Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

MONEY AND THE AGE SHAKESPEARE

OF

E A R LY M O D E R N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S Ivo Kamps, Series Editor PUBLISHED

BY

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 by David Hawkes Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England by Bruce Boehrer Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place by Rhonda Lemke Sanford Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture by Jennifer A. Low Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India by Pompa Banerjee England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism by Mark Netzloff Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean by Daniel Vitkus

MONEY AND THE AGE OF S H A K E S P E A R E : E S S AY S I N NEW ECONOMIC CRITICISM Edited by

Linda Woodbridge

MONEY AND THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

© Linda Woodbridge, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6307–X hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Money and the age of Shakespeare: essays in new economic criticism/ edited by Linda Woodbridge. p. cm. — (Early modern cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6307–X 1. Great Britain—Economic conditions—16th century—Congresses. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Economics— Congresses. 3. Economics in literature—Congresses. I. Woodbridge, Linda, 1945– II. Series. HC254.4.M66 2003 822.3⬘3—dc21

2003051727

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors

vii ix xi

Introduction Linda Woodbridge

1

1

2

3

4

5

A.D.

Monetary Compensation for Injuries to the Body, 602–1697 Luke Wilson

19

Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors Curtis Perry

39

Scene Stealers: Autolycus, The Winter’s Tale and Economic Criticism Barbara Correll

53

On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare Douglas Bruster

67

Exchange Value and Empiricism in the Poetry of George Herbert David Hawkes

79

6

Work and the Gift: Notes toward an Investigation Scott Cutler Shershow

7

Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of Twelfth Night Valerie Forman

97

113

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8

9

Contents

Gift Exchange and Social Hierarchy in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury Michael L. LeMahieu

129

Taking Excess, Exceeding Account: Aristotle Meets The Merchant of Venice Eric Spencer

143

10 The Lead Casket: Capital, Mercantilism, and The Merchant of Venice Mark Netzloff

159

11 The Fiend gives Friendly Counsel: Launcelot Gobbo and Polyglot Economics in The Merchant of Venice Steven R. Mentz

177

12 Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Clause in The Merchant of Venice Robert F. Darcy

189

13 Usury and Counterfeiting in Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, and in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Teresa Lanpher Nugent 14 Middleton and Debt in Timon of Athens John Jowett 15 Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure Natasha Korda

201 219

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16 Fetish and Poem: Ben Jonson’s Dilemma Katherine Eisaman Maus

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Index

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Series Editor’s Foreword

D

espite the rise of historical and materialist criticism over the last two decades, it is fair to say that the nexus between economic and quantitative language and the language of literature continues to be neglected. Luckily, Shakespeare and the Age of Money begins to rectify this situation, because not only is the early modern theater located in one of Europe’s great commercial centers, the language of the plays themselves is infused, often in baffling ways, with the language of economic pursuit. A single example from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream will illustrate the point. Shakespeare’s Theseus, whose “nuptial hour” is still four days away, laments the slow waning of the old moon and says “She [the moon] lingers my desires, / Like to a step-dame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue.” Theseus’s linking of his declining sexual desire to the gradual decimation of a young man’s fortune by his stepmother or by his mother with jointure is highly inappropriate language for a young man to express his ardor for his bride-to be, but it is also startling for its blunt yoking of human desire and financial considerations, of the sexual and the economic. This kind of yoking of divergent cultural spheres within literary artifacts may appear perplexing, but Linda Woodbridge, the editor of Money and the Age of Shakespeare, believes that the enormous rise of economic and quantitative language in the literature and culture of the theater is directly linked to the rise of mathematics, double-entry bookkeeping, and expansion of commerce in the sixteenth century. Driven by commerce, the language of arithmetic grows more and more popular and intrusive as it infiltrates all manners of discourse. Money and the Age of Shakespeare, therefore, employs what has become known as the “New Economic Criticism” to explore the straightforward premise that “money, commerce, and economics make a good deal of difference to English Renaissance literature.” “New Economic Criticism” is a catchall phrase that describes the recent work done by critics such as Douglas Bruster, Lars Engle, William Carroll, Theodore Leinwand, Richard Halpern, and others,

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who focus our attention on a range of economic issues touching the early modern theater. As Douglas Bruster’s contribution to this volume points out, the New Economic Criticism is a “big tent” that brings together critics with varying interests. Among it’s the practitioners we find those who reveal new historicist, Marxist, feminist, and cultural materialist tendencies, but we also encounter an attention to language and genre that evokes the updated reincarnation of Formalism, the so-called New Formalism. New Economic Critics may analyze the impact of broad economic shift in English society on theatrical production, or on the day-to-day financial dealings between hired players, sharers, and entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, or, as my earlier examples from Shakespeare suggest, they may scrutinize the economic language that permeates the plays themselves. In Shakespeare and the Age of Money, we find authors analyze the impact of nascent capitalism, commodity fetishism, commodity markets, the use of debt and credit, international trade, usury, prostitution and pandering, gift exchange, and poverty – all in direct connection to the early modern theater. When we read these essays together, we discover that theater in the age of Shakespeare was not an aesthetic enterprise that happened to make a profit but that it was simultaneously a product of and a shaping force in the commercialization and quantification of culture itself. Few moments in Shakespeare capture the phenomenon explored is these essays as well as the scene in which Lear haggles with his daughters over the size of his retinue. “I’ll go with thee,” he says to Goneril. “Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,/ And thou art twice her love.” Ivo Kamps, series editor

Acknowledgments

W

e express appreciation to the Shakespeare Association of America, which provided a forum (in the shape of a seminar on New Economic Criticism) at which early versions of most of these essays were presented. Thanks are due also for the editorial sponsorship and assistance of Ivo Kamps, Kristi Long, and Roee Raz, and to the detailed and helpful comments of the press’s anonymous reader.

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Notes on Contributors

DOUGLAS BRUSTER is Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Quoting Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, and textual editor of The Changeling for The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. Along with Thomas Moisan, he has edited In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans. BARBARA CORRELL teaches Renaissance literature and cultural studies at Cornell University. She is the author of The End of Conduct: “Grobianus” and the Renaissance Text of the Subject and essays on Erasmus, Shakespeare, Donne, and film. She is currently completing a book on early modern economic, literary, and amatory discourses, “Divestments: Shakespeare, Donne, and the Character of Money in the Renaissance.” ROBERT DARCY is Assistant Professor of English at Utica College, where he is at work on a manuscript about literary misanthropy in the early modern period. VALERIE FORMAN is Assistant Professor of Renaissance and SeventeenthCentury Literature and Culture in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently working on a book on counterfeiting in early modern texts. DAVID HAWKES is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is the author of two books, Ideology (1996) and Idols of the Marketplace (2001), and of articles in journals including The Nation, TLS, Journal of the History of Ideas, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Studies in English Literature. JOHN JOWETT is Reader in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. He edited plays in the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (1986), and Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works

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(forthcoming). Publications include the Oxford edition of Richard III (2000). He has recently completed an edition of Timon of Athens. NATASHA KORDA is Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is author of Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and coeditor, with Jonathan Gil Harris, of the anthology Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002). She is currently working on a book entitled Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage. MICHAEL LEMAHIEU is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is completing work on a dissertation that examines the intersection of historical trauma and linguistic reference in Cold War American literature. His other publications include a review essay treating the relationship between literary theory and postwar analytic philosophy. KATHARINE EISAMAN MAUS is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She has written Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance and Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, edited Four Revenge Tragedies of the English Renaissance, and coedited The Norton Shakespeare, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, and Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and SeventeenthCentury Poetry. STEVE MENTZ is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and a variety of other literary topics. He has published essays on Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene. He is coeditor of Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, a collection of critical essays forthcoming in 2004 from University of Michigan Press. MARK NETZLOFF is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism is forthcoming from Palgrave’s Early Modern Cultural Studies series. His current research includes a book project, Before the Grand Tour: English Travel and Migration in Early Modern Europe, and a critical edition of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue. TERESA LANPHER NUGENT is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “The Usurious Poetics of Early Modern English Literature.” She

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received her M.A. in English literature from The College of William and Mary, and her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Virginia. CURTIS PERRY is currently Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. In addition to essays on diverse topics in early modern culture (Jacobean political culture, Senecan drama, farce), he is the author of The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and editor of Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brepols, 2001). SCOTT CUTLER SHERSHOW is the author of Puppets and “Popular” Culture, and of other recent articles on early modern drama and critical theory; and the coeditor, with Jean E. Howard, of Marxist Shakespeares. His essay is part of a larger project tracing the interrelated ideas of working and giving as central themes in contemporary theory. ERIC V. SPENCER is Associate Professor of English at Albertson College of Idaho. In the rare gaps of his teaching schedule, he works on a project linking Shakespeare’s treatment of money to early modern discussions of excess and limit. The current essay aspires to be a piece of that project. He is also the second author of a seven-year old son. LUKE WILSON is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, and author of Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England. He is currently working on a book on the idea of jurisdiction in relation to literary authority. LINDA WOODBRIDGE, Distinguished Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is author of Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (1984); The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (1994); Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (2001); and coeditor of True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in the Age of Shakespeare (1992) and Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen (forthcoming, 2003).

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Introduction L i n d a Wo o d b r i d g e

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hen we think of the Bankside neighborhood, home of the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan, it’s easy to remember that there were brothels there. You would pass brothels on land owned by the Bishops of Winchester if, instead of hailing a water taxi, you walked over London Bridge to the theater district. As soon as you stepped off the bridge into Southwark you’d turn right at the church of St. Mary’s Overie— nothing gynecological, despite its proximity to the brothels— “Overie” meant “over the river.” A short stroll would then bring you to the Globe. Antitheatrical writers haven’t let us forget those brothels; but who now remembers that if you turned left after stepping off the bridge, and walked along Barnes Street parallel to the river, past St. Olave’s church, right next to Battle Bridge (which crosses a little waterway joining the Thames) you would find a house where John Mellis kept a school, perhaps for as long as 46 years? In this school a Londoner could learn double-entry bookkeeping. In 1588—around the time The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine II, and The Jew of Malta were being acted at Bankside theaters—Mellis, from his reckoning school near St. Olave’s, reissued Hugh Oldcastle’s translation of the very first printed treatise on double-entry bookkeeping, by the Venetian Luca Pacioli.1 In 1561, St. Olave’s Grammar School was among the first in England to include accounting in its curriculum (Watson 304). Theatergoers wending their way toward the Globe might well have seen bills posted, advertising reckoning schools. In 1574, Humfrey Baker—author of an arithmetic handbook—had fulminated against certain foreigners who “advanced and extolled themselves in open talk and writings, that they had attained such knowledge and perfection in arithmetic as no Englishman the like”! Worse, “they have of late painted the corners and posts in every place within this city with their peevish bills, making promise that they could teach the sum of that science.”2 Presently Baker himself founded a reckoning school and plastered London’s

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corners and posts with his own bills. A 1590 broadsheet advertising his school (Baker 1590) promises expertise in double-entry bookkeeping and international currency exchange. Moralists like Gosson thought the drama bore signs of its residency in a brothel neighborhood. Did it also bear signs of its residency in a bookkeeping neighborhood? In Shakespeare, even a crown prince can speak commercial language: “Percy is but my factor, . . . / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf; / And I will call him to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up, . . . / Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart” (1H4 3.2.147–52). Sonnet 134 explores a love triangle in terms of mortgages, bond guarantees, interest on debts. Hamlet’s father faces the great Auditor with “No reck’ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (1.5.78–9). Even the improvident Falstaff keeps a daily account of expenditures (“Item: a capon.2s. 2d; Item: sauce.4d; Item: sack, two gallons.5s. 8d [1H4 2.5.487–9]). Olivia itemizes an inventory of her beauty: “item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin” (Twelfth Night 1.5.216–17). A procedure new in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century was bookkeeping in two columns, which we call debit and credit and they called “debitor and creditor.” Mellis’s bookkeeping manual is entitled How to Keep Books of Accounts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor; James Peele’s is entitled How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the . . . Accompt of Debitor and Creditor. A tradesman’s son, Shakespeare knew these terms. Iago, a book-balancing revenger determined to be “evened with [Othello] wife for wife” (2.1.286), nicknames Cassio “debitor and creditor” (1.1.30). In the very same line, he also denigrates him as a “counter-caster,” a reference to reckoning by counters, the older system that double-entry was replacing: double-entry was sometimes called “reckoning by pen” to distinguish it from the use of counters along lines indicating tens, fifties, hundreds, and so on. Both systems were still in use. Clearly Iago knows something of accounting himself, and why not? He’s a Venetian, and Pacioli’s double-entry, devised by the merchants of Venice, was in England called the Venetian system. Cymbeline also mentions both double-entry and counters. Posthumus faces a divine “audit” (5.5.121), having been condemned to death, “a heavy reckoning” (5.5.250). To his jailor, a hangman’s rope arithmetically “sums up thousands”; it is a kind of double-entry ledger: “You have no true debitor and creditor but it . . . . Your neck, sir, is pen, book, and counters” (5.5.258–61), debitor, creditor, pen, and book belonging to the new accounting, counters to the old.

Introduction

3

St. Olave’s parish was a good place for a bookkeeping school partly because it was poor. St. Olave’s Grammar School authorities noted in 1571, “We have . . . great number of poor people in our parish who are not able to keep their children at grammar,” that is, in the classics-oriented grammar school. Another curricular stream was created to teach poor students “to write, read, and cast accompts, and so to put them forth to prentice” (Watson 304). This was a common class distinction—Latin and Greek and university for young gents, bookkeeping and apprenticeship for common folk. The Charterhouse statutes specified teaching students “to cipher and cast an account, especially those . . . less capable of learning, and fittest to be put to trades” (O’Day 62); in practice, “less capable” meant lower in class. Before 1600, most grammar schools sniffed at mathematics as unfit for gentlemen, tainted by association with Trade. (Except for geometry, which was useful militarily, or for surveying one’s lands.) In 1673 when the Royal Mathematical School was founded, it was located at Christ’s Hospital, which from 1577 on had a commercial curriculum. It was a charitable institution for tradesmen’s orphans; the Hospital taught them and found them apprenticeships (see Trollope). But grammar schools remained resolutely innumerate. As for universities: in 1549 the Privy Council approved sweeping curricular changes at Oxford and Cambridge, replacing Latin grammar with mathematics; but in the timeless way of universities, the recommendations were permanently overlooked (Alexander 722). Mordechai Feingold ferrets out tiny references to math in the 1570 Cambridge statutes (23–31), but the university math curriculum remains largely invisible. A Latin poem printed in 1519 claimed to disclose the mathematical methods of Oxford University. They turn out to be the ancient art of finger reckoning! The commercialization of numeracy was abetted by grammar schools’ and universities’ leaving math alone for so long. Some parents sent their sons abroad to learn accounting and business from continental firms, often in Holland; masters sent promising apprentices abroad. Some parents paid extra for children to learn reckoning outside grammar school class time, as parents now pay privately for piano lessons, which are not part of the regular curriculum—this was long before Rithmetic had become one of the three “R”s. Adult learners attended private reckoning schools like Oldcastle’s in Mark Street, Mellis’s in Southwark, Humfrey Baker’s near the Royal Exchange, John Speidell’s in Queens Street, or N. Physhe’s in Fenchurch Street, or self-tutored from popular books. We know of these private reckoning schools from advertising and from prefaces to arithmetic books. John Mellis mentions Oldcastle’s

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school of the 1540s in the preface to his reissue of Oldcastle’s translation of Pacioli in 1588, in which he also advertises his own school near St. Olave’s. According to the brief autobiography Mellis includes in the dedicatory epistle of his augmented edition of Recorde’s Arithmetic in 1582, he had then been teaching for 18 years, or since about 1564. Mellis advertises his school again at the end of his augmented version of Recorde’s arithmetic, in 1607; the advertisement last appears in the 1610 edition, which adds up to a 46-year teaching career. (However, Mellis’s biographical dedicatory epistle is gone from Recorde by 1610; he perhaps died around this time. In the 1615 edition, Mellis’s ad is replaced by an ad for N. Physhe’s reckoning school in Fenchurch Street.) The location of Mellis’s school— May’s Gate, near Battle Bridge, in St. Olave’s Parish—remains the same in the advertisements of 1588, 1607, and 1610. (In 1607 he says he has occupied these premises for 16 years—arithmetic teachers’ figures do not always compute.) We have a surviving broadsheet advertisement for Humfrey Baker’s school north of the Royal Exchange, dated 1590. The title-page woodcut of the1615 edition of Recorde’s Arithmetic shows a child being brought to the premises of a reckonmaster; Frank Swetz believes that the child is being apprenticed (17). In the epistle to the reader in his 1628 arithmetic book, John Speidell announces that he has been a professor of mathematics for over 20 years (or since before 1608) and advertises a reckoning school at his house in Queens Street (Sig. A3, A3v); the title page identifies him in large print as “Professor of the Mathematics in Queens Street.”3 In addition to all this evidence of English reckonmasters, we have Baker’s complaint about foreign reckonmasters in London in the 1570s. (See Swetz 15–24 on European reckoning schools.) As for self-tutoring, the Renaissance witnessed an explosion of mathematical and commercial publishing (see table 1).4 Mathematical publishing intensified after the Armada attack, which seems to have had a Sputnik effect. (One recalls the money the United States poured into education after the shock of the Russians beating us into space.) A period of high military alert continued after the defeat of the Armada. Leonard Digges had demonstrated the importance of math to military strategy, and now in the wake of the Armada attack, a series of public lectures in mathematics was given in London, under City patronage and with the support of a group of London merchants, starting on the fourth of November, 1588 and continuing at least four years (Johnson 94–5). The lecturer, Thomas Hood, said in his inaugural lecture that the threatening of “our country” by the

Table 1 English mathematical and commercial publishing, 1519–1614 1577: Valentine Leigh, book on surveying, 5 eds. by 1596 1579: Leonard and Thomas Digges, Arithmetical Military Treatise 1582: Edward Worsop, surveying treatise, recognizing disparate systems of measurement in use across England 1587: Francis Clement, book for teachers in petty school, for children aged 4-, on numeration in Roman and Arabic, and casting of accounts 1588: John Mellis, reissue of Hugh Oldcastle’s translation of Pacioli’s work on double-entry bookkeeping 1588: Cyprian Lucar, arithmetic book; appended to first English translation of Tartaglia 1590–98: Thomas Hood, 7 textbooks accompanying his public math lectures, on arithmetic, geometry, navigation, use of globes and other mathematical instruments 1592: William Kempe (grammar school headmaster), trans. of Ramus’s Art of Arithmetic 1592: Thomas Masterson, First Book of Arithmetic (includes first and second books) 1594: Masterson’s Addition to His First Book of Arithmetic (contains answers to problems in first volume)

Introduction

1519: Anon., Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium, on finger reckoning 1522: Cuthbert Tunstall, arithmetic book in Latin, but using the new arabic numbers 1523: John Fitzherbert, The Book of Surveying and Improvements. 11 eds. by 1567 1526: Anon., The Art and Science of Arismetique 1537: Anon., An Introduction for to Learn to Reckon with the Pen or with the Counters; 7 eds. by 1595 ca. 1537: Richard Benese, The Manner of Measuring of all Manner of Land; first surveying book to concentrate fully on measurement expressed numerically; 5 eds. by ca.1565 1543: Robert Recorde, The Ground of Arts: Teaching the Work and Practise of Arithmetic; 18 eds. in 16c, 25 more in 17c; enlarged by John Dee in 1561 and by John Mellis in 1582, Mellis adding a section on double-entry bookkeeping 1543: Hugh Oldcastle, translation of Pacioli’s work on double-entry bookkeeping (now lost) 1547: Jan Ympyn Christoffels, How to Keep a Book of Accounts or Reckonings, based on Pacioli et al 1551: Robert Recorde, short geometry book based on Euclid; first text to apply geometry to surveying; 3 eds. by 1602

5

6

Table 1 (Continued) 1594: Thomas Blundeville, arithmetic book containing England, first trigonometry; 8 eds. by 1638 1595: Masterson, Third Book of Arithmetic 1600: Thomas Hylles, The Art of Vulgar Arithmetic 1609: John Speidell, Table of Sines, Tangents, and Secants 1612: Rooke Churche, book on surveying 1613: John Tapp, The Pathway to Knowledge 1613: Richard Witt, Arithmetical Questions, Touching the Buying or Exchange of Annuities; first compound interest tables in English 1614: William Bedwell, Of . . . Geometrical Numbers

Linda Woodbridge

1553: James Peele, How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the Order of . . . Debitor and Creditor; first home-grown English book on double-entry bookkeeping; enlarged ed., 1569 1556: Leonard Digges, Tectonicon; on mensuration 1557: Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Wit, on algebra 1562: Humfrey Baker, arithmetic book The Wellspring of Sciences; 10 eds. in 16c, 13 more in 17c 1567: John Weddington, How to Keep Merchant’s Books of Accounts 1570: first English trans. of Euclid, by Henry Billingsley (merchant), preface by John Dee 1571: Leonard, Digges. A Geometrical Practice, named Pantometria 1574: Brief Tables to Know . . . How Many Ranks of Footmen . . ., trans of Girolamo Cataneo, applied math to military formations, 2nd ed., 1588 1577: Dionis Gray (goldsmith), The Storehouse of Brevity in Works of Arithmetic

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“cruel . . . proud disdainful insolent Spaniard” cried out for lectures in “the mathematical science, a knowledge most convenient for military men” (Copy, Sig. Aiii). The inaugural lecture and seven of Hood’s course textbooks were printed and have survived. The year 1588 saw other arithmetical events: (1) the first English translation of work by Tartaglia, the great Italian mathematician—it dealt with artillery; (2) Headmaster Kempe of Plymouth Grammar School advocated teaching arithmetic in grammar schools (Education of Children, Sig. F2); (3) John Mellis reissued Pacioli’s treatise on double-entry bookkeeping and advertised his arithmetic school in St. Olave’s parish. Two years later, Humfrey Baker advertised his reckoning school. Within five years after the Armada, fresh issues of many math books appeared, along with many new books: Thomas Masterson, with his printer Richard Field, blitzed the market with three coordinated arithmetic books, trumpeting the need for math in wartime; Thomas Blundeville’s Exercises demonstrated, in chapter 25, “the use of the square root in setting of battles.” The mathemania of the late 1580s and 1590s was fueled by enterprising printers such as Field and Purfoote. Even the universities introduced a serious math program (Alexander 722). Despite the military trappings, the math craze was intimately connected with commerce. Hood’s public lectures had a commercial tinge from the start. The inaugural lecture was delivered at the home of Thomas Smith, “the London merchant who had taken the lead in raising the funds for the project” and who later became the first governor of the East India Company (Johnson 95). Later lectures were at the chapel of the Stapler’s Company.5 Even Leonard Digges’s Arithmetical Military Treatise basically just appends military examples to the usual commercial examples. Even without the Sputnik effect, math had grown exciting. The sixteenth century was an era of new math—a gradual shift from roman to arabic numerals and to reckoning by pen rather than by abacus, counters, or (at Oxford) fingers. And crucially, Renaissance math began comparing unlikes. As Richard Hadden shows, in this period “concepts like velocity are given precise numerical expression; quantities like weight, force, and distance are related in the same expression.” This was new: Aristotle’s physics “always relates force to force, distance to distance or time to time” (63). The Renaissance concept of velocity, Hadden notes, is “a truly modern development. Velocity is not simply time, nor is it simply distance”; it involves “comparison of unlike quantities” (63). Aristotle and Archimedes never include

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measurements; but the early moderns arithmetized continuous magnitudes to allow precision of calculation . . . and compared magnitudes of unlike kind in the same expression. Niccolo Tartaglia (d. 1557), for example, formulates a statics problem in which it is required to calculate the weight of a body, suspended from the end of a beam, needed to keep the beam horizontal. Tartaglia’s solution requires the multiplication and division of feet and pounds in the same expression. (Hadden II 63–4)

These new developments, which enabled stunning advances in astronomy, navigation, and other fields, sparked real excitement. Equations, the great achievement of Italian mathematicians, fired the public imagination. Tartaglia was challenged by another mathematician to an equation-solving contest—the loser was to treat the winner to 30 feasts (Ore 6–35). The dashing Girolamo Cardano, an addictive gambler who used math to figure out statistical probabilities in dice rolling and also published a major book on algebra, visited England in 1552 and stayed with the humanist Sir John Cheke (Stoner xii). Prefaces to practical little arithmetic books featured encomia to mathematics in the loftiest humanist terms. Robert Recorde opens with a paean to the glory of Numbers. And in England, throughout the century but especially after 1588, studying math was patriotic. Many English playwrights were the sons of tradesmen—glovers, shoemakers, bricklayers. George Peele was the son of James Peele, author of the first native English double-entry manual and financial officer of the commercially oriented Christ’s Hospital. The math these dramatists would have encountered was commercial math. But in this period, all math bore important traces of commercial math. Historians of science such as Frank Swetz and Richard Hadden argue that innovations in pure mathematics were piggy-backed on commercial arithmetic. Hadden traces the commercial connections of Italian pioneers of the new math (Pacioli, Tartaglia, Bombelli), and all the English mathematics books foreground their usefulness for merchants. The title page of Baker’s arithmetic book, The Wellspring of Sciences, stressing that the book is “not only profitable for merchants, but also for all artificers,” reveals the assumption that commercial use is the default setting for arithmetic. Baker notes, “some think this arithmetical art peculiar only to a few, using the trade of merchandise, as though it were not so necessary for other men” (Sig. Aiiv). Baker and Peele both dedicate their books to the governor of the company of Merchant Adventurers, England’s leading export consortium. Robert Recorde dedicates his algebra book to the governor and

Introduction

9

members of the “company of venturers into Moscovia.” Dionis Grey, a goldsmith, dedicates his arithmetic book to the Mayor of London and the Mystery of Goldsmiths. The title page of Thomas Hylles’s Art of Vulgar Arithmetic, 1600, promises “all the most necessary and profitable rules used in the trade of merchandise.” What difference does all this make to literature? Money and commercial thinking abound in the literature of the period. From The Merchant of Venice through Jacobean city comedy, plots of plays were often commercial and money-oriented. The opening scene of Thomas Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 1613, takes place in a goldsmith’s shop, where a gentleman brings in a gold chain to be weighed and haggles with the goldsmith over its worth, a reminder that goldsmiths often served as moneylenders. Jonson’s Epicoene, Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, and many other plays are built upon scheming over inheritances. Money is an issue in many standard plot motifs: arrest and imprisonment for debt, beggary, attempts to marry a wealthy widow, manipulation of wardship for financial gain, the luring in of shop customers by a pretty shopkeeper’s wife as a newfangled variant of prostitution, extravagant consumerism that ruins young heirs, gambling as a vice that transfers aristocratic lands into the grasping hands of usurers. More traditional villains had been motivated by lust, ambition, or revenge; in Jacobean city comedy, the new ogres are usurers. It is the premise of this volume that money, commerce, and economics make a good deal of difference to English Renaissance literature. Important work has already been done on many early modern English economic issues that impinge on literature: studies have appeared, for example, on nascent capitalism,6 on the pervasiveness of debt,7 on early modern consumerism,8 on poverty and beggary,9 on the economics of the theater,10 on the patronage system and the beginnings of professional writing,11 on the book trade,12 on prostitution,13 on usury,14 on coinage and counterfeiting,15 on marriage for money, including the issue of dowries,16 on merchants and sea-venturing.17 Essays in this collection deal with a wide variety of economic topics relevant to English Renaissance literature. Nascent capitalism is a topic addressed in varying ways by all contributors, but most directly by David Hawkes, Scott Shershow, Mark Netzloff, Barbara Correll, and Eric Spencer. Commodity fetishism is discussed by Hawkes and Netzloff. Spencer and Hawkes theorize use value versus exchange value. Risk, venture capitalism, and investment are taken up by Shershow and Curtis Perry; Perry also takes up consumerism and the expansion of the commodity market in the sixteenth century, as well

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as issues of debt and credit. Netzloff and John Jowett too write about debt, and Hawkes is interested in the language of debt as it permeates religious discourse and poetry. The topic of usury is taken up by Shershow, Robert Darcy, and Teresa Nugent. Netzloff writes of international trade and mercantile expansion, and Perry explores the intertwining of commerce and sociability. The issue of gift exchange, of gifts versus commodities, is treated by Shershow, Katharine Maus, Valerie Forman, and Michael LeMahieu. As to gender issues, Darcy writes about economic protectionism and the paternal control of daughters, and Natasha Korda about dowries. Poverty is treated by Shershow (“deserving” versus “undeserving” poverty) and Korda (singlewomen and poverty). Forman, Nugent, and Netzloff discuss counterfeiting, and Luke Wilson discusses insurance. Steve Mentz explores the role of an economic middleman. Netzloff, Forman, and Jowett address material culture and preoccupation with money, and LeMahieu treats social and economic mobility. Douglas Bruster theorizes the deployment of the New Economic Criticism in current Renaissance literary study. In order to explore a wide diversity of approaches to this topic, we have decided (by a vote of contributors) to keep the papers short so that more essays can be included. The essays in this volume shelter variously under the broad umbrella of what Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen call the New Economic Criticism; the volume grew out of a seminar on the New Economic Criticism at the 2001 Miami meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. Most New Economic critics (Marc Shell, Jean-Joseph Goux, Walter Benn Michaels, Catherine Gallagher, Kurt Heinzelman, John Vernon, Anthony Purdy) are either modern in their historical emphasis, or leap from the invention of the alphabet and of coinage in ancient times directly into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with but the briefest pause (if any pause) in the early modern period. Essayists in this volume, however, test such approaches in the Renaissance, when European economic systems were shifting out of feudalism and into proto-capitalism at the same moment that literature, vernacular languages, religious systems, and legal systems were undergoing pronounced shifts. It proves a fertile ground for cultivation. Commercial language permeates even plays whose plots are not primarily money-oriented, even lyrics devoted primarily to love or to religion, even the most heroic of epics, the most elegiac of elegies. In an age when credit buying was widespread and nearly everybody was in debt, characters in plays tend to say “I am in your debt” when they simply mean “thank you.” George Peele, son of a prominent

Introduction

11

accountant, wrote an opening scene for Edward I in which even the queen proves familiar with “agrum” or algorism, the arabic-numeral “new math” so necessary to modern accounting. References to reckoning, accounts, inventories, bills of exchange, factors, merchants, usury, commodity purchase, and many kinds of coins circulate in Renaissance literature of all sorts. The crucial enabling move of sixteenth-century mathematics, the conversion of unlikes to a single scale, finds an often sinister expression in Renaissance literature, where King Lear scales opulent land against non-opulent land and converts the quantified love of his daughters to the same yardstick as land. Renaissance tragedy often dramatizes inappropriate attempts to quantify and measure: strikingly like King Lear’s quantifying demand “Tell me, my daughters, . . . / Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.46–9) is Cleopatra’s opening question: “If it be love indeed, tell me how much” (1.1.14), and Antony, not unlike Cordelia in this, refuses to play the quantification game, which seems to strike him as offensively bookkeeperish: “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (1.1.15). Shakespeare’s characters keep challenging the use of bookkeeperish, quantifying language, but the habit keeps erupting all the same. “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum” (Hamlet 5.1.254–6). Our volume begins with an essay by Luke Wilson, which through contemplating what exactly was the cash value of a pound of flesh, or a severed hand, or a nose, in the age of Shakespeare, explores in complex ways the period’s “commensuration of money and human life.” It was a shopkeeping age, a bookkeeping age, and an age when despite Polonius’s maxims, nearly everybody was a borrower and/or a lender. In The Tragedy of Orestes, Thomas Goffe has one character caution another thus: Trust not the heavens too much, although they smile, Good looks do mortal hearts too oft beguile: The heavens are usurers; and as oft ’tis seen A full pouch’d churl give a most fair good even To his poor creditor, who trusting that Hath slack’d his payment: on the morrow next He hath been rooted out by the tusky boar, Which gave the fair good even the day before: The heavens can do thus too. (1.3, Sig. B3)

A literature capable of conceiving the very heavens as usurers is one whose economics are worth investigating. The essays presented here pursue that investigation.

