For all the differences between diseases that I am insisting on, there is still a unifying theme to my argument. By provisionally reimagining disease as a foreign body, people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced new epistemologies within which objects such as the national economy and the global laws of trade could be preliminarily conceived. Hence the early modern English “pathologization” of commerce for which I am arguing was by no means a straightforward demonization, as we might think it to be now. Although mercantilist writers frequently employed images of disease to stigmatize certain economic phenomena, these images equally served as the vectors for a more productive reimagining of international commerce and typologies of the national, the foreign, and the global. If he had been more attentive to the economic nuances of disease and the pathological accents of the economic in the seventeenth century, then, Foucault could have written a supplement to Marx’s famous essay on money and Timon of Athens and called it “The Power of Disease in Bourgeois Society.”
Dramas of National Economy and Disease
The growing seventeenth-century preoccupation with the foreign as a simultaneously pathological and economic phenomenon is evident not just in English mercantilist writing. As my discussion of The Merchant of Venice indicates, it is also prefigured in the drama of the sixteenth century, which repeatedly blurred the boundaries between what we now regard as the separate domains of the medical and the mercantile. This blurring can be seen as early as the Tudor interludes that preceded the drama of the professional London playhouses. In the early Elizabethan entertainment An Interlude of Wealth and Health (c. 1558), the mutual metaphorical implication of disease and economics is the play’s governing conceit. The interlude for the most part imagines wealth and health in medieval fashion—as generic, allegorical concepts stripped of any historical or geographical specificity.65 The character Health, for example, asserts that
Welth is good I cannot denay
Yet prayse yourself so much ye may
For welth oftentimes doth decay
And welth is nothing sure. (28–31)
And Wealth likewise characterizes Health in generic terms: “I neuer marke this muche, nor understood / That Helth was such a treasure, and to man so good” (188–89). But lurking in the play is a counternarrative that looks forward to the mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century. At times, Wealth and Health are presented as nationally specific, even nationalist, figures: “I am welth of this realme” (17, emphasis added); “I welth, am this realmes comfort, / And here I wyll indure” (157–58); “For here I [health] am well cherished” (163).
As soon as the two characters become nationally coded, moreover, they become close allies and even analogues of each other: “Welth for Lybertye doth loboure euer / And helth for Libertye is a great store” (270–71). The allegorical character Remedy observes,
welth, and helth, is your right
names The which England to forbere were very loth
For by welth and helth commeth great fames
Many other renlmes [sic] for our great welth shames
That they dare not presume, nor they dare not be bold
To striue againe England, or any right with holde. (544–49)
The logic of this passage is by no means mercantilist. Indeed, it arguably reproduces the premercantilist discourse of commonwealth, in which the health of the body politic is synonymous with its internally generated wealth. Economic as much as corporeal health is similarly understood here as an endogenous phenomenon, deriving from internal balance; hence even as “other renlmes” covet England’s wealth and health, the latter seem initially to be assets generated entirely within the nation.
But the play also looks ahead to mercantilist understandings of economic health and pathology as corollaries of transnational commerce. The main threats to both Wealth and Health come from two allegorical characters, Illwill and Shrewdwit, who are coded as foreigners. Shrewdwit enters speaking French (350), Illwill speaks Spanish (845–46, 851–52), and both swear Catholic oaths. These two are not the only foreign bodies who threaten England’s wealth and health. One of the interlude’s characters, and indeed its only nonallegorical figure, is a Flemish immigrant named Hans. A mercenary looking for work in England, he is presented as a loutish drunk who speaks in a virtually incomprehensible stage-Dutch. Importantly, he is also linked to economic sabotage: he boasts that wealth no longer resides in England, for “welth best in ffaunders [Flanders], it my self brought him dore” (424). The discourse of the self-contained commonwealth is eclipsed here by that of mercantilist bullionism, according to which national wealth is synonymous with money and hence transferable across countries’ borders. In order to restore health and wealth to a polity that is more nationally than universally coded, Remedy expels Hans from England, exclaiming, “There is to mainy allaunts [aliens] in this reale, but now I / good remedy haue so prouided that Englishmen shall / lyue the better dayly” (760–62). Thus is economic health reconfigured in nationalist terms as liberation from invasive foreign bodies. Yet such xenophobia anticipates the characteristic rhetorical gambit of mercantilist discourse: conflating the economic and the pathological, the play pointedly locates itself on the global stage, but within that stage, the “foreign” is deemed villainous.
In the wake of An Interlude of Wealth and Health, Shakespeare and his contemporaries repeatedly plotted shifting links between the discourses of commerce, disease, and national health. The foreign emerges in their plays as both a pathogenic and a commercial phenomenon, an invasive entity that threatens yet also is crucial to the health of bodies natural, politic, and economic alike. What Walter Cohen has termed the “drama of a nation” repeatedly lays bare the equation of national wealth and health and subjects it to critical scrutiny.66 If the “Asian flu” is not just a metaphor but also a character in a dramatic narrative, so too are the pathologized foreign bodies of the early modern stage. An analysis of how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries resonate with mercantilist discourse can thus disclose the dramatic component of that discourse. To this end, Sick Economies considers the various, early permutations of the drama of national economy produced and refined in what I am calling the mercantilist drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
This is not to say that such drama delineates an entity identical to what we would now regard as “the economy.” Nor does it even represent the “English” national economy. Indeed, most of the mercantilist drama I will examine is located in Mediterranean city-states—Ephesus, Venice, Troy, Fez, Tunis—rather than in the English nation-state. Nevertheless, the mercantilist drama’s preoccupations with commerce and disease entail the tripartite typology of the domestic, the foreign, and the global that distinguishes the economic writings of Malynes, Milles, Misseiden, and Mun. By articulating this typology, the mercantilist drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries also voices novel understandings of desire, identity, citizenship,