If transnational economy in The Merchant of Venice has an explicitly romantic accent, it also has a more occulted pathological one. Old Gobbo misuses the term “infection” when he means affection (2.2.103), but his malapropism brings to visibility the pathological underbelly of desire, whether romantic or commercial, throughout the play. This underbelly surfaces most clearly in the courtroom scene. Bellario fails to appear in court because he is allegedly “very sick” (4.1.151); Shylock leaves the same courtroom complaining that he is “not well” (4.1.392); and Antonio calls himself a “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.114), a diseased animal whose sorry condition, signposted in the play’s very first line, foregrounds the dark side of a desire bifurcated between the imperatives of romance and trade. Theodore Leinwand has noted how Antonio’s sadness exposes the affective component of commercial venturing.31 But this component is also at root pathological, as is suggested by Graziano’s advice to Antonio, couched in the language of humoralism: “fish not with this melancholy bait” (1.1.101). Indeed, The Merchant of Venice’s conjunction of pathology and commerce was made more explicit in a nineteenth-century American minstrel rewriting of the play; this updated version gave Antonio in the courtroom scene a case of “the mumps,” for which he takes the splendidly efficacious “Mrs Winslowe’s Soothing Syrup.”32
The Merchant of Venice’s mixing of the languages of trade and disease within the generic constraints of romance is especially significant. I would go so far as to suggest that this mixing is what distinguishes early modern English mercantilism as a discourse. In a manner strikingly reminscent of the “Asian flu” metaphor’s freighting of the economic and the epidemic, the mercantilists’ discourse of national economy was also a pathologically inflected one. All four writers repeatedly offered “remedies” for what they regarded as the nation’s economic “sicknesses.” Malynes titled one of his earliest works The Canker of England’s Commonwealth, repeatedly compared the nation’s economic ills to “gangrene” and “dropsy,” and presented in his last treatise, The Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623), a sustained allegorical fable of the body politic’s economic diseases.33 Milles saw commercial trade as suffering from “dangerous fits of a hot burning Feauer” and a “Frensie,” each of which he endeavored to cure with an “Apothecary Pill.”34 Misselden employed pathologies of the blood, and even coined the term “hepatitis” to figure obstacles to the circulation of wealth.35 Mun styled idleness as a “general leprosie” that depletes the nation’s treasure and developed the pathological metaphor of “consumption” in a way that heralded its modern, exclusively economic sense.36 Most importantly, all four writers tended to imagine these sicknesses as the products less of internal economic problems than of exposure to foreign elements—whether people, goods, organizations, or practices—within the “natural” functionings of global commerce.
The mercantilists’ obsessively pathological imagination may strike the modern reader as eccentric. But their conceptions of disease itself must seem far less so. We are habituated to political metaphors of invading cancers, plagues, or Asian flus. Susan Sontag and others have bridled at the xenophobic potential of such metaphors, but that is because these critics more or less take for granted that disease is usually transmitted by, and resides in, foreign bodies.37 That the mercantilists repeatedly resorted to the language of pathological foreign bodies does not testify to disease’s transhistorical figural power as an invasive entity. Rather, as I shall argue, mercantilist conceptions of economic pathology are possessed of a historical specificity born of changing material circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in particular, the emergence of the nation-state and the growth of global trade. The mercantilists’ language of economic pathology, moreover, provided one of the discursive fields within which disease could first be figured as a foreign body, “naturally” communicated from one organism to another.
Discourses of Pathology
So naturalized has the notion of disease as a foreign body become that it is easy to forget there once was a time when people’s pathological fears were not figured in terms of viruses, bacteria, germs, or any other contagion. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the dominant conceptions of health and disease in English culture looked decidedly different from our modern counterparts. Rather than an external, invasive entity, as it has overwhelmingly been conceived since Louis Pasteur formulated his theory of germs and Robert Koch discovered the bacillus that causes tuberculosis, disease was imagined as a state of internal imbalance, or dyskrasia, caused by humoral disarray or deficiency. An excess of melancholy, phlegm, or choler, or a deficiency of blood, was understood as both the immediate cause and the form of illness. The goal of the physician was not to prevent entry of any determinate, invasive disease, therefore, but to restore the body to a condition of humoral homeostasis, or balance. This model dates back to Hippocrates, although the notion of the humors was codified primarily in the writings of Galen. For nearly two millennia, humoral conceptions of disease held sway in Europe, northern Africa, and the Near East.38
The humoral model was occasionally challenged by other theories of pathogenesis, particularly during periods of epidemic illness. Because of its understanding of disease as an endogenous state, Galenic humoralism was never able to explain successfully the operations of contagion. To account for the transmission of plague and other epidemic diseases, medical writers frequently resorted to Hippocrates’s miasmic theory of contagion or, more desperately, to arguments based on astrology or divine providence. Nonetheless, such deviations from the Galenic mainstream never seriously undermined the humoral model; indeed, they were usually accommodated within it. According to miasma theory, for example, polluted air or vapors were responsible for disrupting humoral balance. Disease might have external causes, therefore, but its form was understood to be endogenous, rooted in the complexion (or mix) of the body’s internal substances.39 Until and during the Tudor period, Galen retained a virtually uncontested monopoly in scholastic English understandings of disease and its transmission. Nearly all the academic and lay treatises on disease of the sixteenth century shoehorn illness into the glass slipper of humoralism. The Scottish physican Andrew Boorde’s Breuiary of Helthe (c. 1540), for example, which was published in numerous editions in the sixteenth century, offers an exhaustive glossary of early modern illnesses, every one of which it endeavors to explain in terms of humoral composition and imbalance.40
The Galenic understanding of the physiology of the body, its humoral mix, and its appetitive functions provided a particularly rich metaphorical language for sixteenth-century writers. Economic writers were no exception: many articulated fledgling conceptions of national economy in the language of humoralism. In his Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535), for example, Thomas Starkey adduced eight primary illnesses of the body politic. The majority of these are economic ills that have a humoral tinge:
And like as the health of the body determeth [sic] no particular complexion, but in every one of the four by physicians determed, as in sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric, may be found perfit, so this common weal determeth to it no particular state (which by politic men have been devised and reduced to four)—nother the rule of a prince, nother of a certain number of wise men, nother yet of the whole multitude and body of the people, but in every one of these it may be found to be perfit and stable.… For when all these parts thus coupled togidder exercise with diligence their office and duty, as, the ploughmen and