caused a decay in English trade with Spain and France— this pushed the English merchants into the Eastern Mediterranean to seek alternative markets there. Meanwhile, by the 1570s, both the overseas Mediterranean and the overland Antwerp trade routes came under the control of Philip of Spain. The defeat of the Turks at Lepanto (1571) and the fall of Antwerp (1572) were turning points ushering in a new age in the history of relations between the northern countries and the Ottoman Empire. Antwerp, which had served as an emporium of oriental goods and as the transit center for English cloth exports to Europe and Asia, was ruined as a result of the Spanish repression of the rebels in 1576. In France, reactionary Catholic rulers were in control after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and in 1580 Spain succeeded

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in annexing Portugal and her colonies. Rising tension between England and Spain led, first, to a trade embargo, and eventually to open warfare and the Spanish invasion of 1588. Queen Elizabeth, who had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V in 1570, desperately needed allies in the struggle against Habsburg-Catholic hegemony. By the end of the 1570s, war between Turkey and the Venetians helped to create an opening for the intervention of the English, who were considered a neutral party to that conflict, in the eastern Mediterranean. All of these historical conditions encouraged an alliance between England and Turkey. On the sultan’s part, a trade agreement with the English would help to weaken further the already staggering Venetians, and it would also bring needed imports for military use (especially weapons, gunpowder, saltpeter, tin, lead, and “bell metal”) in the ongoing war effort. In England, the initiative to form that alliance came from a group of wealthy London merchants, led by Edward Osborne and Richard Staper, who saw an opportunity to import the silks and spices that were available in Levantine ports. Their desire to set up a profitable trade in the Levant meshed nicely with the anti-Habsburg foreign policy of Elizabeth and her councilors at court.14 Soon court and city were cooperating in a plan to send an English agent, William Harborne, to Constantinople, where he would negotiate with Ottoman officials for the commercial capitulations that, until that point, had been a franchise held by the French, who were authorized to collect consulage fees from English, Dutch, and other European merchants trading in Turkish markets. In 1578, Harborne secretly made his way overland to Turkey, where he met with the Grand Vizier Mehmet Pasha. These discussions with the Porte bore fruit: official capitulations were granted by the sultan, and the queen authorized the royal charter of the newly formed Turkey Company in September of 1581.15 This alliance with a Muslim power, and especially the trade in arms that ensued, was greeted with outrage and protest by European diplomats, who accused Elizabeth of selling out to the Turkish infidel. By May of 1582, the Spanish ambassador to England, Bernardino Mendoza, was making the following report to Philip II of Spain: Two years ago they opened up the trade, which they still continue, to the Levant, which is extremely profitable to them, as they take great quantities of tin and lead thither, which the Turk buys of them almost for its weight in gold, the tin being vitally necessary for the casting of guns and the lead for purposes of war. (Calendar of Letters and State Papers [Spanish] 366)

The English trade in Ottoman-controlled areas prospered from the start. During the course of their voyages, Levant Company ships and

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convoys stopped in a series of Mediterranean ports. A typical itinerary might include Livorno, Zante, Scandaroon (the port of Aleppo, also known as Alexandretta), Smyrna, Chios, and Constantinople, with 15–20 days in Livorno, 20–30 days in Constantinople and 3–5 days in the other ports. The company tried hard to regulate these durations, so as to control the activities and costs of its merchant enterprises. In a report to the crown that detailed the activities of the Levant Company during their first five years, it was stated that the company had employed 19 ships since they began operation under their charter, and that these ships had employed 782 seamen in the course of mounting 27 voyages. The Levant Company claimed that, during those five years, they paid customs fees of 11,359 pounds.16 In the last two decades of the sixteenth century, from the granting of capitulations to England in 1580 until the foundation of the East India Company in 1600, the Levant Company was “the most important and only successful English overseas venture” (Inalcik 371). According to a Venetian source, by 1604 the annual turnover of the London merchants in the Levant was more than 250,000 crowns per year.17 At the end of her reign, Elizabeth was collecting about 4000 pounds per year from the Levant Company, a benefit that cemented the crown’s support of the company’s charter. These numbers indicate the arrival of the English on the global scene of merchant capitalism. Inalcik puts it this way: “It can safely be said that English mercantilism-capitalism owed much of its initial development to the Levant market” (372). The interests of the English court and of merchant elites came together to establish the chartered companies. This was not an effort underwritten by “the state,” since the modern nation-state, with its highly developed bureaucracy, did not yet exist and would not come into being until the eighteenth century. But that is not to say that a national identity and national interests did not already exist during the sixteenth century. As Richard Helgerson and others have argued, the overseas enterprises of Elizabethan merchants and gentlemen, pitted against an aggressive Spain, stimulated the textual production and dissemination of texts that helped to define English nationhood (most notably, in Hakluyt’s Voyages).18 With overseas commerce expanding rapidly, the monarch, influential courtiers, and powerful merchants reacted by cooperating to tighten state control and create monopolies. National interests (that is, the interests of the English crown and upper classes in preserving or expanding their wealth and power) were subordinate to the forces at work in the larger global system, but they were still a powerful impetus for economic and political action, especially when English national interests came into conflict with rival nations such as Spain and Holland. Alarmed by the success of the Dutch in establishing direct trade with the East Indies, the merchants of the Levant Company launched a

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competing English effort to purchase spices at their point of production, so that they would not be undersold in Europe by Dutch importers. This led to the foundation of the East India Company in 1599 by many of the same merchants who were already members of the Levant Company.19 Meanwhile, the export of raw silk from Persia through Turkey, to Aleppo and Izmir, became the basis of OttomanEnglish trade. English silk imports from the Levant increased from 11,904 pounds in 1560 to 117,740 in 1621 (Inalcik 372). Economic facts and statistics are only one way to track the remarkable outward expansion of the English economy that unfolded during the last third of the sixteenth century. We can also measure the impact of this trade by looking at its effects on English culture. As England’s foreign trade grew, cross-cultural encounters and exchanges became more common than ever before. This commercial activity was accompanied by corresponding ideological changes: the culture and literature of the time were profoundly affected by the intensified international circulation of people, goods, and texts. Cultural production, in turn, had a shaping influence on economic behavior. As a culture, England was experiencing an informational overload, not only from the East, but also from the New World to the West. This influx of data about foreign places was disorganized and heavily mediated. It passed through various written and printed forms: commercial reports and memoranda, diplomatic correspondence, maps, geographic and ethnographic writings, news pamphlets, ballads, and travel or discovery narratives. Many of these were translated from continental sources. The theater was also an important site of cultural production where the flood of messy information about the rest of the world was absorbed, reconfigured, and represented in order to attract and entertain playgoers. Just as the English were improvising and shifting in order to position themselves more profitably in the global marketplace, so they were adapting culturally. One such adaptation was the emergence of a new national identity that would characterize Englishness in terms of England’s engagement with the global trade system. The English began to see themselves as an “adventuring” people who went forth to encounter, exchange, and make a profit by doing so.20 The London theater was one place that this image of the venturing hero was projected. Engaged in a violent but profitable commerce, mobile, border-crossing figures frequently appeared on the London stage, and they often encountered wealthy Islamic potentates. These figures include English characters such as Sir Thomas Stukeley in both George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1590) and the anonymous Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596), Bess in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (Part I in 1605; Part II in 1630), the Sherley brothers in the Travels of

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the Three English Brothers (1607), and the renegade pirate John Ward in A Christian Turned Turk (1610). The English were still in the process of sorting out and sizing up the information about the might and wealth of Islamic empires: the rigid binaries of East and West (categories that British imperialists would employ later) did not yet regulate the production of English texts describing the Ottomans, the Safavids, or the Mughals. Although Elizabethan and Jacobean writers sometimes use the terms “East” and “Orient,” there is not yet a Saidian “orientalism” during this era. English knowledge of the peoples of Turkey, Persia, and India was not linked to English colonial power (there was little of that beyond the British Isles and none at all in the Mediterranean): rather, it was Islamic power and wealth that drew English attention, admiration, and envy. As recent scholarship has shown, texts printed in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury London gave the great Islamic empires extensive treatment— and fantasies about their courts and rulers, their power and wealth, appeared frequently on the London stage.21 An example of the theatrical engagement with the new economic system might be taken from Jonson’s play The Alchemist. In the second act, one of the alchemists’ gulls, Sir Epicure Mammon, hoping to obtain at last the philosopher’s stone, arrives at Lovewit’s house, where Subtle and Face have set up their alchemical laboratory. There, Mammon spins out a fantasy in which he will use the power of the stone to found and rule an imperial court in England. While Face and Subtle bustle about him, Mammon imagines that the virile young gallants of London society will be castrated and made to serve as eunuchs in his seraglio: The few, that would give out themselves to be Court and town-stallions, and, each-where, belie Ladies, who are known most innocent, for them, Those will I beg, to make me eunuchs of: And they shall fan me with ten ostrich tails Apiece, made in a plume to gather wind. My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels heels, Boiled in the spirit of Sol, and dissolved pearl, And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamond and carbuncle. My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys: I myself will have The beards of barbells, served, instead of salads;

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Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow newly cut off, Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce; For which, I’ll say unto my cook, “There’s gold, Go forth, and be a knight.” ....................................... . . . My shirts I’ll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment, It shall be such, as might provoke the Persian Were he to teach the world riot anew. My gloves of fishes and bird skins perfumed With gums of paradise, and eastern air— (2.2.65–94)

This speech, with its absurdly exaggerated list of luxury goods, expresses a fantastic desire to obtain imperial power, with all the goods and services that appertain to such a status. Imperial power is specifically associated here not only with the ancient Roman Empire, but also with the empires of the East—Turkey, Persia, and India. Epicure Mammon’s list of rare and exotic commodities is a version of the imported luxury goods, including precious metals, gemstones, and spices, that were sought by the English merchants of Jonson’s day in Levantine markets. Mammon’s imaginary feast indicates the commodity fetishism enabled by emergent capitalism, but more specifically it refers to the trade in Eastern goods that had recently become an important source of profit for English investors. Jonson’s satire targets both the absurdly unattainable imperial ambition of English subjects and the greed inspired by the marketplace. As various scholars, including David Hawkes, have shown, Mammon’s acquisitive perversion of alchemy’s spiritual and intellectual discipline is analogous to the abstractions and fetishizations performed under capitalism, with its alleged capacity to transform the poor into the rich, making profit through the skilled manipulation of invisible, magical elements of capital, credit, and debt.22 Like capitalism, the fraudulent “mystery” enacted by Subtle and Face is an exotic system that is imported into the city of London, where it attracts the participation of investors from a variety of classes and social backgrounds. For these characters, control over the magical mechanisms of the alchemical/ capitalist marketplace will bring profit: “the stone” is the fantasy of economic power, the power to “create” wealth through investment and trade. Surly questions Mammon’s claim to moral qualification for possession of the philosopher’s stone, demanding, “And do you think to have the stone, with this?” (2.3.95). Mammon replies, “No, I do think, t’have all this, with the stone” (2.3.96). Mammon says that he will not

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be the one to perform the skilled labor that will actually produce the philosopher’s stone. He admits that his lust and greed make him unworthy and incapable of doing that work, but Mammon would rather have others perform it for him anyway. The knight is not worried: Subtle will manufacture the stone, and Mammon will then “buy it” (2.3.100). Mammon informs Surly, “My venture brings it me” (2.3.101). Like the other gulls, Mammon is a venturer, or investor, who pays out in advance, in the hope of future returns on his speculation. But if Jonson’s play suggests that capitalism and the new commerce are essentially a scam and a con, he also, through Mammon’s speech, invites the audience to admire and seek to emulate a fantasized model of Eastern-Islamic empire. The audience laughs at the notion that an English knight would attain sultanic luxury and riches, but the dream of wealth through alchemy (or through trade) remains a potent one. Jonson, as always, is deeply suspicious of the marketplace, but even in his drama, the Eastern empires function as models for English aspiration. Mammon’s fantasy of imperial power draws specifically on the image of the sultan’s seraglio, with its eunuchs, concubines, slaves, footboys, cooks, and a host of other servants. Similar images of imperial excess at the court of the Ottoman sultan appear in contemporaneous texts such as Richard Knolles’s Generall historie of the Turkes (1603) and George Sandys’s Relation of a iourney . . . Containing a description of the Turkish Empire (1615). The luxurious foodstuffs and precious goods catalogued in Mammon’s speech function as markers of empire. Many of the gastronomic details in Mammon’s speech are taken from Lampridius’s Life of Heliogabalus, a biography of a third-century Roman emperor; but Jonson’s Mammon adapts the ancient setting to that of the current imperial powers. Objects such as “dishes of agate set in gold” or “spoons of amber” indicate empire because they imply both the consumption of priceless luxuries and the accumulation of wealth in densely concentrated forms. Mammon envisions the imperial court both as a closed world of sensual indulgence and fetish worship and, at the same time, as a site that draws upon a vast, global circulation of commodities, bringing the most densely valued and exotic items to its center, where they are consumed by the sultan himself—like pearls dissolved in broth. While Jonson’s Alchemist embodies, in the figure of Sir Epicure Mammon, the tensions at work in early modern English fantasies about Islamic wealth, there were many other plays that represented, in a more direct manner, Muslim potentates and the Jewish or renegade gobetweens who traded with and for them. Plays such as Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592), Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596), Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1610), and Massinger’s The Renegado (1624), among others, attest to the new awareness, in

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London, of a complex, sprawling global system that brought together people from many different cultures in order to share in the common project of profit making through long-distance trade. These are all multicultural plays, in which ethnic and religious difference play a role, but ultimately Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all players in the same corrupt game. That is why, at the beginning of The Jew of Malta, Marlowe immediately marks out his antihero Barabas as one who, like his patron the Machevill, “count[s] religion but a childish toy, / And hold[s] there is no sin but ignorance” (Prologue.14–15). The tendency of the new international capitalism was to break down all boundaries that separated nation, creed, or race and to replace them with the universal logic of capital. Barabas embodies this radical position: the objective of Christian, Muslim, and Jew alike is to obtain “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37). The Ottoman Empire was a place where all these forms of faith were tolerated, and where trade between them was encouraged. But the ultimate form of riches was not the emeralds, sapphires, and rubies accumulated by Barabas and imagined by Mammon—rather it was capital itself and the ability to control capital transfers, especially when capital was abstracted and manipulated by those whose ventures were measured in mercantile letters of credit. The London theater retained the older sense of an empire built on booty, even as it presented the emergence of a new imperial policy of mercantilism, in other words, a world-empire based on long-distance trade. Again, in The Merchant of Venice, as in The Jew of Malta, we see a text that seeks to represent investment in international, long-distance trade as a disturbing, though alluring, practice. The uncertainty and anxiety surrounding “merchandise,” the concern with debt and the need for loans, and the sense that one must “hazard all he hath” (2.7.9), these run through the play, undermining the happy ending and making sure that The Merchant of Venice is a problem comedy. And in both A Christian Turned Turk and The Renegado, the Ottoman ruler sponsors an economy of piracy in which people are either converted, becoming participants in its immoral marketplace, or they are enslaved, becoming commodities in that same market. All of these plays provided playgoers with an opportunity to confront the new role of Western Europeans, including the English, in the changing global system. Among others, one reason that contact with the Islamic world was important in these plays is the fact that it was in the Eastern Mediterranean that English merchant capital first found an entrance into the profitable global flow. If the English wished to be successful players on the stage of global trade, they would need to deal, from a position of humility and submission, with Muslim rulers and the heterogeneous matrix of Mediterranean (and later, Asian) maritime

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commerce. The logic of capital did not allow for religious scruples. As early as 1549, Sir Thomas Smith, in his A Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England, wrote, “[F]or though God is bountiful unto us and sends us many great commodities, yet we could not live without the commodities of others” (62). This text, which was first printed in 1581 (when it took on new meaning and relevance) and then reprinted at least 11 times before 1640, already imagines the commonwealth of England not as a separate body politic, but as a part of a global whole, dependent on the greater power of the global world-system. Smith goes on to give an account of foreign trade, according to the doctrine of a cosmopolitan universal economy: God has ordained that no country should have all commodities but that that one lacks, another brings forth, and that that one country lacks this year, another has plenty thereof commonly that same year, to the intent men may know that they have need one of another’s help. . . . . . . But since we must have need of other and they of us, we must frame our things not after our own fantasies but to follow the common market of all the world, and we may not set the price of things at our pleasure but follow the price of the universal market of the world. (62)

This “universal market of all the world” was increasingly acknowledged by English culture as the system to which English subjects must accommodate themselves, in order to compete for profits. The domestic economy overlapped with the economy of long-distance trade, and in this first phase of merchant capitalism, linkage with the Ottoman worldempire was a key step toward England’s expansion and integration in the global economy.

Notes 1. See also Bartolovich’s essay, in which she argues that “the inter-mixture that has characterized ports and large cities throughout recorded history” was “given a new form” by “the emergence of capitalism” (14). 2. Most of these goods did not originate in Ottoman territory but passed through Ottoman-controlled areas before becoming available to the English in places such as Smyrna, Aleppo, Chios, and Venice. For Elizabethan lists of the commodities shipped in Levant Company vessels, to and from the Levant, see Appendix VII in Epstein. See also Davis, “English Imports.” 3. Good places to start for a foray into the vast literature on the rise of capitalism are Braudel, Sweezy et al., Holton, Ellen Meiskins Wood, and Alan K. Smith.

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4. See chapter 17 in Faroqhi on “Trade: Regional, Inter-Regional and International” and especially 478ff., where she discusses Braudel, Wallerstein, and the Ottoman Empire as “world economy” (Braudel) or as a “world empire” (Wallerstein). Faroqhi prefers Wallerstein’s term. She writes, “Scholars generally agree that in the early sixteenth century the Ottoman empire was not the economic satellite of an expanding European economy. . . . But once we are dealing with the seventeenth century, the relationship of the Ottoman socio-political system to the expanding European world economy constitutes a problem” (479). She concludes that the Ottoman manufactures were still somewhat resistant to European competition. Turkish military strength and the general state of economic depression in Europe helped the Ottoman economy to remain strong even as it became more effectively linked to European trade. 5. On the efforts of Cabot and others to find a northern route to the East, see chapters 2, 8, and 15 in Andrews. 6. For a complete account of Drake’s career, including his voyage round the world, see Kelsey. 7. The early history of English maritime expansion and aggression is usefully surveyed in Andrews. For detailed information about the growth of English foreign trade in the early modern period, consult Davis, English Overseas Trade, 1500–1700, and Davis’s article on “England and the Mediterranean, 1570–1670.” 8. See Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution and his earlier article, “The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1650.” Brenner should be supplemented and qualified by the counter-arguments put forth in a collection of essays titled The Rise of Merchant Empires (edited by Tracy), in Tracy’s The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, and in Rabb’s Enterprise and Empire. 9. See Barbour 156–58 for a useful description and analysis of “The London Company’s discursive regime.” According to Barbour, the London Company, which would later become the East India Company, was “a monopolist organization that hoarded its knowledge” (158). 10. See Clay 1: 202. 11. On the origins and early history of the Levant Company, the best book-length studies are still those by Epstein and Alfred C. Wood. On the East India Company, consult the two studies by K. N. Chaudhuri. 12. Jardine and Brotton ask us to question “an account of the marginalized, exoticized, dangerous East within Renaissance studies as not only politically unhelpful but also historically inaccurate.” They go on to point out that “Paris, Lisbon, London, Mantua and Venice (for instance) were connected with Istanbul through shared political and commercial interests whose transactional power bases problematize the cultural binaries originally developed by Said in his account of the discourse of Orientalism” (61).

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Works Cited Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Andrews, Kenneth. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Bartels, Emily. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Bartolovich, Crystal. “ ‘Baseless Fabric’: London as ‘World City.’” “The Tempest” and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism: 15th to 18th Century. 3 vols. William Collins, 1982–84. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. ———. “The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1650.” Journal of Economic History 32.1 (1972): 361–84. Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Calendar of Letters and State Papers, [Spanish] Relating to English Affairs, 1580–1586. Vol. 3 of 4. Ed. Martin A. S. Hume. London: Public Record Office, 1896. Chaudhuri, K. N. The English East India Company, 1600–1640. New York: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1965. ———. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978. Chew, Samuel. The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance. 1937. Repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1965. Clay, C. G. A. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Davis, Ralph. “England and the Mediterranean, 1570–1670.” Essays in the Social and Economic History of Tudor and Stuart England. Ed. F. J. Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. ———. “English Imports from the Middle East, 1580–1780.” Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day. Ed. M. A. Cook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. ———. English Overseas Trade, 1500–1700. London: Macmillan, 1973. Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Epstein, Mortimer. The Early History of the Levant Company. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1908.

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Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Part II: Crisis and Change, 1590–1699.” An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Ed. Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Frank, André Gunder. Re-Orient: The Silver Age in Asia and the World Economy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Fuchs, Barbara. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Fuller, Mary C. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Holton, R. J. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Inalcik, Halil. “Part I: The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300–1600.” An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Ed. Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Jardine, Lisa, and Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East & West. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques. 2nd edition. Ed. Richard Harp. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. Kelsey, Harry. Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Knolles, Richard. The generall historie of the Turkes. London, 1603. MacLean, Gerald. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. ———. Turks, Moors & Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Misselden, Edward. Free trade, or, The meanes to make trade florish. London, 1622. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Rabb, Theodore K. Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. Sandys, George. A relation of a iourney. London, 1615. Skilliter, Susan A. William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–82: A Documentary Study of the First Anglo-Ottoman Relations. London: Oxford UP, 1977. Smith, Alan K. Creating a World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade, 1400–1825. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.

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Smith, Sir Thomas. A Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England. London, 1581. Repr. Ed. Mary Dewar. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1969. Sweezy, Paul, Maurice Dobb, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Georges Lefebvre, Giuliano Procacci, Eric Hobsbawm, and John Merrington. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. London: Verso, 1976. Tenenti, Alberto. Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–1615. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Tracy, James, ed. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. ———, ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Hale Decdeli, and Resat Kasaba. “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire in the World-Economy.” The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy. Ed. Huri Islamoglu-Inan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Wood, A. C. A History of the Levant Company. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1935. Repr. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1964. Wood, Ellen Meiskins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. New York: Verso, 2000.

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Chapter 2

“I ll luck, Ill luck?”: Risk and Haz ard in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Ian MacInnes

The Merchant of Venice has always been somewhat disappointing for

critics interested in economics. On the one hand, nowhere else does Shakespeare more clearly confront global trade. And it is widely recognized that the play depicts not only the economic changes implicit in the development of mercantilism but also, more importantly, its social and moral consequences. On the other hand, the plot appears to retreat from the issues and concerns most relevant to the mercantile world of sixteenth-century London into a nostalgic and idealized social harmony. At best, the play’s combination of progressive and regressive elements indicates uncertainty. Phyllis Rackin, for example, calls the play’s reaction to global trade an “ambivalent dialogue of desire and fear” (73). The result, she says, is to “insulate” the Christians from “the contaminating effects of their involvement in the global market” (86). Theodore Leinwand offers what he calls “complementary” readings in which Antonio, the merchant of the play’s title, is either (a) “historically recursive”: “beating a retreat from this role to his sad ‘part’ he at once fades backward in history” or (b) a perfect reflection of contemporary London merchants, with similar trading destinations and a similar “privateering” attitude (16, 114). The play’s famous debate over usury is a good example of this ambiguity. At first, usury seems to be the central economic issue. Certainly no recent critical introduction to The Merchant of Venice can avoid a lengthy discussion of early modern attitudes toward usury.

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After all, the first meeting between Antonio and Shylock, his nemesis, is marked by a fierce argument over the moral status of loans made for gain. And usury seems to track usefully the play’s attempted distinctions between “Christian” and “Jewish” attitudes. And yet usury, or “usance” is mentioned only once in the play, during that first meeting between Antonio and Shylock. It may color the bizarre contract between the two involving the infamous pound of flesh, but it is remarkable how quickly the concept itself fades from view. Even Antonio, who stakes his argument on the fact that he neither borrows nor lends money for gain, turns out later to have a host of “cruel” creditors. The attitudes toward money, capital, and venture that seem so central in the opening scenes become oddly absent as the play progresses. There is, however, an economic theme that does retain its force throughout the play. In his initial discussion with Shylock, Antonio holds up the concept of venture or risk as the missing element in usury. This elevation of risk, or “hazard” as it was usually called, is at the center of the play’s theological, social, and economic discourse. It is the language of risk that runs most clearly throughout the play, linking the two plots of Venice and Belmont and connecting the initial moves of each with the climactic trial scene. And while risk itself might seem to stand outside of the economic realm, it is actually at the center of key economic transformations in the period. As European ships went forth and returned in a rising tide of mercantilism, those whose fortunes depended on trade resorted to an increasingly sophisticated variety of means for raising and protecting invested capital by managing and describing risk. The result was, among other things, a diverse assortment of what are today called aleatory contracts. These legal tactics had profound epistemological consequences because they turned chance from a manifestation of divine Providence into a marketable commodity. Risk itself gained specific monetary value. At first glance, The Merchant of Venice seems insulated from these developments. Nobody mentions insurance,1 least of all Antonio who could certainly use it! Yet the language of risk is pervasive and positive in the play. Risk and hazard do have value: among other things, they are the key to the struggle between Antonio and Portia. And even if the value of risk is partly intangible, the risk itself is clearly financial. Unlike other economic issues, from which the play retreats, the value of owning risk remains central. It makes sense, then, to put the play in the context of rapidly changing attitudes toward financial risk in late sixteenth-century England. In the larger structure of the play, the entire debate over usury serves mainly to raise the issue of risk. As many have noticed, both the economic and emotional logic of The Merchant of Venice appear initially to be structured around an opposition between usury and venture. In their very first conversation, Antonio and Shylock record this distinction

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as basic to their enmity. To Shylock’s famous defense of usury with the parable of Jacob and Laban, Antonio responds, This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for; A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good? Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? (1.3.86–90)2

By this definition, usury is wrong because it results in profit without risk, unlike venture, which is licit precisely because it depends on “the hand of heaven,” or Providence. Antonio himself is more than just a proponent of this argument. The concept of “venture” runs like a thread through his conversation from the first lines of the play to the hazardous loan from Shylock that drives the Venetian plotline. He might protest that he does not worry about risk, but his friends know otherwise. They describe its effects on the mercantile mind with enthusiasm: “had I such venture forth,” Solanio says, “every object that might make me fear / Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt / Would make me sad” (1.1.20–22). And when they want something from him, as Bassanio does, they use the language of venture to get it. On his side, Shylock’s Jewishness and his historic enmity with Antonio also make him more than a simple advocate of usury in the play. And while the term usury itself fades from view during the course of the play, the argument over risk is reflected in the theological and legal conflict between justice and mercy in the trial scene. Justice is in the hands of men; mercy in the hand of heaven. One is, like usury, a matter of compulsion and certainty. The other “is not strain’d,” “an attribute to God himself” (4.1.180, 191). The opposition between venture and usury also helps underpin the play’s two plotlines: the Venetian one built around loans and bonds and the Belmont plot that hinges on the risk or “hazard” of the casket test. These observations of the play are well established, and scholars have not had to look far to see that discussions about the importance of risk are an important part of the debate about usury in the period. As Joan Holmer Ozark puts it in her discussion of the play, “Risk was then believed to be a necessary factor in legitimate enterprise, and usury violated that condition because it was calculated, certain gain ensured by bonds and pawns. . . . The spirit of hazarding, as opposed to the spirit of calculation, is allied with Providence” (35–36, 97). In his Discourse Upon Usury, Thomas Wilson repeatedly argues that risk makes gains acceptable: In buying and selling, your gayne is not alwayes certayne, as it is in usurie: for he that buieth lande thys day for five hundreth poundes,

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Ian MacInnes shall not alwaies be sure to gaine a hundreth pounds by the bargayne, but sometyme he loseth, and cannot have hys own againe; wheras the usurer is always suer [sic] to gaine, whosoever loseth, having good and sufficient assurance alwayes for hys money. (271)

The lawyer in Wilson’s dialogue, who attempts to justify usury, actually does so in part on the basis of risk. When a man lends, he says, “his money is out of his hande which else might be employed, and being in another mannes keping is in danger of loosing, that otherwise was safe and sure enough when it was in his own hands.” He gives an example of a man whose goods are abroad (at risk) and who then will lend at either 10 or 12 percent, for “damages sustained, yf any mishap doe fall” (Wilson 245–46).3 These attitudes are duplicated even in those who are not directly opposed to lending for gain. In discussing maritime loans, for example, Gerard Malynes says that any money lent “without hazard, but vpon securitie, should pay no profit” (93). But usury is only one economic practice governed by attitudes toward risk or hazard. These concepts extended to other areas as well. The most important of these is insurance, which involved the buying and selling of risk itself. Insurance was at least initially a controversial topic, as Giovanni Ceccarelli reveals in his lengthy survey of canonical and theological thought on insurance leading into the early modern period. Insurance was frequently condemned by association with usury;4 it was also attacked because attempting to buy or sell risk was seen as putting a value on something that should not be given a monetary value or made subject to human control. Chance and fortune were reserved to God; they could not be given a monetary value. In contrast to these views, there were at least two main arguments in favor of insurance: one based on what Ceccarelli calls “technical-juridical” claims about the status of risk and ownership, and another more enduring argument that used the social value of insurance (in contrast to usury, for example) as a way of maintaining its legality (630–31). All the arguments for and against insurance depended heavily on the status of risk or chance, and these in turn are part of a larger economic picture. Ceccarelli concludes, The early modern theological and canonical debate on insurance is not, as many legal historians have tended to assert, an isolated topic, but has its roots in earlier thirteenth- and fourteenth-century discussions of usury, just price, and economics generally. (630)

Clearly the concept of risk functioned in multiple contexts as a way of separating licit from illicit economic activity, and debates about risk were deeply embedded in theological discourse. Thus, The Merchant of Venice sits at the beginning of a profound transition in attitudes toward

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chance. To miss the play’s persistent focus on risk and hazard is to miss the play’s connection with critical contemporary debates. The following century would see an explosion of institutions designed to manage risk and of ideas, both mathematical and economic, designed to account for the nature of chance and fortune. The critical event for the play is thus neither the 1571 Elizabethan act against usury nor the 1624 act officially legalizing it, both more than 20 years distant from the play. A better choice might be the formation, in 1601, of London’s court of assurances—itself a crucial marker in the history of long-distance trade, that most risky of ventures. Insurance, in England, was still a fairly new idea in the 1590s. The first evidence we have of an insurance contract created in London is as recent as 1547. That the contract was written in Italian in Lombard Street might give some indication that the whole concept was still quite literally foreign (Franklin 278), and some economic historians are dubious about the industry’s English beginning. Peter Ramsey, for example, says of marine insurance, “Its laws and practices were uncertain, its status at law dubious, and aggrieved parties found it hard to obtain legal remedy” (80). It is certainly true that Gerard Malynes, who wrote extensively on insurance in the 1620s but was doing business through the latter part of the last century, often found it more convenient to have insurance on his freight written at Rouen, a center both of the cloth trade and of the continental insurance industry. But other evidence suggests that the concept of buying and selling risk was a hit. In his History of British Insurance, Harold Raynes uses a detailed examination of Admiralty records to demonstrate a lively English insurance industry in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The formation of the court of assurances was, according to Raynes, an attempt to assert juridical control over a chaotic but thriving industry (23–37, 38–69). In 1575, a group of 16 brokers, notaries, and merchants petitioned against the grant of a monopoly in making and registering policies of insurance, arguing that 170 people in London lived by writing such policies. Insurance instruments were common enough to have a standard price (two shillings), and the signers of the petition were concerned in part because a monopoly would make it hard to get a policy written in a hurry (Tawney and Power 2: 246–51). Insurance was common enough that rates to European ports were standard by 1573, and there was already a rough system by which rates might be estimated. One document from this year notes that “merchantes give and Take Lesse assurance uppon English bottoms, then upon hulkes or other straungers shippes” (Tawney and Power 3: 176). By the 1580s, some writers are even aware of the controversial triple contract by which insurance could be made to produce a virtually guaranteed (if low) rate of return (Robert Hitchcock, qtd. in Tawney and Power 3: 253).

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Straightforward policies of insurance were actually only one of many creative instruments by which early modern merchants began to manage risk. A whole class of aleatory contracts emerged. There was, for example, an especially dangerous kind of insurance referred to by the crucial contractual clause “lost or not lost.” Under this clause insurers could be required to pay out if a vessel did not arrive at its destination within a certain time or if it was merely reported as lost (Malynes 82–83). Insurance could also be taken up after the fact. If a merchant suspected that one of his ships had been lost at sea, he could hasten to have a policy drawn up (at a steep price) by any insurers willing to bet that his information was wrong (Tawney and Power 2: 247). Another practice is referred to as bottomree (or bottommarie). The word first appears in the city of Antwerp’s ordinance on insurance (Raynes 33), but the practice itself blurred the line between the loan and the insurance contract.5 The principal is paid out beforehand and the premium paid (along with the return of the principal) on the safe return of the vessel. This amounts to a loan with considerable interest, and thus Malynes and others are careful to note that the profit is based on assuming the risk of the voyage: This Money is called Pecunia traiectitia, because that vpon the lenders danger and aduenture it is carried beyond or ouer the seas: so that if the ship perish, or that all be spoyled, the lender doth lose the money. But on the contrarie, money letten at interest is deliuered on the perill of the borrower; so that the profit of this is meerely the price of the simple loane, called Vsura: but the profit of the other is a reward for the danger and aduenture of the sea, which the lender taketh vpon him during the loane, which is to be vnderstood vntill a certaine day after the voyage ended; therefore if the money miscarrie, either before the voyage begin, or after the terme appointed for the full loane, then the perill pertaineth to the borrower thereof, and not to the lender. (171, my italics)

When combined with ordinary insurance, loans of bottommarie could become extremely profitable. Later in the seventeenth century, John Vernon calls it “a very strange thing, for it eats out sleeping and waking; and as Men do now subtilly use it, it is one of the greatest Advantages that can be made of Mony, and with little or no hazard, which makes the Profit the larger” (138). Many of these early financial instruments are possible only given the inequities and inefficiencies in the market,6 but their effect on the early modern economic imagination is powerful. The financial markets must have seemed a place where some were wagering enormous sums on a shot in the dark while others were unfairly profiting by coordinating complex contractual obligations. This system put a premium on information: whether a ship was sound or

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unsound, whether a trade route was dangerous or relatively safe, whether a shipment was safe, lost, or only rumored to be lost. As the average distance traded by English merchants grew (as it did rapidly), such information became more difficult to come by and more valuable even as the risks increased. In such a context it is easy to see how the concept of risk itself, bought and sold in a multitude of ways, became detached from the ideology of divine Providence. The linguistic evidence paints an even broader picture of a culture coming to terms with the idea that risk and chance are phenomena separate from specific instances of Divine will and are subject to economic and philosophical definition. The word “hazard,” for example, which by the end of the sixteenth century was the ordinary noun for a risk of economic loss, appears first as a verb (in 1530). It was not used as a noun meaning “risk of loss” until the end of the century (OED). “Hazard,” of course, is used in many noneconomic senses, but its transformation from primarily verbal to primarily nominal demonstrates a significant change in attitude. Risk goes from something one does to something one has. This kind of reification, which is happening to other concepts at the same time, is almost certainly driven by economic developments. Some concepts enter the language already under transformation. “Probability,” for example, is originally a term in classical thought. It enters English in the mid-sixteenth century but is used only as an epistemological term referring to the likelihood that any given proposition is true. “Chance” was the usual mathematical term (Hald 30–31). What happens in the seventeenth century is that “probability” is co-opted by mathematics, giving it the dominant meaning it has to this day. This transformation is not accidental, nor is it part of the general colonization of Western epistemology by mathematics. What is happening is rather that a concept already expressed in a casual way by mathematics, as in the phrase “’Tis ten to one this play can never please” (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Epilogue), is gaining epistemological status. Risk becomes a way of knowing and of controlling the world. At the same time that certain words are altering under these developments, many new words referring to risk and chance are also entering the language. Gambling itself has been frequently practiced in all ages, but many gambling terms such as “bet” and “odds” entered print in their modern sense in the last quarter of the sixteenth century (OED). And, of course, a host of terms for the economic assessment of risk, not just “assurance” but also “policy,” “averidges,” “premium,” “bottommarie,” et cetera, gained their economic meaning in the closing decades of the century. Perhaps the best evidence that the entire epistemology of risk is altering at the turn of the century is in the prolonged debate over gambling between Thomas Gataker and James Balmford beginning in the 1590s and extending well into the next century. The actual issue was the

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acceptability of gambling or “lusorious lots” as they were sometimes called. The early church had opposed gambling because it resembled pagan sortilege or fortune telling (David 30), and the practice had always been associated with a variety of social vices. In theological terms, games of chance were attacked mainly because they made God’s providential order serve trivial human purposes. “Lots are not to bee used in sport,” Balmford says, because “a Lot in the nature thereof doth as necessarily suppose the special providence and determining presence of God, as an oath in the nature thereof doth suppose the testifying presence of God” (sig. A5r). In his Of the nature and vse of lots (1619), Gataker disagreed with such claims, and he did so by redefining the nature of chance itself. “It is not true,” he says, “that in every Lot is a speciall and immediate Prouidence of God”: It is not the casualtie of an Euent that maketh it a worke of Gods immediate Prouidence. For many things are casuall, which yet are not workes of Gods immediate prouidence, nor imply his speciall presence. Whereas if a Lot in regard of the casualtie of it were a worke of Gods immediate prouidence, and did in that regard imply his speciall and extraordinarie presence, then all casuall euents should be such. For that which agreeth to a thing as it is such or such, agreeth necessarily to all things that are such. But for a foule to flie before a man on his way, or for a dog to crosse a mans boule in play, and that it may be, where there is no likelihood of doing well otherwise, implieth not any speciall or immediate Prouidence: no more therefore doth a Lot. (142–43)

If every chance event does not imply a special Providence, then chance is not the same thing as Providence. God might control chance phenomena in the abstract (and Gataker says he does), but any particular instance of chance, hazard, or risk is a manifestation of this principle rather than of direct intervention. It may seem strange, given the burgeoning insurance industry and the lively attention to games of chance, that the mathematics of probability lagged somewhat behind this epistemological shift. True mathematical probability work does not begin until Fermat and Pascal in the seventeenth century. Some were, of course, thinking along these lines earlier. Galileo wrote a small discussion of dice, Sopra scoperte dei dadi, and Cardano’s Liber de Ludo Aleae was written as early as 1575 but not published until 1663. There is some evidence that the basic forms of statistical reasoning—such as the projection of a time series into the future, and the basic algebraic expression of probability as a ratio of numbers—were all present before the turn of the century (David; Franklin 282). But on the whole, probabilistic thinking before the seventeenth century was mostly empirical. Ian Hacking has even

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argued that there is no connection at all between mercantile practice and the mathematics of probability (in Sullivan 57). A better explanation would be that of Giovanni Ceccarelli, who argues that on the contrary the lag in mathematics demonstrates the importance of the economic domain. According to Ceccarelli, The apparent paradox of early debate on the just price of insurance without statistics, or in broader terms, of probabilistic thought without probability, must be considered from a different perspective. . . . Just as nature, before being considered physically measurable, had to become measurable in terms of money, chance, before being conceived in probabilistic and statistical terms, had to become vendible. (633)

Most importantly, chance had to become a thing on its own, separate from the ideological constraints that had governed Fortune since the Middle Ages. To some extent it is difficult to square the turbulent Elizabethan market for risk with the “hazards” of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. And the play’s apparent economic contradictions have troubled scholars. It is true that the opposition between Shylock and Antonio has seemed solid to some. They have even been called “two versions of Economic man” (Gross 54, 93). But this opposition turns out to be more problematic. As Joan Holmer notes, it is difficult to determine which one of this pair is conservative and which progressive in economic matters. Shylock rejects mercantilism, a conservative position, but advocates usury, a progressive one. Antonio, on the other hand, embraces mercantilism but rejects usury (172). Any Elizabethan merchants who found themselves in the audience would hardly recognize themselves in Antonio, who rejects credit, apparently is the sole owner of all his ships and cargo, and never seems to dream of insuring anything. They would not see any reflections of themselves in Shylock either, though, despite his up-to-date attitude toward money, since (laying aside his villainy and religion) he appears to reject venture. Richard Halpern suggests that Shylock is essentially conservative because he represents “money capital” rather than capital “as such” (186). And in any case both Shylock and Antonio are left aside by Belmont’s happy ending. Is the play as a whole economically progressive or conservative? Given the providential outcome required by comedy, it might easily be conservative. And it does deliberately ignore the commodification of risk and chance, turning instead to a clearly providential scheme in which prudent love triumphs by taking risks. On the other hand, it is also possible to call the play progressive because Antonio, who relies on an entirely providential business model, is hardly a winner overall. One answer is provided by Anne-Julia Zwierlein, who argues that early modern merchants “were

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paradoxical figures, harbingers of a new economic paradigm still described in the language of chivalry” (78). In fact, however, these contradictions and paradoxes mask the larger issues governing risk in the play. For all his naiveté, Antonio is the one who most clearly expresses a probabilistic approach to mercantile problems. When his friends suggest that he is the victim of mercantile melancholy, that he “is sad to think upon his merchandise,” Antonio gives a logical objection: Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it, My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate Upon the fortune of this present year: Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad. (1.1.41–45)

This objection is far from relying on the “hand of heaven” in the sense that Antonio means when he complains about Shylock’s usury. A purely providential attitude should lead him to say that his fortunes are subject to God’s will. Instead Antonio is relying on the unlikelihood that all his ventures will simultaneously miscarry. Today we would say he is diversified, but since the loss of any one part would constitute a total loss of material property, we might also call him self-insured. He simply is rich enough that he can absorb ordinary loss as part of the cost of doing business. This probabilistic attitude characterizes early comments on insurance. Francis Bacon, writing the preamble to an early bill on insurance, argues that it is a way of spreading risk among people, just as Antonio sees his risk as spread among ventures: “by means of which policie of assurance it cometh to pass on loss or perishing of any ship, there followeth not the undoing of any man, but the loss lighteth rather easily upon many than heavily upon few” (qtd. in Raynes 53). He also shows his tendency to probabilistic calculation when he accepts Shylock’s pound-of-flesh proposition. Bassanio is quite properly horrified by the nature of the bond, but Antonio tells him not to worry: Why, fear not, man; I will not forfeit it: Within these two months, that’s a month before This bond expires, I do expect return Of thrice three times the value of this bond. (1.3.153–55)

Antonio is probably either playing on Shylock’s constant refrain of “and for three months” when he says “thrice three times” or just being dramatic, but this ratio of expected gain (9) to possible loss (1) is a common one in insurance premiums of the period, and it corresponds to many of the examples given in mercantile texts of the period.7 Once

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again Antonio is calculating the odds in his favor. In his judgment, Shylock’s proposal is indeed a bargain since the chance of his defaulting is extremely low. Thus, while he openly rejects the marketability of risk, Antonio clearly considers it to be a separate and calculable element of commerce. In addition, while the play seems to elide the risk market in its portrayal of the work of the Rialto, it is astonishingly faithful to the sense of urgent information that is the most obvious by-product of such a market. The phrase “what news?” opens more than one conversation, and the substance of such news is loss or prospective loss. The reply to the oft-quoted question “What news on the Rialto?” is a detailed report of rumor and gossip: Why, yet it lives there uncheck’d that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas; the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say, if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word. (3.1.1–7)

Information is clearly collected from distant parts. It comes via other trading cities as well, as in this conversation between Tubal and Shylock: Tubal: Yes, other men have ill luck too: Antonio, as I heard in Genoa, — Shylock: What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck? Tubal: Hath an argosy cast away, coming from Tripolis. Shylock: I thank God, I thank God. Is’t true, is’t true? Tubal: I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck. . . . There came divers of Antonio’s creditors in my company to Venice, that swear he cannot choose but break. (3.1.89–105)

The function of such information, the zeal with which it is sought out and the care with which it is evaluated, is not a matter of curiosity but of vital economic interest. And the main subject of that interest is the assessment of risk. Antonio’s creditors need to know the likelihood that he will be able to repay his debts because it affects his worth in the marketplace. Credit referencing in the period is, as Ceri Sullivan puts it, “a wager on the debtor’s stock, the contents of his secret ledgers” (59). It is also a wager on the risks a debtor has assumed. Information about Antonio’s potential losses would itself have value not primarily for those considering his credit worthiness—that assessment would not rest on up-to-the-minute information. The information has present and immediate value because of the option of “lost or not lost” insurance policies

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and of re-insurance.8 Also, once a policy is written the risk involved has become a transferable commodity whose value rises or falls depending on reports of loss. As it turns out, the market’s assessment of Antonio turns out to be wrong, as it must have been in so many real cases. But the way we discover this error propels us into further contemplation of the benefits of trading in risk. In one of the most peculiar moments of the play, Portia mysteriously gives Antonio a letter telling him that three of his ships “are richly come to harbour suddenly: / You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced on this letter” (5.1.277–79). Such accidents were not uncommon in the turbulent world of Elizabethan shipping news, but this one is indeed strange. How, one wonders, has Portia obtained this news? In the normal marketplace such knowledge, privately held, could be worth a fortune. As long as the ships are thought to be lost, any insurers would pay dearly to transfer the risk before the policy is called in. Now, Antonio has apparently no insurance on his cargoes, and presumably the same is true of his “bottoms,” but in possessing the private knowledge that they are not lost, Portia is in the position to extract money from him if not from anyone else. She essentially owns an option on the risk of the venture, and by giving him the letter gratis she is putting him in her debt. We might also ask why she is unwilling to let Antonio know how she obtained the news. Dramatic economy would be served simply by having her hand over the letter without explanation. The deliberate mystery serves to remind us that Portia may be more involved in commerce than her position in Belmont suggests. Perhaps she has her own agents on the Rialto, in Genoa; whatever the case, she certainly has superior information. In the world of commerce, such information has only two purposes. One is credit assessment and the other, more urgent, is risk management. If Portia knows more about either of these than it seems, it would be only one more of her surprising competences. This surprise, however, both calls attention to the side effects of the risk market and implicates Belmont in the struggle to control this market. It also helps explain why Antonio is uninsured. There is no good business reason for this, his diversification notwithstanding.9 Self-insurance does not make business sense unless one has enough ventures abroad that one’s actual losses approach the statistical average. This principle might not have been mathematically clear in the late sixteenth century, but its empirical force was clearly at work in the marketplace. The truth is that Antonio does not want insurance for reasons that have nothing to do with economics. He wants to own the risk of his ventures. He knows that the world of Belmont replaces the financial with the emotional, and to fail in one is to gain in the other. The play is, therefore, in part a struggle over the ownership of risk and loss. Critics have

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been quick to spot the neurotic self-destructiveness of Antonio’s position. According to Rosenshield, for example, “The more he can see himself as the victim, the more he can see himself as a Christian merchant” (45). It is certainly hard not to feel that Antonio relishes his role as victim in other ways as well, as in his manipulative appeal to his “sweet” Bassanio, an appeal that takes the opportunity to rehearse his losses (“my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit” [3.2.315]) as a preface to his claim to gain (“all debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death” [3.2.318–20]). But the early modern discourse of risk and hazard suggests that losing control of the risk of a venture means losing control over the most volatile and potentially profitable aspect of trade. An insured venture has a relatively fixed value. In contrast, the value of risk itself is at the mercy of chance and information. Risk thus contains not just the nobility of commerce but its profits as well; this is what is really being traded on the Rialto. Portia, too, understands the need to own risk, and she succeeds in wresting ownership of Antonio’s potential loss from him by becoming the agent of his salvation. The portion of Bassanio’s original debt representing the casualty or risk of loss is thus transferred from Antonio to Portia. In this case, of course, the principal may be financial but the risk (and the concomitant gain) is emotional. Portia’s mystery letter revealing Antonio’s good fortune is a kind of mercantile trump card: first she owns Antonio’s risk, and then, by delivering his goods to him unharmed, she turns that risk into gain, eliminating all claims that Antonio might have on Bassanio. As for an insurer, Portia’s risk finally turns to gain only upon the safe return of the original goods. Of course, Portia has been dealing in privileged information since the beginning, and it is really at Belmont that the emerging concept of hazard is most fully articulated—in the famous casket scenes. These scenes, which have attracted such a variety of critical attention over the years, allegorize the transition from an older providential and social understanding of chance to an emerging probabilistic and financial understanding, one that stresses the importance of action and the desirability of risk. It is not just the importance of risk or hazard itself that makes the casket scenes new. In many ways they hearken back to a much earlier model. In general outline the choice between the three mysterious caskets resembles fairy tales or legend—so strongly that scholars have been able to point quickly to source material and so enduringly that the scenes are beloved of psychoanalytic critics. Even the terms describing chance refer to tradition: for example, Portia calls the test a “lottery,” one of the oldest terms for a decision governed by chance and one of the most clearly associated with divine Providence.10 It is also a lottery

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with distinctly patriarchal and authoritative overtones, an example of “the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will of a dead father” (1.2.24). Finally, those surrounding Portia, although significantly not Portia herself, seem sure that this lottery will produce an appropriate husband. Nerissa tells her that the casket “will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly, but one who you shall rightly love” (1.2.31–32). This context stresses hazard as the actions of a providential scheme. The princes of Morocco and Aragon are bound to fail, not by chance but because they do not deserve to succeed. The writing on the caskets appears to clarify the providential order in a peculiar way. Both men have, after all, already entered the lottery by attempting the choice. They have already risked everything (or at least a lot). Their reaction to the caskets thus seems puzzling since both reject the correct leaden casket for the same reason: “men that hazard all / Do it in hopes of fair advantages,” Morocco says, and Aragon, “You shall look fairer ere I give or hazard” (2.9.22). And both choose caskets whose inscriptions promise “gain.” They have taken a risk in choosing at all, but then they avoid the choice that most embodies risk. This behavior does not make them risk averse, nor are they simply confused. Instead, their decision shows they are more interested in getting than giving and more sure that their gain will be somehow appropriate or deserved. Risk, for them, is never something to be embraced for its own sake. Bassanio’s choice, as it turns out, represents an entirely different approach. It is not so much that he is more deserving, although many productions encourage the audience to think so. In fact, Bassanio is more explicitly invested in the concept of financial gain in marrying Portia than either Morocco or Aragon. “In Belmont,” he tells Antonio, “is a lady richly left” (1.1.161). Nor is it true that Bassanio succeeds through purely providential chance, since a hard-headed Portia makes sure he begins his contemplation with as many hints as she can fairly give. He does understand something that the other suitors do not, however, and that is the value of risk itself. “Who chooseth me,” the correct casket reads, “must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.9). Unlike Morocco and Aragon, who have ironically risked as much, Bassanio is not frightened by the peril implicit in “hazard.” That attitude, in combination with the special knowledge contained in Portia’s hints, carries him through. Both are characteristic of the effective merchant. The early modern financial world was full of risk, but it was also not fair. Those who had special knowledge had to use it, embracing risk with one hand and exploiting inside information with the other. Like the early modern financial world, these scenes replace the Providential and passive understanding of chance with an active and calculating approach. They help show how risk, both financial and emotional, becomes the real economic subject of the play.

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Notes 1. Leinwand does suggest that Shylock’s “I will be assur’d, and that I may be assured . . .” (1.3.26–27) contains an oblique reference to insurance. 2. Quotations from the Merchant of Venice are taken from the Arden Edition (Routledge 1955). Antonio here appears to be taking interest and usury as synonymous. Strictly speaking, “interest” and “usury” were separate categories. The former was supposed to be reserved for cases in which a borrower did not return a loan by an agreed on time. Interest was conceived as a kind of award of damage for the loss involved in not receiving one’s principal on an expected date: “usury is onely given for the onelye benefite of lendynge for time, whereas interest is demaunded when I have susteyned losse through another man’s cause, and therefore interest mea, that is to saye, it behoueth me, or it belongeth to me” (Wilson 319). Others, such as Malynes, sometimes use interest and usury interchangeably, however. 3. Wilson’s preacher refutes this portion of the lawyer’s argument, but only by fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of risk. Money taken for risk of damage, he says, is licit only “if you will aswel take nothing at al, if no losse doe happen to you in your adventure” (261). This debate indicates that while hazard was important, the concept itself was not certain. And while the concept of risk was primarily assigned an ethical value, it is clear nonetheless that the early modern world was working toward an understanding of the centrality of risk and uncertainty in economics. In his seminal book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Frank Knight has argued that all economic enterprise is based on the assumption of risk: “The most fundamental . . . form or organization, [is] the system under which the confident and venturesome ‘assume the risk’ or ‘insure’ the doubtful and timid by guaranteeing to the latter a specified income in return for an assignment of the actual results” (269–70). 4. The two were sometimes thought to be combined in ways that make the claim that usury is riskless more understandable. As one of the characters in Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury says, “I will use one trade that shall wythout all doubte bringe me certeyne gayne . . . and that is wyth putting my money forth for interest, and taking good assurance” (211). 5. Investments and insurance are sometimes hard to distinguish even today; witness current debates about whether social security should be considered insurance or an investment. It is noticeable, however, that in the early modern period aleatory contracts were increasingly treated as different from ordinary loans. 6. Insuring a loan of bottommarie, for instance, ought not to result in a profit. If the bottommarie premium accurately reflected the risk involved and the insurance premium did the same, they should be identical. The insurance cost would exactly match the profit from the loan.

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Works Cited Balmford, James. A short and plaine dialogue concerning the vnlawfulnes of playing at cards or tables, or any other game consisting in chance. London, 1593. Ceccarelli, Giovanni. “Risky Business: Theological and Canonical Thought on Insurance from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3 (2001): 607–58. David, F. N. Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era. New York: Hafner Pub. Co., 1962. Franklin, James. The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Gataker, Thomas. Of the nature and vse of lots a treatise historicall and theologicall. London, 1619. Gross, Thomas. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Hald, Anders. A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750. New York: Wiley, 1990.