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Notes 1. In the preface, Mellis notes that back in 1543 when that translation came out, Oldcastle “taught arithmetic and this book in St. Olave’s parish in Mark Lane”; this, however, was another St. Olave’s parish, near Hart Street, just across London Bridge. 2. Prologue to the reader, in Baker’s The Wellspring of Sciences, 1574 edition. All spelling in this introduction has been modernized. Although Baker’s book, reprinted many times, carried the same prologue from one edition to the next, the reference to the foreigners with their advertisements seems to date to 1574, since the prologue also dates the first edition to twelve years earlier (which computes, since the first we have is 1562), and the prologue is not in the intervening edition of 1568. 3. Speidell used to sell his arithmetic books from his house: the first, Certain Very Necessary and Profitable Tables: viz, a Table of Sines, Tangents, and Secants, 1609, he sold “from his house in Coleman Street”; later books he sold from his house “on the back side of Drury Lane, between Princes street and the new Playhouse”—these venues were advertised on his title pages. 4. By 1616, when he published his translation of Bernard Salignac’s Principles of Arithmetic, William Bedwell found it necessary to apologize for adding to the mountain of arithmetic books: “Although I am not ignorant, courteous reader, that there are in our language very many and sundry books imprinted of this argument, and that therefore to write ought in this kind were but lost labor, or more than needeth; yet . . . most of them are too long and tedious” (Sig. A3). He could probably have added that Richard Field, his printer, something of a specialist in math books, thought that making more money from yet another arithmetic book was an excellent idea. 5. Hood’s 1590 translation of Peter Ramus’s Elements of Geometry, one of the texts for his course, was “printed by John Windet, for Thomas Hood,” and copies were “sold in the Stapler’s Chapel within Leadenhall, where the mathematical lecture is read” (title page). 6. For example, Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, 1991; Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his Time, 1993. 7. See especially Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England, 1998. 8. For example, Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” 1996; Kim Hall, “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,” 1996; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England, 1600–1720, 2000.

Introduction

13

9. For example, William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare, 1996; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, 2001. 10. For example, Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, 1992; Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, 1999; William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London, 1992; Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and The Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1986; Melissa Diehl Aaron, Global Economics: An Institutional Economic History of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and Their Texts, 1599–1642, 1998. 11. For example, Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System, 1983; Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family, 1988. 12. For example, Peter Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross, 1990, and “The Publication of Playbooks,” 1997; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, 1998. 13. For example, E.J. Burford, Bawds and Lodgings: A History of the London Bankside Brothels, c.100–1675, 1976, and Burford and Joy Wotton, Private Vices, Public Virtues: Bawdry in London from Elizabethan Times to the Regency, 1995. 14. For example, Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England, 1989; Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 1949. 15. For example, Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, 1985, especially the sections “Numismatic Slang” and “Numismatic History” (22–7); Sanford Sternlicht, “Shakespeare and Renaissance Coinage,” 1972; John Carey, “John Donne and Coins,” 1980. 16. For example, Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England, 1993; Jack Goody, et al., eds. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, 1976; Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice, 2001; Christiane KlapischZuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 1985. 17. For example, Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, 1993; Bruce Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution, 1996; the chapter “Venture Capital” in Leinwand’s Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (110–39); David Quinn and A.N. Ryan, England’s Sea Empire, 1550–1642, 1983. Laura Stevenson’s Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature, 1984, explores literature “concerned with merchants, clothiers, craftsmen and the economic and moral context of their lives” (15).

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Works Cited Aaron, Melissa Diehl. Global Economics: An Institutional Economic History of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and Their Texts, 1599–1642. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998. Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and The Theater in Anglo-American Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Alexander, Michael V.C. “Universities.” Tudor England: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney and David W. Swain. New York: Garland, 2001. 721–3. The Art and Science of Arismetique. London: Richard Faques, 1526. Baker, Humfrey (or Humphrey). The Wellspring of Sciences. London: J. Rowbothum, 1562. STC 1209.5. Of the 23 editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 1574 edition (London: Thomas Purfoote, STC 1210a) is of special interest for its prologue discussing foreign reckonmasters advertising in London. Baker, Humfrey (or Humphrey). “Such as are desirous, either themselves to learn, or to have their children or servants instructed in any of these arts and faculties here under named, it may please them to repair unto the house of Humfry Baker.” London: Thomas Purfoote [?], ca. 1590. Broadsheet advertisement for Baker’s reckoning school. STC 1209. 3. Blayney, Peter W. M. The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard. London: Bibliographical Society, 1990. ——. “The Publication of Playbooks.” In A New History of Early English Drama. Ed. J.C. Cox and David S. Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 388–422. Blundeville, Thomas M. Blundeville’s Exercises . . . in Cosmography, Astronomy, and Geography, as also in the Art of Navigation. London: John Windet, 1594. Brennan, Michael G. Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family. New York: Routledge, 1988. Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Burford, E.J. Bawds and Lodgings: A History of the London Bankside Brothels, c.100–1675. London: Owen, 1976. —— and Joy Wotton. Private Vices, Public Virtues: Bawdry in London from Elizabethan Times to the Regency. London: Robert Hale, 1995. Cardano, Girolamo (Jerome Cardan). The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria Liber). Ed. and trans. Jean Stoner. New York: Dutton, 1930. Carey, John. “John Donne and Coins.” English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Carroll, William. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

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Carruthers, Bruce G. City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1996. Christoffels, Jan Ympyn. A Notable and Very Excellent Work, Expressing and Declaring the Manner and Form How to Keep a Book of Accounts or Reckonings. London: Richard Grafton, 1547. STC 26093.5. Clement, Francis. The Petty School. London: Vautrollier, 1587. STC 5400. Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium. Oxford: C. Kyrfoth, 1519. STC 5613. Cowan, Brian William. The Social Life of Coffee: Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England, 1600–1720. Doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2000. Cuthbert Tunstall’s De arte supputandi. London: Richard Pynson, 1522. STC 24319. Digges, Leonard and Thomas Digges. Arithmetical Military Treatise, Named Stratioticos. London: Henry Bynneman, 1579. STC 6848. Engle, Lars. Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Erickson, Amy. Women and Property in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1993. Feingold, Mordechai. The Mathematician’s Apprenticeship: Science, Universities, and Society in England, 1560–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Ferraro, Joanne. Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fischer, Sandra K. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Goffe, Thomas. The Tragedy of Orestes. Acted ca. 1613–ca. 1618. London: I. B., 1633. STC 11982. Goody, Jack et al., eds. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Gray, Dionis. The Storehouse of Brevity in Works of Arithmetic. London: J. Kingston, 1577. STC 12201. Hadden, Richard W. On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern England. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Hall, Kim. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.” In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Ed. Valerie Traub, Lindsay M. Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 168–90. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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Heinzelman, Kurt. The Economics of the Imagination. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Helgerson, Richard. Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hood, Thomas. A Copy of the Speech Made by the Mathematical Lecturer. London: Edward Allde, 1588. STC 13694. ——. An Engraved Sea Card of the Eastern Atlantic. London: s.n., 1592? STC 13696.5. ——. The Making and Use of the Geometrical Instrument, Called a Sector . . . . London: John Windet, 1598. STC 13695. ——. The Use of the Celestial Globe . . . . London: John Windet, 1590. STC 13697. ——. The Use of the Two Mathematical Instruments, the Cross Staff and the Jacob’s Staff. London: R. Watkins, 1590. STC 13699. ——. Translation of Elementa Arithmeticae, by Christian Wurstisen. London: Richard Field, 1596. STC 24540. ——. Translation of Elements of Geometry by Peter Ramus. London: John Windet, 1590. STC 15250. Ingram, William. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. An Introduction for to Learn to Reckon with the Pen or with the Counters According to the True Cast of Algorism. London: John Waley, 1552. STC 14119. First published 1537. (Title of later editions: An Introduction of Algorisme, to Learn to Reckon with the Pen or with the Counters.) Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Francis R. “Thomas Hood’s Inaugural Address as Mathematical Lecturer of the City of London (1588).” Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 94–106. Jones, Norman Leslie. God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989. Kempe, William. The Education of Children in Learning. London: Thomas Orwin, 1588. STC 14926. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Korda, Natasha. “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 110–31. Leinwand, Theodore. Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ——. Thomas Masterson His First Book of Arithmetic. London: Richard Field, 1592. STC 17648. ——. Thomas Masterson His Addition to His First Book of Arithmetic. London: Richard Field, 1594. STC 17648. Masterson, Thomas. Thomas Masterson His Third Book of Arithmetic. London: Richard Field, 1595. STC 17648.

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Mellis, John. See entries under Oldcastle and Recorde. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Nelson, Benjamin. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. O’Day, Rosemary. Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain. London: Longman, 1982. Oldcastle, Hugh. A Brief Instruction and Manner How to Keep Books of Accompts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor. Expanded by John Mellis. London: John Windet, 1588. STC 18794. (Oldcastle’s translation of Pacioli first published in 1543; edition now lost.) Ore, Oystein. Cardano, the Gambling Scholar. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Peele, George. The Life and Works of George Peele. Ed. Charles Tyler Prouty. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952–70. Three vols. Edward I, ed. Frank S. Hook, vol. 2: 69–170. David and Bethsabe, ed. Elmer Blistein, vol. 3: 189–254. Peele, James. How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the Order of the Most Worthy and Notable Accompt of Debitor and Creditor. London: Richard Grafton, 1553. STC 19547. Enlarged edition, 1569 (London: Thomas Purfoote, STC 19548). Purdy, Anthony. Literature and Money. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993. Quinn, David B., and A.N. Ryan. England’s Sea Empire, 1550–1642. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1983. Ramus, Peter. The Art of Arithmetic. Trans. William Kempe. London: Richard Field, 1592. STC 15241.3. Recorde, Robert. The Ground of Arts, Teaching the Work and Practise of Arithmetic. London: Reginald Wolfe, II 1543. STC 20797.5. (The title page of this first extant edition mentions “new additions,” pointing to an earlier edition.) Of the 43 editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the following are of special interest: edition of 1561 (London: Reginald Wolfe STC 20800) has additions by John Dee; edition of 1582 (London: John Harrison and H. Bynneham, STC 20802) has additions by John Mellis, on double-entry bookkeeping, and a prefatory epistle contains a brief autobiography of Mellis; at the end of the editions of 1607 and 1610 (London: John Harrison, STC 20805 and 20806) appear one-page advertisements for Mellis’s reckoning school; at the end of the 1615 edition (London: Roger Jackson, STC 20806.5) appears a one-page advertisement for N. Physhe’s reckoning school. ——. Pathway to Knowledge. London: Reginald Wolfe, 1551. STC 20812. ——. The Whetstone of Wit. London: John Kingston, 1557. STC 20820.

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Salignac, Bernard. The Principles of Arithmetic. London: Richard Field, 1616. STC 21618. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ——. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ——. “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice.” Kenyon Review 1 (1979): 65–92. Rptd. in Money, Language, and Thought, 47–83. Speidell, John. Certain Very Necessary and Profitable Tables: viz, a Table of Sines, Tangents, and Secants. London: E. Allde, 1609. STC 23060.5. ——. New Logarithms. London: E. Allde (?), 1619. Nine editions by 1628. Sternlicht, Sanford. “Shakespeare and Renaissance Coinage.” Renaissance Papers. 1972: 59–63. Stevenson, Laura. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Stoner, Jean, ed. and trans. The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria Liber), by Girolamo Cardano. New York: Dutton, 1930. Swetz, Frank J. Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987. Tartaglia, Niccolò. Three Books of Colloquies Concerning the Art of Shooting in Great and Small Pieces of Artillery. Trans. and expanded, Cyprian Lucar. London: Thomas Dawson, 1588. STC 23689. Trollope, William. A History of the Royal Foundation of Christ’s Hospital. London: William Pickering, 1834. Vernon, John. Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Watson, Foster. The Beginnings of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England. London: Isaac Pitman, 1909. Weddington, John. A Brief Instruction and Manner, How to Keep Merchants’ Books of Accompts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor. Antwerp: P. van Keerberghen, 1567. STC 25195.5. Witt, Richard. Arithmetical Questions, Touching the Buying or Exchange of Annuities. London: T. Harper, 1613. STC 25932.5. Woodbridge, Linda. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Chapter 1

Monetary Compensation for Injuries to the Body, a.d. 602– 1697 L u k e Wi l s o n

T

his essay is about the “limb” in the familiar phrase “life and limb,” and about the early modern history of what it’s worth. In his Essay Upon Projects (1697) Daniel Defoe proposes a form of insurance “by Contribution” or by “Friendly-Societies,” in which compensation for bodily harms suffered by members is supplied from a fund to which all members have contributed (Defoe 48–52).1 Unlike Seamen in the king’s service, who for their injuries were compensated with “Smart Money . . . proportioned to their Hurt,” those in the Merchant Service received nothing if injured on the job. This problem Defoe proposes to remedy by instituting “an Office of Ensurance for Seaman,” so that if any were injured at sea they would “receive from the said Office the following Sums of Money, either in Pension for Life, or Ready Money, as he pleas’d” [the first column is ready money]:

For the Loss of

冦

An Eye Both Eyes One Leg Both Legs Right Hand Left Hand

l. 25 100 50 80 80 50

or

l. 2 8 4 6 6 4

冧

Per Ann. for Life

Luke Wilson

20

兵

Right Arm Left Arm Both Hands Both Arms

100 80 160 200

8 6 12 16

其

Although Defoe also provides that should a subscriber die, his wife would receive a payment of £50, compensation to dependants in case of death is not his primary concern; he disapproves of life insurance as such, apparently on grounds of providentialism, and he’s primarily interested in the monetary value not of a human life but of parts of the body. Nonfatal injuries constitute here a distinct class for compensation in which value is unclouded by theological considerations. In the conceptual and organizational separation of bodily injuries from other forms of harm, including death, Defoe’s list resembles the more detailed lists that appear in many of the earliest English legal codes, from the Laws of Ethelbert (ca. 602) to the Leges Henrici Primi (ca. 1118). Toward the end of the latter text is a section (cap. 93; pp. 292–5) “De emendatione vulneris” [Concerning the compensation to be paid for a wound]. The following entries are representative: 93, 2 A wound on the head shall be compensated for with thirty shillings, if both bones have been pierced; if the outer bone only has been pierced, the compensation shall be fifteen shillings. 93, 3 If the wound under the hair is one inch long, the compensation payable shall be five pence, that is, one shilling. 93, 3a If there is a wound one inch long in front of the hair, the compensation payable shall be two shillings, that is, ten pence. 93, 5 If anyone knocks out another’s eye, he shall pay him sixty-six shillings, six pence, and a third of a penny. 93, 5a If the eye remains in the head, but so that the man can see nothing with it, a third part of the compensation otherwise payable shall be withheld. 93, 7 A person who knocks out someone’s first teeth or incisors shall pay eight shillings in compensation; a person who knocks out canines or ‘cheek’ teeth shall be liable to pay four shillings; molars which are knocked out shall require fifteen shillings in compensation.

And so on, for another 30 categories of injury, down to each of the fingers individually considered and even to the nails attached to them.2 Compensation values for killing a man (primarily in the form of wergeld) are listed elsewhere in the Leges and seem conceptually and legally distinct, so that even more emphatically than in Defoe, nonfatal injuries to the body constitute a highly specific category of damage or harm.3

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Both these lists not only isolate nonfatal bodily injuries as a distinct conceptual category; both insist as well on fixed values associated with these injuries, values which it’s their aim to promulgate in the form of a list of equivalences or what might even be called a menu or tariff of body parts and how much they’re worth. The differences between the two lists—the legal assumptions they encoded, the cultural work they performed—are profound. But their formal similarity is worth considering as well, especially because the form they exemplify—the list of body parts along with fixed monetary equivalents—does not seem to appear between the early twelfth century and the late seventeenth, though since it would be impossible to show that no such list existed during the intervening years, it’s safer to say that such lists were not used either as part of the legal mechanisms providing compensation to injured persons (as they appear to be in the early codes), or in the context of insurance for bodily injury (the function Defoe imagines for them). There is no point in falling into the trap of saying such lists were impossible, could not have existed; it is enough to say that they do not seem to have been used (at least in these contexts) because they were not needed, were not considered useful or relevant. If Defoe’s insurance scheme represents the reemergence of a specific kind of quantifying and list-making inclination that during the intervening period seems to have gone dormant, then the underlying question is: what would it mean that what vanished as a system of fixed compensation values for personal injury reemerged in the form of insurance? Only a schematic answer will be possible here, and the more literary questions that then emerge—what does this mean for our understanding of legal and popular conceptualizations of the monetary value of the parts of the human body in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and, more generally, how are these developments related to the emergence, in England, of the literary as such?—can be addressed only briefly, at the end, through the idea of a literature of the list in The Merchant of Venice. First, then, what had happened to the list in the early modern period, and to the conceptual structures that made it useful or relevant? Let us work toward the middle from either end, and begin by investigating the history of insurance before Defoe. Despite some significant innovations, Defoe’s proposal (as he himself admits) was not entirely novel. The list and its general rationale closely resemble the schedule of remedies that in 1685 were supposed to guide payments from the Chatham Chest, a fund created in 1590 by Sir John Hawkins to aid injured and disabled navy men (Oppenheim 145). When

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Samuel Pepys, in his role as Secretary of the Admiralty, inquired in 1685 about payments from the Chest, he was sent the following list of values representing a version of the “Smart-Money . . . proportioned to their Hurt” that Defoe was later to speak of: A leg or arm lost is 6l. 13s. 4d. paid as present relief, £ s. d. and so much settled as an annual pension for his lifetime…… 6 13 4 If two legs be lost his pension is doubled…… 13 6 8 For the loss of two arms, in consideration of his being thereby rendered uncapable of getting a livelihood any other way, per annum…… 15 0 0 But if an arm be on, and disabled only, is 5l. per annum…… 5 0 0 An eye lost is 4l. per annum…… 4 0 0 (Tanner 1.139, quoting Pepysian MSS, Miscellania vi.71)

Early insurance may be characterized as either proprietary or mutual. In mutual insurance, members of a group voluntarily insure the member of that group; this arrangement was characteristic of the Saxon and AngloNorman guilds, which insured their members against fire, sickness, death, and other losses, as well as of the Friendly Societies of the eighteenth century. In proprietary insurance, in contrast, no necessary social or vocational connection linked the underwriters and the insured. This arrangement was characteristic of marine insurance, in which policies were typically underwritten by groups of rich men who were often but not always merchants themselves, who bore their portion of the risk entirely on themselves, and for whom such enterprises were not their main source of income (they were not professional insurers). Marine insurance on this model was by far the most common form of insurance between the late medieval period, when the old guilds fell apart, and the insurance boom of 1710, when modern insurance, founded on the new mathematics of probability and the actuarial calculations that mathematics made possible, first emerged (Sibbett; Barbour; Scott 3.363; Hacking). Eventually insurance underwriters created a third kind of insurance by pooling their capital to create insurance companies on the model of joint-stock companies, the earliest of which in England were the fire insurance concerns that first appeared in London in 1667 as a response to the Great Fire (Scott 3.373–5); not until after the South Sea bubble of 1720 did marine insurance come to be underwritten by joint-stock companies (Scott 3.366). Defoe’s scheme, which envisions a voluntary, occupationally defined group that insures its own members, is an instance of mutual

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insurance. The Chatham Chest, however, is harder to classify. Because it was administered by the navy it has affinities with the third type, though not of course on the joint-stock model. But it was funded through the deduction of 6d. from the monthly wage of able seaman, and 4d. from that of ordinary seamen, who were in effect mutually indemnifying one another, though the process was mediated by their employer. The Chest was perhaps more paternalistic than anything else, and distributions from it seem to have been uncertain, the fund itself being vulnerable to misappropriation by administrators who had conflicting obligations. Just a year after the founding of the fund the treasurer of the Navy, Sir William Russell, used £2600 from the chest to pay seamen’s wages, and part of this amount was still owing in 1636. Sir Sackville Crowe committed a similar misappropriation in 1627, and apparently never made full repayment (Oppenheim 245). Corruption was in fact endemic to the naval administration throughout the early seventeenth century (Peck 106–33). Oppenheim’s suggestion that the fund failed to serve its intended purpose, or served it inadequately, is supported by the existence of a series of laws enacted by Elizabethan parliaments. In 1593 (35 Eliz. cap. 4), in 1597 (39 Eliz. cap. 21), and again in 1601 (43 Eliz. cap. 3), legislation provided for a tax to be assessed in every parish to furnish a fund from which injured soldiers and mariners in the government’s service were to be paid a pension. “An Acte for the necessary reliefe of Souldiers and Mariners,” 43 Eliz. cap. 3, explains that soldiers or mariners, “having had his or their limmes lost, or disabled in their bodies by service, being in her Majesties pay . . . shall repayre, if he bee able to travel, and make his complaint to the Treasurers of the Countie, out of which he was pressed, or if he were no prest man, to the Treasurers of the Countie where he was born or last inhabited . . . (Anno xliii Sig. B6). A petitioner must furnish proof of his service and injuries in the form of a letter from his captain or the master of the ship he served on. Then upon such Certificate, such Treasurers as are before expressed, shall according to the nature of his hurt, & commendation of his service, assigne unto him such a portion of reliefe, as in their discretions shall seeme convenient for his present necessitie, until the next Quarter Sessions, at which it shalbe lawfull for the more part of the Justices of peace under their hands, to make an Instrument of graunt of the same, or like reliefe, to endure, as long as this Acte shall stand or endure in force, if the same Souldier or Mariner shall so long live, and the same pension not bee duely revoked or altered, which shall be a sufficient warrant to all Treasorers [sic] for the same Countie, to make

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These acts give no hint that any other remedy was available, and the sense that the predicament of disabled seamen and soldiers returning from the wars was acute is suggested by the stern warnings attached to the 1601 act, that those who despite these provisions continue to beg are to be treated as rogues and beggars (Sig. C), and by another 1597 statute, 39 Eliz. cap. 17, “An Act against lewd and wandering persons pretending themselves to be Souldiours or Mariners” (Anno xxxix Sig. F3–F4). It seems likely that Hawkins, as treasurer of the Navy, introduced the Chatham Chest in the aftermath of the sea battles of 1588 in order to manage the problem of returning seamen, and that its failure prompted the series of parliamentary acts, which probably were not themselves fully effective, since each calls for a higher rate of taxation than its predecessor while maintaining the same ceiling on payments to individuals.4 In the meantime the Chest apparently continued to exist (or at least seamen continued to lose 6d. of their wages to fund it), and payments, however sporadic and inadequate, from it as well as from the parish funds, must have been made. Although the details are hazy, the general structure of payments from the latter source can be inferred from the 1601 statute. The revenue mechanism is a general tax levied at the parish level; payments to those injured take the form of renewable pensions rather than lump sums calculated to correspond to certain categories of bodily injury. The provisions are obviously paternalistic rather than contractual. The statute’s wording is significant: in assigning an injured man a pension the treasurers are to take into account both “the nature of his hurt” and “commendation of his service,” and are to assign an amount “as in their discretions shall seeme convenient for his present necessitie” (Sig. B6). Implicit here is a formula in which compensation for injury is one category of three—the other two being payment for service, and need—and in which it’s the last of these—the amount needed to sustain life— that is the primary consideration in assigning the amount paid out. Records of the mobilization of supplemental funds for the same purpose by the Privy Council in 1593 suggest an even flatter scale of compensation, and one even less focused on compensation for injuries (Acts of the Privy Council n.s. 24.159–60, 191–3). As in the case of the statutory provisions, payments were to be based on need and merit, and were not understood as compensation for the injury

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itself. In neither case was there any certain correspondence between the nature of the injury and the amount of the relief, or any sense that people had a proprietary, liquidated interest in the parts of their own bodies. A fortiori, such injuries to the body could not be handled by means of insurance. The same parliament that in 1601 passed the act for the relief of soldiers and mariners also provided for the regulation of marine insurance through the establishment of an Office of Assurances in the Royal Exchange (43 Eliz. cap. 12 in Anno xliii Sig. E3v–E4v; Sibbett), but unlike harm to ships and their cargo, bodily injury does not seem to have been conceived as a suitable matter for insurance; people did not, as a rule, insure themselves or others against bodily injuries, despite Geoffrey de Malynes’s remark in 1622 that “men cannot invent or imagine any thing, but the value of it may be assured [i.e., insured]” (Sig. O3). Malynes in fact argues (Sig. O3) the practicability of life insurance, which had existed in England at least since the 1570s.5 One could insure lives, just not bodies understood as consisting of conceptually separable parts owned by the persons to whom they were attached and capable of being assigned a monetary value. This development appears relatively late in the history of insurance (Supple 6; Cockerell and Green 80–97; Ewald 204–5), but it was coming, and had apparently arrived by 1685, when Pepys inquired about the structure of disbursements from the Chatham Chest. As we have seen, such a conceptualization of the body had existed in the past, too, in many of the earliest English legal codes. This does not mean, of course, that compensation for bodily injury as expressed in the early lists of equivalences had the same socioeconomic functions as those envisioned by Defoe, but rather that despite these differences there was room for a list of this sort in these two very different socioeconomic orders, and a structural willingness within each order to imagine the body as a proprietary set of functionalities for which monetary equivalents existed or could be established. I have chosen the Leges Henrici Primi as my primary example not because it was the earliest code to set forth a tariff for bodily injuries, but on the contrary because it was one of the latest, lists of this kind first having appeared in the earliest English legal code (and also apparently the earliest extant document written in English), that of King Ethelbert (ca. 602).6 Simpson argues that such listings evolved as remedies for harms alternative to retaliatory violence or blood feud and in response to the Augustinian mission’s attempts to persuade the English that a Christian neither lost honor in forbearing from revenge nor sinned in

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accepting compensation instead (15). In this view the early codes fixed monetary values corresponding to specific bodily injuries not as forms of economic restitution for losses sustained, but as compensation for not retaliating with violence, simply the price that would persuade someone not to retaliate—a price equivalent to the loss of face associated with failure to take revenge. At the same time, the list itself may nevertheless have functioned as a resource for the would-be perpetrator investigating what kind of injury he could afford to inflict on his enemy. These fixed values, in any case, thus represented neither punishments meted out to the offender who paid them nor economic restitution received by the injured party. In this sense, they cannot be regarded “as either a civil or a criminal remedy” (Simpson 12), categories that did not exist in English law in the seventh century. By the time of the Leges Henrici Primi, 500 years later, the distinction between criminal and civil actions is only barely emergent, the accompanying notion that some offences were against the king’s peace remaining tied to territorial or geographic considerations (certain offenses committed in the king’s court or on the king’s highway thus imagined as concerning him directly). Bodily injuries, however, continued to escape classification as civil or criminal matters; the question of whether such injuries might be torts or crimes did not arise, probably because the conceptual equipment needed to make such a distinction was unavailable. In Bracton (early to mid-thirteenth century) the civil-criminal distinction is much more clearly in place; one can sue civilly or criminally (2.425), and similarly in cases of wrongful imprisonment, with or without injuries to the body (2.411). But where Bracton treats injuries to the body as a separate category, he is silent on their proper classification, the implication being, I think, that such distinctions were still not being applied to them. At the same time, however, in Bracton as in later texts, bodily injuries have ceased to be understood as having attached to them fixed monetary values, and this seems to have been the beginning of a major shift. What were soon to replace the lists were actions of trespass, in which, in the early fourteenth century and beyond, such injuries were compensated by flexible money awards adjudicated ad hoc by civil juries. Such actions of trespass for bodily injury seem to have served criminal and civil functions at once, with convicted defendants liable for a money judgment awarded to the plaintiff as well as imprisonment and amercement or fine, payable to the king, as punishment (Arnold 514–15; see also the case of Houton v. Paston [1321], in Baker and Milsom 302–3). This seems to have been true for the next several hundred years as well, despite the increasing

