In his later, bitter plays, Shakespeare was to return to syphilis as a metaphor with which to lament the reduction of all human activity to the carnal desires occasioned by global trade. The Comedy of Errors is not, however, the bleak play that Troilus and Cressida or Timon of Athens is. It seeks to effect a reconcilation between the two sets of twin brothers, and in the process to disabuse Adriana of her delusions about sick appetite and foreign contagion. In doing so, the play ends up vindicating the transnational quests of the characters: Egeon is spared death and reunited with his family, Antipholus of Syracuse is reconciled with his long-lost brother, and the two Dromios leave the stage arm in arm. By the conclusion of The Comedy of Errors, then, “business out o’door” is no longer a challenge to the domestic; rather, it is the deus ex machina that ensures its miraculous reintegration. If the globe is initially condensed by Dromio into the diseased body of the kitchen-wench, it is at play’s end refashioned as one happy, healthy, transnational family. Importantly, this reconfigured globe also necessitates a subtly transformed pathology.
The Abbess is doubly instrumental in this transformation. First she identifies the origin of the Ephesian Antipholus’s malaise; then, having suggested a cure for her son, she takes her place as mother and wife in Egeon’s reconstituted family. The language of syphilis might seem to reverberate in her diagnosis and cure, inasmuch as her understanding of Antipholus’s ills similarly mediates invasive and appetitive understandings of disease. On the one hand, she attributes Antipholus’s frenzy to his being constantly scolded by his wife, comparing his affliction to an exogenous condition such as rabies: “The venom clamors of a jealous woman,” she asserts, “Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth” (5.1.69–70). Yet even as the Abbess reproaches Adriana for corrupting Antipholus with her “venom clamors,” she also models her son’s illness as a melancholic disorder residing in his diseased, humorally imbalanced appetite:
Thou sayst his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings.
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,
And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou sayst his sports were hindered by thy brawls.
Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heels a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life?
In food, or sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturbed would man or beast. (5.1.73–84)
As much as the Abbess may reproduce the mediated disjunctions of syphilitic economy visible elsewhere in the play, her diagnosis entails a subtle but significant adaptation of that economy. Antipholus’s is an affliction acquired not from a desire for foreign luxury goods that draws one “oft from home” but from disharmony within it. It is not appetite per se that is at fault, therefore, nor its objects; rather, it is the excessive restraints imposed on Antipholus’s appetite that have made him humorally and morally sick. In accordance with Galenic and Christian ideals of temperance, therefore, the Abbess’s cure is designed to permit if not unimpeded appetite for the extradomestic, then at least its moderate exercise.
Because the Abbess’s advice to Antipholus is expressed in what seems to be an entirely moral or medical register, it is easy to overlook how it also has significant economic implications. I have argued that the play repeatedly recasts the domestic/extradomestic opposition in commercial terms, thereby allowing Antipholus’s “business out o’door” to function as a catchphrase for both adultery and foreign trade. The Abbess’s medical advice—that Adriana minister to her husband’s health by giving him liberty to indulge in extradomestic “recreation”—works to transform his bivalently sexual and commercial “business out o’door” from a pathogenic into a prophylactic measure. With this counsel, therefore, she provides a retroactive justification less for his sexual truancy than for his mercantile activity in the agora and, more specifically, in the sphere of transnational commerce. The latter can now become a safeguard of rather than a challenge to the health of individual, family, nation, and globe.
But a powerful residue of anxiety lingers in Adriana’s fantasies of syphilitic infection as well as the Abbess’s Galenic solution to them, a residue that was to acquire an even more pathological strength in Shakespeare’s problem plays. In those works, syphilis is the inexorable reality of a world in which commercial appetite is rampant and health a cruel dream; the pox, in other words, has become the stuff of horror. In the earlier Comedy of Errors, syphilis remains a nightmare from which one can still wake up, health and humor—in both senses of the word—intact. What this play shares with Shakespeare’s later work and the mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century, however, is a profound investment in the language of disease as a means of figuring new economic objects. In the next chapter, I turn to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in order to show how its pathological imagery resonates with an early mercantilist lexicon of infection that helped figure a growing economic phenomenon: the alienability of money and identity across national borders.
3
Taint and Usury: Gerard Malynes, The Dutch Church Libel, The Merchant of Venice
In February 1996, the Supreme Court of Arkansas delivered an opinion on a suit brought against a property vendor by two buyers who, unable to meet the unusually high rate of interest set by the vendor, had defaulted on their payments. Weighing the matter, the Supreme Court observed: “This case presents questions about usury.” As quaintly archaic as the court’s “questions” may seem, they had a sound legal basis. Arkansas is the only state in the union to set usury limits: Amendment 60 to the Arkansas constitution asserts that the maximum rate of interest on any contract entered into shall not exceed 5 percent per annum above the Federal Reserve Discount Rate. Clarifying the state’s law before delivering its opinion, the Supreme Court wrote that “the express intent of Amendment 60 was that the taint of usury voids the agreement only to the extent of unpaid interest.”1
If the Arkansas constitutional safeguard against usury sounds old-fashioned, the language of the Supreme Court’s opinion might seem even more so. The “taint of usury” is a formulation that has a decidedly Shakespearean ring: it resonates with The Merchant of Venice, in which the Jewish usurer Shylock brings his “plea so tainted and corrupt” against the Christian merchant Antonio (3.2.75). There is a difference, however, between the Arkansas of 1996 and the Venice of 1596. If a “taint” is now simply a moral blemish, the term possessed a much wider array of meanings for Shakespeare and his audiences. In courts of law, a “taint” was a conviction for felony; hence when Antonio pronounces himself a “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.113), he arguably accepts what he presumes will be the Venetian court’s ruling against him.2 Yet as this example demonstrates, “taint” also possessed a pathological meaning. The term could refer to an illness of animals, especially of horses, and its meaning shaded into that of “infection,” whose etymology is almost identical to one of the senses of “taint”—a staining or contamination.3 In this chapter I examine how both terms are used in the emergent mercantilist discourses of late Elizabethan England to recode the old crime of usury as a new economic phenomenon synecdochally associated with Jews: the alienability of money and identity across national borders.
I read The Merchant of Venice in relation to two other “usury” texts with which it is not normally associated: Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601) and the anonymous Dutch Church Libel of 1593. Each text seems to cast its gaze in a decidedly non-Jewish direction. Malynes’s treatise criticizes, from a recognizably mercantilist perspective, the depletion of England’s bullion reserves; the