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Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare among the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Holmer, Joan Ozark. The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequence. New York: St. Martins, 1995. Knight, Frank. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. New York: Kelley and Millman, 1957. Leinwand, Theodore. Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Malynes, Gerard. Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-merchant. London, 1622. Rackin, Phyllis. “The Impact of Global Trade in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 138 (2002): 73–88. Ramsey, Peter. Tudor Economics Problems. London: V. Gollancz, 1963. Raynes, Harold. A History of British Insurance. London: Pitman, 1964. Rosenshield, Gary. “Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20.2 (Winter 2002): 28–51. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Arden Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1955. Sullivan, Ceri. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing. New York: Associated University Presses, 2002. Tawney, R. H., and Eileen Power, eds. Tudor Economic Documents. London: Longmans, 1924. Vernon, John. The compleat comptinghouse. London, 1678. Wilson, Thomas. A Discourse upon Usury. Ed. R. H. Tawney. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1962. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. “Shipwrecks in the City: Commercial Risk as Romance in Early Modern City Comedy.”Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy. Ed. Angela Stock, Dieter Mehl, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

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Chapter 3

S alvation, Social Struggle, and the Ideology of the Company Merchant: Baptist Goodall’s T H E T RYA L L O F T R AU E L L (1630) 1 David J. Morrow

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. (Psalm 107, 23–24)2

In 1630, an author calling himself “Baptist Goodall, Merchant” (original

emphasis) published The tryall of trauell—80 pages of heroic couplets celebrating overseas trade and traders. Goodall’s punning title reveals the principal aims of his poem: to defend overseas trade, or “Civill travell,” as if it were on trial; and discursively to restrict the field of merchant venturers to men who have already proven their capacity to endure the trials of “travell.” A generic oddball of mercantile writing, Goodall’s poem is at once a handbook for merchants, an encyclopedic account of trade and sea travel from Creation to his present, a breathless hymn of praise to commodities and natural wonders, and a meditation on the suggestive homophone travail/travel. Determinedly grounded in social struggle, the poem combines numinous celebrations of

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England’s newfound sense of command over the natural world with both straightforward praise of company merchants—Goodall’s constituents—and assaults on the masculinity, status, and competence of noncompany men seeking to trade overseas. In the poem, Goodall deploys the narratives of dispersal and redemption dearest to the Christians of his day, while heaping classed and gendered scorn upon those who would threaten existing social relations. Though it has been more or less ignored by commentators, the poem deserves study.3 My emphasis is on its justifications for the monopolistic privileges enjoyed by the era’s chartered merchants. Written in a moment when the merchant companies faced increasing encroachments upon their traditional entitlements and their revenues, Goodall’s defense of the status quo reminds us that England’s emergence into global preeminence was fraught with domestic struggle among commercial class fractions; reading the poem together with contemporaneous merchant charters, handbooks, and polemics, and with the work of twentieth-century historians, provides access to spaces on the wide-ranging ideological terrain on which these conflicts were contested. From its beginnings, English foreign trade was dominated by companies chartered by the Crown, companies that “operated under restricted, corporately controlled conditions designed to regulate competition, to minimize risk, and to ensure profits” (Brenner 106). These enterprises took two forms. Regulated companies, such as the Merchant Adventurers and the Eastland and Spanish Companies, functioned much like guilds or licensing agencies, granting protection for their members, who were normally active merchants. Joint-stock companies, including the Moscovy and East India Companies, were created to amass large amounts of money for more risky ventures; their investors were often not merchants (Rabb 28–29). Both forms of organization depended for their success upon political initiative, upon the securing of government monopolies. Evident throughout the poem, Goodall’s ideological commitment to monopolistic trade is signaled even in his self-designation, “Merchant.” In the era, the term signified “wholesaler” and excluded retailers and artisans (Rabb 13).4 After a decade of economic crises, the companies needed defending in 1630. The crises included, in brief: a worsening balance of trade; ongoing competition with Dutch merchants, who quite consistently undersold the English; continued strife between merchants and their factors overseas; and a debt strike by the Grocers against the Levant Company.5 This last episode draws attention to the structural conflict between company merchants—the monopolistic middlemen who controlled import-export trade—and the domestic merchants debarred from trading overseas. This state of affairs had long generated challenges from domestic retailers, artisans, and others who wanted to participate

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in foreign trade.6 The balance of power was shifting in the 1620s, from the company merchants to the groups of challengers Robert Brenner calls “non-aligned merchants.” The monopolistic merchants themselves helped to bring about this shift. Even as trade in the Americas increased in importance to England’s economy, they remained generally unwilling to risk money in that part of the world on ventures that were far from certain. Indeed, in 1625, trade in sugar and tobacco in the West Indies and Virginia was freed from company control (Brenner 88). Company merchants faced a number of other challenges. The relationship between these “royal merchants” and the Crown, for example, was often an uneasy one, as is suggested by King James’s assertion in Basilikon Doron that merchants thinke the whole common-weale ordeined for making them up; and accounting it their lawfull gaine and trade, to enrich themselves upon the losse of all the rest of the people; they transport from us things necessarie; bringing backe sometimes unnecessary things and at other times nothing at all. (qtd. in Finkelstein 13)

This economic critique overlaps with older, well-known discourses that were turned on merchants—moral arguments based on the ethics of the moral economy that viewed most individual enrichment as detrimental to the general good.7 Merchants in the era were, of course, also always open to critique of their famed sharp dealing and deception. In a 1613 sermon, William Pemberton averred that “[s]uch is the baseness of this worldly gaine, that it may be gotten, not onely by truth and vertue, but also by fraud and falsehood” (100). Baptist Goodall, his fellow merchants, and their fellow travelers justified their business practices from within this discursive field by drawing upon a set of customary defenses. Among those most relevant for Goodall’s poem are self-promoting, nationalistic declarations such as that advanced in the 1605 Proclamation of the Levant Company, thanks to whom, “our kingdom hath been much enriched, our great ships and mariners set on work, and the honour and fame of our nation and kingdom spread and enlarged in those remote parts” (qtd. in Hinton 175). Goodall likewise asserts throughout that monopolistic trade creates work, introduces new commodities, and confers honor upon the nation. Also key to Goodall’s defense of monopolistic trade is what Michael Nerlich has termed “the ideology of adventure”: “the systematic glorification of the (knightly, then bourgeois) adventurer as the most developed human being,” and, specifically, the appropriation by plebian traders of “chivalric ideology to denote their own precapitalist or capitalist practice” (xx).8 Although useful in helping us to see the centrality of discourses of voyaging and risk in Goodall’s claims for merchants,

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Nerlich’s concept does not account for the religious frames within which The tryall of trauell makes sense; what makes Goodall’s voice distinctive among the contemporaneous defenders of merchant companies with which I am familiar is the peculiar ways in which he deploys the ideology of adventure within globalizing, theological narratives. Early on, he defines the purpose of overseas trade as being to Acquaint the earth with miracles unknowne, Which only are by civill travailes showne. And friendly change of each lands fruites thus made, Yea many thousands each way fed by trade. Thus travailes wonders first their maker praise, Then add they store and solace to our days. (sig. B1v)

Voyaging merchants here do not simply provide England and the world with “store and solace.” They reveal the copiousness of creation and reconnect the commodities and the people whom God has scattered about the earth. As we will see, Goodall frames the natural differences found across geographical space within the Expulsion and Babel narratives, and he does so to attribute epic, redemptive significance to “civill travaile”—the mercantile work of discovery and recovery.9 Thereby, he reinterprets “worldly gaine,” which Pemberton and others scorned, as the material enactment of the spiritual promise of salvation. In Goodall’s hands, travell/travaile (the spellings are interchangeable) functions as a tripartite concept and an evocative homophone. Early on, he delimits three distinct modes of travaile: “mortal travaile,” the idea of life as a voyage; “Christian travaile,” which signifies both the life of Jesus Christ and Christian evangelism; and “Civill Travaile,” or overseas trade. He also promises to engage only with civill travaile: “Civill alone is now our muses taske” (sig. A4v). But throughout he praises company merchants by creating allegorical correspondences between and among these three different levels, encouraging his readers to interpret his work within a version of the Medieval, fourfold model of allegoresis, according to which interpretation is a matter of reading at once on literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels. Thus Goodall makes the literal act of merchant voyaging suggest allegorical correspondences with the life of Christ; arguing for the redemptive force of trade, he presents merchants, at the anagogical level, as nothing less than the bearers of the collective meaning of history, as when he concludes his retelling of key stories from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles with this mercantile call to arms:10 Our passage cleared by worthies worlds of these Let’s arme our feeble joints with faith pass one

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In travaile to that high Imperiall throne, Now that the matter each way plaine appear Let Civill cases see themselves as cleere. (sig. F3v)

The verse can be hard going. The point here is that the “worthies”— Christ, his apostles, and the travailing heroes of the Old Testament— have charted a course that merchants, “Civill cases,” must follow. Goodall represents overseas venturing as a bodily and spiritual journey, and merchants as Christ’s best imitators. At the same time, he represents mercantile labor as an exemplary version of life as a journey—the Christian voyage “to that high Imperiall throne.” In another passage (and one that contradicts his earlier promise to focus on civill travell), Goodall elucidates his allegorical approach, asserting a refusal to delimit the three modes: “So by Commixion of this rule of three [mortal, Christian, and Civil Travaile] / Summe travailes worthies so their worths to see. / Nor neede distinction, we of totall treat” (sig. E4v). In order to reveal the worthiness of travaile, that is, he represents the three modes as a “commixion,” within which overseas venturing functions as a perfect form of human endeavor—an imitation of Christ. Goodall’s “commixion” does not, of course, follow the spirit of Christian allegory, for he is primarily concerned with securing privileges for members of his class fraction, rather than pointing the way to heaven. Nevertheless, he exploits the allegorical tradition to celebrate the temporal and corporal travaile of merchants by linking their endeavors to the eternal and spiritual. In addition to collapsing differences between his three modes of travaile, Goodall also exploits the homonymic resonances of “travaile.” Here a horizontal rather than a vertical conception of allegory is useful. Maureen Quilligan has urged readers to understand allegory as “the generation of narrative structure out of wordplay”: as the polysemy in words, rather than as “another meaning hovering above the text” (22, 26). We could add Goodall to Quilligan’s collection of more celebrated authors who demand that we read their works with “an eye on the magic truth inherent in words themselves” (68). And, throughout his poem, with just this sense of the magic of words, Goodall takes advantage of the slipperiness between and among the signifieds that cluster around the homophone travail/travel. Early modern English homophones had a status very different from that to which the debased pun was later consigned. Margreta de Grazia has argued that it was only once the lexical laws were laid down that puns appeared unruly and transgressive. Earlier, she writes, puns were “integral to language, directing and encouraging associations that made sense. They literally made sense,” she continues, “that is, they constituted sense through their copious troping resonances, rather than by representing [sense] as

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something preexistent in mind or world” (143). Goodall’s arguments for his class fraction follow just this logic to produce ideology from the openendedness and free play of meanings. The OED definitions of “travail” available to authors by the mid-sixteenth century include: to labor, to torment, distress, harass; to weary or exert oneself (defs. 1e, 1, 2). And in a culture in which travel for refinement (early forms of the Grand Tour) as well as mercantile enterprise, exploration, and plunder on land and sea were increasingly central to national and individual identities, the homonym also carries the sense of “to journey” or “to voyage” (OED “travel,” def. 2). Goodall does not follow other early modern English authors in exploiting the sense of travaile as the labor childbirth, yet his puns on travaile remain pregnant with meaning nonetheless. In the poem, the longstanding religious trope of life as a difficult journey (Goodall claims, “Life is a travaile through earths sea of woes” [sig. C4r]) and literary narratives such as the chivalric quest and other travailing discourses overlap and invigorate one another within the context of England’s developing sense of itself as an imperial power and its increasingly appropriative relationship with the rest of the world: “Expect no other but a share in crosses,/ As thou through travails desert each way passes,” he promises (sig. H2v). Travaile serves Goodall as his poem’s key term, with which he praises company merchants and scorns interlopers. Goodall is far from the only author who exploits the homophone, but, to my knowledge, his book is the most sustained exploration of it. The weight Goodall puts on this constellation of concepts, this puncept,11 is clear on the first page of the poem. In a summary account of Creation, the Fall, and the Tower of Babel story, he writes, Him made he then the microcosme of all, Seated in costly Eden, whilst his fall, Makes him accursed of a Lord compleate In sweat of browes adjudg’d his bread to eate And pilgrimewise henceforth on earth to wander, Pacing about it as a crookt meander, Then earth for sin sustaines a whole delusion And Nimrods plott produces tongues confusion Sin still and sorrow relatives in us We are to spend our dayes in travaile thus. (sig. B1r)

For Goodall, “mortall travaile” defines the postlapsarian human condition whereby life is an arduous journey comprised of wandering and working, according to the biblical injunction that humans are to eat their bread in the sweat of their brows. “Tis nothing else to travaile but to breathe,” he claims, “Travailes ordained posterities

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bequeath. / . . . Nor may the wise or great or faire go free / But equally the trace of travaile see” (sig. B1v). In this way, as the book’s title punningly suggests, travell does try all, regardless of rank. Yet the special difficulties of travaile interpellate merchants as godly, virtuous subjects, both because its difficulties increase a merchant’s faith (“His faith and valour grow by use more strong/ Praises to god in conquest are his song” [sig. E2v]) and because foreign travel brings exceptional enticements that must be resisted (“Both Church and soule and virtues mount more high/ As they in travailes through temptations flie” [sig. F1v]). This perpetual, self-denying, and laborious movement across space that Goodall characterizes as the life of an overseas merchant is a version of the ongoing, daily struggle in the life of a Calvinist, according to which, in Max Weber’s formulation, effort in the world serves as a means through which to assuage existential anxieties and leads to “systematic self control [whereby he at] every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned” (115). Furthermore, foreign trade enacts salvation for all. In Goodall’s poem, the travaile of overseas merchants redresses the dispersals and “confusion” created not only by the Expulsion, but also by “Nimrods plot” to construct the Tower of Babel. Part one of The tryall of trauell is entitled “The Wonders of Travell.” Shaped by Goodall’s affirmative reading of the Babel story, it catalogues the world’s diversity, reading at times like a globalized version of the lists of commodities that feature in letters and reports written by the era’s merchants and explorers—but reworked as a hymn. Because it is only through “civill travaile” that the world’s miracles are known, Goodall invests English merchants with the power of discovery, the power to reveal the new. This gambit depends upon his masking of the relative belatedness of England’s entry into large-scale global adventuring, as when, in a Miranda-like moment, he images the world as brave and new, chirping, “How full of miracles is nature now / Which every way such difference can allow” (sig. C1r; emphasis added). “ ’Tis new to thee,” a Spanish or Portuguese sailor might retort. As we would expect, such testimonials to new wonders are also framed within older discourses, as in Goodall’s choice for the book’s epigraph: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep” (Psalms 107.23–24), verses that reflect glory back upon those men already working as merchants. As we will see, the complement to this argument is Goodall’s insistence that those who have not done business in great waters should stay at home. On the logic of Christian teleology, the stories of the Fall and Babel recounted in the Hebrew Bible are redeemed by the life and death of Christ. Goodall’s religious valorization of the mercantile status quo also

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follows this trajectory. Thus, his account of “the Jewes of travaile” (sig. F2r)—Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, David, Job, and the rest— gives way to New Testament travailers, such as John the Baptist, the disciples, and finally Christ, whose travaile then prefigures the voyaging labor of Goodall’s class fraction: Our Lord and King thus travailed below Waies of earths travailes to us all to shew Now out of sea in middest of many stormes And then on land in middest of many harmes In hunger thirst, wants, woes and travails tried And now with heavens high honoures dignified. To tell us all and give us this to know Our rest is up above and not below. (sig. F3r)

In the 1625 edition of his collection, Samuel Purchas figures Christ’s life in similar allegorical terms: “This was indeed the greatest of all peregrinations,” he writes, “when the word was made flesh and (leaving in sort his heavenly Country, and his Fathers house) dwelt amongst us. The next remote peregrination was his ascension from the lower parts of the Earth” (50). For both authors, Christ embodies exemplary endurance of travail. Yet Goodall’s account is the more baldly ideological. He brings Jesus Christ on board to ennoble his constituents by accounting Him heroic on the basis of the trials of travaile, the very difficulties—storms, hunger, thirst, wants—that he represents as the common hardships of overseas merchants. Goodall creates ideology supporting company merchants by drawing on his society’s most authoritative discourses and by exploiting the polysemy in travaile to represent their labor and voyaging in salvific terms. And there is more than an echo of Christian salvation in Goodall’s representation of overseas venturing as labor that pulls together the objects and peoples scattered at the demise of “Nimrods plott”: Thousands unseen assisting one another And the Barbarian rude the Christians brother This harmony in nature, and each nation Hatched by travailes howrely propagation Nor warr, nor jar, can totally molest But some way finde they mutuall interest. (sig. C3v)

Goodall’s two-part discourse of dispersal and redemption, discovery and recovery, adumbrates later arguments for the global reach of English capitalism. Paul Young has shown that commentators on

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London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 “cast industrial capitalist logic in a theological light.” He quotes one who describes the setting for the exhibition, the Crystal Palace, as an “‘enormous pantechnicon’ which would promote the ‘fraternity and unity . . . and the peace and prosperity of mankind,’ thus proving ‘to our race, a kind of compensation for the Tower of Babel’” (28). Today, global “free trade” as our neoliberal economic system is popularly figured is likewise often praised and advertised as if it ipso facto advances global unity and peace. (And in the United States, it is not uncommonly represented in messianic Christian terms.) Approaching Goodall’s poem from within his era’s struggles for access to power and revenues reminds us that such paeans to the redemptive power of global business have long furthered the interests of individuals and class fractions seeking political support for their exploitation of natural resources and human labor. Goodall’s poem is not without its progressive, modern strands. His global world view is shaped not only by cosmological, biblical discourses of redemption, but also by emergent forms of geographic imagination associated with developments in cartography.12 In the mid-sixteenth century, England began to master the ability to turn knowledge of the globe into increased political power and profit, and mapping the world provided a useful step in the process, as Goodall argues here: Timly meridian, solles true Declinations The North stares power, Globes rule in Navigations The pillotts art his Chanall sownds, quick viewe Lo! From these fruits our voyages accreue Amazing earth in great discoveries made Inriching Europ with a potent trade. (sig. B4v)

One of the signal tropes of early English imperialism, which is evident, for example, in Richard Hakluyt’s interest in mapping and in his collaboration with Gerard Mercator, is the feedback system through which technical forms of knowledge were turned into profit. Goodall understands this, and his poem performs work at the level of ideology similar to that which others carried out through shipping and cartography. As Goodall has it, “Lo! From these fruits our voyages accreue.” His acknowledgment of the process whereby Europe used its scientific knowledge to enrich itself suggests that Goodall’s true aim, though often cloaked in the language of discovery and redemption, was to maintain the systematic exploitation of ever wider swaths of the world. The domestic counterpart to this expansionist thinking was the retrenchment of monopolistic social relations. Written in a moment of crisis for the merchant companies, Goodall’s poem offers a window into

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the mutual relationships between social change and class conflict on the one hand and overseas expansionism on the other.

* * * Goodall’s construction of the bases upon which Englishmen are and are not fit to work as foreign merchants is the complement to the anagogical celebration of the mercantile status quo that I traced above. It is likewise a product of social struggle, of challenges to the monopolistic status company merchants had long enjoyed: threats from above and below, from artisans and shopkeepers who sought unmediated access to foreign commodities, and from the gentry and nobility, who were increasingly active in the joint-stock companies. Conflict between shopkeepers and merchants dates back to the Middle Ages and was a product of the structural relationship between the two groups. Shopkeepers wanted to trade for foreign commodities themselves while merchant-middlemen used their monopolistic privileges to exploit them in everyday exchanges (Brenner 85–88). In response to these pressures, authors of merchant company charters included language intended to preserve already existing social relations. For example, the charters restricted overseas trade to “meer merchants,” each of whom was defined in the Proclamation of the Eastland Company as “such a one as hath of some good continuance not less than three years traded at home and abroad beyond the seas merchantlike” (qtd. in Hinton 55). This constraint cannily limits membership in the companies to those who have already traded overseas—a strategy that Goodall also uses. The Spanish Company’s charter catalogues the groups it excludes, citing “the lawes and statutes of this realme” to bar from trading with Spain “all Retailers, Artificers, Inholders, farmours, Comon mariners and handycrafts men” (Croft 84): a list that attests both to the prevailing appetite for trading privileges among excluded groups and to the wide array of positions from which merchants were challenged. Goodall’s poem serves as a kind of companion piece to the company charters, though, rather than using legal language, he includes and excludes (as we will see) with bombast, exaggeration, and satire, tropes more common in imaginative works. While all companies restricted the access of artisans and shopkeepers, their response to the participation of the gentry and nobility in overseas trade was more variable. The English gentry had long distinguished itself from its continental homologues by investing in enterprises and sending its younger sons to apprentice as factors (Rabb 13, 173). The expansion of privateering ventures in the last two decades of the sixteenth century brought an influx of upper-rank investors in the joint-stock companies. These companies welcomed the money and also the influence noblemen

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could exert on their behalf in the state. When it came to directing the company, however, the trading elements wanted their investors to be silent partners. (The situation this produced—as noblemen sought to buy access to power from merchants who deigned to interact with them primarily for their money—presents us with a neat inversion of the era’s more common relationship between the great and the middling.) But the merchant governors found their social superiors at times difficult to control. K. N. Chaudhuri writes, for example: “When some disturbances occurred in the Court of Election in July 1619, these were attributed to gentlemen, who it was remarked, having been taken into the [East India] Company by courtesy, ‘do aim to get all the government into their hands, which is a business proper for merchants’” (37). Goodall works to maintain the monopolistic status quo by scorning interlopers high and low, and by creating discursive space that only merchants can occupy. Characteristically, he draws on Christian ideology for this prong of his argument, mobilizing a God who culls from a narrow stratum of society, one from which gentry at one limit and artisans and shopkeepers at the other are excluded. Goodall explains, for example, that overseas trade “is not to be assumed as due to all, / But only such whom God doth to it call” (sig. H4r), arguing that the capacity to succeed as a merchant venturer corresponds with the position of one’s birth: “The subjects birth must sute his way he aimes / Birth greater aptnesse then ye thinke containes” (sig. G2r). If I am right to sense anxiety in the second line of this couplet, it might be due not only to the fact that this middling-sort man is arguing against social mobility, but also to the fact that Goodall is constructing social distinctions at the “lower” margins of the middling sort that would have gone unacknowledged by many of his contemporaries. The accepted distinction between artisan-shopkeepers and international merchants, in the era, was one of occupation rather than rank. According to the views of status then dominant, Goodall is distinguishing between class fractions of the commonality rather than gesturing to an absolute difference—such as that which many recognized between commoners and gentry. He thereby marks out space in the middle of the social order, by constructing ideals of mercantile comportment that neither artisanshopkeepers nor gentlemen can carry off. In one mocking passage, Goodall ridicules an aspiring artisan and then likens his class transgression to the “descents” of gentlemen traders: We see our bould Mechanicke uncontent In discreet way, his manualles [crafts] to vent Will now be merchant yea pry hither too When skill else pride procureth his undoe ..........................................

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D av i d J . M o r r ow As such unmeete ascents prove ruinous So the most base descents befoole it thus When high borne minds debase their breed for gaine And slavish travaile entertaine Or use in travaile an unequall hand Matters too low for such to understand. (sig. G2r)

Contempt for artisans and shopkeepers who seek to “be Merchant,” who are “uncontent” with their “discreet” place in the domestic economy, drips off words such as “bould” and “pride.” Goodall keeps such men in their place on the basis of the manual character of their labor. Likewise, the authors of the Spanish Company charter maintained that “manual trade or occupation [is] far inferior to the profession of a marchaunt” (Croft 85). When it suits their ideological aims, company merchants such as Goodall, and others seated in the upper end of the middling sort, praise themselves by appropriating tropes of manual labor to stress the difficulty of their travaile; but this should not be interpreted as evidence for any actual identification with their commoner brethren. In the same passage, Goodall discursively bars gentlemen from overseas trade by craftily turning traditional aristocratic contempt of mercantile practice against them, asserting that well-born men debase their breeding by participating in “slavish travaile.” Chaudhuri notes a similar argument the East India Company made in response to James I’s offer, in 1624, to become an investor, so that their ships might fly the royal flag. He writes that “the Company declined the offer on the ground that ‘they cannot conceive how with his honour it may be done, the condition of partnership in trade being a thing too far under the dignity and majesty of a king’” (31). Protected by his anonymity and by the fact that he is arguing against abstractions, Goodall goes much further, in the quote above, declaring that the “high-borne,” like the low, “befoole” overseas trade—that is, they both pollute it and render it foolish. At issue, of course, is the threat that politically connected members of the gentry posed to the merchants’ privileges. We saw above that, with the influx of gentle investors, the East India Company’s merchant governors feared relinquishing control of the company. Likewise, Goodall worries that such men will “use in travaile an unequall hand.” And, like the company regulations, his critiques of high- and low-born would-be merchants work to limit participation in overseas trade to those who have already travailed beyond England. His discursive construction of a class fraction of company merchants as a group in the middle of society—neither gentle nor mechanical, but with its own capacities that cannot be matched by either—is in part a product of the pincer-like pressure exerted upon established merchants by political and economic forces.

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The quote also alludes to the threats posed to merchant companies by wayward factors—company representatives who went abroad in a variety of capacities, as servants, apprentices, and independent merchants. Factors were often inexperienced and by and large youthful, and historians provide accounts of their numerous financial and social faux pas, which included trading at a loss in their masters’ name, defrauding their companies, fighting, and appearing drunk in public.13 Company charters included restrictions on who could represent the company abroad, but problems persisted. The bylaws of the Eastland Company, for example, are “full of references to the necessity of preventing disorderly conduct by factors” (Hinton 54). But rather than admitting that the waywardness of factors was an issue for the companies, Goodall exploits concern over such behavior further to distinguish between who is and who is not fit to work overseas. Since “civill travaile” is an ideal, those who “befoole” it do no harm to England’s expansionist projects but only embarrass themselves and provide further support for the existing restrictions upon overseas commerce. Goodall also includes and excludes by drawing on a gendered discourse that figures away as a site of vigorous, manly subjectivity, and home as a place of idleness and the infantilizing, effeminizing mother. Certain men, he makes clear, should have stayed at home: Oh fy! that travaile ere allowd such brats, Fitter to hedge the fire with dogs and catts, For there they still may play with mothers dugg, And pamperd, counsel with an Irish rug. Provident travaile never hatch these braines, Tis true she still of their abuse complaines, Fond Chimy Cricket know that travailes way, Is danger, and adventure and no play. The bests are hardest ere to be gaind And with endurance must be entertaind. (sig. H2r)

The tryall of trauell celebrates England’s emergent control of an expanding globe; on Goodall’s logic, to be place bound is to be provincial, childish, and effeminate. Home life—represented here in the warmth of the hearth and rug and the mother’s breast—infantilizes; it arrests masculine development at a childlike, dependent state. Elsewhere in the poem the mother tongue and the motherland likewise function as representations of debilitating stasis. On Goodall’s argument, only company merchants can attain proper middling-sort masculinity, and they do so by taking “travailes way,” by exhibiting laborious fortitude in the face of difficulty. Recent commentary on early English imperial venturing has often focused on the ways in which constructions of

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Englishness—as white, English masculinity—depend upon the othering of foreign lands and peoples. Produced at a moment in which economic crises within England’s global trade was exacerbating struggles between class fractions, this poem defines its ideal merchants in relation to English others; this is one of the poem’s ideological characteristics that suggest to me that the era’s dialectic of domestic social struggle and overseas venturing deserves further study. Goodall’s combatitive use of home and away offers a satirical, middling-sort refashioning of aristocratic discourse that figured going abroad as a necessary part of a young man’s maturation and socialization. Early in Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare presents a concise version of the expanding sites of opportunity for young gentlemen. Here, Panthino also makes clear how much rests upon foreign travel, when he relays to Antonio the Duke’s disbelief that he, Antonio, would allow his son Proteus . . . to spend his youth at home, While other men, of slender reputation, Put forth their sons to seek preferment out— Some to the wars, to try their fortune there, Some to discover islands far away, Some to the studious universities. For any or for all these exercises He said that Proteus your son was meet, And did request me to importune you To let him spend his time no more at home, Which would be great impeachment to his age In having know no travel in his youth. (1.3.5–16)

Goodall’s poem features two catalogues of fields of endeavor open to young middling-sort men, but, as we have seen, he lacks the politesse of Panthino, who couches his critique of Proteus as a stay-at-home in terms of an aristocrat’s deference to his superior. Goodall is likewise clearly middling sort in his celebration of travaile as effort—“The bests are hardest ere to be gaind / And with endurance must be entertaind,” as he puts it above. Shakespeare features relatively few characters from the middle of English society, of course, leaving that large and heterogeneous group to other dramatists, some of whom engage—from a range of perspectives—with the struggles taking place between fractions of the middling sort. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Thomas Dekker raises and imaginatively resolves the very conflict in which Goodall participates (but in favor of Goodall’s rivals), when Simon Eyre disguises himself as a merchant so that he may buy and sell foreign commodities. The rapidity of

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Eyre’s rise functions as wish-fulfillment for the artisans and shopkeepers restrained by law, while also staging the anxieties that were inescapable effects of the privileges company merchants enjoyed. Writing in the second decade of the seventeenth century, Robert Daborne has his pirate Francisco, in A Christian Turned Turk (1612), deploy the distinction between retail and wholesale merchandising to heap scorn upon Ward, another pirate and the play’s antihero: A little calmer, sir! You are not in Kent, Crying “Herrings, seven a penny!” Nay we have heard of you: You can bawl well; you have served apprenticeship Unto the trade, affrighting whole streets With your full oyster voice. (4.97–101)

Working from the premise that small-time domestic trade is shameful, Francisco does not let Ward forget his humble origins. Francisco’s insistence upon the difference between forms of mercantile practice is part of the play’s subversive aim of debating and troubling distinctions between monopolistic trade and piracy. Early in the play, one of Daborne’s Frenchmen praises the work of overseas merchants in lines that could have inspired Goodall: “the venting merchants, whose manly breast/ (Scorning base gain at home) puts to the main/ With hazard of his life and state, from other lands/ To enrich his own” (1.62–64). Yet Daborne soon asks his readers and auditors to question the status of state-authorized merchants, as when Dansiker, a vicious pirate, receives letters of pardon from the King of France, which also set him up as a chartered merchant. The pirate’s abrupt elevation also writes in little the careers of Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and other well-known English heroes from the previous century. An invective-laden command to artisans aspiring to become merchants will allow us to sum up the ideological bases of Goodall’s modes of inclusion and exclusion: Embrace thy mothers dugg in promised peace Embrace thy slothfulnesse thy shames increase Till times of tryall or confusions come Then runnst thou (as a madd man) bout thy home If not thy pride is clownish ignorance, The plow or cart thy uttermost advance. (sig. L1r–L1v)

Notice here how gendered scorn slips into class contempt, how the effeminate, stay-at-home Other becomes a rural figure of fun, whose labor at plow and cart serves as an absurd shadow of glorious overseas travaile. While early modern English merchants rose to power and

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prominence in London, the connection of mercantile practice with the materiality of labor, money, and goods left these men open to the disdain of their social betters. Given that they were liable to being lumped together with shopkeepers and artisans, early modern English merchants had to set themselves off from their fellow commoners through various forms of distinction; Goodall’s ideological uses of travaile helped to provide discursive space for the construction of company merchants as a middle group—neither high nor low, but with capacities that were out of the reach of both. In that he carves out ideological space for merchants as a middle group, Goodall’s work represents a departure from most of the era’s promerchant authors, for they—as Nerlich, Stevenson, and others have shown—typically reworked discourses and ideology associated with the aristocracy. Edward Misselden, for one, writes that “[m]erchants are wont to make it their glory, to advance their fortunes, renowne their names, embellize their houses, beautifie their families with the honour of this faculty: and to perpetuate the fame unto posterities, as an hereditary title of honour unto their name and blood” (18). Thirty years later, in 1665, Edward Waterhouse makes a similar case: I my self have known as generous, sincere, royal minded men Traders as ever I have done either Noblemen, Lawyers, or Divines, as zealous to God, as true to their Prince, as free to [their] Relations, as charitable to the Poor, as good to their Servants, as patient to their Debtors (205–06)

Goodall refashions such ideology on the basis of the evocative claims of travaile and in so doing moves beyond this sort of straightforward appropriation of values associated with his society’s elite. While Misselden wants to flatten out social distinctions to make his case for merchants, Goodall wants to reinforce and expand upon those discourses and practices that make merchants charted by the crown a group distinct from both artisans and gentry.

* * * His celebration of life lived as incessant, laborious movement across the globe notwithstanding, Goodall allocates very little space to the actual physical travaile of the sailors who moved merchants and their goods to and fro.14 The one exception in the poem is his account of a storm at sea, during which, Goodall tells us, all ranks had to work, and “the merchants [were] but the sailors slaves” (sig. I4v). This story has the same narrative structure as does that with which Shakespeare opens The Tempest, in which a storm imperils hierarchical social relations so

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that they may later be reasserted as paradigmatic. Following Goodall, I, too, have focused here on England’s mercantile elite, and on ideological struggles for access to merchant capital. A more thorough study would chart more completely the material bases for emergent middle-class ideology, the ways in which the kinds of discursive appropriations I have detailed here were made possible by expropriations: the seminal manifestation of which is, of course, the deracination of generations of primary producers—in Britain, in Ireland, and later in much of the rest of the world—who had heretofore enjoyed access to land as a birthright. Within literary studies, Mark Netzloff has done just such work. In England’s Internal Colonies, he attends to the mutual constitution of domestic social struggles and colonialism/empire in early modern England, writing, for example, “while the expanding profits of agrarian capital served to fuel the growing outlets of merchant’s capital in the form of overseas trade and exchange, the excess labor of the English countryside provided the human capital and necessary labor for England’s colonies” (13). Within the discipline of history, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese’s Fruits of Merchant Capital provides a painstaking study of the various functions (within emergent global capitalism) of merchant capital, both in eighteenth-century France and in the Old South of the United States. Their emphasis on slavery reminds us that many of Goodall’s merchant descendents got rich on plantation crops, and that it was, therefore, slave labor—of the unnamed thousands who travailed West from Africa in chains (as well as the deaths of those who did not survive the voyage)—that created the economic conditions within which generations of merchants rose to prominence and adapted the imagery, discourses, and fantasies of men such as Goodall to create their own mythology.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Erika Olbricht and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. And thanks to Stephen Knapper, Dédette Grelier, and Leon van Mierlo for providing me wonderful spaces in which to work. 2. The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version. Nashville, TN and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1977. 3. Louis B. Wright is the only author I have found who deals with Goodall at any length. He figures the poem as a guidebook, noting that Goodall urges merchants to become familiar with three foreign languages (163–64, 357–58). 4. The many more recent studies of ideology nothwithstanding, I find Raymond Williams’s tripartite division of common uses of the concept enduringly useful: “(i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

class or group; (ii) a system of illusory beliefs—false ideas or false consciousness—which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and beliefs” (55). In my sketch of the ideology of the company merchant, I emphasize Williams’s first and third frames, to uncover how this group’s discursive positions were shaped by economic crises and struggles between fractions of the middling sort. See Brenner 85–88. For a discussion of these crises from the point of view of the East India Company see Chaudhuri 56–73. Popfsky explains the 1620s conflicts around custom duties. For the arguments against monopolistic trade, see, for example, Edward Sandys’s 1605 report from the Committee on Free Trade, reprinted in Thirsk and Cooper 436–44. See also J. Roberts, The trades increase. Key discussions of the moral economy include E. P. Thompson’s essay, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” and Appleby 24–72. For an overlapping discussion of such discursive appropriation from outside of Marxism see Laura Stevenson’s Praise and Paradox, in which she argues that since early modern England had not developed a strictly middle-class “social ideology,” authors wishing to praise “merchant heroes” were compelled to employ aristocratic categories. Andrew McRae has noted a similar discourse in the work of Francis Bacon, who, McRae argues, asserts that through knowledge and labor humanity will be able “to repair some of the effects of the Fall” (215). For a summary of this model of allegoresis, see Jameson 28–32. G. Ulmer coined the term “puncept,” which, he explains, differs from a concept in that, while the latter organizes knowledge around like signifieds, puncepts unite disparate (though related) ideas on the basis of their common signifier. See “The Puncept in Grammatology.” See Gillies and Heidegger for (very different) considerations of emergent forms of European geographic imagination. See Chaudhuri 74–88, Fedorowicz 58–59, and Hinton 54–55. John Browne’s The merchants avizo (1607) is a conduct book for factors. By contrast, J. Roberts, in The trades increase (1613), an eloquent critique of monopolistic practice, argues for the value of sailors: It is the good Pilot that bringeth the Shippe to the Haven: It is the wise master that goveneth the men in the Ship; but without men the master cannot governe, nor the shippe goe: What is a Leader without an Army, and that of Souldiers? The same reason of Sea-men in a ship; the body must have life, bloud and flesh: the same are Sea-men in a ship. (22) For accounts on the lives and labor of early modern English sailors, see Fumerton and Linebaugh and Rediker.

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Works Cited Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Browne, John. The merchants avizo. London, 1607. Chaudhuri, K. N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early JointStock Company 1600–1640. 1965. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Croft, Pauline, ed. The Spanish Company. London: London Record Society, 1973. Daborne, Robert. A Christian Turned Turk. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. Ed. Daniel Vitkus. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. de Grazia, Margreta. “Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization.” Shakespeare Jarbuch (1990): 142–54. Fedorowicz, J. K. England’s Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1980. Finkelstein, Lisa. “Gerard de Malynes and Edward Misselden: The Learned Library of the Seventeenth-Century Merchant.” Book History 3 (2000): 1–20. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene D. Genovese. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Fumerton, Patricia. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. London: Cambridge UP, 1994. Goodall, Baptist. The tryall of trauell. London, 1630. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977. 115–54. Hinton, R. W. K. The Eastland Trade and the Common Weal in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. McRae, Andrew. “God Speed the Plough”: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Misselden, Edward. The circle of commerce. Or The ballance of trade. London, 1623. Nerlich, Michael. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Vol. 1. 1977. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

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Netzloff, Mark. England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pemberton, William. The godly merchant, or The great gaine A sermon preached at Paules Crosse. Octob. 17. 1613. London, 1613. Popfsky, Linda S. “The Crisis over Tonnage and Poundage in Parliament in 1629.” Past and Present 126 (Feb. 1990): 44–75. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas his pilgrimes. London, 1625. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. Rabb, Theodore K. Enterprise & Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. Roberts, J. The trades increase. London, 1615. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. Stevenson, Laura Caroline. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984. Thirsk, Joan, and J. P. Cooper, eds. Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971): 76–136. Ulmer, G. “The Puncept in Grammatology.” On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Ed. Jonathan Culler. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. 39–55. Waterhouse, Edward. The gentlemans monitor. London, 1665. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 2nd edition. Trans. Talcott Parsons. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1998. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Wright, Louis B. Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1958. Young, Paul. “Economy, Empire, Extermination: The Christmas Pudding, the Crystal Palace and the Narrative of Capitalist Progress.” Literature and History 14.1 (Spring 2005): 14–30.

Chapter 4

T he Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought: Or, a Merchant ’s M ap of C Y M B E L I N E 1 Bradley D. Ryner

The language of economics is so prominent in Cymbeline that

Caroline Spurgeon felt Shakespeare “almost drags it in at times, even in places where as a metaphor it is both far-fetched and awkward” (296). Nonetheless, surprisingly little scholarship has given attention to the problems of economic value raised by the play.2 The action of the play is set in motion by a dispute over value: Cymbeline believes that Posthumus is inferior in worth to Imogen, whom he has secretly married, and banishes him. In trying to determine the worth of each lover relative to the other, the characters in the play engage in debates similar to those that took place in seventeenth-century mercantile treatises. In 1.5, Philario and the villainous Iachimo await Posthumus’s arrival in Italy. In addition to the two Italian characters, the stage direction specifies the entrance of “a Frenchman, a Dutchman, and a Spaniard” (though of these three, only the Frenchman speaks) (314).3 This multinational group discusses Posthumus’s apparent worth. Iachimo claims, “I haue seene him in Britaine; hee was then of a Cressent note, expected to proue so woorthy, as since he hath beene allowed the name of” (316–18). He dismisses the British assessment of Posthumus’s worth, saying, “I could then haue look’d on him, without the help of Admiration, though the Catalogue of his endowments had bin tabled by his side, and I to peruse him by Items” (318–21). The Frenchman

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verifies Iachimo’s assessment by asserting, “I haue seene him in France: wee had very many there, could behold the Sunne, with as firme eyes as hee” (325–27). Iachimo then attributes Posthumus’s good reputation to the fact that his marriage to Imogen has caused him to be “weighed rather by her valew, then his own,” which “words him . . . a great deale from the matter” (329–31). The metaphoric language in this scene makes reference to one of the key problems faced by seventeenth-century merchants: the difficulty of determining a coin’s value as it traveled from country to country. Iachimo presents Posthumus as a light coin—one whose metal content does not measure up to its denomination. He claims that Posthumus’s material worth is insufficient to truly counterbalance Imogen’s, despite what his reputation suggests. In both of Shakespeare’s sources— Boccaccio’s Decameron and Frederyke of Jennen—the wager that takes place in this scene is made among merchants. Although Shakespeare’s characters are not literally merchants, they perform a fundamentally mercantile operation by charting the differences of valuation between Britain, France, and Italy. Iachimo’s fantasy of being able to view Posthumus with a “Catalogue of his endowments . . . tabled by his side” resembles the mindset of early modern merchants, who often presented information in catalogues and tables. For example, Lewes Roberts’s mercantile atlas The Marchants Mapp of Commerce (pub. 1638) consists largely of catalogues of the principal commodities available in various locations and tables for converting the measurements of one trading center to that measurements of one trading center to those of another. As the title of Roberts’s work suggests, mercantile writers dreamed of being able to “map” the commercial world—to fully and faithfully represent it in tables and abstract models. Mercantile works offered their readers a new way of looking at trade, one in which all of its messy particulars were neatly contained within simple economic models that purported to be applicable to every situation. These models—like the geographic maps to which they were frequently metaphorically linked— offered readers an impossible, godlike vantage point from which the sprawling world of trade could be viewed at a glance. In what follows, I argue that Cymbeline stages the impossibility of achieving such a perspective. I begin by outlining the tension between individual economic transactions and their systemic effects that underlay efforts by mercantile writers to represent global trade in its totality. Then, I examine the metaphoric language these writers used to give their readers the sense that they had access to a panoramic view of commercial activity. Finally, I argue that Cymbeline undermines the possibility of achieving such a view by emphasizing the limited perspective of individual characters and the retrospective nature of all knowledge.

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The Individual and the Systemic By the seventeenth century, England’s growing traffic in foreign commodities (driven by increased consumption of those moving up the economic ladder and facilitated by the emerging mercantile middleclass) brought questions about England’s place in a global economy to the fore. People were becoming acutely aware that, just as they were complexly tied to other members of English society, England itself was complexly tied to the rest of the world. In other words, they were beginning to experience “the market” as we understand the term today. According to Joyce Oldham Appleby’s influential narrative, seventeenthcentury economic thinkers experienced the market as an intangible, alien, and “generally incomprehensible” force (26). Ceri Sullivan has recently challenged Appleby’s claims and has argued that merchants experienced the market as a set of personal relationships based on individual merchants’ reputations for trustworthiness. Indeed, the mysterious complexity of the market as a system described in the mercantile treatises that Appleby examines stands in sharp contrast to the personal, face-to-face nature of most individual transactions and the ready availability of personal information about the members of a community necessary to secure credit networks. However, the fact that these two experiences were at odds with one another does not mean that both did not exist simultaneously. As I shall show, the tension between the personal/individual and the alien/systemic was essential for the production of seventeenth-century economic writing. Appleby frames her analysis of the emergence of mercantile literature within a narrative of the decline of communal values and moral imperatives. For her, it was only after economic writers had extricated their thinking about the market as an economic system from their beliefs about moral and social order that they were able to form an abstract model of market activity and carry out discussion in a “language [that] was both public and impersonal, like the market it described” (98, 52–72). Taking a different view, Andrea Finkelstein has recently argued that seventeenth-century mercantile writers were never actually successful in extricating themselves from traditional moral and social beliefs and were, thus, ultimately unsuccessful at creating an abstract economic model. Finkelstein claims instead that a fear “that there was something inherently chaotic in a market society” motivated these writers to attempt to salvage traditional “visions of a moral or essential universe, not to construct our [modern] vision of the observed regularities of an existential one” (1–2). Despite the differences in their specific arguments, Appleby and Finkelstein are alike in positing traditional communal morality and truly economic thought as polar opposites.

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Members of early modern society, however, would likely not have thought of the personal and the economic as mutually exclusive categories. Craig Muldrew has demonstrated that England was already a highly commercialized, consumer-driven society by the seventeenth century. Moreover, because the increase in the volume of market transactions outpaced the development of financial institutions and exceeded the value of ready money in circulation as specie, the expanding market relied heavily on credit (Muldrew 20). Each transaction implicated its participants in an increasingly complex and widespread system of social and economic obligation necessary to sustain and extend this credit. Muldrew explains, Every household in the country, from those of paupers to the royal household, was to some degree enmeshed within the increasingly complicated webs of credit and obligation with which transactions were communicated. Merchants traded on credit; tradesmen sold or worked on credit; and many of these people were in debt to the poor for wages and for small sales, or work done. (95)

Thus, despite the increasing disparity between the living conditions of the rich and the poor, the monetary and social bonds constellating all members of society within an expansive economic network became more and more recognizable. A set of individual, personal transactions established one’s place in an intricate economic system. Muldrew argues that efforts to resolve disputes informally within a community “were motivated by a moral desire to maintain peace and good order, but were also increasingly economically necessary to maintain trust, and to keep the ‘serial sociability’ of credit networks from breaking down” (200, italics mine). Thus, communal obligation and economic calculation existed side by side, and consideration of individual face-to-face transactions naturally led to consideration of the complex networks formed by the aggregate of these transactions. Therefore, we should modify Appleby’s claim that “the exchanges of the free market required a detachment from specific objects and people,” resulting in the suppression of the “tactile and the sentimental aspects of human activity” while increasing people’s “capacity to manipulate . . . elements in an abstract model” (247). It is more correct to say that the conceptual challenge faced by members of seventeenth-century English society was to understand and represent a set of economic relationships that was simultaneously personal and alien, individual and systemic, material and abstract. The mercantile treatises that I examine in the next section helped to mediate between these poles by functioning as maps: simplified abstractions that facilitated one’s navigation of the real world of trade and commerce.

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Mercantile Mapping Shortly after the East India Company received its patent in 1600, the early works of economic theory that I will refer to as “mercantile treatises” began to appear in England. I avoid the more common term “mercantilist” so as not to give the impression that these works shared a clearly defined political ideology or a consistent economic philosophy.4 In doing so, I take my lead from Andrea Finkelstein, who argues, While the word mercantilism might best be avoided, the adjective mercantile should still be used to describe this body of thought because the specific problems addressed in these works . . . are overwhelmingly those of the import-export merchant though not entirely exclusive to him. (251)

These treatises, which emerged from a variety of debates about commerce during the first half of the seventeenth century, are not necessarily linked ideologically or even topically. However, the one feature that mercantile writers share is a systemic perspective on trade; they insisted on viewing individual transactions in relationship to a larger economic totality. Mary Poovey argues that seventeenth-century merchants posed one of the fundamental questions of modern science: “how to conceptualize the relation between the particular (quantifiable) details one could observe in the world and the general theories one could advance to explain them” (30). However, she argues that this question “was not yet formulated as a problem” (30). She insists that mercantile writers “can be viewed in retrospect as having contributed to the theoretical abstraction of what would first be called ‘the market system,’ then ‘the economy,’” but “none of these writers were specifically trying to devise an image for this system of international and domestic trade” (66). Although the seventeenth century had a different economic vocabulary, I argue that these writers were, in fact, very consciously invested in finding new ways of representing trade as a system. Defining the relationship between the specific and the abstract was not only a problem for mercantile writers, it was the problem. In one of the earliest mercantile treatises, The Canker of England’s Commonwealth (1601), Gerard Malynes demonstrates the need for systemic thinking by making the following assertion: it befalleth vnto vs concerning monies and wealth, as it doth vnto a Generall of a campe of ten thousand supposed armed men, whereof muster being taken at seuerall times, and vpon seuerall dayes, yet all of them generally are found to be armed, because one lendeth his armour

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Here Malynes is concerned not only that England is losing money but also that this loss will be detectable only if one is able to view the economy in its totality. By asking his readers to imagine specie moving through society as armor being passed from soldier to soldier in an army, he points out the inadequacy of economic calculations based on a partial view of the market. In proclaiming his desire to have all of the participants in the economic system mustered before him at once, he announces the need for what Michel de Certeau would term a “strategic model” or a “map”—the totalizing representation that serves as the basis for modern “[p]olitical, economic, and scientific rationality” (xix). Such strategic models give their creators and users a panoptic vantage point from which “the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and ‘include’ them within its scope of vision” (36). At a time when the financial instruments necessary to sustain a large-scale system of credit and to facilitate international currency exchange were growing in complexity, and trade was becoming increasingly more global, Malynes argued for the need to see every participant in the economic system simultaneously. Because all mercantile treatises functioned as “maps” in De Certeau’s sense of the term and because international merchants depended on maps of the more conventional kind, it is unsurprising to find treatises arranged geographically. Anyone reading the main section of The Merchants Mappe of Commerce from beginning to end is taken on a virtual tour of the world’s major “Cities and Townes of Traffique,” originating in America and traveling through Africa, Asia, and Europe before arriving in London. Similarly, Robert Kayll’s indictment of the East India Company, The Trade’s Increase (1615), is organized as a “iourney” through the parts of the world where English trade was reportedly diminishing as East Indian trade increased (sig. B3r). Kayll begins at the Straits of Gibraltar and moves through Spain, France, Hamburg and Middleburg, the Sound, Newcastle, Iceland, and Newfoundland before arriving in the East Indies. In the metaphoric geography of the treatise, the area of the East Indies is a vast gulf into which all commerce flows: “into whose seas, not onely the Riuer of Volga . . . disemboqueth [that is, empties] it self, but euen the bottome of the Straights is emptied to fill vp those gulfes” (sig. C3r). Even treatises that are not primarily organized geographically are often explicitly identified as maps, and the comparison is apt. In The Circle of Commerce (1623), Edward Misselden argued (contrary to

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Kayll and Malynes) that England could maintain a positive balance of trade while at the same time exporting bullion to the Indies, as long as merchants used that bullion to buy commodities that could be reexported for a net gain. Indeed, Misselden argued, the distinction between goods and specie breaks down during trade, and money becomes a commodity. Understanding how this process works requires being able to view trade systemically, to have access to a vantage point that De Certeau associates with a “voyeur-god” who is able to “disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them” (93). In De Certeau’s words, systemic representations simulate the experience of being “a solar Eye, looking down like a god” (92). Misselden uses remarkably similar language to describe the experience of reading his treatise. First he tells the story of a Persian King who “caused a great globe to bee made of Glasse . . . that himselfe might sit in his throne . . . in the Center thereof, and behold the motions and reuolutions of the Starres, rising and falling vnder his feet: as if he that was a mortall man, would seeme Immortall.” Misselden then boasts that anyone wishing to have a similar view of “the various reuolutions of Commerce . . . may behold them all at once in in [sic] this Globe of glasse, The Balance of Trade,” the subtitle of his treatise (sig. Gg2v). Malynes adopts the same image in his rejoinder, The Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623). In this treatise, he argued that specie was not simply one commodity among others but a publica mensura—a universal yardstick by which all commodities are measured. Each chapter of the treatise corresponds to one of “the fiue Zones or Girdles of this Terrestiall Globe” (sig. B2v). For example, the chapter titled “Tropicke of Cancer” presents the argument that the value of English currency in international exchange “may well be compared vnto Cancer the Crab in going backe, for so doth wealth of the Realme . . . decay” (sig. D2v). Taken together, these chapters form a world map, not a map of actual places but of the key economic concepts that Malynes claimed constituted the world of trade. For mercantile writers, the map served as a convenient metonym for all other types of systemic representation—just as it would for De Certeau in the twentieth century. Mercantile “mapping” is a metaphor about metaphoric representation itself. It describes the process by which the real, material world is represented by a simplified abstraction. Indeed, this metaphor has been central to much modern thought about the nature of representation, and it is one of the many inheritances from seventeenth-century thought that is still powerfully with us today. Alfred Korzybski relied on it in 1933 when he likened the relationship between language and reality to the relationship between map and territory in his often-paraphrased statement: “A map is not the territory

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it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness” (58). Such claims set the stage for Jean Baudrillard’s argument that, in the postmodern epoch, the material world is produced by abstract models, rather than vice versa: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map. . . . The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it . . . it is the map that engenders the territory” (2). As markedly different as Korzybski, De Certeau, and Baudrillard are, they all use the same metaphor pioneered by mercantile writers to discuss the relationship between abstract representations and the material world. While the metaphor of the map best describes the mercantile goal of converting complex economic realities into easily accessible abstract models, mercantile writers used a wide variety of metaphors in addition to the cartographic in attempting to achieve this goal. I have already mentioned some of these in passing—such as Malynes’s comparison of specie to armor, or wealth to a crab walking backward. Most frequently, mercantile writers used allegorical figures. For example, Robert Kayll compares the East Indies to the mythical “Swannes in Meander floud,” whose “pleasing notes” were reported to “farre [surpass] the records of any other birds in any other places whatsoeuer” (sig. C3v). Rumors about these birds “drew thither all sorts of people in great confluence,” but, upon arriving, visitors to the Meander “found in stead of faire white Swans, greedy Rauens, and deuouring Crowes; and heard, in stead of melodious harmony, vntuneable and loathsome croaking” (sig. C3v). Kayll’s cacophonous crows quickly and polemically epitomize the pamphlet’s argument about India’s place in the global economy. Gerard Malynes comments explicitly on the usefulness of such allegorical representation in St. George for England Allegorically Described (1601). In this treatise he attacked usury, focusing primarily on the covert interest merchants could charge using bills of exchange. The treatise takes the form of a medieval dream vision in which usury is represented as a dragon named “Foenus politicum” (hardship of the polity) with wings termed “usura palliata” (covert usury) and “usura explicata” (explicit usury) and a tail termed “inconstant Cambium” (variable exchange rate) (sig. A8r). Malynes claims to have chosen an allegorical mode of representation because others who had written about usury had “not made the application euident, some writing thereof according unto Diuinitie, others according to the prohibition of diuerse lawes” (sig. A5v). Allegory is a superb mnemonic tool for fixing a reader’s understanding of a complex concept, and as such it has an advantage over religious and legal discourse (“Diuinitie” and “the prohibition of diuerse lawes”). Malynes’s model encourages the reader to visualize a connection between different economic practices (usury and currency exchange) and their relationship to a fluctuating exchange rate.

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Despite their obvious usefulness, imaginative models such as Malynes’s dragon were open to the charge that they did not accurately represent the realities of trade. The gulf between individual material transactions and abstract representations based on the aggregate of these transactions opens the door for interpretive disputes. Mercantile discourse arose from economic thinkers constructing abstract maps and entering into heated debates with one another over whose map corresponded most closely to the actual terrain of the commercial world. Mercantile writers regularly derided each other’s literary skill. For example, Edward Misselden attacked Malynes’s “rude stile, and vnmannerly manner of writing” (sig. B2v). He claimed that Malynes “abused the termes of Art” and that his treatises were filled with false comparisons of trade “to Clocks, and Shippes, and Dialls . . . and what hee list himselfe” (sig. D4r). When Malynes compared the ability of international exchange rates to direct the flow of currency to the rudder of a ship, which he termed the “most necessary and Actiue thing of True sailing” (Maintenance sig. A4r), Misselden responded by taking Malynes’s metaphor to task—devoting two quarto pages to demonstrating that “the Rudder is the cause of stearing,” but the wind is the efficient cause of sailing (sig. D3v). Misselden represented Malynes as a slapdash craftsman and compared his own artistic ability to that of the Italian master painter Giotto (sig. A3v). Not to be outdone, Malynes responded by comparing himself to Homer and casting Misselden as Zoilus, the Greek rhetorician most well remembered for disparaging Homer’s poetry (Center sig. A3r). Today the poet and the economist may strike us as strange bedfellows, but the successful mercantile writer needed much the same skill as the successful poet. Moreover, for mercantile writers, crafting an unassailable metaphor was synonymous with creating an accurate abstract model of commerce. Lewes Roberts clearly recognized the affinity between mercantile writing and poetry. He justified basing the structure of The Marchants Mapp of Commerce upon “Geographie, and upon . . . Mapps and SeaCards” by claiming, in the language of didactic literary theory, that maps are both “delightfull” and “profitable” to merchants (sig. A5v). Throughout the introductory chapter, he repeatedly draws attention to the work’s aesthetic qualities.5 He even specifically compares the skill of the merchant to the skill of “the Poets, whose excellency must consist in a coursory judgement in all sciences, and to be learned in all professions” (sig. E3v). For Roberts, the difference between the poet and the merchant is that “the Merchants skill, must be reall, solid and substantiall, and the Poets may be fained and poeticall” (sig. E3v). Roberts suggests that a merchant’s knowledge must be accurately applied to the material world of trade, but a poet’s knowledge can remain theoretical and can be used to craft fictional stories. The poet and the merchant are even

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more closely linked, though. As I shall argue, the problem of achieving a panoramic view of the complex economic mechanisms that cause fluctuations in value not only fueled mercantile debates, but also caught the imagination of Shakespeare.

A Merchant’s Map of C YMBELINE What, then, is the relationship between mercantile thought and the “fained and poeticall” representations of early modern playwrights, representations that do not have to map a verifiably real world in order to be effective? To help answer this question, we can turn to the work of Michel Serres, who insists on the ability of art and literature to present knowledge about the material world in ways similar to—but often more effective than—scientific texts. Serres claims that literary and scientific discourse are “two arrows” that “leave a common origin and arrive at different points” (Parasite 7). He argues that both scientific and literary works produce theorized knowledge about the word although they do so using vastly different vocabularies; he has devoted much of his life’s work to putting these two types of texts in conversation with one another.6 In the same spirit, I argue that mercantile treatises can be usefully put in conversation with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare intended his play as a critique of these treatises, many of which were penned after his death. Rather, I argue that the same questions about determining value that preoccupied mercantile writers also interested Shakespeare. However, rather than attempting to create an abstract model that would definitively explain value fluctuation, Shakespeare staged the impossibility of doing so. All attempts by the characters in Cymbeline to chart and predict fluctuations of value are defeated by the fact that they can never truly occupy a godlike vantage point from which to view the system in its entirety. Cymbeline closely resembles Troilus and Cressida, a play that has become a locus classicus for “new economic” readings of Shakespeare. In both plays, commercial transactions are not central to the plot but economic imagery is central to the language. Douglas Bruster argues that Troilus and Cressida uses “London’s [mythic] Trojan heritage” to satirize “the City’s growing commercialism” (102). Lars Engle reads it as “a thought-experiment which takes up the problem of generating value without large systems of belief or intricate patterns of productive activity in which to float it” (148). Jonathan Gil Harris directly connects the play to mercantile publications, arguing that “its principal female characters are coded as public yardsticks of value who, like Malynes’s publica mensura, money, are nevertheless themselves subject to revaluation in the course of foreign exchange” (95). He argues that

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Troilus and Cressida both “disqualifies the possibility of fixed and intrinsic worth” and “pathologizes attributive value” but reaches “a compromise comparable to Gerard Malynes’s” in which “value is assessed and fixed by a single, sovereign will” (100, 102). Cymbeline is an outgrowth of Troilus and Cressida both in form and content. Like mercantile treatises themselves, both Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline rely on metaphor rather than mimesis to represent global economics. Like Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline telescopes contemporary questions about value into a mythic past where they are examined metaphorically. However, Cymbeline goes beyond Troilus and Cressida in two significant ways. First, attributive value in Cymbeline is in itself not a source of anxiety, but a fact of life. Second, Cymbeline moves beyond examining specific models of value formation to critiquing the limited vantage points from which all such models are formulated. The subjective nature of valuation is taken as a given from the beginning of the play. Cymbeline’s court publicly endorses the king’s low valuation of Posthumus’s worth: “You do not meet a man but Frownes” at Imogen’s marriage choice (4). However, sovereign will does not prevent the speculative revaluation of the two lovers. The First Gentleman surmises that although the courtiers “weare their faces to the bent / Of the King’s lookes,” they are at heart “Glad of the thing they scowle at” (19–21). To support his high estimation of Posthumus, the Gentleman notes that Imogen’s “owne price / Proclaimes how she esteem’d him” (60–61). This claim, however, is hardly definitive. First, it does not indicate Posthumus’s intrinsic value but only his value in Imogen’s estimation. Second, it begs the question of how Imogen’s “owne price” is determined. Even the lovers are not in agreement. Posthumus grants Imogen a higher value than his own when he claims, “I (my poore selfe) did exchange for you / To your so infinite losse,” but Imogen claims that Posthumus is “A man, worth any woman: Ouer-buyes mee / Almost the summe he payes” (140–41, 178–79). The resolution of the play requires finding a way of making Posthumus’s value equal Imogen’s. Unlike in Troilus and Cressida, the tension is not between intrinsic worth and nominal value, but between disparate assessments of nominal value. In other words, the question is not “What is Imogen (or Posthumus) really worth?” The question is “How can Posthumus’s value be equated with Imogen’s?” Like a coin, Posthumus’s value is subjected to intense scrutiny as he travels between nations. The villainous characters in the play attempt to minimize Posthumus’s value. I have already noted Iachimo’s representation of Posthumus as a light coin that is “weighed rather by [Imogen’s] valew, then his own” (329). The light coinage metaphor is extended by Cloten, who claims that “From his so many waights of basenesse, cannot / A dram of worth be drawne” (1997–1998). Coins

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were valued not only by weight but also by fineness (their metallic composition), and Cloten represents Posthumus not as a light coin but as an impure one. In effect, Iachimo and Cloten are attempting to hold Posthumus accountable to a mensura publica. Posthumus himself adopts this language when Imogen’s apparent infidelity causes him to question the virtue of his mother and suspect that “When I was stampt,” “Some Coyner with his Tooles / Made me a counterfeit” (1342–43). Light, impure, and counterfeit coins complicated a system of currency exchange that was convoluted even at the best of times. As Lewes Roberts explains, converting currency according to the “true and reall Par of Exchanges” (the centerpiece of Malynes’s economic theory) required finding denominations of specie in different countries that would “countervaile [each other] in the like weight and finenesse” (sig. Ddd1r-Ddd1v). In theory, fixing the price of a coin based on its metallic content would prevent currency prices from fluctuating. However, the price that merchants paid for currency in practice was determined by another par, what Roberts called “the Merchants or Exchangers Par,” which was based “principally upon the current value of the said Coines, the plentie and scarcitie therof, the rising and falling, inhansement and debasement of the same” (sig. Ddd1v). Recognition of this “merchant’s par” caused Misselden to argue that specie was simply a different kind of commodity, not a publica mensura. The metaphoric transactions of Cymbeline operate in accordance with the merchant’s par, which allows for the possibility that value will change as conditions change. Posthumus acknowledges the triumph of subjective value over intrinsic worth when, believing that he has murdered Imogen, he asks the gods to take his life as retribution. He acknowledges that his life is “not so deere” as hers, but he reasons that men “waigh not every stampe” and “Though light, take Peeces for the figures sake” (3058–60). Imogen, too, acknowledges the vagaries of valuation when she wishes that Polydore and Cadwal were her brothers so that her “prize [price]” would be “lesse, and so more equall ballasting / To . . . Posthumus” (2170–72). Of course, the play reaches precisely this resolution. When Polydore and Cadwal are revealed to be Guiderius and Arviragus, the kingdom goes from having a scarcity of heirs to having an excess of them, and Imogen is accordingly devalued. Simultaneously, Posthumus’s heroic actions cause Cymbeline to revalue him. This ending might suggest that Cymbeline, like Malynes’s ideal monarch, is finally able to certify intrinsic worth with his sovereign will. For example, he recognizes Guiderius’s birthmark as a “naturall stampe” guaranteeing his status as a prince (3683). However, the action of the play calls into question the ability of any character, even the king, to correctly map changes in value.

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Cymbeline seems to thwart accurate mapping—in both the literal and figurative sense—at every turn. Several scholars have examined the problematic nature of geography and mapping in the play, particularly in relation to James I’s project of creating a unified Great Britain.7 Garrett A. Sullivan argues that the play attempts to overcome the apparent “cultural and geographic incommensurability of Wales and England” by subsuming Wales within a “landscape of sovereignty,” a way of viewing the world that “reflects and shapes the ambitions and imperatives of those who control or would control the kingdom,” and “represents the conceptual annexation of distinct cultural spaces in the name of monarch or (a culturally homogenized) nation” (146–47). This absence or erasure of anything distinctively Welsh is consistent with the process by which works such as The Merchants Mappe of Commerce elide the individual vicissitudes of real-life trade in creating idealized universal models. As Barbara Sebek argues, “spaces, places, cities, and kingdoms” appear in Roberts’s work as “sets of potential commodities, commodities whose values are reducible one into another” (182). By discounting the distinctiveness of individual locations in favor of the homogenous commodity form, Roberts demonstrates the desire to move from messy particulars to neat abstractions typical of mercantile writers. In Cymbeline, by contrast, the messy particulars are not as easily kept at bay. Sullivan, who connects his concept of the landscape of sovereignty to De Certeau’s concept of the panorama, notes that Imogen is never able to benefit from such a view: as she journeys through Wales, she must take into account not only her linear distance from Milford Haven but also her variable rates of travel and the irregular route required by the uneven geography (127–29, 138–39). Indeed, the complexity of the plot ensures that none of the characters ultimately has access to a panoramic view of the play’s action. Pisanio is one of the most knowledgeable characters in the play because he is confided in by Posthumus, Imogen, and even Cloten; nonetheless, he still loses track of their movements. Before the battle, he worries: I heard no Letter from my Master, since I wrote him Imogen was slain. ’Tis strange: Nor heare I from my Mistris, who did promise To yeeld me often tyding. Neither know I What is betide to Cloten, but remain Preplext in all. (2779–84)

Significantly, he abandons trying to chart the action of the play and consoles himself (and the audience) with the fact that “Fortune brings in some Boats, that are not steer’d” (2789). While these lines hold out

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the promise of a happy ending, they deny the possibility that the action leading to this ending can be plotted in advance (as a mariner would use maps and sea cards to plot a course).8 Ultimately, the only character who is able to maintain the panoramic perspective of a “voyeur-god” is the actual god Jupiter, who provides the mortals with riddles rather than maps.9 The difference between Jupiter’s and the mortals’ information about the world replicates the distinction that De Certeau makes between “maps” and “tours.” De Certeau adopts these terms from a study by Charlotte Linde and William Labov that revealed that virtually all New Yorkers framed descriptions of their apartments as “tours” (“You turn right and come into the living room,” et cetera) rather than as “maps” (“The girls’ room is next to the kitchen,” et cetera). De Certeau defines the tour (or itinerary) as “a discursive series of operations” and the map as “a plane projection totalizing observations” (119). The fundamental difference is that tours are necessarily diachronic and maps are necessarily synchronic. The prophecy that Jupiter offers Posthumus takes the form of a tour: Whenas a Lyon’s whelpe shall to himselfe unknown, without seeking finde, and bee embrac’d by a peece of tender Ayre: And when from a stately Cedar shall be lopt branches, which being dead many yeares, shall after reuiue, bee ioynted to the old Stocke, and freshly grow, then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britaine be fortunate, and flourish in Peace and Plentie. (3176–82)

The riddle contains the basic itinerary of the final scene: Posthumus is reunited with Imogen, and they embrace; Cymbeline is reunited with his sons; Posthumus is free to marry Imogen (ending his miseries); and Cymbeline proclaims peace with Rome. Even if the cryptic elements of this riddle were decoded, Posthumus would have information that is sufficient only to watch a series of predetermined actions complete themselves. He is not given access to the range of options presented by the synchronic and multivectorial space of a map, which allows its viewer to plot one course out of a range of alternative courses. From the point of view of the characters in the play, knowledge is always retrospective—even for the king. After learning of the Queen’s treacherous schemes, Cymbeline proclaims, “Mine eyes / Were not in fault, for she was beautifull: / Mine eares that heare her flattery, nor my heart, / That thought her like her seeming” (3324–27). He insists that even without any flaws in his powers of perception, he could not have accurately predicted the Queen’s actions by observing her. He even goes so far as to say, “It had beene vicious / To haue mistrusted her” (3327–28).

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Even the play’s audience, who have a nearly panoptic view of the play’s action, do not have a viable map. The diachronic nature of live theater ensures that, like the characters, the audience experiences the play’s action as a tour. They can observe the basic factors that cause Posthumus and Imogen to fluctuate in value, but even after attentively watching the play, one could respond to the question “What is Posthumus (or Imogen) worth?” only by asking “Where?” and “When?”: In Britain or in Wales? When the princes are believed dead or alive? Before or after the final battle? A very detail-minded audience member (or literary critic) could certainly use the information gained from this tour to map the complex changes in value over the course of the play. However, such a model would still be useless as a predictor of future value: it could never answer the question “What will Posthumus be worth after the staged action?” This retrospective nature of knowledge is emphasized by the Soothsayer’s fifth-act revision of his earlier prediction. Originally, the soothsayer had claimed that his vision of “Ioves bird, the Roman Eagle,” which “vanish’d in the Sun-beames,” promised “Successe to th’ Roman hoast” (2674–78). In his final speech, he claims the vision foretold “our Princely Eagle, / Th’ Imperiall Cæsar should againe vnite / His Favour, with the Radiant Cymbeline” (3805–07). Leah S. Marcus has read this renarrated prophecy as one of the elements that deconstructs the notion of “authorship” in the play and replaces it with a “protean, shifting referentiality” (140). I would add that this moment of renarration simultaneously deconstructs the ideal of mercantile mapping. Shakespeare’s eagle is of the same abstract species as Kayll’s ravenous birds and Malynes’s usurious dragon and regressive crab. All of these allegorical creatures are simplified (and polemicized) representations of larger systems. The key difference is that mercantile writers undermine their opponent’s abstractions to make way for their own supposedly more solid models, but Shakespeare stages this same process of undermining without ultimately claiming to have arrived at a definitive model of his own. This freedom resulted from the fundamental difference between plays and mercantile treatises. The ultimate goal of mercantile treatises was to secure profit both for merchants and for the kingdom. Putting one’s faith in an erroneous economic model could result in real economic losses. Plays, by contrast, produced economic profit (in the form of specie taken at the door) regardless of whether their representations were true or not, as long as they were entertaining. To this degree, Roberts was correct in contrasting the “reall, solid and substantiall” skill of merchants to the poets’ “fained and poeticall” skill. However, this opposition neglects both the poetic nature of abstraction in mercantile writing and the real profit that playhouses could make by staging plays that imaginatively engaged with concerns raised by England’s economic expansion.

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Notes 1. I would like thank Lois Potter, Jonathan Gil Harris, Kristen Poole, and Julian Yates, as well as the editors of this collection for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. See Goran V. Stanivukovic, and Maurice Hunt, “‘New O’er.’” 3. All citations of Cymbeline refer to the line numbering in Charlton Hinman’s facimile of the first folio. 4. See Coleman, Revisions in Mercantilism and “Mercantilism Revisited,” and Heckscher. 5. For a discussion of the “literary” character of this and other mercantile works, see Ceri Sullivan, esp. 125–26. 6. For a representative selection of Serres’ work, see Hermes. 7. See Boling, Clark, Floyd-Wilson, Marcus, Marley, Mikalachki, Parker, Sanford, and Garrett A. Sullivan. 8. For an account of the emergence of “plot” as a literary term in the period, see Brückner and Poole. 9. Leah S. Marcus provides the most sustained reading of the play’s riddles. See also Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word and Throne.