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importance of the state as initiator of suits, especially since strictly criminal jurisdiction was slow in evolving in this particular area. Even cases of serious and incapacitating injuries (maiming) were normally tried as actions of trespass, despite a criminal appeal of mayhem being available in theory; the first statute making such injuries felony (and therefore capital) was 5 Henry IV, cap. 5 (1404), which concerned the cutting out of eyes and tongues (Baker 603). Thus the demise of the list seems to coincide roughly with the emergence of the civil–criminal distinction, with the rise of relatively complex jurisdictional divisions, and with a shift toward mediated (jury) trial, though nonfatal injuries appear to have been as a category more resistant to systematic treatment in these terms than the fatal injuries from which, as we have seen, they tend to be distinguished. How can we account for these developments, and how are they related to the rise of personal injury insurance later on? For Defoe, mutual insurance is necessitated by the absence of statutory or customary rules of liability attaching to status, by which merchants might be held responsible for the health of those seamen in their employ in the same way that medieval innkeepers, for example, were on the basis of their occupation held liable for losses or injuries to their guests. In the early English codes, in contrast, a general atmosphere of strict liability prevailed, despite some admittedly significant limitations.7 Thus the maxim repeatedly stated in the Leges: “Legis enim est: qui inscienter peccat, scienter emendet” (“For it is a rule of law that a person who unwittingly commits a wrong shall wittingly make amends”; cap. 88, 6a; cf. 90, 11a; 70, 12a–b). Although purely accidental homicides are sometimes excluded from legal remedy (e.g., Laws of Alfred [ca. 892] cap. 36.1–2 [Attenborough 79–80]; Leges cap. 88, 19; 90, 7–7a; but cf. 90, 8), degree of intent seems almost entirely irrelevant to liability for injuries to the body, such liability being imposed with almost no regard to mitigating (or aggravating) circumstances. Notwithstanding Simpson’s description of them as a means of buying off potential acts of revenge, then, the injury provisions provided a remedy not entirely unlike that envisioned by Defoe or perhaps even by the founders of the Chatham Chest. A second and related similarity involves a lack of individualization of monetary values. Like earlier codes, the Leges provides for a fairly complex distribution of liability in cases of homicide, a distribution whose mechanisms involved not only wergeld but also manbot, healfsang, fihtwite, and blodwite, each of which was paid to persons connected, in one way or another, to the person slain. This system of compensation was socially nuanced in ways foreign to the treatment of

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nonfatal injuries. Whereas provisions for payment of the wergeld distinguished several classes of freemen, and even took into account the consanguineal and affinal relations between the deceased and those to whom payments were due, injury compensation provisions do not so distinguish.8 As in Defoe’s insurance scheme, neither how good a lost limb was physically, nor what particular benefit it afforded its possessor, is relevant to the level compensation. The list’s values, as at once fixed and “proportioned to [the] Hurt,” are distinct both from schemes like that legislated in 43 Eliz. cap. 3, which were based on need paternalistically defined rather than on proportionate value of limbs, and from litigated damages arrived at ad hoc rather than ad membrum. But the fixedness of fixed values rests in either category of list on a different foundation. In modern insurance, of which Defoe’s scheme can be taken as an early instance, it stands against legal damages “required to match the full extent of the injury” (Ewald 204); where liability litigation presents itself as an attempt to adjudicate what loss of a limb meant to the person who lost it, what that limb was really worth to him, indemnity entitlement in insurance law is contractually fixed and the question it precisely does not consider is what the limb was really worth. The fact that, as Ewald puts it, “the indemnity will necessarily be arbitrary in relation to the injury” (204) stems from a “technology of risk,” made possible by the statistical analysis upon which modern insurance is founded: “Whereas an accident, as damage, misfortune and suffering, is always individual, striking at one and not another, a risk of accident affects an entire population. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as an individual risk; otherwise insurance would be no more than a wager” (Ewald 203). It’s not this technology of risk that the early codes anticipated, however, but rather the arbitrariness of the compensation in relation to the injury. Unlike the socially complex institution of the wergeld, the provisions for compensation for bodily injuries assumed that all particular instances of a kind of body part were of equal value: a nose was a nose was a nose. It does not matter—as it would if the matter were litigated—that in terms of income potential my nose is worth more to me than yours is to you because I am a professional wine taster and you are not. Moreover, if Simpson is correct that the values assigned each body part represent the calculated cost to buy the victim’s forbearance as to revenge, then they only indirectly express even the standardized value assigned particular classes of parts. Where the lists in the early codes antedate the rise of the trespass litigation that eventually displaced them, Defoe’s insurance scheme provides an

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alternative to such litigation, and in particular a means of evading the link in actions of trespass between liability and intent. Insurance differs from modern liability litigation in the same way that early injury provisions differ from actions of trespass. That leaves the intervening period—thirteenth through late seventeenth centuries—as a period about which it is possible to ask interesting questions. If the replacement of fixed penalties by variable damages and amercements suited to individual circumstances represents an improvement in the administration of justice (Pollock and Maitland 2.513–14)—a significant if—it does so along lines that came to be associated under the Tudors with the operation of equity, that principled adjustment of the letter of the law to the particulars of the case. And, if scholars like Wesley Trimpi are to be believed, attention to those particulars, to the third or qualitative status in classical legal and rhetorical theory, is fundamental to literature as such—another significant if—then the disappearance of the list signals the rise of the literary.9 Might there have existed as well, though, a counter-literature of the list, one that surfaces, perhaps, in Shylock’s demand as it is opposed to Portia’s coercive Christian epieikeia? Other, related questions suggest themselves. Why doesn’t Antonio have marine insurance, when the practice was almost universal? What is the relation between the technology of risk upon which modern insurance practices are based, and the ethic of risk inscribed upon the lead casket (“Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” [Merchant of Venice 2.7.4]10) and, some say, endorsed by the play as a whole? In a model of literary fiction evolving in relation to the third, qualitative status in classical rhetorical theory, the domain of the literary is the domain of a rich inner and background life of motive, context, circumstance, intention, and affect, all at once opened to and performing a hermeneutic of hypothesis. It would be easy enough to see the pressure of such a conception of the literary in Merchant; but other pressures inevitably intrude into readings of the play, and I would like to explore the possibility that these pressures register the almost subterranean presence of a counter tradition, a literature of the list. What would characterize such a literature? Can the Anglo-Saxon legal past function in such a literature as something other than that which has been transcended by the emergence, within English common law, of a series of distinctions: between civil and criminal law; among a web of ever more complex jurisdictional divisions; and between one man’s nose and another’s? First of all, the sense in which that past is represented simply as the retrograde insistence of a

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Shylock on strict justice and an exclusively quantitative equity is immediately complicated by what we know about contemporary commercial practices; most obviously, the conditional bond Shylock proposes was a common form of obligation among Englishmen in the sixteenth and later centuries.11 Shylock says: You want to deal in conditional bonds? I’ll show you a conditional bond. On the other hand, to the extent that it commensurates money and human life, the bond’s stipulated penalty for default resembles the wergeld provisions of the early Anglo-Saxon legal codes far more closely than it does anything in Jewish law (Shell). But here a distinction must be made, for whatever Shylock may be said to intend in exacting repayment in flesh, his immediate demand structurally resembles not wergeld but fixed compensation for bodily injury. In both bodily injury insurance and the Anglo-Saxon codes, only the destruction of the part produces it as a value; parts intact and operational possess utility (that utility the loss of which is compensated in the codes) but they are in no sense at play in any exchange economy. Even if it’s possible to speak of them as unliquidated assets in a production economy, they remain, precisely, unliquidated—not money, not negotiable. This limitation is equally true of body parts in modern liability litigation and early trespass cases as well; but the intact part as understood in the lists is even more firmly outside the domain of the economic in the sense that in each kind of list, as we have seen, the value attaching to the damaged part is arbitrary in relation to the actual utility of the part—as opposed to the utility of the class of parts of which it is a member—when it was sound. Now, how does Shylock attach value to the part of Antonio he demands? As he points out, a man’s flesh is worth nothing in itself: “If he should break his day, what should I gain / By the exaction of the forfeiture? / A pound of man’s flesh taken from a man / Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats” (1.3.159–63). “Taken from a man,” human flesh has neither intrinsic nor exchange value, says Shylock: it cannot (it is assumed) be eaten, nor can it be sold for something that can. Like the parts in the AngloSaxon menus, the part of Antonio Shylock bargains for acquires value only in its loss or waste; it acquires value only in exiting the system of values, in becoming rubbish; acquired, it ceases to have value of any kind; the value lies not strictly in the part but in its destruction. The case is distinct from that of simple consumption. Unlike the “flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats,” which are valuable because once acquired they can be consumed (or exchanged), Antonio’s part does not retain its value once possession has been passed, or rather, its value arises in

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its ceasing to have value. Shylock is either mistaken or dissembling when he compares his interest to that of a Christian in his slave, dog, or mule (4.1.89–100): it may be that his claim of ownership is equally firm, but his relation to that which is owned is absolutely different.12 In any case, if Shylock’s way of thinking of these things resembles the rigid Anglo-Saxon quantification, which the early modern common law had evolved out of and partially transcended, it also resembles, as it pertains to the way in which the human body is inserted into the economic order, modern insurance and its regime of wholly liquidated, essentially arbitrary values. So that if it’s true that Antonio is nostalgic for an order he has helped destroy (Leinwand 14–18), and if his implicit refusal to manage his own risk via insurance is a symptom of this nostalgia, then it is Shylock who represents the future— but a future that more resembles the past than the present. In repudiating the past Antonio repudiates the future. He is nostalgic both for what he supposes has been lost and for what he cannot know is to come. It is Antonio, after all, who insists that in paying the debt he will die; and I tend to agree with those who feel that Antonio, presumably because he desires extinction, makes payment of the penalty necessarily fatal rather than merely a matter of serious concern—as Portia seems to see it in suggesting that Shylock provide Antonio a surgeon “lest he do bleed to death” (4.1.256). Antonio cannot see the part as a part; for him, he pays with his life. This is not to say that Shylock would not want to see Antonio dead (he’s said as much), or even that Antonio is mistaken; but we need to hear in Shylock’s demand the voice of the list, and the list has nothing to say about the value of human lives. The other side to its strict quantitation is its isolation of the part. Parts count without reference to wholes. A literature of the list is also a literature of the partial. If we substitute the hermeneutic of the list—in a sense no hermeneutic at all—for the hermeneutic associated with the qualitative state, Shylock’s demand refuses to be evocative, to mean more than it says, to extend beyond the part to the whole, to acquiesce in Antonio’s morbid self-construction and selfdestruction. (It is for this reason as well that a reading of this kind is not interested in speculations about what Shylock may have in mind in seeking the penalty.) The discomfort of such a reading is precisely the point. It has recently been argued that early modern writers were attuned, in a historically novel way, to the human body as a body of parts and continually working out the relation between parts and wholes; the period can even be “conceptualized as an age of synecdoche,” one

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that generated a “new aesthetic of the [body] part” (Hillman and Mazzio xiv). It is possible to see Antonio as representative of this new age and aesthetic, in which, as Hillman and Mazzio put it, “while the part may often succeed in displacing the whole, it never quite manages to replace it; if there is always a tension between the part and the whole, it is because neither can do without the other” (xxiii).13 Unable to see the part except in relation to the whole of which it is a part, Antonio is committed to believing that in taking the part Shylock will take (and destroy) the whole. It is hard not to hear the same synecdochic logic operating in the dismissive platitude with which he shuts off his friends’ attempts to parse his unhappiness: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano— / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.77–9). In seeking to isolate and identify that component aspect of Antonio’s psychic life that is producing his sadness, Antonio’s friends want to enable him to step out of that role and into a new one. But rather than opening toward a freedom to occupy different subject positions, the arbitrariness of the played part in the “world stage” metaphor promises for Antonio only a coercive totality of identity that amounts, in the end, to death. Again, however, I want to argue against the identification of Antonio’s sense of these things and the play’s. Early modern body parts have a tendency to become animated, invested with agency and subjectivity (Hillman and Mazzio xix), and this animation is precisely what the logic of the list refuses in excluding subjective, ad personam valuations. As we have seen, the list does not ask how much your limb was worth to you, but how much is to be paid for a limb of the kind you have lost. It is not so much “your limb,” where the part acquires some of the subjectivity embedded grammatically in the possessive pronoun, as it is a limb in which you have a certain monetary right and interest. The anti-exchange value logic exemplified in Shylock’s interest in acquiring the pound of flesh, in fact, precisely undoes the animation of the part: in Shylock’s view, as in the list’s, once it’s severed or damaged, it’s no longer yours, no longer implies any whole from which it comes, no longer shares in the identity of the person injured.14 I want to see this attitude neither as a barbaric vestige of primitive law nor as the representative of a pernicious new order of alienation and commodification, but as the potentially progressive entailment of a Shakespearean poetics of the list that with its roots in England’s Anglo-Saxon past looks forward to modern institutions that embody forms of sociality distinct from those originating in a commitment to the implication of all parts in the wholes from which

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they derive. Where the latter found sociality on the individuation of parts, whether persons or limbs, a literature of the list predicated on fungibility substitutes a strictly quantitative form of equity—if that were not a contradiction in terms—for that equity, emerging from considerations of qualitas and in response to the question quale sit? (What kind [of a crime] is it?) that characterizes the “quality of mercy”; social wholes are thus founded on exchangeability rather than singularity, on general rhetorical theses rather than particularizing hypotheses, on equivalence rather than equality.15 In The Merchant of Venice the progressive potential of the list and its literature is easiest to see in terms of risk management. It’s possible of course to argue as Antonio does that Shylock is damned for managing his own risk rather than submitting to providence. But one might just as well say that what’s unethical is risking too much. One way in which the play refuses to stay within the lines it has established for itself is by rendering equivocal its endorsement of the Christian ethic of risk most succinctly voiced by the lead casket: “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.4). As if to problematize the relation between the precept and its use in the world, the play tells us of the lead casket’s inscription only in act 2, in connection with Morocco’s refusal of its message, and not with Bassanio’s acceptance of it in act 3. Applied to Bassanio, the inscription is certainly ironic; such hazarding is not, of course, his to undertake, for all he has is debt. But the play’s disavowal of this kind of absolute risk runs deeper. The one who gives and hazards all he has is Antonio, and in him risk is obscene, narcissistic, and perversely self-destructive, an aspect of his insistence that the part must always entail the whole. Powerfully opposed to this view is an insurantial model of risk, value, and meaning. Insurance partializes risk, limits it to that part of the whole represented by the premium paid. It is thus important to demand why Antonio has not insured his ships, especially since the practice was routine among merchants in sixteenth-century London (and for that matter Venice); this refusal to insure exposes the ethic of risk as not only masochistic but antisocial too. Judging from Shylock’s appreciation of the part, we may fantasize that his antisocial tendencies have not resulted in such imprudence.

Notes 1. I thank Sandra Macpherson not only for calling my attention to Defoe’s interest in insurance but also for suggesting ways to understand it, and, more generally, for advice throughout. Thanks are also

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

due to the Huntington Library, where I completed work on this project on a Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship in Fall 2001. For the thumb, 30 shillings is to be paid; for the index finger, 15 shillings; for the “middle or ‘unchaste’ [impudicus] finger,” 12 shillings; for the “ring-finger or ‘medical’ [medicinalis] finger,” 17 shillings; and for the “ ‘ear’ finger [auricularis],” 9 shillings. Nails are valued at from 5 shillings for that of the thumb to 5 pence for that of the ear finger. Cap. 93, 15–19. These values are not always entirely separate from the wergeld; the value assigned to the loss of the eye in cap. 93, 5, for example, probably represents 1/3 of a 200 shilling wergeld. Cap. 93, 31 provides this same penalty for the “eye, hand, or foot”; and similarly in the (so-called) Laws of William I, for loss of a hand or foot a man is to be compensated half his wergeld (cap. 11 in Robertson 259). Compensation is calculated as a proportion of the wergeld only in the most severe injuries; in William I, cap. 10, concerning less serious injuries, the method is the usual one of fixed values tied closely to the nature of the wound: for visible wounds to the face, 8d. per inch and for invisible (above the hairline), 4d. per inch. In 1593, no parish is to be taxed at more than 6d. or less than 1d. per week; and where a county has at least 50 parishes no parish can be assessed at more than 2d. per week (Anno xxxv Sig. B3v). In 1597, these figures are 8d., 2d., and 4d. respectively; there is an added proviso that the mayor, recorder, and aldermen of London have authority to raise more money if this isn’t enough, so long as it’s not more than 2s./week/parish, or 8d. [on average] for each parish within the city and suburbs (Anno xxxix Sig. G6v). In 1601, the figures rose again, to 10d., 2d., and 6d. (Anno xliii Sig. B5v). Ceilings on disbursements remained the same in all three acts: £10/yr for soldiers/mariners “having not borne office”; £15 for those under the degree of lieutenant; £20 for lieutenants. Sibbett reproduces sections on life insurance from a manuscript entitled “A Booke of Orders of Assurances within the Royall Exchange London,” apparently commissioned by the Privy Council in 1576. The first recorded British life insurance policy was dated June 18, 1583 and was taken out by Richard Martin, citizen and alderman of London, on one William Gibbons (Sibbet 79–80). Cap. 33–72 (Attenborough 8–15). Similar lists are also to be found in the Laws of Alfred (ca. 893), cap. 44–77 (Attenborough 87–930; the (so-called) Laws of William I (ca. 1110–35), cap. 10–11 (Robertson 259); and in the Preston Custumal (early twelfth century), cap. 21 (Bateson 498). On factors mitigating strict liability in early English law (wager of law, pardons for accidental homicide, etc.), see Winfield and Hurnard. And note the apparently contrary assertions in the Leges itself, for example, cap. 5.28b: “A person is not to be considered guilty unless he has a guilty intention” (Reum non facit nisi mens rea).

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8. It is possible that compensation for such injuries was limited to freemen. In the Laws of Ethelbert, the provision (cap. 87), “If the eye and foot of a servant are destroyed [by blows], his full value shall be paid” (Attenborough 17) suggests that the more detailed injury compensations in earlier sections apply to freemen only. Note that cap. 87 provides not injury-specific compensation but for payment of the “full value” of the man himself: that is, as a servant (esne), he is regarded as worthless if thus injured. This comes closer to wergeld than to the injury menu. 9. On status see Quintilian 3.6 and Wilson 131–2. Braet 83 provides a useful summary account. Trimpi offers a detailed argument for the close relation between the emergence of the literary as such and the rhetorical and philosophical concept of qualitas. 10. Quotations from The Merchant of Venice are to the text of the Pelican edition. 11. Conditional bonds, which called for repayment by a certain date and provided a severe monetary penalty for default, are of course entirely distinct from loans at interest. Baker 368–9 notes that by Tudor times it was also “the commonest single class of actions in the Common Pleas rolls.” See also Muldrew 203. They seem to have been favored in the theater business, or at least by Philip Henslowe, whose Diary records numerous such bonds entered into with players in his employ. 12. It’s not so easy to identify structurally similar transactions. Shylock’s proposal differs as well from those in which the purchase virtually implies the consumption of what’s purchased, as for example, buying a seat (rather than a negotiable ticket of admission) at the Globe or Blackfriars. There, you get what you pay for; Shylock proposes to pay for the destruction of what he pays for. 13. Hillman and Mazzio distinguish between this new aesthetic and that characteristic of medieval period: “the medieval Christian understanding of the relation between corporeal fragmentation and wholeness tends to adhere to the Pauline view that ‘as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ’” (xiii, quoting 1 Cor. 12:12). But as we have seen, there existed in premedieval England a conceptualization of body parts that was almost entirely secular, despite its possible origin as a means to ease the introduction of Christian ethics into a culture of revenge and blood feud. It seems likely that a closer look at the treatment of parts in early modern trespass cases involving bodily injury would fit into the collection’s general assumptions, and particularly the animating reattachment of the part to the whole. But the periodization collectively constructed by the contributors to The Body in Parts might look somewhat different had the economics of the corporeal part been taken into account. 14. It might be objected that Shylock, too, seeks to reconnect the part to the whole in the sense that he wants to kill all of Antonio by extracting a part of him; this certainly is what Portia charges him with. But

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Luke Wilson I want to resist this reading, which depends on a desire and intention to kill nowhere stated by Shylock. The hermeneutic of the list dictates that this absence of explicit direction be taken at face value. 15. On status, qualitas, and literary fiction see Trimpi 252–66. I do not mean to suggest that Trimpi does not consider the quantitative dimensions of the literary as well; see for example 345–6n.

Works Cited Acts of the Privy Council of England. N.s. Ed. John Roche Dasent. London: Her Majesty’s Stationers Office, 1906. Anno xxxv Reginæ Elizabethæ. London, 1593. Anno xxxix Reginæ Elizabethæ. London, 1597. Anno xliii Reginæ Elizabethæ. London, 1601. Arnold, Morris S. “Toward an Ideology of the Early English Law of Obligations.” Law and History Review 5 (1987): 505–21. Attenborough, F. L., ed. and trans. The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Baker, J.H. An Introduction to English Legal History. 3rd ed. London: Butterworth, 1990. Baker, J.H. and S.F.C. Milsom. Sources of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750. London: Butterworth, 1986. Barbour, Violet. “Marine Risks and Insurance in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1928–29): 561–96. Bateson, Mary. “The Laws of Breteuil.” English Historical Review 15 (1900): 73–8, 302–18, 496–523, 754–7. Bracton, Henri de. De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliæ. Latin text by George Woodbine, trans. S.E. Thorne. ⬍http://bracton.law.cornell.edu/ bracton/Common/index.html⬎ Braet, Antoine. “The Classical Doctrine of status and the Rhetorical Theory of Argumentation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 20.2 (1987): 79–92. Cockerell, H.A.L, and Edwin Green. The British Insurance Business: A Guide to Its History and Records. 2nd ed. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. Defoe, Daniel. An Essay Upon Projects. Ed. Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, and Maximillian E. Novak. New York: AMS, 1999. Ewald, François. “Insurance and Risk.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 197–210. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 1997. Hurnard, Naomi D. The King’s Pardon for Homicide Before AD 1307. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

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Leges Henrici Primi. Ed. and trans. L.J. Downer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Leinwand, Theodore B. Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Malynes, Geoffrey de. Consuetudo, Vel, Lex Mercatoria, or, The Ancient LawMerchant. Divided into Three Parts: According to the Essential Parts of Trafficke. London: Adam Islip, 1622. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: Saint Martin’s, 1998. Oppenheim, Michael. A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy from 1509 to 1660. London: John Lane, 1896. Peck, Linda Levy. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. London: Routledge, 1990. Pollock, Frederick and William Maitland. The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H.E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Robertson, A.J., ed. The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. Scott, William R. The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; rpt. New York: Viking, 1977. Shell, Marc. Money, Language, Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Sibbett, Trevor. “Early Insurance and the Royal Exchange.” The Royal Exchange. Ed. Ann Saunders. London: London Topographical Society, 1997. 76–84. Simpson, A.W.B. “The Laws of Ethelbert.” On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne. Ed. Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully, and Stephen D. White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 3–17. Supple, Barry. “Insurance in British History.” The Historian and the Business of Insurance. Ed. Oliver M. Westall. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. 1–8. Tanner, J.R., ed. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Naval Manuscripts in the Pepysian Library. 4 vols. Naval Records Society, 1903–23. Trimpi, Wesley. Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Wilson, Thomas. The Art of Rhetoric (1560). Ed. Peter E. Medine. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Winfield, Percy H. “The Myth of Absolute Liability.” Law Quarterly Review 42 (1926): 37–51.

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Chapter 2

Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in T H E C O M E DY OF ERRORS Curtis Perr y

I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. —Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors (1.2.35–40) Though we are much more dependent on the whole of society through the complexity of our needs on the one hand, and the specialization of our abilities on the other, than are primitive people who could make their way through life with their very narrow isolated group, we are remarkably independent of every specific member of this society, because his significance for us has been transferred to the one-sided objectivity of his contribution, which can be just as easily produced by any number of other people with different personalities with whom we are connected only by an interest that can be completely expressed in money terms. —Georg Simmel 298 (1990)

My first epigraph is perhaps the most frequently quoted passage from The Comedy of Errors, one of the few places in that play that

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offers the kind of subjectivity effect we expect from Shakespeare. Antipholus of Syracuse (hereafter Antipholus S) expresses simultaneously his feeling of total isolation and an intuition of something like universal kinship. My second epigraph describes a relationship between individual and society in modern capitalism that might be expected to produce a feeling, rather like that expressed by Antipholus S, of being at once isolated and part of a larger whole. I do not think this congruence is coincidental, for The Comedy of Errors is unusually preoccupied with the exchange of money and goods (Bruster 73–7; Haines; Hall 39–71; Parker 56–82), and the longing for family that drives Antipholus S and his father Egeon can be understood in part as a symbolic expression of the alienating pressures of mercantilism. I begin with Simmel, though, in part because his analysis of urban capitalism—so nicely intuitive to modern urban readers—can too easily be projected back to early modern England. After all, well-known plays like Volpone, The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice all pivot around the disaffiliations of urban commercialization. And yet the modern independence Simmel describes is in fact made possible by modern institutions that guarantee credit and that thus help minimize the impact of each individual’s fiscal activity. The expansion of the commodity market in the sixteenth century, coupled with chronic shortages of coin, meant that a great deal of buying and selling at all levels of society involved informal credit. Without banks or credit card companies to mediate this kind of exchange, the default of one household might well have a significant impact upon the fortunes of others. As a result, the early development of commodity culture in England created networks of credit and debt that linked communities together by making the economic success of each household dependant upon the creditworthiness of others. Shakespeare’s England was neither the modern marketplace of individual commercial agents that Simmel describes nor the primitive culture he sets modernity against: in attempting to recover the “socio-economically aroused affect” dramatized in the period’s fictions, we need somehow to reconcile the disaffiliating force of early capitalism with the intense sociability fostered by the culture of credit (Leinwand 1). The Comedy of Errors, because of its notorious structural discontinuities, makes this imaginative reconciliation possible. We might think of this as a function of the twin Antipholi, for example, who between them experience both isolation from and immersion in the commercial world of Ephesus. In fact, each of the play’s two sets of characters—the isolated, melancholy interlopers and the participants

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in the Ephesian mart—express a different aspect of a shared longing for a community with the closeness of kin.1 Because its pervasive longing for kinship is set against both radical isolation and a structure of urban, commercial obligations, The Comedy of Errors makes it possible to understand the play’s interest in isolation and community as a characteristic expression of an economic world poised uneasily between Simmel’s modern “objectivity” and precapitalist forms of communality. Though its neat concluding gestures repudiate the commercialization of social bonds and can be read as expressions of nostalgia for what Simmel might call a more “primitive” social system, the play’s evocation of community remains uneasily entangled with its animating interest in the networks of commerce.

“Great Care of Goods at Random Left” Egeon’s exchange with the duke of Ephesus at the start of The Comedy of Errors provides necessary exposition for the play’s prehistory, and in so doing it establishes a subtle but insistent affective connection between the familial and the economic. His narrative, for instance, blames the journey that separates his family upon the disruption of mercantile fortunes. We learn that the family had sailed to Epidamnum in the first place to deal with a business crisis seen as disrupting a life of hitherto uninterrupted financial success and marital bliss: I lived in joy, our wealth increased By prosperous voyages I often made To Epidamnum, till my factor’s death, And the great care of goods at random left, Drew me from the kind embracements of my spouse, From whom my absence was not six months old Before herself—almost at fainting under The pleasing punishment that women bear— Had made provision for her following me, And soon and safe arrivèd where I was. (1.1.39–48)

Egeon’s “great care of goods at random left” anticipates and mirrors the sorrow he later feels for his sons who are likewise scattered. Having children, in Egeon’s compressed narrative, accompanies and is symbolically related to the risky investment of capital in mercantile ventures. This is not the only instance in Egeon’s expository narrative where we can intuit such a connection. When Egeon speaks of having “hazarded” (1.1.131) his one remaining son in hopes of recovering his lost twin, we can perhaps hear echoes of the mercantile

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language of affection that runs throughout The Merchant of Venice, as when Bassanio implores Antonio to keep bankrolling him despite his inability to pay his debts “in money and in love” (1.1.131): I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth That which I owe is lost; but if you please To shoot another arrow that self way Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, As I will watch the aim, or to find both Or bring your latter hazard back again, And thankfully rest debtor for the first. (1.1.146–52)

Egeon too is forced to hazard all he has in the hopes of recovering what has been lost. This accommodates his family feeling to the rhythms of mercantile risk. “Great care of goods” seems also to have been the original cause of Egeon’s characteristic world-weariness. Why else would this younger Egeon—the proud new father of “two goodly sons” traveling with his beloved wife (1.1.50)—already be so eager to embrace his death even before his family is separated in the play’s prehistory? A league from Epidamnum had we sailed Before the always-wind-obeying deep Gave any tragic instance of our harm. But longer did we not retain much hope, For what obscurèd light the heavens did grant Did but convey unto our fearful minds A doubtful warrant of immediate death, Which though myself would gladly have embraced, Yet the incessant weepings of my wife— Weeping before for what she saw must come— And piteous plainings of the pretty babes, That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear, Forced me to seek delays for them and me. (1.1.62–74, emphasis is mine)

Egeon is similarly despondent when speaking to the duke of Ephesus in the play’s first exchange, displaying a readiness for death that stems from his isolation and loss of family. But by including this earlier instance of near-suicidal melancholy, one that predates the loss of family and so seems instead to have its origins in Egeon’s “great care of goods,” the narrative again exposes the intercomplication of familial and economic concerns. It turns out to be impossible to separate the alienation and isolation of Egeon at the outset of the play in Ephesus from the uncertainties of his mercantile estate that set the story in motion and apparently shape his character.

