Chapter 7, “Consumption and Consumption,” examines the shifting valences in the early seventeenth century of a particularly important economic and pathological term. “Consumption” was employed in early modern economic discourse almost invariably as a negative pathological metaphor with which to heap opprobrium on commercial practices that depleted or “wasted” the nation’s wealth. But it also brought to visibility emerging practices of conspicuous consumption, whereby exotic luxury commodities were purchased and flaunted by a new kind of subject, the cosmopolitan consumer. Although conventionally regarded as an endogenous, humoral affliction, consumption became increasingly freighted with the exotic in the early seventeenth-century imagination as a result of the growing trade in foreign luxuries. Such an association is visible in the influential economic treatises of the mercantilist writer Thomas Mun. Yet even as Mun vilified foreign luxury commodities, he also sought to reconfigure consumption as a necessary rather than pathological economic practice, and specifically as a mode of venture capital that benefited the English economy. Both these shifts are evident also in Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, which pushed the meanings of consumption away from the purely domestic wasting of wealth toward the purchase and conspicuous display of foreign goods. Consumption is thus represented less as a wasteful, pathological phenomenon than as a medicinal process whereby a controlled encounter with foreignness safeguards the health of the body politic.
What I offer here, then, are several discursive etiologies of our modern notions of the national, the foreign, and the global. Indeed, the diverse meanings of the term “etiology” are of crucial importance to my argument. Throughout this book, I attempt to clarify the origins of the discourses of national and transnational economy. But inasmuch as etiology has more specifically become that branch of medical science concerned with the causation and origins of disease, I seek also to show how early modern debates about both the nature and the transmission of illness cannot be separated from the early modern emergence of economics as a discrete field of inquiry. In Sick Economies, I argue both that our modern notions of economy have a decidedly pathological provenance and that our modern notions of disease cannot be disentangled from the development of transnational capitalism. If the London commercial stage was the site of the “drama of a nation,” therefore, its economic vocabularies betray traces of new, nationalistic etiologies of disease; equally, its pathological lexicons hint at multiple etiologies of the national economy. In these embryonic dramas, then, we might also see the egg from which the flu-bearing Asian chickens of modern commercial pathology have hatched.
2
Syphilis and Trade: Thomas Starkey, Thomas Smith, The Comedy of Errors
As critics have increasingly noted, images of syphilis cast a long shadow over Shakespeare’s more mature drama, particularly the so-called problem plays of his dark middle period.1 But what are we to make of the disease’s presence in an early, ostensibly sunnier work like The Comedy of Errors? The play brims with references to the pox, to the point where it becomes a virtual leitmotif. The Syracusian Dromio and Antipholus joke about its effects, especially the loss of hair, at some length in 2.2.83–93; they banter about the same symptoms again at 3.2.123; and Dromio quibbles on the “burning” mode of its transmission at 4.3.53–55.2 The disease also operates throughout the play at a darker, more metaphorical level. It haunts Adriana’s extended lament about her own flesh being “strumpeted” by the “contagion” of her husband’s seeming adultery (2.2.143); its hereditary nature lurks in Balthasar’s assertion that slander can damage an “ungalled reputation” and “with foul intrusion enter in … For slander lives upon succession” (3.1.102–3, 105); and its effects can be recognized in Luciana’s memorable question to her Syracusian brother-in-law: “Shall, Antipholus, / Even in the spring of love, thy love springs rot?” (3.2.2–3). Johannes Fabricius, the leading scholar of syphilis in Shakespeare’s drama, has argued that the pervasive pathological imagery of the plays written in the period 1601–4—Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Othello—points to Shakespeare’s having contracted the pox at some time around the turn of the seventeenth century.3 But any correlation one may attempt to draw between Shakespeare’s syphilitic imagery and his personal health is quite confounded by The Comedy of Errors, written when the playwright was in his presumably healthy twenties.
In this chapter, I offer a different strategy for decoding the syphilitic references of The Comedy of Errors—one that divulges neither the biographical details of Shakespeare’s life and pathologies, nor even the phenomenology of the syphilis epidemic in early modern England and Europe. I instead situate the play’s treatment of the disease within a broader constellation of discourses and structures of feeling that accompanied the enormous growth of international commerce in the sixteenth century. When Adriana attributes her husband’s seeming mental illness—one of the chief symptoms of syphilis—to “some love that drew him oft from home” (5.1.56), we can glimpse the playwright’s calibration of the pathological and the economic. Throughout The Comedy of Errors, the appetite that lures one away from “home,” whether domestic or national, is the necessary foundation of commerce: according to Luciana, men’s “business still lies out o’door” (2.1.11). For Adriana, by contrast, such appetite is rather the source of disease, as is shown by her earlier complaint that her husband’s pathological “ruffian lust” for women “out o’door” has left him (as well as her) syphilitically “possessed with an adulterate blot” (2.2.132, 139).
Adriana’s remarks entail a potential semantic confusion, however, concerning what she perceives to be the cause of her husband’s peregrinations and illnesses. Does the “love” that has led to his pathological alienation from “home” refer to his sexual and commercial appetite or to the objects of that appetite—the Courtesan and the exotic goods he covets? Does she believe his problem, in other words, to be internally generated or externally contracted? As I shall argue, this confusion resonates throughout The Comedy of Errors, and in a fashion that notably reproduces a disjunction endemic to premercantilist Tudor economic literature. In much the same manner as treatises like Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535) and Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1581), the play vacillates between a traditional view of commerce as a subset of ethics in which the appetitive subject assumes moral responsibility for his or her transactions and an emergent conception of commerce as an amoral, global system to whose demands the subject and the nation have no choice but to submit. As Adriana’s ambivalent pathologization of her husband’s extradomestic “love” suggests, moreover, this disjunction significantly mirrors—and is partly grounded in—late sixteenth-century medical discourse. Replicating the contemporary swirl of controversy concerning the etiologies of epidemic illness, the play flip-flops between representing disease as an interior state that the patient can avoid through self-regulation of appetite and as an implacable, invasive force that overwhelms its hapless victim. In both economic and pathological spheres, then, the play stages a contest between individual agency centered on internal appetite and ineluctable subjection to external control.
I shall argue that syphilis, a disease attributed by Shakespeare’s contemporaries variously to appetitive immoderation and to contact with infectious