Works Cited Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Boling, Ronald J. “Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.1 (2000): 33–66. Brückner, Martin, and Kristen Poole. “The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England.” ELH 69.3 (2002): 617–48. Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Clark, Glen. “The ‘Strange’ Geographies of Cymbeline.” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 230–59. Coleman, D. C. “Mercantilism Revisited.” The Historical Journal 23.4 (1980): 773–91. ———, ed. Revisions in Mercantilism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1969. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkley: U of California P, 1984. Engle, Lars. Shakespearean Pragmatism: The Market of His Time. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

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Finkelstein, Andrea. Harmony and Balance:An Intellectual History of SeventeenthCentury English Economic Thought. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. “Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race.” British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. Ed. David J. Baker and Willy Maley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 101–15. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Heckscher, Eli F. Mercantilism. Vol. 2. Trans. Mendel Shapiro. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1934. Hunt, Maurice. “ ‘New O’er’: Mining the Veins of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.” English Language Notes 36.4 (1999): 14–27. ———. Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1990. Kayll, Robert. The trades increase. London, 1615. Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction of Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 4th edition. Clinton, MA: Colonial Press, 1958. Maley, Willy. “Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 145–57. Malynes, Gerard. The center of The circle of commerce. London, 1623. ———. The maintenance of free trade. London, 1622. ———. Saint George for England, allegorically described. London, 1601. ———. A treatise of the canker of Englands common wealth. London, 1601. Marcus, Leah S. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Mikalachki, Jodi. “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.3 (1995): 301–22. Misselden, Edward. The circle of commerce. London, 1623. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave, 1998. Parker, Patricia. “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline.” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. Ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 189–207. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Roberts, Lewes. The merchants mappe of commerce. London, 1638. Sanford, Rhonda Lemke. “A Room Not One’s Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline.” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 63–85. Sebek, Barbara. “ ‘Strange Outlandish Wealth’: Transglobal Commerce in The Merchant’s Mappe of Commerce and The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II.” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 176–202.

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Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Josué Harrari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. ———. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd edition. Ed. Charlton Hinman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996. Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935. Stanivukovic, Goran V. “ ‘The city’s usuries’: Commerce and Cymbeline.” Quidditas 19 (1998): 129–243. Sullivan, Ceri. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Sullivan, Garrett A. The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Throne, Alison. “‘To write and read / Be henceforth treacherous’: Cymbeline and the Problem of Interpretation.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 176–90.

Chapter 5

“Not every man has the luck to go to Corinth”: A ccruing Exotic Capital in T H E J E W O F M A LTA and V O L P O N E Lea Knudsen Allen

But now how stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill? Ha! to the east? yes. See how stand the vanes— East and by south: why, then, I hope my ships I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles Are gotten up by Nilus’ winding banks; Mine argosy from Alexandria, Loaden with spice and silks, now under sail, Are smoothly gliding down by Candy-shore To Malta, through our Mediterranean sea —Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

Early modern England’s “national economy,” according to Jonathan

Gil Harris, “engages the ‘foreign’ in [an] often aggressively self-protective and even xenophobic fashion” (109). Harris is not alone in this claim— a number of recent studies have suggested that sixteenth-century England’s expanding foreign trade generated anxiety about a host of issues, including the loss of the nation’s supply of bullion, the influx of foreign luxury goods and immigrants, the dangers of open ports, the

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concentration of wealth among private merchants and the possibility of moral decay.1 Such readings attribute the source of anxiety to a fundamental dissolution of social bonds and national boundaries occasioned by mercantile trade—unmoored from traditional ways of relating, the story goes, the English shored up their sense of national identity by pathologizing the foreign and displaying xenophobia. In this light, Barabas’s opening monologue in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592), which serves as my epigraph to this chapter, might be read as a greedy cataloguing, by a villainous and wealthy Jew, of the profits to be had in Mediterranean trade. But there is another story to be told about early modern international trade, one that takes into account the way representations of foreign trade insist on the desirability of exotic objects, an exoticism that derives not only from the remoteness of the object but also from the object’s movement through various spaces. To focus on dramatists’ obsession with xenophobia or disease, as, for instance, Harris does in his reading of Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), is to ignore how the theaters stage foreignness as the very source of an object’s value. Barabas rhapsodizes not simply on the amount of his wealth, but also on the places from which he gains such riches (Egypt, Candy, Alexandria): the halcyon’s bill points us to the importance of place as we trace the “gliding” of Barabas’s homeward-bound ships (1.1.46).2 Elsewhere, Volpone draws our attention to the series of displacements or migrations that the mountebank’s miraculous “poulder” undergoes by naming the places through which it travels: Olympus, Troy, Asia, and France (2.3.236–42). There is, in other words, something about foreign origins and migrations that make an object more desirable and wealth more excessive. In this chapter, I seek to uncover what it is about specifying the foreignness of an object, by naming the place(s) from which it has traveled, that generates a certain kind of value. It has long been assumed that the allure of the Orient—a place of fantastic creatures and fabulous tales inherited from classical and medieval traditions—constituted at least part of the value of such coveted goods as silks, pepper, nutmeg, and other spices,3 and historians have alerted us to the fact that the long overland caravan routes from India and China to Mediterranean ports such as Alexandria, Cairo, Constantinople, and Aleppo added to the cost of these commodities.4 I hope in this chapter to demonstrate that representing “things in motion” (Harris 115) produces the very allure we have come to see as the “exoticism” of early modern objects in trajectories of exchange. I am not interested in the “true” economic value generated by high costs involved in long-distance trade but, rather, in the symbolic value objects gain as they travel from one site to another. Analyzing the way trade objects in The Jew of Malta and Volpone are marked by a poetics of exoticism, I suggest that these plays

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help produce a discourse of value that not only posits trade in Mediterranean places as a source of exotic capital but is also central to imagining London as a metropolitan city. In this reading, rather than “lethal agents” of contamination (Harris 110), foreign things that cross national boundaries become markers of the city’s own capital. Although it is typically Marlowe’s Tamberlaine plays that receive attention for their extensive geographical allusions culled from early modern cartography, The Jew of Malta and Volpone both “insist . . . on [their] place in a global frame of reference” (Burton 139). These references not only work to display Marlowe and Jonson’s knowledge of geography but also, significantly, reveal the way “place” accumulates myriad meanings and desires.5 To name Malta, Candy, and the Mediterranean Sea, as Barabas does in the passage quoted above, in turn-of-the-century London was to invoke an imaginary about particular geographical sites and the desires such places provoked: the Mediterranean basin was, for most Englishmen, the site par excellence of immense wealth, extensive and pervasive commodity exchange, and urbanized metropolitan centers.6 It has been a commonplace assumption that, with the discovery of the so-called New World and a direct sea route to the East Indies, Mediterranean commercial and cultural capital migrated north and westward to the Atlantic.7 Recent scholarship has shown, however, that the Mediterranean retained its cultural cachet despite the growth of an Atlantic economy.8 By the late sixteenth century, antiquities, paintings, carpets, ostrich feathers, coral, horses, and “blackamoors” were among the more coveted Mediterranean imports, in addition to the equally coveted trade in dried fruits, oranges, wines, and olive oil. As sailors, merchants, travelers, ambassadors, members of diplomatic retinues, soldiers, laborers—and in various other capacities—the English went to the Mediterranean seeking to improve their fortunes, or their cultural capital.9 Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, for instance, was celebrated for “transplant[ing] old Greece into England” by acquiring Greek and Roman statues and displaying them in the gardens and galleries of Arundel House (Peacham 120). A great deal of Henry Peacham’s advice on “fashioning” a gentleman, in fact, consists of instructions on identifying statues, coins, and other antiquities so that English travelers to Italy and Greece might not embarrass themselves by their lack of knowledge (122). When Marlowe and Jonson thus turn to the Mediterranean as settings for their plays, they invoke deep-seated fantasies of a space teeming in wealth and cultural objects—a fantasy bolstered by the influx of goods to metropolitan London. The Jew of Malta promises good theatrical entertainment by drawing on this Mediterranean imaginary. Marlowe couples spectacles of religious transformation with Machiavellian policy, thus cashing in on

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the already infamously notorious Florentine politician, and fills the play with the language of global trade and excessive wealth. While the play is riddled with examples of Machiavellian policy—such as Barabas’s temporary alliance with Calymath in order to “be revenged on this accursèd town” (5.1.62) or Ferneze’s failure to pay the tribute Malta owes to the “Emperor of Turkey” (1.2.39)10—the marketplace in Act 2 is symptomatic of the play’s dramatization of mercantilism as a logic that underpins all relations: here we find the slave market, the negotiation of Abigail’s “price” (2.3.65), and the courtesan Bellamira. The fact that Barabas and Lodowick’s veiled negotiation of Abigail’s virgin-price takes place in midst of a slave market, framed by the language of evaluation (“why should this Turk be dearer than that Moor?” [2.3.111]) and valuation (“this Moor is comeliest” [2.3.147]), serves figuratively and visually to turn Abigail into one of those bodies for sale, despite her father’s professing to “giv’it” freely to Lodowick (2.3.68). Moreover, shortly thereafter, Bellamira seduces Ithamore in order to “ha’ more gold”—a policy she reverts to once her “gain grows cold” due to the Turks’ siege of Malta (3.1.1). Malta is thus staged as a space characterized by a market economy: there are no bonds beyond those for profit.11 Due to the series of conversions, transferences, and exchanges that make up this play, Malta appears a “world in process” (4), to use Clark Hulse’s phrasing. While the marketplace epitomizes this representation of Malta, Barabas’s conversion promise to the friars Bernadine and Jacomo dramatizes it by conflating political “policy” with religious conversion and a rhetorical display of wealth spilling over all bounds: Oh holy friars, the burden of my sins Lie heavy on my soul . . . Cellars of wine, and sollars full of wheat, Warehouses stuffed with spices and with drugs, Whole chests of gold, in bullion, and in coin . . . All this I’ll give to some religious house So I may be baptized and live herein. (4.1.48–76)

Significantly, this passage mirrors the epigraph to this chapter (and to which I turn later) in that it enumerates both the goods owned and the places from which they originate. Here, Marlowe effectively opposes international markets (“Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London, Seville, / Frankfurt, Lubeck, Moscow and where not” [4.1.71–72]) to the individual’s inner life; this should be read not only as a parodic depiction of Catholic indulgences and good works but also as the religious conversion from Jew to Catholic mirrored in the economic conversion of “warehouses” for “soul[s].” This scene must be read finally as locating Malta in the midst of the major international trade

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routes—and then displacing this trade onto the figures of religious conversion and Jewish villainy. Barabas’s language here, and throughout the play, displays what has been called a “figural impulse” insofar as his self-dramatization works to figure him forth as a “paradigm or discursive category” (Grantley 227) of the wealthy, Machiavellian Jew. Considering that this conversion scene seems to reiterate the idea that wealth and profit are gotten by illegitimate means, it may seem counterintuitive to claim that the very performativity of this scene calls into question its essential nature. Indeed, by staging Barabas as a “counterfeit profession[al]” (1.2.292), it appears, Marlowe gives voice to moralists’ worries about the dangers of an acquisitive society, or, as in the case of disgruntled London merchants who resented competition, the dangers of “strangers” within London—“Machiavellian Marchant[s],” ran the resentful Dutch Church Libel of 1593, “like the Jewes . . . eate us up as bread” by usury and “Cutthroate” selling (5–8; 23).12 Yet in its excessive iteration, the expectation that “Jews” perform acts of murder, cuckoldry, counterfeiting, and treason is revealed to be the stuff of dramatic spectacle: As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells. (2.3.178–80)13

Barabas’s catalogue of villainy, we might remember, significantly ends with his boasting of being a “usurer,” which he glosses further as “extorting, cozening, forfeiting” (2.3.193). Barabas thus makes a deliberate exhibition of his villainies, and Ithamore’s retort—“O brave, master, I worship your nose for this” (2.3.177)—both undercuts and reinforces the exaggerated posing of his so-called Jewishness. Yet The Jew of Malta’s representation of mercantilism and foreign “others” is, I believe, more complex than parody, for the exoticism of this play lies not simply in the anxiety of England’s own strangers that is perhaps displaced onto satisfyingly far-off figures such as a Maltese Jew (or Turk or, even, Catholic knights and friars) but in the way place accrues value as it circulates in tales. In other words, Malta is exotic both because it is a “remoter region” as Samuel Purchas says of the Mediterranean in general and because “Malta” signifies evocatively. As Michel de Certeau says of proper names, to invoke a name is to both “place” and to set into flight a series of associations, meanings, and histories that make that geographical location richly mobile.14 From 1524 on (increasing in the period 1640–170015), pamphlets, histories, drama, and novellas figured Malta either as the site of warfare, bravery, and honor or as the site of trickery, slavery, and erotic dealings.16

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Whether the site of honor or of trickery, much of Malta’s fame stemmed from its geographical and political importance in Mediterranean imperial, commercial, and religious contestation. Marlowe himself would have known of Malta’s historic centrality in Christian attempts to stem the rising Ottoman Empire: his patron Lord Strange was the nephew of Sir Edward Stanley, a member of the relief force brought to the aide of the Knights of Malta in June 1565 during the four-month siege by Ottoman forces.17 Malta functions as a marker of exoticism, then, in part because the English had some knowledge of Maltese history, not because they had no knowledge. Moreover, Marlowe’s play was extremely popular—it was performed 36 times between 1592 and 1596 alone—and surely contributed to early modern Londoners’ knowledge of this Mediterranean island. While spectacles of conversion and bits of history and hearsay inform The Jew of Malta’s representation of Malta as an exotic space, the language used to represent trade itself posits movement between places as a marker and producer of value. As with his conversion promise, Barabas’s accounting of his riches at the play’s opening is remarkable for its insistence on the transnational purview of his mercantilism. Within the space of 47 lines, we range across the globe, through such places as Italy, Persia, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Candy, Arabia, and India (east and west), through such capitals as Cairo and Alexandria and across such waters as the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile. This attention to place can be seen as a function of what de Certeau calls the “magical power” of proper names—their ability not only to “carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meanings” (104) but also to make present linguistically the thing named. Thus the naming of place and thing may be seen as a rhetorical device to incite an audience’s imagination (faced as they were with a near bare stage) by bringing these places on stage, so to speak, just as Barabas brings his wealth into view by delineating its international reach.18 Marlowe may utilize this “magical power” of proper names to produce “place” in an otherwise unlocalized setting, but it is clear that Barabas’s insistence on delineating transnational trade routes—his ships sail from Alexandria past Candia to Malta—performs linguistically the accumulation of value that it rhetorically stages. The rapid geographical progression of this scene is formally paralleled in Barabas’s use of the list, which becomes even more insistent when he inventories the specific “riches” returning on his ships: Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price. (1.1.121–24)

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As Patricia Parker has pointed out, the list form and accounting share an underlying discursive strategy: a rhetoric of possession marked by “division,” of “dividing matter or material into its parts in order to make it ‘increase and multiply’” (128). Certainly this scene, with its insistent naming of places and things, rhetorically performs such increase. The close-packed nouns, often without adjectives or articles, are like his “heape[s]” of coin and gold, crammed into his counting house. We have, thus, a linguistic counterpart to the 60 camels, 30 mules, and 20 wagons needed to transport his “ware” from the ships to his storehouses (1.1.163). Accounting for his profits, “So that of thus much that return was made,” Barabas ends up “enclos[ing] infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37). This particular trade route—from empires to little rooms—operates as a mechanism of concentration, figuratively and linguistically (and, we shall see, also semantically), to accrue particular forms of value. To draw on Bourdieu’s notion of the different forms of capital, this rhetorical performance of accumulating by enumerating the places from which riches originate is a display of cultural capital. By making present rhetorically objects from around the world, Barabas acquires not only wealth (silver, gold, commodities) but also objectified cultural capital: “infinite riches” is contrasted to the “vulgar trade” in “paltry silverlings” (1.1.35; 6). Exacerbated by references to biblical and classical knowledge—such as “Uz” and “Samnites” but also the Latin tag “Ego mihimet sum simper proximus” (1.1.188)—both the origins and the transnational movement of his goods provide an allure of exoticism that adheres to Barabas’s performative display of wealth. While Barabas’s description of his mercantile trade allows us to see the way “increase” is performed rhetorically, Jonson’s Volpone explicitly stages the way routes of migration give objects value by associating them with a series of Mediterranean spaces. The plot contains, as with The Jew of Malta, a similar trajectory of expansion and concentration: the international commodities and bodies that abound in this play are finally located in—or gravitate toward—Volpone’s house. Indeed, most of his “business” takes place at his bedside, if not actually in his bed. Not only do his various suitors appear at his “couch” bearing gifts in the form of plate, pearls, and foreign luxury drugs—from Egypt, India, Asia, and also America—but most famously, Corvino offers his own wife Celia as a “cure” for Volpone’s feigned sickness in order to become Volpone’s heir. Significantly, Volpone’s desire to first “see her” (1.5.117; 123; 127) and then “do . . . the act” (3.7.265) stems from Mosca’s description of Celia’s “rare” beauty not only in the familiar language of the blazon (with the vocabulary of snow, whiteness, lilies, and swans) but also in the very same language with which the play opens: she is as “bright as your gold! and lovely as your gold!”

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(1.5.113). Thus it is true both figuratively (in that Celia is equated with gold) and literally (in that the riches of the “whole world” [2.3.233] and of Venice are consumed “in a little room”). Given its focus on trade goods and ways of accumulating wealth and cultural capital, the play’s Venetian setting seems entirely appropriate. Venice, after all, repeatedly figures in English literature of the period as one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities and, as a result, exudes cultural capital precisely because of its widely touted worldliness. Not only did the Venetian shipping industry and its financial capital make Venice, like the Genoese earlier, one of the richest and most competitive constituents in Mediterranean trafficking, but also Venice was widely considered the “Adriatique wonder” because of its notorious assembly of “strangers” and its pervasive mercantilism.19 As Lewes Lewkenor records, visitors stood with “open mouth” admiration at the sight of the architecture and situation of Venice, the presence of “unmeasurable quantity of all sorts of merchandise . . . brought out of all realms and countries into this Citie” and the “wonderful concourse of strange and foreign people” that was seen to turn Venice into a “common and generall market to the whole world” (1). In this light, Volpone’s bedroom seems a microcosm of Venice itself: all the riches and visitors that come to Venice, that well-known cosmopolitan port, seem to appear at his bedside. We have here, therefore, not merely another form of that concentration we saw earlier—here it is the world into Venice, Venice into a bedroom—which operates to display the cultural capital of Venice to a London audience. Volpone also reveals the valuation of exotic goods to be intricately bound to movement, as well as to place. The play is riddled with figures of dispersed movement. In Act 1, scene 2, Volpone’s household stages the entertainment of Pythagoras’s “fast and loose” soul that moves through natural and politic bodies—from Apollo to whores, hermaphrodites to Catholics, and from Troy to Delos to Venice (1.2.6–50). This doctrine of the migrating soul—which undergoes “translation” as it “shift[s]” its “coat” (1.2.29, 30)—informs other passages where objects are represented in trajectories of exchange and circulation; as such, it informs the play’s representation of trade as a series of migrations with stopovers along the route at various national and natural bodies (or “places”). In The Jew of Malta, mercantilist accounting works to increase both figuratively and linguistically Barabas’s capital—in Volpone, it is objects’ transnational migrations that serve both to produce and to mark value. In both plays, mercantilism and the consumption of luxury goods are lexically equated with travel, with the movement of things across place. But in Volpone we see clearly how the process of trade serves to generate semantic density, and thus symbolic value. Fittingly, this process is most

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visible when Volpone, dressed as Scoto the mountebank, offers Celia the fantastic powder that “made Venus a goddess.” As he claims, it is the poulder that made Venus a goddess (given her by Apollo), that kept her perpetually young, clear’d her wrinkles, firm’d her gums, fill’d her skin, colour’d her hair; from her derived to Helen, and at the sack of Troy unfortunately lost: till now, in this our age, it was as happily recovered, by a studious antiquary, out of some ruins of Asia, who sent a moiety of it to the court of France, (but much sophisticated,) wherewith the ladies there, now, colour their hair. (2.3.236–43)

Here Scoto inventories famous beauties, Venus and Helen, and places, Troy, Asia, and France, much as did Barabas when he named the countries, cities, and seas from which his riches travel. This passage operates rhetorically, therefore, to move the powder from Olympus to French courts to Venetian streets: Scoto represents his magical powder as a circulating commodity. The powder of Venus is thus presented to the audience in terms of the places it has been, and to whom it has belonged in those places; such a “trade route” is important for it is by this very mechanism that the drug displays its symbolic—and hence economic—value. The mountebank’s ability to sell his drugs depends not only on his audience’s credulity but also on his ability to draw upon their cultural memories and fantasies. Scoto invokes Venus, Helen, Troy, the ruins of Asia, and the French court (and, of course, Venetian streets for a London audience) as a means of garnering cultural capital.20 Although neither Venus nor Helen had untarnished reputations in the early modern imagination, their names serve to link the “poulder” to a long history of beauty and desire—as well as to educated, literary knowledge (accentuated by “antiquary” and “ruins”). In order for it to signify powerfully as that which bestows divinity and idealized beauty, Jonson (and Scoto)’s audience needs to recognize the places through whom and through which the powder passes.21 Scoto, thus, invokes that “magical power” of proper names in an attempt to convince his audience that the powder he sells is just what they desire and need if they too would be goddesses or the kind of woman whose face launched a thousand ships. While association with classical goddesses and beauties provides the explicit and obvious means by which Scoto claims value for his powder, as Scoto’s fantastical history of the drug unfolds, its symbolic meanings proliferate and, in this way, acquire semantic density. To trace briefly just one of the names Scoto associates with his priceless powder, “Venus” conjures up not only an image of the goddess of love and beauty—perhaps even specific images (Titian’s Venus and Adonis for instance22)—but also courtesans with their jars of cosmetics, perfumes,

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and other so-called “tools of Venus” and, in a perhaps surprising turn, Venetian imperial ambition.23 During the Renaissance and early modern period, Cyprus, one of the two islands claimed by Venice, was reputed the birthplace of Venus, and in Venetian iconography Cyprus is often figured as a nude Venus. “Venice,” moreover, was thought to derive etymologically from “Venus” and, like Venus, to rise from the sea; thus in the Republic’s myth-making iconography, Venice is often personified as the beautiful goddess Venus receiving the riches due to divine grace.24 The powder thus functions as what Karen Newman calls, in another context, a “snowballing signifier” that “accumulates myriad associations and meanings” as it “passes from hand to hand” (Fashioning 91). The snowballing effect operates, moreover, by means of a crossing and inversion between economic and symbolic value: as the powder moves from causing immortality, to bestowing beauty, to coloring hair (migrating from godliness to cosmetics, from sublime essence to commodity), its semantic density accumulates— finally to be “distilled” in Scoto’s “preserved moiety.” This crossing of kinds of value traces the commodity form itself in the early modern market: caught between, on the one hand, an ideology of rarity that posits the common as devalued and, on the other, an expanding economy where the passing between numerous hands (and lands) is both commonplace and a necessary condition of mercantilism. It is thus all the more significant that Scoto ascribes to his powder a series of geographical migrations in an attempt to give it value, for in this way he exposes semantic density (its exotic value) to be an effect of the drug’s travels. What makes the powder of Venus scene significant is that it exposes the way value inheres in representations of exchange: if the value of the drug lies in its exoticism, Scoto produces this value by ascribing to his powder a famous lineage and a series of geographical displacements. As a rhetorical effect of representing objects as things from afar embedded in discourses of desire and foreignness, exoticism derives not merely from being in places that are remote, but also from movement through space. In this way Volpone demonstrates that representations of trade generate a kind of symbolic value in excess of an object’s “real” economic value—mountebanks were, after all, notorious peddlers of “new-fangled trumperies” as one visitor to Venice reported.25 Because Volpone reveals that an object’s travels mark and produce its value as something exotic, the play demonstrates that it is not simply the traveler abroad who is faced with rare sights but that the foreign permeates domestic space too: the cosmetic powder is inseparable from its international and exotic heritage. That is to say, there can be no “domestic space” when exotic, movement-generated value is objectified and consumed in such trifles as hair-coloring, wrinkle-erasing powder.

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While scholars such as Kim F. Hall have suggested that the incorporation of sugar and such foodstuffs as oranges, currants, and almonds into seventeenth-century cookery and household manuals marks the housewife’s cultural capital (her ability to purchase and consume expensive foreign goods) and the simultaneous domestication of such goods, I have shown that objects gain value in part through their movement through various places—not just from exotic place to not-exotic place— and that this value they accumulate remains, adheres to them even after they arrive “home” so to speak.26 In permeating and, in some sense, destroying the “pure” domestic space, moreover, these exotic objects are something to be prized rather than feared, for they transform the very quality of “home” in a positive way. To reformulate Bourdieu slightly, displaying and consuming objects that objectify exotic capital serves as a means for the “home” space to acquire this value for itself. And as we have seen, both Marlowe and Jonson suggest that there is little distinction between the street, market, and bedroom when the “whole world” is transferred into a “private purse” (Volpone 2.3.235)— in this way, everywhere becomes a foreign space.

* * * If I am correct in arguing that representations of international migrations produce objects with what I have called “exotic capital,” I think this has important implications for our understanding not just of these plays but also and more broadly of how Londoners made sense of their changing urban space. In order to investigate Londoners’ sense of the space of their city, I will, of course, be shifting interpretive objects from the language of the plays to an examination of London itself, as it were. But rather than suggesting that, for all their evocation of far away places and exotic goods, both plays in evoking the Mediterranean are evoking London, I turn to London and that well-known London landmark, St Paul’s Cathedral, to demonstrate what the language of the plays tells us: value depends upon a series of displacements. As both Braun and Hogenberg’s map and Visscher’s panorama show, St Paul’s dominated the skyline of London; Wenceslaus Hollar’s engravings of the cathedral before the Great Fire show a lofty, spacious interior with massive columns and gothic arches.27 Allowing even for exaggeration, the medieval cathedral must have been one of the most impressive spaces many early modern Englishmen and women would ever experience. Perhaps for this very reason it continued to serve as a central public gathering place even as its religious function diminished: large crowds still gathered here and at Paul’s Cross to hear sermons and, once Lombard Street grew too small to hold them, merchants also began to meet regularly in the nave (Holmes 41). Thus not only were there shops

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surrounding the cathedral—most famously the booksellers on Poetaster’s Row and in Paul’s Churchyard—but the nave and center aisle were serving as a space for exchanging gossip, news, prices, and material goods. So prevalent were these exchanges that the center aisle was nicknamed “the Mediterraneo.” In Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) and Thomas Dekker’s Dead Tearme (1608) and The guls hornebooke (1609), the pun on isle/aisle functioned to equate the social uses of the cathedral with Mediterranean mercantilism. For instance, Dekker writes, the “middle aisle show[s] like the Mediterranean Sea, in which as well the merchant hoists up sayls to purchace wealth honestly as the rover to light upon prise unjustly” (Dead Tearme 17). Noticeably, Dekker does not reject commerce per se; not all trade in St Paul’s is “bad,” only piracy. And in The guls horne-booke, Dekker satirically dispenses advice to would-be gallants on how to behave in Paul’s Walk: Your Mediterranean aisle is the only gallery, wherein the pictures of all your true fashionate and complemental Gulls are, and ought to be hung up. Into that gallery carry your neat body . . . bend your course directly in the middle line, that the whole body of the church may appear to be yours; where, in view of all, you may publish your suit in what manner you affect most. . . . After dinner you may appear again, having translated yourself out of your English cloth cloak into a light Turkey grogram, if you have that happiness of shifting; and then be seen, for a turn or two, to correct your teeth with some quill or silver instrument, and to cleanse your gums with a wrought handkercher. (18)

Dekker’s advice emphasizes the migratory nature of consuming: the opening image is of Englishmen “swimming up and down” the aisle (18) in order to “publish” or display their fashionable clothing and accessories—not only taffeta cloaks, Turkish grogram (a cloth made of wool and silk), toothpicks and handkerchiefs but also silver spurs, silk stockings, hats, and perfumed and embroidered purses (17–19). Not only does “Mediterranean” operate as a marker of symbolic and economic value but the cathedral materializes spatially that reduction of far-flung empires into “a little room” we saw with Barabas and Volpone. Within the urbanized space of St Paul’s, a plethora of material goods acquired through foreign trade can be seen on the bodies of London citizens, and thus what was linguistic and rhetorical in The Jew of Malta and Volpone is in St Paul’s materialized. Moreover, in order to observe “decorums” (18) gallants must also be seen smoking, reading—or at least pretending to read—and hanging about the “sempsters shops”

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(19): in other words, displaying other forms of cultural capital to which urbanization gives rise.28 The reigning metaphor in this passage is of Paul’s Walk as a “gallery” or a space where portraits are displayed—Paul’s is thus the place both to show off and to gaze at foolish consumers. In this sense, the Walk becomes a parodied version of galleries such as in Arundel House where paintings by Continental artists were collected and displayed for public viewing.29 Even in this parody of the gallery, then, Paul’s Walk is associated with the cultural capital of the Mediterranean. As if this association with the Mediterranean were not enough, the frequent invocation of figures of maritime venturing such as “shoals,” “islanders,” “swimming,” “sailing,” “coasts,” “anchor,” and “venture” (17–18) cements the idea that going to St. Paul’s requires a voyage by sea. In this way, “islanders”—English gulls walking in the aisles/isles— are cast as belonging to a culture of consumption and display linked to the Mediterranean. Rather than piracy, shipwrecks, or poor exchange rates (typical problems for the merchants of the Levant Company), the fear of meeting creditors, standing too near the “serving mans” pillar, or becoming “stale” (appearing in outdated fashions) comprise the dangers of venturing into Paul’s Walk. What is most significant about this naming of Paul’s Walk, however, is that it reveals the way cultural practices shape conceptions of space—not only London’s but the Mediterranean’s as well. As the references in Dead Tearme and Guls horne-booke—as well as in Jonson’s Every Man Out of Humour (“Come, let’s walk in the Mediterraneo” [3.1])—bring to light, central sites of commercial transactions and theatrical displays in London were equated with the Mediterranean. Specific urban activities— sartorial extravagance, shopping, walking to see and be seen, prostitution, and reading—that mark the growth of London as a cultural capital30 are thus also imaginatively cast as the purview of a space outside London. Though such displacements shift unwanted behaviors onto a satisfactorily far-away place, such invocations of the Mediterranean are much more complex. Appearing at the same time as Dekker’s texts and the first staging of Volpone, Richard Johnson’s urban encomia, London’s Description (1607), reveals the way that London is imagined through its relation to other lands and cities: What Seville, Spain, or Portugal affordeth, What France, what Flanders, or what Germany, What Crete, what Sicily, or what Naples hoardeth, The coasts of Turkey, or of Barbary, The boundless seas to London walls presenteth Through which all Englands’ state she much augmenteth.

(19–24)31

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Although it imagines goods flowing “to London walls” and not from London—the image is of accumulation rather than circulation—this panegyric contributes to the development of a metropolitan identity by situating London in relation to the “flow[s]” (49) of international trade. The ideological work Johnson’s poem does is important, for it puts London on the map of what several decades later James Howell will call the world’s “great cities” (381)—most of them located in the Mediterranean. For, of course, the Mediterranean was the space of what Lisa Jardine denotes, borrowing from F.J. Fisher’s famous essay by that name, conspicuous consumption long before England grew its own metropolis to rival anything found rimming the Mediterranean Sea.32 Like the places named by Barabas and Volpone/Scoto when they fantasize about fabulous wealth or extraordinary powders, “Mediterranean” thus functions as a marker of value, as a specific site upon which meaning and signification accumulates. London is thus represented as having cultural capital in much the same way that Scoto’s miraculous powder gains its value: by a series of (dis)placements that produce a density of signification, an accumulation of value. In this way, textually as well as materially, London is figured and lived through its exchanges with “else-where” spaces. Significantly, such a figuring does not posit London as insular and homogenous but, rather, as comprised by the presence of strangers and foreign goods circulating about the city.33 To conclude I return to my title, borrowed twice over from Erasmus and Horace. In the very opening lines of De copia, Erasmus tells us that there is nothing more “admirable” than speech “overflowing” with “rich” words and thoughts, for, and here he quotes Horace, “not every man has the luck to go to Corinth” (1.1). If copia substitutes for actual travel, we might see the playhouse as a space where exotic value is staged and, in this way, circulated within metropolitan London. Rather than suggesting that playhouses are, as Richmond Barbour argues, “exoticized by representing and setting exotic difference”(28)—which entails a relationship of (positive) contamination—turning to Erasmus’s idea of copia helps us see the theaters as spaces that transfer rhetorically, performatively exotic objects and sights from grand “empires” into a “little room.” The relation between domestic entertainment and foreign practices, thus, is more complex than either leisurely diversion or ideological displacement. For representations of urban activities, especially the practices of exchange imagined as happening in Mediterranean spaces, presented English writers and theatergoers with the terms to imagine their own metropolis and the practices shaping its space. Volpone and The Jew of Malta thus call attention to the way international trade and representations of “things in motion” are central to the production of (a) cultural capital.

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Notes 1. Harris (Sick Economies and “I am sailing to my port”) and Fumerton (chapter 5) discuss foreign trade in terms of pathology and xenophobia. For studies dealing with English reactions to foreigners, see, for example, Matar, Fuchs, Shapiro, Yungblut, and Hall, Things of Darkness. 2. Candy, or Candia, was a common early modern name for Crete. This nomenclature seems to derive from the fact that Candia was the Venetian name for the ancient city called Khandak or Kandia by its Arab founders (modern day Heraklion/Iráklion) and thus metonymically the island as a whole. 3. For a discussion of this phenomenon see Halikowski-Smith. 4. On this fact there is considerable literature; see, for instance, Clay, Foster, and Jardine. 5. Ethel Seaton’s “Marlowe’s Map” (1924) is the authoritative essay on Marlowe’s use of Abraham Ortelius’s 1570 Theatrum orbis terrarum; see also Burton, Gillies, and Sullivan. 6. See Burton for a succinct summary of English and Ottoman diplomatic and mercantile relations. 7. Braudel’s monumental The Mediterranean typifies the declining influence of the Mediterranean narrative. Hess, esp. 121–22, takes issue with the Mediterranean as a “forgotten frontier.” 8. See, for example, Stephen Orgel’s essay on connoisseurship and art collecting, “Idols of the Gallery.” 9. On Englishmen traveling to the Mediterranean to improve fortunes, see Matar and also Vitkus, Turning Turk. In using the term cultural capital here I mean both objectified and embodied cultural capital. See Bourdieu. 10. These scenes are to be read in light of the history of Malta, which enjoyed the dubious fame of being the site of much political and military conflict long before the siege of Malta in 1565. The Knights of St John—formerly of Jerusalem—to whom Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted Malta after they were uprooted from Rhodes in 1522, were known to carry on an extensive trade in both Jewish and Turkish slaves. In fact, Barabas’s allegiance with Calymath could have its sources in the rumor that Jews colluded with Turks—by funding their attack—to overthrow the Knights out of revenge for the Christians’ too brisk trade in Jewish captives. See Roth for a discussion. See also Gill for the point that Marlowe was intimately familiar with Malta. 11. Abigail and Mathias’s love might be seen as one of the only bonds not subject to the dictates of “money” in this play, but it fails to come to fruition. 12. Situating The Jew of Malta in relation to the commotion over the many “strangers” living within and around London imbues the

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

Lea Knudsen Allen invocation of “Machevill” with political significance. It requires us to rethink not only the claim that England was “insular” and “homogen[ous]” (Vitkus 15) but also the assumption that only ethnic or religious others—Turks, Jews, Moors, and Indians—occupied the position of “the Other” for English audiences. For this reason Barabas’s characterization as the stereotypical Jew cannot simply be taken as a sign of English fears of non-Christians. The complaints leveled against “strangers” should be seen as the result of international trade in commodities, labor, and capital; as London became a cultural and economic capital, drawing foreigners both to live and trade, English merchants, artisans, and financiers had to deal with competition. See Neal for a discussion of Jewish moneylenders in Northern Europe and England. The villainy catalogue is an oft-repeated topos of the Jew on the early modern stage. In John Webster’s The deuils law-case, Romelio, disguised as a Jewish physician, images himself a “rare Italianated Jew” who will “coin money, corrupt ladies’ honours,/ [and] Betray a town to th’ Turk” (3.2.3; 12–13)—a clear allusion to The Jew of Malta. Names, de Certeau argues, “create a nowhere in places; they change them into passages” (104). It is precisely this dual function of proper names—to place or locate and to set into flight—that I see operating in Marlowe and Jonson’s plays. The claim that references to Malta increased in the latter half of the seventeenth century is made based on a search using “Malta” as a keyword in the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collection’s Early English Prose Fiction, English Poetry and English Drama databases and the ESTC. The triumphs of Gods revenege (1621), John Reynolds’s moralistic romance, sets up an opposition between “the renowned and famous Ile of Malta, the inexpugnable Bulwarke of Christendome” and the corrupt, licentious world of Nice. Massinger and Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta (1618) presents the Maltese knight Mountferrat as a duplicitous, sexually dissolute disbeliever and the Knight’s Order as unable to contain conflicts between its French, Italian, and Spanish members even with the ever-present threat of the invading Ottoman fleet. See Hopkins for a summary of this expedition and Marlowe’s relation to it. Consider Sir Philip Sidney’s mockery of staging locations: you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. (65) This phrase comes from one of the dedicatory poems to Lewis Lewkenor’s 1599 translation of Contrarini’s The commonvvealth and gouernment of Venice. Other terms of praise include “matchless,” “famous,” “glory,” “beautie,” “magnificence,” “amazement,” and “admiration” (preface).

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20. Philip Massinger’s play The Emperour of the East echoes Jonson’s mountebank scene; there, the doctor attempts to impress the Emperor by listing Latinate drugs and ingredients, as well as more exotic objects such as the “fether of Struthio cameli, or a bird of Paradise.” The mix of Latin and nonsensical but Latinate words— including the word “balsumunguentulums”—serves to emphasize the “Emperik’s” pretensions to arcane, medical knowledge. 21. We know Volpone is invested in the problem of how to acquire and display kinds of capital because numerous characters in the play, including Sir Politic Would-Be and his wife, make claims to cultural capital. Of course, Sir Politic’s “knowledge” is paranoid, exaggerated, naive—but, also, the very stuff of travel narratives and drama, as in the case of his being informed enough to “sell this state, to the Turks” (4.1.130), making him a potential Barabas figure. Lady Would-Be also attempts to display cultural capital by discoursing on Petrarch, Montaigne, and Aretino, dispensing medicinal remedies and expounding philosophical doctrines (3.4). Such blundered attempts ultimately reveal her lack of cultural capital, but not without displaying at the same time what is recognized as such. The audience’s pleasure thus stems from their ability to recognize her too eager parading of learning, thereby satisfying themselves in their own possession of cultural knowledge. 22. Several critics have suggested that Shakespeare knew of Titian’s painting when writing his Venus and Adonis. For a discussion see Hulse 141–46. 23. On the association of Venus with Venetian courtesans, see Santore, esp. 189. 24. Tintoretto’s Ariadne, Venus and Bacchus (1576–78), one of the four canvases he painted for the Sala dell’Anticollegio, depicts a crowned Venus receiving riches from Bacchus and Ariadne. On the mythology of Venice, see Rosand. 25. Thomas Coryate’s phrase for counterfeit ware mountebanks sell in the Venetian marketplaces and squares. See Coryats crudities 273. 26. See Hall’s “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces.” 27. Reproduced in Dugdale (EEBO image 65). 28. In “Walking Capitals,” Newman argues that urbanization gives rise to new experiences and forms of knowledge and, hence, cultural capital (see especially 210). 29. See Orgel 255–56 and also Gilman 284–85 in the same volume, for a discussion of the Arundels and art collecting. 30. On this point, see Newman’s essay “Walking Capitals” 210, and also Manley 1. 31. Reproduced in Manley 63–65. 32. Although only one chapter in Worldly Goods is titled “Conspicuous Consumption,” that term informs Jardine’s overall characterization of the Mediterranean as a space reveling in its material plethora.

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33. See Bartolovich on the subject of London as a “world city” comprised of heterogeneous and often conflicting constituents.

Works Cited Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Bartolovich, Crystal. “ ‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City.’” The Tempest and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. J. G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood P, 1986. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean. Trans. Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Burton, Jonathan. “Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.1 (Winter 2000): 125–56. Clay, C. G. A. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Coryate, Thomas. Coryats crudities. London, 1611. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dekker, Thomas. The Dead Tearme. Or, VVestminsters complaint for long vacations and short termes. London, 1608. ———. The guls horne-booke. London, 1609. Dugdale, Sir William.The history of St. Pauls Cathedral in London from its foundation untill these times. London, 1658. Erasmus, Desiderius. On Copia of Words and Ideas: De Utraque Verborem Ac Rerum Copia. Trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1963. Erikson, Peter, and Clark Hulse, eds. Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Foster, Sir William.England’s Quest of Eastern Trade. 1933. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Fuchs, Barbara. “Spanish Lessons: Spenser and the Irish Moriscos.” SEL 42.1 (Winter 2002): 43–62. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991. Gill, Roma. The Jew of Malta. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Gillies, John. “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography.” Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated University Presses, 1998.

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Gilman, Ernest B. “Madagascar on my Mind: The Earl of Arundel and the Arts of Colonization.” Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Ed. Peter Erikson and Clark Hulse. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Grantley, Darryll. “What meanes this shew?: Theatricalism, Camp and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta.” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. Ed. Darryll Grantley and P. Roberts. Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Scolar P, 1996. Halikowski-Smith, Stefan. “The Mystification of Spices in the Western Tradition.” European Review of History 8.2 (2001): 119–36. Hall, Kim F. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.” Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. ———. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “I am sailing to my port, uh! uh! uh! uh!’: The Pathologies of Transmigration in Volpone.” Literature and Medicine 20.2 (2001): 109–32. ———. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Hess, Andrew C. “The Mediterranean and Shakespeare’s Geopolitical Imagination.” The Tempest and Its Travels. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Holmes, Martin. Elizabethan London. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969. Hopkins, Lisa. “‘Malta of Gold’: Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, and the Siege of 1565.” (Re)Soundings 1.2 (1997), http://www.millersv.edu/~resound/ *vol1iss2/topframe.html. Howell, James. Londinopolis. London, 1657. Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman, eds. The Tempest and its Travels. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Hulse, Clark. Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996. Johnson, Richard. “London’s Description.” 1607. London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology. Lawrence Manley, ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1986. Jonson, Ben. Every Man Out of His Humour (1599–1600). English Drama Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1997. ———. Volpone. Ed. Philip Brockbank.New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000. Lewkenor, Lewis. The commonvvealth and gouernment of Venice. London, 1599. Manley, Lawrence, ed. London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1986.

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Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. Ed. James R. Siemon. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994. Massinger, Philip. The Emperour of the East. A tragae-comoedie. London, 1632. Massinger, Philip, and John Fletcher. The Knight of Malta. London, 1647. English Drama Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994. Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. ———. “Walking Capitals: Donne’s First Satyre.” The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Ed. Henry S. Turner. New York: Routledge, 2002. Orgel, Stephen. “Idols of the Gallery: Becoming a Connoisseur in Renaissance England.” Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Ed. Peter Erikson and Clark Hulse. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London and New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1987. Peacham, Henry. The compleat gentleman. London, 1622. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas his pilgrims. London, 1625. Reynolds, John. The triumphs of Gods revenege [sic]. London, 1621. Rosand, David. Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 2001. Roth, Cecil. “The Jews of Malta.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 12 (1928–31): 187–251. Santore, Cathy. “The Tools of Venus.” Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 11.3 (1997): 179–207. Seaton, Ethel. “Marlowe’s Map.” Essays and Studies 10 (1924): 35. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Sidney, Sir Philip. A Defence of Poetry. Ed. J. A. Van Dorsten. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. Sullivan, Garrett A. “Geography and Identity in Marlowe.” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Vitkus, Daniel, ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. ———. Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Webster, John. The deuils law-case. London, 1623. Yungblut, Laura Hunt. Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Part II

Transforming H ome through Trade

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Chapter 6

“A bsent, weak, or unserviceable ”: The E ast India Company and the Domestic Economy in T H E L AU N C H I N G O F T H E M A RY , O R T H E SEAMAN’S HONEST WIFE Ann Christensen

This chapter examines a little-known verse play written on the

author’s return voyage from the Indies in 1632. Partly a mercantilist defense of England’s East India Company (EIC) and partly a fictional account of the trials of Dorotea Constance, the puritan wife of an absent seaman, The Launching of the Mary is a snapshot of early modern English empire building and its critics.1 Walter Mountfort’s play represents the emerging mercantilist discourse exemplified in Thomas Mun’s 1621 treatise A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies, while also dramatizing an established discourse of domesticity that responds to the human and economic costs of globalization. A hybrid city comedy, Launching depicts the impact of global trade on the household, showing women’s implication in the processes of the developing global market. Although it is true that the play “adeptly stages a counternarrative to the real, denying all the charges of profiteering, of flooding the country with unnecessary luxuries, of losing ships and men in large numbers, and of neglecting the widows and orphans of its

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sailors” (Taylor-Pearce), the “domestic plot” persists in refusing to exonerate the company.2 The chapter title refers to one objection (among several) against the company: the exhaustion of natural and human resources. Ships, critics of the EIC alleged, are either absent from England or return “weak and unserviceable.”3 A similar accusation could be made about the seamen themselves, absent for extended (often indefinite, sometimes permanent) periods or returning possibly unable to work. Households had to accommodate the exigencies of international trade, which included the routine absence of men. The home, represented in the play by its imperiled yet virtuous wife, appears as both a heroic source of national identity and a vulnerable space endangered by the requirements of the nation’s economy. Women ran households while their male “heads” served in long-distance trade, and although many of these domiciles no doubt operated successfully, the women also faced certain practical and ideological obstacles—from employment and credit problems to constraints on their conduct. Properly speaking, neither wife, maid, nor widow, the wife in this play occupies a multivalent, seemingly marginal social position through which she critiques company practices. As we will see, the EIC defenses acknowledge the economic troubles of families, but they deny responsibility and fail to address (or redress) those issues adequately. Given the crucial role of women in relation to local and global economies, gender must continue to inform economic analyses. The play alternates between the promotion of EIC practices (through what I call the “defense plot”) and explicit and implicit criticism of the human costs of global trade (via the “domestic plot”). The defense plot follows the pamphlet formula of Mun, comprised of long set-speeches between an inquisitive but not adversarial admiral and members of the EIC, who pose and refute a series of “objections” against the company.4 (Among the objections are wasted resources, death of seamen, destruction of ships, abuse of the mint, and the poverty of families left behind by travel.) Meanwhile the “domestic plot” voices criticism against the company via more individuated characters familiar to citizen drama: shipyard workers, named for their occupations like the “rude mechanicals” of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who talk shop, drink, and, as in Dream, have plans to perform a play; and other seamen’s wives, Mary (Mall) Sparke and Isabel (Tibb) Nutt, who gad about taverns, seduce apprentices, misrepresent their employment, drink to excess, and defend their lifestyles because husbands are at sea. Paramount in this plot is Dorotea who must put down her dishonest neighbors and put up with their sexual advances and misogynist mockery. Like the EIC, she too finds herself in a position that needs defending.

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Mountfort uses citizen drama to represent the company’s idealized image5 and sets the play neither in the experience at sea nor in the potentially stageworthy regions of the east, but on the London home front.6 Characters allude to other plays (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Edward IV) and refer to specific London locales, such as Smithfield and Wapping. An ideal audience for a staged version of A Discourse of Trade, these potential viewers would also be consumers of city comedies; Also, Mountfort tries to cater to their tastes when he grafts the domestic plot onto the treatise.7 Like city comedies, the domestic plot of Launching dramatizes both serious and comic issues inherent in the classed and gendered oppositions between home and abroad, private and public life, production and consumption. The play depicts the socially and sexually anarchic potential of the emergent global market in conflict with the traditional modes of conduct for women. The colorful and bawdy seaport orchestrates this incipient global mercantilism (with its concomitant marital separations) along with the trials of the proverbial good wife. While the two plot strands contradict each other, these structural oppositions reveal the play’s unreconciled tensions regarding the EIC’s role in England—as social service or social menace—and dramatic weight resides with the domestic plot and the seaman’s honest wife. A brief summary of Mun’s project will help to sketch the defense plot of Launching, the formal issues of which I return to later. Mun, Edward Misselden, Gerard Malynes, and Dudley Digges were selected by the company to write economic tracts defending trade practices, thereby shaping the early discourses of mercantilism. For Barber, “The EIC was in the vanguard of innovation in the seventeenth century: and . . . was a magnet for critics” (8). According to Lawson, Mun’s writing “became most influential in defending and justifying the company’s innovative role in English trade expansion” (36). Furthermore, Forman argues that these tracts “for the first time significantly influenced government policy” (“History” 614). Mun’s stated goal in what one economic historian calls the “phrenetic and bitter dispute” was to argue that the company’s enterprise was the most profitable trade in England (Muchmore 500).8 In these debates Mun maintained that the EIC serves the nation politically and socially, as well as economically. Barber claims that the company “contributed importantly to national preparedness by developing a reserve naval capacity and by sharpening the skills of shipwrights and seamen” (15). Mountfort’s company officials repeat these and other defenses verbatim. Mun’s first “objection” concerns the exhaustion of English coin, presented in a mock lament that distances him from the “many men” whom he quotes: It were a happie thing for Christendome (say many men) that Navigation to the East-Indies, . . . had never bene found out; . . . gold,

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silver, and Coyne of Christendome, and particulary of this Kingdome, is exhausted, to buy unnecessary wares. (4–5)

(Mountfort’s heroine will similarly wish away global trade, though without irony.) Mun defends the usefulness (and relative cheapness) of imported goods, clarifies the EIC’s navigation routes and concomitant cost savings, and shows how this system benefits England as both consumer and producer. Mun argues that this trade stimulates England’s by-industries, such as shipbuilding and cloth trades, ennobling the company as a kind of charity. For example, he credits it with improving England’s woolen industry, which lends “great reliefe and maintenance of so many hundreds of poore people; who are continuallie imployed, in the winding, twisting, and weaving of the same” (7). More than once he mentions the company’s assumption of the costs in supporting mariners, factors, and officers (12, 25).9 The second objection concerns shipbuilding, alleging that the EIC wastes raw materials such as timber and robs the state of ships, which are either gone at sea or “come home verie weake, and unserviceable” (29, also 31). Mun dismantles this criticism by celebrating this perpetually busy industry: “The East-India Companie (besides their fleetes of Shippes going and coming & also abiding in the Indies) are continuallie building, repairing, rigging, victualling, and furnishing to Sea, with all provision needefull for such a long voyage” (32).10 Mountfort’s defenders echo this rebuttal when they argue for the “commodious use” of materials: “Shall wee keepe our woods / & goodly trees onely to looke upon [?]” (1395, 1396, 1391–92). In a speech that elevates travel as it denigrates home, one officer asserts that, by definition, “all shipps / must goe & Come, they are not made to staye / at home, to rott in muddie moorish dockes” (1438–40). He goes on to list provisions that the company generates for domestic and royal use (1442–52). Mun’s and Mountfort’s habit of listing—of goods and prices, exports and imports, and articles of labor (Mountfort also adds the workers’ colorful names [1140–61])—was surely a function of the EIC’s extensive record keeping (Lawson 22). How such lengthy lists might have been dramatized is unclear, but Launching’s frequent apologies for its tedium imply that they challenged audience attention. The third objection in The Defense of Trade most directly relates to Launching in that it refers to London families, whose mariner-fathers are absent or dead. Mun coyly rhymes the problems attributed to the EIC and then washes his corporate hands of them: The Answer. Why what a world of mischiefes have we heere? 1. Dearth. 2. Mortalitie.

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3. Destruction. 4. Beggarie. 5. And never a whit the neere. A verie Team of calamities, drawing on to miserie; is it not then high time to seeke a remedie? Yes verily, and it will be easily done, because these evils never were (as yet at least) procured by the East India Trade. (33)

In this ventriloquizing moment, Mun seems an amateur playwright too.

Staging T he Defense Most of the “defense plot” occurs through undramatic and nondramatized dialogues, though Mountfort attempts to “naturalize” it using theatrical gestures such as a banquet. The play opens with the shipbuilder showing Admiral Hobab the model for the Mary. Hobab’s approval inspires him to extol the virtues of such a ship that can furnish unprecedented superior goods (“& at Cheaper rates”); the greater “profitt that accrues, / Unto the Common wealth . . . / then heretofore” (23, 21–22). He boasts about the EIC’s socially beneficial employment practices: How many seamen yearely are imployde, & shall I tell you, many land men too, wch might have beggd, or starvd, or else been hangd, had that imployment faylde: thus I Conclude (maugre the scandal of the multitude) they are the most noble marchants, & shall have old Hobabs approbation to his grave. (25–31)

Rhetorically overblown (with such flourishes as “the state take special notice” [24]), this speech is nonetheless grounded in at least a modicum of stage business—the model display. This however tenuous connection to plot or staging soon vanishes. The majority of scene one’s over 600 lines comprises the “dialogue” between Hobab and members of the company, motivated only by Hobab’s recollection of “rumours” against the monopoly. Characters repeatedly comment on the amount of time needed to cover the topics, and the dialogues stretch out, like Boccaccio’s tales, over several days. Thus the defense plot sets itself up as a leisured, time-consuming indulgence among elite men in contrast to the occupations of the laboring classes who dominate (and invigorate) the domestic plot. Given the admiral’s “approbation” (above), his role as the mouthpiece for the objections poses ideological as well as aesthetic problems. Admittedly

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unable to “fathom” the workings of this profession (170–72), he nonetheless defends the company against complex charges, couching the objections in “some grumblinge rumours [that] fly abroade,” and eventually voices the same objections that Mun treats (195, 199–207). Finally, his query sets in motion the defense plot; he insists that the “committees” answer him, for “[his] idle houres afford [him] as much tyme” to entertain their replies (213). Initially, the governor balks: the answers will be “tedious,” and the auditors agree that commerce’s mystery surpasses the uninitiate’s grasp (225, 251–53, 607–09).11 Nonetheless, having agreed to reply, the governor plays the host, ordering in music and a banquet, “because the [proceeding] will be somewhat longe / please you a little to refresh your selfe” (242–43). The officials, in turn, address the myriad concerns relating to the first objection in speeches that range from 40 to over 60 lines. The onstage audience, Hobab could speak for all auditors when he says, “no more of this: my memorie / will fayle in all to heare to much of any” (486–87). Yet “committee 1” slogs on with another 50 lines to which the deputy adds over 30. At last “satisfied,” Hobab proclaims, “Let Calumnie hereafter hold her tonge / to slander those that never did her wronge” (613, 614–15). This mode of discourse characterizes the two subsequent scenes devoted to the defense. In scene three, the officials return to renew the “debate,” apologizing for sleeping in and being late (1361–67), and Hobab asserts optimistically his “earnest willingness . . . to heare / the Consequent objections made serene / wth arguments as energeticall / as was the former” (1370–73). Here company officials again use Mun’s arguments to discount the second and third objections in 449 lines. Meanwhile their inquisitor readily takes up their cause, even lamenting the absence of “penalitie against detraction,” deriding the “viperous broode” of detractors and defending “such men, / whose actions tend to benefitt a state” (1812, 1464, 1469–70). Hobab predicts an ultimate justice: “[T]hey’le ende theyr dayes in sorrow: you in peace” (1816). That portion of the defense ends with the governor acknowledging (again) the tedium of the foregoing: “the length of tyme / spent in discourse, doth fatigate the spirits / and dulls the edge of apprehension” (1821–23). The same characters meet again on another day “to add a period to our longe discourse” (2279). But the final objection, concerning the EIC’s use of the mint, is deemed “frivolous” (2288) by Hobab who, Hamlet-like, dismisses the issue: “for what’s the mint to you, or you to yt [?]” (2286). Instead of analyzing the matter, and rather than disperse, the interlocutors make more speeches. Together they fantasize about writing a satire against “Detraction,” lament the gullible who believe anti-EIC rumors, and rail against those who damage their

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reputation (2305–57). Once again, the admiring admiral judges “your answeares solid: & your resolutions / in every point emphaticke,” as he blesses the enterprise: “fayre fare you all, and may the suffrages / of all good men attend your voyages” (2359–60, 2364–65).

Domestic Dramas Respite from this undramatic propagandizing comes in the domestic plot mainly from the workaday world of the London shipyards and ports and Dorotea’s drama—beleaguered by suitors, alone, friendless, and poor, she speaks several soliloquies, often directly addressing the audience. Taken together, these two strands challenge the defense of global trade and, by deploying familiar theatrical conventions, rescue the play from mere propaganda. For example, the comical entrance of the shipyard workers in scene one (47–115) and the focused exchange between the shipwright Naupegas and Captain Fitzjohn in scene two allow for interactive dialogue and action absent from the other plot. Several moments in the domestic plot transpire via metadrama: onstage characters view others working. The supervising shipwright and the admiral stand aside undetected to observe the antics of the “knot of merry fellows,” Trunell, Oakam, and company, at work on the ship (67–71). Later, those laborers will look on as Dorothea sews in her window (o.s.d. 2471–72). The workers resist the busy agenda of a Mun, and the wives testify to the paucity of the EIC’s family wages. Contributing to the more effective theatricality of the domestic plot and adding another dimension to Launching’s concern with labor, Tibb and Mall are stock citizen wives. They flout constancy to court “varieties” via taverns (“sometymes at / the windmill beyond Milend” [979–80]), wines, and apprentices (see 977–86, 1859–76). This pair is as hypocritical as the puritan gossips of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and as insatiable as the consumerist wives of Eastward Ho!. Further, they antagonize their pious neighbor for praying and working hard. Dorotea castigates them for their willfulness, bad language, and reputations that “bringe reproch upon all sea-mens wyves” (966). She reminds them of absent husbands: “paynfull men abroad, / they Cannot spare so fast as you Canne spend” (962–63), though her description does not square with their own images of their lazy husbands (1942–43, 1945–50). Nonetheless, despite these obvious moral differences, all the wives suffer because they have lost husbands to the EIC. The good woman has to fend for herself and rebuff unwanted sexual advances while the bad women are left to make sexual advances (possibly for pay). They share sexual and recreational desires, including an apparent love of the theater (701–05, 943), and give voice to their physical needs, though only Mall and Tibb act on them. Dorotea asks, like the Duchess of

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Malfi, “why should I spend the vigour of my yeares / in Contemplations onely? am not I / Composde of flesh and blood as other women?” (734–36). Not shy about acknowledging her loneliness, she could as well speak Tibb’s couplet: “I will not spend my dayes without delight / nor keepe my lodginge like an anchorite” (998–99; see also 851–53, 879–81).12 Similarly, and most germane to my argument, none of the wives is adequately supported by the EIC salary allotment. Tibb pitiably characterizes herself and her friend: “Your poore neighbors . . . that take / paynes night & daye, earely & late, tyme & tyde / for a poore lyvynge:” I hope you doe not thinke that two moneths paye a yeare is able to keepe an officers wife, in that rancke & port as wee doe, keepe our selves in. (1892–97)

Though Dorotea never directly objects to the company’s low salary, she accepts charity from the captain, and, as I discuss below, she “must work,” like other husbandless wives such as Jane in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The city wives’ behavior plays on the stereotype of London’s allure for women seeking commodities.13 First, the ladies describe their tavern-hopping in parts of London associated with the import trade: Poplar, near the shipyard of Blackwall (the EIC chapel was built there), Wapping, Limehouse Corner, White Chapel, Little Minories (see 1980). Second, we learn that their trysts include grocers’ apprentices who meet them “at a taverne in west Smithfield . . . [and] bringe sugar / & nutmegge, whch we infuse into white wine / & rosewater” to swill with aphrodisiac pickled oysters (988–92). This plot strand clearly runs counter to the play’s agenda of defending objections to the EIC: the wives’ bad habits depend on the exotic import trade. Indeed, arguably the playwright misses an opportunity to valorize the company’s contributions to the domestic economy. Though domestic industry was in fact stimulated by the EIC, as Mun avows, Mountfort’s domestic plot complicates that attribution of credit.14 For example, the shipyard workers fret about the capitalists’ oversight rather than band with them like their shoemaking counterparts in Dekker’s play: “for the m’chants Canne finde faulte (fast ynough) with us all” (1064–65). And although tailors and clothiers populate city comedies to great effect, Mountfort omits such obvious examples of global-trade-related labor.15 Instead, “work” in silk and the expanding cloth industry is exploited only as a cover for the port wives’ sexual predation. Sparke goes so far as to bless (ironically) those “that first invented this art of silke windinge, [since] yt makes many good huswives” (1843–45). And Nutt

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pretends to be finishing caps and sleeves for a newly established milliner (1847–49). Though paying lip service to Mun’s reverence for busyness, these women disrupt the working day while their companions drain their masters’ profits. Indeed the import/reexport or “balance of trade” in silk that Mun promulgated did “make many good huswives”; but Mountfort’s play illustrates that the “discourse of trade” did not account for those housewives and that the practice of trade did not support them. The seamen’s wives’ cynical mini-encomium on trade points to these deficiencies. The wives always carry (or talk about) handbaskets intended to document their industry, but the contents are sham.16 The play devotes considerable attention to this (non-)labor through the basket props, which figure prominently in two key scenes and animate stage directions (s.d. 925, 1827–32, 1982, 2012–19). In her first appearance, Sparke wonders “what would my basket saye at first word?” as she imagines Friar Bacon enabling objects to talk (945). Dorotea punctures the comical atmosphere and quips that these baskets would speak “some shameles language . . . those needful baskets serve your needles use for ------” (946–48). She cannot bear to utter the horrors concealed in the handbasket; nonetheless she continues the verbal spar with the other wives on the accessories’ proper uses. Their next (and final) entrance comprises the funniest, most theatrically realized scene in the play: “Enter Mary Sparke at one doore &. Isabell Nutt. At another wth handbasektte. In one basket a bricke batt wrapt in a Cleane napkin: & in the other 3 or 4 peece of painted Cloth in another Cleane napkin” (s.d. 1827–32). Trunell, aware that neither basket carries “an ounce of worke” (1850), accosts the pair, buys them drinks, and lets them fall asleep in order to search their baskets (1982–88). Relishing the exposure, he invites the audience to gaze and judge, “I praye you tell me is this silke? yf there Came no other silke from Persia, the m’chants would make a poore trade” (1983–85). When the “unfruitefull drones” awaken, the baskets spill and, “(as yf no body sawe them),” Sparke and Nutt replace their goods and exit (2016). Cynically mouthing Mun’s dogma of industry, they also mock Dorotea: “this younge giglett is ever / workinge, & yet shee doth but live: & I never worke, / and yet live as well as shee” (939–41). In addition to highlighting the city comedy world, the domestic plot constructs a vivid if ambivalent image of the company’s daily operations. The taskmaster company monitors work times by ringing a bell, which the workers resent. For example, when Tarre, Sheathingnail, Oakam, Trunnel, and Tallow drink on the job and discover the governor approaching, panic sets in. “To worke, to worke, my masters, yonder comes the Governour” (114), calls the tavern boy, scurrying to remove the evidence (see also 1045–46).