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Credit and Community in the Ephesian Mart The farcical central action of the play picks up this interest in the commercialization of human relations, emphasizing the sociability of commerce and shifting the action to the bustling Ephesian marketplace. From the moment this portion of the play begins—at the start of act 1, scene 2—we see a careful intertwining of commerce and sociability: the merchant who accompanies Antipholus S into Ephesus at the beginning of act 1 scene 2 refuses his invitation to dine. It seems he has an important business luncheon to attend: “I am invited, sir, to certain merchants, / Of whom I hope to make much benefit” (1.2.24–5). Later, when Adriana begins to fret about her husband’s absence, Luciana excuses him by saying that he too may have had such an invitation: “Perhaps some merchant hath invited him, / And from the mart he’s somewhere gone to dinner” (2.1.4–5). In fact, Antipholus E has invited some of his business associates to his home, as we learn when he shows up with the merchant Balthazar and the goldsmith Angelo at the beginning of act 3. Though Luciana speaks abstractly of the “liberty” of men whose “business . . . lies out o’door,” we can perhaps see this brand of social commerce as a necessary and required part of successful participation in the Ephesian marketplace (2.1.7, 11). For the interpersonal trust thereby fostered seems to be an essential aspect of the way Ephesian business is transacted. Because he trusts Antipholus E’s “reverend reputation” and “credit infinite,” for example, Angelo gives him the gold chain he has made for him before receiving any payment (5.1.5–6). Likewise, the bewildered Antipholus S discovers that other Ephesian merchants have laid out money for goods in advance of payment from Antipholus E: Even now a tailor called me in his shop, And showed me silks that he had bought for me, And therewithal took measure of my body (4.3.7–9)

As we see with Angelo, who finds himself desperately needing the money owed him by Antipholus E in order to pay a debt to the unnamed second merchant, business conducted in this way has its risks. In fact, the play’s farcical middle portion is constructed around the disruption of fragile networks of exchange built upon trust. The money for the chain is needed to pay the merchant. Antipholus E in a fit of pique promises the chain to the Courtesan in exchange for her ring, which he takes with him. It is presumably because of Antipholus E’s “credit infinite” that Angelo, the Courtesan, and the tailor are willing to trust him with objects whose loss could be devastating or

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at least inconvenient. As the Courtesan puts it, “forty ducats is too much to lose” (4.3.91). Antipholus E’s credit, in turn, presumably stems both from the large sums of ready cash he has stashed away “in the desk / That’s covered o’er with Turkish tapestry” (4.1.103–4) and from the friendly social interactions he cultivates with other Ephesian merchants. Business lunches and schmoozing are not unique to the English Renaissance, of course. What is important here, though, is the precariousness of the play’s network of indebtedness, which in turn puts added pressure upon credit and reputation.2 In his eye-opening recent book The Economy of Obligation, Craig Muldrew demonstrates that massive increases in the sale and purchase of commodities at all levels of society beginning in the early sixteenth century, combined with a real shortage of ready money and insufficient technologies for handling financial transactions, created a situation in which “almost all buying and selling involved credit of one form or another” and in which “every household in the country, from those of paupers to the royal household, was to some degree enmeshed within . . . increasingly complicated webs of credit and obligation” (95). These networks, which I think are represented by the disrupted exchanges in The Comedy of Errors, were of course in some sense socially binding, since they meant that one’s fortunes were literally tied up with the fortunes of one’s neighbors. As Angelo the goldsmith learns, being enmeshed in networks of credit entails risking one’s own liquidity on the ability of one’s neighbors to meet their obligations. It is not much of a stretch, I think, to see Angelo’s unenviable situation as a comic refraction of the anxiety-provoking social situation Muldrew describes: the growth in the sheer complexity of obligations from the 1560s onwards meant that even the most careful and prudent person had difficulty keeping track of all his or her obligations. Ensuring that one had enough liquidity to meet all obligations once they came due, if there were others who owed them debts which were overdue, was a very difficult and often impossible task. In this way, the English practice of basing most credit on oral agreements and reckonings meant that structural problems with trust became endemic as credit expanded, and it is this intensely social fact which is of historical interest because it affected the way in which households did business with each other, and ultimately how they understood their relationships with each other. (174)

These developments, as Muldrew carefully documents, were accompanied by a huge spike in the frequency of debt litigation, a growing sense of the vulnerability of social position, and consequently by “a

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reordering of notions of community relations towards a highly mobile and circulating language of judgement . . . about the creditworthiness of households attempting both to cooperate and compete within communities increasingly permeated by market relations” (2–3). The Comedy of Errors dramatizes this “language of judgment,” for instance, in the debate that Balthazar and Antipholus E share as they head to the latter’s house to dine. Balthazar argues that a warm welcome is the essence of hospitality and Antipholus E insists that “a table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish” (3.1.23). Both however agree on the value of sociability and neither equates hospitality with excessive generosity. Even the obviously wealthy Antipholus E is unconcerned to demonstrate hospitality via lavishness (“though my cates be mean, take them in good part” [3.1.28]). This twin emphasis on thrift and sociability makes sense within a social formation built around fragile networks of debt, for lavishness—traditionally an important aspect of hospitality—could in such a system seem reckless and thus destabilizing. Presumably Antipholus E’s willingness to offer “mean” cates openhandedly works to secure his credit and reputation by cementing social bonds while demonstrating the virtue of thrift. And while thrift is often seen as a signature virtue of an emerging capitalist middle class, Muldrew argues that we should instead see the increasing emphasis on thrift during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “the product of a continual attempt to maintain access to the circulation of credit” (151; on changing attitudes toward lavish display among the aristocracy see Smuts). More broadly, the Ephesian characters are all shown to be deeply concerned with anything that might undermine their perceived creditworthiness. Credit and reputation blur into one another in the play (as in the culture: see Leinwand; Muldrew) and mark out a territory that is of necessity both fiscal and ethical. When Angelo discovers that he will not be paid for the chain he has made, and that he in turn will not be able to pay the merchant to whom he is indebted, he seems most concerned that public knowledge of the shakiness of his finances will destroy his credit and reputation: “Consider” he implores Antipholus E, “how it stands upon my credit” (4.1.68). When the merchant then follows through on his threat to have Angelo arrested, he is furious because the public charge touches him “in reputation” (4.1.71). With the rise of debt litigation in the sixteenth century such arrests were not uncommon, and to Shakespeare’s original audiences—at Grey’s Inn, at court, or in the public theater—the dramatization of arrests for debt would have evoked the public discredit such

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a scene would have entailed: as Muldrew describes, “public knowledge of an arrest or attachment could seriously damage the credit of a household, leading to the loss of business and downward social and economic mobility” (275). The same concern for credit and reputation helps shape the quarrels that grow between Antipholus E and his wife Adriana. When Antipholus E finds his own doors locked against him, he is persuaded to leave only by Balthazar’s reminder that making a scene in public could taint Adriana’s reputation: Herein you war against your reputation, And draw within the compass of suspect Th’unviolated honour of your wife. (3.1.86–8)

Since the essential economic unit for credit was the household, and since wives and dependants were involved in a great deal of day to day buying and selling, the perceived intemperance of a wife could have serious financial consequences for her husband’s ability to conduct business on credit. For this reason I think Ann Cristenson’s argument that The Comedy of Errors resists the separation of the public and domestic spheres from one another is in fact understated. Not only does Antipholus E seek to keep his domestic worries hidden for reasons having to do with the public currency of reputation, but Adriana too makes appeals to the importance of reputation (2.2.121–2) and worries about the effect Antipholus E’s behavior will have upon their shared social position: O husband, God doth know you dined at home, Where would you had remained until this time, Free from these slanders and this open shame. (4.4.59–61)

Despite the tone of rollicking hilarity that governs the play’s Ephesian errors, we are reminded on several occasions that the kind of society therein depicted is deeply dissatisfying in human terms. We can perhaps see this in the Merchant’s rejection of Antipholus S’s invitation at the beginning of 1.2, and we can certainly see it in the way Adriana complains about the absence of her husband: Sister, you know he promised me a chain. Would that alone a love him would detain So he would keep fair quarter with his bed. (2.1.104–6)

Caught up in the networks of exchange that structure the middle section of the play (love for chain for money), the affection that might otherwise make marriage work is alienated. And though the farce of

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mistaken identities pushes the hostility of husband and wife or master and servant to new extremes, the play also suggests that these outlandish errors are only an exaggerated literalization of dissatisfactions already present. Thus, unintentionally joking upon our knowledge that her husband has literally been mistaken for his twin, Adriana tells the Abbess that her husband has been “much different from the man he was” for at least a week (5.1.46). Moments like this register the alienation felt to pervade the kind of intensely commercial sociability we see in Ephesus, relocating the alienation figured at the outset of the play by Egeon in an urban social setting. The commercialization of society, which can be felt as alienating in a number of ways, is also for Shakespeare’s culture an intensely interpersonal phenomenon.

“Neurotic nostalgia” and the Repudiation of Exchange The miraculous resolution of The Comedy of Errors transforms by fiat its community of credit into a community of superabundant kinship. One of the changes Shakespeare makes to his Plautine source material is the addition of Luciana, and one of the effects of this addition is to enhance the density of family bonds that are installed or rediscovered at the end of the play. Not only is there a mate available for Antipholus S, but she is the sister of Antipholus E’s wife. Antipholus S’s intuition of oceanic kinship is thus made good: the ties that bind at the end of the play are rendered as thick as possible. In fact, the reestablishment of familial bonds at the end of the play involves an explicit repudiation of the chains of obligation that make up community in its middle. When we first meet Egeon, the duke of Ephesus tells him that he will be executed on the morrow unless he can come up with a thousand marks in cash (1.1.22). Given Egeon’s situation, this seems unlikely, until we meet Antipholus S, his son, who enters the city carrying a bag that—coincidentally!—contains exactly a thousand marks (1.2.81). Plays are limited imaginative worlds: the gun on the mantle in act 1 must in due time be fired. Such coincidences, in other words, tend to be purposeful, and so we expect that the newly arrived funds of Antipholus S will ransom Egeon and save the day. In this case, however, Shakespeare seems to want to establish an expectation only to let it go unfulfilled. As act 5 unfolds, we are twice reminded of the fee due to save Egeon (5.1.130–2, 285) and thus kept aware of the need for the thousand marks. But then the Duke, moved withal by the Abbess’s miraculous revelations and all the reunions that unfold thereupon, simply pardons Egeon. Crucially,

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since the pardon renders the ransom money unnecessary, the act effectively separates filial piety from the structures of commercial exchange and obligation that we have come to expect in Ephesus. I think we can see in this odd detail the thoroughness of Shakespeare’s engagement with contemporary anxieties about the commercialization of social bonds, for he carefully sets up the expectation that money will be involved in the play’s happy ending specifically in order to subvert it, thereby demonstrating more forcefully that the kind of reunion imagined at the end of the play is a repudiation of the kind of commercialized interconnectedness dramatized in its middle. The celebration of kinship over commerce at the end of The Comedy of Errors is of course reinforced by the play’s connection with St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (which stresses the hierarchical but reciprocal bonds of husband and wife and master and servant as a way to find an end to alienation in the community of the church), and to the liturgical emphasis on family reunion associated with Innocents Day, when we know it was twice performed (Kinney; Hassel Jr. 38–42). And though the solutions we find at the end of the play do not necessarily match well with the problems we see in its body— there is no explicit reason to think that Antipholus E will be a better husband, for example, or that the Dromios will get beaten less frequently—I think it still makes sense to think of the play’s miracle ending as a broadly drawn symbolic solution to the problems of community traced in its beginning and middle. This suggests, in fact, that the play is finally less interested in the trials and tribulations of individual characters (which it doesn’t even bother to solve fully) than in larger questions about the nature of community provoked by contemporary anxieties about credit and the commercialization of social bonds. Accounts of the play that treat its ending in exclusively spiritual terms, however, miss the specificity of its engagement with contemporary anxieties about commercialization and debt. Kinney, for example, reads The Comedy of Errors as an updated mystery play depicting a representative figure “distracted by worldly things (like . . . a chain) of a mercantile world, such as the merchants of Ephesus whom St. Paul addresses” (168) but eventually redeemed by the Abbess’s miraculous revelations. The problem with this approach is that while it lavishes brilliant scholarly effort to explain the play’s Christian resonance, it treats the mercantile world of Ephesus as a timeless and ahistorical distraction. If one recognizes that the mercantile world Shakespeare depicts in Ephesus is closely based on urgent, specific, and contemporary concerns, then perhaps the play’s solution will

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look less exclusively like a timeless Christian allegory of the worldly and the spiritual. Instead, the play’s complex attitude toward commercialization instantiates what Theodore Leinwand has called “neurotic nostalgia.” This phrase, which Leinwand uses to describe Antonio’s self-defeating longing for pre-commercial bonds in The Merchant of Venice, names “the human potential not so much for denial of, but resistance to change which is already overtaking one, change to which one knows oneself to have contributed” (14).3 In the case of The Comedy of Errors, though, this ambivalence is located not in a specific character, but in the insistent tension between the play’s evocation of pre-commercial kinship and a farcical tone that undercuts the sentimentality required of heartfelt nostalgia. We see this, for instance, in the way Shakespeare gives the final celebration of brotherhood to the Dromios, the play’s least sentimental major characters and also the characters who—in their ability to withstand and joke about constant beatings—best exemplify farce’s characteristic reduction of people to things. Dromio E gets the final couplet that sums up its nostalgic emphasis upon kinship—“We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other” (5.1.426–7)—but we are less likely to take it seriously as a result. More generally, the series of sudden, interlocking anagnorises that resolve the play’s problems feels more like a Rube Goldberg machine than a meaningfully happy ending. Farce is hostile to pieties, and so these elements of the end of the play tend to deflate any sentimental morality that the play might otherwise seem to put forward. More importantly, there is a special affinity between the representational conventions of farce—its reduction of people to near objects and its corresponding use of props to construct situations and ascribe character—and early modern concerns about the commercialization of everyday life (Bruster 63–96). The connection between farce and commodity culture is suggested, for instance, by the way Shakespeare uses Angelo’s gold chain as a marker of identity, the item that allows the audience to keep the situation straight and tell one brother from the other (Lanier). As Douglas Bruster puts it, the fascination with the circulation of such objects in plays like The Comedy of Errors “replicates a larger social fascination with the material” in early modern London (63). Likewise, we might perhaps say that the deeply unsentimental depictions of character in farce replicate a larger social fascination with the way commercialized relationships replace more meaningful kinds of affective bonds. Farce works this way in the central portion of The Comedy of Errors at any rate. The Dromios are

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beaten both because such beatings are typical of farce and because a master/servant bond, which might elsewhere be given sentimental weight (Orlando and Adam in As You Like It, for example), is here reduced to a master/slave relationship by the power of Egeon’s purse: “Those, for their parents were exceeding poor, / I bought” (1.1.56–7). This means, though, that the mode is uniquely inappropriate for the kind of nostalgic repudiation of commercialization that the play’s neat conclusion seems to aim at. More than simply undercutting the sentimentality of the play’s resolution, the farcical tone of its hasty wrap-up continues to evoke the kind of dehumanization that the miracle plot supposedly dispenses with. This, to return to Leinwand’s useful phrase, is what makes the play’s evocation of nostalgia for precommercial community essentially “neurotic”: the plotting of act 5 may be nostalgic in its repudiation of exchange and celebration of universal kinship, but its unavoidably farcical nature retains an affective connection to the dehumanizing world of commercial exchange and thus continues to register the play’s investment in an economic regime that its characters have supposedly escaped. In this case, we might say, the neurotic, self-repudiating relation to commercialization belongs not to a single melancholy merchant but more broadly to Shakespeare and his audience.4

Notes 1. See Paster, 189. On the play’s interest in the ties that bind see also Henze and Slights, 13–31. 2. John Jowett’s essay in this volume likewise discusses anxiety concerning the instability of networks of debt in Timon of Athens, though he describes this concern predominantly as Middleton’s contribution to that play. 3. This brand of nostalgia is by no means uniquely Shakespearean. See, by way of comparison, Katharine Eisaman Maus’s analysis of Ben Jonson’s ambivalence about the commercialization of sociability in her essay in the present volume. 4. I would like to thank Vernon Dickson for his helpful responses to an earlier version of this paper.

Works Cited Bruster, Douglas. Drama and Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Christenson, Ann C. “ ‘Because their business still lies out a’ door’: Resisting the Separation of the Spheres in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.” Literature & History 5.1 (1996): 19–37.

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Haines, Charles. “Some Notes on Love and Money in The Comedy of Errors.” Critical Dimensions: English, German and Comparative Literature Essays in Honor of Aurelia Zanco. Cuneo, Italy: SASTE, 1978. 107–16. Hall, Jonathan. Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation State. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Hassel R. Chris, Jr. Renaissance Drama & the English Church Year. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Henze, Richard. “The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22 (1971): 35–41. Kinney, Arthur F. “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds.” Rpt. in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Garland, 1997. 155–81. Lanier, Douglas. “ ‘Stigmatical in Making’: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors.” English Literary Renaissance 23 (1993): 81–112. Leinwand, Theodore B. Theater, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998. Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Paster, Gail Kern. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1990. Slights, Camille Wells. Shakespeare’s Comic Commonwealths. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Smuts, R. Malcolm. “Material Culture, Metropolitan Influences and Moral Authority in Early Modern England.” In Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Curtis Perry. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001. 203–24.

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Chapter 3

Scene Stealers: Autolycus, T H E W I N T E R ’ S T A L E and Economic Criticism Barbara Correll

T

Theft

he questionable events of the past U.S. presidential election have provoked me to think about theft and scene stealing: in The Winter’s Tale and in continuing debates on cultural materialism and economic criticism. While my goal is not didactic, the 2000 election taught me that pockets, purses, plackets get picked when dissembling rogues or institutions—state offices, bourgeois media, supreme courts—create self-interested distractions. As for the politics and the place of method and theory in the current state of early modern studies, there’s something to be said about the need to sustain a scene of critical reflection and the work of cultural critique. My chief example of scene stealing, in this case, appears in the introduction to Woodmansee and Osteen’s The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (Woodmansee and Osteen) where the editors are harshly critical of post-structuralist theory and especially target JeanJoseph Goux’s Symbolic Economies: After Freud and Marx. In their negative reaction to theory the editors not only obscure the importance of theory, attempting to remove it from the current scene of criticism; they valorize a tacitly antipolitical historicism that, counter to its own stated intentions, may actually dematerialize its objects of

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study by privileging what another author who pits historicism against theory has referred to as facticity and “the literal” (Strier). It is important to remember that Goux’s work offers a politically generative theoretical intervention, much inspired by the events of Paris 1968 and their global anticolonial contexts. The essays of Symbolic Economies analyze and compare what Goux calls four “symbolic registers”—monetary, phallic, linguistic, patriarchal—that regulate social-discursive practices, authorize meaning, and determine legibility under the subtending power of a “general equivalent” (the paradigm of exchange). Examining “modes of symbolizing in economic and psychological realms of signification,” Goux locates “a precise coincidence between monetary logic and the logic of the signifier and of the subject (as articulated by Lacan) . . . categories . . . belonging to a general logic of the exchange relation” (Goux 52). The interpenetrations of economy and signification come to constitute what he calls a “numismatic chain” (Goux 38) of symbolization whose conventionally unacknowledged homological structures are beset with conflicts that his critique would expose: “Speech, money, sex, phallus, monarch—each is the central authority of a set of which it is, nevertheless, another member. . . . The general equivalent functions as head and capital of a divided territory from which it is barred as empty, omnipotent center” (Goux 44–5). Thus Goux maps symbolic domains to demonstrate their compromised territorial integrity and enable critique. He argues for attention to the crossing of language and material practices in the conceptual and material context of exchange with the intention of dislodging monopolies on representation and working toward alternative ways of thinking about meaning. And while his approach attests to the insufficiency of a narrowly construed economic materialism, it also preserves political economy as a critical category, even as it suggests possibilities for cultural and literary studies.1 Goux’s project, not without its critics,2 is directed toward what he (utopianly?) calls “decapitating” the “very thought of the general equivalent . . . to pave the way for a polymorphic, acephalous social organization that would challenge the monopolies on representation” (46–7). Part of finding the alternative is the work of “historiographical anamnesis” or the recovery of lost, noncentristic modes of signification. Looking forward, Goux hypothesizes “the feminine (as distinct from the maternal) dimension” and “the question of multiplicity and . . . difference,” a post-symbolic future agenda for the “transcendence of the sociosymbolic system governed by the logic of general equivalents” (Goux 6).3 And while Goux has criticized

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Bataille’s notions of excess and expenditure, arguing that excess is recuperable and instrumentalizable in capitalist economy and culture, he distinguishes excess from signs of social antagonism in which potential political change resides (Goux 218). Before I return to the role of Goux in the new economic criticism, I’m going to look at one of Shakespeare’s great scene stealers: Autolycus, the masterless, kinless figure of shifting identities in The Winter’s Tale. In act 4 scene 4 Autolycus goes about cutting purses and plackets at the time that, in Polixenes’s aristocratic scene of patriarchal abuse and filial rebellion, the drama is intensely preoccupied with revisiting an earlier crisis of legitimacy and legibility—by which I mean Leontes’s monarchical and patriarchal power to determine and enforce meaning, set against his catastrophic misreading of Hermione’s fidelity—that initiated the play’s action 16 years earlier. For Simon Forman, who saw the first performance in 1611, Autolycus nearly stole the show from the main players (Orgel 233). Yet in a drama in which symbolic regulation and legibility—the king’s prerogative to make law, to read, judge, and punish actions and actors—are the issue (a loaded word in the play), Autolycus’s lawlessness matters. While Autolycus may not have received much attention in the critical work on the play, I am not the only one to discuss his role vis-à-vis market economies and politics. Stanley Cavell notes that the play is “engulfed” and “saturated” by economic references, though he sees Autolycus as an artist and focuses more on disseverance as a universal human condition with a transcendentalizing thematic function (Cavell 200).4 Most recently in Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money, Frederick Turner, the ebullient apologist for modern capitalist markets, sees Autolycus as an emblematic figure who knits together characters and reconciles conflicts in The Winter’s Tale: It is through the agency of Autolycus that the lovers are united, the estranged kings of Bohemia and Sicilia are restored to friendship, and the lost daughter Perdita is given back to her grieving father, Leontes. Reading between the lines, Shakespeare implies that despite the deceptions of the market, it is only through the market’s communicative agency—whose spirit the Romans called Mercury—that the miscarriages and frozen deadlocks of justice can be dissolved into merciful resolution.

Linking Autolycus to the Greek god Hermes, Turner offers not just a sunny and ontologizing view of the market but a piece of sociohistorical amnesia that marries high humanist rhetoric to a vision of

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cyber-communicative utopia: . . . being the spirit of communication and exchanges, he is that which allows whole systems of connected feedback to come into being. He is thus the patron of change, since systems can change only to the extent to which they can communicate within themselves and with other systems. . . . The marketplace is the place where both goods and ideas are exchanged, and thus it bears the god’s name. Mercury [Hermes] conducts human consciousness—itself the product of the internal communication of self-awareness and the external communication of exchange with other human beings in the marketplace of life—across the greatest threshold of change, from life to death. (88–9)5

By mapping computer models onto the socioeconomic world, Turner’s economic glad tidings certainly mark a forgetful revision of Jean-Christophe Agnew’s own work on the early modern market and his view of Hermes—“trickster and thief ”—as the divine representative of the significant movement of trade from country to urban agora, a precursor of the early modern market, commodity production and exchange and their sweeping, less than affirmative effects on social relationships (Agnew 20–1).6 With such a context in tow, Autolycus’s role is rather less digressive, more sobering.

Exit Pursued by a Beare ⁄ Enter Autolycus Singing In adapting Greene’s narrative Pandosto in which, reunited with his daughter, the guilt-stricken Leontes character ends the story by committing suicide for causing the death of the Hermione character, Shakespeare made important changes.7 Clearly most significant is the playwright’s choice to return a live and ceremonially revived Hermione to a remorseful but not suicidal Leontes, and to conclude the play by having him lead the group off to share their “winter’s tales” from the 16 years of mourning, separation, and exile, the sixteen years since the deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus. This decision allows for the further development of the much discussed thematics of art and nature, debated by Polixenes and Perdita in act 4 and further addressed in Leontes’s wish that the statue “be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.310–11). Second, the play’s concern with legibility and legitimacy is foregrounded first by Polixenes’s melancholic recollection of pre-symbolic unity of boyhood—the “twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun, / And bleat the one at th’ other” (1.2.68–9)—lost or

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“dissevered” by their fall into a patriarchal domain of language, class, and heterosexuality (“In those unfledged days was my wife a girl; / Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes / Of my young playfellow” [2.1.79–81]); then, almost immediately, its apparently causal link to Leontes’s fierce paranoid reading (along with the power to enforce it) that set in motion the catastrophic events that abort Mamillius’s “winter’s tale” (“There was a man . . .”) as well as thwart his maturation to manhood and kingship. Third, the addition of Paulina as the critical chorus who keeps alive Leontes’s memories of patriarchal abuse and its horrific consequences and who secretly cares for Hermione during the 16 years of her concealment, then artfully stages the scene of reunification in her gallery, is also significant for its interrogation of patriarchal power linked to loss and art. In keeping Hermione and Leontes alive, Shakespeare keeps alive the larger psychological and political issues of estrangement (disseverance) in the symbolic order and makes the deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus the unfinished business the play never manages to account for or transcend. With Paulina as the voice that ceaselessly interrogates Leontes’s regal legibility, loss remains foregrounded at the play’s end. Finally, though, Shakespeare introduces another kind of art and another kind of artist in Autolycus. If Leontes, the king who determined the law so catastrophically, wants the statue to be wholesome magic, “an art / Lawful as eating,” Autolycus is the artful dodger who practices the unlawful arts mentioned in the vagabond literature. He is a figure whose self-conscious lawlessness and less than sentimentalizing competition with the aristocratic family and marriage plots highlight the thematics of law and legitimacy and give him a remarkable role in the play.

