Why was the theater the space for such dramas? One might cite historical, institutionally specific reasons for the irruption of economic and medical concerns into early modern English drama. As Jean-Christophe Agnew and Douglas Bruster have argued, the London playhouses were thoroughly implicated in the emergent forms of market capitalism, and these forms suffuse the plays that were staged in them.67 Leeds Barroll has reminded us how the playhouses were equally the putative sites of disease, subject to repeated closures by the city authorities who feared that large audiences might be breeding grounds for plague.68 It is tempting to speculate that an institution accused by its opponents of not only spreading but causing disease (the Puritan preacher Thomas White had claimed that “the cause of plagues is sinne … and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes”) may also have had a special investment in debating the etiologies of illness.69
But to explain early modern drama’s vocabularies of commerce and disease, we need to do more than just identify extradiscursive, historical “realities” that influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. No matter how much the nascent market economy and the plague may have touched the lives of early modern playwrights and their audiences, there is also something literally generic about the drama’s obsession with mercantile and pathological foreign bodies. As I have shown in my earlier discussion of The Merchant of Venice, romance afforded Shakespeare and his contemporaries a medium in which to articulate new visions of global trade. Fredric Jameson has argued that romance from the twelfth century on entails the projection of an Other, a projection that ends when that Other reveals its “name.”70 As subsequent critics have noted, romance’s projections and erasures of alterity provide the narrative template for many early modern English fantasies of empire and colonialism. Joan Pong Linton, for example, has demonstrated how romantic topoi mediate representations of Raleigh’s exploits in Guiana and early English ventures in Virginia.71 I wish to supplement Linton’s analysis by showing how early modern romance’s affiliations to dramas of nationhood are confined neither to the space of the American New World nor to the project of empire building. Romance’s projections and erasures of alterity also offered mercantilist writers and early modern playwrights narrative strategies with which to imagine the commercial nation as well as its transactions with foreign bodies within an overarching global system.
Yet the plays I examine here are not romances in the conventional sense. Notably absent from this book are Shakespeare’s late romances or the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays that have captured my attention are instead works in which romance is blended with other genres: the Plautine comedy, the Florentine novella, the nationalist epic, the Lucianic satire, the pirate adventure, the London city comedy. In all these generic hybrids, the transoceanic scope of romance serves to articulate and refract the play’s commercial preoccupations. Such exercises in generic contaminatio—a term synonymous in the Renaissance with “infection”—also seem to come ready-fitted with a pathological vocabulary.72 And this vocabulary is enlarged and refined by romance’s characteristic “projections” of alterity.
Chapter 2, “Syphilis and Trade,” attends to the mutual implication of early modern discourses of the pox and transnational commerce, with specific reference to The Comedy of Errors. In the process, I argue that the growth of global trade in the second half of the sixteenth century placed considerable pressure on conventional understandings of both pathology and economy. New understandings of syphilis as deriving from foreign nations came into conflict with residual conceptions of illness as an endogenous, appetitive, or humoral state; new understandings of the systemic operations of global commerce problematized the medieval conception of economy as a subset of morality. Shakespeare, I argue, reproduces these conflicts in his comedy. The language of syphilis provides him with a vocabulary that allows him to mediate, albeit problematically, conflicting understandings of trade. He does so, moreover, in a fashion parallel to the rhetorical gambits of protomercantilist economic writers of the sixteenth century such as Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith.
Chapter 3, “Taint and Usury,” considers how the economic pathology par excellence of medieval Christian ideology—usury—was reconfigured in three early modern texts: Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England Allegorically Described, the anonymous Dutch Church Libel of 1593, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. What is voiced in each text is less the conventional condemnation of usury as a form of unnatural breeding than a new, mercantilist problematic of transnational identity for which the “Jew” serves as the unstable signifier. Each text views the Jew as a palimpsest, in which discrete categories of national identity are fused and confused. The resulting transnational contaminations are registered pathologically, as “infections,” “gangrene,” and, most important, “taints.” Yet in each case the hybridization of the Jew (as Turkish, Dutch, or Spanish) works to disavow the textual and historical hybridization of the “gentile” and/or English subject. Mercantilist discourse helps generate yet also subjects to immense pressure the myth of a discrete “national” subject in a time of unprecedented transnational fluidity.
Chapter 4, “Canker/Serpego and Value,” examines the crisis of value prompted by what Malynes called “merchandizing exchange”—European bankers’ playing of the foreign currency markets through the manipulation of rates of exchange. This raised the question: was the value of money intrinsic or extrinsic? Debates about the origins of disease provided writers a vocabulary with which to articulate the conflict over value’s origins. Malynes refers to the problems of “merchandizing exchange” as a “canker,” a disease that, like its close cousin “serpego,” was understood to be both endogenous and invasive. Similarly, when Hector speaks in Troilus and Cressida of “infectious” valuation, he reproduces the disjunctions of the term in contemporary medical discourse, where it was used to designate both humoral disarray and contagion. Indeed, the play’s extensive pathological and mercantile vocabularies repeatedly embody this uncertainty over whether the origins of disease and value are external or internal. Such an uncertainty, however, was one of the consequences of the growth of foreign trade and transnational practices of foreign currency exchange, and thus was symptomatic of the emergent drama of national economy.
These first chapters show how pathological language mediated mercantilist writers’ and Shakespeare’s understandings of the economic. In Chapter 5, “Plague and Transmigration,” I argue that economic developments also affected dramatic understandings of the pathological. Ben Jonson found in the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul, a richly suggestive figure for the dynamics of international trade. In Volpone, movement across the boundaries of national body politics, particularly via their ports, is both a constitutive principle and an occasion for considerable anxiety. A similar anxiety is expressed in medical tracts such as Timothy Bright’s Treatise: Wherein is Declared the Sufficiencie of English Medicines and mercantilist treatises such as Thomas Milles’s writings on national customs policies. Like Bright and Milles, Jonson lends expression to a fear of transmigratory foreign commodities contaminating the body politic through its ports. Jonson’s heightened sensitivity to the transmigrations of things across national borders notably influences his vision of plague and, as a consequence, he brings to partial visibility the mercantile coordinates of what has been widely regarded as the most significant epistemic shift in seventeenth-century medical science: the eclipse of the old Galenic and Aristotelian cosmology of qualities, elements, and humors by the new mechanistic philosophy of quantifiable matter in motion.
Chapter 6, “Hepatitis/Castration and Treasure,” examines how early modern physiologies of blood and semen underwrote economic models of the transnational circulation of bullion. In their extended pamphlet war of 1622–23 concerning the causes of the decay of English trade, Edward Misselden and Gerard Malynes both resorted to pathologies of the blood—most notably, hepatitis—to represent the pathologies of the national economy.