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Mountfort captures a sense of the obsessive supervision inherent in the company’s structure, dramatized repeatedly by the metatheatricality of work. The EIC was headquartered “in close proximity to wharves and warehouses owned and controlled by the organization,” and the directors were involved in “central administration” as well as “the most mundane Company activity” (Lawson 22). In addition to the props of cups, tools, and baskets, Launching also shows workers’ anxious and subversive concerns with work. The deadline for the launching motivates the “management team” (1162–215), who discuss the preparations underway (1171–1213), to conjecture about royal presence at the “lanchinge” (1178) and to praise their “most honourd masters . . . by whose bounteous meanes / we have our lyvinge” (1190, 1193–94). The subject of their working relations constitutes an entire scene, closing with the captain’s reminder: “your busines Calls: and mine brookes no delaye” (4.2.2220–70). The captain of the Mary looks forward to the launching when “my feares have ende” (2570). Yet there is no promised end for workers.17 In the next line, Captain Fitzjohn’s reverie is broken by the sight of the shipyard workers relaxing: “How now my hearts what idle: not at worke?” The laborers report that they “made hollidaye” since “wee have belabourd / the busyness out of all measure” (2571, 2572–75). Trunell’s speech of relief seems a parodic echo of Mun’s list of participles outlining the company’s busyness (quoted above); he celebrates the end of “sayinge or doinge, or fidlinge or fadinge, or pratinge or talkinge, or heavinge or settinge or gruntinge or groninge” (2575–77). Fitzjohn has caught them taunting Dorotea, and he joins her in class-based insults, “ill-bred, ill mannerd Canvas-Coates. / untutored pitchpotts, Tallow-bucketts, spunges, / . . . mechanicke slaves,” finally kicking them and threatening to draw his weapon (2603–04, 2611, o.s.d. 2611–12). Properly named and likewise insulted for their labor, these characters, like their female counterparts, help to make the domestic plot a drama. That drama suggests the company’s excessive demands on workers and lack of accountabilty to their employees’ families. Both Mun and Mountfort denigrate the English working classes. For example, one of the committees notes the “desperate folly & meere willfullnes” of men “who hav[e] Charge of wife & familye / but . . . [lack] meanes, & artes to gett a lyvinge,” and who need the “grace” to seek employment and the luck to find it in the EIC (Launching 1699–1701, 1702). Mun does not address the unique situation of working women while Mountfort depicts them with ambivalence. Dorotea’s honest labor at once ennobles and humiliates her; the captain who praises her modesty and diligence is also scandalized by her “hard hand-labor,” and other (male) laborers accost her sexually because she works for pay. Meanwhile, the other port wives know enough about working life to fake it.

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Mun’s treatise and Mountfort’s defense plot aver that a seaman’s wife is maintained financially by the company, but the reality is that poor and vulnerable Dorotea Constance must work. We have seen the lazy wives’ opposition to the company, and, enhanced by Dorotea’s own plight, these criticisms gain validity. The play’s juxtaposition of the two plot situations—East India directors talking abstractly about trade and unpartnered wives living and working in port—complicates the easy defense of the EIC to suggest that maritime trade in general and the EIC in particular contributed to the social dislocation of seamen’s wives (honest or otherwise) in London and to economic problems in England. Because of this vulnerability, Dorotea’s case is similar to many real seamen’s wives, whose reputations and livelihoods suffered with their husbands away. In the riverside neighborhoods of East London, like “the fast-growing, crowded industrial area of Wapping,” where Launching is set, Laura Gowing documents that as many as 75 percent of the men might be sailors “absent for long periods” (15). Their wives were both susceptible to accusations of illicit sex and bastardy and “well prepared to fight cases alone” (15, also 134). For Dorotea, want invites unwanted suitors; loneliness leads to complaint for relief. Even the honest work she does to support herself makes her vulnerable to accusation and assault. Sailors’ employment caused sometimes permanent restructuring of the household and had serious ramifications for the wives at home— competing narratives that Launching documents. Dorotea describes the “chronic” situation of her marriage to a long-absent seaman: . . . . my disease is more then of a dayes Continuance how many dayes, weekes, months, & yeares must I suffer exile from knowinge use of man? ......................................... would I had never knowne a maryed state or else would India had been never knowne. ......................................... must sea mens wyves, especially those that trace the seas to utmost India be table talke, nay taverne-talk to all? (739–42, 681–82, 861–63)

Some critics observe Dorotea’s sentimental attachment to her husband whom, Akiko Kusunoki claims, “she deeply misses,” but the play does not warrant this reading (195, see also Heinemann 211). Even at her most abject, Dorotea offers no detail about her husband, no description of their former life together, no fantasy of their reunion. In the speech above she mentions general abstinence (“exile from knowing

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use of man”), not Mr. Constance, and she quibbles: “Thinke you my husbands absence is my greife [sic]? Weare I a man . . . I would not be so stupid” (748–50). This character does not languish for love but speaks out about injustices against women like herself. One of those injustices that is always linked to her quasi-single state is persistent poverty despite employment. Dorotea struggles to maintain her equally threatened livelihood and chastity (see 2598–99). In the defense plot, Mountfort, again borrowing Mun’s tack but localizing the detail, denies the economic problems facing company wives: And when did any of these widowes begge for mayntenance in Churches as some doe? Blackwall proclaims theyr bountie; lymehouse speakes (yf not ingrate) theyre liberalitie Ratcliffe cannot Complayne nor wappinge weepe, nor Shadwell crye against theyr niggardness. (1726–31)

Yet, as noted, the domestic plot shows the wives (who, for all intents and purposes, are widows) hardly secure with company funds.18 Dorotea’s initial speech directly implicates the EIC, personalizing the mock-lament in Mun: “Oh; India, India, hadst thou nere been knowne / I should have had no Cause to make this mone” (709–10), and overshadowing the captain’s terse reply and the glib defense plot. Captain Fitzjohn voices a Munlike defense of the company’s charity: India hath made you husbandles a while, what then? is India therefore blameable? did not your husband by petition implore employment? . . . .................................... the fayre imployment that’s Conferrd on him had beene supplyde by better [] abler men (sic). (713–19)

He tells Dorotea to be grateful, not critical of “that wch gives . . . you yearely maytenance” (711–12, 727), and to blame “want of meanes,” not India. Although the EIC certainly contributes to her “want of meanes,” Dorotea retracts her blame: “I honor the Employers of my husband / with all respect and reverent regard” (744–45), a kind of loyalty oath also sworn by Fitzjohn himself and Naupagus (658–60, 643–44).19 Despite this retraction, though, Dorotea’s raison d’etre is to articulate her victimization. The play continually and explicitly identifies Dorotea vis-à-vis India, as when a Websterian stage “Eccho” distills from

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Admiral Hobab’s questions: “dorotea. / ys. / a wife. / her husband. / ys. / in India. / No. / —spouse. / more chast.” (1232–40). Dorotea’s stage presence compels audience interest and sympathy much more than the corporate monopoly. Indeed, her own “defense plot” uses some of the same rhetoric of the EIC promotional literature. For example, like Mun and the governor’s group in the play, she shows her critics no mercy, attacking their “base Calumnie” and “viperous darts” (2561, 2563; see also 730–33). “The method she employs for defeating her male opponents is verbally to dissuade them, as if she were preaching at them. Moreover, the men are impressed by [her rhetorical prowess]” (Kusunoki 195). Because we also see this woman dispute with sea captains, land captains, citizens, and others, our sympathy for her increases. Alone at work in her petticoat, she is confronted by the shipyard workers. Dorotea justifies herself against their assumptions (“for how ys it possible for a petticoate & wastcoate woman / to be honest [?]” [2493–94]): I know there are a packe of Satyrists, malignant Swetmans [sic], drunken poetasters wch farce & bumbast out theyr spurious lines wth raylinge language ‘gaynst our feeble sex, . . . out of Idiotisme, and shallow apprehension speake theyr pleasure: thus palefacte envy, and dull ignorance . . . are our enymies. (2514–21)

The defense plot similarly charges its opposition with ignorance and envy, but rather than face a true enemy directly, those defenders sit at a banquet entertaining objections at one remove. Here, not only is Dorotea outnumbered but, unlike the pliant Hobab who favors the EIC, her accusers talk back. They interrupt her speech against “Swetmans,” referring to Joseph Swetnam, “the woman hater,” author of the misogynist tract The arraignment of Lewde, idle, froward and unconstant Women (1615), and they “all” laugh, calling her “starke mad” (2529–30). One worker credits her with taking down “an Inche lower / at the least” the boisterous Trunell (2549–51). And Trunell in turn promises to prove the next Swetnam (2555–59). Accused of madness, pitied for her poverty, derided for her industry, and accosted for her beauty, this character indexes the conflicting expectations for single women working in London. Unlike the tedious lectures of the defense plot, Dorotea’s speeches appeal through lyric elements and engage the audience directly, even announcing “I [am] one of you” (1014). Her final speech to close the play nearly parodies the Mun material. Here she challenges “the austerest

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Criticke [to] censure [her]” and vows, “nor will I longe molest your patience / wth tomes, & tropes, & doubtfull ambages” (2938, 2942–43). Her 40-line soliloquy after the exit of her neighbors, implores the “kinde Courteous women” of the audience to conceive well of seamen’s wives (1013). This speech begins (melo)dramatically, apostrophizing “fayre heavns,” but quickly delineates a problem: unfairness to women (1000). She speaks of “report,” judgment, and “censure,” indiscriminately accusing all sailors’ wives, and questions why the few bad examples “bring reproch & shame / on us, & [our] the profession of our husbands” (1001, 1003, 1016, 1003–04). Though the “falsely accused” company also defends its profession, the play’s defense plot spokesmen are neither theatrically realized nor sympathetic. Dorotea’s speech does use cliché and aphorism (that is, a repetitive list of metaphors on the theme of “wheat and chaff ” [1017–28]); still, the final appeal to the women in the audience is lively and even powerful. Having implored them to make “good Constructions, upon seamens wives,” she urges women: your silence tells me I have gaynde my wish. me thinkes I here you in a silent murmur saye you will doe yt: heavn blesse you for the thought & much more for the acte. My bended knee I hope will make you speake: speake loud & free. (1034, 1037–41)

Dorotea’s soliloquies usually address women directly as above (and 1354–55); succeed in some adversarial encounter, as with the neighbor women or a suitor (s.d. 1257–59); and are often overheard by a male(s) on stage. She speaks consistently of women’s unfair lot in life, a platform that some male auditors pity and others mock. For example, Hobab finds and reads aloud the letters between Dorotea and Locuples, her purse-proffering suitor whom, to Hobab’s relief, she rebuffs (1217–23). Hobab then stands by to witness her withstanding a “storme” of lust from Locuples and also eavesdrops on her monologue after the “adulterate villaine” exits (1265). Consequently, the admiral is converted: “I thought / all women had beene false: at leaste I tooke / the seamens wyves for such” (1324–26). Moved by her rhetoric (though not enough to intervene during the assault), Hobab privately promises his “good soule” to her (1356). That his reflection on the wife’s trials in port is immediately followed by the company officers’ dismissal of widows’ poverty and mariners’ deaths demonstrates the ironic juxtaposition typical of the play. The same Hobab convinced of the chastity of seamen’s wives is also convinced that the company is innocent of such charges as he himself voiced: “Victualls & mariners greately are Consumde, / Widowes & widowes Children unrelieved: / many shipps

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yearely sent, & few returne” (1483–85). Hobab never makes the connection between the two plots—Dorotea’s problems as a poor single woman and the EIC’s dependence on ordinary sailors and factors—but the audience may. Her penultimate appearance again features Dorotea in soliloquy, fitting for one whose semiwidowed condition leaves her “solus.” Her speech begins with urgent rhetorical questions about (in)justice: How suddenly doth fortune like the Moone encrease, & wayne, make rich and indigent? (2378–79; see also 1330–31)

Dorotea’s stage occupations—complaining, working, defending the reputation of seamen’s wives, and castigating other wives—are all arguably occasioned by the EIC. She grieves for her wasted youth, her limited mobility, and suspicions against her reputation: “Am I suspected for incontinent / Because sometimes to recreate my selfe / I see a play” (701–03). She speaks further of loneliness and want, of “liv[ing] in such anxieitie of minde / as ys of force to overcharge a woman” (699–700), of her poverty, vulnerability, and desire. She addresses these complaints to a series of male interlocutors, most of whom sue for her love (some via letter that she reads and then answers aloud—highlighting her solititude). Whereas the company promises charity and support, Dorotea’s situation belies that promise. She can count only on her own labor: . . . here’s the thinge that shall supply my wants, & keepe the bed of holy wedlocke still immaculate. worke, worke, poore dorotea: worke to live & live to worke: preserve thy honest name. (2393–97)

The independent working woman was common in seventeenth-century London: Gowing establishes that “[w]omen worked, often without a male partner, in markets, alehouses, and ships; in the dockside parishes many married women were making their own livelihoods in their husbands’ absence” (265). While Launching often speaks of the hardships of men’s labor, the “want & danger” (891) that seafaring husbands endure for their company, country, and families, it is in fact the lonely workingwoman who acts as dramatic presence. Her port world is staged, rather than the sea or the east. Mountfort may intend to promote the EIC discourse, but audience sympathy goes to Dorotea because of her labor. She is up “so early” while the company government sleeps (675). As she utters that paean to work quoted above, she

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enters “wth her worke in her hand,” “shewes her worke” (probably needlework), and “sitts [down] to worke” (s.d. 2377, o.s.d. 2393, 2398) while the shipyard men joke around.20 In this scene toward the end of the play, when Captain Fitzjohn “saves” Dorotea from his shipbuilding crew, he is shocked to see her condition reduced, recognizing her work as debasing: “hath stepdame fortune turned her ticklish wheel? / must vertue sitt at shopworke? gett a livinge / by hard handlabour?” (2582–84). His surprise is itself surprising since Dorotea had complained articulately about her poverty at their initial meeting. Instead of praising her productivity, he is baffled by her need to work: either because of “thine owne negligence” or “the adverse will of Cruel fate” (2596–97), overlooking the possibility that her husband’s extended absence on EIC business has impoverished her. Apparently, that two months’ salary invoked by Mun and Mountfort is inadequate support for even an honest seaman’s wife. The drama thus documents the hardships endured by the wife at home while the discourse attempts to exonerate the company of those hardships. That the captain must intervene (twice) with his own purse seems to point up the failure in Mun’s version of EIC maintenance.

Defending T he Domestic One way that Mountfort attempts to resolve the apparent tensions of the two plot strands is through the universalizing mode borrowed from Mun. In Mun-think, the company is blameless because poverty, death, deforestation, et cetera are unavoidable facts of life. Meanwhile, the domestic plot turns Dorotea into a kind of every (sea)man’s honest wife, willing to support the company’s requisites despite hardships. She achieves this sanctuary by her imagined union with other port wives— acknowledging the necessary woman-centered domestic life. Earlier I noted that Dorotea’s husband appears in her speeches only in the abstract—as an absence, and never in conventional marital metaphors— as, for example, a yoke-fellow or head. Only once in the play does a character hope for the seafarers’ return: when Trunnel offers “a health, to the / old boyes homewards bound” (1939–40). But, willing to drink, the wives nonetheless do not consider their men “worth the pledginge” (1941). For her part, Dorotea has less need for her husband than for a social apparatus that would allow her to function without him. Stated loudly and frequently, her main problem is her lack of male support in a culture that demands that women be supported. That lack forbids her erotic life, limits her mobility, makes her poor, causes rumors, and invites mockery from other women and men. The company that requires this absence from its workers does not accommodate the social and economic

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realities of their families. Ten times in as many lines in her final soliloquy she acknowledges that she appears alone (2919–28), but here she expands her identity to encompass “thousands more”: “within this brest are seamens honest wyves” (2929, 2926). So her final couplet (ending the play) describes her now as “[h]appy [to] leade such a lyfe, / and blest the seaman that hath such a wife” (2955–56). This imagined community of working wives defies the play’s predominant estimation of women’s labor: neither idealized nor debased, women’s work materially supports families and that work is necessary with men gone to sea. Further universalizing “the seaman’s honest wife,” Mountfort’s characters address the audience on the subject of good women, presenting Dorotea as a “mirrour of thy sex” (887) among exemplary women such as “Chast Penelope” (914) and Camilla (697). This pattern occurs, as rejected and reformed suitors discover: “no Chaster woman, then this sea-mans wyfe” (1329, 890–92). Once reprimanding Dorotea for her “lavish . . . tongue” (730), Captain Fitzjohn displays this paragon to the public theater audience (“within this Circled orbe” [898]): “you, you luxurious dames . . . whose husbands sayle / to Orientall India: here’s a patterne, . . . / live, live, by this example” (897–901). By thus exemplifying her, the play admits the voice of complaint against the EIC even as it tries to diminish the force of that voice. Ironically Dorotea’s champion adds: “who would not trace the furthest verge on earth / for such a wife?” (902–03). Traveling to “the furthest verge” created wives such as Dorotea, Nutt, and Sparke. Company seamen did travel for extended or indefinite periods; their absence tested the wives and challenged English society to accommodate these women-headed households. The Launching of the Mary uncovers both the “modern” economic practices of the EIC and the early modern lives directed by those practices.

Notes 1. All quotations come from Walter. But see Pangallo’s parallel-text modern-spelling edition, not available as I wrote this chapter. Walter suggests that no “[theatre] company would willingly have produced so remarkably unsuitable a play,” but the EIC may have subsidized a few “in-house” productions (x, vi, xi, xii). Jones describes “that cumbrous tract by the East India man Mountfort” (492). Heinemann observes that the “action, such as it is, . . . consists of two separate plots that alternate rather than connect”; the “tedious” play demonstrates the use of drama as City propaganda (210, 213). Others have briefly considered Launching in terms of textual and printing history (Werstine 68–69) or staging issues (Jones, 492; Hosley, 17–18). I thank the S.A.A. seminar leaders and participants in “Maritime Cultures” (Bermuda 2005) and my UH/Rice Writing Group.

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2. In a thread of messages relating to capitalism, on infodesign-café, Taylor-Pearce observes, “The Launching of the Mary is exemplar of the companies’ [sic] cross-media PR blitz, being in essence a dramatization of Thomas Mun’s earlier prose defense, The Discourse of Trade from England unto the East Indies (1621). . . . The town was at this point full of talk unfavorable to the company and its officials, and Mountfort’s play” responds to that criticism. 3. On allegations against the EIC, see Lawson 35 and Chaudhuri 55, 20. 4. The List of Characters is inconsistent with character tags (Walter xii). See also Lawson, 21. 5. Taylor-Pearce notes that Mountfort, “having been charged with minor peculations, clearly hoped the drama would restore him to favor [with the Company].” Walter reproduces, transcribes, and briefly discusses Mountfort’s petition regarding those “peculations” (xiv–xv). 6. Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1623) was the first English play known to be set in the Indies. See Forman, “Tragicomic,” and Neill. 7. Walter observes that the alternative title is “crowded into the heading” of the MS (vi). 8. On Mun’s legacy, see Barber, esp. 8–27; Lawson 35; and Forman, “History”. 9. Forman recounts Company workers’ mutinies and protests (“History” 639–40n45). 10. Similar syntactical constructions appear elsewhere in Mun’s treatises; see England’s Treasure 11. 11. Both Mun and the Launching defenders deploy ad hominem assaults against their detractors: “such Ignorants / as never yet weare able to discerne / the misteries Contanyed in Commerce” (Launching 223–25, 538; see also Mun, Discourse 3). 12. Dorotea refers to “the vigour of [her] yeares” and “Contemplations” again in 879–80. 13. See Newman’s study of early modern consumption habits and Howard’s on city comedy. 14. See Mun, Defense 41; England’s Treasure 11. For modern corroborations of Mun’s estimates, see Wild 67. 15. See Lawson 36 and Barber 14, 19–20 on the increase of “spin-off benefits” to the domestic economy. 16. “Bawdy-basket” was name for female rogues in the period, but Fumerton describes them as a kind of “transient worker” (38). 17. See Coleman, Holderness, and Northway on capitalists’ inspiration (or enforcement) of productivity. 18. Capp includes sailors’ wives among “women without men” (36, 141). See also Fumerton. 19. The Captain describes his relation to the company in marital terms: “bound, obliegd, egagde, devoted / to my much honored masters” (Launching 658–59).

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20. See Orlin on needlework and Callaghan on women’s work in the cloth trade.

Works Cited Barber, William J. British Economic Thought and India, 1600–1858. A Study in the History of Development Economics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Callaghan, Dympna, “Looking Well to Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England.” Marxist Shakespeares. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. London: Routledge, 2001. 53–81. Capp, Bernard. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Chaudhuri, K. N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1660. New York: Routledge, 1965. Coleman, D. C. The Economy of England 1450–1750. London: Batsford, 1971. Forman, Valerie. “History of the English East India Company.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 (Fall 2004): 611–41. ———. “Tragicomic Redemptions and Discourses of ‘Free’ Trade in the Early 1600s.” “Romances of Trade and Trauma” paper session. Shakespeare Association of America meeting. Philadelphia. April 2006. Fumerton, Partricia. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Holderness, B. A. Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750. London: Dent, 1976. Hosley, Richard. “The Gallery over the Stage in the Public Playhouse of Shakespeare’s Time.” Shakespeare Quarterly 8.1 (Winter 1957): 15–31. Howard, Jean. “Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II.” The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Ed. Henry S. Turner. New York: Routledge, 2002. 163–82. ———. “Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl.” Erotic Politics:Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992. 170–90. ———. “Shakespeare and the London of City Comedy.” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2001): 1–21. Jones, Marion. Rev. of Shakespearean Staging, 1599–1642, by T. J. King. Review of English Studies 23.92 (1972): 491–93. Kusunoki, Akiko, “‘Their Testament at Their Apron Strings’: The Representation of Puritan Women in Early-Seventeenth-Century England.”

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Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance. Ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992. 185–204. Lawson, Philip. The East India Company: A History. New York: Longman, 1993. Mountfort, Walter, The Launching of the Mary or The Seaman’s Honest Wife. 1623. Ed. J. H. Walter. Malone Society Reprints, 1932 (misdated 1933). Muchmore, Lynn. “A Note of Thomas Mun’s ‘England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade.’” The Early Mercantilists. Ed. Mark Blaug. Brookfield, VT: Edward Edgar, 1991. 186–92. Mun, Thomas. A Discourse of Trade. London, 1621. rpt. facsimile. New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. No. 85 The English Experience. ———. England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928. Neill, Michael. “Material Flames: The Space of Mercantile Fantasy in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess.” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 99–131. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Northway, Kara. “ ‘To kindle an industrious desire’: The Poetry of Work in Middleton’s Civic Pageants.” “Domestic/Civic/National Middleton.” Shakespeare Association of America meeting. Philadelphia. April 2006. Orlin, Lena Cowen. “Women on the Threshold.” Shakespeare Studies 25 (1997): 50–58. Pangallo, Matteo, The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife by Walter Mountfort A Modern Edition of a 1632 Manuscript Play. MA Dissertation: King’s College Univ. of London, 2006. Taylor-Pearce, Deborah. ⬍http://list.informationdesign.org/pipermail/ infodesign-café/2004-June/130619.html⬎. Walter, J. H. Introduction and Notes. The Launching of the Mary or The Seaman’s Honest Wife. 1623. Ed. J. H. Walter. Malone Society Reprints, 1932 (misdated 1933). Werstine, Paul. “Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1 (Spring 1990): 65–86. Wild, Anthony. The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from 1600. New York: Lyons Press, 2000.

Chapter 7

The Flowers of Paradise: Botanical Trade in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Engl and 1 Amy L. Tigner

Recreating Paradise In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world known to the English was rapidly expanding, from the Americas and Africa to India and Asia, but this new globe was accessible only to a minority of the English, first to explorers and eventually to colonists and merchants. For the vast majority of the British population, however, the outside world remained abstract—until trade enabled the importation of global products, including plants. Introduction of foreign plants into English gardens represented a physical incorporation of the new world within the soil of the old. Because plant trade represented a relatively small portion of English commerce, horticultural importation relied upon existing trade routes developed around more lucrative products that merchants were already conveying across the globe. Though the transportation of botanicals into England was miniscule (often only a few seeds), this early trade in horticulture created an enormous ecological and cultural impact on the English landscape and the English imagination. Gardens had traditionally been symbolized as microcosms of the world; however, with the burgeoning of English colonialism, gardens became material microcosms, composed of the actual plants originating

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from the four corners of the earth. Imported horticulture in this period was a luxury item, desired both for beauty and for rarity; as exotic commodity obtained primarily for aristocratic and wealthy middle-class consumption, botanical trade required the commercial scaffolding of empire. New World discovery was predicated on the pursuit of new routes for the spice trade; the slave trade facilitated and sustained the viability of colonialism. Along with general commerce, the spice trade and slave trade enabled the acquisition, transportation, and dissemination of the plants that were to populate the English garden. The newly discovered land of America, along with the already discovered (though exotic) lands of Africa and Asia, increasingly became nursery gardens for England and Europe. Exploration changed the way that the English imagined landscape, and importation transformed English gardens. These plants revolutionized the English horticultural and gastronomic landscape; in essence, the garden became a site for reconstructing, owning, and naturalizing the larger world within a plot of English land. Once the products were imported into the country, the English had to discover how the plants were to be used: for food, for medicine, or for ornament. The process of categorizing and cataloguing exotic horticultural products gave rise to the invention of the botanical garden and the publication of new herbal manuals that described in detail the physical properties of the plant, the methods of cultivation, and the plant’s origin. This process of incorporation of foreign horticultural commodities into the garden and the English mindset is emblematic of the English conception of possessing the expanding world. For most Europeans possession of the world became a twodirectional process: one of egress, through exploration and eventually colonization; and one of ingress, procuring the world’s products within one’s own country. As living entities, plants were reproducible and adaptable, thereby suited to be assimilated into English culture: enriching the table, the medicine cabinet, and the landscape. The acquisition and trade of global plants reflect the essential belief that one could recreate the Garden of Eden with plants from abroad. Ideologically, Eden was a site that the English wanted to imprint onto the New World and simultaneously desired to fashion domestically. The idea of the garden and the perceived discovery of a new paradise inflected much of the language surrounding both Asian and New World exploration. The conceptions and myths about the East were transferred to the New World, specifically in terms of the representation of America as a new Eden. Under the sponsorship of Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hariot traveled to Virginia in 1584–1585 to explore the potentially exploitable resources that might form the new backbone of English commerce. In A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588), Hariot promoted America both as a place of plantation

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and as a source of desirable commodities, including a host of flora that could either be grown in America and then transported to England or could eventually be transplanted and cultivated at home. At the beginning of the text, an engraving of Adam and Eve identifies America as a new paradise that would revive England both morally and financially through the products that could be introduced into the English market (see figure 7.1). Texts about the New World, such as Hariot’s, propounded that the exportation of New World plants was an importation of the Edenic plants rediscovered in the Americas. From a biblical standpoint, Eden had originally possessed all of the plants that God had created, “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew” (King James Bible, Gen 2.5). Discovery and trade of foreign botany constituted the recollection of Edenic flora, thereby enabling the possibility of restoring paradise. Perhaps the most vivid site of Edenic reproduction in the early modern world was the botanical garden. The first botanical gardens came into existence in Padua and in Pisa in 1543, then in Florence in 1545, and Bologna in 1567. Others were soon influenced by their Italian counterparts: Leiden opened its botanical garden in 1587, followed by Heidelberg and Montpellier in 1593.2 In 1621, Oxford University created the first botanical garden in England, and one was begun in Paris in 1626 (Tomasi 81). As John Prest writes, “The great age of the botanic garden followed the discovery of the New World” (1). Along with the exploration of the New World, new trade routes opening to Asia and the recovery of ancient herbal texts all encouraged the development of botanical gardens. In the early sixteenth century, the discovery and dissemination of Latin and Greek herbal texts or res herbaria inspired a renewed interest in botanicals.3 Classical opinions led Renaissance humanists to introduce the field of botany into university curricula, leading to the creation of the botanical garden. Studying plants firsthand was necessary, since Renaissance knowledge of plants through classical herbals and treatises was limited, and the number of plants existing in early modern Europe greatly outnumbered those recorded by the ancients. The Greek Dioscorides had listed around 600 plants in his herbal, whereas by the early seventeenth century, Casper Bauhin could name nearly 6000 types of flora in his 1623 Pinax, theatric botanici (Reeds 540). The primary cause for such influx was the increased commerce that enabled the importation of plants from America, Africa, and Asia. Every plant was to be accessible and, therefore, knowable; in the botanical garden, the physical properties of the plants from around the world could be examined firsthand without the observer ever leaving the path. Though knowledge was available only through initial possession, true possession of the plants came from

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Figure 7.1 Frontispiece, Thomas Hariot, A brief and true report (1588) Source: This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

the knowledge obtained by the botanists; one had to know the plant, how to keep it alive, and discover all its potential usages for the transplanted flora to become naturalized and owned in the domestic soil. Ideologically, ownership of plants enabled the horticultural illusion of possessing the entire world and of actualizing Eden.

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The botanical garden design often reflected a symbolic representation of the world as a whole. European garden design was influenced by ancient Persian gardens, which were laid out in a square cut into quarters, meant to represent the four corners of the earth. Botanical gardens elaborated on this fundamental design idea, since not only would the layout come to correspond with the four continents— Europe, Asia, Africa, and America—but also the plants would represent their continents of origin. The botanical garden at Padua, for example, was laid out in the shape of a circle as if to suggest the globe; inside the circle were four parterred squares where the plants were cultivated. In this way, the newly reconstituted map of the world was recreated microcosmically in the layout of the garden. The botanical garden was to reproduce the paradise from which all seeds purportedly originated, but the seeds needed to be counted and catalogued to ensure Edenic completeness. This quest brought about the first systematic study and categorization of plant life in Europe since the classical period. The botanical gardens constructed a rigorous system of organization in which all plants were placed according to their species, genus, and place of geographic origin. The designer of the Jardin du Roy in Paris, Guy de la Brosse, explained the garden’s arrangement: “The plants are arranged in their beds in their species according to their genus, so that anyone familiar with a certain species can be sure that all the known genus is there” (qtd. in Tomasi 82). The layout of the botanical garden catalogued and controlled the plants and by extension the world from which they came. The world was being incorporated in Europe, where it could be a knowable and ownable commodity. The botanical guidebooks of the period demonstrate such sentiments: Horto de i semplici di Padova (published by Girolamo Porro in 1591) claimed that in the botanical garden in Padua they were collecting the whole world in a chamber; in his Paradisi Batavi prodromus sive plantarum exoticarum in Batavorum hortis observatarum index (1689), Hermann said of Leiden that the plants were being derived from both Indies, indeed the whole world; and Thomas Baskerville noted in “The Preface to the Philobontanick Reader” (1658) that in Oxford specimens were cultivated from “the remote Quarters of the World” (qtd. in Prest 44–45).4 The idea of importing paradisiacal flora to regenerate England’s landscape also occurred in William Harrison’s 1587 The Description of England, in which he exclaims about the wide practice of trading, introducing, and cultivating new plants from around the globe: It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americans, Taprobane [Sri Lanka], Canary Isles, and all parts of the world. . . . There is not almost one nobleman, gentleman, or merchant that hath not great

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store of these flowers, which now also do begin to wax so well acquainted with our soils that we may almost account of them as parcel of our own commodities. They have no less regard in like sort to cherish medicinable herbs fetched out of other regions nearer hand, insomuch that I have seen in some one garden to the number of three hundred or four hundred of them if not more, of the half of whose names within forty years past we had no manner of knowledge. (265–66)

For Harrison, the incredible number of new flora symbolized the whole new world—from America to India to Africa, indeed from “all parts of the world”—reproduced in England. This horticultural project spanned the middle- and upper-class socioeconomic spectrum from the merchant to the upper-middle-class gentleman and finally to the aristocracy. The fact that Harrison leaves out agricultural laborers and farmers (unless they are gentlemen)—those who would normally be involved in horticultural pursuits—marks this kind of gardening as a leisure activity that possessed significant cultural capital. Merchants were essential to the aristocratic garden enthusiasts, however, as they had access to the sources of the plants imported into England or even Europe. Unlike other types of commodities, plants represented only a small percentage of goods imported into the country, yet their importation was most often reliant on the same merchant ships that were importing other more common and abundant goods, such as silks and spices from the East.

Procurement, Trade, and Proliferation The commentary in Renaissance herbal texts illuminates the varying modes by which English plantsmen and aristocratic gardeners were able to obtain their precious commodities: through indirect trade with foreign merchants; through English merchants; or through direct procurement either by a merchant or the plantsman himself. In his 1629 Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, John Parkinson discusses the acquisition of the double yellow rose, which was “first procured to be brought into England, by Master Nicholas Lete, a worthy Merchant of London, and a great lover of flowers, from Constantinople . . .; but [which] perished quickly both with him and with all others to whom hee imparted it” (420). Parkinson continues to say that another merchant was then able to acquire the double yellow rose again and had more success in its cultivation: “yet afterwards it was sent to Master John de Franqueville, a Merchant also of London, and a great lover of all rare plants, as well as flowers, from which is sprung the greatest store,

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that is now flourishing in this Kingdome” (420). In the case of both Lete and de Franqueville, Parkinson notes that they were “great lovers” of flowers or rare plants, indicating that plant importation was not a mainstream activity of merchants in general but rather one that merchant connoisseurs shared with those who had a similar horticultural passion. Often English merchants had contact with foreign merchants and would specially request that they acquire and transport plants into England as the merchants traveled their regular trade routes for other merchandise. Parkinson’s description of the Persian Lilly (Lilium Persicum) chronicles how Nicholas Lete was instrumental in obtaining the plant through foreign merchants: “This was, as it is thought, first brought from Persia unto Constantinople, and from thence, sent unto us by the meanes of divers Turkie Merchants, and in especiall, by the procurement of Mr. Nicholas Lete, a worthy Merchant, and a lover of all fine flowers” (30). Like other merchandise, plants traveled from the East through Constantinople, as the city was the major spice and silk–trading hub between Asia and Europe. Since earlier than the Middle Ages, one of the most common overland trading routes from East to West departed from the Persian Gulf and arrived in Constantinople, where merchants, often from Venice, would distribute the merchandise all over Europe (Keay 105–06). Like the spices and silks that made the long journey from the East, plants were part of the luxury trade of exotica so desired by those who could afford the extravagance. In his 1597 Herball, John Gerard discusses the procurement of plants by way of Constantinople for the aristocratic consumer: “The double white Daffodill of Constantinople was sent into England unto the right Honorable the Lord Treasurer, among other bulbed flowers” (111). The buyer, the lord treasurer, was none other than William Cecil, Lord Burghley, for whom Gerard himself worked as head gardener of one of Burghley’s estates, Theobalds. As lord treasurer involved in economic matters of the country, particularly in customs, Lord Burghley would have had contact with both foreign and domestic merchants who could obtain rare plants during their regular trading voyages to Constantinople or destinations further east. Some of the “bulbs” that were sent from Constantinople, such as the Tulip, originated in Turkey itself, while others, such as the Crown Imperial, was brought from Constantinople “into these Christian Countries” but originated in Persia (Parkinson 28). Other major ports would also have functioned as clearing houses for exotic plants that were marketable to traders and merchants who were gathering other goods. Plants such as the Aromatic Sedge, or Aromaticall Reedes as Gerard calls it, arrived in England primarily because its place of origin, in this case Tripoli, was one frequented by merchants who traded in Europe: “The true Calamus aromaticus

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groweth in Arabia, and likewise in Siria, especially in the moorish grounds at the foote of Libanus, neere unto the towne of Tripolis, where there is great resort of English marchants, as of other nations out of most parts of the world” (56). Although Gerard himself sees no need to mention it, the reason that so many merchants, English and foreign alike, frequented Tripoli had to do with the thriving slave market. Glossed over by Gerard and other herbalists, the plant market was intertwined with the slave trade, making its routes to Europe, on to the New World, and back again. Established as plantation intended to enrich Europe, America was imagined as Eden, but the unspoken toil required to sustain paradise was provided by the slaves. Most slaves coming into Europe in the late sixteenth century departed from Africa via Tripoli because it was the closest Mediterranean port. The number of slaves was enormous: Ralph Austen estimates that an annual average of 1,500 slaves was exported from Tripoli between 1550 and 1699 (227). Alongside the slaves from Tripoli, other commodities, including plants, appear to have been marketed, sold, and transported across the Mediterranean. Though the plants were destined to gardens in Europe, the slaves would have been bound primarily either for the Islamic slave market in the East or to the Americas, frequently via European slave markets in Venice, Lisbon, Seville, or even as far north as Antwerp (Postma 3). Often slaves en route to a colony in the New World would be carried by a ship from the mother country; slaves bound for Brazil, for example, were commonly carried by Portuguese merchants, who were the major slave traders in the Renaissance. Nonetheless, merchants did not necessarily correspond nationally or even religiously with their destination, as in the 1585 example of a slave ship going from Tripoli to the Levant, taken by the Knights of Malta (Austen 10). One only has to look at the familiar literary example from The Merchant of Venice, in which Antonio has “an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies . . . a third at Mexico, a fourth for England” (1.3.15–17), to see how merchant ships traveled and traded internationally. Making general assumptions about trade routes, I would argue that Antonio seems to have been involved in the slave trade (picking them up in Tripoli, perhaps taking them to Mexico, and bringing back gold and other New World commodities), the spice and silk trade (collecting luxury items in the Indies and delivering them to Europe), and the wool trade (perhaps trading the spices and silk for English textiles). On their ships, Antonio-like merchants were potentially carrying additional saleable items, such as plants, that were not major trade commodities themselves. Buyers had to rely on the existing trading routes and merchants interested in importing extra merchandise back to Europe. Because the seeds or plants would have taken little space on the ship and would not have been as difficult to transport as

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human slaves or other larger and more precarious cargo, they would provide the merchant some additional material goods for specific buyers with relatively little trouble. Carried in the bellies of slave ships, plants originating from diasporic countries and new colonies came to fashion Eden at home. The beauty of paradise imagined both in the foreign and the domestic soil belied the ugly realities of colonialism. As slaves were headed to the Americas from Europe and Africa as a source of cheap labor for colonial mines and plantations, American plants were sent back to Europe and to other destinations where European merchants had trade connections, such as Africa and Asia. In the case of the tomato or “apples of love” (after pomo d’amour), the plant originated in the west coast highlands of South America and had been cultivated in the major pre-Columbian cultures of Peru and Mexico (see figure 7.2). The Spanish encountered the fruit after Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in 1519, importing it to their mother country where it became a popular dish that spread to other Mediterranean regions. By the late sixteenth century, English herbalists were aware of the tomato but thought of it as an ornamental rather than an edible fruit. Parkinson acknowledges that “in the hot Countries where they naturally growe, they are much eaten of the people”; however, in his garden he categorizes the tomato as a “curiousity” and grows them only for the “amourous aspect or beauty of the fruit” (380). Gerard had also grown tomatoes in his garden, but he does not seem to know their actual provenance, declaring that “Apples of Love do growe in Spaine, Italie, and such hot countries, from whence my selfe have received seedes for my garden, where they do increase and prosper” (275). Although Parkinson is informed about the tomato’s Peruvian ancestry, he thinks they were also growing wild in Africa: “They growe naturally in the hot Countries of Barbary, and Ethiopia; yet some report them to be first brought from Peru, a Prouince of the West Indies” (380). As the Aromatic Sedge had been traded out of the Barbary Coast by means of the existing slave trafficking routes, the tomato seems to have made its entrance into Africa by way of the same trade circuit. As a general practice, the Spanish distributed desirable plants to the corners of their expanding empire; the Spanish carried the tomato not only to North Africa, but also to the Caribbean, where the slaves were bound to work in the sugar plantations, and to the Philippines, where the Spanish were involved in the spice trade and eventually sugar production (Smith 16). As tomatoes graced the English gardens as ornamentals, they also fed the mouths of the slaves that sustained colonial pursuits. At the base level, botanical trade into England relied on other commercial enterprises, such as the spice or slave trade, to transport the horticultural merchandise either to England directly or into Europe,

Figure 7.2 “Apples of Love,” John Gerard, Herball (1597) Source: Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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where plants could be more readily procured. Often the horticultural trade was incredibly specialized: plants changed hands from one aficionado, such as Nicolas Lete, who had direct access to the market, to others, for example, professional gardeners and plantsmen such as Gerard and Parkinson, interested in obtaining the exotic. The plantsmen in turn were often in the business of procuring botanicals for aristocrats such as the Duke of Buckingham, for whom gardener John Tradescant wrote to Edward Nicholas, secretary of the admiralty, in 1625 to arrange for merchants from “All Places But Espetially the Virgine & Bermewde & Newfownd Land” to “furnishe His Grace With All manner of . . . slipes or seeds Plants trees or shrubs” (qtd. in Allan 114–15). Though only peripheral compared to other commercial ventures, botanical trade or collection was important enough to aristocrats that the government officials in charge of the merchant trade complied with their requests. The marketability of botanicals arriving from various trade routes was limited to specific buyers. Yet, as only one seed or root would generate an abundance of the plants, the cultural and ecological impact of the botanical trade was enormous, and, after a plant was introduced, further importation was unnecessary unless the plant did not take. As exotic plants were in the process of being acclimated in the English terrain, Harrison saw their importation and cultivation as one of nationalistic interest: the world’s products would become England’s “own commodities,” those that could be reproduced and disseminated domestically for economic profit. Indeed, this period of time marks the beginning of professional plantsmen and nurserymen, whose business it was to cultivate, propagate, and sell both foreign and domestic plants to the growing population of horticultural consumers. The most famous professional gardeners in the business of importing foreign plants and producing them for sale in the early seventeenth century were John Tradescant the Elder and his son, John the Younger. Between 1610 and 1620, John Tradescant Sr. had personal experience traveling and collecting botanicals while he was working for Robert Cecil as the head gardener at Hatfield House. He toured the Low Countries and France and journeyed to Russia to acquire a variety of plants, most of which were rare or did not exist in England. John the Younger continued his father’s passion for accumulating new plant varieties and species, making three separate expeditions to North America. The Tradescants were the first to cultivate these new plants in their garden at Lambeth, where they adjusted their growing practices to accommodate and habituate the species to the English soil and climate.5 Successful plants soon produced a surplus that the Tradescants sold to other gardeners, thereby supplying the avid enthusiast with a world of new horticultural wonders. Unlike gardeners relying on foreign or domestic merchants for plant acquisition, the Tradescants were willing

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to travel great distances and suffer many hardships to procure new botanicals themselves, either by trade or by means of their own collecting, and, therefore, they were perhaps the most successful at importing new plants into England and at cultivating the plants once they arrived. As John Parkinson observed of Tradescant the Elder, “[H]e hath wonderfully laboured to obtain all the rarest fruits he can heare off in any place in Christendome, Turky, yea or the whole world” (Paradisi 575). Tradescant’s trade was indeed one of luxury that supplied the growing English appetite for the exotic botanicals. Luxury, however, can obscure its unsavory associations; Parkinson, along with Gerard and Harrison, employ the rhetoric of discovery, science, and nation building that obfuscates the global politics of colonialism and its reliance on slaves. The slave trade, often used to transport horticulture, supported and sustained the aristocratic and merchant culture of conspicuous consumption. All of the herbals look inward to England, but the botanical trade was reliant on exotica from abroad that exacted real human costs; certainly Tradescant “laboured” to possess the world’s bounty, but much of the real labor involved in the conquest of plants was that of slaves. Slave labor, like the laborers in gardens themselves, is concealed by the fiction of the Golden Age and by horticultural writers who promote the English Edenic fantasy.

Plants as Luxury Increasingly, pursuit of luxury was the driving force behind horticultural trade, as aristocrats and merchants clamored to possess the exotic and the beautiful. As Claudia Swan explains, already by the late sixteenth century, the garden “was a space in flux: while it continued to be used for humanist recreation and for the cultivation of known varieties for medicinal (pharmaceutical) purposes, it grew to accommodate the rapidly developing accumulation and study of unknown, foreign, and rare plants” (228). Earlier in the period, new plants were often imported specifically for medicinal purposes, as it was thought that drugs derived from new world plants would cure new world diseases (syphilis, for example) and that other drugs (such as tobacco) would remedy diseases (such as cancer, ironically) that had existed for centuries without a cure. In Thomas Mun’s 1621 treatise, A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East Indies, the importation of plant derivatives emerges as one of the primary arguments for commerce. Mun describes how “learned men . . . have undertaken” to write about “Drugs and comfortable Spices, Which, have beene so much desired in all times, and by so many Nations . . . to cure their diseases” (6). Though Mun acknowledges that some luxury trade products are superfluous, importing plant derivatives for the purpose of health benefits the public good, he argues, and

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should be allowed to continue. To bolster his case, Mun includes in the marginalia a reference to Rembert Dodomeus (Dodoens), a Flemish doctor and herbarist, and his Historie of Plants (translated into English in 1586 by Henry Lyte) as further evidence of the necessity of obtaining foreign plants or plant-derived drugs and spices for the nation’s well-being. In his dedication to the reader, Henry Lyte explains that the purpose of Dodoen’s text is to provide medicinal information so that any of his “Countriemen” could use plants growing in the garden or field to cure various ailments: But the good and virtuous Physition, whose purpose is rather the health of many, than the wealth of himselfe, will not (I hope) mislike this my enterprise, which to this purpose specially tendeth, that even the meanest of my Countriemen . . . may yet in time of their necessitie have some helpe in their owne, or their neighbors fields and gardens at home.

Dodoen’s herbal is primarily designed to be a medical reference, and the plants he lists, either domestic or foreign, are provided for their curative applications, not for their aesthetic value. Mun, therefore, cites this text rather than John Gerard’s more recent herbal, which catalogues plants not only for their remedial properties but also for their decorative appeal. During the approximately 10 years between the publication of Lyte’s translation of Dodoen’s History of Plants and Gerard’s Herball, a shift in horticultural perspective begins to emerge, from importing plants primarily for their practical, medicinal usage to acquiring foreign plants predominately for their beauty and exoticism. Mun employs Dodoen’s as opposed to Gerard’s more recent herbal precisely because Gerard clearly participates in the kind of trade in “luxury” commodities that Mun shuns. Mun’s conservative argument looks to the kind of commerce he associates with necessity, rather than acknowledging and supporting the luxurious trade that was becoming more and more common in the seventeenth century. Collection and cultivation of plants for medicinal usage declined in the seventeenth century and was primarily confined to doctors, midwives, and apothecaries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medicinal botanical trade would again prosper in the service of a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.6 However, in the seventeenth century, luxury botanicals provided a larger and wealthier market, from the aristocrats who desired all the newest and rarest of flowers to the rising merchant class whose trade allowed both exposure to desirable horticultural goods and the means by which to purchase them. In turn, writers of herbal manuals fashioned imagined gardens in their books that featured more flowers and decorative plants and prized the exotic

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and rare. Gerard opens his Herball with a dedicatory epistle to William Cecil that argues that the study of plants leads to the cultivation of one’s mind and that delight in plants enriches the land and lauds its owner: Among the manifold creatures of God . . . none have provoked mens studies more, or satisfied their desires so much, as plants have done, and that upon just and worthy causes: For if delight may provoke men’s labour, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversity of rare and costly jewels?

To his aristocratic patron and to the upwardly mobile middle-class reader, Gerard suggests that dressing the garden with flowers and decorative plants is tantamount to clothing oneself in the finest apparel, and—as with sartorial luxury goods—the most valuable is not only the most beautiful but also the hardest to obtain. The distance the “orient pearl” (whether derived from the Eastern shellfish or from the foreign soil) must travel increases its allure and, therefore, its worth. The herbal functions as a catalogue of plants, showing how to grow and use them; however, the herbal’s popularity also stems from its ability to describe and illustrate the beauty of the plants and their exotic provenances. Like classical herbals, Gerard’s text provides under each plant entry a detailed section entitled “The Place,” in which he describes the origins of the flora. This section advertises foreign plants and thereby increases the delight of gardening through the veneration of the rare. If the gardener, or armchair gardener, cannot afford the actual plants, the herbal enabled readers to experience the newly imported botanical world without leaving their houses and actually participating in global horticultural trade. Yet, for the aristocrat or the wealthy merchant, collecting, cultivating, and possessing both the common and the rare demonstrated their financial abundance, showcasing both their wealth and power through the beauty of the embroidered “earth apparelled with plants.” Building on the aesthetics of Gerard’s text, John Parkinson in his 1629 Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris emphasizes the pleasurable aspects of plants over their medicinal usage. Rebecca Bushnell writes that “for Parkinson his book’s value lay in its selectivity and in its organization of nature into hierarchies and affinities” (63). By organizing the book with flowers and decorative plants according to their principal horticultural roles, Parkinson shows how readers should value botanical beauty above utility and how gardens should be planted with aesthetic over practical (culinary or medicinal) considerations. The frontispiece announces the book’s purpose as “A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permit to be nourished up” (see figure 7.3). Parkinson

Figure 7.3 Frontispiece, John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole (1629) Source: This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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explains in the dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria that his book is a “speaking Garden,” designed to “informe you in all the particulars of your store, as well as wants, when you cannot see any of them fresh upon the ground: and it shall further encourage him [the gardener] to accomplish the remainder.” The book is meant to illuminate the details of plants already existing in the English terrain, as well as those newly available— imported wonders of America, Africa, and Asia—and it gives explicit information about the origins of the plants and how they arrived in England. The book functions imaginatively (when the reader, specifically the Queen, cannot see the actual plants due to the season), instructively (educating the reader exactly how to cultivate a multitude of plants), and psychologically (allowing the reader to possess these foreign and domestic horticultural commodities within the cover of the book if not in actuality). Just as the illustration of Adam and Eve in Hariot’s text promotes the New World as Eden, Parkinson’s similar engraving and his title (which translates as Paradise in the Sun; Earthly Paradise) champion England itself as the new Eden. By means of his text, Parkinson contributes to the horticultural and ideological project of regenerating paradise in English landscape, an idea that will continue to resonate both visually and rhetorically in the seventeenth century from the Royal displays of power to Puritan ideas of reform.

Eden as Royalist Rhetoric As Parkinson’s text demonstrates, the Queen had a great interest in her garden, as it represented beauty obtained through wealth and power. The exquisiteness of the garden was meant to be a direct reflection of Henrietta Maria herself, so for her gardener the Queen chose John Tradescant the Elder, the most famous plantsman who had the greatest access to trade in exotic botanicals. In 1630, Tradescant was appointed keeper of the gardens, vines, and silkworms at Oatlands Palace, an estate granted to Queen Henrietta Maria. Not long after Tradescant was in the service of the Queen, Henrietta Maria sent a letter requesting exotic plants to her mother, Marie de Medici, who had a great interest in gardens and had made many improvements to the French royal estate gardens. Though Henrietta Maria did not mention Tradescant’s name explicitly, it is likely that it was he whom she sent, as Tradescant had experience gathering and transporting plants from abroad. In France, the garden was a location where Marie de Medici staged her political spectacles, or Magnificences, in which she displayed her power through grandeur and expenditure both in the physical surroundings of the garden and in the extravagance of the performance.7 Similarly, in 1631, Henrietta Maria sponsored and acted in Chloridia, Ben Jonson’s horticultural masque played before the King

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for Shrove-Tide.8 The masque presents the arrival of spring and Chloris, the “queen of the flowers and mistress of the spring,” who must triumph over the wintry elements: tempests, lightning, thunder, winds, and rain unleashed from Hell by the mischievous Cupid. The Queen, enacting the role of Chloris, and her ladies, playing her attending nymphs, were all dressed in white and silver and trimmed with flowers in their head-tires. The stage itself was dressed like a garden, “consisting of pleasant hills planted with young trees and all the lower banks adorned with flowers.” The scene would certainly recall the newly enhanced garden at the Queen’s palace at Oatlands, and, indeed, the flowers and trees may have been real, potted from the stores of plants that Tradescant kept. The conceit of the masque was that the Queen of the Caroline court was the ruling force that could bring about spring even in the wintry month when the masque was performed. Henrietta Maria’s focus in this masque gives us an indication of how flowers had become a court fashion; like the masque form itself, the display of the exotic flora in the dead of winter exhibited the Monarch’s complete control and power. Similar to Parkinson’s herbal manual, the masque simulated the botanical garden with its Edenic and colonial implications for the royal and court viewers. In the masque, the Queen manifested the return to Eden or the Golden Age, in which “The Springtime lasted all yeare,” as in Golding’s Ovid (1.122); the Queen’s Eden, however, was one that contained not simply domestic English flora, but imported, exotic foreign flora, showcasing England’s acquisition and possession of the flowers and the lands from which they originated. The masque concludes with a final triumphant image signifying the Caroline imperial worldview: “Here out of the earth ariseth a hill, and on the top of it, a globe, on which Fame is seen standing with her trumpet in her hand” (205, my emphasis). Following Fame’s ascension, Poesy, History, Architecture, and Sculpture (along with nymphs, floods and fountains) appear sitting on the hill to sing of the monarchal power that Fame will spread throughout the globe. According to the fiction of the masque, this power originates from the paradisiacal setting created by Chloris herself. Iconographically, Fame atop the globe promotes English, specifically Stuart, possession of the world, which is further proclaimed by the very elements (Poesy, History, Architecture, and Sculpture) created to be monuments of Caroline power—or future power. Representationally, the masque conveyed the royal ability to offer the aristocracy a domestic paradise populated with plants from what will become the empire; yet, the rhetoric of the masque and the image of the globe itself also imply that Chloris and her bower have the power to reproduce an English paradise throughout the world. On the stage and in the estate gardens,

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botanical art created from the world’s bounty promoted this newly forming imperial ideology originating from the political heart of England. Over the course of the seventeenth century, from botanical trade and botanical collecting to aristocratic displays of power, horticulture exploded as an English obsession, causing what Keith Thomas has called a “Gardening Revolution” (224). The Oxford Botanical Garden, after it was established in 1621, practiced the system of importing, collecting, and acclimating new plants and then selling the surplus to others. After publishing a list of their horticultural collection in 1648, the sales of their plants escalated, further disseminating both knowledge and living artifacts from the expanding world. The plant trade, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, enabled the cultivation and propagation of nearly all of the plants that are mainstays for the English Garden today. Plants were rarely the primary objective for trading; yet, this minor trading commodity led to a multitude of plants in the country, thereby changing the face of English ecology. The process of importation and naturalization of so many plant types marked the beginning of a dramatic expansion of flora: in England in the year 1500, only 200 kinds of plants were cultivated in gardens; in 1597, John Gerard lists 1033 species growing in his garden; and by 1839, the number in England had increased to 18,000 (Thomas 226; Harvey 128; Reed 70). Over the course of the sixteenth century, the number of plants introduced into Europe was 20 times that of the preceding 200 years (Morton 118). The importation and propagation of new botanical specimens during this time period produced a change not only in the landscape but also in the political ideology. Though seemingly benign, trade in plants trafficked with the most egregious aspect of colonialism, the slave trade, and the imported plants that formed the new paradise were in fact trophies of empire. If the seeds from around the globe could be brought into England and cultivated with success, England could, in essence, if not in fact, possess the entire world and regenerate Eden within its very domain.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Allison Carruth for her thorough reading of this chapter; her insightful comments enriched and clarified the argument. 2. For information about the effect of Dutch Trade on the botanical garden at Leiden, see Swan. 3. Herbals and treatises on plants by Theophrastus, Pliny, Dioscorides, and Galen had become available in recently printed editions, with all the Greek texts newly translated into Latin. See Reeds 526–27. 4. Baskerville’s quote is from P. Stephens and W. Brown, Catalogus Horti Botanici Oxoniensis (1658).

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5. Information about the Tradescants is from Hobhouse 111, 1126–27, and from Leith-Ross. 6. See Schiebinger, “Prospecting for Drugs” and Plants and Empire, for more information about naturalists searching for pharmaceuticals, particularly in the Caribbean. 7. See Yates for more information about Marie de Medici’s Magnificences. 8. Chloridia, the text of the masque, comes from Lindley 147–54.

Works Cited Allan, Mea. The Tradescants: Their Plants, Gardens and Museum 1570–1662. London: Michael Joseph, 1964. Austen, Ralph. A treatise of fruit-trees. Oxford, 1653. Austen, Ralph A. “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave-Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census.” The Human Commodity. Ed. Elizabeth Savage. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1992. 214–48. Bushnell, Rebecca. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Dodoens, Rembert. A new herball, or historie of plants. Trans. Henry Lyte. London, 1586. Gerard, John. The herball or Generall historie of plantes. Gathered by Iohn Gerarde. London, 1597. Hariot, Thomas. A Brief and True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia. Ann Arbor: Clements Library Associates, 1951. Harrison, William. The Description of England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1968. Harvey, John. Early Nurserymen. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1974. Hobhouse, Penelope. Plants in Garden History. London: Pavillion, 1992. The Holy Bible: King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990. Keay, John. The Spice Route: A History. London: John Murray, 2005. Leith-Ross, Prudence. The John Tradescants. London: P. Owen, 1984. Lindley, David. Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Morton, A. G. History of Botanical Science. London: Academic Press, 1981. Mun, Thomas. A discourse of trade, from England vnto the East-Indies. London, 1621. Parkinson, John. Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris. London, 1629. ———. Theatrum botanicum. London: Thomas Cotes, 1640. Porro, Girolamo. Horto de i semplici di Padova. Venetia, 1591. Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1600–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Prest, John. The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Reed, Howard S. A Short History of the Plant Sciences. Waltham, MA: Chronica Bontanica Company, 1942. Reeds, Karen Meier. “Renaissance Humanism and Botany.” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 526–27.

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Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. ———. “Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies.” Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 119–33. Smith, Andrew F. The Tomato in America. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1994. Swan, Claudia. “Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade.” Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 223–37. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983. Tomasi, Lucia Tongiorgi. “Botanical Gardens in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” The History of Garden Design: The Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day. Ed. Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. 81–83. Yates, Frances Amelia. The Valois Tapestries. London: Warburg Institute, U of London, 1959.