Money’s a Meddler In one essay on the play that takes Autolycus seriously, Michael Bristol reads the much noted temporal oddities of the drama—the 16-year gap between acts 3 and 4—as stemming from a structural and symbolic clash between the romance events at court and the concrete and contemporary world of sheepshearing, ballad selling, and thievery in which Autolycus has the most active role (Bristol 147). But while he deftly sketches out the historic–economic context of the sheepshearing festival and the economic fortune of the shepherd who finds Perdita, he sees the turf struggle between court and class resolved as a subsuming allegory of the market. He places the aristocratic Leontes in an ironic entrepreneurial role and sees him as an

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unwitting venture capitalist-king: Leontes’s initial sacrifice takes on the surprising character of a successful long-term investment. . . . In the fullness of time, . . . losses are made good and even his supposedly dead wife is returned to him. . . . [T]he living statue is the ultimate in luxury goods, a lavish promise of consumer satisfaction. . . . Leontes’s ‘redemption’ is not brought about by grace and by forgiveness but is rather the result of his own bold, risktaking decisions combined with his patience and enormous capacity for deferral. (Bristol 166)

What escapes and tacitly challenges the calculating logic of capitalism and the market’s takeover of events and characters is Hermione’s silence, signifying for Bristol “the intersubjective or dialogic fullness of time symbolized so powerfully in the gestation of the child in the mother’s body,” which is the “untold story . . . that has been systematically violently excluded from the spatiotemporal organization of this play” (Bristol 168). For Bristol, Hermione’s maternity counters the calculating logic of the market. But important things remain unaccounted for by Bristol’s rather essentializing treatment of Hermione: the supplements of the dead child Mamillius and the lost husband Antigonus, iteratively reasserted by the name Perdita and the outspoken Paulina. The living statue’s commodity value is belied by the signs of an aging Hermione, and those signs in turn point toward 16 lost years, not nine months’ gestation. Perdita is the heir who never recuperates the lost condition of her history nor stops resignifying other losses—most especially the male heir—in the play. Leontes’s “initial sacrifice” amounts to robbery rather than investment. What then is the role of Autolycus in this aristocratic family drama, in which Leontes’s legibility—as monarch and all powerful lawgiver, as enforcer of readings, however paranoid—and his patriarchal privilege are so destructive? Autolycus first appears in act 4 scene 3, 16 years after the Shepherd discovers the remains of Antigonus, the foundling, and the basket of rich clothing and gold coins. While characters like the Shepherd enjoy or suffer changes in their fortunes, Autolycus is most closely associated with the social mobility of a market economy in which selling and stealing are integral activities and multivalent, improvised meaning is the rule: “My traffic is sheets” (4.3.23), he explains, referring to cloth, bed linen, sex, and music. He remembers wearing “three pile” when he was in the service of Florizel, but he appears as a masterless man in rags, the consequence of a life with gamblers and prostitutes “With die and drab I purchased

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this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat” (4.3.26–7). Eliciting the Clown’s compassion for him as robbery victim, he shears him of his money, then circles back metadiscursively to offer him a warning about his own notorious character: I know this man well. He hath been since an ape-bearer, then a process-serving, a bailiff. Then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married a tinker’s wife within a mile where my land and living lies, and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue. (3.4.90–5)

Artfully moving through identities and occupying two simultaneously, he calls himself “the rogue that put me into this apparel” (3.4.100). Self-representation collapses into misrepresentation, as Autolycus perverts legibility to his advantage. In Autolycus’s second entrance in 4.4, just after Perdita and the disguised Polixenes debate on nature, art, legitimate and illegitimate reproduction (bastardy), he enters singing and selling clothing, lovers’ gifts, and mobile tokens of courtship and sexual commerce, and printed ballads or narrative songs that he has pirated from a Mistress Tale-porter (4.4.269), becoming a porter of tales himself. Oblivious to the loftier matters of the art–nature debate and Polixenes’s repetitive abuse of patriarchal authority in forbidding Florizel’s declaration of love for Perdita—for Autolycus, a “time of lethargy” that sets the stage for his thievery—he returns from the scene of confrontation, comically reducing the crisis to a mere digression, an “old man . . . with a whoobub against his daughter and the king’s son” who “scared my choughs from the chaff” that interrupts the far more pressing business of picking pockets, purses and plackets.8 Camillo “instrumentally” gets Autolycus to exchange clothing with the prince when he decides to leave the now equally abusive Polixenes and aid Florizel. The divestment gets Autolycus in three-pile again (now Florizel’s own clothing), and he exchanges his con man’s mantra, “I am a poor man,” for the counterfeit courtier identity he carries into act 5, commenting, What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here with this exchange! Sure the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore. The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity, stealing away from this father with his clog at his heels. If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would not do’t. I hold it the more knavery to conceal it, and therein am I constant to my profession. (4.4.673–80)

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These crossings and divestments have Autolycus commenting irreverently on the aristocratic plot while remaining far outside its symbolic authority. To this character, the aristocrats are entirely legible pieces of iniquity, thieves, and lechers, engaged in unlawful shenanigans. Despite the use to which he’s put by Camillo and his role as the mediating figure who teases out the narrative of events from the courtiers in act 5, the presence of Autolycus in the play competes with rather than enables the aristocratic family romance and suggests another way of reading, unassimilable to the aristocratic plot of legibility, loss, and (partial) recovery. Positioned among goods, textiles, print culture, and money as the dealer and the thief who figuratively fleeces the sheepshearing rustics, he suggests, as a historical footnote, that pastoral settings may be inhabited by More’s man-eating sheep and the violence of the enclosures taking place at the time that Shakespeare wrote the play. Moving opportunistically between and among social realms and symbolic registers, snatching and deceiving at will, Autolycus unpacks and disorders the plot, divesting it of any restabilizing moment. If, in eliciting tales from the courtiers, he’s the midwife of the (dubious) recovery in act 5, things have changed that keep Leontes’s legibility crisis alive. The king’s heir and paternal legacy, Mamillius, is never recovered; Perdita is its eponymous signifier. The Winter’s Tale, whose conclusion places the main characters in the Lost and Found Department of Art, leaves Leontes in an arguably unexculpable position. Thanks to the mediating and digressive role of Autolycus, it seems to make an even stronger statement about symbolic structuration as that which subtends Leontes’s legibility in the first place. Thus The Winter’s Tale is a late reflection on the vicissitudes of cultural masculinity and the costs of living in a patriarchal world of gender-power relations, one that reflects on art and the consequences of making theatrical art.9 At the end of the play Autolycus disappears, leaving a trail of lawlessness to haunt the play and to mark the dead end of symbolic signification. If life in the symbolic order is a winter’s tale, a record of loss that art attempts to revivify and restore but that only preserves the signifiers of loss, something else is left that seems to take up the space left by the departing Autolycus and respond to his opening up of symbolic space: the women’s roles in which Perdita is the nominated concrete signifier of loss, Hermione its most poignant surviving victim, and Paulina the director who stages their reunion. When Paulina disingenuously commands the statue to come to life—“Dear life redeems you” (5.2.103)—she is not proclaiming a happy reintegration of Sicilian society, ruled by a remorseful male ruler now willing to “converse”

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with the formerly demonized others of his past projections. The artful revival of Hermione never effaces the record of events over 16 years, but it gestures toward something that has to do with Goux’s “feminine” as another kind of symbolic register—“the acephalic space of non-coercive meaning”—that precipitates suggestively from the unresolved crises of the drama, and I would locate it in the never told tale, the gap of time in the hidden world of women who care for Hermione.

Conclusion My goal has been to link a reading of Autolycus in the play to a discussion about the place of new economic criticism in early modern and Shakespeare studies, where I see another kind of theft taking place in depoliticizing readings of the economic. In contrast to Turner’s social software, Shakespeare does not cast the economic in an affirmatively “communicative” or orderly tropic role. And while Turner’s less than scholarly work of historical amnesia might not be the best example of what’s being called the New Economic Criticism, it may be seen as indicative of areas of blindness. In other words, when Autolycus picks pockets and steals the aristocratic scene, the action reveals a critical dimension of The Winter’s Tale; but when the New Economic Criticism tries to silence hard questions of power and signification and reduces its terrain to one of historicist orthodoxy it fleeces the political and robs us by concealing critique. Woodmansee and Osteen’s introduction to The New Economic Criticism makes the unfortunate claim that the new economic criticism excludes post-structuralism and deconstruction as just another sort of “formalism” (6). They repeatedly privilege the work of Marc Shell and see his definition of economic criticism as authoritative: “literary works are composed of small tropic exchanges or metaphors, some of which can be analyzed in terms of signified economic content and all of which can be analyzed in terms of economic form” (5). While Shell’s pathbreaking discussion of “verbal usury” (as generating “unnatural” significations and supplements “through punning or flattering”) in The Merchant of Venice puts pressure on this orderly notion of reciprocal discursive interchange, the movement that characterizes his work, ingenious and brilliant though it can be, is toward delineating a complete anastructure with no residual indeterminacy or social critique.10 The difference between Shell and Goux is not a matter of historicism but rather a difference between Shell’s structural functionalism—always, in the end, a kind of restrictive formalism or systematicity—and a more politically

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invested post-structuralism that does not lose sight of the relations between signifying practices and social relations, or between structures of power and manifestations of resistance. But the most telling moment comes in Woodmansee and Osteen’s criticism of Goux for producing—and believing in—“a rhetorical gold standard in which the money form acts as universal equivalent both within its own system and between itself and other cultural systems” (17–18). Goux’s clearly stated aim of writing the work of anamnesis in the history of exchange, to disable the general equivalent in order to break the bank of symbolic monopolies and mobilize thought on other modes of symbolization, is lost, reforgotten in their negative summation: “The belief in universal equivalents becomes an untranscendable horizon” (18). Lest we lose sight of what is picking our pockets here, this unacknowledged misreading of Jameson’s Political Unconscious (1981), massively ironic and somewhat confessional, seems indicative of the editors’ own unconscious, apparently working to steal and repress politically informed history, located through careful consideration of its theoretical and semantic layers, as well as of its “alienating necessities,” as what Jameson called “the untranscendable horizon of reading” (Jameson 102). In a critical project that goes hand in hand with Goux’s call for anamnesis and other important tendencies in early modern studies, Walter Mignolo writes movingly of the need to reinscribe the legacies of colonialization, on the one hand, and the need to decolonize scholarship and decenter epistemological loci of enunciation. I mention Mignolo not as digression, since his methodological debts should be quite legible to us: not only does he speak from the data of history, but also from the unfinished critical-conceptual projects of Foucault and Derrida. The need for what he calls the “linguistic inscription of theorizing in the realm of a variegated spectrum of colonial legacies” is itself historical and responds to current divisions between an institutional locus of enunciation and one with dissident—or institutionally less assimilable—investments and possibilities. Considered from this less insular critical perspective, poststructuralism’s ongoing reflections on knowledge, power, and counter-memory are hardly gestures of an empty formalism; indeed, they belong to the work of New Economic Criticism. If critical reflexivity is no longer called for, and self-privileging statements of humanist transcendence are to reign without critical challenge from without or within, then we no longer need to take note of the division between an institutional locus of enunciation and one with oppositional investments.

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Notes 1. Cf. Douglas Bruster’s essay on economic criticism in this volume. While Bruster would seem to place Goux’s ideas in the “rash” category, I am arguing for a less schematically classified consideration of the political stakes of economic criticism, for which Goux suggests a productive answer. 2. Richard Halpern usefully criticizes Goux’s insufficient attention to a value/use-value distinction and to the significance of labor (Halpern 199). Gayatri Spivak notes especially the rigidity of Goux’s insistence on the isomorphism of symbolic domains in which the money form effaces questions of labor’s determining role in value (Spivak 155–7). Aside from what may now be seen as the limits of the category “structural homology,” the work has a certain nostalgic, anarchist-romantic aspect when Goux speaks of an “acephalous social organization.” 3. Goux seems to approach the critique of “phallomorphic” thought such as Freudian and Lacan psychoanalysis and Marxism in Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Cf. especially the chapters “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” “Women on the Market,” and “Commodities among Themselves.” 4. Cavell also reads Leontes’s reading of Hermione as “mad” but human, rather than the outcome of patriarchal logic. 5. One wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time critiquing Turner’s really nonscholarly puff piece of amnesia, but the following comment on race in global markets should serve as an “economical” summary of what we’re dealing with: “The miracle of the market is that its system of negotiation and feedback actually produces mechanisms that mitigate the unfairness of life. The more buyers and sellers can participate in the market, the richer everybody gets. Using ‘givens’ like skin color to exclude people is economically inefficient, and a market that does so will get swallowed up by one that does not” (91). 6. “Appropriately, it was Hermes, god of the boundary stone, who became the Greek patron of trade, embodying as he did the suspicion and apprehension toward strangers common to most household economies. . . . Hermes himself came into being as a rustic deity but was gradually urbanized when the locus of trade shifted from the countryside to the agora—the main political, religious, and military assembly point of the Greek city-state. the messenger god became the patron of craftsman and trader, who, in concert with the unskilled laborer, formed the ‘Third Estate of Greek social history’ ” (Agnew 20–1). 7. Stephen Orgel’s excellent and characteristically thorough edition of The Winter’s Tale includes the text of Greene’s Pandosto (Orgel 234–74). 8. Cf. Valerie Forman’s admirable discussion of the destabilizing role of the purse in Twelfth Night in this volume.

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Barbara Correll 9. In a discussion of theatrical legitimacy and censorship Richard Burt less optimistically sees Autolycus’s function as analogous to that of a potentially subversive theater, his “unruly energy . . . displaced and absorbed by the concluding festivities” (Burt 97). 10. Indeed, Shell concludes that the verbal usury of the play indicates an insidious but rock solid bond between affective and economic relationships that forebodes unhappy marital unions and a tragic outcome (82–3).

Works Cited Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Bristol, Michael. “In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter’s Tale.” SQ 42.2 (Summer 1991): 145–67. Burt, Richard. Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Cavell, Stanley. “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter’s Tale.” In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 193–222. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Freud and Marx. Trans. Jennifer Gage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. ——. “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” (on Bataille). Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 206–24. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995. Orgel, Stephen, ed. The Winter’s Tale. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Shell, Marc. “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice.” In Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 65–92. Spivak, Gayatri. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. 154–75. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

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Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Chapter 4

On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare Douglas Bruster

For a long time most commentators ignored the economic basis

of Shakespeare’s theater. When critics mentioned it at all, they typically portrayed it as regrettable. An old historicist essay on The Merchant of Venice exaggerated this practice. Asking “Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?” (1948), Norman Nathan went on to identify the best-known “money man” in the early modern theater with Shakespeare’s notorious usurer. Nathan held that “Henslowe’s tightfistedness, especially in respect to playwrights, would be likely to antagonize Shakespeare, who, on several known occasions, lent money gratis.”1 For Nathan, the à clef argument found support in a figurative parallel: “Henslowe lent money to playwrights. In return, they had to compose plays for him. Is this not, figuratively, demanding a pound of flesh in return for not being able to pay a debt by means of money?”2 Such scapegoating of the early modern theater’s financial organizers appears too in the popular film Shakespeare in Love (1998), which opens with a loan shark and his henchmen roasting Henslowe’s feet “over the hot coals of a fire burning in a brazier.”3 This scene follows, and is wittily set up by, a brief glance at a discarded playbill advertising The Lamentable Tragedie of the Moneylender Reveng’d. Of course money, and the desire for money,

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fall easily into literary cartoons like this. Given this easy caricaturing, we should not be surprised that economic issues have traditionally garnered less attention than they deserve at the hands of those who study and teach literary texts and their stereotypes. Critics have been only too willing to adopt these texts’ economic caricatures. Recently, however, this trend has been reversed. The past decade has witnessed a significant new mode of criticism relating to Shakespeare and early modern English drama, a mode that takes economic issues much more seriously. What has been called the New Economic Criticism offers an extensive range of economic models and assumptions.4 Made up of such works as (among others) Richard Halpern’s The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (1991), my own Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992), William Ingram’s The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (1992), Lars Engle’s Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his Time (1993), Melissa Aaron’s Global Economics: An Institutional Economic History of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and Their Texts, 1599–1642 (1998), and Theodore Leinwand’s Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (1999), this mode has focused on various facets of early modern England and its representations—from repertorial competition and cultural institutions to playhouse economics and dramatic themes.5 These critical works treat, among other things, money, commodities, exchange, credit, the economic, the financial, and capitalism itself; in so doing, they have profoundly qualified the questions we ask of early modern drama and culture, and the beliefs on which those questions are based. The list of topics in the preceding sentence may imply that the New Economic Criticism is a big tent erected over disparate topics and diverse critics and approaches. For example, an essay that proposes to look at the minting of certain denominations of coins under a particular monarch differs enormously from an essay that seeks to describe the mentalité of nascent capitalism in the transition from one historical era to the next. Here the initial distinction involves focus (a single coin versus a cultural mindset), but other differences, and other instances of quite disparate interests—interests loosely definable as “the economic”—come just as easily to mind. Add to this mix numerous dramatic texts and their heterogeneous playworlds, diverse audiences, scattered venues, and varying performance situations, and one has an astonishing array of critical possibilities. In this copious array, and in the approaches entailed thereby, one can locate

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a reasonable objection to the idea of the New Economic Criticism: with so many disparate practitioners under one tent, is there anything cohesive here save the tent itself? I believe we can consider the New Economic Criticism an open unity, an emergent mode of criticism defined by its willingness to treat the economic basis of social interaction both in and out of literary texts, and supporting the production of literature itself. Because it has emerged fairly recently, such willingness is historically important, and if for no other reason makes the shared topics within this mode as significant as any divergences of methodology. Far from a disabling condition, in fact, the diversity of approaches under its tent remains one of this mode’s greatest potential resources. I say “potential” because a certain tendency in this New Economic Criticism is to think and write in terms of traditionally defined approaches. Rather than calling upon the full resources of this critical ensemble, we usually draw upon it somewhat narrowly, in patterned ways. And although one could sort these patterns of approach variously, I would offer that we may usefully divide them into two avenues or paths. One of these interpretive paths emphasizes the rational and practical aspects of economic life, the other its irrational and thematic features. Borrowing Shakespearean language for moments of, respectively, carefulness and carelessness, I will call these “the reckoned” and “the rash.” In brief, I ask “the reckoned” here to represent the calculated and specific, and “the rash” to stand in for the opposite: the intuited and general. Where “reckoned” criticism implies homo economicus, “rash” criticism emphasizes homo ludens. “Reckoned” criticism sees “the economic” as an object, “rash” criticism treats “the economic” as a metaphor. I do not mean for these terms to carry moral implications, however much they may seem to possess them. For example, if Juliet gives us a pejorative definition of “the rash” in saying “I have no joy of this contract to-night, / It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” (2.2.117–18), we remember that Antony likewise denigrates reckoning when he points out, in language he must have learned from Cleopatra, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d” (1.1.15). That two famous lovers can have such varied relations to the economic parsing of love is telling. Like a young trader intent on not being defrauded, Juliet takes great pains to validate a “contract,” pains that the more experienced Antony can afford not to take. These instances help indicate that, even though I am using “the reckoned”

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Primary mode of approach Secondary emphases Historical ground Procedural habit Governing image of mental process Governing metaphor of lifestyle Status of “the economic”

Reckoned

Rash

Positivistic Actuarial, quantitative Historicist/synchronic Specific; makes distinctions

Theoretical Thematic, qualitative Epistemic/diachronic General; sees similarities

Rational Homo economicus Object

Irrational Homo ludens Metaphor

and “the rash” to describe critical genres, such terms have a practical application as well: almost all, past as well as present, in literature and out of it, have had “rash” as well as “reckoned” moments in their economic lives. How do these paths look in criticism? One might understand them in light of their critical features and assumptions. With apologies for simplification, I represent them here as antinomies. Like all such divisions, this one is largely heuristic: few critics, and few instances of criticism, could be said to be consistently or wholly in line with either side of this table. Nor do I mean to imply, once again, that either of these modes is superior to the other. Each has strengths and limitations. And I should make it clear that what I intend to represent with this table is more than the byproducts of various “strong readings” left to us by the 1980s and 1990s (however much such readings have had the effect of exacerbating the tendency I am describing). In fact, in themselves the two sides in the table are not the main story. What I mean to suggest with this table is no more and no less than the tendency, in economic criticism of Shakespeare and early modern drama, to think and write mainly in terms of one side or the other. This tendency pushes us toward generic thinking and research. In inducing patterns of analysis that replicate the features and assumptions that form this table’s two columns, such a tendency not only solidifies these patterns as critical subgenres, but leads us to privilege particular kinds of economic activity and explanation, and encourages us to read in selected ways. Perhaps some concrete examples will give texture to these categories. My examples here have one thing in common: as in the Juliet and Antony speeches quoted earlier, each consists of definition from

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the “outside.” That is, my examples of what “the reckoned” and “the rash” are, in criticism, rely on opposing voices for their articulation. “The rash” will be defined when it is called on the carpet by an opposing practitioner; “the reckoned,” in turn, will come into view when its assumptions are similarly questioned. Such opposition need not imply caricature. In fact, in a field where balanced appraisal of the strength and weaknesses of research has generally given way to an inflationary rhetoric of praise, we are likely to hear disciplinary truths only when those involved come close to speaking distinct critical languages. We could take our description of “the rash” from Eric Wilson’s recent essay on The Al-Chemist: “Abel Drugger’s Sign and the Fetishes of Material Culture” (2000).6 Midway through his argument, Wilson reflects on “[t]he rapid growth of interest in material culture” in criticism of early modern literature. His discussion of this newly popular form of materialist criticism hinges on a recollection of an oppositional voice in a “contentious” conference debate over the validity of such criticism. I should let Wilson tell his own story: As for the price of such cross-disciplinary voyeurism, literary studies has been getting it from both sides. A recent interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Material London’ closed with a contentious debate as to the proper constitution of evidence and the fit methods for assessing those objects of inquiry. From a voice in the balcony, the well-worn claim that historicist approaches to literary study were little more than ‘potted history’ was made more pointedly material, claiming that for all their attention to the ‘discourses of domesticity,’ literary critics stopped short of asking how much a pot cost, how it would have been glazed or used in a kitchen—in short, they knew neither its means of production and consumption, nor its standards of value.7

This, in a nutshell, is “the reckoned” defining “the rash,” and critically so. A voice from the balcony comes close to challenging the whole project of the conference in question. It asks, in essence, whether people trained to read literary texts have any business swapping a Shakespeare play for an early modern pot if they are not willing to learn the disciplinary skills that would help them responsibly account for such objects. As Wilson tells the story, it is easy to assume that the anonymous questioner believed in the reckoned facts and details of a rationally organized and real economy, and wanted others to see the value, to their criticism, of these facts and details. A counterinstance, an instance of “the rash” talking back to “the reckoned,” occurs in the afterword to Theodore Leinwand’s Theatre,

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Finance and Society in Early Modern England (1999).8 Now, Leinwand’s book devotes itself to what I have called “the rash” in its concern for “affect” and finance in early modern English plays and society. A brief appendix to his book challenges Andrew Gurr, whose study The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996) might be seen, in contrast, as something like a textbook of “the reckoned” in relation to Shakespeare’s theatrical career. Leinwand notes, in particular, Gurr’s hypothesis regarding the motivation for “two very important decisions made by the King’s Men”: [the] decision, first, to continue to use the Globe after the Burbage brothers had reacquired the Blackfriars lease in 1608 . . . and second, to rebuild the Globe, at very great expense, after it burned down in 1613.9

Leinwand takes issue with Gurr’s explanation for these decisions, which, by Gurr’s account, made little economic sense: after 1608, the sharers of the King’s Men would have been confronted with the reality of higher profits from renting the Globe to another company while continuing to play at the Blackfriars; after the conflagration of 1613, they would have seen that rebuilding the Globe would be a waste of resources (as the Blackfriars could make more money for them by itself). Gurr attributes these decisions to a nostalgia, on the part of the King’s Men, for an earlier time in the company’s history, and concludes, in qualifiers emphasized by Leinwand, that such nostalgia was “quixotic” and “costly.”10 Leinwand admits that such an explanation remains “plausible,” but insists that “particular economic decisions may be bound up with a wide variety of affect,” and that “a number of other emotional factors might be at least as helpful in explaining the sharers’ choices.”11 He offers an instance of such a nonrational motive for these decisions of the King’s Men when he suggests, “Perhaps there were company members whose adrenaline flowed only when they were performing amidst the commotion that we presume was typical at a playing space like the Globe. Exhilaration, as opposed to nostalgia, might explain the desire to maintain an amphitheatre presence.”12 Later in the same paragraph, in fact, Leinwand reveals something about his controlling image of early modern acting companies when he notes, “Rock-androll bands that make considerable fortunes from compact disks and music videos continue to mount lavish live-performance tours held at huge outdoor venues.”13

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In shifting from the calculation of homo economicus to the “adrenaline” and “[e]xhilaration” of homo ludens, Leinwand places this afterword, and the book that it closes, squarely in the genre of criticism I have called “the rash.” Where Gurr assumes a frugal husbandry as the norm from which the King’s Men departed in their decisions, Leinwand gives us something more romantic in conception. We might guess that, for Gurr, the King’s Men resembled chartered accountants temporarily “pound foolish” over something (amphitheater playing) that reminded them of their youth. For Leinwand, actors are perhaps like a 1970s rock-and-roll band “committed to playing for popular audiences” and loving every minute of their performances.14 As Leinwand notes, his and Gurr’s accounts are not diametrically opposed: each concedes that profit alone cannot have been the primary motive for the decisions the company made about playing venues. But these critics’ assumptions about what made the world of the early modern theater “go round” produce profoundly varied accounts of what these plays and players were. I agree with Leinwand’s main point: behavior in the world cannot adequately be explained by strict economic laws. We should not presume that people have done what they have done after carefully reckoning the odds (financial or otherwise) on mental abacuses. To that extent, Leinwand’s widening of explanatory language relating to the decisions of the King’s Men—they may have had more than a nostalgic rationale for doing what they did with the Globe playhouse— stands as a salutary thing. But I disagree with an assumption that Leinwand makes in getting to his point. As he asserts at a telling turn in his argument: “Since few of us are prone to think of economies governed solely by economic laws, or of actors within these economies rationally pursuing their goals, it is reasonable even if only hypothetically to identify a space for affective economies.”15 We might start here by putting some pressure on the slipperiness of Leinwand’s qualifying introductory clause: “Since few of us are prone to think of economies governed solely by economic laws …” Now, one of the keys here is “solely.” Leinwand’s book depends on there being some (i.e., at least a “few of us”) who believe that economies work (“solely” or otherwise) in a more or less rational manner, and in terms of specific laws. He bases his argument, in fact, on the premise that too much thinking about economic themes and activities in and out of early modern literature has been shaped by what I have called “the reckoned.” Were such not the case, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England would lack its raison d’être.

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But even more important here is the exceedingly slippery word “economy.” Leinwand uses it in two ways while implying that he is calling upon a single sense. The sense of “economy” he deploys in relation to “laws” is the traditional sense of an “economy” as something one reads about in the financial pages of a newspaper: an economic system involving money, credit, debt, profit, and loss. Thus one might think of the “law” of supply and demand, or the “law” of diminishing returns (not to mention more formal principles, such as “Gresham’s Law” or “Say’s Law”). So far, so good. But the plural Leinwand uses at the end of his sentence—in the phrase “affective economies”—is a metaphoric one that can describe any system or organization. “Economy,” that is, not referring to pounds and shillings or dollars and cents, but rather “economy” (and “economies”) in terms of any large theme, system, or organization. This is a usage familiar to Shakespeareans in such titles as “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice” (1986), Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991), and Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995).16 I should be clear: I do not wish to imply that the Wall Street Journal-sense of “economy,” is in any way superior (or inferior) to the metaphoric sense of “economy,” which can encompass nonfinancial themes and behavior. To “economies,” that is, of “spirit,” “theatrical experience,” or “race and gender.” But I do think they are different things, and require (and produce) varying assumptions from those who practice criticism in the divergent modes I have outlined and also from those who read and use such criticism. In short, Leinwand overlooks at least one iron law of “economy” when he says that “few of us are prone to think of economies governed solely by economic laws . . .” He misses, first, the fact that few of us define “economy” in the same way, even when we agree on the larger question of whether it is a metaphor or an object. Also worth mentioning here is the fact that Shakespeareans as a group are governed by the “economic laws” of training, employing institution, and disciplinary niche. These laws have consequences. Because of educational background, institutional home, and professional identity, among other things, those of us devoted to “the rash” read differently than those of us devoted to “the reckoned.” To revise Leinwand’s claim, one could say that few of us who pay attention to the prices of goods on a year-to-year basis in early modern England typically read Marcel Mauss and Jean-Joseph Goux. Likewise, few of us who read Marcel Mauss and Jean-Joseph Goux typically pay much

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attention to the prices of goods on a year-to-year basis in early modern England. We tend to choose between paths. Our research finds its home accordingly. Though one could argue that there are various “crossover” journals and series, publications seem often to acquire a strong generic profile and then perpetuate this profile. “Reckoned” and “rash” essays tend not to appear in the same places. For instance, when William N. West performed, in one and the same essay, a Derridean reading of the Sonnets and a Shakespearean reading of Derrida’s The Post Card entitled “Nothing as Given: Economies of the Gift in Derrida and Shakespeare,” he did not publish his essay in Philological Quarterly or Notes and Queries.17 Similarly, when Anthony James West sought to publish his findings about the sums advertised and paid for First Folios from 1623 forward, it is a safe bet that he did not send his essay to Representations before it was published in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.18 When one group of critics writes about “the gift,” another asks “Which gift, in particular?” Likewise the faith in the “literal” prompts more than a few critics to ask for a more considered theory of subject and object in such analyses.19 Such a division seems to me more than a trivial matter. For it is a division we rarely talk about, however much we signal it in conscious or unconscious uses of such telling “flag” words as “scholarship,” “criticism,” or “theory.” I have said that a tendency in economic criticism of Shakespeare sees us engage in generic thinking and research. And although genres can be as unavoidable in scholarship as in the theater, I believe that this tendency is detrimental to the criticism we write. It not only closes us off, as individual critics, from language and ideas that could enrich our work, but, in so doing, ensures that the kind of work we do will perpetuate this very division in the field. Clearly, many things stand in the way of overcoming this tendency. I have suggested some of the external obstacles. Others are internal. Like lumpers and splitters, Platonists and Aristotelians, and foxes and hedgehogs, those of us participating in these patterns may do so not from any ingrained habit of misperception or constitutional bad faith, but because it is in our nature to read and interpret accordingly. Yet we have a great deal to gain from resisting this tendency, whatever its source. The New Economic Criticism can benefit from methodological diversity if we take this diversity as a genuine resource and something that can be accessed by all. What would this involve? Among other things, reading what we do not ordinarily read; talking with those we do not ordinarily talk with; listening to voices from the balcony and likewise speaking out from the balcony ourselves. For if our

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lives indeed resemble those of the characters we study in having moments of both “reckoned” and “rash” economic behavior, we owe it to our readers to expand the language and ideas we use to account for this diversity of economic experience.

Notes 1. Norman Nathan, “Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?” Notes and Queries 193 (1948): 163–5; quotation at 163. 2. Nathan, “Is Shylock Philip Henslowe?” 164. 3. Shakespeare in Love (screenplay), by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion, 1999), 1 ff. For a review that notices the role of such “money men” in the film, and in the film’s presentist allegory of the studio system, see Kenneth S. Rothwell, “Shakespeare in Love,” Cineaste 2–3 (March 1999): 79–80. 4. On “the New Economic Criticism,” see the editors’ introduction to The New Economic Criticism: Studies in the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999). Two earlier studies of economics and literature have special resonance for my argument here: see Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 5. See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of his Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Melissa Diehl Aaron, Global Economics: An Institutional Economic History of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and Their Texts, 1599–1642 (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998) [see also Aaron’s “The Globe and Henry V as Business Document,” SEL 40.2 (2000): 277–92]; and Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Eric Wilson, “Abel Drugger’s Sign and the Fetishes of Material Culture,” in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds., Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 110–34. Wilson’s essay is a stimulating defense of psychoanalysis as “one of many strategic methods necessary in exploring the traces of individual and collective memory” (129).

