Bacon’s choice of verb here is fascinating. “To colour” is synonymous in this context with “to dye” or “to stain” and hence, in a more metaphorically pathological sense, “to corrupt.” The OED lists Bacon’s use of “to colour” under the now obsolete sense of “to lend one’s name to; represent or deal with as one’s own.” I would argue that this meaning of “colour” also sheds light on Shylock’s otherwise enigmatic vision of usury. Although they are the offspring of Laban’s sheep, the eanlings become Jacob’s by virtue of his ability to (parti-) “colour” them, and hence “represent or deal with” them as his “own.” Shylock instructively aligns Jacob’s profit with the usurer’s interest, therefore, by means of an image of staining; like Bacon’s “coloured” money, the “parti-coloured” fleeces embody the lambs’ categorical hybridity as goods that have become alienated from Laban to Jacob, or Israel, father of the Jewish nation. For Bacon and Shakespeare alike, then, “colour” is the mark of a national boundary transgression intrinsic to usury.
In the process, the “colouring” usurer generates a potential crisis of uncertain identity, goods, and coin. Paraphrasing Portia, one might ask: which is the merchant’s, and which the lender’s “moneys”? For the mercantilists, this question was of pressing importance when the lender was a stranger and English bullion stood to be alienated across national borders. Thomas Milles, for example, argues that “many merchants do collour the conueying of ready Money out of the Realme of England.”15 The transnational undecidability generated by the foreign usurer’s “colouring” also informs the early modern phrase “to colour strangers’ goods,” which the OED glosses as “to enter a foreign merchant’s goods at the custom-house under a freeman’s name, for the purpose of evading additional duties” (colour, v., 4). Gerard Malynes uses this very phrase in his treatise Lex Mercatoria (1622): “a Factor or Merchant, doe colour the goods of Merchant Strangers in paying but English Customes.”16 For Malynes, such “colouring” is tantamount to usury, inasmuch as it involves a crafty profiting from transnational dealership less in goods than in money. In both Bacon’s and Malynes’s texts, then, the “colouring” effects of usury are made to figure a twofold indeterminacy that is the product of transnational commerce. First, the usurer “colours” goods and money in such fashion as to obscure knowledge of who owns them, and whether they are domestic or foreign (or both). Second, the usurer confuses national borders, both by merging with his host nation and by obtaining money from—or sending it to—uncertain destinations in which he has family, factors, or trading connections. The “colouring” usurer thus both embodies and transmits national indeterminacy.
The pathological dimensions of “colouring” and the nationally indeterminate usurer are particularly evident in Malynes’s first published work, Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601). Unlike his later treatises, the text takes the form of a brief allegorical fable about England’s economic ills; to this extent, it may be seen as a boiled-down Faerie Queen set on London’s Lombard Street. Malynes recounts a dream he has had, in which he visits a city (“Diospolus,” or London) on a “most fruitfull Iland” (“Niobla,” an anagram of Albion).17 The country is suffering, however; a beautiful princess, whom Malynes equates with the nation’s treasure, is tormented by a rampaging dragon, which he identifies with usury. Despite the fable’s title, Saint George notably fails to make his promised appearance. England’s patron saint is “allegorically described” by Malynes only in his opening dedication to Sir Thomas Egerton; here he asserts that Saint George is a type of both Christ and Queen Elizabeth, each of whom has been used by God “to performe the part of a valiant champion, delivering an infinite number of the diuels power” (sigs. A2v–A3). When Malynes turns to the narration of his fable, however, he devotes nearly all of it to an allegorical description not of Saint George but of usury. And just as Malynes invokes a Christian frame of reference in his dedication only to exclude the very type of Christ from his actual narrative, so does the traditionally theological explanation of usury figure in his fable as a striking absence, referred to but once in a parenthetical citation of passages from scripture (65). Malynes instead focuses the majority of his critique on usury’s economic and political effects. The dragon is named “Poenus politicum [hardship of the polity]”; one of his wings is called “Vsura palliata [disguised usury],” the other “Vsuria explicata [explicit usury]”; the dragon’s tail is called “inconstant Cambium [exchange rates]” (sig. A8). As this allegorical anatomy suggests, Malynes imagines usury quite differently from Aquinas and the medieval scholastics. He believes not only that usury takes multiple forms, overt and disguised; it is also—as his invocation of exchange rates suggests—intrinsic to the systematic practice of commerce across national borders.
Malynes does not entirely abandon the language of moral economy. At times, he blames the dragon for a brace of sins practiced by Niobla’s inhabitants: usury has, for example, produced “a present greater abilitie … to liue licentiously, following whores, harlots, wine-tauernes, and many other vnlawfull games, to their vtter destruction” (21). But throughout the fable, the religious is overwhelmingly subsumed within the economic, and medieval sins are eclipsed by systemic modes of transnational commerce. Uppermost in Malynes’s lengthy list of the dragon’s crimes are dangerous practices of “merchandizing exchange” that have resulted in the flow of bullion out of the nation: “he maintaineth a league with forreine nations, and causeth them to serue his turne, by bringing in superfluous commodities at a deare rate, and they to feede vppon our natiue soile, to the commonwealths destruction.… He carieth out our treasure in bullion and money, empouerishing our commonweale.” (42). Here Malynes emphatically refashions usury in accordance with the characteristic nationalist preoccupations of mercantilism.18 As a consequence, “usury” begins to lose its traditional meaning. In the above passage and elsewhere in Malynes’s fable, the term refers no longer simply to the charging of interest on loans but more generally to “money being made a merchandize” in the course of transnational trade (71)—in this case, merchant strangers’ manipulation of rates of currency exchange in order to buy English commodities cheaply and to sell foreign commodities at exorbitant prices. What should be England’s wealth, therefore, becomes “coloured” as foreign.
Throughout his allegory, Malynes employs a resolutely pathological vocabulary to figure the usurious underbelly of transnational commerce. In his dedication, he compares statesmen to the “Phisitions of commonweales” whose job is to heal “the biles botches, cankers and sores thereof”; chief among these is the “venimous sore” of usury (sig. A7v). And in the fable proper, Malynes describes the dragon of usury variously as a “Gangrena” (49) and “this contagion, where-with we are infected” (13). Both of these latter pathological metaphors are, I would argue, crucial to Malynes’s vision of usury and the relationship between the “domestic” and the “foreign.” On the one hand, Malynes seems to figure the dragon of usury as an invasive disease when he compares “Gangrena” to “Synons [the Trojan] horse” (49). To modern eyes, a presumption of invasive disease may be yet more apparent in Malynes’s use of terms like “contagion” and “infected.” All these pathologies might suggest that he views usury as a practice specific to foreigners. But I would argue that each of Malynes’s metaphorical diseases implies less foreign invasion (though that is certainly one of their connotations) than a corruption or mixing of categories that is redolent of usury’s “colouring” indeterminacy.
Gangrene,