Chapter 8

Inhaling the Alien: R ace and Tobacco in Early Modern E ngl and Kristen G. Brookes

In a surprising double reversal of the proverb “You Can’t Wash an

Ethiop White,” the frontispiece to Richard Brathwait’s The smoaking age (1617) exclaims, “How much changed from white are these Englishmen transformed into Ethiopians” (figure 8.1).1 Countering the well-known proverb’s declaration that differences between kinds are natural and inalterable, Brathwait proclaims that racial transformation is indeed possible. In Brathwait’s engraving, the sign of racial difference is not visible on the surface of the body, but rather is located in the pipe that introduces tobacco into it and in the smoke that wafts out. This suggests, on one hand, that these are ephemeral transformations and that the smokers have become Ethiopians only in the sense that they are imitating an “Ethiopian” habit, demonstrated by the trade figure with whom they are juxtaposed: “A Black-more upon the Stall, with rolls of Tobacco Drinking his Petoune, according to the nature and guize of that Country.”2 Yet, on the other hand, the tobacco smoke’s highly visible entrance into the body, along with its even more striking exit from it, suggests that we are witnessing not simply the imitation of a foreign habit, but an incorporation of the alien into the English body.3 Brathwait’s mottoes and engraving indeed point to the possibility— made explicit by other antitobacconists—that tobacco might transform Englishmen into Africans by altering not the surface of the body, but instead its very core.4

Figure 8.1 Frontispiece, Richard Brathwait’s The smoaking age. In Multibibus, Blasius. Disputatio inauguralis theoretico-practica . . . (1617) Source: This item is reproduced by permission of the The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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The anxiety about racial transformation articulated in The smoaking age is part of a larger set of concerns about the integrity of England in the face of increased global traffic.5 Conservative voices frequently linked “excessive” English consumption of extravagant food, clothing, and “trifles” to moral decline and national degeneration. Of particular concern was not only the imbalance between what the English consumed and what they exported for consumption, but also a loss or dilution of English national identity through the imitation of foreign habits and styles, part of which was effected through the purchase of foreign goods, especially articles of clothing. The ingestion of foreign substances (such as food and drugs) into English bodies was seen as posing an even more profound threat to England and the English “race,” contaminating and even poisoning both English people and the English body politic.6 Tobacco served as a particular focus for discourse against the consumption of foreign drugs, initially because of its introduction into England and Europe in the sixteenth century as an herbal panacea. Some writers found the idea of this popular panacea unsettling, for, according to humoral theory, cures should work differently on people of different ages, sexes, temperaments and with different ailments. On similar grounds, such writers were disturbed by the notion that English bodies might respond to tobacco in the same way as American and other bodies; as Timothie Bright put it, if the qualities of a medicine “agre with the . . . complexion of a Moore, an Indian, or Spaniarde, then must it needes disagre with ours” (sig. F4v). While, in the minds of humoralists and others, the successful use of tobacco and other foreign drugs had the potential to disturb racial divides, the smoking by Englishmen of American tobacco (which became widely popular and highly fashionable in the 1590s) seemed even more disturbing to those concerned with keeping English identity intact. More than donning a foreign style of clothing, eating a newly imported food, or using an herbal from abroad, smoking tobacco called attention to the incorporation of the alien, for, as Joan Pong Linton puts it, “smoking . . . dramatizes [the] exchange” (119) between inside and outside, both as the actual taking of a foreign substance into the human body and as a visible reminder of an alien product having been taken into the body politic. Partly because of the novelty of smoking and hence the oddity of seeing smoke coming out of the body, the exhalation of tobacco smoke brought to early modern English minds the notion of a foreign substance traversing the body and suggested that the English self had been “visibly transform[ed]” by “the incorporation of an other” (Linton 119). In the pages that follow, I take as my primary objects of study tobacco pamphlets, poems, and images—published mainly in the first

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two decades of the seventeenth century—that express anxiety about English national and racial integrity. Focusing on tobacco’s associations with darkness and surprisingly—given its New World origins—with the African, I explore the language of racialized contamination and transformation stimulated by the excessive inhalation of this alien product into English bodies. Ultimately, I argue that the sale (or “vent”) and consumption of this New World “weed” was figured not only as making Englishmen internally African, but also as transforming the English body into a vent for filthy, alien waste. This racialized nexus of associations of tobacco with blackness, with the African, and with bodily waste seems to have had some staying power; several decades later, a quite similar discourse emerged in pamphlets against coffee, another muchconsumed dark product from another “dark” land. Many antitobacconists who participated in the tobacco controversy of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries spoke of tobacco’s insinuation into England and English bodies in the racialized language of fair and dark.7 In his Work for chimny-sweepers (1602), for example, Philaretes figures tobacco as a “swartie Indian” who, “pla[ying] the painted English Curtesan,” has been corrupting “faire Albion” from within (sig. A4v). Addressing tobacco, Philaretes declares, “thou Pagan Idol: tawnie weede, / Come not with-in our Fairie Costs to seede.” He goes on to imagine himself beating tobacco until it is “never t’set foot more on our Farie land.” Thus, opposing “faire Albion,” the “Farie land” with its “Fairie Costs,” to the “tawnie weede,” Philaretes suggests that if this stranger is not purged from England, it may leave on it an indelible stain.8 John Deacon emphasizes the mark made by tobacco on smokers themselves, personifying it as a traitor who leaves behind him a trail of darkness: This is a Traitour, and doth treason warke; Braine cleare and bright, with smokie mists polluting: And with his colour blacke, obscure and darke, Throughout the body every part imbruing. (196)

Despite his use of personification and verse form, Deacon is not speaking figuratively here. Along with several other antitobacconists, he saw tobacco as literally blackening the insides of smokers’ bodies, corrupting the very core of the body. In the words of Deacon, who apparently witnessed the anatomies of several smokers, tobacco “corrupteth and defileth the whole body with a blacke, filthie, and smokie colour” (42); “tobacconists’” “entrails [are] as blacke as a coale” (sig. A1r).9 Some writers associated this internal darkening with race. Edmund Gardiner, for example, in The triall of tobacco (1610) reports that Indians discovered the practice of tobacco-smoking precisely so that their

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inward color would match the color of their skin: There be some hold opinion that certain Indians dwelling neere unto Torrida Zona, were the first inventors and finders out of this smokie medicine, that inwardly also they might turne blacke: for you must imagine, that their Morian-black hue pleased them wondrous well, and they judged it no reason that the inward parts should any whit differ or varie from the outward. (18r–v)

Later, in A crew of kind London gossips (1663), Samuel Rowlands writes of an inveterate smoker: With filthy leaves he smoaks his head withal, Such weeds as Indians do Tobacco call: But sure as Black-amores look outward skin, So Collier-like are English-men within. (qtd. in Brooks 2: 358)

By making a parallel between the internal appearance of English smokers and the external appearance of “Blackamoors,” Rowlands comes quite close to suggesting that smoking turns Englishmen into Africans, at least on the inside. As this early modern English focus on tobacco’s darkening of the body might suggest, despite its American origins, in both promotional and moralistic discourse, tobacco was often associated with the African. In “Plutoes Proclamation concerning his Infernall pleasure for the Propagation of Tobacco” (1614), John Taylor introduces tobacco into a racialized nexus of associations with blackness. He first capitalizes on the identification of blackness with hell to make an argument that it is natural that people with dark skin, who are also non-Christians (and, therefore, are not only physically, but also symbolically “black”), are smokers of tobacco. For Taylor, specific nationalities are not significant (indeed, he says both that “the Indians, and other farre remote barbarous Nations were the first that used it” [sig. D2r] and that “first it came, from faithlesse Moore” [sig. D3r]); for his purposes, nonChristians with dark skin all belong to Pluto’s kingdom, while white Christians await his corruption.10 Taylor locates the origins of tobacco not so much in the New World as firmly outside of white Christendom, anywhere inhabited by people who have dark skin and lack faith in a Christian God; as Pluto explains to his court, before this attempt to spread into Christendom, he caused tobacco to grow in “Rich America, . . . India, and blacke Barbaria,” the “blacke Nations that adore my name” (sig. D1r). Taylor suggests that tobacco makes people resemble Pluto in both spirit and in appearance, the latter due to the resemblance between the

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smoke exhaled from the body and the smoke from the fires of hell. In his proclamation, Pluto declares that tobacco has “a long time . . . beene in continuall use and motion, amongst the Sunburnt, tan-skind Indians, Barbarian and the rest of our black guard inhabiting in America” and expresses his pleasure that “our execrable servantes on the earth [have] come so neere our infernall Tartarian sulphorous contagious stinke, with their terestriall imitations” (sig. D1v–D2r). Pluto’s aim is, of course, to win over subjects for himself from the kingdom of God. Through tobacco, he wants not only to convert Christians, but also to transform them so that they resemble him, both in body and in spirit. He sends his minions out to disperse tobacco “through all Christian lands,” in order to make Christians “all like to [him],” as are “Moores and Pagans,” so “[t]hat from the Palace to the paltry nooke, / Like hell in Imitation all may look” (sig. D1v). Taylor appends to his work “Certain verses written in the Barbarian tongue, dropt out of a Negroes pocket, which I thought good to insert, because they tend to the honour of Tobaco”: Vaprosh fogh stinkquash flavorumques fie fominoshte Spitterspawlimon, loathersom hem halkish spewriboshte Mistrum fog smoakrash, choakerumques olifa trish trash Dam durticum belchum, contagioshte vomitroshe: Whifferum, puffe gulpum, allisnuff huff fleaminon odish, Rewmito contaminosh diabollish dungish odorish . . . . (sig. D3r)

These lines, written in a somewhat nonsensical blend of Latin and English, with perhaps an Irish accent (as in Macmorris’s line, “What ish my nation?” [HV 3.3.61]), speak of the venting of tobacco; we hear, for example, of stinking vaprous fog, spitter-spawling, a hawkish throatclearing, spewing, a dirty belch, and contagious vomiting. To the reader who does not stop to parse the poem (and I suspect we are not really meant to), it reads like a list of disgusting exoduses from the body brought about by tobacco. In addition to the most obvious result of inhaling tobacco—its exhalation in a “vaprous stinking fog”—tobacco unleashes from the body a barrage of disgusting smells, sounds, and fluids. In the final lines of the poem, the African speaker declares, in first person, “I remit contaminating diabolical dungish odors.” The poem— which, having dropped out of the African’s pocket, is, essentially, refuse—celebrates tobacco’s disgusting effects, ending with what is essentially a diabolical, contaminating fart from the body of the African himself.11 This figure, who vents both “diabolical dungish odors” and poetry in praise of the contamination caused by tobacco, is a fictional version of an actual promotional phenomenon. In England, as well as in

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Europe, a “black boy” or a “blackamoor”—either a picture or a carved figure like the later cigar-store Indian—was commonly used as the sign of a tobacconist’s shop.12 It is also possible that actual men of color were employed to advertise tobacco by smoking in front of a tobacconist’s shop, as some lines from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair suggest.13 These trade figures, intended to promote the sale of tobacco, helped to cement in the English mind an association between Africans or Blackamoors and tobacco that could be readily exploited for moralizing purposes, as we see not only in the frontispiece to The smoaking age, but also near the end of this text, when Time declares, “So when I behold that Tawny-faced Aethiopian that stand out pictured with a Pipe in his hand, to entice the poore passenger, may I justly cry out; Now doe I behold the misery of the world; the corrupter of Cities; the depraver of youth; the dotage of Age; the dissolution of all!” (176). The symbolic reading of the association between tobacco and the African reaches a high (or perhaps a low) point in the 1630 broadsheet The armes of the tobachonists (Figure 8.2).14 The focal point of the arms is the eyes of a Moor, who returns the viewer’s gaze with a malevolent glare. The Moor’s head is crowned with tobacco leaves, with two pipes angling out from its sides. There is a chamber pot right beneath his lips, and smoke emanates from his nostrils. The moral tells us that the “[t]he Moores head shewes, that cursed Pagans did, / Devise this stinke, long time from Christians hid” and that “[t]he Sable field” in which the fair boy is located “resembles hells blacke pit.” This broadsheet makes quite graphic the association, made earlier by Taylor, between tobacco, hell, and nonChristians, whose skin color is seen as a sign of the darkness of their souls. While the source of tobacco is the New World, I believe the Moor (here, clearly Negroid, rather than Arabic) is chosen because he represents the epitome of blackness, in a way that “tawny Indians” do not. The eye is drawn quite quickly from the gaze of the Moor down to the smoking white bottom below, which stands in contrast to both the Moor and the dark field in which it is located. The figure in the pit is A Man reverst proper improperly, In a field Sable mounting up on high, His faire posteriours whilsts, his head and hands Are pendant to his legges where on he stands; Out of his mouth two pipes a Cheveron makes From whom the precious vapour that he takes: He at his backe side, very freely vents, As sweet as sugar carrion to the sent:

The poet makes explicit that tobacco smoking results in the reversal of the natural order of things; the white boy’s bottom is exposed, open,

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Figure 8.2 The armes of the tobachonists (1630) Source: British Library shelfmark C.30.f.2.(5). © The British Library. All Rights Reserved.

and positioned above his head; he is “reverst proper improperly.” This reversal is emphatically reiterated by the notion of black over white presented through the depiction of the Moor’s head over the white boy’s inverted body. This broadsheet, then, represents tobacco as a contaminating, alien presence that will reverse the order of things, sending

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Englishmen to hell and subjecting white to black. It warns that smoking tobacco will make one completely subject to a corruptive force, represented by a menacing Moor, dark both of skin and of soul. The smoker is positioned so that we can witness tobacco smoke entering his body as well as exiting it. It leaves not through his nostrils or mouth, but rather through his anus, suggesting a more complete permeation of the body by the dark, alien substance one inhales, as well as, of course, a more filthy and stinking venting. This fair boy has invited a dark stranger into his body; the stranger has travelled through him— “imbruing,” in Deacon’s words, “every part” “with his colour blacke, obscure and darke”—before exiting out the back door.15 Further, this boy, whom we might think of, in Philaretes’s terms, as “Faire Albion,” has been left open and vulnerable, inviting penetration. Smoking has transformed this fair-bottomed boy into a “smooth-faced Ganymede” (161), a figure Brathwait suggests would also entice customers to Pluto’s tobacco shop. The smoker’s bottom, which, willy-nilly, might well increase an English tobacco shop’s business, is aimed both at the viewer and, I would argue, at the Moor, suggesting both that the Englishman has made himself vulnerable to penetration by the Moor and, given the early modern associations between Moors and sodomy, that Albion of the Faire Posteriours has, in effect, turn’d Turk.16 Perhaps, as Philaretes’s call to “caste [one’s] eyes on the smoake issuing forth of the nosthrils of the Tabaconnists” (sig. G1r) suggests, exhaling the alien is ultimately even more significant than inhaling it. The venting of the alien signals a profound transformation of the self, because it reminds witnesses that this substance has traveled through the entire body. Further, while inhaling may make the smoker’s body a repository for soot, exhaling makes the body into a chimney that vents a “contagious stink” from a dark, alien source, and this “stink” may be sensed not only by the nose, but also by the eyes; smoke exhaled is, as Linton puts it, the visible sign of “an otherness within” (118). The armes of the tobachonists makes this “otherness within” especially apparent; in this image it is as if Taylor’s “Barbarian” words, “Rewmito contaminosh diabollish dungish odorish,” are voiced by the “faire posteriours” themselves. I did not begin this chapter intending to focus on a fart. But this fart is important, because it is a striking indication of the sort of reversal many feared would take place as a result of excessive consumption of products from abroad. It is also part of a larger discourse of international exchange. In the preface to The smoaking age, the narrator, refusing a Bermudan tobacconist’s plea for support, writes “that Alexander Severus would have smoaked such sellers of smoake, and Xerxes would have pulled their skin over their eares; if these smoakie Merchants . . . had vended, or vented those commodities in their time” (87). Here,

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Brathwait punningly brings together two senses of the word “vent” associated with the sale and consumption of tobacco, as well as with other sorts of international exchanges. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the seventeenth century, “vent” meant letting something escape or issue forth from a confined space, as one might vent smoke out a chimney, and it also had related meanings associated with or even specific to the bodily discharge of waste (sb. 2, II.9.b and v2, I.2.b).17 Additionally, “vent” was an economic term, meaning “to sell or vend (commodities or goods); to dispose of by sale” (OED v. 3, 1a).18 The significance of these two senses of the term “vent” in an England newly opened to cross-cultural transactions is conveyed strikingly by the scene from The Tempest in which Stephano and then Trinculo first encounter Caliban. This scene brings together two different notions of venting the alien, one a sort of mercantile fantasy, the other a comic version of a cultural nightmare of exchange. At the beginning of the scene, Caliban hears Trinculo coming, and, fearing it is a spirit sent by Prospero to torment him, hides under his cloak. When Trinculo first discovers him, he is not sure what to make of him, but whether this “monster” is man or fish, he begins to dream of the profit he could make by importing him into England: Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man—any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. (2.2.27–32)

Similarly, Stephano, upon discovering an even stranger creature, a fourlegged “monster of the isle” (2.2.63), imagines the great profit he could make by bringing this alien home: “If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s-leather. . . . I will not take too much for him; he shall pay for him that hath him, and that soundly” (2.2.66–68; 74–75). After dreaming of venting this alien, Stephano sees his fellow would-be vendor of the alien as being vented by the alien, in a different sense. Pulling Trinculo out from under Caliban’s cloak, the bewildered Stephano asks, “How cam’st thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos?” (2.2.101–02). Clearly, this scenario plays on a common colonial nightmare, in which, rather than consuming foreign land and resources, the explorer is consumed by the alien whose land he has invaded. Caliban (famously, an anagram of “cannibal”) has apparently consumed one who meant to make him an object of consumption. Stephano’s vision is, of course, a comic version of this nightmare. Trinculo has apparently been eaten up by, passed

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through, and turned into the excrement of an alien, yet miraculously, he not only survives, but also emerges unscathed and unchanged, very much himself; as Stephano puts it, “Thou art very Trinculo indeed” (2.2.100–01).19 This scene also resonates with a Jacobean nightmare about mercantilism, in which importing products makes England into a sort of vent for foreign waste, a receptacle for that waste, or even, as Stephano so vividly suggests, makes waste of the kingdom and its consumers. The venting represented in The armes of the tobachonists—in which smoking turns the English body into a vent in another sense, “the anus, anal, or excretory opening of (persons or) animals” (OED n2, II.9b)—is certainly an extreme expression of Jacobean nightmares about consumption of the alien.20 Yet it is well within the range of the seventeenth-century English imagination. Some voices against coffee, another exotic commodity that was highly racialized, speak in precisely the same tongue. Coffee’s resemblance to excrement, in both color and odor, is a recurrent theme in the literature on coffee. In The Ale-wives complaint (1675), for example, the Ale-wife tells the Coffee-man, “[D]o not you magnify the vertues of your Coffee, and tell wonders of its effects, when o’th my conscience it seems both by tast and smell to be no better than a Sirrev—pulveriz’d and intermixt soot, one gives it the Hogo, and to’ther the colour” (4).21 Similarly, in John Tatham’s Knavery in all trades, or, The coffee-house (1664), when the Turkish coffee man complains that “de Cat sirreverence” has gotten into the coffee, his man responds, “o sir let it boyl well, a Dog or Cats Turd is as good as the Berry itself, ’twill give a rare hogo sir, and make the drink the better” (sig. B4v). A cup of coffee: or, Coffee in its colours (1663) satirizes the English appetite for such a “shitty” product, claiming that even a “forraign Fart . . . sells quick as the new Perukes now adays.” Given this, the broadside makes the outrageous suggestion that English merchants exploit their countrymen’s appetite for alien waste by saving their own urine and excrement and marketing it as an exotic product, with an outlandish foreign name: “Jumble’t together, call it Scythian Sack, / Tantavelin, Fogofarto, or but some New name, not known in English Christendome.” This strategy, suggests A cup of coffee, will lead to tremendous success: You’ll be besieg’d with Money and good Words For the rare Juyce that your Back-sides affords; Ye shall make Coffee stink. In short, be all Made men at length, for to make men withal. ‘T shall ne’er be said, a Turdy Turk could do More with a meer Sirreverence then you.

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This reversal of the reversal of the sort of which The armes of the tobachonists and The Tempest speak does not exactly put matters straight. While The Tempest suggests that attempting to “make a man” of oneself by venting a “monster” might end up making one into alien excrement, A cup of coffee advocates “mak[ing] a man” of oneself by marketing domestic waste as a foreign luxury. Like the smoker in Armes, the English merchants imagined in this broadside are “open-arsed.” Yet, rather than making them vulnerable to a menacing Moor, the opening of these men’s bodies will, preposterously, enable them to profit greatly and even to outdo the Turks who threaten to undo them. While A cup of coffee imagines a darkly carnivalesque conquest over an economic threat from abroad, much of the literature on coffee (which burgeoned in the 1660s and 1670s) figures this exotic commodity as a serious economic threat. Probably because of the very real threat of the Ottoman Empire and because of English perceptions of Islam as emasculating and hypersexual, coffee pamphlets often figured the economic threat posed by this import in sexual terms, which, in turn, were sometimes inflected with the language of economics.22 Even as anticoffee discourse focused on sexuality and on the Turkish threat, it also deployed the racialized nexus of associations with darkness used by antitobacconists. In The Maidens complaint against coffee (1663), for example, not only is Mr. Black-burnt’s coffeehouse referred to as a “Hell-black Ordinary” (2) and as the “Devil’s Ordinary” (2), but also coffee is spoken of as blackening its drinkers; Mrs. Troublesome tells her husband, the Usurer, that he will “ene make [his] body as black with this cursed liquor, as [his] Soul is with extortion” (1). This notion of internal blackening is again associated with racial and religious difference in the postscript to this “merry conference,” in which the Mountebank declares: “[Coffee] makes a Christian blacker far within, / Than ever was the Negars outward skin” (6). Thus, the image of the dark alien insinuating himself into English bodies through their economic and corporeal consumption of imported goods continued to haunt the English imagination. “A Broad-Side against Coffee or, the Marriage of the Turk” (1676) figures the mixing of coffee beans and water as a miscegenative union between a “Turkish Renegade” and “Christian” English water (58–59). This match is represented as unlikely and unnatural, partly because of the contrast in their external complexions—“Coffee so brown as berry does appear, / Too swarthy for a Nymph so fair, so clear” (59)—and partly because of an incompatibility of their internal ones. Fascinatingly, the writer draws direct parallels between this marriage and Othello’s marriage to Desdemona: Incorporate him close as close may be, Pause but a while, and he is none of he;

Inhaling the Alien Which for a truth, and not a story tells, No Faith is to be kept with Infidels. Sure he suspects, and shuns her as a Whore, And loves, and kills, like the Venetian Moor . . . .

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A dangerous alien, like Othello (as Brabantio and Iago would have it), this foreign groom has stolen from and darkened his adopted land: “This canting Coffee has his Crew inricht, / And both the Water and the Men bewitcht” (59). Coffee and tobacco, the Turk and the African, are brought together in a woodcut representing “the Tobachonists Armes, and Turks Coffee-house.” This woodcut appears in John Hancock’s The touchstone, or, Trial of tobacco (1676), only three pages after “A BroadSide against Coffee,” which suggests that it depicts a sort of union between fair England and a dark, non-Christian “other” parallel to that in the verse it seems meant to accompany.23 Here, four figures appear under a crest with a smoking Moor above, an inverted white smoker below, clearly modeled after The armes of the tobachonists. In this alien’s space, an English man and woman smoke pipes and drink coffee, served to them by an African slave, whose face is identical to the face of tobacco in the crest. The couple is sandwiched between the slave and a turbaned Turk, who is smoking and drinking coffee along with them. This couple’s “union” with the Turk and the African is formed, of course, not through an exchange of vows, but rather through a commercial exchange. Clearly, this image is meant to portray the English consumers as highly vulnerable and as being corrupted by foreigners because of their desire to inhale and ingest exotic products. More dramatically, the setting of this entire scenario under The armes of the tobachonists suggests that this exchange will turn the English consumers into the debased figure of the “faire posteriours,” their bodies open both for ventilation and for penetration. The looming presence of The armes draws coffee into the racialized nexus of associations with blackness often invoked by antitobacconists and also suggests for the English couple a hellish fate of humiliating subjection. Given this, the presence of the African in the coffeehouse seems symbolically redundant. Yet, while this reiteration may add nothing new, it does, as the menacing Moor comes down off the wall and reappears in the guise of a slave, remind viewers that, even though the goods the consumers so desire may be produced or even served to them by black slaves, ultimately it is the fair consumers themselves who are enslaved.24 As I embarked on this project, I was surprised by tobacco’s association with the African. I was also surprised to hear the same associations reiterated in anticoffee discourse. Yet perhaps this pattern should not

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be surprising at all, given the dark color of these substances and England’s racialization of itself as fair, against an often undistinguished dark world outside of its own borders and outside of Christendom. Yet the questions still remain: Why was the trade figure for tobacco so often a “black boy” or a “blackamoor”? Why was tobacco represented as turning Englishmen into “Ethiops”? Why was coffee referred to as turning its “Christian” drinkers as dark on the inside as “the Negars outward skin”? One approach to answering these questions is to turn to a few historical connections between tobacco and Africa, most of which are represented in the frontispiece to The smoaking age. In spite of tobacco’s American origins, trade figures such as Brathwait’s “Black-more” made sense in seventeenth-century Europe in part because Africans were thought of as inveterate smokers.25 Further, as historian Allison Blakely notes in his study of the Dutch version of this figure, “[t]he Moor had long been the main symbol of trade contacts with the outside world” (59). “The Smoking Moor’s” English counterpart, the “black boy” or “blackamoor,” appealed to the English consumer through an exoticism associated with blackness; these figures represented, as Kim Hall has said of black people brought to England as slaves, “the riches that could be obtained by European travelers, traders, and collectors in the Atlantic enterprise” (212–13). Blakely suggests also that “[t]he black African could be associated with tobacco both because African slaves in the New World cultivated it and because African peoples were thought to be highly sensual” (59). Blackness’s associations with long-distance trade and with slavery may both be found in the frontispiece to The smoaking age. While, from the front of the shop, the smoking “Black-more” beckons passersby, within the shop, above the Englishmen smoking in a room screened from the public by a curtain, are “shadowed” “Negroes . . . fishing and diving for Pearle: Confined to an Iland, expressed by this word: Necotiana.”26 Here we have African figures from two different registers. The first, a rather noble figure in ancient Roman garb, is a symbol for the exotic, for new commodities brought into England through long-distance trade; the latter, apparently naked, seems to signify African slavery in the New World, the world of tobacco. Certainly, given the history of what is now the southern United States, one might assume that the seventeenth-century English association between Africans and tobacco has to do with the cultivation of tobacco by black slaves. Yet, it was not until the 1680s—50 years after the publication of The armes, the latest tobacco text I discuss here—that African slaves became the primary cultivators of tobacco in the New World. In fact, in Virginia and Bermuda, as well as in Spanish and French colonies, tobacco was grown primarily by European settlers, often with the aid of

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white indentured servants who labored to pay for their passages across the Atlantic.27 According to Jordan Goodman, in contrast to sugar— which “from its early beginnings in the New World, was inexorably linked to African slave labour” (167)—tobacco was very much associated with the European: “whether in the Chesapeake or later in Bermuda and the West Indies, indentured servitude, settlement and tobacco cultivation were inextricably linked” (169). Looking again at Brathwait’s frontispiece, we see that, while it does gesture toward African slavery in the world of tobacco, the connection it makes between tobacco and slavery is an associative, almost figurative one. Although they do seem to be slaves in a literal sense—fishing and diving for pearls on an island named after a New World crop—the three black men in the picture are not slaves who raise tobacco, but rather slaves to tobacco; they are “[c]onfined” to the island of Necotiana. Thus, we see that, while slavery is one term in a discursive field of blackness often brought into play by antitobacconists, this term does not always accompany African figures. In the mind of the seventeenthcentury English person, “African” does not necessarily equal “slave,” even when invoked in the context of tobacco; what now might seem a commonsense association did not make quite the same sense until the last decades of the seventeenth century. Significantly, in order to assure the proper resonance for the white smokers’ motto about transforming into Ethiopians, the frontispiece’s artist, William Marshall, had to add on the picture of the slaves.28 Certainly, another explanation for tobacco’s association with the African is the tendency of early modern England to conflate its “others,” defining itself against an often undifferentiated field of spiritual and physical darkness. While such terms as “blackamoor,” “Ethiopian,” “Negroe,” and “black Barbarian”—along with images such as those that accompany this chapter—make undeniable an association between tobacco and the African in moralizing discourse, it is important to remember that, in advertising language and elsewhere, “black boys” and “blackamoors” are not necessarily “black,” as we think of it. The images in Ambrose Heal’s The Signboards of Old London Shops, for example, show that some signboard “black boys” or even “blackamoors” (used by linen drapers, lacemen, haberdashers, and other tradesmen) are, in fact, Native Americans. Others have typical subSaharan hair and facial features but are dressed as American Indians and often are accoutered with bows and arrows. Similarly, some tobacconists’ statues conflate the American Indian and the African; as Susan Iwanisziw puts it, “the countertop statues of African boys . . . [were] often dressed as savages [sic] in tobacco-leaf skirts and feathered headdresses” (75).29 While geographic specificity did signify, for commercial and dramatic purposes, “the main prerequisite” of such figures was, as

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Blakely suggests, “that [they] be exotic, . . . that [they] seemed from another world” (58–59). Ultimately, it was because of a combination of several factors (the profound cultural symbolic force of the opposition between black and white, Christian and non-Christian; superficial connections between dark skin, a dark beverage, a tawny weed, and cloudy smoke; the exotic appeal of blackness; the smoking habits of Africans; and their enslavement by Europeans) that, in order to convey the deepest threat to English bodies and to the English national body, writers and graphic artists often swerved away from the specificity of tobacco’s and coffee’s places of origin, in favor of the figure of the African, who could wordlessly speak the language of darkness. Yet, some of the most fascinating moments come when this symbolic figure is imagined as speaking for himself—like Taylor’s fictional “negro,” who wrote, “Rewmito contaminosh diabollish dungish odorish”—and when this same symbolic language passes through the bodies of Europeans, as in Brathwait’s frontispiece and in The armes of the tobachonists. Clearly, although putting words such as Taylor’s into African mouths only furthers a demonization often deployed to justify slavery, at the same time, these moments do seem to offer at least a fictional space of agency for those imported to labor in the name of international commerce. The words that escaped from the pocket of Taylor’s “negro” make us wonder about what might have slipped out from the slave in “Turks Coffee-house” while his master was in a cloud of smoke. What sort of verse might he have written? Of what exchanges might he have spoken?

Notes I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I did the initial research for this chapter. I am grateful also to Susan Campbell Anderson for providing me the opportunity to present an early version at a panel on “New Approaches to Early Modern Prose”: The South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Meeting (2004). I would like to thank Rebecca Poage and Susan von Salis for research housing and assistance, respectively. I would like also to thank the participants in the SAA seminar “English Long-Distance Trade” for their enriching discussions, as well as Deanna Shemek, the coeditors of this volume, and the anonymous reader at Palgrave for their generous feedback. 1. This phrase is Brooks’s “compound translation of the [three] Latin phrases contained in the scrolls above the smoke” (2: 37). On the proverb “to wash an Ethiop white,” see Prager, Newman, and Hall, esp. 62–73 and 107–16. For an alternative reading of Geffrey Whitney’s emblem “Æthiopem lavare,” see Brookes 218–22.

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2. The terms “moor” and “blackamoor” were both associated with blackness and sometimes referred specifically to a person from North Africa; the former often “signified a generalized Islamic identity” (Vitkus 91) and could also be “synonymous with black African” (Barthelemy 1), although the latter often signified a generalized African identity, even as it still carried an association with Islam. For more on these terms, see Barthelemy 1–17, Hunter 51, and Loomba, esp. 45–74. 3. For a reading of tobacco as “the focus of an emerging controversy in which the status of the self was fully implicated in commercial exchange” (118), see Linton 104–30. Linton also writes about smoking tobacco as an incorporation of the alien. In contrast to my work—which has more to do with the African than with the American—Linton’s focuses on cultural and commercial exchange between England and the New World, arguing, for example, that English consumption of American tobacco “undoes the boundaries between civilized and savage” (118). 4. The engraving is actually by William Marshall. 5. My references to anxieties about race point to early modern concerns with the maintenance of an English racial identity—national and cultural, and also a matter of biology or blood—in the face of intimate encounters with others against whom the English defined themselves. On the fluidity of the notion of race in the early modern period, see, for example, Hendricks. On the complexities of ideologies of race and for a useful bibliography, see Loomba. 6. On the threats posed by breast milk and foreign food, see Wall 127–60. On those posed by foreign drugs, see Harris. 7. Here I am indebted to Kim Hall’s work on discourses of “fair” and “dark,” “black” and “white”; see especially 1–24 and 62–122. For references to older discussions of the tobacco controversy, see Linton 224n38. For more recent discussions, see Anderson, Knapp 134–74, Linton 117–26, Pollard, and Rustici. 8. The term “Albion,” meaning “white land,” was frequently deployed in the project to construct England as “white,” in contrast to its “dark” others. 9. This idea was echoed on stage in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), in which Mistress Overdo declares, “the lungs of the tobacconist are rotted, the liver spotted, the brain smoked like the backside of the pigwoman’s booth, here, and the whole body within, black as her pan” (2.6.39–42). See Knapp 311n64 for references to internal blackening cited by Brooks, in Tobacco. 10. Rustici notes that in More Knaves Yet? (1613), Rowlands “suggests that Moors were the first human smokers (167).” He also points out that “an anonymous poem appended to a 1624 edition of John Skelton’s Elinour Rumming conflates [the] two notions concerning tobacco’s origins, as it supposes that smoking ‘Was ne’re knowne before / Till

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14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Kristen G. Brookes the devil and the More / In th’indies did meete, / And each other there greete’” (167). In The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Jonson locates the origins of tobacco in a tremendous fart let by the devil (1041–46). See index to Brooks (5: 158) for references to the “blackamoor” as trade figure or sign; see also Brooks’s discussion of Brathwait, esp. 2: 37. “He would name you all the signs over, as he went, aloud . . . I thought he would ha’ run mad o’ the black boy in Bucklersbury that takes the scurvy, roguy tobacco there” (1.4.104–08). Brooks cites these lines as possible evidence of actual advertising practices (2: 37). This is probably a parody of an actual trade crest. Thomas Allen describes a tobacco-pipe makers’ arms having on its crest “A demimoor in his dexter hand a tobacco-pipe, in his sinister a roll of tobacco” and as supporters “Two young Moors proper, wreathed about the loins with tobacco-leaves vert” (423). This company was incorporated in 1663, but it is likely that a similar sort of arms existed before the broadsheet was published. On the association of what Bakhtin calls the “lower bodily stratum” with darkness and with “dark” people, see Daileader, esp. 308 and 323. As Vitkus points out, while the primary meaning of to “turn Turk” was to convert to Islam, this phrase often carried the sense of sexual transgression or perversion (84–86). The armes’s preposterous image resonates with Goldberg’s brilliant reading of a Gulf War-era T-shirt that bears the turbaned image of Saddam Hussein superimposed over the anus of a camel, accompanied by the slogan, “America will not be Saddam-ized” (1–6). Here I give the citations listed by Netzloff (92). Also notable is an example given for a definition that refers to exhalations, liquids, or smoke passing out of a confined space by way of an opening: “Corrupt exhalacions, ventynge out of mens bodyes” (v2, II.11.a.[a]). The OED notes that this sense was “very common from c 1600 to c 1670.” For more commerce-related meanings, see OED n3. Netzloff argues that “[a]t its base, venting is an economic term . . . [,] an idea linked with the mercantilist preoccupation with ‘vending’ and commerce” (92). Here, as Netzloff points out, Shakespeare also plays on another sense of the term “vent,” which Netzloff calls “colonial venting” (91): “the rid[ding] ([of] a kingdom) of people” (OED v.2, I.8.a); see also Netzloff 92. A recurrent image in tobacco literature is the smoker as chimney. While often negative, this representation of tobacco was also part of a related fantasy about venting, in which the exhalation of tobacco is a release of ills native to the body, rather than of a by-product of a foreign substance taken into it. Along these same lines, Knapp

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

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argues that supporters of tobacco, trade, and colonization saw these three things as means for England to open itself up for a much-needed venting (141–45). In his chapter “Divine Tobacco,” Knapp deals at length with the praise of tobacco and with the positive transformations some believed it offered England and its people (134–74). According to the OED, “sirreverence” means “human excrement” or, with “a,” “a piece or lump of this.” See, for example, The womens petition against coffee (1674), esp. 2 and 6. See Hancock 63. This image may also be found on the same page of an earlier addition of Hancock’s collection, entitled Two Broadsides Against Tobacco (1672). As Linton points out, in the dedicatory verses to his “Tobacco Battered,” Joshua Sylvester makes a similar point about tobacco, “denounc[ing] . . . the ‘Indian tyrant’ for keeping thousands of Englishmen ‘under slavish Yoak’ ” (121). See also Rustici 168. See Gately 59–63. This quotation is from the first of two explanatory leaves to the frontispiece, reproduced in Brooks 1: 37. The name of this island translates as “tobacco”; “Nicotiana” is the name of the genus that includes all tobacco plants. See Blackburn, Goodman, and Macmillan (key word: “tobacco”). Rustici makes the intriguing suggestion that, while “the image of the Moor . . . reduced to a static ornament . . . implies European control over the alien, the scrolls streaming above the heads of the three smokers . . . imply the opposite” (168). He concludes that “[t]he frontispiece . . . casts doubt on who was mastering whom during European encounters with Africans” (168). I agree with this conclusion but would note that the shift from exotic Moor to a state of enslavement takes more interpretive work without the three black men in the picture. In Brathwait’s image—as in others—the multiple and sometimes conflicting notions about black Africans were simultaneously exploited to suggest that the appeal of an exoticized blackness can lead one to the blackness of servitude. On the association between blackness and exotic foreign luxury goods, see Hall, esp. 212 and 232. A photograph of such a statue may be found in Iwanisziw (76). For illustrations of signboards that conflate the Indian and the African, see Heal, esp. 110, 112, 118, and 167; it is also informative to view the images indexed under terms such as “Black Boy,” “Blackamoor,” “Blackamoor’s Head,” and “Indian Queen.” For an example of a Dutch Smoking Moor that has physical traits of various races and ethnicities, see Blakely 58, fig. 17. On connections between native Americans and tropes of darkness, see Bach, esp. 174–80.

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Works Cited The Ale-wives complaint against the coffee-houses in a dialogue between a victuallers wife and a coffee-man, being at difference about spoiling each others trade. London, 1675. Allen, Thomas. The City and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent. Vol. 2. London: Cowie and Strange, 1827. The Edwin C. Bolles Collection: A Digital Archive on the History and Topography of London. Tufts Digital Collection and Archives. April 18, 2007. ⬍http:// nils.lib.tufts.edu/4000.01/⬎. Anderson, Susan Campbell. “A Matter of Authority: James I and the Tobacco War.” Comitatus 29 (1998): 136–63. July 15, 2005. ⬍http://digital. library.ucla.edu/comitatus/librarian?VIEWTEXT=029A08_a⬎. The armes of the tobachonists. London, 1630. Bach, Rebecca. Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. New York: Verso, 1997. Blakely, Allison. Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1993. Brathwait, Richard. The smoaking age. Multibibus, Blasius. A solemne ioviall disputation. London, 1617. Bright, Timothie. A treatise: wherein is declared the sufficiencie of English medicines, for cure of all diseases, cured with medicine. London, 1580. “A Broad-Side against Coffee or, the Marriage of the Turk” (1676). The touchstone, or, Trial of tobacco. Ed. John Hancock. London, 1676. 58–60. Brookes, Kristen G. “Gentling Jessica.” “Alien Incorporations: Fantasies and Nightmares of Racialization in Early Modern England.” Diss. U of California, Santa Cruz, 2002. Brooks, Jerome E., ed. Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by the Books, Manuscripts, and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr. New York: Rosenbach, 1937–52. A cup of coffee: or, Coffee in its colours. London, 1663. Daileader, Celia R. “Back Door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic.” ELH 69 (2002): 303–34. Deacon, John. Tobacco tortured, or, The filthie fume of tobacco refined. London, 1616. Gardiner, Edmund. The triall of tabacco. London, 1610. Gately, Iain. Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. New York: Grove P, 2001. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Hancock, John, ed. The touchstone, or, Trial of tobacco. London, 1676. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Heal, Ambrose. The Signboards of Old London Shops. London: B. T. Batsford, 1947 (?). Hendricks, Margo. “ ‘Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 37–60. Hunter, G. K. “Elizabethans and Foreigners.” Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 37–52. Iwanisziw, Susan B. “Behn’s Novel Investment in ‘Oronooko’: Kingship, Slavery and Tobacco in English Colonialism.” South Atlantic Review 63 (1998): 75–98. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. Three Comedies. Ed. Michael Jamieson. New York: Penguin, 1985. 325–459. ———. The Gypsies Metamorphosed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. 316–73. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Linton, Joan Pong. The Romance of the New World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Ed. Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998. The Maidens complaint against coffee. London, 1663. Netzloff, Mark. England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Newman, Karen. “ ‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor. New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1987. 143–62. Philaretes. Work for chimny-sweepers, or, A warning for tabacconists. London, 1602. Pollard, Tanya. “The Pleasures and Perils of Smoking in Early Modern England.” Smoke: A Global History of Smoking. Ed. Sander L. Gilman and Xun Zhou. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2004. 38–45. Prager, Carolyn. “ ‘If I Be Devil’: English Renaissance Responses to the Proverbial and Ecumenical Ethiopian.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 257–79. Rowlands, Samuel. A crew of kind London gossips. London, 1663. Rustici, Craig. “The Smoking Girl: Tobacco and the Representation of Mary Frith.” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 159–79. Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. Ed. Andrew Gurr. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. ———. The Tempest. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

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Tatham, John. Knavery in all trades, or, The coffee-house. London, 1664. Taylor, John. The nipping and snipping of abuses . . . [wherein is] a proclamation from hell in the Deuils name, concerning the propogation, and excessiue vse of tobacco. London, 1614. Vitkus, Daniel Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Whitney, Geffrey. A Choice of Emblemes (London 1586). The English Emblem Tradition. Vol. 1. Ed. Peter M. Daly, with Leslie T. Duer and Anthony Raspa. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988. The women’s petition against coffee. London, 1674.

Chapter 9

“A Foreigner by B irth” : The Life of I ndian C loth in the Early M odern English Marketpl ace 1 Gitanjali Shahani

The Home and the World In 1708, Daniel Defoe inveighed against a foreign entity that had steadily made its way into the private domain of the English household. “It crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushion, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs,” he lamented (qtd. in Lemire 16). The fabric from the “Heathen World” was everywhere, adorning English furniture and Englishwomen alike, invading the sanctity of the early modern home.2 Defoe was not alone in his apprehension about the widespread popularity of this commodity from the East Indies. Among the many clamorous voices that denounced the “tawdery, pie-spotted, flabby, ragged, lowpriz’d thing call’d Callicoe” were those of three petitioners calling themselves Dorothy Distaff, Abigail Spinning-Wheel, and Eleanor Reel. Claiming to be spinsters in the local wool industry, they bewailed “all this suddain change” in consumer tastes “which is apparently to the ruin of so many thousands” at home. In a vituperative pamphlet they reviled the printed cotton fabric as “a Foreigner by Birth; made the L**d knows where, by a parcel of Heathens and Pagans, that worship the Devil, and work for a half-penny a day” (9–10).3 Others such as

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John Cary, a merchant and pamphleteer from Bristol, attempted a more gently coercive approach in their propaganda against Indian calicoes and silks. In a tract first published in 1695, Cary beseeched the gentry of England “to be more in love with our own manufactures, and to encourage the wearing them by their examples, and not of choice to give imployment to the poor of another nation whilst ours starve at home” (10). Numerous such petitions and pamphlets against the alien commodity were printed with remarkable frequency in London, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, well into the early decades of the eighteenth. Some of these appeared as “humble” entreaties to the House of Commons by local weavers, for the passing of a bill that would hinder the home consumption of calicoes. Others were printed as mercantile tracts concerning the East India trade, “shewing how it is Unprofitable to the Kingdom of England” as a whole.4 Many were written specifically as propagandist attacks on the commercial strategies of the East India Company and the harm they had wrought upon indigenous commodities such as wool. Collectively, these treatises articulated a polemical response (antagonistic, xenophobic, and defensive by turns) to the growing East India trade and its import of foreign merchandise into the English textile market. Cast in distinctly nationalistic terms, this discourse variously presaged local unemployment, bemoaned the loss of precious English bullion, and cautioned against the infiltration of heathen goods into the Christian world.5 It envisioned an alarming cultural and economic scenario in which the world was impinging upon the home, by way of commodities. Something strange from “out there,” as Patricia Fumerton puts it, was causing significant disorder “in here.” While the source of this “economic strangeness,” Fumerton argues, was configured as “ ‘mysterious,’ abstract, representational, or perpetually unlocatable,” it was simultaneously reified in “particular foreign nations, peoples, or events that could be quarantined from the home trading body” (173–74). Conceived as such, Indian cloth had come to embody more abstract fears vis-à-vis the world “out there.” The virulent attack against this seemingly innocuous fabric was a concrete manifestation, within the domestic realm, of larger conflicts that had inevitably resulted from intercourse with foreign bodies. These complex processes by which the local negotiates changes in the global are the focus of this chapter. Of particular interest to me are the ways in which an inanimate object such as cloth acquired a heathenish and foreign character in public perception. I take up Arjun Appadurai’s formulation that “commodities, like people, have social lives,” in order to examine the highly controversial trajectory of Indian cloth as a foreign commodity in the early modern English marketplace (3).

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If, as Dorothy Distaff had declared, this cloth was a “Foreigner by Birth,” how had it woven itself into the social fabric of everyday life in England? How did it become a fashionable favorite of the English consumer in the closing decades of the seventeenth century? How did it survive as a clandestine commodity even after legislative measures in the early eighteenth century had banished it from English territory? What did the uncontrollable consumer predilection for this foreign ware over domestic fare imply for a society that had so carefully regulated the private domain of its denizens through sumptuary legislation? In addressing these questions, I hope to capture not just the “life” of a commodity circulating in a protocapitalist economy, but the very warp and weft of a culture that was grappling with new forms of social, cultural, and fiscal exchanges, both in the home and the world.

The Origins of “Evil” and the Spread of an “Inveterate Plague” In 1719, long after numerous textiles from the East had penetrated different realms of English social life, a weaver by the name of Claudius Rey wondered how this evil phenomenon had come to pass. In a pamphlet called The Weavers True Case, addressed to the House of Commons, he protested that Indian cloth had completely destroyed the local wool manufacturers. The fashion for calicoes, according to Rey, had spread through the body politic like an “inveterate plague, over all our women-kind, from the ladies of the best rank, down to the lowest servant-maids; from the best citizens wives to the meanest country women” (14). Struggling to grasp the interminable “Flood of Evil” that had resulted from global commerce, the weaver found a handy metaphor in the idea of infection (14). He declared that the fashion for calicoes was like a ubiquitous “canker” that had insidiously affected everyone with its “mortal sting” (15). After much contemplation, he concluded that “this evil began with the very first callicoe gown that ever was put on a woman’s back, tho’ then but insignificant” (9). To take up the weaver’s question of origins is to reckon with the long and complex history of the English East India Company (EIC). The process by which a much-maligned Indian fabric first made its way onto an Englishwoman’s back is inextricably linked to the vagaries of this commercial organization. Founded by a Royal Charter in 1600, the joint-stock company had been granted a monopoly over England’s trade with the “East Indies”—a term variously used to denote the islands of the Malay Archipelago, parts of Southeast Asia, and India. The English had particularly hoped to profit from trading in the Spice Islands, much like the Dutch and Portuguese had earlier. Indeed it was the growing Dutch monopoly over the spice trade in the 1590s that

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provided a powerful impetus for the foundation of the EIC, along with the desire to find new markets for woollen cloth. Through much of the sixteenth century, the commodity structure of English exports had been dominated entirely by woollen manufactures, which were typically exchanged for European finished goods such as linen, wine, oil, and fruits (Chaudhuri 5). But this bilateral mode of exchange was to change drastically with the East India trade, since there was little demand for woollen textiles in Asian markets. An English merchant in Gujarat put it succinctly, when he wrote in 1614 that “English cloth will not sell” (qtd. in Fisher 157). A few “great men” had bought it to cover their elephants and make saddles for their horses, but they would not deign to use it in garments. India’s own fabrics were truly infinite in variety, including silks, calicoes, chintzes, muslins, ginghams, cambrics, taffetas, and seersuckers, among others. The company was quick to realize that woollen textiles had no scope in such a market. Thus by the middle of the seventeenth century, bullion (rather than woollen manufactures) formed the basis of its port to port trade in Asia; in turn, this bullion was obtained by reexporting East Indian wares such as spices and indigo to European markets. With this multilateral trading pattern, the predominance of woolen cloth as an item of export was no longer absolute. This crisis in the wool industry was further exacerbated when the EIC flooded the domestic market with Indian calicoes. Printed with floral or geometric motifs, calico was a lightweight cotton fabric, imported from the coastal city of Surat, in Gujarat. In the early years of the East India trade, the English used these fabrics as barter-goods in the Malay Archipelago, where neither wool nor bullion held any value.6 Spice islanders had traditionally preferred Indian piece-goods for their clothing, and these had been the primary objects of barter from the time that Arabs had controlled the medieval spice trade. Consequently, the Dutch and the English, like the Portuguese before them, had been obliged to follow a three-cornered trading pattern, bringing in bullion from Europe and England, exchanging it for piece-goods in India, and bartering these in the Malay Archipelago for spices. But the unique fabric that had been the mainstay of the inter-Asian trade inevitably made its way to English soil. John Irwin and Katharine B. Brett suggest that small quantities of Indian textiles reached London on the spice ships as early as 1613, probably as “leftovers from the barter trade rather than fabrics specially commissioned for the Western market” (3). Even these stray samples must have so captivated the English imagination that the EIC’s directors eagerly helped themselves to more than their fair share of these “perks,” much to the disapproval of the governor, who rued that there were “none left for general sale.”7 In the 1620s, particularly after the massacre at Amboyna, the English

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were compelled to abandon their interests in the Spice Islands and focus on trading opportunities in India. It was during this period that they began to explore the English market for Indian textiles on a more sustained basis. By the 1640s, the EIC was issuing specific instructions to its factors in India about ways in which to adapt traditional Indian motifs and patterns to suit Western taste. Within a few years, auction prices for Indian cloth “had increased by 20 per cent and orders had grown twentyfold” (Irwin and Brett 4). It was a matter of time before the “piece goods” of the Indian subcontinent would find their way onto the backs of Englishwomen and the interiors of English homes. As these imported goods inundated the English marketplace, the fashion for Eastern-style garments did indeed spread like an “inveterate plague.” Although Claudius Rey had retrospectively conceived this fashion as a distinctly feminine folly, men were equally enthusiastic consumers of Indian merchandise. Some, such as William Fielding, the first Earl of Denbigh, even posed for portraits to commemorate their newly acquired Oriental garb. In a painting by Anthony Van Dyck from around the 1630s, Fielding dons what Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass describe as “Hindu Indian style clothing” (53). Wearing a “rose-pink silk paijama with a narrow gold stripe,” Fielding stands besides “a dark-skinned young servant, dressed in an ornate turban and a yellow satin robe” (53). The Earl’s hybrid attire is displayed against what Jones and Stallybrass interpret as the wild and exotic flora and fauna of the East. Reveling in an emergent Orientalist splendor, the portrait symbolically conveys the dream of colonial possession that had taken root in the English imagination. It depicts Fielding as being in proud possession not only of sumptuous Anglo-Indian garments, but also of the servant figure and the exotic landscape itself. The English explorer appears to be master of all. His Indian boy, as Kim F. Hall suggests, is in many ways analogous to the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; both figures are “subtly associated with exotic foreign commodities” (232). Even as they inhabit a relatively marginal space in their respective representations, they embody much sought-after possessions in both contexts. By the time of the Restoration, everyone, from the Merry Monarch to the middle-class Samuel Pepys, was pursuing the fashion for Oriental wear. Beverly Lemire argues that in 1666, during a period of hostilities with France, Charles II deliberately sported an Eastern vest at court, in an effort to undermine the former hegemony of French styles and to promote England’s trade with the Orient. The monarch’s fashion statement naturally spawned a number of imitators, including Pepys, who promptly made a note of the new trend in his diary and later ordered a similar vest for himself (Lemire 10–11). Elsewhere in his diary, Pepys records the acquisition of “a very noble parti-coloured Indian gowne

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for my wife” (4: 391). Apparently, Elizabeth Pepys was among the many women who had cultivated a taste for calicoes. The demand for this cotton fabric was so high that in 1664, the East India Company imported over a quarter of a million pieces of calico into England (Lemire 15). Like Elizabeth Pepys, several Englishwomen used this material in gowns, as well as in headdresses, aprons, and petticoats. But calicoes were not for the living alone; even the dead had to have them! The English were now so reluctant to use woolen shrouds that one local merchant complained it was as if “the dead could not rest easie in their graves if wrapt in our native commodities, or that it would trouble them inter Hades” (Cary 5). Although legislation during the reign of Charles II put an end to this practice, stipulating that the dead could not be buried in a shirt, shift, or sheet made of anything but wool, the living could not be stopped.8 The fashion for calico gowns carried on, unabated, into the early decades of the eighteenth century, despite legislation in 1701 that prohibited the domestic consumption of several Indian fabrics.9 In 1720, Defoe was still complaining about the thousands of women “who have two or three several suits of callicoe at a time, for morning-gowns, wrapping-gowns, and mantuas” (The Trade 30). Both local imitations and smuggled calicoes from India continued to meet the demand for this fabric, even after it was banned as an imported commodity. If calicoes were de rigueur on the backs of Englishwomen, they were equally fashionable in the interiors of English homes. Chintz, a kind of calico imported from Masaulipatam, on the Coramandel coast of India, was particularly suitable for wallhangings, counterpanes, and curtains. The elaborately dyed fabric came in vibrant blues and reds. Its ornate designs—usually intricate branches embellished with a plethora of flowers and foliage—incorporated diverse cultural elements from Hindu, Islamic, and Chinese artistic traditions.10 These brightly colored exotic motifs made chintz especially popular as a furnishing fabric in homes across Europe and England. Here too the Pepys’ household was abreast of the trend. As early as 1663, Samuel Pepys accompanied Elizabeth to Cornhill, “where after many tryalls bought my wife a Chinke; that is, a paynted Indian Callico for to line her new Study, which is very pretty” (4: 299). Chintz was especially popular, as Anthony Wild notes, in rooms with an Indian theme, which had become quite the rage in seventeenth-century homes. According to Wild, “the English were fascinated by the tales they heard of the East Indies from the EIC’s activities, and the fabric was a tangible expression of those exotic ideas” (24). It is not without significance then that immediately after buying the chintz for Elizabeth’s study, Pepys paid a visit to the home of one Captain Minors to discuss the current state of affairs in India. There, “I did inform myself well in things relating to the East Indys,” Pepys notes

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(4: 299). India, as it were, had entered the public and the private domain of English existence. It had also found its way into bedrooms, which were frequently adorned with ornate Indian silks and cottons. In 1698, when Celia Fiennes, the intrepid English traveler, toured Windsor Castle, she caught a glimpse of a bed chamber with “fine Indian quilting and embroidery of silk” (217). Even the Queen’s Chamber of State was “all Indian Embroidery on white sattin being presented to her by the Company” (219). Later, while visiting a house in Surrey, she came across the following rooms: [T]he next roome was Lady Dennagalls . . . chamber and closet hung with very rich tapistry, the bed crimson damaske lined with white India sattin with gold and crimson flowers printed . . .; the roome over the little parlour was Mrs. Ruths a pladd bed lined with Indian callicoe and an India carpet on the bed. (236)

It is noteworthy that the aristocratic establishment of Lady Donegall, like the Pepys’ household, was adorned with calicoes. As with garments, this fabric had been popular in a range of homes, including those of the aristocratic and middle class. While the satins and embroidered pieces that Fiennes describes at Windsor were confined to royal and aristocratic chambers, both the middle class and the elite had taken to calicoes. The global processes set into motion by numerous ventures in the East Indies had thus registered at different local levels. The resultant economic and social changes, as Audrey Douglas suggests, were “now reflected not only in the prosperous man’s consumption in dress and furnishings but in the poorer man’s opportunity to buy better quality or new-fledged textile products for ordinary clothing and household purposes” (31). But even as the desire for calicoes manifested itself in a wide section of English consumers, an anxiety about its mass appeal became palpable in the popular literature of the period. A recurring strain in contemporary ballads and broadsides was that the cheapness of this fabric had somehow rubbed off onto its wearers. In 1719, for instance, an anonymous piece of doggerel verse complained about the preponderance of tacky “Callico Madams” across the English social landscape: And Ev’ry She Clown Gets a Pye-spotted Gown And sets up for a Calllico Madam ........................... They’re so Callico wise, Their own Growth they despise,

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Easy access to the relatively inexpensive fabric meant that every “Jilt of the Town” could now pretentiously lay claim to the title of “Callico Madam.” It is this very phenomenon that irked Claudius Rey when he complained that calicoes were everywhere, on ladies of the “best rank” as well as on the “lowest servant-maids” (14). As in the case of the anonymous ballad writer, part of Rey’s discomfort with the fabric had to do with the manner in which it had effortlessly spread across the different rungs of English society. For Rey and several others, calico in particular seemed to be imbued with a strange leveling force, and herein lay its potential for creating rank disorder (in both senses of the term). His metaphor of an “inveterate plague” is telling in this regard. Although by no means unusual, as the work of Jonathan Gil Harris has amply demonstrated, Rey’s invocation of the plague is crucial in the way that it conflates the language of commerce with the language of contagion, in an effort to articulate the uncontrolled spread of an alien fabric.12 Much like the plague, “this common Evil to the whole Nation, hath spread it self ” (14). Also like the plague, it had little regard for its victims’ social position, spreading over all womankind. As Rey developed his argument, he explicitly pointed to the dangers inherent in the widespread availability of calicoes. For the most part, he was concerned about the confusion that could result when maid and mistress were dressed alike: Again, the Wearing of printed or painted Commodities, puts all Degrees and Orders of Womenkind into Disorder and Confusion, and the Lady cannot well be known from her Chamber-Maid. In this Confusion, Men often pay Honour to those to whom ’tis not due, and withhold it from those to whom it justly belongs: But when our Women-kind were clothed with Silk and Woollen Commodities, those Mistakes were avoided, and a tolerable Order observ’d. (30)

Rey’s insistence on order and degree hints at a nostalgic yearning for an era in which sumptuary legislation had hoped to enforce more rigid distinctions in appearance. By the time of Rey’s pamphlet though, the imperative of sumptuary legislation had been eroded by the forces of global commerce.

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The foreign fabric had not only displaced a local one, it had also perceptibly transformed local practice. While it could not altogether have done away with the existing social structure, it had certainly altered the traditional markers by which this structure was understood. In his resistance to calicoes, Rey was also resisting the onslaught of larger historical processes that had been set into play, as England made the transition to a protocapitalist economy. His pamphlet attacked the foreign fabric as much as it did the principle of “private interest” that had created the domestic demand for this fabric. It was “private interest” that had led the English to disregard the “common good,” as they chose to dress themselves in Indian textiles (30). In fact, the notion of choice had little room in his schema: What is the Reason we shou’d not wear what we please, and that which is most convenient for us, both for cheapness, for washing, and cleaning? Answ. The common Good of the whole Body Politick, is the GRAND, AND ULTIMATE RULE of all that ought to be eaten, drank, and worn, by every individual Member thereof.

In presenting his True Case, Rey had given voice to a pervasive fear about how the commonweal would withstand new forms of consumerism and conspicuous consumption. The “inveterate plague,” though transnational as an entity, had brought about a very fundamental change at the national and the local levels. In longing for an era of sumptuary legislation and private regulation, Rey was holding on to a residual past that had been irreversibly altered by emergent transformations at the global level.13

Fashion and Foreign Invasion In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Jones and Stallybrass argue that in order to fully grasp the significance of apparel in early modern society, “we need to undo our own social categories, in which the subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn” (2). In the cultural perception of Renaissance England, clothes were vested with the power to inscribe themselves onto their wearers, shaping them “both physically and socially” (2). They had the ability to fashion subjects. In fact, Jones and Stallybrass observe that the term “fashion” as connoting a change in style was a newly emerging referent in the early modern lexicon, which had primarily understood the word in its sense of “molding” or “forging.” For a culture that accorded such symbolic value to clothes, the implications of Indian material on English bodies were serious.

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The idea that English consumers had willingly cast aside a homespun commodity such as wool and adorned themselves with the fabric of heathens and pagans inevitably provoked the censure of several pamphleteers. Even advocates of the East India trade could not easily come to terms with the home consumption of Indian cloth. In A discourse of trade, from England vnto the East-Indies (1621), Thomas Mun had aimed to answer “diverse objections” leveled against this trade. As one of the EIC’s directors, Mun had a vested interest in defending its commercial practices. Throughout A discourse, he refuted all allegations that claimed the EIC had depleted the gold and silver of Christendom, in order to obtain “unecessarie wares” from the East (5). However, when faced with a sartorial commodity such as calico, Mun had to concede to its impropriety on English bodies, even as he elaborated on its uses for English trade: Now touching the trade of Callicoes . . . although it cannot bee truly sayd, that this commodity is profitable for the state of Christendome in generall (in respect they are the manufacture of Infidells, and in great part the weare of Christians) yet nevertheless, this commoditie, likewise is of singular use, for this common wealth in particular, not onely therewith to increase trade into forren parts; but also thereby greatly to abate the excessive prices of Cambricks, Holland, and other sorts of Linnen-cloth; which daily are brought into this Kingdome. (7–8)

For Mun, the EIC’s trade in calicoes was clearly beneficial to the nation, however, its home consumption was not unequivocally so. Even as a staunch defender of the trade, he admitted the need to separate the ware of Infidels from the wear of Christians. Writing a full century after Mun, Defoe was far more outspoken about the implications of Indian cloth on English bodies. In an essay called A brief state of the question between the printed and painted calicoes and the woollen and silk manufacture (1720), Defoe attempted to steer the English away from calicoes by appealing to their national pride: “Why should not an Englishman, or an English Lady reject foreign and destructive Gewgaws, and choosing to wear the Woollen and Silk of our own Product and Manufacture, give this for a Reason for it, ’Tis our own Trade ’tis our own Manufacture,” he demanded (26). In fact, Defoe held up the Indians as examples of constancy, suggesting that the fickle English could learn from their wise example. Although their own fashions were “uncouth,” the people of India had refused to alter their customary manner of clothing (28). They had rejected England’s woollen manufactures and stayed true to their essential nature, unlike the English, who vainly allowed themselves to be governed by “Humour” and “Fancy” (28).

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Interestingly, the related concepts of humor and fancy were frequently disparaged by pamphleteers writing against the East India trade. Defoe himself repeatedly used these terms in order to evoke the irrational frenzy of consumer behavior with regard to clothes. Elsewhere in A brief state, he condemned both the “Humor of the people” and the “Stream of Fancy” that drove the English to reject their local manufactures (10). Claudius Rey had similarly dismissed the “foolish fancy” of women who persisted in wearing calicoes (41). As expressions of individual whims, fancy and humor appeared to be vested with the subversive potential to undermine the idea of a commonweal. Both terms were often used synonymously with the newly emerging sense of fashion. “Fashion is Fancy, which . . . hath of late years brought in a disuse of our native commodities,” John Cary wrote, as he puzzled over why the people of England were so much more “in love” with Indian calicoes than with their own manufactures (4). Fashion and fancy were clearly disruptive forces, spurring the English to act against their better judgment and against the interests of the nation. It was these “untractable” faculties, as Defoe called them, that had made the English susceptible to Indian clothing in the first place (28). Cary, likewise, claimed that it was fashion that had influenced the English against their own commodities: “He that considers how wonderfully Fashions prevail on this nation may soon satisfy himself how things of little value come to be prized, and to justle out those of greater worth” (4). Fashion, in other words, was responsible for the popularity of unworthy foreign commodities and the devaluation of native ones. The attack on foreign apparel thus inevitably morphed into an attack on fashion. The English proclivity toward foreign attire had long been the subject of acerbic and good-humored critique. A range of English writers had mocked their country’s obsession with fashion in general and foreign fashions in particular. As far back as 1542[1562?], Andrew Boorde personified the English in the following terms: I am an English man, and naked I stand here Musing in my mynd, what rayment I shall wear For now I will wear this and now I will wear that Now I will wear I cannot tell what All new fashions be pleasant to me ....................................... What do I care if all the worlde me sayle I will get a garment, shall reach to my tayle. (116)

The woodcut accompanying Boorde’s verse depicts a naked Englishman, holding a pair of shears, presumably to cut the fabric from “all the worlde” and piece together his own garments. In an analysis of

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this woodcut, Roze Hentschell reads the Englishman’s nakedness as emblematic of his identity crisis: “It is only by clothing himself in foreign attire that the Englishman can be dressed at all, and it is the dressing in the clothes of ‘strangers’ that puts English national identity into crisis” (547). He is literally and symbolically exposed to “all the worlde,” as he indiscriminately absorbs all it has to offer. In Boorde’s representation of the Englishman, we see an early preoccupation with fashion and foreignness. This preoccupation would persist in subsequent discussions of English clothing (or the lack thereof ). Like Boorde’s naked figure, other caricatures played on the idea that the Englishman was devoid of any national markers. The fashionably attired English fop was a fixture on the early modern stage, satirized chiefly for the eagerness with which he adopted the fashions of other nations. In The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), for instance, Portia jokes about the English baron’s accoutrements in the following terms: “How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere” (1.2.61–63).14 The only one of Portia’s suitors lacking any distinctive characteristics of his own, Falconbridge, was also, in a sense, stark naked. He had neither costumes nor customs that distinguished him from the others. Moreover, the English attraction to the “gewgaws” of strangers had dangerous consequences. It could potentially transmute the English into strange monstrosities, as they became a hybrid amalgam of other national identities. A 1634 ballad, called “The phantastick age,” portrayed the English as “neutral monsters,” held together by the threads of European fabric: An English man or woman now ............................... Composed are I know not how, of many shreds together: Italians, Spaniards, French, and Dutch of each of these they have a touch O monsters, Neutrall monsters, leave these apish toyes.