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7. Wilson, “Abel Drugger’s Sign,” 125. In a private communication to the author, Linda Woodbridge has generously shared a divergent memory of the event Wilson recalls for us. Her recollection of a passionate voice from the balcony involved an individual critiquing the conference’s emphasis on the factual details of material life—to the detriment, it was implied, of a more traditional kind of materialism. This is, of course, exactly counter to the narrative I reproduce earlier. I am grateful to Woodbridge for sharing her memories of this event with me, memories that serve to remind us of the dangers inherent in the anecdotal. 8. Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 140–3. 9. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society, 140. 10. Quoted by Leinwand, Ibid., 140. 11. Ibid., 141. 12. Ibid., 141. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Ibid., 142. 15. Ibid., 140. 16. Ronald A. Sharp, “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology 83.3 (1986): 250–65; Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); and Kim Hall, Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 17. See William N. West, “Nothing as Given: Economies of the Gift in Derrida and Shakespeare,” Comparative Literature 48:1 (1996): 1–18. 18. Anthony James West, “Sales and Prices of Shakespeare First Folios: A History, 1623 to the Present,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92.4 (1998): 465–528; 93.1 (1999): 74–142. West has recently published his findings as The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 19. See, e.g., Barbara Correll’s essay in this volume, which calls into question Richard Strier’s reliance on “facticity and ‘the literal.’ ” Jonathan Gil Harris has likewise questioned recent criticism’s excessive reliance on “ ‘material culture,’ with its whiff of the dialectic of renunciation and allure.” See Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4.3 (2000): 111–23, at 113. I have discussed this aspect of the “new materialism” in chapter 8 of Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

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Chapter 5

Exchange Value and Empiricism in the Poetry of George Herbert David Hawkes

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his essay considers George Herbert’s copious use of “economic” imagery in The Temple. My working assumption will be that it is futile to distinguish between the “literal” and the “metaphorical” registers in which Herbert uses “economic” terms, and that to attempt to do so would seriously deform his poetry. The people of the early seventeenth century had no conception of a distinct “economic” dimension of life, and if we are to understand their thinking we must suspend our artificial and reified notion that the “economy” is an identifiable “sphere” or “thing.” Herbert introduces the crucial typological figure around which his entire work is structured in the introductory poem “Perirrhanterium,” when he alludes to the transcendence of the external, literal, and objective temple of the Jews by the internal, figurative, and subjective “temple” of the Christian “heart”: “Christ purg’d his temple; so must thou thy heart” (423). The Temple, he claims, will instruct the reader how to drive the figurative money-changers out of the figurative temple that is the human heart. This oscillation between the material temple and the spiritual “temple” of the heart is the primary technique through which Herbert considers the ethical and soteriological implications of phenomena that our society might naïvely regard as merely “economic” in purview.

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For example, Herbert’s God, or “Redeemer,” is consistently presented as the antithesis of usury. The speaker of “Faith” recalls that “I owed thousands and much more / I did beleeve that I did nothing owe, / And liv’d accordingly; my creditor / Beleeves so too, and lets me go” (13–16),1 and in “Love Unknown,” the narrator is amazed to find that “all my scores were by another paid, / Who took the debt upon him” (60–1). It is not particularly surprising that Herbert should associate salvation with the cancellation of debt: this figure is entirely conventional. Herbert is singular, however, in the breadth and depth of the implications he deduces from this association. On the opposition between usury and redemption he constructs a sequence of polarities—between means and ends, law and grace, sign and referent, object and subject, flesh and spirit—which amount to a comprehensive and minute description of the human soul’s relation to its creator. The didactic poems that open The Temple and are collectively entitled “The Church Porch” serve to establish Herbert’s Aristotelian view of money. “Perirrhanterium” repeats Aristotle’s proclamation of the ethical superiority of use value over exchange value: “ . . . Get to live; / Then live, and use it: els, it is not true / That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone / Makes money not a contemptible stone” (153–6). The word “use” is employed here in archly ironic fashion. It could mean “to practice usury,” as in Antonio’s pun in The Merchant of Venice: “I do never use it” (I.iii.66). But in Herbert’s poem it means the reverse; he recommends that we put money to its natural use as the medium of exchange, as opposed to an unnatural, usurious use as an end in itself. According to Aristotelian ethics, money was not supposed to be an object of exchange, and its employment as such constituted the sin of “usury.” The “use” of money referred to in the term “usury” was unnatural and improper; in fact, it was not really “use” at all, but exchange. Usury reverses the natural relation of use value to exchange value, making the medium of exchange into an object of exchange, and thus “putting it to use”— that is, imposing an improper and usurious value upon it. “The Church Porch” accomplishes the requisite preliminaries to the transcendence of the external by the internal “temple” by recommending reforms in outward personal conduct, while the concluding poem, “The Church Militant,” describes the historical and political manifestations of this subjective struggle. The subject of the latter poem is the growth and spread of Christianity, envisaged as dogged at every turn by the pursuing specter of “sinne,” which reveals itself in various forms of idolatry. The most recent of these, according to

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Herbert, is financial: Ah, what a thing is man devoid of grace, Adoring garlick with an humble face, Begging his food of that which he may eat, Starving the while he worshippeth his meat! Who makes a root his god, how low is he, If God and man be sever’d infinitely! What wretchednesse can give him any room, In us the same transplanted foolerie. (111–20)

In this passage, Herbert explains how, like earlier forms of idol worship, the fetishization of money involves a topsy-turvy attitude to experience, which mistakes the means for the end, the sign for the referent, and the object for the subject. There is nothing remotely mystical about this; Herbert understands perfectly well that the baleful power of money stems from the American gold that was pouring into Europe as he wrote. The idolatry that this influx of gold must inevitably produce will, Herbert accurately predicts, have a disastrous long-term effect on the health of European Christianity. The lines in which Herbert declares “Religion stands tip-toe in our land / Readie to passe to the American strand” (235–6) have usually been read as an approving reference to the radical sectaries who were being forced into transatlantic exile. Critics have puzzled over this reference, since it comes from a man who elsewhere appears to be a staunch conformist Anglican. No one, so far as I know, has observed that in their context these lines cannot possibly refer to Englishmen. When Herbert declares “Then shall Religion to America flee,” he imagines it spreading among the Indians, not among European immigrants. In the following lines, the reference to gold makes it clear that “We” refers to Europe as a whole, while “they” designates the native Americans rather than the puritan exiles: They have their times of Gospel, ev’n as we. My God, thou dost prepare for them a way By carrying first their gold from them away: For gold and grace did never yet agree: Religion alwaies sides with povertie. We think we rob them, but we think amisse: We are more poore, and they more rich by this. Thou wilt revenge their quarrell, making grace To pay our debts, and leave her ancient place To go to them, while that which now their nation But lends to us, shall be our desolation. (247–58)

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Many of Herbert’s poetic discussions of exchange value associate it with a confusion of subject and object. Money, he repeatedly suggests, becomes an animate force to the same degree that human beings are reduced to mere things—the subjectification of the object and the objectification of the subject are different aspects of a single process. “Perirrhanterium” invokes avarice as the paradigmatic instance of worldliness and suggests that it is a sin that involves a reversal of the natural relation of subject to object: Herbert cautions his reader “Lest gaining gain on thee” (164), and points out that “Wealth is the conjurer’s devil; / Whom when he thinks he hath, the devil hath him” (165–6). In “Providence,” Herbert remarks how appropriate it is that God has placed precious metals within the earth—the same element of which the human body is made, and to which it must return. This design, Herbert insists, is providential: Thou hast hid metals: man may take them thence But at his perill: when he digs the place, He makes a grave; as if the thing had sense, And threatend man, that he should fill the space. (81–4)

The attribution of a merely customary, human value to a natural object, such as takes place when gold is declared to be money, is in Herbert’s view an act of fetishism: it is acting “as if the thing had sense.” As such, it reverses the proper roles of subject and object, assigning agency to a mere metal and, by the same token, removing it from human beings. In “Avarice,” the financial power of gold is nothing more than externalized human power: Nay, thou hast got the face of man; for we Have with our stamp and seal transferr’d our right: Thou art the man, and man but drosse to thee. Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich . . . (10–13)

In poems such as this, Herbert approaches a full-fledged understanding of alienation. The significance of this for his thought is so portentous that it is hard to fathom how many of his most distinguished critics have missed it. Helen Vendler, for example, dismisses “Avarice” out of hand: “ . . . the motivation of the poem itself is entirely obscure. Why did Herbert feel moved to write ‘Avarice’? And in sonnet form? . . . There is no breath of temptation in the poem, nothing to show that Herbert himself ever thought money powerful or attractive.”2 Of course this is true, but Vendler inexplicably fails to see the implications of Herbert’s analysis of money as alienated

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human thought. She seems to assume that he is merely trotting out a trite denunciation of the lust for pelf. But it seems to me that Herbert’s “economic” thought shares a common pattern and logic with his theology and his poetics, and that an awareness of this common element makes Herbert a richer and deeper poet than the pedantic preacher Vendler finds in “Avarice.” The problem is that Vendler assumes that “Avarice” is only about money; she does not see its implications for what our society considers extra-economic spheres of life. This impossible attempt to delineate a determinate object or area called the “economy” frequently leads to theoretical misunderstandings, as well as to critical misreadings. For example, in his contribution to this volume, Douglas Bruster distinguishes between two modes of New Economic Criticism, which he calls the “reckoned” and the “rash”: “Reckoned” criticism sees “the economic” as an object, “rash” criticism treats “the economic” as a metaphor . . . . I do not wish to imply that the Wall Street Journal-sense of “economy” is in any way superior (or inferior) to the metaphoric sense of “economy” which can encompass non-financial themes and behavior . . . . But I do think they are different things, and require (and produce) varying assumptions from those who practice criticism in the divergent modes I have outlined . . .

This is a radically false dichotomy. What Bruster calls “the Wall Street Journal-sense of ‘economy’ ” is not remotely literal. He tries to define the “literal” meaning of “economy” as a “system involving money, credit, debt, profit, and loss,” but these terms do not refer to objective things; they are figurative terms for relations between people. The idea that certain modes of human behavior can be isolated as “economic” was invented by the political economists of the eighteenth century, as a means of sidestepping ethical objections to trade and usury—economics, for Smith or Mandeville, is a separate “sphere” from ethics. But it would never have occurred to the people of Renaissance England to separate the “economy” from the rest of life, and such a separation is manifestly untenable in the postmodern environment, where the “market” saturates every aspect of experience. The totalizing world-view of the seventeenth century sometimes had what are for us quite disturbing consequences. I said earlier that Herbert’s God, or “Redeemer,” is defined in opposition to usury. This, regrettably, meant that he is defined in opposition to what Herbert understood as “Judaism.” The identification of Judaism with usury is perhaps the most tragic instance in history of the practical effects of tropological representation. Francis Bacon reports it as a

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common view “That usurers should have orange-tawney bonnets, because they do judaize.”3 Bacon does not say, as some of his continental contemporaries might have, that Jews are usurers; he says that Judaism is like usury. The perceived homology between Judaism and usury dictates that even where the categories “Jew” and “usurer” are not literally coterminous, they are figuratively so. Thus in a Star Chamber case in 1605, the Lord Chancellor casually referred to usurers by the term “mercatores Juadizantes.”4 In The Speculation of Usurie (1596), Thomas Bell cites a passage from Saint. Bernard that illustrates this homological reasoning: “ . . . if Jewes be wanting in any place, Christians that be usurers (a pitifull case) are found to surpasse them in Judaisme; if it be that we may terme them Christians, and not rather baptized Jewes.”5 What is this figurative “Judaisme,” in which Christian usurers “surpasse” literal Jews? As in Bacon’s observation that usurers “judaize,” the term must refer to some common element that was assumed to unite usury and Judaism. That element, in my opinion, is objectification. The people of Renaissance England thought of Judaism as a “carnal,” or objectifying, religion, and it was this rather than any empirical evidence that made the connection of Judaism with usury seem plausible. Although they could not but admit the aniconic nature of Judaism, early modern Christians nevertheless found it appropriate to consider it an idolatrous religion, due to their expansive understanding of “idolatry.” The Jews, it was claimed, made an idol out of the carnal law. They were therefore supposed to possess an entirely fleshly consciousness, which excluded them from the spiritual grace of the Gospel, and which harmonized appropriately with their usurious business practices. It is not difficult to trace the logic through which this connection is sustained. For money to reproduce, it must be conceived of as valuable in itself. It must not be thought of as a sign or token, which merely represents commodities in order to facilitate their exchange. It must not simply stand for something beyond itself; it must be viewed as an end in itself—its value must be imagined as inherent rather than referential. The correlative of this in the sphere of hermeneutics is a rigid, materialistic literalism, a refusal to look beyond the letter of the signifier, which was often referred to as an antiteleological “abuse”— hence the facility with which John Weemse declares, “the word of God is still the word of God, although [the Jews] abuse it to a wrong end.”6 As Barbara Lewalski explains, “the ‘meer letter,’ or ‘the carnal sense,’ is frequently equated with the ‘sense of the Jews’ now wholly

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abrogated by Christ.”7 Hence, for instance, Shylock’s inflexible adherence to his bond, and hence, in the view of Christian typologists, the inability of the Jews to perceive that the literal, historical events of the Old Testament were the material signs designating the new, spiritual dispensation instituted by the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ. A Platonizing strain entered very early into Christian hermeneutics and encouraged its adherents, the foremost among whom was Origen, to portray the Old Testament types as “fleshly” signs that received their “spiritual” referents in the life of Christ. Christian typology thus evolves into a kind of historicized Platonism, where a succession of spiritual significances is revealed lurking behind precedent material shadows, not by means of Socratic syllogisms or Platinian contemplation but in the course of the chronological unfolding of human history. The lack of sophistication displayed by George Herbert with regard to Judaism is thus the effect of historical rather than personal causes. It is nevertheless hard for a modern reader to see certain poems in The Temple as anything but anti-Judaic. This no doubt explains why several of Herbert’s most important poems are barely mentioned in many eminent studies of his work. Stanley Fish notes the lack of critical attention given to “The Jews” in particular, pointing out that “Martz, Summers, Stein and Vendler do not even list it in their indexes.”8 Neither do Lewalski, Singleton, Sherwood, Clarke, Hodgkins, Lull, or Veith, while Strier9 and Todd10 mention it only once, in passing. The importance of typology to The Temple is impossible to ignore, but critics have understandably been reluctant to follow through the implications of this emphasis. The meanings that Herbert is constantly concerned to refute, obviate, and transcend are the “carnal” elements of life and consciousness, and he utilizes Judaism as a synecdoche for those elements. Herbert’s anti-Judaism is thus not an embarrassing foible or aberration: it is absolutely fundamental to his theology and his art. The imagery he associates with Judaism in “The Jews” is identical to that employed by Shakespeare and Marlowe: barrenness, death, usury, legalism, and literalism are its leading characteristics: Poore nation, whose sweet sap, and juice Our cyens have purloin’d, and left you drie: Whose streams we got by the Apostles sluice, And use in baptisme, while ye pine and die: Who by not keeping once, became a debtor And now by keeping lose the letter. (1–6)

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This sort of thing would be of little interest if Herbert were seriously essaying a diagnosis of Judaism, but of course his real concern is with the implications of the relationship between the old and the new dispensations for the interior condition of the Christian psyche. He explains this in “Self-condemnation”: Thou who condemnest Jewish hate, For choosing Barabbas a murderer Befor the Lord of Glorie; Look back upon thine own estate, Call home thine eye (that busie wanderer) That choice may be thy storie. (1–6)

This is entirely conventional typology: the story of the Jewish nation is the story of the Christian individual in figurative form. But Herbert puts a particular emphasis on this relationship. We experience a kind of interior Judaism, he claims, when we feel attracted to the things of this world and the pleasures of the flesh. To love material things is to love mortality; it is to choose death over life. This is a “Jewish choice,” because it is the fulfillment of the choice prefigured in the Jews’ preference of Barabas to Jesus: He that doth love, and love amisse The worlds delights before true Christian joy, Hath made a Jewish choice: The world an ancient murderer is . . . (7–10)

In the third stanza the poem’s biblical model shifts from Barabas to Judas, and also from the thanatropic attachment to mortality that characterizes all worldliness to the paradigmatic epitome of worldliness that is financial value. This mode of value, Herbert notes, is not merely unethical; it is ontologically “false”: He that hath made a sorrie wedding Between his soul and gold, and hath preferr’d False gain before the true, Hath done what he condemnes in reading: For he hath sold for money his deare Lord, And is a Judas-Jew. (13–18)

Herbert uses the word “Jew” here in much the same way as Marx uses it in On the Jewish Question: as a conceptually appropriate trope for exchange value.11 To be a “Jew” is to prefer the “false gain” of “money” above the “true” gain available only to the “soul.” The

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hermeneutic habit that made Judaism seem appropriate for this purpose is typological, as Herbert indicates in “The Bunch of Grapes”: For as the Jews of old by Gods command Travell’d, and saw no town; So now each Christian hath his journeys spann’d: Their storie pennes and sets us down. A single deed is small renown. Gods works are wide, and let in future times; His ancient justice overflows our crimes. (8–14)

For Herbert, the effect of typology is to transcend and render obsolete the opposition between subject and object. To interpret one’s experience in typological form is to institute a system of mediation between the subjective psyche of the individual and the objective process of history. “The Bunch of Grapes” explicitly recommends just such a mode of interpretation: Then have we too our guardian fires and clouds; Our Scripture-dew drops fast: We have our sands and serpents, tents and shrowds; Alas! our murmurings come not last. (15–18)

A typological hermeneutic involves a rigorously symbolic reading of the empirical. The Christian must learn to see “sands and serpents, tents and shrowds” within the mundane phenomena of everyday experience. Alone among Christian hermeneutic procedures, typology insists that not only the signs of the Bible but also their referents must be interpreted symbolically. Christian typology is thus an instrument for extending the realm of signification from text to world; it is a way of understanding the world as a text. In the words of Augustine’s City of God, typology is “an eloquence of things, not of words.”12 Accordingly, Herbert demands that we take the sensual world to be a series of signs that point toward imperceptible referents. We should beware, however, of an over-literalist interpretation, such as the speaker lapses into in lines 19–21 of “The Bunch of Grapes”: “But where’s the cluster? Where’s the taste / Of mine inheritance? Lord, if I must borrow, / Let me as well take up their joy, as sorrow.” At this stage in the poem, he imagines that there must be a strictly legalistic, one-to-one correspondence between his experience and that of the Israelites. He assumed that he is “borrow[ing]” from them and that the typological relation is in the nature of a bill of

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credit. As a result of this assumption, he feels cheated when he does not find a precise correspondence in his own experience for the cluster of grapes picked by Moses’s scouts at Eschol (Numbers 13:23). In the final stanza, however, the speaker comes to understand that such legalistic haggling is inappropriate, and this insight is achieved when he attains an accurate typological interpretation of the poem’s central image. Rather than scanning his own experience for some comfort or blessing that might correspond to the Israelites’ grapes, he realizes that the cluster is to be regarded as a different kind of sign. It is, he realizes, a type of Christ, and participation in Christ removes the need for the worldly signs that merely prefigure him: But can he want the grape, who hath the wine? I have their fruit and more. Blessed be God, who prosper’d Noahs vine, And made it bring forth grapes good store. But much more him I must adore, Who of the Laws sowre juice sweet wine did make, Ev’n God himself being pressed for my sake. (22–8)

The new dispensation is to the old as wine is to grapes: it is its “fruit,” its purpose, and final cause. The grapes remain in the wine, but the wine is more than the grapes: it is the telos of the grapes, and the grapes prefigure the wine in potentia. The Old Testament God “who prosper’d Noah’s vine” is to be reverenced, but his ultimate and true revelation has the effect of transcending the worldly images that represent him, and this entails the recognition by human beings of the symbolic nature of experience. To continue to pay attention to the grapes rather than the wine would be idolatry—it would be to “rest in Nature, not the God of Nature” (“The Pulley,” 14)—and this is the kind of idolatry of which the Jews are convicted by virtue of their persistent attention to the literal level of the Old Testament narrative. The Temple announces the centrality of typology to its project in the very title, which alludes to the scriptural trope of the human heart as the temple of the Holy Spirit. This was an especially attractive figure for Protestants because of its facility for expressing the internalization of faith. The external, objective temple of the Old Testament is transcended by the internal, subjective “temple” of the New, just as the external trappings of Catholicism are brushed aside by the interior faith of the Protestant believer. Furthermore, the image of the temple lays a particularly heavy stress on the internalization of religion, because even within the Old Testament we read of the contrast

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between the literal, physical temple of Solomon and its ideal prototype within the mind of David. From Herbert’s Protestant perspective, God dwells on earth only within the human heart, as is testified by his incarnation in human form. The incarnation is prefigured in the idea of the temple, which took shape in David’s heart and of which the Lord specifically approves (1 Kings 8:17–18, 2 Chron. 6:7–9). Solomon’s literal temple, on the other hand, soon proves susceptible to defilement by idolatry, despite God’s warning (1 Kings 9:6–7). With the New Testament’s internalization of the temple, the objective, literal idols with which Solomon polluted the house of the Lord also become subjective and figurative, as in 2 Corinthians 16: “what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God . . . ” In numerous scriptural texts, the transcendence of the temple by the heart is associated with the transcendence of Jewish law by Christian faith. Such, for instance, was the Christian interpretation of Jeremiah 31:33: “After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” As elaborated in the Pauline epistles, such prophecies bespoke the fact that justification is by faith alone: For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves. Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts . . . (Romans 2:14–15) Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart . . . (2 Corinthians 3:3)

The process of expelling the subjective idols from the figurative temple is constantly hampered by the tendency of the heart to become “hard.” The main biblical allusion here is to the Pharoah, and the bondage of Israel in Egypt, which is typologically associated by Christians with subservience to the law of the old dispensation. Hardness of heart is mollified through the influence of the Spirit, as in Ezekiel 36:26: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh.” As Calvin notes, this is a process that can work both ways, so that “When his spirit is taken away, our hearts harden into stones.”13

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Herbert describes his struggle for salvation as an unceasing battle against this process of objectification, which turns the human heart into a stone, an insensate thing. The opening poem of “The Church,” “The Altar,” inaugurates the complex analysis of this metaphor: “A broken altar, Lord, thy servant rears, / Made of a heart, and cemented with tears” (1–2). The visible altar that we can see on the page—in the shape made by the poem’s lines—is manifestly not “broken” but whole. The reader’s attention is thus drawn to the fact that the “broken altar” referred to must be internal and subjective. This is confirmed by the following lines: “Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; / No workman’s tool hath touched the same” (3–4). Herbert refers here to Exodus 20:25: “And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.” This text is readily amenable to the Protestant prohibition of “works righteousness,” and in the context of The Temple the allusion indicates that the poems will be authentic to the degree that they exhibit the author’s “heart” in unmediated fashion, scorning to obscure God’s handiwork by the prideful ostentation of poetic wit. Due to the centrality of the image of the heart in Catholic devotion, Herbert’s choice of this figure as the main focus of his meditation has a controversial aspect. The Temple is an attempt to rethink this image in Protestant terms by interiorizing and spiritualizing it. In Catholic meditation, concentration on the literal, physical heart of Mary or Jesus is an important and necessary stage in the mental quest for the love and compassion of which the material heart is a symbol.14 For example, Richard Crawshaw’s “The Flaming Heart” indicates that the pity evoked by contemplation of Saint Theresa’s physical wound transforms her heart from a literal, passive object into an active, metaphorical subject: “Love’s passives are his activ’st part, / The wounded is the wounding heart” (73–4).15 In Herbert, by contrast, the physical heart is purely metaphorical. The heart, in Herbert, is vivified precisely to the degree that it is “spiritualized,” and this process involves the simultaneous (and homologous) flight from literalism and from the flesh. In “Sepulchre,” the rocky tomb in which Jesus’ body was interred is presented as tropologically apposite, because his death occurred as a result of his compatriots’ hard-heartedness: “Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee, / And missing this, most falsly did arraigne thee; / Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee” (13–15). The biblical reference once again links hardness of heart with Judaism; it is to John 10:31, “Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him.” The

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familiar cluster of associations is invoked, with “the Jews” once again standing for every kind of objectification: And as of old the Law by heav’nly art Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart To hold thee. (17–20)

A two-fold process of spiritualization seems to be taking place here. First, there is the transformation of the external, Judaic law of torah and nomos into an internal law, said by Paul to belong to the gentiles and written “in the heart.” Second, there is a hardening of the heart itself, which renders the interior law just as ineffective for salvation as that of the old dispensation and prevents Christ from dwelling within us. This is what I have called the “interior Judaism,” which Herbert exhorts his readers to resist. The same line of thought informs “Nature”: O smooth my rugged heart, and there Engrave thy rev’rend Law and fear; Or make a new one, since the old Is saplesse grown, And a much fitter stone To hide my dust, then thee to hold. (13–18)

The pivotal word “Or” signals the speaker’s recognition that Christian “works righteousness” is merely Judaic legalism writ large. The transition from the law written in stone to the law written in the heart is here called fruitless and “saplesse,” because the figurative heart has itself become a figurative stone. The point, which is also the point of The Temple as a whole, is that we should adopt toward our “heart” the same attitude as Christianity adopts toward Judaism, since the objective relationship between the law and gospel is reenacted on the subjective level within each individual soul. For Herbert and his contemporaries, then, “Judaism” meant materialism. To be a “Jew” was to be fixated on material signs to the exclusion of spiritual referents. To forget that a sign has a referent is to forget that it is a sign. “Judaism” thus involved the misapprehension that money was not a sign of other objects but a valuable thing in itself, which could be “used” as if it had a use value independent of its function as the medium of exchange. This is why Herbert equates Judaism with usury. But usury is only one manifestation of materialism; equally prominent in Herbert’s society was the species of

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philosophical materialism that is known to posterity as Baconian empiricism. Empirical science abandons the quest for the final cause or telos of things, and concentrates instead on their material causes. It forgets that the empirical appearances of things are mere signs of anterior meanings. In a letter to Bacon, Herbert urged the philosopher not to limit his investigations to matter: “God grant that the same advances thou hast made in the sphere of nature, thou mayest also make in that of grace.”16 The Temple expands upon this injunction, connecting Baconian science to the other forms of carnality that Herbert finds in Judaism, usury, literalism, and sensuality. Each stanza of “The Pearl” cautions against a different kind of carnal temptation. The final verse announces that the speaker’s knowledge of science, honor, and pleasure have merely served to confirm his estimation of their value relative to God: I know all these, and have them in my hand: Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes I flie to thee, and fully understand Both the main sale, and the commodities; And at what rate and price I have thy love. (31–5)

The speaker proudly asserts his discernment in matters of value, his ability to identify and reject mere “commodities.” His mode of evaluation has taught him to aspire to heaven by rejecting the world, rather than by rooting around among empirical phenomena as Bacon recommended. “Vanitie I” personifies Baconian science in the figures of the “subtil Chymick” (15) who “strip[s] the creature naked” (16); the “nimble Diver” (8) who seeks a literal rather than figurative “dearely-earned pearl” (10); and the “fleet Astronomer” (1) who “Surveys” the heavens “as if he had designed / To make a purchase there” (4–5). Vendler finds in this poem a “fearful repudiation . . . of intellectual enquiry.”17 However, Herbert is not attacking intellectual enquiry as such, but merely empiricism. He evidently feels that such an approach produces a dead, empty (we might say “reified”) vision of the universe, which denudes it of its creator. Viewed in such a way, the things of creation appear in a similar light as the commodities laid out in a shop window, on which the scientist gazes “as if he had designed / To make a purchase” (4–5). Describing the vain temptations of worldly things as if they were exhibited for sale is a favorite technique of Herbert’s. In “Vertue,” for instance, we can clearly see the deflating, unmasking effect of this figure: “Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses, / A box where

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sweets compacted lie” (9–10). The pun on the last word is hardly necessary. The reader will have grasped the point by virtue of the difference between the natural appearance of spring as it is described in line 9, and line 10’s comparison of spring to an artificially packaged, or “compacted,” “box” of “sweets,” which have been designed to tempt and allure. Herbert uses the same method to satirize worldliness in “Dotage”: False glozing pleasure, casks of happinesse, Foolish night-fires, women’s and children’s wishes, Chases in Arras, guilded emptinesse, Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career, Embroider’d lyes, nothing between two dishes; These are the pleasures here. (1–6)

As Singleton perceptively observes regarding these lines: “It is as if the eye were moving over the surface of a courtly world at random, noting here a tapestry, there some dishes, and intermixing these objects indifferently with thoughts and feelings and fancies.”18 The same device is used in “The Quidditie”: “My God, a verse is not a crown, / No point of honour or gay suit, / No hawk, or banquet, or renown, / Nor a good sword, nor yet a lute . . . ” (1–4). It is this kind of superficial imagery against which Herbert protests in the “Jordan” poems. It is now generally accepted that Herbert does not, paradoxically and hypocritically, denounce poetic representation per se. Rather, his ire is directed against what he considers bad poetry—the “winding stair” and “painted chair” that disguise the “course-spunne lines” criticized in “Jordan (I).” The advice of that poem’s “friend” is not to avoid figuration per se but, like a canny customer, to shun vain expenditure on the overpriced things of this world: “There is in Love a sweetness readie penn’d / Copie out only that and save expense” (13–14). “Jordan (II)” goes into further detail concerning the kind of idolatry Herbert eschews: When first my lines of heav’nly joyes made mention, Such was their lustre, they did so excell, That I sought out quaint words and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. (1–6)

This is, plainly enough, a protest against the commodification of language. The difficulty facing a modern reader is not in recognizing this fact but in understanding the concept. How could language be

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commodified; what does Herbert mean by “Decking the sense, as if it were to sell”? It is the same difficulty we face when Shakespeare informs us: “That love is merchandiz’d whose rich esteeming / The owner’s tongue doth publish every where.”19 The only possible modern translation of “merchandiz’d” is “commodified,” and yet we are not immediately familiar with the notion of commodified love, so that Shakespeare’s precise meaning, like Herbert’s, is elusive. One possibility is that in “Jordan (II),” Herbert is condemning poetry that is literally composed in order to be sold, in the manner of antitheatrical pamphleteers from Stephen Gosson to William Prynne.20 I think, however, that our preceding investigations will allow us to put forward a more plausible suggestion. What Herbert intends by this phrase is the fetishization of the signifier. When selling or buying—when exchanging—one’s attention is distracted away from use value and directed toward exchange value. Exchange value is no part of phusis, it is part of nomos. It is not a natural essence, it is a customary sign. This sign, as Herbert very often points out, has a strong, empirically observable tendency to float free of its referents. It tends, in other words, to invite idolatry. Money, for Herbert, is this idolized signifier (“None will believe this now, though money be / In us the same transplanted foolery”). In that case, “Decking the sense, as if it were to sell” would involve not the simple use of images and metaphors (the phrase itself is metaphorical) but their fetishistic adoration. It would involve a fascination with the letter and a neglect of the spirit. It would lead to a focus on the surface appearance of things and an idolatrous triumph of custom over nature. In fact, if we want to know what Herbert intends by “Decking the sense, as if it were to sell,” we could do worse than to look around us.

