Sick Economies
Sick Economies
Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England
Jonathan Gil Harris
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harris, Jonathan Gil.
Sick economies : drama, mercantilism, and disease in Shakespeare’s England / Jonathan Gil Harris.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3773-0 (acid-free paper)
1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Economics in literature. 3. Mercantile system—Great Britain—History—16th century. 4. Mercantile system—Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Economics. 6. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Medicine. 7. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 8. Great Britain—Economic conditions—16th century. 9. England—Economic conditions—17th century. 10. Economics in literature. 11. Diseases in literature. I. Title.
PR658.E35H37 2004
| 822.3'3—dc22 | 2003055561 |
for my sister Naomi Harris Narev(1968–2003) —b’ahava raba
Contents
1
The Asian Flu; Or, The Pathological Drama of National Economy
At the end of 1997, newspaper readers around the world were treated to a striking journalistic diptych. Alongside reports of the outbreak of a new, possibly lethal strain of chicken influenza in Hong Kong, there appeared the first articles detailing the turmoil and collapse of East Asia’s “tiger” economies. The juxtaposition proved quite suggestive. Although the new strain of influenza turned out to be relatively innocuous, the language it generated was altogether more contagious: in a matter of days after the Hong Kong outbreak, Anglophone reporters had dubbed the economic ills afflicting nations such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Korea the “Asian flu,” or, with greater euphony, the “Asian contagion.” The tigers were thus transmuted into morbid chickens, threatening to infect the economies of the West.
The “Asian flu” metaphor reveals a great deal. First, it bears witness to the constitutive role played by the body in shaping Western perceptions of the economic. One might think also of eighteenth-century French Physiocrat theories of the blood-like circulation of wealth; the word “inflation,” which was originally a specialized medical term for “swelling”; the pathological connotations of “consumption”; Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market; or the organic etymology of “capital” itself.1 Metaphors of infectious disease like the “Asian flu” similarly disclose the corporeal images that, even in an age where the archaic logic of resemblance between microcosm and macrocosm no longer holds sway, continue to organize popular understandings of the economic.
Just as strikingly, the metaphor lends expression to deep-seated fears about the vulnerability of national markets within larger, global networks of commerce. In these fears lurks an intriguing paradox. Fundamental to the notion of the nation’s commercial health is an ambivalent conception of transnationality that works to naturalize the global even as it stigmatizes the foreign. The “Asian flu” metaphor embodies this ambivalence particularly clearly. By troping economic illness as a communicable condition that transmigrates across oceans, the metaphor attributes the cause of plunging stocks and evaporating capital around the world to specific foreign bodies