While the ballad amiably laughed at English vanity, it simultaneously hinted at a darker aspect of English fashion. The apish English imitation of others had left them strangely deformed. They were “neutral monsters,” without a shred of their own identity.15 Philip Stubbes had anticipated this monstrous dimension of fashion even in 1595, pointing to it as one among the many dangers of the “pride in apparel” (8). In

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The anatomie of abuses, he warned his readers about the ways in which fashions “deform” rather than “adorn,” making us “rather to resemble savage beastes, and brutish monsters, then continent, sober and chast Christians” (8). Stubbes’s cautionary words were aimed at fashion in general, regardless of where it came from. By the early eighteenth century, his words might have seemed even prophetic to some. They certainly would have to the likes of Dorothy Distaff and Daniel Defoe, who had been obsessed with the heathen origins of calicoes and their brutish effects on the English people. Like the anonymous ballad writer, these critics agreed that the English weakness for foreign wear had taken a decidedly monstrous form. The long-standing attacks against foreign fashion seemed acutely relevant in this context and they were readily invoked in the many tirades against Indian gewgaws. The “battle” between calicoes and wool was symptomatic of a larger concern about the ways in which consumer trends would, and indeed had, impacted domestic goods in the globalizing marketplace. The satiric pieces against foreign fashions were united by a recurring grudge: wool, England’s native commodity, never seemed to be fashionable. Somehow fashion implied and necessitated foreignness. Some pamphleteers even suggested strategies by which wool could be made to seem more en vogue. John Cary’s plea to the gentry of England was along these lines. He was convinced that “by their examples” they could set the trend for local manufactures such as wool, signaling thereby the end of Indian silks and calicoes in the English marketplace. To those who alleged that the yellowing English wool was a poor contrast to vibrant Indian silks and calicoes, he simply retorted that a change in fashion would make all flaws vanish. “So strange impressions do custom and fashion make on us,” that if yellow were to be declared fashionable, it would look just as good as white (7). In Cary’s discourse, the notion of fashion retains its older sense of “impressing” or “imprinting,” even as it takes on the newly emerging sense of rapidly changing trends, governed by “fancy” and “humor.” The merchant perceives the craze for calicoes as a kind of passing fancy—a transient, easily alterable fashion. He deploys the older sense of the term “fashion” to emphasize the ways in which the English can be prevailed upon (with laws if necessary) to turn away from calicoes. They could, as it were, be fashioned into thinking of wool as fashionable. One of the most interesting appeals for a change in fashion came from Dorothy Distaff and her friends, in The female manufacturers complaint (1720). These “spinsters” from Suffolk addressed Lady Rebecca Woolpack (the pseudonym used by Richard Steele), who had been sympathetic to their cause in a pamphlet published in 1719. They despaired at the trend for calicoes, which had changed their fortunes so

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drastically. Now they were spinsters in both senses of the term, since the Indian fabric had ruined their occupation and their chances of marriage. The pamphlet warned English ladies to check their fancy for “outlandish” foreign ware and switch to “the good, honest, home-spun manufactures of England,” before men intervened through legislation (10–11). Englishwomen had donned this heathenish garb of their own will, with neither husbands nor sweethearts inciting them. But if they obstinately persisted in wearing it, they would be “commanded” by men to change their fashion and compelled “by FORCE” to remedy their behavior (11). The repercussions of this male interference in the female realm would be dire for all womankind: We most earnestly intreat your Ladyship . . . to consider what Reproach you are going to bring upon yourselves, and upon us all. And what Injury even your Children and Grand-Children of our Sex may sustain, by thus bringing us all under a Sort of Subjection to the Men, in the Modes of Dress; a Yoke from Husbands, which neither we or our Mothers have ever been able to bear. (11)

The “spinsters” then go on to foresee a grim future in which men would execute “intolerable” sumptuary laws that obliged women to wear clothes no richer than their husbands could pay for (11). The “real” identity of the petitioner(s) in The female manufacturers complaint has not been established with any certainty, although it is unlikely that the author was a woman.16 The practice of male authors taking on a female persona was not uncommon in pamphlets that addressed the battle between Indian cloth and English wool. Richard Steele as Rebecca Woolpack had invited correspondence from any “gentlewoman” with strong feelings about the calico controversy, thus paving the way for other female impersonations. Regardless of its authorship though, The female manufacturers complaint is important in the way it accorded both power and blame to the lady of fashion. It held her solely responsible for ruining the local wool industry through her purchase of foreign commodities. Yet it recognized that the power to change fashions also rested in the hands of the fashionable lady. By invoking the horrors of sumptuary legislation, the author had playfully threatened the cherished notion of female autonomy in the realm of fashion, which in turn could affect women for generations to come. The general message of The female manufacturers complaint was echoed by several others. Indian cloth would have to be removed from the Englishwoman’s closet. It was an imposter that had wreaked havoc on the lives of the English. In calling it a “Foreigner by Birth,” Dorothy Distaff had succinctly conveyed what many other critics of the East India trade had felt about the fabric. A number of pamphleteers

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obviously wrote with vested interests in the local wool industry.17 But for several others, the domestic devaluation of English cloth had consequences for English national identity as well. Claudius Rey made this connection explicit when he declared that “as bread is called the staff of life, so woollen manufactury is truly the principal nourishment of our body politick” (14–15). For pamphleteers such as Rey, wool represented qualities that were “good” and “honest.” In defending the humble attributes of English wool, these pamphleteers were also protecting what they saw as intrinsically “English” values—values that had to be protected from contaminating foreign influences. For these polemicists, Indian cloth became an embodiment of the dangerous relationship between fashion and foreign invasion. Consequently, it could not be allowed on English bodies, which were better suited in the homespun fabric of England.

The Bleeding Body Politic The violent local reaction to the image of the Englishwoman adorned in Indian calicoes can be sensed in an incident noted by an anonymous pamphleteer in 1720: “On the 29th of December last, three young ladies were very near being drag’d out of their coach, and tore to pieces, by a mob calling themselves weavers, and for no reason, but because they wore callicoe-dresses.”18 The pamphleteer condemned this mob frenzy, wondering what the “Black Princes” (presumably of India) would think when they heard about these “Bashaws of Spittle-fields” and the violence with which they had disrobed respectable women. Others such as Claudius Rey were more sympathetic to the weavers’ cause. While disapproving of the unruly rabble, Rey advised women against wearing calicoes in parts of town where the fabric was seen as an incarnation of evil (41–42). Although differing in their responses, all the pamphleteers who mentioned the aggressive mob from Spitalfields suggested that the English weavers had perpetrated an act of actual and symbolic violence on what they took to be the emissaries of fashion and foreignness. In retrospect, as we read about the weavers’ hostility to the fabric from India, their sentiments seem uncannily familiar: the outsider had taken away their jobs and their children were starving at home. The calico controversy in early modern England was in many ways like the outsourcing controversy in contemporary America. When Dorothy Distaff complained that the heathens and pagans of India worked for “a half-penny a day,” she had voiced yet another familiar complaint against the cheap labor that the outsider had willingly provided, at the cost of local jobs. But more important than its parallels with modern-day globalization is the way in which this threat of the outsider was configured

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in the early modern English mindset. The corporeal metaphors deployed by pamphleteers to describe various global phenomena are especially revealing in this context. If they had envisioned the entry of Indian commodities into the English marketplace in terms of an invasive plague circulating in the body politic, the ensuing loss to England was imagined as a kind of outward flow, a bloodletting experience in the body politic. The recurring objection leveled against the East India trade was that it took away the precious specie and bullion from England and brought in wares that reduced local employment. In the process, this trade diminished the reserves of the body politic in two ways. An anonymous weaver writing in 1697 under the initials of “T. S.” estimated that the East India goods, in just one year, had been “directly opposite” to the employment of 250,000 local manufacturers and had hindered the consumption of nearly 18,000 packs of “long fine wool” (Smith 3). Simultaneously, he found that in carrying away such great quantities of bullion, the trade to India had taken away the very sustenance of England—for bullion, he explained, was the treasure of the land, the sinews of war, and the lifeblood of the body politic. “Money in the body politic, is as blood in the body natural, giving life to every part,” the weaver insisted (8–9). When circulating within England’s realms, this blood fueled local weavers, spinsters, and landowners. But once in India, “it never returns again,” T. S. lamented (9). India swallowed up all, leaving England an exhausted, wounded, and bleeding entity. Defoe echoed this sentiment in decidedly gruesome terms. His pamphlet The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Consider’d (1720) argues that the East India trade had brutally violated all Christendom: “Europe, like a body in a warm bath, with its veins open’d lies bleeding to death; and her bullion, which is the life and blood of her trade, flows all to India, where ’tis amassed into infinite heaps, for the enriching the Heathen world at the expence of the Christian world” (39). Defoe’s image of a mutilated body graphically conjures up the outward flow of bullion and the ultimate loss rendered to the Christian world. Like T. S., he imagines India as a bloodsucking alien that only brought the body politic closer to its death: “India, like the grave, swallows up all, and makes no return,” he continues, “What they send us back, is nothing; ’tis consumed here, and so vanishes and dies away” (41). Thus India, in the writer’s morbid imagination, had gone from being a foreigner to being heathenish, to being no less than an agent of death. The heated protests against Indian textiles had taken on such a violent dimension that in 1721 an act came into effect prohibiting the domestic consumption of every kind of pure cotton textile. Indian calicoes of almost any form or hue would no longer be allowed in English homes or on English bodies. Of course, in practice, Beverly

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Lemire notes, the fabric was not altogether swept away from English society. But with this legislation, as Lemire puts it, “Parliament had taken the most stringent measure at its disposal in an effort to enforce conformity among English consumers” (42). The lobby for wool had struck its final blow on fashion and on foreign invasion. The calico controversy had come to an end. But the English tryst with India obviously did not. There was more violence and more bloodshed to follow, for centuries to come. Cloth would continue to be an important character in the story of English encounters in India. British colonial rule and industrialization would wreak another kind of havoc on local textile manufacturers in India. British manufacturers would try to invade the Indian textile market with woolen broadcloth. Mahatma Gandhi, adorned in homespun khadi along with other Indian nationalists, would take up the spinning wheel as the symbol of swaraj (self rule).19 But that, of course, is another story of another cloth, in the long conflict between the local and the global.

Notes 1. I am deeply grateful to Sheila Cavanagh, Pat Cahill, Deepika Bahri, and Roze Hentschell for their feedback on this chapter. 2. Defoe frequently refers to India as the “Heathen World.” See, in particular, The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Consider’d (1720). 3. Here, and elsewhere in this chapter, I have modernized spellings and punctuation. 4. I am specifically quoting a 1697 pamphlet called Reasons Humbly Offered for the Passing a Bill for the Hindering the Home Consumption of East-India silks, Bengals &C. by a weaver calling himself T. S. 5. Here I use the term “nationalistic” loosely to refer to a range of xenophobic statements provoked by Indian commodities. 6. In what follows, I have drawn extensively on Irwin and Brett’s excellent account of inter-Asian trade in the Indies (3–6). 7. Quoted in Irwin and Brett 3. 8. For more details about this act see Baldwin 265. 9. Douglas writes that the Act of 1701 “prohibited the import of chintzes for domestic use and wear, though allowing them to be brought into bonded warehouses for the purpose of re-export” (35). Plain calicoes were exempt from this legislation, which permitted the sale of calicoes that were imported from India but printed in England. Plummer suggests that the legislative measures against calico were ineffectual, mainly since the Act, even as it prohibited the wearing of calicoes and silks imported from India, did not provide any penalties for those who continued to wear it. Plummer notes that women were briefly hesitant about wearing the prohibited fabric, but soon “became bold again and returned to their forbidden fashions” (294–95). Not only did the

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13. 14. 15. 16.

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18.

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G i ta n j a l i S h a h a n i fledgling calico-printing industry in England step in to meet the demand for this fabric, but “Clandestine Traders” continued to smuggle in calicoes from India, with hawkers, peddlers, and seamen’s wives helping to sell large quantities of these goods. See Irwin and Brett’s chapter on “The Flowering Tree” (16–22). From The Weaver’s Complaint against the Callico Madams, qtd. in Plummer 297. See 1–28. Harris takes up the discourse of pathology in the language of early mercantilists such as Gerald Malynes, Thomas Mun, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Milles. For more information on the decline of sumptuary in the years following Elizabeth’s reign see Baldwin. Shakespeare quotes are from The Norton Shakespeare. For an excellent analysis of this ballad see Hentschell 548, 551. There has been some speculation about whether “Dorothy Distaff” was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe. However, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens have refuted this claim (123). Following Furbank and Owens, I have treated them as separate authors throughout this chapter. Defoe is an obvious example. Plummer points out that at the time Defoe was approached by the London Weavers Company, he had already established himself as a journalist and was therefore well placed to keep the weavers’ case in the news, constantly presenting it before Parliament (298). Distaff 17. The episode discussed in this pamphlet was by no means an isolated outbreak of violence. Lemire and Plummer record several instances of rioting by weavers reacting to the calico trade. These included attacks on the East India House, threats to destroy the houses of company officials, and random assaults in which aqua fortis was thrown on women attired in calicoes. For an account of Gandhi’s use of khadi and the spinning wheel in the Indian freedom struggle see Bean.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth. Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1926. Bean, Susan. “Freedom Homespun.” Asian Art and Culture 9.2 (1996): 53–67. Boorde, Andrew. The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge. London, 1599. Cary, John. A discourse concerning the East-India-trade, shewing how it is unprofitable to the kindome of England. London, 1699.

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Chaudhuri, K. N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965. Defoe, Daniel. A brief state of the question between the printed and painted callicoes and the woollen and silk manufacture. London, 1720. ———. The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Consider’d. London, 1720. Distaff, Jenny. The linen spinster, in defence of the linen manufactures. London, 1720. Douglas, Audrey W. “Cotton Textiles in England: The East India Company’s Attempt to Exploit Developments in Fashion 1660–1721.” The Journal of British Studies 8.2 (1969): 28–43. The female manufacturers complaint: being the humble petition of Dorothy Distiff, Abigail Spinning-Wheel, Eleanor Reel, &c. London, 1720. Fiennes, Celia. The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes 1685–c.1712. Ed. Christopher Morris. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1995. Fisher, F. J. “London’s Export Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Economic History Review New Series 3.2 (1950): 151–61. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens. Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist. London: Hambledon Press, 1994. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Hentschell, Roze. “Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2002): 543–70. Irwin, John, and Katharine B. Brett. Origins of Chintz. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Mun, Thomas. A discourse of trade, from England vnto the East-Indies. London 1621. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1971. “The phantastick age.” London, 1634. Plummer, Alfred. The London Weavers’ Company 1600–1970. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Rey, Claudius. The Weavers True Case. London, 1719. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997.

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Smith, Thomas. Reasons humbly offered for the pasing [sic]a bill for the hindering the home consumption of East-India silks, bengals &c. London, 1697. Steele, Richard. The spinster: in defence of the woollen manufactures. London, 1719. Stubbes, Phillip. The anatomie of abuses. London, 1595. Wild, Anthony. The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from 1600. London: Harper Collins Illustrated, 1999.

Part III

Trade and the I nterests of S tat e

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Chapter 10

T H E T E M P E S T and the Newfoundl and Cod F ishery E d w a r d M . Te s t

The codfish forms the basis alike of food and amusements, of business and general talk, of regrets, hope, good luck, everyday life—I would almost be ready to say existence itself. —L’Abbé Ferland, 1871

U

pon first seeing the beastly Caliban in The Tempest, Trinculo ponders: “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish! He smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of, not of the newest Poor John” (2.2.25–28). Scholars frequently identify Caliban’s symbolic monstrosity—half-man, half-fish—with an inhuman and preternatural creature, a “thing of darkness,” a servant, savage, or a slave. His finny half, however, remains obscure. By stating he is a “kind of . . . Poor John,” Shakespeare places on stage what his contemporaries would unmistakably recognize as the name for Newfoundland salt-dry cod.1 When The Tempest was first performed in 1611, England dominated the lucrative market in salt-dry codfish, trading with France, Spain, and other Mediterranean countries. Not only did this international commerce fill English coffers, but it also strengthened England’s navy, supplying the English with seaworthy vessels and experienced seamen. English fishermen had harvested Newfoundland waters since at least the 1550s, using temporary spring fishing stations to dry cod ashore and abandoning them in autumn at the end of the fishing season; migratory fishermen made no attempt to settle in America. Unlike the

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traditional paradigm for colonization (military conquest and political control), Newfoundland became a new economic model for England: a foreign space temporarily housing a mobile labor force, employed wage-earners who produced salt-dry cod in the New World for trade in the Old World. Unlike its southern counterpart, Jamestown, the Newfoundland colony had a long precolonial history as an economic space—an unsettled settlement—that was maintained specifically for the international trade of Poor John. Recent scholarship has contested the singular presence of the American colonial experience in The Tempest, and rightly so. Barbara Fuchs, invoking a “polysemous” reading of colonial contexts and geographic activities, writes: “this critical privileging of America as the primary context of colonialism for the play obscures the very real presence of the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean . . . and elides the violent English colonial adventures in Ireland” (46). Likewise, Peter Hulme and William Sherman in their collection The Tempest and its Travels emphasize both a Mediterranean and American reading of Prospero’s isle. Barbara Sebek views transglobal trade “as the pre-dramatic catalyst bringing the Europeans to Prospero’s island” (467), which is exactly where Poor John fits into this “polysemous” and transglobal mixture. Newfoundland, while certainly American, is a much sidelined aspect of English colonialism, despite its long history as foster parent for England’s maritime trade. In this chapter, I examine the little-known trade history of “Poor John” and how the lowly codfish contributed to the highest concerns of the nation state: domestic stability, national security, and foreign trade. First, I provide a history of salt-dry cod and its importance to early modern European aristocratic and merchant societies; second, I explore the exploitation of the “poorer” half of John—the destitute laborer— and his subservience to England’s commercial pursuits, especially the fishing industry, which according to the seventeenth-century mercantilist Edward Misselden, was England’s “nursery of trade” (125). I read the materiality of Caliban as both laborer and product, suggesting how England’s early modern market relied upon what Patricia Fumerton labels “the ‘economy’ of unsettledness” (11), particularly in the trade of the New World resource, salt-dry codfish, and its return commodity, sack wine. England’s early modern Ship of State depended upon the codfish trade to keep afloat, and international trade depended upon employing at sea a vast sector of unsettled and masterless men. Finally, we shall see that the island of The Tempest is not conceived as a permanent colony or traditional plantation; rather the magical isle represents the new economics of global exchange, stressing the importance of (and dependence upon) uncolonized foreign spaces for the growth of the early modern nation state.

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Trade without Settlement One hundred years before the English settled in North America, European fishermen braved the cold Atlantic to harvest Newfoundland codfish, America’s principal commodity for international trade until tobacco became a viable export in the 1620s. England’s “gold” from the Indies, salt-dry cod literally fed long-distance trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Morton commented in 1638 that codfish is “a better commodity than the golden mines of the Spanish Indies, for without dried codd the Spaniard, Portingal, and Italian, would not be able to vittel [that is, provision] a ship for the sea” (86). The entire transatlantic trade industry of Holland, France, Portugal, and Spain depended upon tons of Poor John for food on lengthy voyages; according to David Kirke, they could not “get any ship to the Indies without the Newfoundland fish, there being no fish that will endure to pass the line [equator] sound and untainted but the fish of that country salted and dried there” (qtd. in Innis 52). During the age of exploration, global shipping increased exponentially and with it the demand for salt-dry cod. By 1634, the gross income for the Newfoundland fishery was approximately £180,000, and the total catch approached an astounding 200,000 ton (Pope 20). In the last heyday years (1980s) of the Newfoundland fishery, harvest remained a substantial 250,000 ton. After a lucrative 400 years, and billions of tons of codfish later, the tradition came to a sudden halt in 1992 when Canada permanently closed the fishery. While the closure made overfishing a worldwide concern, the shock to the diet of the general populace was minimal compared to the initial influence of salt-dry cod on the populations of early modern Europe. In the everyday life of Londoners, “Poor John” was no mere New World trifle, as most people commonly characterize America’s infamous export, tobacco. Admittedly, salt-dry codfish hardly had the allure of Asian silks, or Peruvian gold, and certainly was never elevated beyond a poor man’s food to some exotic luxury status. To be sure, fishing was a lowly business, yet the “contemptible trade in fish,” as Virginia’s Captain John Smith referred to it,2 supported the commoner at a time when Europe was desperately short of affordable protein (meat was beyond the exchequer of most and the little ice age had reduced crop harvests).3 Marc Lescarbot notes that Newfoundland “hath long time supported by her fish the whole of Europe alike on sea and on land” (304). Throughout Europe, D. B. Quinn writes, “millions of people associated Newfoundland in some way or other with the dried codfish they ate” (“Newfoundland” 26). Poor John was not so poor after all: it fed millions, and fueled global commerce unlike any other New World commodity.

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English participation in international fisheries of the north Atlantic began as early as 1400, when West and North Country fishermen voyaged to Iceland, returning with wind-dried stockfish. Peter E. Pope states that records from the English customs in the 1470s note the import of several kinds of Icelandic fish, including “salt-fish,” which fetched twice the price of wind-dried stockfish (11). Backed by Bristol merchants in the West Country, John Cabot “discovered” Newfoundland in 1497, and 10 years later his son, Sebastian Cabot, “named those landes Bacallaos, bycause that in the seas therabout he found so great multitudes of certeyne bigge fysshes . . . that they sumtymes stayed his shippes” (Martyr 161). (The indigenous name bacallao is still used in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries today where the dried cod fish is a popular dish. Cervantes refers disparagingly to the fare: “as ill luck would have it, it happened to be Friday and there was nothing to be had at the inn but some pieces of fish . . . called Bacallao in Andalucía”4) Despite fathoms of fish staying Cabot’s ships, this abundant natural resource had little influence on English global trade until the second half of the sixteenth century, when the fishing fleet sailed from England to the Newfoundland fishing grounds in March and returned to England in October, as regular as migrating geese. Anthony Parkhurst estimates that by 1578, there were 350 European vessels involved in the fishery: 50 Portuguese, 100 Basque, 150 Breton, but only 50 English ships.5 England would soon develop a major presence in the fishery as part of its first forays into North American colonization. In 1582, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir George Peckham presented Queen Elizabeth with a joint Catholic-Protestant proposal for establishing a colony in the Americas. Queen Elizabeth, surprisingly, agreed to the scheme. Gilbert and Peckham received a land grant from the queen for “fyfteene hundred thousande acres,” and to freely use “all that river or porte called by Master John Dee, Dee Ryver,”6 which is known today as the opening of the St. Lawrence seaway between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The Queen’s astrologer and magus, John Dee, drew up the map for Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage using the abundance of cartographic resources in his library, the largest of its kind in Renaissance England, which included the first Mercator globe. We know from Dee’s diary that Sir George Peckham “Promysed [him] of his gift . . . of the new conquest” for his efforts (16). Gilbert, in turn, made promises to other notable merchant adventurers; Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, received a grant of 3 million acres.7 With land grants in hand, Sir Humphrey Gilbert voyaged to Newfoundland in 1583 (he unfortunately drowned on the return trip) and took possession of the island in the name of Queen Elizabeth. At the time, there were at least 30 fishing vessels in St. John’s harbor; fishermen from France, Spain, and Portugal who attended the courtly ceremony “did

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verie willingly submit themselves” to England. George Peckham writes that immediately thereafter they disputed over the best shoreside drying stations “in sundry partes of that Land for theyr Fish” (40). The Newfoundland migratory fishery provided a lucrative alternative to the declining wool industry. Prior to the sixteenth century, England had used its successful cloth industry—called by the mercantilist Misselden, the “Indies of England” (40)—to exchange for spices and silk from the Indies in Antwerp, furs and timber from Scandinavia, and fruit and wine from the Iberian Peninsula. After the decline of England’s wool industry in the sixteenth century, Newfoundland fish became England’s primary export to France, Spain, and other Mediterranean countries; Gillian Cell writes that “the demand for dried fish, as the demand for cloth earlier in the century, seemed insatiable” (3). After what George Peckham labeled England’s “navy of fishermen” (49) defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the foreign trade in salt-dry codfish exploded, leading to the founding of England’s second American colony in 1610. The traditional language of colonization, however, was replaced with a paradigm for economic exchange; in the Newfoundland charter, King James prioritized trade over settlement, his “inten[tion] by such Plantation and inhabiting, both to secure and make safe the said Trade of Fishing to Our Subjects for ever” (Purchas 406–07). Until tobacco was planted in Virginia in 1614, Newfoundland cod was England’s sole New World export, dominating transatlantic trade until the 1620s. And unlike the New World crop tobacco, a favorite among English domestic consumers, Newfoundland’s dried cod fish was primarily traded abroad, especially to France and Spain. The cod fishery, then, was emblematic of England’s new economy: it required a mobile and temporary labor force to harvest resources and produce commodities in the New World and to sell the commodities abroad in continental Europe. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain’s vast import of New World gold benefited English trade on the continent; widespread inflation created a dear market price for saltdry Newfoundland codfish. “Poor John,” albeit a banal substitute for Peruvian and Mexican gold and silver, became, according to Harold A. Innis, “the lever by which [England] wrested her share of the riches of the New World from Spain” (52). Sir Francis Bacon, in a pamphlet supporting colonization, writes of “the Gold Mines of the Newfoundland Fishery, of which there is none so rich” (qtd. in Prouse 54), and in 1626, William Vaughan describes Newfoundland as England’s “Golden Fleece” and as “Great Britaines Indies, never to be exhausted dry” (3: 9). (There is, of course, great irony in this statement read almost 400 years later after the fishery was indeed “exhausted dry.”) The Newfoundland fishery, now joining England’s wool industry in the “Indies” reference,

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was an enormously successful industry for its time, even by twenty-first century standards. New England’s Captain John Smith acknowledges (though underestimates) the tonnage generated by the fishery, denigrating Caliban’s fishy half in the process: “New found land, doth yearely fraught neere 800 sayle of Ships with a sillie leane skinny Poore-John . . . which at least yearly amount to 3 or 400,000 pound” (General 224–26). The English fishing fleet in 1615, asserts Captain Whitbourne, generated “the totall of the fish of 250 saile of those ships, when it was brought into England, France, or Spaine, amounted in mony to 120,000 pound” (12).8 As noted earlier, Harold Innis estimates the gross income for the Newfoundland fishery in 1634 at £178,880 (70), or roughly US$19 billion in today’s figures. (The largest fishery in the world today, Alaskan pollock, pales in comparison, generating only US$2 billion per year, although the total catch is 1.2 million tons.) The Newfoundland fishery, although a far cry from Drake’s phenomenal 5000 percent return on investments to Queen Elizabeth for his piracies on the Golden Hind, became a steady and extremely profitable trade according to Peter Pope, returning 48 percent to freighters, and 15 percent to owners (117). Not only was Newfoundland cod lucrative, it was also a focus for debates about the changing nature of trade. Bristol merchants disagreed with the sovereign’s creation of legislation to promote privatization of the sea, which supported “shore-based” capitalist merchants—that is, merchants who “owned” the land where drying stations were set up. The key to the fishery was having land for drying cod. The migratory fishermen came and went, setting up temporary drying stations on land on a first-come basis—nobody “owned” the land. Western merchants, who had dominated the Newfoundland fishery in the sixteenth century, did not want to see London’s Newfoundland charter create a monopoly of “shore-based” fishing stations, allowing only specified merchants to make a permanent claim to the shoreside drying stations. The fishery had already proved successful as a prototype for using a mobile labor force to both produce and exchange commodities abroad; thus Western merchants battled hard to keep the fishery a “migratory” operation versus a “shore-based” fishery. Furthermore, London merchants sought to restrict trade and insisted that English fishermen use London-based vessels to transport their product abroad, thereby attempting to exclude migratory fishermen from trading directly with foreign countries. Fishmongers who sold directly to foreigners could, and did, undersell their London-based merchants by eliminating the middleman. In 1609, the West Country promoted a democratic charter for trade with France: all fishermen should “have liberty to transport and carry their fish into France and the Dominions thereof and to return their monies in any kind of merchandise” (qtd. in Innis 65). “Liberty to transport,” of

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course, meant free trade. It was not until 1634 that London granted the first Western Charter (as it is known), in which the freedom of the fishery was guaranteed. In the earlier half of the sixteenth century, England remained isolated on the edge of continental Europe and played a limited role in global commerce, which was dominated by Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Spain. This marginal position shifted in the early seventeenth century with the growth of transatlantic trade routes opened by the English “discovery” of Newfoundland. The sea and its trading outposts became England’s new economic space. Migratory fishermen producing and trading without the need to enforce colonial control epitomized England’s new economy based on international trade. As Richard Helgerson writes (paraphrasing Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), national prosperity “derives rather from trade—now explicitly free trade—than from the maintenance of monopolistic political and economic control over conquered and colonized territories” (189). Trade without settlement as represented by the migratory Newfoundland fishery was a template for economic success, which proved true in the eighteenth century and continues to be true today. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in his Discourse of the Invention of Ships, “[W]hosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself” (80). A nation did not need to conquer the landed world in order to dominate it, but rather it should control the liminal space in between. The fisherman, the ship, and the various ports of exchange worldwide shaped England’s early modern step toward economic dominance. This new transglobal space of foreign production and foreign trade, developed and promoted by England’s migratory fishermen, required a large cast of unsettled laborers to crew the ships. The ship itself—a mobile space filled with a transitory labor force—symbolized this “economy of unsettledness,” and as we shall see, this new economic space received plentiful assistance from the throne.

The “Poor” in Poor John The poor sailors who fished the Atlantic and manned England’s navy were conscripted from the leagues of vagabonds and rogues, idle persons and masterless men, whom the state sought to employ at sea. In 1622, Captain Whitbourne argued for transplanting the poor and unsettled to the Newfoundland colony: There are many thousands of poor people of both sexes, which might be spared out of all your Maiesties Dominions, who liuing penuriously, and in great want, would be perswaded to remooue their dwelling into New-found-land . . . where by industry, in time inrich

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themselues . . . for yeerely there is great abundance of good fish lost for want of labourers. (19)

The double-usage of the word “want” is particularly telling in this passage: the miserable poor are in “great want” at home, therefore, they should be employed abroad where there is a “want” of laborers to harvest the enormous natural resource. Employment in the New World was billed as a panacea for the “wants” of the poor. Thomas Mun, a seventeenth-century mercantilist, recognized in his seminal work, England’s treasure by forraign trade, that “our fishing plantation . . . in New-found-land . . . afford[s] much Wealth and employments to maintain a great number of poor, and to encrease our decaying Trade” (21). Those who had anything to say about transatlantic trade recommended that rogues and vagrants be gathered up and sent down to the sea in ships. These seamen came from the vast population of laboring poor. England’s international trade thrived because of—indeed, depended upon—poor laborers. A threat to stability at home, the unsettled poor became productive fishermen at sea; with the support of the state, productive fishermen developed into Peckham’s “navy of fishermen,” securing the nation from foreign invasion. This poor, mobile labor force, created by a variety of cultural pressures, contributed greatly to England’s new transglobal economy. Foremost in the creation of this mobile workforce, perhaps, was the enclosure of the commons, which not only sent the poor packing in search of subsistence, but also, as Linebaugh and Rediker claim, “was the source of the original accumulation of capital, and the force that transformed land and labor into commodities” (16). Patricia Fumerton provides a list of many factors, in addition to the enclosure of the commons, that contributed to an increase in the number of dispossessed poor: “rising population and unemployment (especially in the economic depressions of the 1590s, 1620s, and 1630s), decreases in noble households and hospitality, rising rents (to 1650), the conversion of copyhold tenures to leaseholds (fueling property disputes), high agricultural prices, and low wages” (6). Without land or employment, many eked out a living in desperate poverty and ill health, some resorting to criminal activities. As Paul Cefalu writes, “the ‘masterless man’ . . . threatened society’s image of itself as an organic whole, an interdependent family, and was denounced as the source of all disorder” (91); Linebaugh and Rediker concur: vagabonds and rogues were the “hydra-headed monster ready to destroy the state and social order” (18). Order came from work. Little different from today’s immigrant population, the dispossessed multitude (20 percent or more of the population during crisis years9) powered the engines of economic exchange. The unsettled poor—some of whom earned a wage, others who worked

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as indentured servants, apprentices, or mere slaves (as did Caliban), all of whom were commodities of the protocapitalist world—were the perfect labor force for an unsettled life of maritime trade. The monarchy, seeking to employ the “superabounding multitudes,” pressed the idle into service not only to “sweep the streets” of the poor, but also to protect the country. An invested reader of Dr. John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials noted the link between fishing and England’s navy, writing in the margins: “surelie our fisshinge moughte not onlie gyve vs greate wealth but make vs also [very] stronge and our enemies weake by Sea” (Sherman 168). Proclamations during the reign of King Charles I “commanding the due execution of the Lawes made against Eating and Selling of Flesh in Lent” explicitly state that the “increase of Fisher-men was the meanes to preserue the Nauie” (1631), directly linking the fishing industry to national security. (Recall Peckham’s “navy of fishermen.”) As Edward Jeninges noted in 1590, fish days were “appointed for the abstinence from the fleshe and the eating of fish, and thus was this wall or nauie kept in a sufficient repaire as a redye defence for the Prince” (10); disobeying such proclamations led to the “Great decay of the nauvie . . . to the great peril of this realme, and incouragement of the enemie” (10). John Dee also points out that foreign fishing vessels reaping the fish harvest of the local coastline presented another danger to national security because their “perfect Chartes of all our Coa[s]ts, rownd about England, and Ireland . . . are become (allmost) perfecter in them, then the most parte of our Maisters, Loadmen, or Pylots, are: to the dubble danger of mischief in tymes of War” (17). England needed to not only control its coast, but, in order to grow into an international empire, it also needed to control the sea and ply the world with trade, recalling Sir Walter Raleigh’s statement, “whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade.” Newfoundland was the training ground for England’s transglobal foot soldier. State proclamations forced an underworld of the destitute poor to produce dry-salt cod and to consume it as well. While desperation forced many a sailor to board the fishing vessels bound for the wrack and scud of the North Atlantic, the Queen forced the consumption of dried fish at home, creating a domestic market for dry-salt codfish. Religious practices contributed to economic goals through a commitment to the success of the fishing industry and the international trade of Poor John. Poor John was consumed extensively during the lengthy Lenten fast.10 Indeed, no other commodity or industry received so much attention and aid from the throne. Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth issued proclamations for the “due obseruation of Fish dayes” during Lent for the general benefit of the “common weale.” What was good for the fishing industry was good for the common wealth, and good for the state. As early as 1568, Queen Elizabeth issued a

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proclamation to create a subsidy for fishmongers: “all and euery person and persons which shoulde by vertue of that act transport or carry any herrynges, or other sea fishe from or out of any Port or Harborough of this Realme . . . shoulde be free from payment of any Custome.” Although Newfoundland cod is not specified, it is clear that “other sea fishe” would include cargo holds filled with salt-dry cod. Moreover, this proclamation added Wednesday as a fish day, thus increasing the number of days that the English must consume fish, according to Edward Jeninges, to 153 days per year (23). Despite its popularity in state proclamations, Poor John was never an epicure’s meal. The landless, poverty-stricken narrator of Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592), a would-be gentleman in quest of quick riches, takes to the sea where his “dainty fare is turned to a hungry feast of dogs and cats, or haberdine and poor John at the most, and, which is lamentablest of all, that without mustard” (66). During a threatening storm, the character jokingly promises to give up eating dried fish all together, but when he finally sets foot on land, he cries out: “Not without mustard, good Lord, not without mustard” (67), as though it had been the “greatest torment in the world” to eat dried fish in this manner. Ben Jonson certainly had Nashe in mind when his character Sogliardo, from Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), pays for a coat of arms with the ridiculous motto “Not Without Mustard.” In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that this motto poked fun at William Shakespeare (also an actor in Jonson’s play), who had recently applied for a gentleman’s coat of arms with the motto: Non sanz droict, or “not without right” (80). Underlying the sarcasm of both Nashe and Jonson, however, is the irony that Poor John, with or without mustard, could indeed make a merchant rich enough to purchase the rank of gentleman. Clearly, the meager diet of Poor John (at least as it was prepared in England) was hardly palatable without some kind of condiment. Nashe emblemizes the suffering of the poor in the food they eat as well as in the servile labor they perform to support England’s growing trade. Similarly, Nashe remarks in Lenten Stuff (1598), a book devoted to the praise of the red herring, that “the poorer sort make [fish] three parts of their sustenance” (406), thus noting the importance of fish in the diet of the poor. Poor John was undoubtedly a disparaged fare, even for the poor, but despite this it helped found England’s navy and was a readily available protein source that prevented starvation at home and abroad. The connection between Poor John and food for the poor is further evident in the term’s etymology. Robert Hayman notes in a series of epigrams about his experiences in Newfoundland that “Poor John” arises from a homophone: the dried codfish is “Cald in French Poure Gens, in English corruptly Poore Iohn, being the principall Fish brought

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out of this Countrie” (sig. F3r). It is unclear what meaning Hayman intends to communicate because “poure” has no provenance in French (it may be a printer’s error), but in grammatically correct seventeenthcentury French, one might say “poure les gens,” or “povres gens,” which translate respectively as “for the people,” or simply “Poor people.” In each case, it is obvious that the French associated salt-dry Newfoundland codfish with “gens,” or “men, people, folke”.11 “Poor John” is an appropriate translation, for he is, as the epithet implies, a misfortunate fellow, down on his luck, hard-pressed to make ends meet, forced by desperate circumstance to serve his opposite, the wealthy aristocrat or merchant adventurer. Likewise, the adjective “poor” precedes “seaman” in almost every passage of the journal of Edward Barlowe,12 a mid-seventeenth-century mariner who sailed aboard the large “sack” ship Real Friendship, which freighted dried fish to Spain in 1668.13 Part of the trade triangle between England, Newfoundland, and Spain, these “sack” ships returned with holds filled with drying salt and what the English referred to as “sack wine,” a favorite drink of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the life saver of Stephano in The Tempest (which I will explore later). According to Harold Innis, “Sack—sec, dry, from the French—was used in referring to the white wines from Spain and the Canaries, and it is probable that this return cargo gave the name to these ships” (54). In this sense, the French sec refers to both of the “dry” commodities in the hold: fish and wine (the former being exhausted “dry” by the close of the twentieth century). The etymology, then, of Poor John points to both the persons (poor consumers on land and at sea) and the commodity (salt-dry Atlantic cod) for which they labored and which they consumed. Similar to the etymology of Poor John, Shakespeare’s Caliban unifies person and commodity for exchange as a marketable fish and marketable labor, both of which were essential to England’s new transglobal economy.

The Isle of Exchange Poor John, as we have seen, was not some trivial New World commodity trickling into the consciousness of Europe from a remote periphery, but rather an abundant food product inundating European markets. It was anything but peripheral to the culture of England and Europe; rather, it was central, going straight to the stomach of millions and the coffers of many. England’s early modern Ship of State depended upon the codfish trade to keep afloat (financially and militarily), and international trade depended upon the containment and exploitation of sailors and masterless men; lowly, unsettled subjects either keep the state seaworthy or threaten to run it aground. Shakespeare’s “conspiracy” of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban against Prospero and the subsequent disruption

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of his masque emphasize the brutal realities of England’s market economy versus the idealistic and mythological vision of England represented by the nuptial masque of Ceres. What is at stake on The Tempest’s isle is the control of the mechanics of trade. The work of poor laborers (whether native sprite or African slave) must be harnessed and rebellion quashed; Mediterranean shipping lanes must remain open, which presumably the marriage between Christian Claribel and the Islamic King would ensure. The island, like the ships that bring voyaging aristocrats to mingle with a host of unsettled characters, is a liminal space temporarily occupied for the exchange of daughters for kingdoms. Compressed into a single space of exchange, all the desires of the aristocrats are resolved “in one voyage” (5.1.208), as the counselor Gonzalo states near the end of the play. From the opening scene of The Tempest, Shakespeare stresses the dependency of the strong state upon the weak poor. We are accustomed to seeing a sovereign at the helm, as John Dee represents the queen in his General and Rare Memorials: “ELIZABETH (Sitting at the HELM . . . of the IMPERIALL SHIP” (53). In The Tempest, however, rank and privilege reverse; the boatswain barks orders at the nobles to get safely below deck while the ship bucks into the roaring sea. Shakespeare is not merely inverting hierarchies, as some critics suggest; rather he highlights the fact that aristocrats have little authority aboard a ship at sea. Significantly, the first line of the play is spoken by the ship’s master, and in the chaos of the raging tempest, the boatswain further asserts a poor sailor’s authority over the wealthy nobility when he yells at the stubborn lord Antonio, “Work you, then” (1.1.43). Gonzalo, the old counselor, acknowledges the dire position of the aristocrats: “make the rope of his [the boatswain’s] destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage” (1.1.32–33). This statement, referring to the hanging of the boatswain, also has wider implications: the destiny of England’s aristocracy rests on the shoulders of the sailors, who hold the cables of global trade. To be sure, the wealthy English rely on ships exchanging goods in distant ports; trade was much more important than the old paradigm of “possessing” the land through colonization. Without the sailor, there is no global trade; without global trade, England has no empire. The sailor’s threat to aristocratic authority echoes the various attempts (some successful) at usurpation in The Tempest: Antonio takes over Milan and exiles Prospero; Sebastian (with Antonio’s urging) considers killing Alonso and usurping the throne of Naples; Ferdinand is accused initially of coming to the island to “win it / From [Prospero], the Lord on’t” (1.2.456–57); Prospero, as Caliban reminds us, took the island from Caliban by sorcery; and finally, the three lowly characters (Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban) comically conspire against Prospero’s

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rule. As in the opening scene, there is a notable difference between the concerns of the lower and upper-classes throughout the play: the upper class characters trade in kingdoms (by marriage or usurpation), while the lower classes belong to the mundane realm of trade in material objects—salt fish and sack wine. Yet both are equally important, even necessary, to England’s ambitions for dominating global trade. In a frequently cited passage, Trinculo objectifies Caliban as a commodity for trade, identifying his odor as “very ancient,” which in terms of smell implies a rather old and noisome (“not of the newest”) Poor John. What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not of the newest Poor-John. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man and his fins like arms! (2.2.25–35)

In this passage, most scholars concentrate on Caliban’s relation to the sale of a “dead Indian,” equating him with a “strange beast” or “monster.” Undoubtedly, Caliban is a strange fish, for he is “legged like a man and his fins like arms” and monstrous as an Algerian slave, but to concentrate on his odd “otherness” overlooks his potential as a common marketable object. While Stephen Greenblatt comments that spectators of The Tempest “see and perhaps touch (or, we are told in the case of Caliban, smell) a fragment of a world elsewhere, a world of difference” (122), Caliban’s fishiness is anything but “different.” Poor John was as common as any other fish brought to market, the same as Norwegian or Icelandic wind-dried stockfish, an international commodity since medieval times.14 When Trinculo states, “there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man,” he implies that Caliban’s deformed hybridity—half-man, half-fish—would make a man’s fortune; also, the Italian visitor suggests that Londoners and their new market economy are monstrous. Underlying Trinculo’s jest, moreover, is the relation of African slaves and Newfoundland fish to England’s global economy. Caliban is not a marketable object in the sense that a “dead Indian” is a mere curiosity; rather his fishy commodity and slave labor are essential to England’s new economy: half-slave, he is a laboring subject; half-fish, he is a marketable object. Indeed, Antonio’s acknowledgment that Caliban is a “plain fish, and no doubt marketable” (5.1.266) suggests that, like Poor John, he is just as “plain” as he is monstrous.

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If Caliban first embodies the marketable slave, and second the reified object of codfish, then later in the play he is trebly reified by getting drunk on Poor John’s return commodity, sack wine. As noted earlier, English ships brought home sack wine after selling Poor John to France and Spain. Stephano, who is saved by a “butt of sack which the sailor’s heaved o’erboard” (2.2.126–27), foists the drink upon Caliban, turning Prospero’s slave mockingly religious. He mistakes Stephano for a god bearing “celestial liquor”: “I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true subject, for the liquor is not earthly” (2.2.130–31), and “Hast thou not dropped from heaven?” (2.2.142).15 Stephano follows suit, asking both Trinculo and Caliban to “kiss the book,” that is, take a swill of wine. The religious mockery is evident in Stephano’s playfulness, but more important is the fetishistic veneration of a material object as a reflection of the divine. After drinking substantially, Stephano conflates both market items—salt fish and sack wine—in Caliban: “Why, thou deboshed fish thou. . . . Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half a fish and half a monster?” (3.2.27–31). As Prospero’s island slave, Caliban is not only “all the subjects” (1.2.342) of the isle, but also many of the objects. In order to generate labor out of subjects such as Caliban, their energy must be charged with the production or trade of viable commodities, such as Poor John and sack wine. Barbara Ann Sebek writes, “We can read Caliban as a prototype of exploited labor-power” (465), and Ariel, always negotiating his day of liberty with Prospero, who “did promise / To bate [Ariel] a full year” (1.2.248–49), likewise reflects the life of an indentured laborer. England’s new economy channeled the unsettled mobile labor force into the production of capital: Prospero asserts his need for Caliban, “We cannot miss him. He does make our fire / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices / That profit us” (1.2.311–12). The poor slave Caliban makes capitalistic “profit” possible; he allows aristocrats to “prosper” (an epithet applied to Prospero several times throughout the play). The living poor abused and channeled through the capitalist engine, become what Hardt and Negri call “the very possibility of the world” (157). The material reality of this world is especially clear in the disruption of the masque of Ceres by the lowly conspirators Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban. The Tempest has been variously compared to Chapman’s Memorable Masque16 as both were performed for the marriage of King James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to Prince Frederick of Bohemia. This marriage served as a balm to the mourning of the sudden death of Henry, Prince of Wales, a few months before. Significantly, Prince Henry not only played an active role in court masques, but also, as Sir John Holles wrote shortly after Prince Henry’s death of his avid support of transatlantic pursuits, “all actions profitable or honorable to the kingdom were

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fomented by him, witness the Northwest Passage, Virginia, Guiana, The Newfoundland, etc. to all which he gave his money as well as his good word.”17 Overseas ventures to the New World were extremely unpredictable, and English failures to find a mother lode of gold equivalent to the Spanish discoveries in South America was public knowledge: Martin Frobisher returned with a hold filled with worthless ore in 1577; Sir Walter Raleigh failed to find gold in Guiana; Captain John Smith openly complained about his idle colonists wasting their days searching for gold in the hills of Virginia. The English, of course, wanted what the Spanish had, which is reflected in Shakespeare’s choice of aristocrats from Naples and Milan as characters, dukedoms gotten with Spanish gold from the New World.18 While The Tempest occurs on a dreamy isle, it is not full of dreamy ideas of riches, like Chapman’s Memorable Masque, in which Virginian priests adorned in precious and gilded garments open mines of gold for the English to discover. Caliban acknowledges as much in his dream: “The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, / I cried to dream again” (3.2.146–48). Ideally, the English hoped to find the golden riches of the Spanish in the New World, but realistically they settled for Poor John as their gold from the Indies. The interruption of the performance emphasizes a grossly material view of trade and economics—no fantastic Juno or Ceres to celebrate the glory of English sovereignty, just rebellious subjects drunk on cheap sack and reeking of Poor John. In The Tempest, the courtly masque becomes subordinate to lowly uprising, just as aboard ship the aristocrat is subordinate to the lowly sailors. Caliban seeks revenge against Prospero for cheating him of the island and aligns himself with his new masters and hopeful usurpers, Stephano and Trinculo. Significantly, it is Caliban who orchestrates the plan to murder Prospero, and not his co-conspirators who are readily defeated by a desire for aristocratic finery. Caliban, unlike Stephano and Trinculo, recognizes usefulness: “Let it alone thou fool! It is but trash” (4.1.224), Caliban shouts at Trinculo, who avidly gathers up Prospero’s aristocratic attire. Once again rank is inverted as the slave barks orders at his new master. Stephano and Trinculo, despite their pretensions of superiority over Caliban, neither recognize true economic value, nor know how to employ it. As simpletons, they merely wear the “trumpery” of power, but have no ability to control it. Caliban, who is both a valuable subject and an object on the island, at least recognizes their futile affectation of power. Prospero’s aristocratic clothes are like the gilded garments of the Virginian priests in Chapman’s masque: mere representations of wealth, power, and empire. The gross materiality of Poor John and sack wine in Shakespeare’s play reminds his audience that English imperialism rests

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more upon material trade than Greco-Roman mythological representation. The success of the English empire lies in exchange, not ownership: daughters for dukedoms, salt fish for sack wine. The importance of controlling exchange is perhaps most evident in the radical offstage marriage of Alonso’s daughter Claribel, a Christian Italian noble, to a heathen African king. By unifying Tunis and Naples, “ ’twixt which regions / There is some space” (2.1.260–61), Shakespeare fences in the crucial and much contested economic space of the Mediterranean. Trade had become extremely multicultural in the seventeenth century: not only did the poor stretch across cultural and racial borders, but the wealthy aristocrat also inhabited this new miscegenated space of exchange. The play ends with Prospero’s abjuration of his powers: freeing his indentured servant Ariel, pardoning the lowly conspirators, and abandoning the island to return to his native Milan. Jeffrey Knapp maintains that this conclusion exhibits “an antimaterialism . . . [that] converts empire, or the desire for it, to irrelevance” (221–22), which is true in the traditional sense of colonization (conquest and control). However, I would suggest that by focusing on the importance of sea trade to England’s empire, and viewing Caliban as slave and fish, subject and object, The Tempest becomes extremely material minded, even in relation to the lower classes, which, as we have seen, are vital cogs in the wheel of England’s international commerce. Whether in the middle of the Mediterranean or on transatlantic sailing routes, the isle of The Tempest represents an economic necessity to England. While the nobles retire in comfort and wealth to their kingdoms, merchant sailors continue plying the ocean for trade, surviving on Poor John (we hope with mustard). Prospero achieves his goal: regaining his dukedom and joining Naples and Milan into one kingdom with the marriage of Miranda to Ferdinand. The union of Claribel with a Tunisian king suggests that England’s new economic space in the Mediterranean would no longer be threatened by the Muslim world of Africa. “Poor John,” then, is not so poor after all; he is cement in the foundation of England’s global trade. Like the isle of The Tempest, the Newfoundland fishery was a microcosm of England’s greater concerns for international trade, national security, and domestic stability. Salt-dry codfish netted England a substantial and lucrative trade with continental Europe, helped prepare and train a navy, and employed the poor. No other commodity so intertwined the state with commerce. The commonwealth benefited from the international fishing trade, which created both jobs and a cheap source of food. While fishing was a poor man’s occupation and the fishermen’s commodity a poor man’s food, the industry supported kings and commoners alike. Perhaps Ben Jonson’s character Cob—literally “fish head”—from Every Man in His

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Humour (1598) expresses it best: “mine ancestry came from a king’s loins . . . one of the monarchs of the world.” Poor John helped crown an empire.

Notes 1. “Poor John” is commonly footnoted as dried or salted North Atlantic (sometimes Icelandic) hake fish. It is important to distinguish Poor John from other terms for dried codfish, the most common being “stockfish,” which came from Iceland and Norway and was dried in the winter by the cold. “Haberdine” is a Dutch name for “Poor John” but was rarely used. “Poor John” also appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1.1.30) in a passage full of sexual innuendos. 2. Smith used this phrase to sum up the common attitude toward the fishing industry. See Travels 1: 194. 3. See Fagan 241. 4. See 66–67. A few sentences later “bacallao” is again mentioned, though wrongly translated as “stockfish,” which is the case in all the translations I examined: “They laid a table for him at the door of the inn for the sake of the air, and the host brought him a portion of illsoaked and worse cooked stockfish.” It is interesting to note that the soldier is consuming a soldier’s fare: dried codfish. 5. These statistics come from Anthony Parkhurst’s letter to Richard Hakluyt. See Quinn, New American World 4: 7–10. 6. See “February 28, 1583. Agreement between Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir George Peckham, and George Peckham” in Quinn, New American World 3: 237. 7. See Quinn, New American World 3: 218. 8. Whitbourne makes the calculation by the fish “being sold at a rate of foure pound, for euery thousand fish, sixe score fishes to the hundred, which is not a penny a fish, & if it yield lesse, it was ill sold.” 9. See Fumerton 6. 10. Fagan makes the connection between Lent and the Newfoundland cod fishery throughout his book. 11. See Cotgrave, under the heading “GEN.” There are no page numbers in this edition. 12. See Fumerton 99 and 102. 13. See the Web site, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage. 1997–2003. Memorial University of Newfoundland and the C.R.B. Foundation. June 19, 2006. ⬍http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/17fishery. html⬎ for Barlowe’s illustration of this vessel. 14. See Pope 11. In The Tempest, Stephano threatens to turn Trinculo into a stockfish: “I’ll turn my mercy o’ doors and make a stockfish of thee” (3.2.74–75). 15. The fact that Caliban believes Stephano to have dropped from heaven reinforces the long-standing Eurocentric myth that natives believed

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the Europeans to be gods. See Tedlock 167–68. This myth began with Columbus and gained even more credence with the publication of Cortes’s letters, which stated that Moctezuma thought Cortes had dropped “from among the clouds, from among the mists.” Ironically, Tedlock points out that in the Mexican tradition it was the “common people” who dropped from the heavens, not the gods. Thus, when Moctezuma questions Cortes’s heavenly origins, he is actually questioning his pretensions to power. Caliban’s questioning undoubtedly fits the Eurocentric tradition of a supposedly ignorant native facing the godlike qualities of the European. 16. See Gillies. 17. See Nichols 1: 193–94. I owe this quotation to Sir John Holles’s letter to Strong 8. 18. See Knapp 233.

Works Cited Cefalu, Paul A. “Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy.” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 85–119. Cell, Gillian T. Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610–1630. London: Hakluyt Society, 1982. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Walter Starkie. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1957. Cotgrave, Randle. A dictionarie of the French and English tongues. London, 1611. Dee, John. General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of nauigation annexed to the paradoxal cumpas, in playne. London, 1577. ———. Private Diaries of Dr. John Dee. Ed. James Orchard Halliwell, Esq. F. R. S. Montana: Kessinger Publishing Co., 1998. Fagan, Brian. Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Fuchs, Barbara. “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (Spring 1997): 45–62. Fumerton, Patricia. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Gillies, John. “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque.” ELH 53.4 (1986): 673–707. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. ———. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

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Hayman, Robert. Quodlibets lately come ouer from New Britaniola, old Newfound-land Epigrams and other small parcels, both morall and diuine. London, 1628. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Innis, Harold A. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1954. Jeninges, Edward. A briefe discouery of the damages that happen to this realme by disordered and vnlawfull diet. London, 1590. Jonson, Ben. Every Man In His Humour. Ed. Robert S. Miola. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. ———. Every Man Out of His Humour. Ed. Helen Ostovich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Lescarbot, Marc. History of New France by Marc Lescarbot. Ed. H. P. Biggar and W. L. Grant. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1907–14. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Martyr, Peter. “Decades de Orbe Nouvo.” Trans. Richard Eden. Ed. Edward Arber. The First Three English Books on America 1511–1555 A.D. Birmingham, England, 1885. Misselden, Edward. Free trade. Or, The meanes to make trade florish. London, 1622. Morton, Thomas. New English Canaan. Amsterdam, 1637. Mun, Thomas. England’s treasure by forraign trade. London, 1669. Nashe, Thomas. Lenten Stuff. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Ed. J. B. Steane. New York, London: Penguin Books, 1972. ———. Pierce Penniless. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Ed. J. B. Steane. New York, London: Penguin Books, 1972. Nichols, John. The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James I. London, 1828. Parkhurst, Anthony. “November 13, 1578. Anthony Parkhurst to Richard Hakluyt the Elder on Newfoundland.” New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. Ed. David B. Quinn. Vol. 4. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, Inc., 1979. Peckham, Sir George. “True reporte of the late discoveries . . . by . . . Sir Humphrey Gilbert.” New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. Ed. David B. Quinn. Vol. 3. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, Inc., 1979. Pope, Peter P. Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.

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Prouse, D. W. A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records. London: MacMillan & Co., 1895. Purchas, Samuel. Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes. Vol. 19. London, 1905–07. Quinn, D. B., ed. New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. Vol. 3. New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, Inc., 1979. ———. “Newfoundland in the Consciousness of Europe in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” Early European Settlement and Exploitation in Atlantic Canada. Ed. G. M. Story. St. John’s: Memorial U of Newfoundland, 1982. Raleigh, Sir Walter. Works of Sir Walter Raleigh. Ed. T. Birch. Vol. 2. London, 1751. Sebek, Barbara. “Peopling, Profiting, and Pleasure in The Tempest.” The Tempest: Critical Essays. Ed. Patrick Murphy. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. 462–81. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Robert Langbaum. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. Sherman, William H. John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Smith, John. The generall historie of Virginia. London, 1624. ———. Travels and Works of Captain John Smith. Ed. E. Arber and A. G. Bradley. Edinburgh, 1910. Strong, Roy. Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Tedlock, Dennis. “Dialogues between Worlds: Mesoamerica after and before the European Invasion.” Theorizing the Americanist Tradition. Ed. Lisa Philips Valentine, and Regna Darnell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Vaughan, William. The golden fleece. London, 1626. Whitbourne, Richard. A discourse and discovery of Nevv-fovnd-land. London, 1622.

Chapter 11

“Mysteries of Commerce” 1 : I nfluence, Licensing, C ensorship, and the L iterature of L ong-Distance Travel Matthew Day

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n January 10, 1625, just prior to the publication of his multivolume collection of travel narratives, Purchas his pilgrimes, Samuel Purchas visited the East India Company (EIC) seeking permission to include a dedication to the merchants.2 They enthusiastically agreed but wanted to make some “additions and alterations” (Sainsbury, CSP 1625–29 10). In particular, they sought to comment on “the generall injuries of the Dutch [toward the English] in the Indies” (Neville-Sington 532).3 Since relations with the Dutch were politically sensitive this was a dangerous ploy, but Purchas accepted, perhaps encouraged by their £100 donation. Some days later, the compiler returned. Grateful for the EIC’s largesse, he regretted that he could not persuade the printer to publish the revised dedication, “notwithstanding it is allowed by authority”—that is, it had the government censor’s approval. The EIC decided that “rather than fayle, somewhat [was] to bee given [the printer] to insert it.” They were clearly successful, because, a few days later, Purchas was back again. Now it was the bookbinder who was playing up. He had “taken advise . . . and [was] told [the dedication] may be dangerous.” He refused to include it. No doubt exasperated,

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the merchants pragmatically resolved to “lett it rest for a while, and if they cannot procure it to be bound with the booke, they will print it upon some other occasions.” The events surrounding Purchas’s dedication draw attention to a neglected aspect of travel writing—that is, the conditions under which it reached print. In particular, little attention has been paid by those interested in travel writing or print culture to the controls exerted over such literature.4 Andrew Hadfield is the only recent critic to have offered an extensive consideration of the impact of censorship on travel writing and his focus is a specifically political one (Literature, Travel). This chapter, by contrast, examines the obstacles and difficulties that confronted those who wanted to bring travel writing into print culture. It revises our understanding of the practice and discourses of textual control by demonstrating that the literature of travel was subject to censorship not only by the state but also by trading companies.5 It examines the practice of this control and the content over which it was exerted. The desire for commercial advantage emerges as a cause of textual repression and this wish, as we shall see, might be directly expressed or couched in the terminology of more familiar reasons for censorship such as issues of state, offense to a foreign ally, or moral corruption. I begin by looking at how the state controlled print culture before discussing the discourses that these mechanisms sought to restrain. As Cyndia Clegg has demonstrated, the mechanisms for presscontrol in the Tudor-Stuart period were complex and changing (Elizabethan). The 1559 regulations established, amongst other press controls, the need for prepublication licensing of texts. This was a twopart process. The master and/or wardens of the Stationers’ Company were to oversee procedural issues such as ensuring that printers had the rights to the copies they presented for approval. The Injunctions provided for books to be licensed on the basis of their content. Authority to print could be given by “the Queen, by six privy councillors, the chancellors of the universities, or by ecclesiastical authorities specified in the Injunctions” (Clegg, Elizabethan 37). According to Clegg, however, the rigor with which this was applied depended on the type of text and the period. In the 1560s and 1570s, “well over ninety percent” of the printed works published were entered in the Stationers’ Register, but “during the 1560s only three percent of the entries in the Company’s Registers record ecclesiastical authorisation; during the 1570s this increased to seven percent, and in the 1580s to forty-two percent” (43). From then on until 1609, never more than 60 percent were registered, although a greater number were licensed (18).6 In 1586, the Star Chamber Decrees for Order in Printing introduced tighter controls for licensing texts under the Ecclesiastical High Commission. It established a panel of licensers whose presence, for a

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short while at least, increased the percentage of books licensed.7 These arrangements continued “well into the seventeenth century” and were reenforced by letters patent of 1611 (Clegg, Jacobean 26, 51–57). Jacobean preprint press control achieved a higher rate of conformity than Elizabethan arrangements, especially in the 1620s. Throughout the period such licensing was supplemented by royal proclamations that called in and suppressed books and by proceedings against transgressors, which resulted in fines, imprisonments, and mutilations. How did the literature of travel fare under such conditions? According to Clegg, in the early Elizabethan period the Stationers’ Company “needed to seek official approval only for religious, political or foreign texts” (Clegg, Elizabethan 44): hence, the low number of texts for which ecclesiastical authorization was obtained (43, 60). In the same period, a relatively small quantity of travel texts was produced. Some were authorized by the wardens only but several were checked for their contents.8 This was because many were translations.9 Thus, Thomas Nicholas’s work The Discoverie and Conquest of the Provinces of Peru (1581) was “Lycenced . . . under th[e h]andes of master Secretary WILSON and master Coldock” and Nicholas Lichefield’s translation The First Booke of the Discouerie of the Weast India, Atchieved by H. Cortes (1582) was licensed “under th[e h]andes of the Bishop of LONDON and both th[e] wardens” (Arber 2: 386 and STC 26123; 2: 404 and STC 16806). However, other works of travel literature including George Best’s account of Frobisher’s voyages, A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya (1578), and Richard Hakluyt’s Diuers voyages touching the discouerie of America (1582) were also subject to ecclesiastical licensing (Arber 2: 342 and STC 1972; 2: 411 and STC 12624). When tighter controls were implemented, travel texts were often licensed by the wardens provided the printers obtained “further authority.”10 The political topicality of many of these books explains why. In July 1605, for example, the wardens referred “A Copie of [a] letter sent from the greate Turke to the Emperour of Germanie . . . concerninge the Estate of Germanie invaded by the Turke” (Arber 3: 295). Other texts referred by the wardens concerned issues relating to the Portuguese, the Spanish, or the Dutch.11 Some material was particularly sensitive. In 1589, the printer Richard Field got a licence for Edward Daunce’s A briefe discourse of the Spanish state approved by the licenser, Abraham Hartwell, before going to the Stationers’ Company. The Stationers’ Register subsequently noted, “The Byshop of LONDONS hand was also after seene to the copie, as for allowance of th[e] imprintinge thereof” (Arber 2: 535). In 1608, The Generall Historie of Spayne was approved “PROVIDED that euerye sheete is to be by Master ETKINS revised and by Aucthority allowed” (Arber 3: 395).12 In some cases, the requested further authority was not

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forthcoming—as in the case of the proposed narrative of the pirates Ward and Dansker (Arber 3: 411). Licensers could get pernickety about process if their requests were not heeded. When Dutch merchants executed ten English East India Company men and nine Japanese soldiers on suspicion of a plot to overthrow the Dutch presence in Amboyna in March 1623, a diplomatic incident ensued. It was accompanied by an exchange of pamphlets between the Dutch East India Company and its English counterpart. Seeking to obtain permission to print “Mr Skinner’s second book against the Dutch concerning the Amboyna business” in January 1627, the East India Company “bestowed two pieces for his pains and courtesy” on Dr Worrall, the licenser (Sainsbury, CSP 1625–29 308).13 Despite this encouragement, Worrall “complained that on licensing [Skinner’s] first book he was promised that Sir Hen.[ry] Marten should have certified his allowance and approbation before it was printed, but not being performed he desired Sir Henry might approve this book before it was licensed for the press” (310).14 Marten was an eminent civil lawyer and judge who had been called on by James in 1624 to deal with the furor aroused by the Amboyna affair. This time the EIC complied with Worrall’s request and although he was apt to license material “hand over head,” the Amboyna affair was clearly sufficiently grave to make even Worrall think twice (Greg 101). If licensers could be awkward, they could also be useful. Richard Hakluyt persuaded Abraham Hartwell to translate Duarte Lopes’s A Reporte of the Kingdom of Congo (1597). Hartwell, a licenser for more than 20 years, approved a number of travel narratives, including his own translation (Greg 42–45; Arber 3: 47). He was not the only selfauthorizer for, as Clegg points out, Sir Thomas Smith oversaw eight texts—all of which were to do with Virginia (Jacobean 181). Since he was on the Council for Virginia it is clear that this was the basis for his authority. Yet either he chose not to or was not in a position to authorize tracts relating to East India Company or the many other trading ventures in which he was also involved. By 1620, the Council for Virginia was sufficiently powerful to act as licenser in its own name. A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia (1620) was entered in the register “under the handes of Certaine of his Majesties Councell for Virginia” (Arber 3: 676). The entry discloses the firm tie between the publication of travel literature and government intervention in press control. In this case, poacher had turned gamekeeper. It was a sure way to get what one wanted into print. Getting published, however, was not always the end of the story. The original account of Jerome Bowes’s embassy to Russia was replaced with a different version in the 1589 edition of Hakluyt’s The principall nauigations; from the second edition of 1598–1600, the account of the

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1596 Cadiz raid was suppressed; and Samuel Purchas made changes to his Purchas his pilgrims in light of relationships with the Dutch (Croskey, Armstrong, Neville-Sington). Most famous was the suppression of Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe common wealth (1591)—an incident invoked eight years later by the satirist Thomas Nashe to complain about the misinterpretation of texts and state interference.15 The literature of travel, then, in early modern England was subject to both pre- and postpublication control. This was usually state organized and the authorities were often nervous about this type of writing. To understand why, we need to explore what they sought to control. Cyndia Clegg observes that “while Elizabethan pre-print authorization was ecclesiastical in its administration and intent, James expected it to be moral, cultural, and political as well” (Jacobean 57). She also draws a distinction between the theory and the practice of Elizabethan censorship, noting that, although the former was religious, the latter was, “in the fullest sense of the word, political” (Elizabethan 222). Conversely, Anthony Milton demonstrates that for the later period, control of the press was “a crucial area in which the battle for religious orthodoxy was fought” (627). Sheila Lambert, however, argues that for both Tudors and Stuarts, “the primary concern of the Crown was to maintain the integrity of its foreign policy,” while its “principal domestic duty” was to “maintain the peace” and “nip sedition in the bud” (“State Control” 8). The state was also concerned with public morals; Archbishop Abbot, for example, suppressed a translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1620, even though it had been licensed (Jacobean 52). It was not only the state that influenced the control of texts. In the Jacobean period “‘private’ men and women as well as ‘public’ institutions appropriated censorship to protect their honour and reputation or assault their enemies” (225). A text then could offend the state or powerful individuals and could do so in a variety of ways. The Stationers’ Register reveals that the licensing of travel literature followed similar practices. On October 8, 1599, the wardens licensed The Conquest of the Grand Canaries, made this last Summer (1599), “PROVIDED that yf it Conteine any thinge offensive to th[e] Estate of England Then this entrance to be void” (Arber 3: 149). Toward the latter part of the period, Georg Weckherlin licensed a number of travel works. Those pertaining to the New England colony that put the event in a positive light, rather than those that attacked the separatist religion of the New Englanders, appear to have been received more favorably (Thompson 671). Moreover, awareness of these areas of sensitivity shaped what authors wrote. When seeking to obtain a licence for Coryats Crudities (1611), Thomas Coryate claimed it contained no words “against our State or any forraine Prince confederate with us, or against religion or good manners.”16 Similarly Christopher Farewell’s

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An East-India collation (1633) expatiates upon the virtues of books, noting that they are beneficial “prouided that neither Church not State be dishonoured, or any particular person thereby justly offended” (sig. F1v). Fear of offending individuals seems to have affected print culture in two ways. Firstly, it affected what reached print. As M. Lindsay Kaplan has argued, transgressive language often eluded the state’s control mechanisms by remaining in manuscript (112); it is possible that Michael Lok’s damning account of Frobisher following the collapse of the Cathay Company, “The doynges of Captayne Furbusher,” failed to reach print because of this.17 Where criticism was published, as Strachan notes of Purchas’s practice, “the names [we]re suppressed of living Britishers against whom derogatory allegations had been made” (“India” 243). Of the dead, however, it was possible to speak ill as attacks on Captain Wyndham and Richard Grenville make clear.18 The second aspect of censorship pertaining to slander and libel was the fear that they might lead to faction and imperil the state. As Justus Lipsius put it, “Factions haue alwaies ben, and will be euer the destruction of many nations” (sig. Bb4v). In the 1590s, in particular, although the extent to which faction played a part in politics is contested, it is clear that this was a period of intense rivalry at court. The pressure manifested itself in the 1596 Cadiz raid and its literary aftermath.19 Conducted under the joint command of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Charles Howard, Admiral of the Navy, the raid was a debacle. Quarrelling and justifications followed, resulting in a ban on publications relating to the event.20 Richard Hakluyt’s desire in 1598 to publish an account was an attempt to circumvent the prohibition that remained in place (Hammer, Polarization 252). Despite his strong links with the Howard family, he made studious efforts to remove material critical of Essex and evidence of faction between the two parties.21 Among a number of textual emendations and omissions, the frank comments about the tension during the expedition and afterward are the most noticeable: But even now at the very first tyme of their settinge out, there fell a certain great strife and contention betweene the two LL: generals. And albeit it appeared somewhat manifestlie while their L[ordshi]ps weare a shoare, yet did it nowe beginne more apparantlie to Budd, and to showe it sealf, while they weare a ship board yea and increased more and more, till they weare fully returned into England, and as farre as I can see or conjecture is like ynough allwaies to continue. (Rawlinson f. 3r)

The account goes on to observe that the animosity amongst the aristocracy spread to lower ranks and this too was omitted by Hakluyt.