Notes 1. C.A. Patrides, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (London: J.M. Dent, 1974). Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry will be to this edition. 2. Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 180–1. 3. Francis Bacon, “Of Usury,” in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 421. 4. Cited in Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989), 170. 5. Thomas Bell, The Speculation of Usurie (London, 1596), Sig. C. 6. John Weemse, A Treatise of the Foure Degenerate Sonnes (London, 1636), 341.

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7. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 114. 8. Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 140–1. 9. Strier, Love Known, 221. 10. Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s “The Temple” (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 55. 11. See Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 3:172. 12. Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950), 41. 13. Calvin, Institutes 2.3.9. 14. Scott Manning Stevens points to a revealing difference in the churches’ iconography. Where Protestants tried to emphasize the emblematic nature of the heart, Catholic iconographers tended to emphasize its literal, material aspect: “Unlike the Protestant emblems of the heart, which were stylized to the point of being visual symbols of the heart rather than representations of it, the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Counter-Reformation iconography increasingly took on anatomical precision.” “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 263–82, quotation from 275. 15. Stevens reminds us that in Calvinism “the heart was a more passive receptor of God’s grace rather than an active participant in the process of redemption” (273). 16. Cited in Harold Toliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 22. 17. Vendler, Poetry, 182. 18. Marion White Singleton, God’s Courtier: Configuring a Different Grace in George Herbert’s “The Temple” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 87. 19. Shakespeare, sonnet 102, 3–4. 20. See David Hawkes, “Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in the Antitheatrical Controversy,” Studies in English Literature 39:2 (Spring 1999).

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Chapter 6

Work and the Gift: Notes toward an Investigation Scott Cutler Shershow

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n 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a law that ended the very idea of a federal “entitlement” to welfare benefits for the poor. Specifically, the law established stringent work requirements in return for welfare, and set strict new limits on the amount of time an individual family could receive cash relief. Many commentators have described in detail the debate leading up to this “reform” (or repeal) of welfare, and explored the racist and misogynist fantasies that inhabit its margins: the threatening specter of the so-called welfare queen, the endlessly repeated claims that welfare merely subsidizes crime and illegitimacy in inner-city ghettos.1 Here, I observe more simply how both the intention and the effect of the 1996 bill is, more than anything else, to compel welfare recipients to work—either directly (with so-called workfare) or indirectly (by removing a safety net of support). Indeed, at the time of this writing, the debate about the future of this so-called welfare reform focuses almost entirely on whether or not such work requirements should be made even more stringent. The plain fact that, as William Julius Wilson summarizes, there is “no conclusive evidence to support the prevailing common beliefs that welfare discourages individuals from working” (William Julius Wilson 163), indicates clearly that something else is at work in this obsessive concern for setting the poor to labor.

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I want to suggest, in fact, that the successful contemporary attack on welfare as a social entitlement is conditioned by a structure of thought that can be traced at least as far back as the early modern period and that I will call a double annulment of the gift in the name of work. It can be schematically summarized like this: all social subjects must labor to earn their “daily bread”; and the gift of charitable assistance must be given only to those who are absolutely unable to work. And then, by the same token, forcing all able-bodied social subjects to work (at least in part by means of these merely conditional gifts) is itself considered a collective Work for the “common good.” Thus, for example, in the vast discourse addressing the question of poverty in early modern England, it was conventional to insist, as William Perkins does, that people who “are strong, able to labour and doe somewhat for their living . . . are not to bee releeved” (Perkins 2:144); and also to celebrate how (as the famous Elizabethan “Homily against Idleness” puts it) “in this Realme of England, good and godly lawes have bin divers times made” for the care and control of the poor (Certain Sermons 253).2 This discursive structure, in which the ideas of working and giving are doubly connected, remains very much with us, as the debate that preceded the so-called welfare reform of 1996 indicates all too clearly. In welfare policy, writes James Q. Wilson in an often-cited article, “we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously,” because “not only is such conduct desirable in its own right, it appears now to be necessary if large improvements are to be made in those matters we consider problems” (James Q. Wilson 15). Now that such arguments have triumphed in the passage of the 1996 law, it is also common to celebrate, as President Clinton did the following year, that “welfare reform works!”3— his rhetorical figure precisely suggesting how the enforcement of work upon the poorest members of society is itself being considered a collective Work of social amelioration. In what follows, I engage with the early modern period in three slightly different ways: by briefly considering several fundamental historical narratives that shape the way we think about that period, by questioning the way we make use of history in the first place; and by discovering in a few specific early modern texts discursive structures that still limit contemporary political debates. I end by trying to glimpse a way beyond those limits with reference to several key concepts of contemporary theory. Any attempt to observe a continuity of socioeconomic attitudes between the early modern period and the present will necessarily reopen the vexed question, raised most famously by Max Weber and

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repeatedly debated by subsequent writers, of a fundamental shift or transition taking place at the dawn of modernity in which both the mode of production and a range of socioeconomic attitudes and practices were transformed. Such a shift, at least as commonly described, involves in particular the ideas and practices of working and giving. On the one hand, it has often been argued that a medieval ideal of “indiscriminate charity as a spiritual good” is replaced by “a concept of charity as a duty to be carried out circumspectly, distinguishing carefully between deserving and undeserving poor” (Woodbridge 276). On the other hand, as Weber in particular suggests, a medieval vision of work as no more than a means to the end of “daily bread” was transformed into a so-called work-ethic, an idealization of work as a god-given vocation or “calling,” a uniquely privileged site of spiritual self-fulfillment. Of course, a wide range of scholarship has questioned or at least complicated this familiar narrative of economic history. Even if one focuses on the unmistakable difference between medieval notions of holy poverty and the denunciations of the “sturdy beggar,” which are so frequent in later homiletic texts, one finds no definitive moment of change nor even a coherent linear progress from one extreme to the other. As Bronislaw Geremek observes, “the writing of St. John Chrysostom and the imperial legislation of Justinian [fourth to sixth centuries] scrupulously distinguish between those among the poor who are capable of work and those who are not”; and “Merovingian society [sixth to eighth centuries] was hostile and contemptuous in its attitude toward the poor”; so that “it was not until the eleventh and twelfth centuries . . . that poverty began to be recognized as a spiritual value” (Geremek 16–17). Correspondingly, as Michel Mollat concludes, “the idea of the pauper as an image of the suffering Christ remained alive” through a wide range of humanist and reformation discourse in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries (Mollat 299). Indeed, I would suggest that at least one fundamental vision of charity survives virtually unchanged from early Christianity to the present moment: an affirmation of something that might be described, in necessarily paradoxical terms, as the gift that is not a gift: a movement from one social subject to another that reinscribes both in a circuit of exchange. Thus, for example, in the fourth century, Saint John Chrysostom argues, “God appointed almsgiving not only for the needy to be nourished, but also for the providers to receive benefit” (Chrysostom 141–2); in the seventeenth century, popular sermonist Isaac Barrow argues that God allows economic inequality so that “some mens industry and patience might exercised by their

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poverty” and “other men by their wealth should have ability of practising justice and charity” (Barrow 95–6); and in the late twentieth century, Marvin Olasky (advisor to President George W. Bush and coiner of the term “compassionate conservatism”) advocates what he calls an “effective compassion” that always “discriminates between those who are truly hungry and those who are looking for a free lunch” (Olasky, Renewing 157). Then and now, in other words, charity is affirmed only insofar as it involves both giver and receiver in a structure of mutual obligation and mutual benefit. To be sure, as Jacques Derrida argues in a different context, an absolutely “pure” gift is in any case strictly impossible, for even the very awareness of giving or receiving necessarily opens up a certain symbolic structure in which questions of debt and restitution are always potentially activated. Nevertheless, the history of charity seems to evoke not merely this negative (im)possibility of giving but, rather, a positive refusal of what Derrida calls “the injunction or the order of the gift,” a fatal unwillingness even to recognize “what giving wants to say” (Derrida, Given Time 30). Such observations also, of course, invite consideration of the famous hypothesis, first formulated by Marcel Mauss, that archaic human cultures around the world were fundamentally grounded in practices of mutual gift-giving and ritualistic expenditure, instead of in the production and conservation of scarce resources (as in modern capitalist societies). The fascination that this possibility of a “gift economy” continues to exert in anthropology, history, literary studies, and even philosophy can hardly be overestimated. Here again, to entertain such a possibility always entails some assumption of a moment of historical rupture or transition, some fundamental historical shift from gift economy to market economy. For Mauss, it was “the Semitic, Greek and Roman civilizations” who “after a veritable, great, and admirable revolution, went beyond . . . this economy of the gift” (Mauss 54). Subsequent historians, by contrast, are in no precise agreement about where this alleged turning point of Western economic history should be located. Lester K. Little, for example, takes Marc Bloch’s identification of A.D. 1020 as a dividing line between two different ages of feudalism, and understands this moment as also one of transition from gift economy to profit economy (Bloch 60–1; Little 3–18). Other historians, not surprisingly, relate the hypothetical transition from gift to market exchange with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Jean-Christophe Agnew, in an influential study of the historical development of the market both as literal practice and as idea, describes the medieval marketplace as a fluid

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combination of gift and commodity exchange in which the latter only gradually comes to predominate.4 Natalie Zemon Davis joins many other historians in describing the sixteenth century as one with “special consequences for gift practices” (Davis 22): a period in which gift and market exchange coexisted, and in which their relation was at once closer and more sharply divided than it is today. In this period, there was a particular “sensitivity to the relation between gift and sale: and to “the border between them”; and it was always possible to move “back and forth between the gift mode and the sale mode, while always remembering the distinction between them” (44). Since then, “gift-systems have contracted and expanded”; yet today, she suggests, “the dream returns of a world restored, replenished, even expanded in generosity” (132). In such arguments, the gift economy manages to remain in focus at once as an ever-vanishing horizon and as a kind of ever-present harbinger of its own imminent return. In the end, however, Davis’s argument merely replicates what I have tried to describe elsewhere as a temporal and conceptual ambiguity in Mauss’s own theory, which positions the gift, at once, as an absolute historical Other of the commodity and as something that still exists in contemporary society—in the form of “well-organized work,” “reciprocating generosity,” and “habits of ‘aristocratic extravagance’ ” (Mauss 83, 68; Shershow “Of Sinking” 474–8). Therefore, just as the practices of gift and counter-gift in archaic cultures can be interpreted as a rudimentary system of economic exchange, so it can be claimed of modern capitalism (as George Gilder, one of its most extravagant apologists does) that “giving is [its] vital impulse and moral center” (Gilder 30). And those who follow this hypothetical ideal of the gift toward a world merely “expanded in generosity,” continue to insist, as Mauss does at the end of his essay, that “the individual must work. He should be forced to rely upon himself rather than upon others. . . . Over-generosity, or communism, would be . . . harmful to himself and to society” (83). Arguments such as these perhaps make clear why, as James Carrier suggests, the idea of the gift economy remains particularly attractive today, following “the apparent fall from favor of the Marxian framework” (Carrier viii). Now, the work of contemporary conservative scholars—whose relentless critique of federally funded welfare programs significantly influenced the 1996 welfare bill—is grounded in an analogous but different historical narrative. For example, both Olasky and Gertrude Himmelfarb tell another story about the loss of the gift—a story, this time, of how organized, state-sponsored welfare put an end to good

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old-fashioned charity. Specifically, both Olasky and Himmelfarb use histories of charitable relief, in America and England respectively, to underwrite their polemical critique of contemporary policy. Indeed, everything these writers advocate regarding the present (that America must cut welfare benefits and force recipients to work), follows from what they claim are fundamental truths about human nature that are knowable as manifest in the past. Thus the projects of both writers are necessarily circular; for the people whose ideas and actions they celebrate in their historical narratives—the people who wrote about or tried to alleviate poverty in American or English history—were, on their own evidence, always making precisely the very same moral case that Olasky and Himmelfarb reiterate today. Accordingly, this discourse can do nothing more than endlessly reaffirm the most impotent of conclusions: that, as Charles Murray puts it, “the underclass we have always had with us” (Murray xiv), and that, as Irving Kristol asserts, “we are not going to abolish” poverty, injustice, or “any of those things” (Kristol 294). One turns to history in order to learn, so to speak, that there is nothing to be learned from history. For example, Olasky discusses how leaders of the so-called scientific charity movement in nineteenth-century America such as Josephine Shaw Lowell and S. Humphreys Gurteen campaigned against the practice of “outdoor” relief (i.e., cash paid to support people in their own homes, as in modern welfare), in favor of the socalled workhouse or poorhouse. Such a policy is, of course, entirely faithful to the theoretical arguments put forth by the contemporary Right. As Himmelfarb summarizes elsewhere, the workhouse “offered a means of determining who was a ‘pauper’ and thus eligible for relief,” and, as she memorably puts it, physically separated the pauper from “the working poor, thus preventing him from ‘infecting’ them.” And, most of all, the humiliating and draconian conditions of the workhouse ensured that anyone but the truly desperate “would be loath to apply for relief.” Thus the workhouse was an essential component of what Himmelfarb describes admiringly as a strategy of “separation, segregation, differentiation,” and “deterrence” (Himmelfarb, “Moral Responsibility” 4). The work of these Victorian welfare reformers had a significant effect on American social policy of the time, and as Olasky summarizes, “By the mid-1880s, outdoor relief was out and the works of Gurteen and Lowell were in the bookstores” (Tragedy 80). And yet, in Olasky’s own account, Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century, following decades of such separation and deterrence of paupers, were still repeatedly warning, just as Olasky continues to do today and in almost exactly the

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same words, against the “indiscriminate charity” that rewarded immorality and fostered poverty (e.g., Olasky, Tragedy 109). In other words, Olasky describes a history in which everything is always changing, and everything is always the same. In his account, people are always practicing exactly what he preaches (i.e., setting the poor to labor and deterring them from seeking relief ); and yet also always decrying, exactly as he still does, that there was and is too little moral discrimination in charitable relief. Himmelfarb, similarly, moves via a trilogy of learned scholarly books—The Idea of Poverty (1984), Poverty and Compassion (1991), and The De-Moralization of Society (1995)—from a detailed historical account of nineteenth-century English social theory to a fierce moral critique of contemporary American society. She too, however, manages to disguise the self-canceling quality of her own argument only by staying one step ahead of herself at each moment, and by mobilizing alternating narratives of decline and progress, success and failure. When Himmelfarb discusses Adam Smith, for example, she asserts, “A close reading of The Wealth of Nations itself suggests that political economy as Smith understood it was part of a larger moral philosophy, a new kind of moral economy” (Idea of Poverty 48). Still, she also concedes that Smith’s famous image of the “invisible hand” (an impersonal economic mechanism by which private acts of self-interest are harmonized into collective wealth) made it possible for many of Smith’s followers and successors to efface the moral core of his vision and simply stress the self-interest. Then, about a hundred years later, as she argues in her next book, Alfred Marshall’s “neoclassical synthesis” in economics “restored [its] original moral dimension” and “ ‘moralized’ both society and political economy” (Poverty and Compassion 303). But then, Marshall’s neoclassical economics itself evidently fails in this moralizing project, much as Smith apparently failed to convey his underlying moral intentions to his readers. For today, a little more than a century after Marshall, and even though his neoclassical model of economics still dominates the field, society has once again been, as Himmelfarb claims in the title of her next book, “de-moralized.” In this book, Himmelfarb also formulates her version of the argument summarized here, arguing that the system of welfare fosters “dependency,” encourages sexual immorality and undermines the “work-ethic” among the poor. “Having made the most valiant attempt to ‘objectify’ the problem of poverty, to see it as the product of impersonal economic and social forces,” Himmelfarb now argues, “we are discovering that the economic and social aspects are inseparable from the moral and personal ones” (De-moralization

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242; emphasis added). But what she calls here a discovery is, if one accepts her historical narrative, really a recovery—of an alleged moral truth that is somehow always both succeeding and failing, being ignored or forgotten, and yet being industriously revived. This happens one more time in Himmelfarb’s own prescriptive conclusions, which themselves revive, restore, and rejoin all those constantly misunderstood and too-soon forgotten ideas of her beloved Victorian reformers; and thus, at the end of her long road of historical scholarship, Himmelfarb has herself learned precisely nothing, for she is still preaching exactly the same thing that they did. All this perhaps also indicates, here again, how contemporary and early modern economic thought share both a certain fascination with the gift and a certain inability, as it were, to think the idea of giving all the way to its completion. Let me thus consider a few brief examples from the homiletic literature of early modern England as a way of glimpsing this failure. An obvious starting part would be the intense new interest, in Reformation theology, in an ideal of God’s “free gift of grace.” I suggest that Protestant discourse encounters an absolute and symmetrical contradiction when it attempts to move typologically between the divine gift of salvation and the human gift of charity. The fundamental idea at issue here, of course, is that God’s grace can never be earned or deserved by a human subject. If we receive grace, it is not a reward for our deeds; rather, as William Tyndale describes it in a celebrated passage, our good deeds merely indicate or express a grace already given: I do good frely for so is my nature as a good tree bringeth forthe good frute and an evyll tree evyll frute. . . . What so ever good thinge is in us that is gyven us frely withoute our deservynge or merytes. (Tyndale C5r–C6r)

In this model, we receive as a gift a kind of second “nature” that becomes our own, and then express that nature in the form of good deeds, which, most typically, are themselves understood to take the form of gifts. As Henry Smith puts it, writing a few years after Tyndale, and echoing the same scriptural image, the kingdome of heaven belongs unto those that harboureth strangers, cloatheth the naked, feedeth the hungry, comforts the sicke, and doth perfourme such charitable actes of compassion: yet not as the papist doth to account it meritorious, but as a faithfull christian to doe it in faith . . . It is not enough for us onelie to bear fair leaves, but we must also bring foorth good fruit. (Smith 4–5)

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In one sense, then, God’s gift of grace is understood to produce, as its proper effect, a typological repetition of itself. As Tyndale writes, “By faith we receyve of God and by love we shede out again. And that must we do frely” (Cv–C2r). Nevertheless, as may be illustrated once again with any number of texts, the charitable giving with which humanity echoes and confirms the divine plenitude, must only be given to worthy objects. Thus, the famous Protestant reformer Martin Bucer enjoins that in giving charity one should carefully distinguish between those “who lacke in deade, and be not able to relieve their ow[n]e lacke,” and those “who, when thei may by their owne honest labour mayntaine themself, will not labour” (Bucer 12, 10). In all this, the Reformation thought of the Gift reveals (as Jean-Luc Nancy observes in another context), how the logic of the absolute violates the absolute (Nancy 4). No one can deserve God’s grace; therefore, God gives only to the undeserving. Of human charity, however, the reverse is true. To be like God, to express by one’s own gift the free gift of God’s grace, is also to be precisely unlike God. We must and must not give “freely.” By extension, Tyndale’s counterintuitive logic, and his ingenious attempt to explain why good people still perform good deeds even outside every conceivable economy of salvation, reveals itself obliquely in contemporary discourses on welfare and work. In the discourse of “welfare reform,” it is always assumed that the performance of work produces the moral subject and that the moral subject expresses or manifests itself (or, most precisely, indicates its presence) by its willingness to work. Thus participants in so-called workfare—like prisoners condemned to “hard labor” as a rehabilitative and punitive end in itself—are denied literal wages for their work; so that, in working, they do not primarily produce or earn but, rather, merely signify their potential for “personal responsibility.” Consider, for further example, how the Geneva Bible misses no opportunity to translate or interpret virtually any reference to an offering or sacrifice in the Hebrew scriptures as a “free gift.” When Moses enjoins the children of Israel to “Take from among you an offering unto the Lorde” (Ex. 35:5), the headnote paraphrases this line as: “The free gifts are required.” But of course, a gift required cannot, in principle, be “free”; so that this commandment inescapably neutralizes itself in the process of its own expression. In another similar passage, the children of Israel are enjoined to “keepe the feast of weeks unto the Lord thy God, even a free gift of thine hand, which thou shalt give unto the Lorde thy God, as the Lord thy God hath

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blessed thee” (Deut. 16:10). The Hebrew word translated as “free gift” is a term in Jewish law denoting something “which is given of one’s own accord when there is no obligation to do so, as would be the case in tithes, vows, sacrifices prescribed by the law” (Hartman 819). Tyndale translates the word as “frewilofferinge”; and most subsequent English translations retain this unusual adjectival sense of “free will.” The Good News Bible, for example, has: “Celebrate the Harvest Festival, to honor the LORD your God, by bringing him a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing he has given you.” The relative clarity of this recent translation emphasizes, by contrast, the ambiguity of the Geneva version. In the latter, the gift or offering is enjoined to be “as God blessed thee,” a phrase that seems to denote both causality and proportion, and by which we are enjoined to give, so to speak, both because the Lord has blessed us, and in the same amount that the Lord has blessed us. A contemporary Jewish translation makes it: “Then you shall observe the festival of Shavuos for HASHEM your God; to the extent of what your hand can offer, HASHEM your God will have blessed you” (Herczeg). Here, the use of the future perfect tense in the final clause indicates the same ambiguity in a slightly different way, expressing in terms of time a calculation of quantity. Either way, the passage describes two acts of giving linked in a closed circle of exchange and proportional reciprocation, and thus commands something (a “free” gift, a gift transcending all obligation to give) that the act of commandment itself makes impossible. Such observations indicate, in at least a preliminary or partial way, how early modern and contemporary thought share a certain inability to think the idea of the gift, an inability that continues fatally to limit the political possibilities available to us today. Let me also suggest before closing, however, that either historical narrative I briefly mentioned at the beginning—that is, the idea of a shift in attitudes toward poverty at the birth of modernity, or the idea of a fundamental transition from gift-giving to market-exchange—can be radically rethought in terms of Georges Bataille’s theoretical opposition between “restricted” and “general” economies. The former term refers to the economic logic of scarcity and productive self-interest that is characteristic not only of capitalism but of all that modern thought understands under the very name “economy” itself; the latter term attempts to name what Bataille suggests is the “general” or universal motion of energy in the universe itself, an economy of surplus and excess, grounding itself neither in exchange nor even in mere giving, but rather in absolute loss.

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To be sure, Bataille’s thought in this matter first emerges in large part from his study of Mauss, and he similarly sometimes assumes an anthropological history in which the “great and free forms of unproductive social expenditure” (festival, potlatch, sacrifice, and the like) that prevailed in archaic cultures were gradually superseded by the restricted economic values of thrift, prudence, and economic calculation (Bataille, Visions 123–4). But even Bataille himself eventually came to reject as “ridiculous” all such forms of anthropological or historical nostalgia, and to realize that “we can only go further, without imagining for a moment the possibility of a going back” (Bataille, Accursed Share 3:228). At these frontiers of his thought, and especially as drawn out and reinterpreted by subsequent theorists such as Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, the restricted and general economies reemerge not as discrete historical alternatives, nor even as two poles of a spectrum of reciprocity; but, rather, as an irreducible ontological relation. The economy of surplus and loss is understood as “general” because it denotes the economic condition of the universe grasped in its greatest possible generality, a condition figured, for Bataille, by a sun that “gives without ever receiving” (Accursed Share 1:28) and that continually expends far more heat and light than could ever be utilized. The economy of scarcity is understood as restricted, similarly, because it refers to the economic condition of singular beings, who— considered as individuals—are indeed “constantly short of resources,” and “eternally needy” (Accursed Share 1:23). Yet the very being of such individuals (as Nancy suggests in an extended reading and reinterpretation of Bataille) is always and only a being-in-common; that is, such beings literally are only “to the extent that they are exposed, presented, or offered to one another” (Nancy 58). Thus finite beings, who under one aspect must live a restricted economy of needs and exertions, investment and return, under another aspect exist only as they are exposed to a community where their inescapable neediness is grasped as their access to a collective wealth that is, if not quite infinite, then at least always without limit. Let me try to clarify this further by very briefly considering Derrida’s well-known essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” one of the seminal statements of what would later be somewhat awkwardly known as post-structuralism. Derrida offers an astonishingly simple yet unanswerable critique of one of the founding gestures of structuralism, Levi-Strauss’s explanation of his method in the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked. Here, Levi-Strauss explains why he has not collected every possible version of the basic South American Indian myth he intends to

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analyze. He concedes, first, that “although the book is carefully documented, I have disregarded certain sources of information, and some other have proved inaccessible,” and acknowledges that “further information already available or as yet unpublished will affect my interpretations” (6–7). But then he goes on to suggest, with a certain audacity, If critics reproach me with not having carried out an exhaustive inventory of South American myths before analyzing them, they are making a grave mistake about the nature and function of these documents. The total body of myth belonging to a given community is comparable to its speech. Unless the population dies out physically or morally, this totality is never complete. You might as well criticize a linguist for compiling the grammar of a language without having complete records of the words pronounced since the language came into being, and without knowing what will be said in it during the future part of its existence. Experience proves that a linguist can work out the grammar of a given language from a remarkable small number of sentences, compared to all those he might in theory have collected. (Levi-Strauss 7)

Derrida points out, however, that Levi-Strauss has here given two distinctly different reasons for renouncing totalization. On the one hand, it has simply not been practical to collect all versions of the myth, for there are too many of them, and too many obstacles to their collection. Totalization is possible in principle, but not in practice. On the other hand, Levi-Strauss also claims that the many versions of this central myth form a system like a language that is open-ended and that continues to evolve even as the analysis goes forward. In this case, to collect every version of the myth would be not just difficult, but impossible in principle. Even more importantly, however, such totalization would also be quite useless, because one can recreate the mythic system as a whole with only a relatively few examples, the way a linguist can recreate the grammar of a language using only a few of its infinite number of possible utterances. But Derrida’s point is that even as Levi-Strauss glimpses the absolute impossibility or uselessness of totalization within an open-ended structure such as language, he never quite leaves behind a certain classical empiricism—which, by contrast, endlessly strives to grasp (or at least continues to regret its failure to grasp) the totality of an object of study. For empiricism grasps its object, not as a field of openness or incompletion, but merely as “a finite richness which it can never master” (Derrida, “Structure” 289).

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For my purposes here, there is one thing to emphasize in Derrida’s justly celebrated critique. In the case of classical empiricism, the finitude of being—that is, quite simply, the material limits of time, energy, or awareness that finite beings inevitably confront—is grasped as a reproach. There is too much, more than we can say or do, no matter how hard we work. In the case of that open-ended structure whose paradigm is language, by contrast, a finite number of rules produce an infinite number of utterances. A language has a relatively simple grammar that can be reconstructed from just a few sentences; yet the language as a whole could, in principle, never be exhausted. In this case, the apparent limits of the system (its finitude) serve precisely as the access to its limitlessness. Without insisting on a precise correlation, it is also clear that these two ways of conceiving the limits of totalization correspond broadly to the restricted and general economies. Under the aspect of the restricted economy, scarcity itself, the finite limits of ontical (mortal) being, are at once a perpetual reproach and an irresistible goad. Because there might not be enough, we must each grab what we can, producing an aggregate of selfishness that ensures the endless repetition of the same scarcity and the same response, the fundamental economic vicious circle. Under the aspect of the general economy, by contrast, the fact that there is always more than I can have, more than I can say or write, is grasped not as my frailty or my failure, but as the very ground of my beingin-common: that is, my access to the open-ended limitlessness whose name is community. Finally, and to do no more than put this another way, the idea of a general economy invites us simply to uncover or recognize something about the world we really live in, in which the community always in principle has access to value with no predetermined limit; and where the gift therefore need not even be isolated from a collective life that can always and only be shared. Indeed, contemporary right-wing ideologues, even as they attack all forms of organized welfare and seek to condemn us all to lives at hard labor, seem frequently to arrive at the very brink of such insights, which, however, they simply refuse to acknowledge. Olasky, for example, denounces all forms of welfare that come from the government (as opposed to private charity) precisely because, he says, government assistance is often seen as flowing from a practically inexhaustible source. Like air or water or sunshine, assistance comes to be regarded as a right, as a permanent pension implying no obligation. (Olasky, Renewing 159)

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Olasky himself is unable to see what his own words plainly suggest: that the truly collective gift is indeed “practically” (i.e., quite literally, in practice) inexhaustible. These rather brief summaries of a complex political and theoretical landscape remain necessarily incomplete. But, for the moment, and at the very least, I join my observations here with those of many other contemporary scholars and theorists who look to the past not in order to find reasons to think and do what we have always thought and done, but rather, to glimpse the negative possibility of that which has so far remained unthinkable; and even, perhaps, to begin to think otherwise.

Notes 1. Among the many recent books and essays discussing the recent assault on welfare in America, see Fraser and Gordon, Handler, Katz, Sidel, and William Julius Wilson. For my own theoretical critique of the underlying logic of welfare, from the point of view of the same theoretical concepts employed here, see Michaelsen and Shershow. 2. For recent studies considering the general question of poverty and its relief in early modern England see Carroll and Woodbridge. 3. “ ‘I think it’s fair to say the debate is over: We know now that welfare reform works,’ Clinton told a group of business people and former welfare recipients in St. Louis” (Shogren A1). 4. See Agnew. For a critique of Agnew and other scholars who discuss the connection of market and theater in early modern England see Shershow, “Idols of the Marketplace.”