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Hakluyt’s account of the Cadiz raid demonstrates the detailed nature of the editing undertaken to appease the censor, even though, ultimately, the attempt failed. Tracing this textual metamorphosis informs our understanding of the literature of long-distance trade and travel because such journeys also sometimes resulted in acrimonious dispute. Although there are a number of reasons why Richard Madox’s diary and other materials relating to Edward Fenton’s failed 1582–1583 voyage intended for the East Indies, for example, failed to reach print, the strong criticisms they contained effectively prohibited publication (Taylor; Donno). When printed narratives disclosed evidence of faction, they tended to be responses. Thus, in The Seamans Secrets (1595), John Davis rebutted the claim made by Cavendish (but never printed) that Davis had deserted him on the latter’s second attempt at circumnavigation (Edwards 21–42 and 96–97). Not surprisingly, in the light of anxiety about slander, such defenses did not usually make counteraccusations. The state, then, applied to travel writing the same constraints that it imposed on other literature but it also examined such texts on other accounts. Richard Boothby attributed delays in the publication of A breife [sic] discovery or description of the most famous island of Madagascar (1646) to the “hinderance of a captious licencer” who objected to his “placeing Madagascar in Asia, which he would needs have to be in Affrica” (sig. A4r).22 In 1622, this concern with geographical accuracy was also evident when Richard Whitbourne presented to the Privy Council his A Discourse and Discovery of the New-Found-Land (1620) prior to the publication of a second edition. They appointed four of their number to investigate it and other reports about the “Condicion of that Country and the benifitt of a Plantacion there.”23 Five months later, they ordered that “according to his desire [Whitbourne] showld have the printinge of that Booke” and went out of their way to promote it (Cell 100–01). Geographical information, then, could also sometimes be the subject of official scrutiny. Nor was it just the state that restricted publication; trading companies also sought to control the publication of travel writing and this is a more pertinent explanation of the slowness with which material relating to long-distance travel reached print than Geoffrey Parker suggests. He attributes it to a lack of public interest, the workings of market forces (28, 62, 84–85, 94–97), and the lack of a need to “propagandize” wellestablished trading ventures, such as the Levant Company (184).24 These reasons, however, do not satisfactorily explain the concerted efforts made by the trading companies to suppress information about their business. The evidence for the active constraint of printed material is varied and widespread, and ironically some of it derives from material that did reach print. Sir John Skinner’s tract in relation to the Amboyna affair

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makes clear that the general absence of printed books about the East India Company voyages was no accident. The Dutch pamphlet to which it was a reply had caused the East India Company, he claimed, “contrary to their desire and custome, to have recourse also to the Presse” (sig. A1v). Plentiful other evidence supports the view that the East India Company was an active suppressor of texts, and that it had a number of means of doing so. One of these means was influence. Many writers of travel narratives were employed and felt a duty to their employers. Richard Jobson, for example, worked for the Guinea Company when it was attempting to establish a trade for gold between c.1618 and 1625 (Gamble and Hair 9–38). His 1623 The golden trade was intended to encourage his superiors and dedicatees—Sir William St. John, Sir Allen Apsley, Sir Thomas Button “and other Noble Knights and Gentlemen, adventurers for . . . Ginney and Binney”—to continue the trade despite their losses (sig. A2r). He apologized to them for his “presumption in offering to bring to the publike presse, that which to you hath bin so chargeable in discovering, and therefore by all reason to you belongs the benefit of what is discovered” (sig. A3r–v). Jobson implied that he was publishing material that might harm the financial interests of those who funded the voyages. Likewise, Richard Boothby, formerly an agent of the East India Company, acknowledged his culpability when he put the case for embarking on trade with Madagascar: I will endeavour to clear my self of aspertion, which I expect will be cast upon me by the unworthy Governour and Committees of the Honourable East-India Corporation, who I presume will tax me, of perjury and false-hood, to the same Honourable company, whereof my self am a Member, for discovering that which may prove hurtfull or prejudiciall to that worthy Society. (breife discovery sig. F3v)

His allusion to “perjury and false-hood” refers to the oath he had taken “to perform all good and no bad Service, to the prejudice or detrement of the said society” (sig. F4r). Further evidence of the East India Company’s desire to control information about the journeys it undertook derives from the instructions given to those in charge of their expeditions. The EIC instructed George Waymouth on his 1602 voyage in search of a route to India by the elusive North-West Passage to “make note[s] Iournalls & observac[i]ons in writeing of [his] Continuall p[ro]ceedinge[s] in the said viadge” and to report “in writinge” within ten days of his return “all & ev[e]ry his p[ro]ceedgine[s] in the viadge worthie of note or memory for the good of the Companie.” Significantly, he was to answer the EIC’s questions and “shall not discouer the secrete[s] or

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course of his p[ro]ceedinge[s] in the vyadge to any other p[er]son or p[er]sons whatsoev[e]r then to the said Gov[e]rnor” (Birdwood and Foster 24). The EIC wanted to reserve to itself the valuable information it thought Waymouth would bring back. In short, it wanted a competitive edge. It is unclear from the wording of the documentation whether the ban on Waymouth was for 40 days only or in perpetuity. Future voyage instructions were more explicit and required that from the “Continuall & true Iournalls . . . kept of ev[e]ry daies course & Navigac[i]on” that “a p[er]fect discourse may be sett downe to be presented to the Gov[e]rnor & Companie, . . . to be kept for better direcc[i]on of posteritie” (116–17). The clause was incorporated into subsequent voyages (116, 297, 399) and was sometimes supplemented by requests to put in writing other specific information for the commercial use of the company. The 1606 voyage, for example, was charged with ascertaining whether the kinge of Cambaya or Suratt or any of his havens be in subiection to the Portugalls, & what havens of his are not, together wth the daungers and depthes of the water there for passadge, that by this crteine notice & diligent inquirie, (wch we wish to be sett downe in writeing for the Companies better informac[i]on) whereby we may hereafter attempt for further trade theare, or otherwyse desist. (123)

Information then was to be kept for the company and sent directly to the governor and the court. As the volumes of Letters Received by the East India Company make clear, different varieties of letters were sent to the governor. Some, such as Nicholas Downton’s letter to Sir Thomas Smith of June 20, 1613, specifically asked the recipient to suppress some of the information contained in it (HMSO 1: 268). On other occasions, it seems the governor could select what might be disclosed. In May 1618, the Court Minutes affirm: “There being many points unfit to be divulged in the letters from Persia which both the Spaniards and the Hollanders will be ready to take advantage of, the Committee only [are] to be allowed to read them” (Sainsbury, CSP 1617–21 167). Such letters differed from “general letters” submitted by employees. Though addressed to the governor, they were intended for more public consumption, perhaps being read aloud at company meetings where members of the company, perhaps minor investors, were present in addition to the Council members. From 1621, the printed Standing Orders required such “publique Letters” “to be opened, registered and after read in open Court,” perhaps suggesting that prior to this the governor’s freedom to control the release of information had extended to such “general letters” (sig. B3r).

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In addition to the pressure it put on individuals by such oaths and the very practical control it exercised over publication of letters received by the governor, the East India Company had other means of exerting influence. In 1601, the EIC accepted the dedication of William Walker’s The iournall, or dayly register, contayning a true manifestation, and historicall declaration of the voyage, accomplished by eight shippes of Amsterdam, vnder the conduct of Iacob Corneliszen Neck Admirall (Sainsbury, CSP 1513–1616 120). As Walker claimed, this account of the 1598 Dutch voyage to the East Indies disclosed a wide range of useful information acquainting us with their Voyages, discoveries and dangers, both outward and homeward; with their negotiation and Traffique at Iava, the Molucos, and other places, with the disposition of the naturall inhabitance, and the slye sullen practises of the Portugals, and likewise with the quantie [sic] and value of Spices and other commodities which they brought home. (sig. ¶ 2v)

Happy to make public information from the voyages of rivals, the EIC was more circumspect about that deriving from its own undertakings. Christopher Farewell sought to dedicate to it his narrative of the 1614–15 East India Company voyage led by Nicholas Downton. The EIC refused, however, largely because Farewell had become persona non grata. His hope that the rejection might be “to [his] aduantage” reveals the power relationship at stake (sig. A3r). As potential payer of outstanding wages, as possible future reemployer, or as the granter of charity, the EIC held sway over Farewell, and, having rejected his repeated requests for work, perhaps felt obliged to make him two small charitable donations.25 Apart from financial influence, the companies also had the power to dispose of the material in their own holdings as they pleased. Philip Edwards has shown that the Muscovy Company almost certainly suppressed information about Hudson’s ill-fated voyage (130) and the East India Company censored what Samuel Purchas could see and write. He was “allowed to see the Company’s journals of voyages into the East Indies, particularly the journal of Sir Thomas Roe, but is to take nothing but what ‘is proper to history, and not prejudicial to the Company.’ His notes to be perused before they are carried out of the house” (Sainsbury, CSP 1622–24 18). In short, the East India Company exercised just the same sort of control as the state and ensured that the texts Purchas published from their archive were “seen and allowed.” Such interventions supplemented the requirement for Company members to take an oath of allegiance and the possibility of employment or the withdrawal of it as means of

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influencing print-publication. This authority meant that writers had to go to some lengths to disguise their authorship. As Wendy Wall has demonstrated, in the early modern period authorial disclaimers about the circumstances in which their works came to the press were a commonplace, although the debate about the stigma of print has never extended to travel literature.26 Gerald MacLean, however, has recently suggested that William Biddulph’s The trauels of certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea (1609) exemplifies the way this custom could be exploited to publish material that might offend (51–55). The preface, written by “Theophilus Lavender,” claims that the letters were obtained surreptitiously and published without the author’s (William Biddulph’s) consent (sig. ¶4v–A1v). Biddulph was the preacher of the East India Company and his religious calling might lead us to believe the work’s claims about publication, but contemporaries were more skeptical and their evidence confirms MacLean’s suspicions. John Sanderson, the Levant Company magnate, was expecting a work from Biddulph in 1608 (Foster, Travels 257), and when it emerged the next year he took a dim view of it, reaching the conclusion that since “by Bidles Kinsman His Lordship [Sir Thomas Glover, ambassador in Constantinople] had bine covertly a little toutched [in the book] . . . it could not be without Bidles concent” (265). In short, the complex story about the text’s route to publication spun by “Theophilus” was a protection required by the criticisms contained in the work. If charged, “Theophilus” could claim he knew of no offense in the material he published; Biddulph could argue that he specifically requested the letters be unpublished. Thus, while some texts may have come into print surreptitiously, this practice also made possible a defensive discourse that could protect authors. Biddulph’s case shows how the influence exerted by the East India Company could be circumvented, and it highlights the lengths to which authors were driven when they wished to criticize powerful individuals. Trading companies, then, did seek to influence publication of material that they thought might damage their interests, and we need to expand our understanding of the agents of control of the press in the early modern period to include them. The mechanisms they deployed varied from outright refusal to release information, to applying the financial power available for an employer to exert on its employees. What sort of information, however, did those involved in travel seek to suppress? Many of those who come into print admitted to suppressing information themselves. This self-censorship was often an attempt to prevent useful information from being revealed to competitors, often international ones. The preface to A True Relation of the Most Prosperous

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Voyage Made in this present Year 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth (1605), which had been to “north Virginia,” observes: Because some forrein Nation . . . have hoped hereby to gaine some knowledge of the countrie . . . I have neither written of the latitude or variation . . . [nor the] many words in their language to the number of foure or five hundred, as also the names of divers of their governours, aswell their friends as their enemies; being reserved to be made knowen for the benefit of those that shal goe in the next Voyage. (Quinn and Quinn, New England 253).

Yet, in other circumstances geographical information was not suppressed when it might have been. The lack of consistency suggests that there was no overarching principle about the type of material that was regarded as sensitive. Instead it appears that decisions were made on a case-by-case basis. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. As instructions for the “methodical” writing of travel literature demonstrate, a vast array of information was thought worth recording for its practical value.27 Albert Meierus’s Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners, &c. employed in seruices abrode (1589) included 12 headings ranging from “Cosmographie” to “The Ecclesiasticall State.” Each of these was further subdivided into a number of parts; the shortest of which had 10 subheadings; the longest, “Husbandrie,” had 33. In his posthumously published England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664), Thomas Mun, a director of the East India Company in the 1620s, detailed “The knowledge and qualities, which are required to be in a perfect Merchant of forraign trade” (119).28 This included knowledge of commodities, weights and measures, prices, and markets, but Mun also expected the merchant to be “a diligent observer of the ordinary Revenues and expences of forraign Princes, together with their strength both by Sea and Land, their laws, customes, policies, manners, religions, arts, and the like” (124). The diversity of potentially useful knowledge meant it could not be controlled completely. Nor did either the government or those involved in trade specifically seek to do so. Instead, against a general background in which influence was exerted, they tried, on specific occasions and often for specific reasons, to shape what reached print. Thus, Maurice Abbott, the deputy governor of the East India Company assured his colleagues that “as for the Broyles between the English and Dutch he [Purchas] will sett them downe otherwise then they be in the Iournalls” (Neville-Sington 522). As Michael Strachan notes, information regarding “Forts, India factories, etc.,” was suppressed by Purchas, as per William Hawkins’s account of his time at the Mogul court (“India”

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243). Similarly, at the end of the material dealing with Sir Thomas Roe, Purchas observes, “That which followes, as other Letters also, I have willingly omitted, as not so fit for vulgar Readers, being Mysteries of Commerce” (Strachan, “India” 243). The expectation that authors would not reveal commercially sensitive information is also implicit in Richard Boothby’s defensiveness in A breife discovery (1646). He disclosed the commodities bartered in the Surat-Gombroon trade and the percentage profit to be made on each. He purported to take his information from actual trading voyages made in 1629 and 1630. In this instance the EIC was unable to prevent publication, largely because Boothby had already fallen out with it.29 In the case of Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe common wealth, the Muscovy Company seems to have had more success.30 Published in 1591 following Fletcher’s return from his embassy to Muscovy in 1588–1589, the work was soon recalled after complaints by the Muscovy Company. Their letter to William Cecil complained about 18 specific passages and summarized their concerns:31 (besides the discowrse of the descripcion of the Countrie, the militarie government and forces thereof, the Emperoures Revenue, and howe yt ryseth which is offensive to the Russe that anie man should looke into) the person of the Emperour his father, his Brother and the Lord Boris Fedorowich the protector, and generallie the nature of the people, are towched in soe harde tearmes, as that the Companie doubt the revenge thereof will light on theire people, and goodes remayninge in Russia, and utterlie overthrowe the trade forever. (Berry 150–51)

In terms of the practice and discourse of censorship, the Muscovy Company’s letter is particularly interesting. They complain about the personal criticisms of the current czar (a minor) and his protector, Boris Godunov; they object to three comments that imply faction and suggest rebellion; they deem the revelations about affairs of state including the size of the army and how it was funded, methods of taxation, and the claims that the government is “plaine tyrannical” as offensive; finally they criticize Fletcher’s tract for the aspersions it casts over the character of the Russians: its suggestion that the nobility and populous allow themselves to suffer slavery; that the people are full of “whoredomes, adulteries and like uncleanes of life”; and, finally, that “the Russe nether beleeveth anie thinge that an other man speaketh nor speaketh anie thinge him self worthie to be beleaved” (Berry 153). Thus, the Muscovy Company couched its complaint in the discourse of censorship. Yet it was not concerned about the things in themselves; it merely recognized that Fletcher’s writing might undermine the trade with Russia. The discourse of censorship served commercial ends.

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Yet the story of Fletcher’s tract does not end with its calling in. In 1598, Hakluyt published a heavily edited edition. As with the account of the Cadiz raid, he was seeking to circumvent government censorship. Omitting all the sections that the Muscovy Company complained about and some others, he managed to publish some chapters of Fletcher’s tract. Twenty-seven years later, Purchas could also publish large extracts from Of the Russe common wealth but with significant differences. Although he claimed to “have in some places contracted, in others mollified the biting or more bitter stile, which the Author useth of the Russian Government; that I might doe good at home, without harme abroad,” his version contains almost all the elements that the Muscovy Company was concerned about (Purchas 3.3: 413). Purchas, however, was able to historicize them. For example, the 1598–1613 period, known in Russia as the “Time of Troubles,” was one of great political instability as various pretenders sought to assert their claims to the Muscovite throne following the extinction of the Rurik dynasty. This meant that the imposers of what Fletcher had identified as a burdensome tax regime were no longer alive, and Purchas could include Fletcher’s critical comments, observing, “Gods chastisement hath since beene heavy to sweep such ills among them” (3.3: 430).32 Fletcher’s accusation about the mendacity of the Russians was also included and was ameliorated only a little by the addition of the phrase “as some say” (3.3: 460). However, Purchas’s own historical period brought its own constraints. During the “Time of Troubles,” James I had himself considered invading Russia, but the attempt at colonization in 1612–1613 had been aborted (Dunning; Lubimenko). It was perhaps this incident that made Purchas omit Fletcher’s allusion to Russian desires for foreign invasion. Similarly, complaints toward the end of James’s reign about what was perceived as the increasingly autocratic nature of power, particularly that exercised by the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles, may have led to the exclusion of the assertion that in Russia there was no written law except the “pleasure of the Prince and Magistrates” (Coward 151–58; Smith 59–65). Such omissions suggest that Purchas’s eye was on England, not Russia, despite his claims. The publication history of Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe common wealth exemplifies the complexity of the discourse and practices surrounding the censorship of early modern travel writing. While the state enforced censorship, it was a private company that sought such action. Citing commercial concerns, the Muscovy Company nevertheless focused its complaint to the state on recognized areas of discourse. Since, on this occasion, the aspirations of the state and the company coincided, the plea was successful. Yet, the postpublication censorship of a text could be circumvented by adroit editing or could lapse through the passing of time. Republished in a different historical period,

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Fletcher’s tract was subject to an alternative set of concerns. Censorship that had originated in commercial sensitivity had now become more politically motivated. The literature of travel then in the early modern period was subject both to the same mechanisms and discourses as other literature and to additional pressures. Examined before publication by those in an official capacity, sometimes to an unusually high degree when translation of foreign language texts was involved, it was also constrained in additional ways. Not only the state but those with vested interests, especially long-distance trading companies, sought to restrict publication. They did so through a variety of means: limiting access to materials, refusing dedications, threatening to end employment, and requiring oaths from employees that they would not prejudice the company’s interests. In terms of content, the literature of travel was again both constrained by the same pressures as other writing and perused on other counts, such as commercial interest and geographical accuracy. Exactly what might be of “commercial interest” depended on the particular historical, political, and geographical circumstances and these could change. Information about commodities, prices, and profits might all be commercially sensitive. Less obviously, harbors, latitudes, warfare, and disputes could also be deemed better left unpublished. Yet, practical knowledge could be published if it did not prejudice company interests. Thus, commercial requirements need to be added to our understanding of the motivations behind the censorship of early modern print culture, and long-distance trading companies need to be aligned with the government in their desire to suppress texts. As Samuel Pepys put it, “[I]t is pretty to see what money will do” (Latham and Williams 8: 123).

Notes 1. Strachan, “India” 243. 2. For full details of the events described here see Neville-Sington 465–573. 3. All succeeding quotes in this paragraph are from Neville-Sington 532. 4. Seminal works in both areas that fail to discuss this issue include (for travel writing) Parker, Armitage, and Greenblatt; and (for print culture) books by Rostenberg 133–57; Clegg, Elizabethan and Jacobean; Patterson; Hadfield, Literature and Censorship; Dutton; Clare; Burt; Sharpe (644–729). For articles, see Hill 1: 32–71; Lambert, “Printers” and “State Control”; Shuger; Thompson; Bland; and Milton. Although Fuller (7), following Jed (74–120), investigates both manuscript and print sources, she does not consider how the one was transformed into the other or what impact this might have had on the text.

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5. Although Strachan is right to assert that “compared with the Portuguese, the British were remarkably open about publishing navigational and commercial information” (“India” 243), his view conceals the strenuous efforts made to prevent much commercially sensitive material from reaching print. 6. The figures for the 1580s hide very significant variations: in 1584, less than 25 percent of all books printed appeared in the Stationers’ Register, and in 1585, less than 20 percent; but in 1586, 1587, and 1588, the figures were respectively “half the books printed” and “two thirds” (Clegg, Elizabethan 61). 7. Clegg notes that “between 1588 and 1590, approximately half the English books printed were ‘seen and allowed,’” but that by 1596 “less than forty percent of printed books were entered in the register, and only forty percent of those were authorized” (Clegg, Elizabethan 61). 8. Translations for which higher authority was not sought include works by Hackett, Frampton, Nicholas, The pleasant historie (Arber 1: 90; 2: 325 and 2: 342). 9. Of the 50 works listed in Parker’s “Bibliography” (243–65) between 1560 and 1585, 29 were translations. The figure is higher if Eden’s History and Hakluyt’s Diuers voyages are included. 10. Arber, entry for October 9, 1605 (3: 303); entry for May 20, 1606 (3: 322); entry for May 28, 1607 (3: 350); entry for May 21, 1608 (3: 379); entry for June 2, 1609 (3: 411); entry for April 19, 1613 (3: 529); entry for June 28, 1614 (3: 548); entry for December 11, 1621 (4: 62). 11. Arber, entry for June 21, 1597 (3: 85–86); entry for August 11, 1600 (3: 169), for the Portuguese; entry for February 17, 1598 (3: 104); entry for June 13, 1598 (3: 118); entry for January 16, 1601 (3: 178); entry for March 19, 1603 (3: 230), for the Dutch; entry for November 12, 1595 (3: 52); entry for June 21, 1597 (3: 85–86); entry for January 30, 1599 (3: 137); entry for July 17, 1600 (3: 167); entry for January 4, 1601 (3: 177) for the Spanish. 12. This unusual phrasing implies that licensing a work did not normally require inspection of every sheet, which may help to explain what Patterson has called “those famous puzzling incidents of noncensorship” (13). 13. The text referred to here is STC 7450, A Remonstrance of the Directors of the Netherlands East India Company, Presented to the States Generall Touching the Proceedings against the English Merchants, Executed at Amboyna. Together with the Acts of the Processe. And the Reply of the English East India Company (1632). As the STC entry reveals, the third part of this work was stayed on July 30, 1628, indicating that although commercial companies could themselves seek the repression of texts, they too could have their publishing desires thwarted.

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14. For details of Sir Henry Marten see DNB. 15. In Nashe’s Lenten stuffe (1599), Nashe reviled those who he claimed misread authorial intention: If but carelesly betwixt sleeping and waking I . . . leaue some termes in suspence that my post-haste want of argent will not giue mee elbowe roome enough to explane or examine as I would, out steps me an infant squib of the Innes of Court, . . . and he[,] . . . [,] catcheth hold of a rush, a[n]d absolutely concludeth, it is meant of the Emperour of Ruscia, and that it will vtterly marre the traffike into that country if all the Pamphlets bee not called in and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned. (sig. I3r) Although Charles Nicholl (116–21) reads the passage in the light of international relations with Denmark, a closer parallel is the suppression of Fletcher’s work. 16. The text is from a letter in Coryat’s hand bound into a British Library copy of Coryats Crudities shelfmark G.6750 (Strachan, Life and Adventures 128). 17. This document is British Library, Lansdowne MS 100, item 1. It is printed in McDermott, Third Voyage 71–104. For the financial disputes surrounding Frobisher’s three voyages, see McDermott, Martin Frobisher 120–256. 18. For such attacks in print see Eden, Decades 345v that speaks of “The evill conditions of [Captain] Wyndham.” See, too, Linschoten, reprinted in Hakluyt, The principal nauigations 2.2: 185. 19. See, Hammer, Polarization; “Myth-Making”; “Patronage at Court” and Guy 437–58. 20. Hammer (“Myth-Making” 632) refers to two manuscripts: British Library, Stowe MS 159 ff. 353r–69v, and British Library, Sloane MS 226. However, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 124 is a third manuscript, which appears to be a presentation copy. The Sloane and Stowe manuscripts include at the end of the text a paragraph that is not included in the Rawlinson MS, but is included in Hakluyt, suggesting that either of the first two may have been the basis for Hakluyt’s copy-text, though this is not conclusive. 21. The 1598 volume was dedicated to Charles Howard and noted that Hakluyt’s brother had tutored William Howard (Hakluyt, The principal nauigations 1: sig. *2r.). Charles Howard’s sister had given the living of Wetheringsett to Hakluyt in 1590 (Quinn and Quinn, “Chronology” 1: 300, 303). 22. Interestingly, the licenser also disliked “the rudenesse of the stile” (sig. A4r). 23. Public Record Office, PC 2/30, 425 and P.R.O. PC 2/30, 578, in Cell 100–01. 24. It seems more likely that the overlap in personnel between the East India Company and the Levant Company resulted in a shared skepticism

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

M at t h e w D ay toward print culture. As Brenner put it, “Levant Company merchants dominated [the East India Company] from its foundation” (366). For Farewell’s demise and subsequent requests for charity from the company, see Foster, Voyage 153–54. See Saunders and the response by May. Neither addresses the issue of travel writing. See Stagl, History of Curiosity, chapters 1 and 2; “Methodising”; Poe 15–16, 40–41, 56–58; and Streitberger 17–48. As Brenner (Merchants 272) notes, the work was probably written in the 1620 or 1630s and Mun died in 1641. For more information on Mun, see Supple 211–12 and DNB. See Boothby, A true declaration. For the context of Fletcher’s 1588–1589 embassy, see Berry and Crummey 87–108 and Willan 172–79. For discussion of Fletcher’s tract see Archer 114–19; Poe passim; Palmer 129–54. None of these has considered its suppression in the light of current thinking about censorship. The most comprehensive discussion of Hakluyt’s editing of Fletcher’s tract is Lindsay’s. For a full version of the letter, see Bond 352–55 or Berry 150–53. For a helpful discussion of the confusing “Time of Troubles,” see Perrie.

Works Cited Arber, Edward, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640. 5 vols. 1875–94. New York: Peter Smith, 1950. Archer, John Michael. Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India and Russia in Early Modern English Writing. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Armitage, David. “Literature and Empire.” The Oxford History of the British Empire. 5 vols. Ed. Nicholas Canny and Alaine Low. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 1: 99–123. Armstrong, Charles E. “The ‘Voyage to Cadiz’ in the Second Edition of Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages.’” Bibliographical Society of America Papers 49 (1955): 254–62. Berry, Lloyd E. The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder. Madison, NJ: U of Wisconsin P, 1964. Berry, Lloyd E., and R. O. Crummey, eds. Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers. Madison, NJ: U of Wisconsin P, 1968. Best, George. A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya. London, 1578. Biddulph, William. The trauels of certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea. London, 1609. Birdwood, Sir George, and William Foster, eds. The Register of Letters &c of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. London, 1893.

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Bland, Mark. “ ‘Invisible Dangers’: Censorship and the Subversion of Authority in Early Modern England.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 90.2 (1996): 151–93. Bond, E. A., ed. Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century. London, 1856. Boothby, Richard. A breife [sic] discovery or description of the most famous island of Madagascar. London, 1646. ———. A true declaration of the intollerable wrongs done to Richard Boothby, merchant of India, by two lewd servants to the honorable East India Company. . . . London, 1644. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. ———. “The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1650.” An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450–1800. Ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam. London: Ashgate, 1996. Burt, Richard. Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Cell, Gillian T. Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation 1610–1630. London: Hakluyt Society, 1982. Clare, Janet. “Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Censorship. 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. ———. Press Censorship in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age. 2nd edition. London: Longman, 1994. Croskey, Robert M. “Hakluyt’s Accounts of Sir Jerome Bowes’ Embassy to Ivan IV.” Slavonic and East European Review 61 (1983): 546–64. Donno, Elizabeth Story. An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls. London: Hakluyt Society, 1976. Dunning, Chester. “James I, the Russia Company, and the Plan to Establish a Protectorate over North Russia.” Albion 21 (Spring 1989): 206–26. Dutton, Richard. Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. East India Company. The lawes or standing orders of the East India Company. London, 1621. Eden, Richard, trans. The decades of the newe worlde or west India. London, 1555. ———. The history of trauayle in the VVest and East Indies. London, 1577. Edwards, Philip, ed. Last Voyages: Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Farewell, Christopher. An East-India colation; or a discourse of travels. London, 1633. Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe common wealth. London, 1591. Foster, Sir William. The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant 1584–1602. London: Hakluyt Society, 1931.

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Foster, Sir William. ed. The Voyage of Nicholas Downton to the East Indies 1614–1615. London: Hakluyt Society, 1939. Frampton, John. A briefe description of the portes, creekes, bayes, and hauens, of the Weast India. London, 1578. Fuller, Mary C. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576–1624. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Gamble, David P., and P. E. H. Hair, eds. The Discovery of River Gambra by Richard Jobson 1623. London: Hakluyt Society, 1999. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Posessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Greg, W. W. Licensers for the Press to 1640. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962. Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hackett, Thomas, trans. The whole and true discouerye of Terra Florida. London, 1563. Hadfield, Andrew, ed. Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. ———. Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Hakluyt, Richard. Diuers voyages touching the discouerie of America. London, 1582. ———. The principall nauigations, voiages and discoueries of the English nation. London, 1589. ———. The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation. 3 vols. London, 1598–1600. Hammer, Paul E. J. “Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596.” Historical Journal 40.3 (1997): 621–42. ———. “Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex.” The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade. Ed. John Guy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 65–86. ———. The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Hill, Christopher. “Censorship and English Literature.” Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. 2 vols. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985. 1: 32–71. HMSO. Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East. 6 vols. London: Sampson Low and Co., 1896–1902. Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Jobson, Richard. The golden trade: or, A discouery of the riuer Gambra. London, 1623. Kaplan, M. Lindsay. The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Lambert, Sheila. “The Printers and the Government, 1604–1640.” Aspects of Printing from 1600. Ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987. 1–29.

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———. “State Control of the Press in Theory and Practice: The Role of the Stationers’ Company before 1640.” Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910. Ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1992. 1–32. Latham, Robert, and William Matthews, eds. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 11 vols. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970–1983. Lindsay, Robert O. “Richard Hakluyt and Of the Russe Common Wealth.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 57 (1963): 312–27. Linschoten, van Jan Huygen. Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. his discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies. Trans. William Phillip. London, 1598. Lipsius, Justus. Sixe bookes of politickes or ciuil doctrine. Trans. William Jones. London, 1594. Lubimenko, Madame. “A Project for the Acquisition of Russia by James I.” English Historical Review 29 (Spring 1914): 246–56. MacLean, Gerald. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. May, Stephen W. “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ‘Stigma of Print.’” Renaissance Papers 10 (1980): 11–18. McDermott, James. Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. ———, ed. The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island 1578. London: Hakluyt Society, 2001. Meierus, Albertus. Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners, &c. employed in seruices abrode. London, 1589. Milton, Anthony. “Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England.” The Historical Journal 41.3 (1998): 625–51. Mun, Thomas. A discourse of trade, from England vnto the East-Indies. London, 1621. ———. England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade. London, 1664. Early English Tracts on Commerce. Ed. J. R. McCulloch. Cambridge: Economic History Society, 1952. 115–31. Nashe, Thomas. Nashes Lenten stuffe. London, 1599. Neville-Sington, Pamela. “The Primary Purchas Bibliography.” The Purchas Handbook. Ed. L. E. Pennington. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1997. 465–573. Nicholas, Thomas. The strange and marueilous newes lately come from the great kingdome of Chyna. London, 1577. ———. The pleasant historie of the conquest of the VVeast India, now called new Spayne. London, 1578. Nicholl, Charles. A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe. London, 1984. Palmer, Daryl. Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Parker, Geoffrey. Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620. Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965.

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Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison, NJ: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Perrie, Maureen. Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Poe, Marshall T. “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography 1476–1748. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas his pilgrimes. 5 vols. London, 1625. Quinn, D. B., and A. M. Quinn. The English New England Voyages 1602–1608. London: Hakluyt Society, 1983. ———. “A Hakluyt Chronology.” Hakluyt Handbook. Ed. D. B. Quinn. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1974. 1: 263–331. Rawlinson ms. D. 124. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Rostenberg, Leona. The Minority Press and the English Crown A Study in Repression, 1558–1625. Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1971. Sainsbury, W. Noel, ed. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Persia 1513–1616. London, 1862. ———, ed. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Persia 1617–21. London, 1870. ———, ed. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Persia 1622–24. London, 1878. ———, ed. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Persia 1625–29. London, 1884. Saunders, J. W. “ ‘The Stigma of Print’: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry.” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64. Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Shuger, Deborah. “Civility and Censorship in Early Modern England.” Censorship and Silencing. Ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998. 89–110. Skinner, Sir John. A true relation of the vniust, cruell, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies. London, 1624. Sloane ms. 226. British Library, London. Smith, David L. A History of the Modern British Isles 1605–1707. Oxford: Blackwells, 1998. Stagl, Justin. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–1800. London: Routledge, 1995. ———. “The Methodising of Travel in the 16th Century: A Tale of Three Cities.” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 303–38. Stowe ms. 159. British Library, London. Strachan, Michael. “India and the Areas Adjacent.” The Purchas Handbook. Ed. L. E. Pennington. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1997. 1: 241–54. ———. The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate. London: Oxford UP, 1962. Streitberger, W. R.Edmond Tyllney: Master of the Revels and Censor of Plays: A Descriptive Index to His Diplomatic Manual on Europe. New York: AMS Press, 1986.

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Supple, B. E. Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959. Taylor, E. G. R., ed. The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton 1582–83. London: Hakluyt Society, 1959. Thompson, Anthony B. “Licensing the Press: The Career of G. R. Weckherlin during the Personal Rule of Charles I.” The Historical Journal 41.3 (1998): 653–78. Walker, William, trans. The iournall, or dayly register, contayning a true manifestation, and historicall declaration of the voyage, accomplished by eight shippes of Amsterdam, vnder the conduct of Iacob Corneliszen Neck Admirall . . . 1598. London, 1601. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Willan, T. S. The Early History of the Russia Company 1553–1603. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1956.

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Chapter 12

Global Œconomy : Ben Jonson’ s T H E S TA P L E O F N E W S and the E thics of Mercantilism Stephen Deng

At the close of Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626), Lady Pecunia,

the personification of money, in a play that also contains figures of the prodigal heir and the stingy usurer, expresses her desire to be a useful and active participant in society: And so Pecunia herself doth wish, That she may still be aid unto their uses, Not slave unto their pleasures or a tyrant Over their fair desires, but teach them all The golden mean: the prodigal how to live, The sordid and the covetous how to die; That, with sound mind; this, safe frugality. (5.6.60–66)

As with the late morality plays The Three Ladies of London and A pleasant comedie, shewing the contention betweene liberalitie and prodigality, Jonson allegorizes Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics on the right use of riches. Pecunia cites Aristotle’s “golden mean” of wealth use, the middle ground between wasteful prodigality and covetous meanness, in order to prescribe a virtuous future course for her own treatment, as well as for her influence on others. She should be neither “slave” nor

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“tyrant” to her admirers’ pleasures and desires, but be cared for with “safe frugality,” as she teaches the young prodigal the proper manner of living and the old miser the proper use of wealth in the art of dying. This allegorical structure elicits a series of questions about the play and the historical site of its production. Why at this time does Jonson choose the right use of wealth for his topic? Why does Jonson include numerous topical allusions? Also, why does Jonson translate Aristotle’s term eleutheriotqs as “safe frugality” rather than “liberality,” like the author of Contention betweene liberalitie and prodigality? Why give it the sense of household budget and concern about spending within a market economy rather than the connotation of generosity in a gift economy? In this chapter, I offer an answer to these questions by arguing that Staple should be read in relation to economic thought emerging in the seventeenth century, especially during the 1620s when England was experiencing an unprecedented depression. A prominent fear at this time was that England was losing its money, which many believed would precipitate the destruction of the commonwealth. As a result, writers published a number of tracts concerning the monetary situation, giving rise to the school of economic writing that Adam Smith later popularized under the rubric “mercantilism.” Much of the mercantilist discourse aligns the interest of the state and English households against conspiring foreigners, both the exchange dealers spreading “banker canker” and “trade pirates” who have manipulated the English into an unfavorable balance of trade. However, commentators also perceived a significant threat within England itself that must be held in check by an ethical approach to national and household economy. For example, Thomas Mun, the most influential mercantilist author, employs Aristotelian ethics on “liberality” to prescribe economic restraint essential for England’s success within an international economy. I read Jonson’s concern with the right use of wealth in a similar light, as a response to the national economic crisis. Pennyboy Junior’s proper treatment of Pecunia offers a household-level remedy for England’s monetary problems by advocating the golden mean as the appropriate path for monetary circulation to ensure a healthy economy. Individual choices about how one uses wealth within the household balance sheet thus become linked to the national balance of trade within what I term “global œconomy.”

The Enemy Without: The “Banker Canker” and Trade Pirates Around 1621, England faced its most severe economic depression to date, which included rising unemployment, falling prices, a falling exchange rate, and, most alarmingly, a great outflow of specie, precious

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metals used for the coining of money. England’s problems arose primarily from its dependence on one key export, wool cloth, to two external markets: Germany and the Low Countries. According to Raymond De Roover, the immediate cause of the economic downturn was the outbreak in 1618 of the Thirty Years War in Bohemia and the Palatinate (201). As a result, England experienced a diminished demand for its cloth in Hamburg, which served as the primary center for distribution among the various markets in Germany. Also, 1621 witnessed the breaking of a 12-year truce between rebel and reconciled provinces in the Low Countries. By 1624, England faced war with Spain to support the Protestant cause. England, therefore, could find no place to send its inventory of cloth. The inability to sell wool cloth led to unemployment for thousands in the cloth industry and lower profits for owners from both decreased prices and lesser quantity traded. This also led to a tightening of the money market and a lowering of the exchange rate to the point at which gold and silver were more valuable on the world market than as English coin. As a result, England saw its coinage disappear. Many believed the loss of specie would ultimately lead to the failure of the commonwealth, a dramatic implication that would influence the general mercantilist belief that the health of the commonwealth depended on its quantity of money.1 Although the depression was likely related to world events, contemporary commentators were quick to find particular groups, both insiders and outsiders, to blame for their problems. One common theme was that foreign bankers and exchangedealers were conspiring to destroy England. The English were relatively new at international finance, becoming involved in the international money market only under Edward IV and Henry VII, and during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, London was merely a satellite of Antwerp, the principal banking center in northern Europe.2 Therefore, foreignness for many English often meant intrigue.3 During the depression of 1564, a Royal Commission on the Exchanges accused the “Counsell of the Finaunces in the Lowecontreyes” of influencing the “Bankeres of Antewerpe” in a “Conspyrasye” to keep the pound sterling low “to the Comone benefyte of the Lowe contreyes gayned uppon the Comone detrimente of the Realme of England” (Tawney and Power 3: 352). Another commission convened during the depression of 1576 found that exchangers, especially Flemish ones, had “robbed” England of “many millions” and had made it “so bare of monye, jewells, and plate that therebye Townes, Cytties, and Burroughs” had fallen into decay.4 R. H. Tawney explains that the English believed Flemish bankers, encouraged by the Spanish government, were waging secret economic warfare against England by depressing the sterling (80).5

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Fears of foreigners and theories of banker conspiracies persisted into the seventeenth century, especially in the writings of Gerard de Malynes, who staged a particularly virulent attack against the “banker canker.” As with previous conspiracy theorists, Malynes maintained that bankers kept the pound sterling low so that foreign countries could steal England’s specie.6 In his A treatise of the canker of Englands common wealth, Malynes finds the abuse of the exchange to be “the very efficient cause” of the trade deficit, “and consequently of the decrease of our wealth, & exportation of our monies” (sig. B8r–v). English money being “undervalued,” there was an incentive to export it out of England as specie to be used in other countries. Moreover, Malynes argues that flows of specie to foreign countries would inflate foreign price levels even more, making the English buy foreign commodities “too dear,” thereby increasing expenditure on foreign products (sig. D2r). Malynes believed that the financial instruments called “bills of exchange”—a transfer of funds, based on the rate of exchange, from one place to another by means of contract—facilitated foreign manipulation. The transaction required two bills, one for the initial delivery of money in the specified denomination to the “borrower” and the second for the delivery of money in the specified denomination (typically not the same denomination as the first delivery) at the specified place and time to the “lender.” The scarequote terms “borrower” and “lender” indicate the possibilities for charging implied interest in these transactions—a premium above the going exchange rate. Therefore, merchants’ exchange typically permitted profit from loans. Such charging of interest could be justified on the grounds that the profit was uncertain because of fluctuating exchange rates. The bill was not a direct loan because it did not specify a greater quantity of the same currency to be returned to the lender. Rather, repayment would be made in another currency, whose value in relation to the borrower’s currency might depreciate by the time of the final delivery. Because of this negotiable rate for relative currency values, Malynes felt that bills of exchange allowed foreign bankers to drain specie from England by keeping the pound sterling “artificially” low. It was especially the artificial or “imaginative” nature of these rates that offended Malynes (sig. C5v). He believes that exchange should be based on “real,” measurable factors, especially the “mint par,” which depended entirely on the “weight, finenesse and valuation of the money of each countrey, according to value for value” (sig. B7v). Money should be relatively easy to value because one merely had to measure the precious metal content, but because of debasement and different standards set by different princes, early modern coins were not homogeneous. Nevertheless, some commentators called for “tables of exchange rates” at the par pro pari, the relative intrinsic values of different

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denominations of money, to be established and enforced by authorities. For example a 1622 letter to the king signed by Henry Mandeville asks for such a table to “be fixed in some Publicke place, as a Rule to guide all exchanges in future . . . and noe exchange made either from thence or thether, under that Rule of Parity” (f. 153v). Although what amounts to a “just price” edict would likely have had little effect on the economy, those in Malynes’s party were convinced that the English authorities could prevent the “banker canker” by strictly enforcing the par pro pari in international exchange. However, another prominent mercantilist, Thomas Mun, objected that Malynes’s emphasis on the exchange is “a mere fallacy of the cause . . . a Secondary means,” and it is fruitless for the public authority to try to maintain exchange by bills at the par pro pari since “it is not the undervaluing of our money in exchange, but the overballancing of our trade that carrieth away our treasure” (sig. D4r–v). Mun believes that the balance of trade drives balance of payments and not vice versa. Exchange rates are merely “Passive” responses to the “over or under ballance of the several Trades which are Predominant and Active” (sig. D8r).7 Mun’s emphasis on the balance of trade came to dominate subsequent economic discourse in England. It was a simple formula: if England’s exports exceeded its imports, the country would accumulate wealth; if on the other hand imports exceeded exports, England would lose wealth. Therefore, if the English wished to increase their wealth, they “must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value” (sig. B2r). Such a simple solution had powerful implications. For example, it created new guidelines for designating parties responsible for England’s economic problems. Since conspiring bankers were not the ones directly responsible, English writers looked at those parties immediately involved in imports and exports, especially foreign merchants. Italian merchant-bankers were often accused of pushing up prices by restraining trade and importing foreign commodities without employing “a great part of the money coming thereof upon the commodities of this realm” (1 Rich. III c. 9). Moreover, importers were accused of selling the English useless but expensive trifles in exchange for useful but cheap English products.8 For several years, and into the seventeenth century, by enforcing “Statutes of Employment,” the English state had attempted to prevent “evil” foreign merchants from taking too many valuables out of England in exchange for foreign trifles.9 The first such statute in 1390 required all merchants who imported foreign wares to purchase at least half of their imports’ value in wool, tin, and other English commodities.10 According to a statute under Henry IV, such requirements were “for the better keeping of gold and silver within the realm of England and

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for the increase of the commodities of the said realm.”11 Commentators continued to appeal to them into the sixteenth and seventeenth century as a way of curbing specie drainage. For example, a royal commission of 1600 headed by Master of the Mint Sir Richard Martin, and which included Malynes, recommended stricter enforcement of the statutes in order to prevent a flood of imported foreign commodities.12 However, foreigners were not alone in being suspect for England’s economic troubles. In addition to looking outward, the English began to look inward to see if any within their own country might be responsible for the trade deficit. In her reading of Jonson’s masque Neptune’s Triumph in relation to the financial problems of the 1620s, Patricia Fumerton finds a “paradox” that whenever the English looked outward in order to find the party responsible for England’s economic problems, they always found the English involved: “strangeness ‘out there’ was also ‘in here’” (174). The “strangeness” in which the English were involved was a type of “cannibalism” that “suddenly appeared in England in the form of a bourgeois spirit (and class) infiltrating the aristocratic identity” (173). The English body politic was in essence “‘eating’ itself” (188). But the “culprits” Fumerton points out were those who profitted directly from trade, whether merchant, banker, or even king. The perceived “cannibalism” in England, I will argue, went deeper—it occurred at the tables of every English household. Although the easiest to spot were those directly involved in trade— bankers and merchants, since both of these groups tended to work on the figurative fringes of England or literally outside it altogether—once the gaze started turning inward it continued its path into the heart of the country, especially toward its penchant for exotic foreign goods: English consumers must be held accountable for their purchase decisions despite the trickery of foreigners. Yet consumers might not succeed on their own. Just as proper religious doctrine must be taught, so too must proper consumption. Invoking the great ethical authority of Aristotle, especially his writings on the right use of wealth, both literary and mercantilist writers tried to solve the trade problem and place England in a stronger economic position.

The Enemy Within: The Ethics of Consumption In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the right use of wealth, which he defines as “all the things whose value is measured by money” (79). He designates “liberality” (eleutheriotqs) as the “mean with regard to wealth” (79). The liberal man, who employs wealth virtuously, “will give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time” (80). At the extremes of this formulation are “prodigality” and “meanness.”

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The prodigal, who spends wealth excessively, is guilty of “wasting his substance,” which is “thought to be sort of ruining of oneself” since life is “held to depend on possession of substance” (80). The mean person, on the other hand, “falls short in giving, and exceeds in taking” (83). Because they often show more concern about money than bonds of humanity, usurers are typically associated with extreme meanness. Some late morality plays, those written from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, explore Aristotle’s formulation for the right use of riches, and Jonson seems to have been influenced by this tradition in his own Staple of News.13 At the start of the play, Pennyboy Junior, the figure of prodigality, comes of age and inherits his estate. We learn early on that his father has decreed that Pennyboy Junior should become engaged to the gentlewoman “Mistress Pecunia Do-all,” an obvious allegory of money, whose waiting women are also various instruments of wealth: Statute, Band [Bond], Mortgage, and Wax. Pecunia is initially “sojourning” with Pennyboy Junior’s uncle, Richer Pennyboy or Pennyboy Senior, “the slave of money . . . Lady Pecunia’s drudge’” (2.1.13–14), who represents the usurious and stingy figure of meanness. While Junior freely distributes Pecunia’s affections among his friends, Senior keeps Pecunia “close prisoner, under twenty bolts” and “would ha’ smothered [her] in a chest / And strangled her in leather,” if Pennyboy Junior had not rescued her (4.3.41–43). The treatment of Pecunia by the uncle and nephew allegorizes the two abuses of wealth, prodigality and meanness, and it is left to the wise Pennyboy Canter to teach his son the proper use of wealth, the virtuous “golden mean” of liberality (5.6.64). But rather than a universal figure of wealth, Pecunia bears a pedigree that associates her with specific metallurgical locations of the period. In addition to Cornwall (1.6.39), which was mistakenly thought to be rich in silver, Pecunia’s pedigree links her to Spanish wealth from the New World, the importation of which provided an important impetus for the prodigious growth of international trade in the period. According to various historians’ estimates, between 145,000 to 165,000 tons of silver and between 2,739 to 2,846 tons of gold were shipped to Europe from the New World. Ward Barrett estimates that the Americas contributed around 70 percent of the world’s output of gold and 85 percent of the world’s output of silver from the discovery in 1492 to 1800 (228). The enormous quantities of metals being imported into Europe expanded monetary economies and supported the emergence of global commerce, while also inducing the first occurrence of inflation, which economic historians often refer to as the “Price Revolution.” Pecunia’s “secretary and gentleman-usher” Broker hopes that Piedmantle, who has drawn up Pecunia’s pedigree, has found that she comes “from all the Spanish mines in the West Indies . . . for she comes

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that way by her mother” (2.2.12–13). Moreover, her title as “Infanta of the Mines” (1.6.42) associates her with the Spanish Infanta whom Prince Charles had sought in marriage during the early 1620s. Anthony Parr finds in Pecunia’s full name, “Aurelia Clara Pecunia” (1.6.46), an allusion to Isabella Clara Eugenia, the daughter of Philip II of Spain and aunt to the Infanta.14 More than a mere desirable object, however, Pecunia is also a desiring subject, representing the female consumer whose penchant for luxury eats away at the commonwealth. When she first meets Pennyboy Junior, Pecunia confesses to having had an unexplainable “desire” to see him, . . . to behold That youth and shape which in my dreams and wakes I have so oft contemplated and felt Warm in my veins and native as my blood. When I was told of your arrival here, I felt my heart beat as it would leap out In speech, and all my face it was a flame; But how it came to pass I do not know. (2.5.50–57)

Pecunia’s bloodflow connotes the flow of money throughout the commonwealth, and her ruddy complexion suggests the beauty of gold. Yet, her expression of desire shows she is at once object and subject, both money and its user. While critics have read this intimation of an active subject in Pecunia as a sign of strength in the character,15 I read her assertiveness as an indication of her conflation between money and the female consumer of luxuries, especially since Pecunia complains when Pennyboy Senior keeps her locked up and yet sees Pennyboy Junior as her savior despite the fact that he passes her around from friend to friend. Although she ultimately will teach both Pennyboy Junior and Pennyboy Senior her proper “use,” Pecunia accepts her treatment by the former because as a desiring female consumer her character has a built-in complicity with prodigal practices. By the end of the play, Pecunia must be reformed just like Pennyboy Junior. Consumption itself was often considered a “female” activity in opposition to “manly” production.16 Karen Newman finds in the feminization of money the idea that woman is the scapegoat for capitalism because she embodies the temptation of inactivity and wasteful consumption (“Engendering” 59–60). It is no accident that the members of Jonson’s all-female audience are depicted as slaves to fashion. During the Induction, Mirth states that she and her companions are “women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen” (9–10). Moreover, they proceed to judge characters by their clothes rather than by their virtues.

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For example, they cannot tolerate the beggar Pennyboy Canter because of the rags he wears, but Tattle confesses that if he “had been a courtbeggar in good clothes, a beggar in velvet, as they say, I could have endured him” (1 Intermean.10–12). The gossips are more impressed with Pennyboy Junior, whom Mirth sees, despite his father’s protestations, as “very communicative and liberal, and began to be magnificent if the churl his father would have let him alone” (18–20). Ironically, using Aristotle’s terms of the virtuous use of money, both “liberality” and “magnificence” (which Aristotle discusses in the subsequent section of the Ethics), the gossips demonstrate their belief that virtue is more in dress than in behavior.17 In addition to complaining about the economic deterioration from the consumption of such luxuries, writers perceived this excessive consumption as indicative of England’s moral deterioration: economic promiscuity implied sexual promiscuity. According to Ian Archer, in the Christian tradition “luxury was equated with desire, and desire with disobedience,” an equation that induced frequent “parallels between prostitution and trade” (186). Such a link between prostitution and commerce is apparent in Pennyboy Senior’s complaint that “Now the public riot / Prostitutes all, scatters away in coaches, / In footmen’s coats and waiting-women’s gowns” (3.4.37–39). Moreover, Jonson parallels the two in the action of the play when in 4.2 the prodigal Pennyboy Junior freely spreads Pecunia’s kisses among all his friends. An astonished Pennyboy Canter exclaims in aside, “Why, here’s the prodigal prostitutes his mistress!” (4.2.127). Even the usurer Pennyboy Senior, having been abandoned by his idol, ultimately declares that “Pecunia is a whore” (4.3.82). Karen Newman finds in the conflation of money and women in the figure of Pecunia implications of women as filthy lucre and “a venal object of exchange that passes, like money, from hand to hand” (“Engendering” 62).18 However, Pecunia’s initial complicity with Pennyboy Junior’s prodigality intimates anxiety over desire within the prostitute herself, in the form of either avarice or lust. The prostitute is at once the object of desire circulating among men as well as the subject whose own monetary or sexual desires threaten the commonwealth. While prodigality connoted sexual promiscuity, so paradoxically did its opposite: “meanness.” The connection here is the stingy usurer, who was likened to a pimp or a bawd, arranging for what Aristotle considered the unnatural breeding of money. Although Pecunia has her own “Broker,” the usurer Pennyboy Senior is initially depicted as her “fleshbawd” (2.5.100). While Pecunia does not seem to mind when Pennyboy Junior freely distributes her kisses, she does resent Pennyboy Senior’s “use” of Band, Wax, and Statute’s “bodies” (4.3.39–40). Each end of the commercial spectrum, the wasting and hoarding of all one’s

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money, bears an implication of sexual commerce, and the two were seen to go hand in hand because the prodigal and usurer often depended on each other. So what appears to be merely an economic problem proves also to be a moral problem. The health of the English economy was inextricably bound to the health of individual consumers’ souls. The existence of such a moral-economic nexus explains Philip Stubbes’ discussion, in The anatomie of abuses, of the desire for foreign clothing as both sinful and economically disastrous: [I]f wee would contente our selves with such kinde of attire, as our owne Countrey doeth minister unto us, it were much tollerable. But wee are so surprised in Pride, that if it come not from beyond the seas, it is not worth a straw. And thus we impoverish our selves in buying their trifling merchandizes, more pleasant tha[n] necessarie, and inrich them, who rather laugh at us in their sleeves, than otherwise, to see our gret follie in affecting of trifles, & departing w[ith] good merchandizes for it. (sig. C1r)

Even Mun uses moral terminology to explain the economic crisis, stating that “if we were not too much affected to Pride, monstrous Fashions, and Riot, above all other Nations,” the English nation might spend a third less than it currently does on its “unnecessary wants” such as “Silks, Sugars, Spices, Fruits, and all others.” Yet the riches England once enjoyed have turned the English “vicious and excessive, wasteful of the means we have,” as well as “improvident & careless of much other wealth that shamefully we lost,” by which he means the opportunity of developing a fishing industry in England, Scotland, and Ireland (sig. F3v, my emphasis).19 Nonetheless, Mun does not imagine foreign countries to be devils laughing at England’s fall as Stubbes does. Rather, he sees foreign countries as engaged in similar economic (as well as moral) decisions as the English. For this reason, Mun argues that consumption of luxuries, “all kind of Bounty and Pomp,” should not be discouraged altogether because “if we should become so frugal, that we would use few or no Forraign wares, how shall we then vent our own commodities?” (sig. E5v). Continuing to consume a certain quantity of luxury goods would produce goodwill among countries that export them, and these countries would in turn be happy to import English goods. If, on the contrary, England bans all consumption of luxuries it will lead to foreign retaliation: “doe we hope that other Countreys will afford us money for All our wares, without buying or bartering for Some of theirs?” Mun concludes that it is safer and more secure “to run a middle course by spending moderately, which will purchase treasure plentifully” (sig. E5v).

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Moderation, the “middle course” or “golden mean,” rather than a complete ban on foreign luxuries makes economic sense to Mun even as it makes ethical sense to Aristotle. Aristotle’s golden mean also serves as a model for the proper flow of money, according to Mun, who has the revolutionary idea of seeing money as an essential component of the trade cycle, as something that like goods should also be “exported” (sig. B5r).20 Exported money would be used to invest in things that could bring a future profit by adding value to imported products. By sending out money, the English would bring in “forraign wares, which being sent out again will in due time much encrease our Treasure,” because it will amount to “an exportation unto us of a far greater value than our said moneys were” (sig. B7r).21 Money will eventually flow back in, and in greater quantities, if England purchases investment commodities; whereas money not used, hoarded money, brings in no wealth.22 England should avoid prodigality, the superfluous expense of foreign luxury items, as well as hoarding, the profitless accumulation of currency held from circulation, and instead choose the “middle ground” in order to guarantee that money continues to flow out of England so that it will eventually flow back in. This “middle ground” is also the moral of Jonson’s Staple: the proper treatment of Pecunia represents the proper flow of money. Early in the play, her waiting women discuss how much air Pecunia should take, that is, how much she should circulate outside. Statute argues that “A little [air] now and then does well, and keeps” Pecunia in her “complexion” and “true temper” (as Band adds), while Mortgage warns that “too much . . . may increase cold rheums, / Nourish catarrhs, green sicknesses and agues, / And put [Pecunia] in consumption” (2.1.50–54). Under the protection of Pennyboy Senior, Pecunia suffered the opposite fate, being with two of her women, “crammed . . . in a close box / All three together, where [they] saw no sun / In one six-months” (4.3.44–46). It is not surprising that Pecunia was delighted to circulate outside with Pennyboy Junior, but the prodigal’s dispersion of her favors similarly placed her in danger of “consumption.” In both cases she will waste away, like the English commonwealth that either squanders its money on foreign goods or hoards all of its gold.

Global Œconomy That Jonson’s household in The Staple of News represents the economic situation of England as a whole should not be surprising. Analogies between household and commonwealth were quite common in early modern England, especially in household manuals. For example, Richard Brathwaite writes in The English gentleman, “As every mans house is his Castle, so is his family a private Common-wealth, wherein

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if due government be not observed, nothing but confusion is to be expected” (sig. X2r). Susan Amussen argues that the analogy was “available to all those interested in authority and the enforcement of order in early modern England” (37). For this reason, Amussen discusses the analogy as a relation between household and state. But in addition to political purposes, the analogy could also be used for purposes of economy in its contemporary meaning. Throughout most of the early modern period, “œconomy” referred to the management, including financial decisions, of the household and not of the commonwealth in its entirety.23 However, mercantilist and even premercantilist writers often portrayed what we would refer to as “economic” problems of England in terms of the domestic scenario, especially the father’s/husband’s responsibility for the flow of money. Since the national economy is the aggregation of individual households plus the commercial and government sectors, in a period when fiscal positions were relatively small and much production still occurred in the home, the household accounted for a significant percentage of national economic activity. Steve Rappaport calls the early modern household the “centre of economic activity” (41), and Amussen points out that “until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, most production— agricultural and industrial—took place in family settings” (68).24 In one of the most famous expressions of the analogy between household and commonwealth, Robert Cleaver writes that the “Household is as it were a little Common-wealth, by the good Government whereof, Gods glorie may be advanced, the Common wealth which standeth of severall families, benefited, and all that live in that familie receive much comfort and commoditie” (sig. A7r). While “commoditie” could mean convenience rather than a material good as in its modern meaning,25 Cleaver goes on to make a more explicit reference to household finance: “Through wisedom (saith Salomon) is an house builded, and with understanding it is established: and by knowledge shall the Chambers thereof bee filed with all precious pleasant riches” (sig. A7r). The “good Government” of the household implies the virtuous use of wealth and productive activity, which would bring “precious pleasant riches” to the household and, more importantly, would have a significant positive impact on the national economy. For this reason, the manuals often assume, as Amussen puts it, “that the family was a productive as well as reproductive unit” (68), and, therefore, like Jonson, they emphasize the virtue of frugality. Richard Brathwaite’s advice might very well be Pennyboy Canter’s advice to his son Pennyboy Junior: “because providence is the way . . . beware of Prodigality, and excesse lest you give your honour unto others, and your yeares to the cruell” (sig. X2r–v). Moreover, like Jonson, Brathwaite warns against the dangers of hoarding: “Neither is it sufficient to

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gather, but frugally to dispose of that which is gathered” (sig. X2v). In a statement resembling Lady Pecunia’s speech at the end of Staple, Brathwaite concludes: “I approve of his opinion, who would have a Gentleman neitherto hoord up niggardly, nor lash out [spend] lavishly” (sig. X3r).26 Brathwaite’s audience is clearly male (“Gentleman”), the husbands/fathers he imagines overseeing household economies. The commonwealth analogy typically links the father to the prince. Edward Misselden writes that “a Common-wealth is like unto a Family, the Father or Master whereof ought to sell more then he buyeth” (sig. B6v). Malynes explicitly identifies the prince as the analogical “Father or Master,” stating that “a commonwealth is nothing else but a great houshold or family,” and “the Prince (being as it were the father of the family) ought to keep a certaine equality in the trade or trafficke betwixt his realme and other countries” (sig. B1v–B2r). Mun expresses similar concern for the Prince’s budget, especially decay from “Excessive Bounty” (sig. E8v). However, unlike Malynes and Misselden, he does not assume that the prince controls all expenditures within an economy; he assigns to the prince responsibility only for fiscal spending. Mun realizes this limitation in the prince’s control, and so he couches the analogy between household and commonwealth in terms of a representative household.27 He envisions an entrepreneurial family within every English household, each contributing to the overall success of the English economy. Mun, therefore, employs Aristotle’s notion of liberality, but he translates the concept away from connotations of a prince’s gift economy and toward a representative household functioning within a market economy. Mun realized that the monarch had only a limited impact on the overall economy, and so the best way to improve England’s position in relation to the world economy was to reach what Steve Rappaport calls the “centre of economic activity.” Focusing on household economy might be the solution to problems of national economy despite the penchant for blaming foreigners for England’s economic woes. Moreover, Mun’s emphasis on investment and the balance of trade was such an elegant solution to a complex problem that it proved to be useful at the household as well the national level. In effect, it linked principles of global economy to the everyday financial decisions of the average English household. As every householder would know, if one spends more than one earns, the household loses money. Similarly, if England spends in aggregate more than it brings in, the country loses money. Therefore, if every household does its part in maintaining financial discipline, England could become an economic powerhouse. I call this household-level remedy to England’s problems “global œconomy,” invoking once again Aristotle, this time in his distinction in The Politics between “oikonomike,” household management (the

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etymological root for the early modern sense of the term), and “chrematistike,” acquisition for the sake of acquisition. Critics often differentiate between the private or use-based (oikonomike) and public or market-based (chrematistike) realms of the early modern economy.28 They especially tend to adopt the common perception—primarily from the influence of Marx29—of a movement from personal to impersonal relationships, from the generous bonds of family to calculating financial bonds, from economics as a branch of morality to economics as a rational science. My analysis, however, suggests that this notion of a “householder’s obligation” being translated from a notion of gift into that of expense might maintain its ethical implications. Moreover, the significance of the household to economic activity in general implies that oikonomike and chrematistike were indeed interdependent, which Aristotle himself had acknowledged. Although in general he distinguishes between the two—“for the business of the one is to furnish the means, of the other to use them” (18)—Aristotle includes within “oikonomike” “that species of acquisition . . . which is according to nature” (20). The household may persist in acquiring goods as long as that acquisition remains “natural.” Principles of “global œconomy” would, therefore, maintain ethical ideals while permitting the possibility for national economic growth. It is indeed the natural/ethical course that The Staple of News prescribes for the individual, representative household of Pennyboy Junior and Lady Pecunia, and hence for England as a whole. Pecunia’s proper circulation is the moral of the play, and The Staple of News, in essence, teaches “global œconomy”; that is, it teaches English households how to be virtuous in order for the English commonwealth to succeed within a world economy. The domestic situation of Pecunia relates to the public situation of the commonwealth, and reconciliation within the household, especially the proper treatment of Pecunia, offers a solution to England’s economic woes. Since the monarch can control only his or her own finances, economic success for the commonwealth required the ability to extend influence into the average English home. The best manner of doing so was to appeal to the spiritual as well as material interest of householders. Although, as Sandra Fischer points out, “economy” in the early modern period was often a “branch of religious morality” often concerned with “the abuse and misuse of money” (14), Staple and mercantilist tracts such as Mun’s demonstrate that the “abuse and misuse of money” would also lead to material consequences both for the household and for the commonwealth. The principles of “global œconomy” thus suggest an inability to differentiate between the moral and economic realms, a separation that has become a mainstay of early modern economic criticism, as if

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the period witnessed a complete epistemological shift from economics as a moral category to economics as a scientific category. In “Governmentality,” Foucault cites La Mothe Le Vayer on the three fundamental types of government: self-government, family government, and state government, which respectively involve issues of morality, economy, and politics (91). To the extent that continuity persisted from the individual to the state according to the governing analogy, continuity also persisted between the three categories of morality, economy, and politics. Moreover, the principles of “global œconomy” suggest the possibility of moderation as consistent with “capitalist,” or at least “protocapitalist,” goals within a moral economy, offering a challenge to the stereotype of amoral capitalist excess. Both Jonson and Mun believed that England could become economically (as well as morally) successful if individual households engaged in virtuous economic activity, and they therefore attempted through their texts to teach “global œconomy” as a way to rectify the monetary problems within England.

Notes 1. Such fears had accompanied previous money shortages. See, for example, 5 Rich. II s. 1 c. 2 and 17 Edw. IV c. 1 in The Statutes of the Realm—all cited statutes are from this source. 2. The perceived foreignness of international finance is evident in works such as the late morality play A pleasant comedie, shewing the contention betweene liberalitie and prodigality, in which the gallant Tom Tosse reports that Money, who has been granted to the usurer and stereotypical “stage foreigner” Tenacity by Fortune, “is going into a strange countrie, / With an odd chuffe called Tenacity” (4.4.919–20). 3. See De Roover 179–80, on reasons for fears of foreign intrigue. 4. Qtd. in De Roover 193–94. For an earlier example, see 1 Rich. III c. 9. 5. Even Thomas Gresham, who was one of those rare Englishmen with experience in the financial world, believed that foreign financiers in Antwerp were trying to put England at a disadvantage by manipulating exchange rates. See Tawney and Power 2: 148–49 and DeRoover 226–27. 6. In 1540, stories about the case of Gaspare Ducci, an Italian banker who had created a panic in Antwerp by cornering the money supply and putting the king of Portugal at a financial disadvantage, circulated widely and served as an example of bankers’ ability to manipulate the money market (see De Roover 159–60). 7. The importance of the balance of trade as an economic factor was not new to Mun’s time; it can be traced back at least to the Middle Ages. Moreover, it was Mun’s peer Edward Misselden who was the first writer

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

to use the term “balance of trade” in print (See Misselden sig. B7r). Nevertheless, it was Mun’s single-mindedness, his insistence that the balance of trade was the only essential factor, which made his writings influential. The Italian merchant Mercadore, in Robert Wilson’s late morality play The Three Ladies of London, represents this fear of manipulation by foreign merchants. See especially ll. 395–423. See for example 14 Edw. III s. 1 c. 21; 5 Henry IV c. 9; 4 Henry IV c. 15; 5 Henry IV c. 9; 18 Henry VI. c. 4; 27 Henry VI c. 3; 17 Edward IV c. 1; 3 Henry VII c. 18. Prior to the 1390 statute, there were more informal ones such as that of 1340, which forbid “any exporter of wool to leave the country without giving sufficient surety to the ‘customers’ (customs officials) that, on his next visit to England, he would bring in two marks of silver for every sack of wool which he had taken out” (14 Edw. III s. 1 c. 21). 5 Henry IV c. 9. An act of 1439 even required all foreign merchants to have a “host” assigned to them, who was supposed to observe and keep a record, in a special register, of all the activity of foreign merchants (18 Henry VI c. 4). See De Roover 195–96. Even Misselden supported the idea of the statutes, though he proposed “another maner of Execution of the Statute for Employments then heretofore” (103). But Thomas Mun, the strongest proponent of the trade balance theory, argued against the Statutes. See sig. C8v–D1r. See especially A pleasant comedie, shewing the Contention betweene liberalitie and prodigality (1602), which A.B. Stonex argues was a primary source of Staple (825–30). Unlike the author of Contention, who depicts Money as a “boy,” Jonson feminizes money in a convention stemming from Latin texts, especially Horace’s “To Numicius.” He had earlier developed a female monetary persona in Lady Argurion of Cynthia’s Revels. Richard Barnfield’s late sixteenthcentury “Encomion of Lady Pecunia” offers a rationale for her feminization: “I have given Pecunia the title of a Woman, Both for the termination of the Word, and because (as Women are) shee is lov’d of men” (83). The term “money” also had feminine association, deriving from “Juno Moneta,” in whose temple Roman silver coinage was produced (see Weatherford 48). See Newman, “Engendering” 59–66 and Wayne 83 for other examples of Staple being read in relation to contemporary economic conditions. For a more general discussion of morality plays in relation to commercial developments, see Archer 175. See, for example, Sanders 193–94, 198. See Newman, “City Talk” 181–95. A more severe indictment of female consumers is in Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies, esp. 898–904 and 1266–81.

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18. Newman also points out that other women in the play, such as the country woman and the she-anabaptist, are depicted as consumers rather than producers or venders of news (“Engendering” 66). 19. Earlier in England’s Treasure, he calls for the English to “soberly refrain from excessive consumption of forraign wares in our diet and raiment . . . which vices at this present are more notorious amongst us than in former ages” (sig. B3r, my emphasis). 20. See Harris’s discussion of this idea as a “nationalist species of venture capital” (173–83). 21. There is another practical reason to keep the flow of money going out of England: inflation. Mun points out the general consent that “plenty of mony in a Kingdom doth make the native commodities dearer,” which is “directly against the benefit of the Publique in the quantity of the trade” (sig. B8r). 22. I believe this idea of investment commodities is critical for understanding Mun; he does not believe in consumption for its own sake, but as having a specific purpose in trade cycles. 23. According to the OED, the first use of the word “œconomy” to refer to the commonwealth as a whole appears in Hobbes’s Leviathan. 24. Amussen goes on to clarify, “The family in this sense—the sense most familiar to early modern English women and men—included not just a married couple with children, but also servants, apprentices and sometimes even day labourers” (68). 25. See the entry for “commodity” in the OED. 26. See also Cleaver sig. F3r–v, who employs language of business for the household; see Foucault 91–92, on the relation between household, the state, and national economy. 27. See, for example, Mun sig. B7v. See also Starkey 22, who makes the explicit connection between the fortunes of the individual and the commonwealth. 28. See, for example, Fischer 15 and Agnew 21. 29. See especially Marx’s footnote discussion of the difference between oikonomike and chrematistike in Capital 253–4n6.

Works Cited Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Archer, Ian. “Material Londoners?” Material London, ca. 1600. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. ———. The Politics and Economics of Aristotle. Trans. Edward Walford. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853.

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Barnfield, Richard. The encomion of Lady Pecunia: or The praise of money. London, 1598. Barrett, Ward. “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800.” The Rise of Merchant Empires. Ed. James D. Tracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Brathwaite, Richard. The English gentleman containing sundry excellent rules or exquisite observations. London, 1630. C[leaver], R[obert]. A godly forme of household government. London, 1603. “Commodity.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. May 25, 2006 ⬍http://dictionary.oed.com⬎. De Roover, Raymond. Gresham on Foreign Exchange. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949. Fischer, Sandra K. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Jonson, Ben. The Staple of News. Ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. Letter to the King signed by Henry Mandeville. Additional ms. 34324. British Library, London. Malynes, Gerard. A treatise of the canker of Englands common wealth. London, 1601. Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Ben Foakes. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Misselden, Edward. Free trade, or, The meanes to make trade florish. London, 1622. Mun, Thomas. England’s treasure by forraign trade. London, 1664. Newman, Karen. “City Talk: Women and Commodification.” Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. “Engendering the News.” The Elizabethan Theatre 14: 49–69. “Œconomy.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. May 25, 2006 ⬍http://dictionary.oed.com⬎. A pleasant comedie, shewing the contention betweene liberalitie and prodigality. London, 1602. Rappaport, Steve. Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Sanders, Julie. “Print, Popular Culture, Consumption and Commodification in The Staple of News.” Refashioning Ben Jonson. Ed. Julie Sanders. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Starkey, Thomas. A Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset. Ed. T. F. Mayer. London: Royal Historical Society, 1989.

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The Statutes of the Realm. 4 vols. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1810–28. Stonex, A. B. “The Sources of Jonson’s The Staple of News.” PMLA 30.4 (1915): 821–30. Stubbes, Philip. The anatomie of abuses. London, 1583. Tawney, R. H. “Introduction.” Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1962. Tawney, R. H., and Eileen Power, eds. Tudor Economic Documents. 3 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924. Weatherford, Jack. The History of Money. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. Wilson, Robert. The Three Ladies of London. Ed. H. S. D. Mithal. New York: Garland, 1988.

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Chapter 13

Afterword: A ccommodating Change Jean E. Howard

G

lobal Traffic documents just how immense were the economic and cultural changes attendant upon England’s expanding international trade between 1550 and 1650. During this period, for example, England launched the regulated and joint stock companies that extended English trade into the Levant, the Americas, and eventually into Africa and the Far East. Technological changes accompanied and enabled this expansion of trade: advances in mapmaking; the development of maritime insurance to protect investors from losses at sea; the increasingly widespread use of bills of exchange and other financial instruments that made it unnecessary to transport large sums of money to distant markets; improved navigational instruments.1 But the changes that were occurring were more than technological in nature. Expanded international trade, for example, meant the English were in more frequent contact with alien cultures, forcing them to inaugurate new categories of difference and to provide ideological justifications for their economic and territorial expansionism.2 Politically, the Tudors were building the administrative structures that would eventually support a modern nation state, and London— partly because of its position on the Thames—was rapidly becoming one of Europe’s major entrepots, its population increasing fourfold between 1550 and 1600.3 The city was an increasingly cosmopolitan metropolis where products from abroad filled the shops and infiltrated English homes and kitchens, spurring new kinds and levels of consumption and bringing about changes in the gender system. New

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institutions, such as the commercial theater, sprang up there to entertain London’s diverse population, negotiating through its fictions the rapid pace of economic, political, and social change. This book details many aspects of these transformations, each perhaps unremarkable in itself, but collectively repositioning England within the international arena and gradually transforming aspects of its social and economic life in unmistakably modern directions. In the masterful chapter by Daniel Vitkus that opens this collection, he outlines how, in retrospect, we can see the complicated process by which English merchants moved beyond a feudal conception of empire based on plunder and lust for gold toward an emerging capitalist understanding of investment, risk, and abstract economic exchanges. He also draws usefully on world systems theory to show how England gradually became a central player in a global network of trade that linked England not only to the New World, but also to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire and then to markets further east in Persia, India, and China. Other chapters deal with some aspect of these larger changes, often in novel ways that expand our collective sense of the many domains where international trade impacted early modern life and of the factors that contributed to bigger outcomes. For example, if we are used to thinking of the European powers during this period as engaged in a race for luxury items such as silk and spice, Edward Test shows the role that the lowly Newfoundland salt cod played in England’s participation in that race. An essential staple of seamen’s diet, dried cod was acquired and transported by English fishermen and became key to England’s trading fortunes. And if we are used to thinking of New World gold and Moluccan pepper as some of the period’s inherently valuable commodities, Matthew Day reminds us that knowledge itself was another such commodity, especially knowledge of the trading routes and the distant markets that might be useful to competitors. He demonstrates the role of the great trading companies in self-censoring records of their overseas endeavors, records that contained information that they had an interest in concealing from rivals. Histories of early modern censorship, therefore, need to be adjusted to take account, not just of the actions of governmental agencies, but also of entities directly engaged in lucrative overseas ventures. These same companies also played a direct role in cultural productions. Two of the striking chapters in the volume show how. David Morrow writes about a little-known poem, “The Tryall of Travell,” published in 1630 by a merchant named Baptist Goodall. It is a full-throated attack on both the small artisans and the feckless gentlemen who would encroach on the merchant’s trading prerogatives and a robust defense of those merchants. It provides good evidence for the class struggles

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that attended England’s expansion of its overseas trading efforts as a dominant group that justified its privileges by claims both to specialized knowledge and a commitment to travel and travail, that is, to arduous labor, which, it is argued, was not possible for either artisans or gentlemen to undergo. A more complicated case of company intervention in the cultural domain is analyzed by Ann Christensen in her very illuminating analysis of The Launching of the Mary, a play written by a member of the East India Company in defense of its practices. Christensen shows how this propagandistic drama nonetheless registers a critique of the company through its second plot that shows the suffering of the seamen’s wives left in port when their sailor husbands are away on long voyages. Intentionally or not, the double-plotted play speaks with two voices about, on the one hand, the heroics of trade and, on the other, the role its pursuit plays in the disintegration of families and the escalation of prostitution and vice. Many of the chapters in this volume explore how the public theater, itself a joint stock venture that shared investor risk in the hopes of profit, was affected by international trade and in its turn created narratives that made change intelligible, if not always consistently, and if not always in ways that echo our contemporary understanding of early modern events. The Alchemist, The Jew of Malta, The Staple of News, The Merchant of Venice, Volpone, Cymbeline—these are just some of the plays that, along with other texts, are explored in this volume. Collectively, the chapters make a strong case for the imbrication of the theater and the international market. Building on Christensen’s work and that of others in the volume, I would like to emphasize, however, the contradictions and occlusions that frequently mark the theater’s responses to the momentous changes with which it was involved. Playwrights did not have the benefit of historical hindsight. Their narratives of the market sometimes acutely capture the underlying dynamics of cultural and economic change and provide terms for critique, rather than simply a celebration of market developments. Sometimes, however, plays speak to their time of production most powerfully through their ideological or formal incoherence, registering contradictory understandings of or responses to cultural change. Often, their obvious occlusions point to problems or issues that their narratives cannot manage. Accommodating change of the magnitude detailed by the chapters in the volume required significant ideological effort. The theater was one of the places that work was performed, but sometimes of most interest are the instances where the edges are rough, the work of ideological resolution most strained. Take, for example, one of my favorite plays from the second decade of James’s reign, Samuel Rowley’s A New Wonder, Or a Woman Never Vext (1611–1614).4 This energetically plotted drama is both a prodigal

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play in which a young man must reform or end up in debtor’s prison and a big merchant play about the high-risk ventures that can also lead one to prison. With vivid strokes, the play outlines the speculative ventures that lead one particular merchant, Old Foster, to risk all he owns in anticipation that some ships in which he has an interest will bring home goods worth £25,000. The ships, however, are lost off the Dover coast, sending Old Foster off to Ludgate Prison as a debtor. In the meantime, his prodigal brother, Stephen, having married a rich widow, reforms and becomes a wealthy man, though he himself had also begun the play in Ludgate. The play vividly captures the vertiginous changes in fortune that involvement in overseas trade and other market ventures could entail. Old Foster is hurled from the height of prosperity to the debilitating depths of debtors’ prison. In the high-stakes game of long-distance trading, he played a losing hand, while his shiftless brother was granted a second chance at fortune through the good luck of a fortuitous marriage. Even as the play, however, registers the risks of long-distance trade, it offers an antidote to its dangers that is decidedly old-fashioned and inadequate for the historical juncture in which the play was produced. The drama pins its redemptive hopes on the twin pillars of charity and a sweet disposition. Old Foster had married a shrew, his prodigal brother a good-tempered widow. Her forbearance and charitable generosity to her new husband appear to be what lead to his reform and also to the “miracle” by which a ring she had lost in the Thames is returned to her in the belly of a fish she had bought at the market. Economic ills and losses find a moral antidote. Good things happen to good people. Moreover, if a good disposition does not redress all ills, charity will do the trick. Throughout the play, charity is highlighted. The debtors in Ludgate cry at the grate of the prison for citizens to give them alms and food; and various benefactors come forward to address the poverty of those whose bad habits or ill fortune have brought them low. The emphasis on charity is both comforting and disturbing. The miraculous nature of the transformations it effects strains credulity, but perhaps more problematic is the fact that while the play refers repeatedly to current London conditions, several of its characters are historical figures who performed charitable acts, such as the improvement of Ludgate prison and the endowment of St. Mary’s Hospital, in the fifteenth and twelfth centuries, respectively. These acts are recorded in John Stow’s Survey of London (39–40, 166) as well as in the play. At the end of A New Wonder, Henry III, the late twelfth-century king, appears on stage as part of a concluding public ceremony in honor of these public benefactions.

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Contradictorily, the play is thoroughly modern in its representation of new forms of market risk, yet nostalgic and backward looking in the remedy it proposes for those who suffer from market calamity. The play is tinged with the same nostalgia that suffuses Stow’s Survey with its loving record of the many charitable benefactions granted to the city by the guilds and by its prominent citizens in prior centuries.5 Registering alarm at the risks involved in long-distance trade and other market ventures, the play can only articulate a sentimental faith in charity as a redress to those risks. Yet the overinsistence on charity flags a problem, a lack, in the social structure. If charity will not miraculously cure prodigality, incite reformation, and protect against economic ruin, it nonetheless marks the longing for social structures that could perform such work. Charity, in short, points to a lack generated by new kinds of market risk and market seduction even though the discourse of charity is an inherited and historically inadequate response to changed conditions. Quite clearly the theater does not just reflect what is happening in the social world it inhabits; rather, it constructs narratives—in this case of vertiginous loss and recovery by charity—that interpret the new world of traffic and trade, give it a discursive shape, and at the same time articulate by indirection a longing for a remedy for its violent and unpredictable effects. David Morrow’s chapter on the “Tryall of Travell” raises an important point about another aspect of how global trade is represented in cultural productions of the period, and that has to do with work. In Baptist Goodall’s poem, the work or travail of merchants is valorized. It is what justifies merchant privilege. Yet as Morrow points out toward the end of the chapter, Goodall is selective in his acknowledgment of the labor that goes into a successful merchant voyage, including the labor of the seamen, of the agricultural workers who made profits for landlords that were channeled into merchant ventures, or of the slaves who in the Americas would raise the crops and run the sugar mills necessary for profitable trade. Many plays that deal with venturing and overseas voyages, such as John Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage, struggle with the representation of labor. Whatever else venturing entails, it involves work, and the drama often has difficulty devising new ways to understand and parse the labor that overseas trade, traffic, and plantation require. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, though elusive in so many ways, opens with an acknowledgment of the work of sailors as they are shown battling a fierce storm. Though the sailors are presented comically, the aristocratic voyagers clearly depend upon them for their survival. In a more muted and contradictory form, native labor is acknowledged in the person of Caliban who carries wood and scouts out

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berries and water for the Europeans who have come to his island. Yet Caliban’s willing labor is transformed into punishment when he fails to conform to European norms of behavior, just as Ariel’s labor is made the price for his freedom.6 In both instances, labor is expropriated by the European magus and narratives constructed by which Caliban’s permanent enslavement and Ariel’s temporary bondage are justified.7 The privileged labor in the play clearly remains that of the noble Prospero who uses the technologies of his art to control the movements of those on the island and to give them instructive, disciplinary visions. As magus and eventually as the ruler of Milan once more, Prospero and his labors are given center stage, and these always involve controlling and commanding the labor of others. This seems at first like a replication of the traditional class structure in which the work of the head is privileged over the work of the hand, the aristocrat over the manual laborer. Yet something more complicated is introduced by the figure of Ferdinand bearing Caliban’s logs in the play’s central disciplinary vision of the young prince learning self-control through submission to Prospero’s work regime. A prince doing manual labor, even labor as relatively untaxing as that assigned to Ferdinand, is unusual, and it conjures its opposite: the image of English gentlemen refusing to do such work and starving as a result. This, of course, was what happened in Virginia, the ultimate destination of The Sea-Venture, the ship that was wrecked on the Bermudas and whose story became one of the sources for Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare’s island, at once a barren Mediterranean way station and a New World plantation, cannot be entirely disentangled from the stories of New World starvation caused by the failure of English gentlemen to do manual labor.8 The Tempest’s emphatic denigration of idleness is important given that context. In Shakespeare’s play idleness is connected with the dissipation of low characters such as Stephano and Trinculo or with the unrealistic utopian dreams of Gonzalo. In The Tempest, even a prince must submit to the discipline of labor. Yet being a “logbearer” is a particular kind of work that temporarily puts Ferdinand in Caliban’s role, doing Caliban’s tasks. This is a status violation, a twinning of master and slave, even if it is cloaked as a temporary expediency that will prepare Ferdinand for his role as Miranda’s properly self-disciplined husband. The play does not for long linger over Ferdinand’s role as log bearer. The prince must labor, but not really and not for long. By Act IV, when presented with their wedding gift, the masque of Ceres, Iris, and Juno, Ferdinand and Miranda have passed over into the place of rule. They are doubly positioned as audience to others’ labor, that is, not only as audience to the labor of the spirit actors who present the masque, but also as audience to the

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representational content of the masque that has to do with the work of childbirth and of harvest. While Miranda may indeed bear children, the garnering of Ceres’s crops will not fall directly to either. It will remain the work of others, of reapers and “nymphs” whose labor will make the land profitable for those who claim dominion over it. The work of “plantation” has been etherealized into a Georgic vision of spontaneous and willing labor performed by nymphs and reapers and presided over by goddesses and the appreciative gaze of a prince and princess. For all Shakespeare’s considerable craft in this conspicuously wellmade play, the colonial context makes this tale of venturing and shipwreck ideologically fraught, and labor and its representation a point of crisis. Many have commented on the way the play distances itself from the colonial context it also evokes, but labor, starting with the labors of Caliban, brings that context to the surface.9 Someone must fetch and carry, harvest and cook, do the work of plantation. Only for a moment does the play imagine the European gentleman in that role, but that moment lingers in the imagination before the traditional privileges of rank are reasserted, the predictable narratives of willing service reinstated. But in the slippage between Caliban and Ferdinand, the play’s two log bearers, the play acknowledges for a moment how the work of venturing and of colonial plantation can pressure class hierarchies and, consequently, the ideological labor that must go into their reconstitution. As a volume, Global Traffic is exemplary for the many ways it insists on the centrality of culture to the ensemble of changes that were overtaking England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The theater, for example, neither as institution nor as a site for the performance of particular dramatic fictions, can be separated entirely from the emergence of capitalist economic practices, the circulation of new kinds of material goods, or the ideologies that underwrote the commercial and colonial ventures that are also examined in this book. The stage helped to create the discourses about tobacco that Kristen Brookes examines; the theater contributes to the creation of symbolic capital around objects in motion that Lea Knudsen Allen explores; the theater was itself organized in part along a joint stock model. The binary model that separates “history” from “art,” that makes the one stable and the other fluid, has had its day. When we tell the story of the enormous changes that global traffic and early capitalism wrought, we need to make cultural productions central to that story and to take pleasure in just how complicated a role they played. Unpacking that role is the fun of a historical literary practice, and seeing its fruits one of the chief pleasures of reading the fine chapters gathered in this volume.

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Notes 1. For accounts of the development of the joint stock companies see Brenner and Rabb. Fernand Braudel is the most comprehensive expositor of the technological and commercial changes that accompanied the uneven development of capitalism in Western Europe. See his Wheels of Commerce and The Perspective of the World. 2. There has been a flood of good work on early modern racial categories. Important early work included Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama and, later, Shakespeare, Race, Colonialism; Hall; and Shapiro. More recent work has included Wilson and Vitkus. For an up-to-date introduction to the field, see Loomba and Burton, eds. 3. For thoughtful approaches to the changing demographics of London during this period, see Finlay 51–66 and Harding. 4. For a fuller discussion of this play, see my Theater of a City 93–99. 5. See Archer and Collinson. 6. Patricia Seed shows that the criminalization of Caliban follows a pattern found in many early modern New World “encounter narratives” in which the “inexplicable” violence of the native is what triggers their enslavement. 7. An important early account of the master/slave relationship that develops between Prospero and Caliban, and Prospero’s appropriation of Caliban’s labor and his food is given in Hulme 131–32. 8. For a full account of the human failings that led to disaster and disarray in the Jamestown colony, see Strachey. 9. Barbara Mowat shows how the play operates in an intertextually dense field in which meaning is constructed through the citation of multiple points of reference (New World and Old World, ancient epic and modern travel tale) such that both the geographical and the ideological coordinates of the play remain elusive.

Works Cited Archer, Ian. “The Nostalgia of John Stow.” The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649. Ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 17–34. Braudel, Fernand. The Perspective of the World. 1979. Trans. Sian Reynolds. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Vol. 3 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. ———. The Wheels of Commerce. 1979. Trans. Sian Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Vol. 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

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Collinson, Patrick. “John Stow and Nostalgic Antiquarianism.” Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720. Ed. J. F. Merritt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 27–51. Finlay, R. Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London 1580–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Harding, Vanessa. “The Population of London, 1550–1700: A Review of the Published Evidence.” London Journal 15 (1990): 111–28. Howard, Jean E. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and The Native Caribbean 1492–1797. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1986. Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. ———. Shakespeare, Race, Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Loomba, Ania, and Jonathan Burton, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Mowat, Barbara. “ ‘Knowing I loved my books’: Reading The Tempest Intertextually.” “The Tempest” and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2000. 27–36. Rabb, Theodore. Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967. Rowley, William. A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext. Ed. George Cheatham. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Seed, Patricia. “ ‘This island’s mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty.” “The Tempest” and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2000. 202–11. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Stow, John. A Survey of London. Ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. Strachey, William. “A True Reportory of the Wracke.” 1610. Hakluytus posthumus, or, Purchas His Pilgrimes. 1625. 20 vols. Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1905–07. 19: 5–72. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wilson, Mary Floyd. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

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Index

abstraction, 79–80, 81–86 advertising parody of, 162 promotion of tobacco, 162–63, 174–75 n20 promotional literature or discourse, 171–72 signboards, 171–72, 174 n13 trade figures, 157, 158 fig. 8.1, 162–63, 170, 171–72, 174 n12 Africa, 216 African and tobacco, 157–78 passim Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 19–20, 261 n28 Albion, 160, 162–63, 165, 173 n8 allegory, 60–64, 84 Allen, Lea Knudsen, 7, 27 Amboyna affair (1623), 224, 228 America, 162, 170, 173 n3, 174 n16, 201, 203 Amussen, Susan, 256, 261 n24 anticoffee texts, 160, 167–69, 172 antitobacco texts and images, 157–66, 158 fig. 8.1, 164 fig. 8.2, 170–71, 172, 173–74 n10, 175 n25 Antwerp, 144, 247 Appadurai, Arjun, 180 Appleby, Joyce Oldham, 74 n7, 79, 80 Archer, Ian, 253, 260 n14, 272 n5 Archer, John Michael, 258 n30 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, 245–46, 250–51, 253, 255

The Politics, 257–58 Armes of the tobachonists, The, 163–65, 167, 169, 172 assurance see insurance authorship disguised, 231 balance of payments, 249 balance of trade, 246, 248, 249, 257, 259–60 n7 “banker canker,” 246, 248, 249 bankers, foreign, 247, 249 barbarian, 161, 162, 165 Barber, William J., 164, 188 n8, 188 n15 Barbour, Richmond, 33 n9, 34 n21, 108 Barnfield, Richard, 260 n13 Barrett, Ward, 251 Bartels, Emily, 34 n21 Bartolovich, Crystal, 32 n1, 112 n33 Baskerville, Thomas, 141 “The Preface to the Philobotanick Reader” 141 Baudrillard, Jean, 84 Bauhin, Casper, Pinax, theatric botanici, 139 Best, George, 223 Biddulph, William, 231 bills of exchange, 248, 249 blackamoor, 157–59, 161, 163, 170, 171, 173 n2, 174 n12, 175 n29 see also moor

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INDEX

Blakely, Allison, 170, 171–72, 175 n29 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 78 body, 157–78 passim English, 157, 159 excrement, 160, 162, 166–68, 175 n21 excretion and flatulence 162, 163–5 passim, 164 fig. 8.2, 165–66, 167, 174 n11, 174 n17, 174 n20 internal darkening of, 157, 158 fig. 8.1, 160–61, 168, 173 n9 posterior, 163–65, 167, 169, 174 n15 see also race and skin color; vent, body as Bohemia, 247 Bologna, 139 Boorde, Andrew, 189–90 Boothby, Richard, 227, 228, 233 botanical gardens, 138–39, 141, 145, 153 botanical trade, 138, 145, 147–49, 154 Bourdieu, Pierre, cultural capital, 101, 105 Brathwait, Richard, 157–59, 158 fig. 8.1, 165–66, 170–71, 173 n4, 175 n28, 255, 256 Braudel, Fernand, 272 n1, 32 n3, 33 n4, 109 n7 Breife [sic] discovery or description of the most famous island of Madagascar, A (1646), 227, 233 Brenner, Robert, 23, 33 n8, 58, 59, 66, 74 n5, 238 n2, 272 n1 Bright, Timothie, 159 broadsides, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 167–68, 168–69 Brookes, Kristen, 4, 8–9, 271 Brooks, Jerome E., 172 n1, 174 n12–13, 175 n26 Browne, John, The marchants avizo, 1–2, 12 n2, 74 n13

Bruster, Douglas, 3–4, 13 n4, 86 Buckingham, Duke of, 147, 234 bullion, 180, 182, 194 Burton, Jonathan, 14 n8, 34 n15, 97, 272 n2 Bushnell, Rebecca, 150 Cadiz Raid (1596), 225, 226–27 Callaghan, Dympna, 135 n20 cannibalism, 166–67, 250 capitalism, 259, 266, 271, 272 n1 see also global systems theory; joint-stock companies; Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist; mercantilism Capp, Bernard, 188 n18 cartography and maps, 65, 78, 81–86, 89 Cary, John, 180, 189, 191 catalogues and tables (merchant’s use of), 78 Cathay Company, 226 Cecil, William, 143, 147, 150, 233 censorship, 221, 222, 225–27, 230–35, 266 manuscript culture and, 226 Privy Council and, 227 reasons for, 222: commercial advantage, 222, 231–32, 233, 235; fear of faction, 226, 233; geographical accuracy, 227; individuals, and, 225, 226, 233; issues of state, 222, 233; morality, 222, 225; offense to foreign ally, 222, 233; political, 225, 233, 235; religious, 225 self-censorship, 231–32 trading companies and, 227 Certeau, Michel de, 82, 83, 84, 89 ‘names’, 99, 100, 103 chance mathematical concepts of, 45–46 lottery, 52 charity, 165, 172, 179, 184, 268–69

INDEX Charles I, 209 as prince, 252 Chaudhuri, K. N., 33 n11, 67, 68, 74 n5, 134 n3, 182, 187 n3 chrematistike, 258 Christensen, Ann, 7–8, 9, 267 Christian allegory, merchant appropriation of, 60–61, 63–64 city or citizen comedy, 161, 163, 170–71, 174 class struggle, 266–67 see also social struggle Cleaver, Robert, 256, 261 n26 Clegg, Cyndia, 222, 224, 225 cloth, 173, 205 calico, fabrics, 179–96 imports, 174 see also wool coffee and race, 160, 167–69, 172 Cohen, Walter, 1, 5, 13 n7 coins counterfeit, 88 light, 78, 87–88 see also specie Coleman, D. C., 188 n17 colonialism, 137–38, 145, 148, 154, 174 n19, 202, 204–5, 207, 212, 216, 271 colonial possession, 183 emergent, 174 n19 Collinson, Patrick, 272 n5 commerce, 137–39, 148–49 see also trade commercial expansion, 1–3, 21–32 passim, 79, 159, 202–3, 201, 212, 265, 267 commodity and commodities, 138–39, 142, 144, 147, 149, 152, 256, 261 n25 cataloguing of, 139,141 codfish, 201–16 sack wine, 211, 213, 215, 216 see also cloth; gold; industry; tobacco commodity fetishism, 29, 30

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see also Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist company merchants, 58–59, 66–68 Conquest of the Grand Canaries, The (1599), 225 Constantinople, 25–26, 142–43 consumption, 265 and moral deterioration, 253 as female activity, 252 bodily, 157–78 passim discourse against, 157–78 passim, 179–95 passim economic, 159 contagion, 186 Contention between liberalitie and prodigality (A pleasant comedie, shewing the), 245, 259 n2, 260 n13 Copie of [a] letter sent from the greate Turke to the Emperour of Germanie, 223 Cornwall, 251 Cortés, Hernán, 145 Coryate, Thomas, Coryats Crudities (1611), 225 cosmopolitan, 102 counterfeit coins see coins Court of Assurances, 43 credit, 79, 80 cultural capital, 97, 101, 102, 105, 107 culture and trade, relations between, 1–5, 157–78 passim, 204, 216 currency conversion, 88 see also exchange rates Cyprus, 104 Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turk, 71 Daunce, Edward, A briefe discourse of the Spanish state, 223 Davis, John, The Seamans Secrets (1595), 227 Day, Matthew, 10–11, 266 de Grazia, Margreta, 61

278

INDEX

de la Brosse, Guy, 141 De Roover, Raymond 247, 259 n3–6, 260 n12 Deacon, John, 160, 165 dedicatory epistles, 2, 221 Dee, John, 204, 209, 212 Defoe, Daniel, 179, 184, 188, 189, 191, 194 Dekker, Thomas Dead Tearme, 106 Guls Horn-booke, 106–7 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 70–71 Deng, Stephen, 11 depression, economic, 246–47 Devereux, Robert see Essex, 2nd Earl of didacticism, 85 Dimmock, Matthew, 34 n21 Dioscorides, 139, 154 Distaff, Dorothy, The female manufacturers complaint, 179, 181, 191–92 Dodomeus, Rembert, 149 Dolan, Frances, 13 n3 Douglas, Audrey, 185 Downton, Nicholas, 229, 230 dream vision, 84 Ducci, Gaspare, 259 n6 Dutch East India Company, 221, 224, 228, 230 East India Company see English East India Company see Dutch East India Company East India trade, 180, 182, 188, 194 Eastland Company, 66, 69 ecological impact of trade, 137, 145, 147 economic discourse, sexualized, 168, 175 n22 economy, as “theme,” 4–5, 13 n7 Eden, 138–41, 144–45, 148, 152–54 Edward IV, 247 eleutheriotes, 246, 250

Elizabeth I, 204, 206, 209, 212 empire, 161, 212, 216, 217 Engle, Lars, 86 English body see body, English English East India Company (EIC), 7–8, 26–27, 58, 67, 68, 81, 82, 161, 164, 169, 171, 174, 176, 183, 184, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 194, 221, 224, 228, 230, 231, 237 n24, 267 court of, 229 critiques of, 162, 170, 179, 169 defenses of, 162, 169, 172, 179 employees oath of allegiance to, 228, 230 Governor of, 229 influence of, 230–31 instructions to captains of voyages, 228–29 letters to and from employees, 229 minutes of, 229 Standing orders of, 229 1602 voyage, 228 1606 voyage, 229 Letters Received by the East India Company, 229 see also joint-stock companies Englishness anxiety about, 157–78 passim changing conceptions of, 26–27 English theater and Englishness, 27 as joint-stock company, 20 see also Fletcher, John; Jonson, Ben; Marlowe, Christopher; Mountford, Walter; Ottoman Empire, representations on English stage; Rowley, Samuel; Shakespeare, William; Wilson, Robert Essex, 2nd Earl of, 226 ethics (or morality) and economy, 246, 250–59 exchange dealers, 247

INDEX exchange rates, 247, 248, 249 tables of, 248–49 exotic and exoticism, 96, 99, 104, 167, 170, 171–72, 175 n28 exports see balance of trade factors, 1, 12 and merchant company, 69 fair/dark, 157–78 passim, esp. 160–65, 168, 170, 173 n7–8 Farwell, Christopher, An East-India collation (1633), 225–26, 230 fashion, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191, 195 Female manufacturers complaint, The, 179, 181, 191–92 Fenton, Edward, 227 Field, Richard, 223 Fielding, William, First Earl of Denbigh, 183 Fiennes, Celia, 185 Finkelstein, Andrea, 79, 81 Finley, R., 272 n3 Fischer, Sandra K., 258, 261 n28 Fletcher, Giles, Of the Russe common wealth (1591), 225, 233–35, 238 n30 Fletcher, John, 134 n6, 265 The Sea Voyage, 269 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 92 n7, 272 n1 Forman, Valerie, 164, 188 n6, 188 n8–9 Foucault, Michel, 259, 261 n26 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene Genovese, 73 France, 201, 203–6 Franqueville, John de, 142–43 Frederyke of Jennen, 78 frugality, 245–46, 256–57 Fuchs, Barbara, 34 n21, 109 n1, 202 Fuller, Mary, 34 n18, 235 n4 Fumerton, Patricia, 13 n4, 74 n13, 180, 188 n16, 188 n18, 202, 208, 217 n12, 250

279

Gandhi, Mahatma, 195 gardens, 137–40, 141–45, 147–50, 152–54 Gardiner, Edmund, 160–61 gender, 6, 7–8, 58, 69, 71, 118–19, 162, 163–65, 265 Generall Historie of Spayne, The, 223 gentry, involvement in trade, 66–67 Gerard, John, 143–50, 154 Herball, 143, 146, 149–50 Germany (trade to), 247 gift economy, 257, 258 Giotto, 85 global œconomy, 246, 258–59 global systems theory, 5, 21–22 global whole, 5, 6–7, 12, 32, 79–80 globalization, 1–3, 65, 73, 193 globalizing marketplace, 191 Glover, Sir Thomas, 231 Godunov, Boris, 233 gold, 203, 205, 215, 247, 251 Goldberg, Jonathan, 174 n16 golden mean of wealth use, 245–46, 250–51, 255 Goodall, Baptist, 57–73, 266, 269 Goodman, Jordan, 171 Gowing, Laura, 177, 184 Greenblatt, Stephen, 210 Gresham, Thomas, 259 n5 Guillory, John, 3, 4 Guinea Company, 228 Habsburg Empire, 23, 24–25 Hadfield, Andrew, 222 Hakluyt, Richard, 65, 223–24, 226–27, 234, 237 n20 Hall, Kim F., 170, 172 n1, 173 n7, 175 n28, 183, 272 n1 Halpern, Richard, 47 Hamburg, 247 Hancock, John, 168–69, 175 n23 Harding, Vanessa, 272 n3 Hariot, Thomas, 138–40, 152 A brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia, 138, 140

280

INDEX

Harris, Jonathan Gil, 2, 4, 12 n1, 13 n4–6, 34 n20, 86, 95–97, 173 n6, 186, 261 n20 Harrison, William, 141–42, 147–48 The Description of England, 141–42 Hartwell, Abraham, 223, 224 Hawkes, David, 4, 12 n1, 13 n6, 29 hazard see chance Heal, Ambrose, 171, 175 n29 Heidelberg, 139 Heinemann, Margo, 178, 187 n1 hell, association with race, antitobacco discourse, discourse against consumption, 161–62, 163–65, 168, 173–74 n10, 174 n11 Hendricks, Margo, 173 n5 Henrietta Maria, 152–53 Henry IV, 249 Henry VII, 247 Hentschell, Roze, 190 herbal manuals, 138, 139, 148–50, 153, 154 Hermann, Paul, Paradisi Batavi, 141 hoarding, 255, 256 Hobbes, Thomas, 261 n23 Holderness, B. A., 188 n17 Homer, 85 homosexuality see sexuality; sodomy; queer Horace, 260 n13 Hosley, Richard, 187 n1 house, household, 162, 187 economy, 246, 255–59 representative, 257, 258 Howard, Charles, 226 Howard, Jean, 3, 13 n3, 134 n13, 188 n13, 272 n4 Hulme, Peter, 202, 272 n7 humors/humoral theory, 159, 168 husbands, absent, 162, 166, 171, 172, 177–78, 186–87

images/visual images, 157, 163–65, 169, 171, 172 see also list of images imports, discourse against, 157–78 passim see also balance of trade India, Indies, 161, 165, 179, 180, 187, 203, 205, 215 West Indies, 251 Indian see Native American industry, 174 fishing, 201–3, 206, 209–12, 216 shipbuilding, shipyard, 165, 172 see also cloth; commodity; wool Infanta of Spain, 252 infection, 181 inflation, 251 insurance history in England, 43 maritime policies, 44 theological perspective, 42 interest (on bills of exchange), 248 investment, 255, 257, 261 n22 see also mercantilism Irwin, John and Katherine B. Brett, 182 Isabella Clara Eugenia, 252 Islam, 168, 173 n2, 174 n16 see also blackamoor; moor; Turk; “turn’d Turk” Italy, 207 Iwanisziw, Susan B., 171, 175 n29 James I, 89 as James VI, King of Scotland, 59, 68 Jameson, Fredric, 74 n10 Jardine, Lisa, 24, 33 n12, 108, 111 n32 Jobson, Richard, The golden trade (1623), 228 Johnson, Richard, London’s Description, 107 joint-stock companies, 20, 23, 26

INDEX see also Dutch East India Company; English East India Company; Levant Company; mercantilism; Muscovy Company Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass, 183, 187 Jones, Marion, 187 n1 Jonson, Ben, 152 The Alchemist, 267: depiction of Eastern empires in, 28, 30; as satire of capitalism, 29–30 Bartholomew Fair, 163, 173 n9 Chloridia, 152–54 Cynthia’s Revels, 260 n13 Every Man In His Humour, 216 Every Man Out of His Humour, 105, 107, 210 The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 174 n11 Neptune’s Triumph, 250 The Staple of News, 245–46, 251–59, 267 Volpone, 96, 101–4, 267 Kamps, Ivo, 3 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, 226 Kayll, Robert, The trades increase, 82, 84, 91 Knapp, Jeffrey, 173 n9, 174 n11, 174–75 n20, 216, 218 n18 Knights of Malta, 144 Korzybski, Alfred, 83 Kusinoki, Akiko, 178, 180 labor, 62, 64, 72, 73, 123–32 passim, 170–71, 202, 206–12, 214, 267, 269–71, 272 n7 indentured, 170–71 slave, 170–71, 172 see also slaves, slavery Labov, William, 90 Lambert, Sheila, 225 Launching of the Mary, The, 117–35 passim, 267 Lawson, Philip, 164, 166, 187 n3, 175, 188 n8, 188 n15

281

Leiden, 139, 141 n154 Leinwand, Theodore, 12 n1, 39, 53 n1 Lemire, Beverly, 179, 183, 194–95 Lete, Nicholas, 142–43, 147 Levant Company, 21, 25–26, 32 n2, 58, 59, 227, 237 n24 see also joint-stock companies Lewkenor, Lewes, 102 liberality, 245–46, 250–51, 253, 257 Licensing see press control Lichefield, Nicholas, The First Booke of the Discouerie of the Weast India (1582), 223 Linde, Charlotte, 90 Linton, Joan Pong, 159, 165, 173 n3, 173 n7 Lipsius, Justus, 226 Lisbon, 144 literature and trade, relations between, 1–5, 27–32, 47, 70, 85–86, 91, 157–78 passim, 201, 221–35 Lok, Michael, 226 London, 265, 272 n3 as metropolis, 97, 105, 108 strangers in, 99, 108 Loomba, Ania, 173 n2, 173 n2, 173 n5, 272 n1 Lopes, Duarte, A Reporte of the Kingdom of Congo (1597), 224 Low Countries trade to, 247 truce with, 247 Ludgate Prison, 268 luxury, 253 MacInnes, Ian, 6 MacLean, Gerald, 34 n21, 231 Madagascar, 228 Madox, Richard, 227 Malta, 99–100 siege of, 100

282

INDEX

Malynes, Gerard (de), 42, 43, 87, 88, 91 A treatise of the canker of Englands common wealth, 81–82, 248–49, 257 The center of The circle of commerce, 83 The Maintenance of Free Trade, 85 Saint George for England, allegorically described, 84 see also mercantilism Mandeville, Henry, 249 manuscript culture, 226 Marcus, Leah, 91 market economy, 79–80, 81 Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, 30–31, 95, 97–101, 267 Marten, Sir Henry, 224 Marshall, William, 158 fig. 1, 170–71, 173 n4, 175 n28 see also Brathwait, Richard Martin, Sir Richard, 250 Marx, Karl, 258, 261 n29 masculinity, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 168 materialism/materialist analysis, 3–4, 6, 13, 157–78 passim, 212, 214, 216 materiality of the text bookbinder, 221 transition from manuscript to print, 222 McGrath, Patrick, 12 n2 McRae, Andrew, 74 n9 meanness (stinginess), 245, 250–51, 253 medicinal plants, 138, 142, 148–49 Mediterranean, 97, 99, 106–8 cultural capital of, 97, 107 trade with England, 20–21, 23–24 travel to, 97 Meierus, Albert, Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions (1589), 232

mercantilism and mercantile, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32 n3, 69–72, 246–50, 254–55, 258–59 mercantile fantasies/nightmares, 166–67 “mercantilism” as a term, 81 see also joint-stock companies; Malynes, Gerard de; Misselden, Edward; Mun, Thomas Mercator, Gerald, 65 merchant(s), 1–2, 39, 44, 137, 141, 142–45, 147–50, 180, 202, 204, 206 fictional, 165, 166, 167–68, 169 foreign, 249 Merchant Adventurers, 58 merchant-bankers, 249 metaphor, 83, 84, 87 Milton, Anthony, 225 mint par, 248 misogyny, 163 Misselden, Edward, 72, 202, 205, 257, 260 n12 The circle of commerce, 82–82 moderation see golden mean money exportation of, 248, 255 money market, 247 personification of 245 See also coins; Pecunia, Lady; specie monopoly, 168, 180 Montpellier, 139 moor(s), 158 fig. 8.1, 161, 162, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 173 n2, 173–74 n10, 174 n14, 175 n28–29 see also blackamoor; Islam morality, 79, 80 and economy. See ethics and economy Morrow, David, 4, 6, 8, 266, 269 Mountford, Walter, 161 and passim see also Launching of the Mary, The

INDEX Mowat, Barbara, 272 n9 Muchmore, Lynn, 164 Muldrew, Craig, 80 multiculturalism, 31 multilateral trade, 182 Mun, Thomas, 148–49, 161, 162, 164–67, 175, 178, 181, 185, 208 A discourse of trade from England vnto the East Indies, 148, 161, 188, 188 n11, 188 n14 England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, 188 n10, 188 n14, 232, 246, 249, 254–55, 257–59, 259–60 n7, 260 n12, 261 n19, 261 n21–22, 261 n27 Muscovy Company, 230, 233–35 Nashe, Thomas, 225, 237 n15 Pierce Penniless, 210 Lenten Stuffe, 210 (nation-) state emergence of, 202, 265 interest of, 10–12, 89 see also censorship, reasons for Native American, 159, 160–61, 162, 163, 166, 171, 175 n24, 175 n29 see also America; New World navy, 201, 205, 209–10, 216 Neill, Michael, 188 n6 Nerlich, Michael, 59–60 Netzloff, Mark, 12 n1, 73, 174 n17–19 Newman, Karen, 188 n13, 252, 253, 260 n14, 260 n16, 261 n18 New England Colony, 225 New Wonder, or A woman Never Vext, A, 267–69 New World, 160, 161, 162, 170–71, 173 n3, 173–74 n10 see also America; Native American Nicholas, Thomas, The Discoverie and Conquest of the Provinces of Peru (1581), 223

283

Nichols, Edward, 147 Northway, Kara, 188 n17 œconomy, 256–59, 261 n23 oikonomike, 257–58 Orient, 183 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 188 n20 Ottoman Empire, 22, 33 n12 alliance with England, 24–25 representations on English stage, 28, 30, 31 Oxford University, 139, 141, 154 Ozark, Joan Holmer, 41 Padua, 139, 141 Palatinate, 247 Pangallo, Matteo, 187 n1 par pro pari, 248–49 paradise, 138–39, 141, 144, 145, 152–54 Paris, 139, 141 Jardin du Roy, 141 Parker, Geoffrey, 227 Parkinson, John, 142–43, 145, 147–48, 150–53 Paradisi in Sole, 142, 148, 150–51 Parr, Anthony, 252 Patterson, Lee, 2 Pecunia, Lady, 251–53, 255, 257, 258, 260 n13 see also Jonson, Ben, The Staple of News Pemberton, William, 59 Pepys, Elizabeth, 184 Pepys, Samuel, 183, 184, 185, 235 Philaretes, 160, 165 Philip II of Spain, 252 piracy, 23, 71 Pisa, 139 plague, 183, 186, 187, 194 playhouse economics, 91 plot (plotting), 89–90 Poovey, Mary, 81 Popfsky, Linda S., 74 n5

284

INDEX

Porro, Girolamo, 141 Horto de i semplici de Padova, 141 Portugal, 203, 204 pound sterling, 247, 248 preposterous, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 168 press control post-publication: royal proclamations, 223 prepublication, licensing, 222–27 Prest, John, 139, 141 Price Revolution, 251 print culture, 222, 228, 231, 233 employers influence over, 221, 227–31 probability see chance prodigality, 245–46, 250–51, 253, 254, 255 production as “manly” activity, 252 household, 256 profits, 247 promotion see advertising prostitution, 253 publica mensura, 83, 86, 88 Purchas, Samuel, 64, 221–22, 225, 226, 230, 232–33, 234 queer, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 174 n16 Quilligan, Maureen, 61 Rabb, Theodore, 33 n8, 58, 66, 272 n1 race, 157–78 passim, 272 n2 concept of, 173 n5 and coffee, 160, 167–69, 172 and imitation of habits, 157, 159, 162 and promotion of trade, 162–63 and religion, 161–65, 167–70 and sexuality, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 168

and skin color, 157, 159, 160–61, 163, 168 and tobacco, 157–78 passim see also fair/dark Rackin, Phyllis, 39 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 138, 207, 209, 215 Rappaport, Steve, 256, 257 religion, religious discourses, 161–65, 168–69, 173–75 n10, 204, 209, 214, 218 n17 divine providence, 46 influence on capitalism, 20, 31 Islam and Ottoman Empire, 25 see also hell; Islam; race and religion Rey, Claudius, The Weavers True Case, 181, 183, 186, 187, 189, 193 risk commodification of, 40 epistemology of, 45 legitimizes profit, 41 mathematical basis, 46 shifting concepts of, 5, 45, 58–59, 269 Roberts, J., The trades increase, 74 n14 Roberts, Lewes, The merchants mappe of commerce, 1–2, 13 n2, 78, 82, 85, 88, 89, 91 Rowlands, Samuel, 161, 173 n10 Rowley, Samuel, 267 A New Wonder, or A woman Never Vext, 267–69 Royal Commission on the Exchanges, 247 Russia, 147, 224 ‘Time of Troubles’ in, 234 James I and planned invasion of, 234 Rustici, Craig, 173–74 n10, 175 n24, 175 n28 Ryner, Bradley, 6–7 sailors see seamen

INDEX Sanders, Julie, 260 n15 Sanderson, John, 231 satire, 67–68, 157–78 passim, 225, 237 n15 of English fashions, 189, 190, 185–86, 191 scientific discourse, 81, 86 seamen, sailors, 163, 177, 183 profession of, 182 Sebek, Barbara, 13 n2, 89, 202, 214 Seed, Patricia, 272 n6 Serres, Michel, 86 Seville, 144 sexuality, 163–65, 164 fig. 8.2, 168, 171, 172, 176, 177 Shahani, Gitanjali, 4, 9 Shakespeare, William Cymbeline, 77–78, 86–91, 267 Merchant of Venice, 41–42, 47–52, 154, 190, 267 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 183 Othello, 168–69 Romeo and Juliet, 217 n1 The Tempest, 72–73, 166–67, 168, 201, 202, 211–13, 215–16, 217 n14, 269–71 Troilus and Cressida, 86–87 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 70 Shapiro, James, 109 n1, 272 n1 Sherman, William, 1, 202 Shershow, Scott, 3, 13 n3 silver, 247, 251 Skinner, Sir John, 224, 228 slaves and slavery, 8, 9, 73, 170–71, 201, 209, 213–15 figurative, 169, 171, 172, 175 n24, 175 n28 markets, 144 representations of, 158 fig. 8.1, 166, 169, 171, 172 trade, 138, 144–45, 148, 154 Smith, Adam, 246 Smith, John, 206, 215, 217 n2 Smith, Sir Thomas, A Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England, 12, 32

285

Smith, Sir Thomas (member of the Council for Virginia), 224, 229 social struggle, 3–4, 66–70, 71–72, 123–33 passim, 252 see also class struggle; materialism sodomy, 165, 174 n16 see also queer Spain: 201, 203, 207, 211, 215 English war with, 247 see also Habsburg Empire Spanish Company, 66 specie, 80, 83 loss of, 246–47, 248, 250 spice trade, 138, 142–45, 148–49 Spurgeon, Caroline, 77 St Paul’s Cathedral, 105–7 Starkey, Thomas, 261 n27 Stationers’ Company, 222, 223 Stationers’ Register, 223, 225 Statutes of Employment, 249–50, 260 n10–12 Stevenson, Laura, 12 n2, 72, 74 n8 “stigma of print” see print culture stinginess see meanness Stonex, A. B., 260 n13 Stow, John, 268, 269 Strachan, Michael, 232 Strachey, William, 272 n8 Stubbes, Philip, 190–91, 254 sugar, 171 Sullivan, Ceri, 49, 79 Sullivan, Garrett, 89 Swetnam, Joseph, 181 systemic thought, 79–80, 81 Tatham, John, 167 Tawney, R. H., 247 Taylor, John, 161–62, 165, 172 Taylor-Pearce, Deborah, 187 n1–2, 187 n5 technological change, 265 Test, Edward, 4, 10, 266 Thirty Years War, 247 Thomas, Keith, 154

286

INDEX

Three Ladies of London See Wilson, Robert Tigner, Amy, 4, 8 tobacco, 148, 203, 205, 271 controversy, 160, 173 n7 history, 159, 170–72, 173 n7 and race, 157–78 passim “Tobachonists Armes, and Turks Coffee-house, The,” 169, 172 tomato, 145 Tower of Babel story, appropriation of, 60–63, 65 trade, 227–35 as “theme,” 4–5, 13 n7 commerce, 201–3, 207, 216 global, 202–5, 208, 210–13, 216 monopolistic, 58, 67 religion and, 6 trading companies, 227, 231 see also Cathay Company; Dutch East India Company; Eastland Company; English East India Company; Guinea Company; Levant Company; Muscovy Company; Spanish Company; joint-stock companies trade deficit, 248, 250 see also balance of trade trade routes, 138, 143–45, 147 Trade Crest, 163–65, 167, 169, 172, 174 n14 trade figure see advertising “trade pirates,” 246 Tradescant, John the Elder, 147–48, 152–53, 155 Tradescant, John the Younger, 147 travail/travel, as pun, 60, 61–63 travel writing, literature of travel and, 222, 223, 224, 227, 234–35 Travels of certaine Englishmen, The (1609), 231 Tripoli, 143–44

True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, A (1578), 223 True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage, A (1605), 231 Tryall of Travell, The see Goodall, Baptist Turk, 165, 167–69, 174 n16 Turkey see Ottoman Empire “Turks Coffeehouse,” 169, 172 “turn’d Turk,” 165, 174 n16 Turner, Henry, 12 n1, 13 n3 Ulmer, G., 74 n11 unemployment, 247 union controversy, 89 usury, 251, 253–54 contrasted to risk, 41 contrasted to interest, 53 n3 valuation, 77–78, 86–88 Van Dyck, Anthony, 183 Venice, 102, 104, 143–44 “vent” bodily/body as, 157, 160, 161–62, 163–68 passim, 169, 174 n17 concept of, 165–67, 174 n17–19, 174–75 n20 economic, 165–68, 174 n18 Virginia, 205, 215, 224, 231 Virginia, Council for, A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia (1620), 224 Vitkus, Daniel, 4, 5, 7, 12, 34 n21, 109 n9, 110 n12, 173 n2, 174 n16, 266, 272 n2 Walker, William, The journal or dayly register of the voyage, accomplished by eight shippes of Amsterdam (1601), 230 Wall, Wendy, 231

INDEX Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1, 3, 21–22, 33 n4 see also global systems theory Walter, J. H., 187 n1, 187 n4–5, 188 n7 Waterhouse, Edward, 72 Waymouth, George, 228–29, 232 Wayne, Don, 260 n14 wealth of England, 249 right use of, 245–46, 250–51 Spanish/New World, 251 Weatherford, Jack, 260 n13 Weber, Max, 63 Werstine, Paul, 187 n1 Whitbourne, Richard, A Discourse and Discovery of the NewFound-Land (1620), 227 widows, 178, 179, 183 Wilde, Anthony, 184 Williams, Raymond, 73 n4 Wilson, Robert, The Three Ladies of London, 245, 260 n8, 260 n17

287

Wilson, Thomas, A Discourse upon Usury, 41–42, 53 n2, 53 n4, 54 n7 women, 9, 11, 117–19, 123–25, 162, 164, 172, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183–93, 251–53, 260 n13, 261 n18 as theatre-goers, 171, 181, 183, 187, 252–53 working women, 176, 181, 184, 186 Woodbridge, Linda, 12 n1, 13 n4 wool, 205 cloth (export of), 247 world system/world systems theory, 1, 5, 7, 79, 266 Wright, Louis B., 73–74 n3 Young, Paul, 64–65 Zoilus, 85 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, 47