Works Cited Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Barrow, Isaac. The Duty and Reward of Bounty to the Poor [1677]. 2nd ed. London: 1677. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Theory and History of Literature. Ed. Alan Stoekl. Vol. 14. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1985. ——. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Trans. Robert Hurley. 3 vols. (in 2). New York: Zone Books, 1991. The Bible and Holy Scriptures. Geneva: 1560. Bloch, Marc Léopold Benjamin. Feudal Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

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Bucer, Martin. A Treatise. How, by the Worde of God, Christian mens Almose ought to be Distributed. London: 1577. Carrier, James G. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700. London: Routledge, 1995. Carroll. William C. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches in the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory. London: 1623. Chrysostom, St. John. On Repentence and Almsgiving. Trans. Gus George Christo. The Fathers of the Church. Ed. Thomas P. Halton. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 278–93. ——. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. “ ‘Dependency’ Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State.” In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology. Ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997, 618–33. Geremek, Bronislaw. Poverty: A History. Trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. New York: Bantam, 1981. Good News Bible: Today’s English Version. 2nd ed. Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1992. Handler, Joel F. The Poverty of Welfare Reform. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Hartman, Louis F. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible. New York: McGrawHill, 1963. Herczeg, Yysrael Isser Zvi. The Torah: with Rashi’s Commentary. Brooklyn, NY: Mesoarh, 1997. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Knopf, 1984. ——. Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians. New York: Vintage, 1991. ——. “Moral Responsibility: The British Experience.” Points of Light: New Approaches to Ending Welfare Dependency. Ed. Tamar Ann Mehuron. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991, 1–7. ——. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Knopf, 1995. Katz, Michael B. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. Revised ed. New York: Pantheon, 1989. Kristol, Irving. “A Capitalist Conception of Justice.” Ideological Voices: An Anthology in Modern Political Ideas. Ed. Paul Schumaker et al. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Little, Lester K. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. London: P. Elek, 1978. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990. Michaelsen, Scott and Scott C. Shershow. “Practical Politics at the Limits of Community: The Cases of Affirmative Action and Welfare.” PMC 12:2 (March 2002). Mollat, Michel. The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Murray, Charles. “Preface.” In The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington, DC: Regnery. 1992. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Olasky, Marvin. The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1992. ——. Renewing American Compassion. New York: Free Press, 1996. Perkins, William. The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience. In The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins. Vol. 2. London: 1631. Shershow, Scott Cutler. “Idols of the Marketplace: Rethinking the Economic Determination of Renaissance Drama.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 26 (1995): 1–27. ——. “Of Sinking: Marxism and the ‘General’ Economy.” Critical Inquiry 27 (Spring 2001): 468–92. Shogren, Elizabeth. “Welfare Reform Is Working, Clinton Says.” Los Angeles Times August 13, 1997, A:15. Sidel, Ruth. Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War on the Poor. New York: Penguin, 1996. Smith, Henrie. The Poore Mans Teares. London: 1592. Tyndale, William. A path way i[n]to the holy scripture. London: 1536. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1992. Wilson, James Q. “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy.” The Public Interest 81 (Fall 1985): 3–16. Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Random House, 1996. Woodbridge, Linda. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Chapter 7

Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of T W E L F T H N I G H T Va l e r i e F o r m a n

I

n the final moments of Mark Norman and Tom Stoppard’s film, Shakespeare in Love, Will Shakespeare and Viola deLesseps conceive the plot for Twelfth Night. This new comedy is intended to recuperate Shakespeare’s loss of a love object—Viola deLesseps herself. In this fictive account, Twelfth Night would serve to disavow the very economic forces at the film’s center—that is, those that produce the need to marry the wealthy merchant’s daughter (Viola) to the financially strapped aristocrat (Lord Wessex) in order to save the Lord’s investment in the Americas. Thus this Twelfth Night is imagined to rewrite Shakespeare in Love in perhaps the same way that the actual Twelfth Night writes over the merchant forces central to one of its own sources, Gl’Ingannati. Moreover, even as the film foregrounds the economics of the theater in Shakespeare’s need for 50 pounds in order to become Burbage’s partner, the film marks the separation of the economic sphere from that of the aesthetic and the affective. Ironically it does so by having the very marker of that separation also serve as the means by which Shakespeare gets the money he needs. Shakespeare acquires the 50 pounds by winning a wager that a play can show us the “very truth and nature of love”; “culture” and love with it are elevated from the base economic on which they depend and are even purified of it. Thus, while Shakespeare does not get to

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keep the girl (who is shipped off to America), the film’s losses are recuperated through these twin elisions of the economic forces that provide the (re)sources for both the plot and the institution of the theater. Twelfth Night is thus an appropriate choice for the plot’s imagined future; for this comedy depends on the disavowal not only of its literary source, but also of its historical and material contexts, especially, I will argue, the economic forces of nascent capitalism. In his discussion of the limits of comedy, David Kastan argues, “according to the generic definitions derived from the late classical commentaries on Terence, comic action—unlike tragic—is to be feigned rather than drawn from history, testifying to comedy’s freedom to shape its fiction into comforting patterns of wish fulfillment”(576). This distinction provides useful insight into the workings of Twelfth Night, a play that thematizes this distinction by conspicuously showing how its action depends on a disavowal (i.e., a simultaneous registering and denying) of any historical and material context. It is not simply that the play is not drawn from history, but that the play’s action disavows its relation to history through its explicit reliance on convention and counterfeiting. I want then to describe the play not as utopic, but as anti-topic. Rather than creating an idealized reality (a utopia), the play rejects the constraints of reality. The play’s seeming absence of any tangible obstacle that would obstruct the satisfaction of its characters’ desires is thus interconnected to its refusal of material concerns.1 To prevent these submerged concerns from coming to the surface, the play does however immediately create an obstacle. By taking on a disguise and, more specifically, by cross-dressing, Viola creates the necessary obstacles—Olivia falling in love with a woman and Viola/Cesario’s frustrated desire for Orsino—that the comedy must overcome. Kastan’s discussion of Terence’s distinction between comedy and tragedy, then, can provide a framework for thinking about how this play is structured. Viola’s cross-dressing serves as a displacement for material concerns. In particular, it displaces concerns about economic shifts and the loss of place even, I will argue, as it also registers them. I want then to suggest a modification of this emphasis upon comedy as wish fulfillment. I would emphasize the workings of “cultural fantasy” to signify that wish fulfillment is always a negotiation dialectically engaged with conventions and with material and historical limitations, even if those wishes depend on disavowing those constitutive limitations.2 This dialectic structures the text and it does so through forms of counterfeiting. To counterfeit usually means to imitate or to

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copy; yet etymologically, “to counterfeit” means to make in opposition or contrast. Counterfeits inevitably then raise the question of how something that imitates or copies also works against that which it imitates. Inherent in counterfeiting is a tension, a pull in opposing directions. The cultural fantasy of Twelfth Night produces counterfeits that work in two ways. First, as objects they both register and deny economic forces and the losses (both real and imagined) they produce. Second, as subjects they disavow material constraints so as to create the illusion of autonomy. Thus the characters’ initial isolation from each other gets rewritten as a potentially positive and defining attribute—as autonomy, a condition in which individuals imagine themselves to be free from history and untethered by the very material conditions that enable their subjectivity.

Counterfeit Investments Disguise allows Viola to circumvent material restrictions; yet it simultaneously embroils her within the play’s financial economy. While Viola’s cross-dressing has been the focus of much recent critical attention, little attention has been paid to the transaction that leads to it. In the lines that precede Viola’s decision to impersonate a eunuch, she not only makes a request for the captain’s assistance; she makes him a generous offer: There is a fair behavior in thee, Captain; And though that nature with a beauteous wall Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee I will believe thou hast a mind that suits With this thy fair and outward character. I prithee (and I’ll pay thee bounteously) Conceal me what I am and be my aid For such disguise as haply shall become The form of my intent. I’ll serve this Duke; Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him. (1.2.47–55)

As Viola is about to take on a disguise of her own, she appropriately considers whether the Captain’s external beauty matches his mind or is itself a form of deception, a disguise. Though she says she believes his outward character is supported by a similarly suited mind, by the end of her solicitation, the relationship between his outward character and the interior mind that should guarantee it is perhaps no longer

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at issue. Subordinated in this dialogue (literally placed in parentheses in the first folio) is the information that she will pay the Captain and pay him bounteously. The medium of their exchange shifts from courtesy to money, a shift expressed in the displacement of “prithee” (a shortened form of pray thee) by “pay thee.” Does the payment displace reputation as the guarantee for the captain’s behavior? Such a displacement remains marginal; the parentheses seem to keep the financial transaction bracketed off from the ethical concerns. While one might say that payment and courtesy are forms of solicitation representative of different social orders, they coexist here though not on equal terms. Grammatically, the financial offer is suppressed; but from within the parentheses, it still puts pressure on courtesy’s “beauteous wall.” And it does so precisely because Viola’s purchase of clothing is a literal (in)vestment that functions as a rematerialization of the disavowed expenditure. Prior to the late sixteenth century, “to invest” did not yet have the now dominant economic meaning. The OED offers the following definitions, all tied more closely to clothing (i.e., to vestments) than to money: “to clothe, robe, or envelop (a person) in or with a garment or article of clothing”; “to clothe or endue with attributes, qualities or a character”; “to establish in the possession of any office, position, property”; “to endow or furnish with power, authority, or privilege”; and “to clothe with or in the insignia of an office, hence, with the dignity itself”; “to install in an office or rank with the customary rites or ceremonies.” All of these meanings are in some way relevant here, but they exist in tension with the newly minted economic meaning of “investment.” While the play de-emphasizes its merchant roots—through Viola’s and Sebastian’s parentage (noble in this play, but mercantile in its most immediate dramatic source, Gl’Ingannati), through the play’s highly conventionalized romantic and courtly pursuits, and through the highly affective qualities of Viola’s disguise—they find their way back through the cracks in the beauteous wall of Viola’s disguise. For an early modern audience, perhaps no object would appear as steeped in the economy as does clothing. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have convincingly argued, clothes were themselves a significant form of currency (i.e., an accepted medium of exchange) in the early modern period; they were circulated, detached, reassembled, and pawned in a society without a functioning modern banking system or much liquidity. The circulation of clothing for economic purposes, they argue, was not an exception but the norm; people of every class stored up wealth in clothes.3

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Clothing was also at the center of debates about England’s economic stability in the period. Wool cloth was England’s primary export, but it was becoming increasingly unpopular both abroad and at home and was often blamed for England’s negative trade imbalance and, thus, for the emptying of its coffers. This unpopularity stimulated the search for new markets for wool and thus led to the development of new trade routes (Chaudhuri; Fisher; Fumerton). The increasing importance of fashion, the subject of much anxiety in the period, was also stimulated by, and was a catalyst for, these expanding markets (Mukerji). Furthermore, as the available style of clothes and the fabrics out of which they were made proliferated, domestic production itself was stimulated and transformed (Thirsk). As a result of these changes, there was an increased speed in the circulation of clothes—both new and secondhand—and of other goods from newly tapped foreign markets.4 Clothes were thus enmeshed in the economy. This link is evident in the very extension of the range of meanings of the term “investment” from something one does with clothing to something one does with money, an extension that takes place in the early part of the seventeenth century. To invest begins to mean not only to clothe or bestow in an office, but “to employ money in the purchase of anything from which profit [or interest] is expected.” Perhaps the term picked up economic resonances in part from clothing’s centrality to the economy. Significantly, the OED’s first two examples of the commercial usage of “to invest” and the first three of “investment” are from the East India Company’s correspondence, and most of the examples through the eighteenth century are explicitly about overseas trade. The OED speculates, furthermore, that the economic meaning emerges in English through the Levant or Turkey Company prior to the East India Company. So the new financial meaning of “invest” is a result of developing markets in foreign trade in which clothing played a complicated part. The explicit etymological connection between clothing and the outlay of money in the expectation of a profit lies in their shared transformative possibilities: to “invest” is to give “the capital another ‘form.’ ”5 To invest, then, is to dress money in a new set of clothes— to disguise it or rematerialize it. Money, then, can alter its form (or the form of the person who possesses it); it can become unrecognizable, can become the source of mistake and of misrecognition. The etymology suggests that fundamental to capitalism is not simply increase or accumulation, but a transformation. Counterfeiting is thus inherent in capitalism, not just symptomatic. Capitalism depends on

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investment, an abstract and dematerializing process that disguises and rematerializes itself in the accumulation of capital. Twelfth Night highlights the insecurity built into capitalism by making the content of the investment itself a disguise, a form of counterfeiting. The difference between the new and old meanings of “investment” marks a fundamental shift in expectations about guarantees, one that corresponds to the shift from “prithee” to “pay thee.” To dress in the proper “livery” or accouterments (e.g., Malvolio’s imagined branched velvet gown) is a way of securing one’s place within a clearly defined and rigid hierarchy marked by ritual and stable, visible signifiers. To employ money in the expectation of a profit is also to seek a “place” within a social order, not one marked by a clear hierarchy, but marked instead by mobility and unpredictability. It is to seek a profit through a risky alteration. The additional meaning of “investment” thus registers a shift in the shape of subjectivity itself. Viola’s exchange with the Captain is thus haunted by the economic forces it seeks to suppress. Moreover, her disguise masquerades as an attempt to restore and resecure a social order disturbed by the very material conditions that the disguise signifies. Put another way, the disguise both conceals and registers the very material conditions that enable it and the play as a whole. While the play goes out of its way to disavow economic conditions (even in this scene), it cannot avoid traces of them.

Material Dispossessions These tensions structure the characters’ relationships to objects in general. Curiously, though there is much exchange in this play, there is very little acquisitiveness. Like participants in a game of hot potato, the inhabitants of Illyria seem to want to avoid being tainted by objects. Nobody claims any of them as his or her own; instead the characters try to give them away. Olivia tries to return a ring that was not even given to her. Malvolio leaves this same ring on the ground and Viola/Cesario only reluctantly acknowledges its significance for her/him. Olivia tries to give Viola/Cesario a miniature of herself. We don’t know whether or not s/he accepts it. Finally, Orsino gives Viola/Cesario a jewel to deliver to Olivia, but it is never mentioned again. Malvolio seems the least ambivalent about objects. Perhaps these disappearing objects resurface in his fantasy. The forgotten jewel reappears as the “rich jewel” Malvolio imagines when he strokes his steward’s chain, and one could argue that the miniature reappears as

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Olivia’s hand—her “c’s,” “u’s,” and “t’s.” What was initially an innocuous counterfeit (i.e., a miniature portrait of Olivia), then, becomes the threatening counterfeit letter that binds Malvolio to his aspirations. After Malvolio reads the epistle of love (supposedly written by Olivia, but actually forged by Maria) Maria announces to Olivia that Malvolio is “sure possessed,” and as Jonathan Goldberg observes, he is “entirely possessed by the letter” (217). It speaks him. Malvolio becomes merely the letter’s vehicle—a medium through which the lines of the letter get spoken aloud, rehearsed to Olivia. This possession is directly contrary to his initial desires for the letter; he had wanted to possess it. In fact, the letter actually dispossesses him. As he later complains to Feste, “they have here propertied me” (4.2.94). Rather than becoming a man of property, Malvolio has himself become that property, objectified by the very accessories (the yellow cross-gartered stockings) that were to be the sign of his potency. Malvolio’s fantasy that (as Count Malvolio) he will wear a velvet gown and play with “some rich jewel” becomes reality-cumnightmare in the form of the humiliating cross-gartered yellow stockings that “make some obstruction in the blood” (3.4.20). A sign of the tension between the ascriptive norms that guarantee the authenticity of the aristocracy and prescriptive norms that would allow for social mobility, the cross-gartered stockings are reminders of the loss of the very blood whose flow they also impede. Olivia gives yet another gift—a pearl to Sebastian. Though the giving of the pearl is never staged, Sebastian invokes it as a sign of his very sanity when he can trust none of the other signs around him: “This pearl she gave me. I do feel’t and see’t” (4.3.1–2). The very externality of the pearl guarantees his existence: “I have a pearl, therefore, I am.” Even though Sebastian’s knowledge of his existence seems to depend on possession of the pearl, he is precisely not possessed by it, as Malvolio is possessed by the letter. I am not arguing that all of the characters except Malvolio are free from (a dependence on) objects, but that the play represents a struggle between their investment in these objects and a need to be unaffected by them. In addition to the play’s representation of objects whose counterfeit status derives from the absence of any authority behind them that would guarantee their worth (e.g., the forged letter), counterfeiting also takes the form of the absence of any claim on subjects by objects. Counterfeiting is the necessary condition for Illyria’s anti-topianism, for the appearance of autonomy in which subjects are not only freed from history and unfettered by locale, but also (perhaps counterintuitively) uncontaminated by objects, that is, not

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possessed by them.6 Autonomous subjectivity, then, must be constituted not in relation to objects, but by denying their effect.7 Perhaps it is Antonio’s purse that registers this struggle most profoundly. Like Viola’s clothing, the purse is an object caught between two spheres of exchange, the personal and the economic. 8 Though Antonio gives it to Sebastian whose “store . . . is not for idle markets,” he does not simply offer money (3.3.45–6). He offers the purse itself as a gesture of affection, of love even. Thus, Cesario’s offer to split his/her coffers with Antonio is not an adequate substitution for returning the purse that Antonio needs. The purse, however, does not represent only Antonio’s person. While the circulation of any purse would seem to be, at least in part, about the circulation of money, the very source of the purse’s contents is particularly telling here. Though Antonio’s offer of his purse to Sebastian appears largely “innocent,” the contents of the purse are not. Antonio makes this offer immediately after his partial admission that he is in danger in Illyria for an act of piracy, and he acknowledges that the real source of his danger in Illyria is that he alone has stood out and did not repay what was stolen, which he explains, “for traffic’s sake / Most of our city did”(3.3.34–5). I want to suggest, then, that this purse has a history, and one that makes its contents suspect. The purse represents what was stolen from Orsino and, as the play repeatedly suggests, stolen in an act of piracy. In fact, each of the three times the purse is invoked (in 3.3, 3.4, and 5.1) it follows upon the suggestion, or even direct accusation, of Antonio’s piracy. In 3.3, as I just discussed, Antonio gives his purse to Sebastian; in the following scene he asks for it back from Cesario, who does not have it. In this scene there is logic to the simultaneous mention of purse and piracy: Antonio is being arrested and thus needs his purse. In the final scene, however, there is no such causal connection: Orsino accuses Antonio, calling him a “notable pirate” and “salt-water thief.” In his defense, Antonio paradoxically accuses Cesario, whom he thinks is Sebastian, of denying him his purse, the purse presumably containing what was stolen from Orsino. My point is not that the play is concerned with piracy per se.9 The repeated invocations of piracy (along with the shipwreck that begins the play) in conjunction with a purse filled with money taken outside of Illyria’s boundaries and then brought back within them do, however, materialize the potential anxieties surrounding an “international” monetary economy. If the play disavows economic forces, one of the places they reappear is in Antonio’s purse. As a sign of affection, the purse displaces the very anxieties that Antonio, the foreigner, represents. Yet it is a substitution that still

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registers what is denied. Not surprisingly, then, it appears as a sign of rupture. It seems to haunt the play, to disturb and disrupt Illyria. Because the purse is constitutively problematic, its exchange cannot serve the purpose that Antonio wants it to serve, that is, to bind him to Sebastian and to authenticate himself. If the purse has anything like an explicit function in the play it is to highlight the precariousness of identity, manifested in the fact that Viola/Cesario can be, or can be mistaken for, Sebastian. While Viola’s name is never mentioned until the play’s final scene, it is perhaps phonetically embedded in the text at the very moment when the unmooring of identity becomes an issue, that is, when Viola/Cesario is first mistaken for Sebastian and “refuses” to return the purse that is actually not given to her/him. Antonio exclaims, “O how vile an idol proves this god / Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame” (3.4.330–1). Antonio speaks her name, “vile a,” just prior to naming Sebastian’s. Indeed, “Sebastian” occupies the same metrical place in the second line as “vile a” does in the first, as if the two are substitutes for each other. The specificity of Antonio’s accusation is itself significant to the problem that the clothes and the purse not only register, but actually (re)materialize. To believe in an “idol,” from the Greek eidos (shape or form), is not only to mistake the image for the real thing or the substance. As anti-Catholic polemicists were invested in pointing out, to worship an idol was to give the material object power over the subject. Idolatry enables the possession of subjects by objects and thus counteracts their independence and lessens their “value.” Antonio’s accusation is perhaps redundant then: an idol is already “vile,” etymologically, of low value or price, common, or base. A specious counterfeit of base rather than precious metal (i.e., not specie), Viola/Cesario and the purse s/he cannot return complexly disavow the historical and material constituents that would both produce and ground subjectivity. As Eric Spenser astutely notes in his reading of the Merchant of Venice in this volume, a different Antonio’s offer of “my purse, my person” (1.1.138) highlights an “indifference to divergent categories of value.” In Merchant, that indifference is transformed into a central problem of the play, made literal in Shylock’s demand for a pound of Antonio’s flesh when Antonio cannot repay the money he has borrowed on behalf of Bassanio. Yet, while purse and person are made commensurable in Merchant of Venice, in Twelfth Night the purse is divorced from the very person who stakes his legitimacy on its contents. While the purse becomes a problem precisely at the moments when identity seems unfixed and unmoored, Antonio invokes it twice

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to stake his claims upon Sebastian and, ironically, to insist upon his part in Sebastian’s very existence. In the same breath in which Antonio asks for the purse back, he asserts Sebastian’s indebtedness to him: Antonio has not only lent him his purse but has given him his life. Antonio reasserts this fact in his defense when he needs to prove his own legitimacy. But if the purse appears at moments when identity is shown to be most unstable and if its contents are suspect, if the purse is doubly counterfeit, can it authenticate or guarantee Antonio? What guarantees the value of the purse and the person if its origins are, in a sense, unlocateable? The play’s final scene poses these questions yet again. Unlike the Comedy of Errors, the emphasis in this scene is not simply on discovery or recognition, or even the return of property to its rightful owner. Rather than a recognition scene this is an authentication scene: Malvolio tries to authenticate the letter; Olivia tries to prove that she is legitimately married to Cesario; Sebastian tries to determine whether Cesario/Viola is truly his sister Viola, and Viola/Cesario tries to determine whether the copy of herself is really the original—him whom she imitates; finally, Orsino tries to authenticate Cesario as Viola. The authentication of Viola and Sebastian is conspicuously drawn out and the recognition itself deferred as if to call attention not only to the stakes but to the very depth of their connection guaranteed not by bonds, or oaths, hands, or even seals, but by the mole on their father’s brow. What Sebastian and Viola/Cesario demonstrate here is that they are two sides of the same coin or two coins whose authenticity is guaranteed by their issuing authority, a father whose inscription they bear and whose blood, Orsino announces soon after, is “right noble” (262). But this authenticity, one based on blood and the marriage alliances it should enable (that of Sebastian to Olivia and Viola to Orsino) comes at a cost: the squelching of those characters and things that could pose a threat to an (already nostalgic) social order based on blood and the confirmation of referents through signs, like a mole on the brow. Orsino’s attention never returns to Antonio who is left imprisoned and immobilized, like the Captain, the other foreigner, who is held in durance at Malvolio’s suit, the substance of which is never explained. In the play’s final moments the two plots are for the first time brought into contact with each other, but also brought to a halt as this conjunction makes Viola’s identity dependent on Malvolio, who holds the Captain, who holds Viola’s “maiden weeds” (5.1.253). It is as if the failure of Malvolio produces a failure in the other plot;

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Malvolio ends up, as Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in possession of Viola’s weeds. Furthermore, as Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass observe, the play introduces a whole new narrative about Viola’s maiden weeds (199). The “authentication” scene then is not only drawn out; it is endlessly deferred. The confirmation Viola/Cesario promises Sebastian rests on a return of the clothes that never takes place. The Captain is prevented from returning to Cesario the “woman’s weeds” that would allow her to become Viola again, Sebastian to claim his sister, and Orsino to claim his wife to be. At the last moment, then, Malvolio’s possession of Viola’s clothes produces a chain reaction that works its way backward through the events of the play. Not surprisingly, the ending is deferred to a fantasized, nostalgic future—when, as Orsino puts it, “golden time convents” (5.1.381). If Viola is the means by which the play swerves to avoid the historical and material concerns, she gets tied back into its knot in the play’s refusal of an ending. While the deferral of profit is inherent in investment, the deferral of this profit to a nostalgic future suggests that Viola will not be able to get the hoped for return on her investment. Perhaps Twelfth Night provides adumbrations of the romance genre itself (with its geographic and temporal intervals) that reproduces the process of investment and enables more “legitimate” profits to accrue. The story of the purse is also left unresolved. Just as no one actually asks Malvolio about the Captain, even though Malvolio is remembered precisely for this purpose, Antonio does not ask Sebastian for the purse that was so crucial to him and which he demanded of Cesario earlier in the same scene. It is still missing. Antonio’s reunion with Sebastian, from a narrative perspective, should include a returning of the purse; its return is necessary to the resolution of their conflict and of the mistaken identities. It is not, however, so much that the narrative of the purse is left unresolved as it is left unacknowledged, as if nothing in the plot actually depends on it. Actually, nothing in the play does depend on it. Unlike the handkerchief in Othello or the chain in Comedy of Errors whose circulations are crucial to the plot, the purse in Twelfth Night has no causal relation to the events of the play. The purse occupies an unusual position in that it is simultaneously central to the plot complications—a sign of mistaken identities and of Antonio’s identity or history—and yet irrelevant to the plot itself. Perhaps its very irrelevancy is what makes it paradoxically relevant, a sign of the disavowal through which the play’s “festive” quality is constituted. It cannot be returned.10 While there is potential for a whole new narrative, the play blocks off that future; it simply comes to a halt. The play’s economy is static

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because it displaces its concerns onto secondary, or even tertiary, characters who have a history within Illyria, but who are foreigners. Imprisoning them at the end keeps Illyria insulated, figuratively preventing traffic from outside of the realm, but also preventing the play’s resolution. The play’s ending is also static perhaps because its disavowals do not successfully produce the profits or pleasures that are due to the practitioner of disavowal—the fetishist. Unlike Freud’s fetishist whose substitutions produce, or at least enable, pleasure, the subjects of capitalism disavow the very material and historical forces that produce them in order to claim the autonomy necessary to capitalism’s perpetuation.11 In a sense, then, the true subjects of capitalism must always believe that they have arrived at the “end of history.”12 It is in the romance genre, of which Twelfth Night might be a precursor, and particularly in The Winter’s Tale, that disavowal is made productive, rather than static, by being transformed into redemption.13 This tragicomedy (and others as well) place the mathematical possibilities of redemption in dialogue with the constitutive material and historical forces in order to allow investments to produce the profits necessary, for example, to economic and geographical expansion.14 The continuation of history represented in these texts, then, might not be so much the result of the end of the dream of autonomy, but the ability to utilize that autonomy in order to extend across temporal and geographical boundaries.

Notes 1. As Camille Slights has astutely observed, unlike most other English Renaissance comedies, the play begins not with a conventional obstacle to marriage—e.g., a dowry dispute or a disapproving father—but with a fragmented social order and isolated, exiled, and solipsistic characters. 2. For an extended discussion of “cultural fantasy” see Zizek. 3. See especially 17–33. 4. Brenner argues against the traditional account that new trade routes were developed to find markets for woolen cloths. He argues instead that trades with southern and eastern areas concentrated on imports and were also important to the re-export market. He does, however, suggest that the decline or disruption in cloth trade could have provided the stimulus to compete with the Portuguese and Spanish in more lucrative markets. Cloth was, however, a significant import. Raw silk imports had increased ten-fold between 1560 and 1621, and by the 1620s, 90% of all raw silk was being imported directly from its source by the Levant-East India Company.

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5. “Investment.” Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Ed. C.T. Onions. 6. What is counterintuitive is that we tend to associate autonomy and the emergence of capitalism with an intense interest in material objects as a form of accumulation. Yet, as Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism suggests, capitalism results in a disinterest in specific objects; commodities are instead exchangeable equivalents. Obscuring the specific labor used to produce them, commodities assist in the extraction of surplus value and thus the accumulation of capital—not of objects. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, 163–77. For a discussion of capitalism as the mode of production defined by dematerialization, see Peter Stallybrass (1996 and 1998). In his analysis of the dematerializations of capitalism, Stallybrass is arguing against those who mistake capitalism for a system defined by its materialism. I would add that the assigning of materiality to capitalism also occurs as a result of a conflation of Marx’s theorization of capitalism with his theorization of materialist history as opposed to Hegelian idealist history. I want to extend the signification of “dematerialization” to include a disavowal of material historical forces and limitations—a dehistoricization that is central to capitalism’s abstract and equal autonomous individuals. It is this disavowal that Marx’s theorization of materialist history, in part, serves to correct. For a discussion of the importance of material interests, that is interest in objects, to the development of capitalism see Chandra Mukerji. 7. In his article on the origin of the concept of fetishism, William Pietz argues that the concept emerges during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a result of foreign trade and in response to contradictory perspectives on the valuation of objects. The European perspective that understood value to be purely the result of the market, of economic exchange through the medium of money, contrasted with that of West Africans for whom the object’s value was determined precisely for its relation to, and effect on, the subject. Pietz directly ties the conceptualization of this discrepancy to the autonomy of the subject: “the fetish represents a subversion of the ideal of the autonomously determined self” (23). 8. For a discussion of the possibility for objects to go in and out of commodity status and to exist in different spheres of exchange, see Kopytoff. My understanding of the purse’s dual registers of signification is indebted to Peter Stallybrass’s work on how clothes in early modern England functioned as both currency and material, which is “richly absorbent of symbolic meaning and in which memories and social relations are literally embodied” (1996, 291). 9. Piracy was, however, a serious concern for those engaged in overseas trade. At the turn of the century both the Mediterranean and Irish Seas were menaced by pirates. See Minchinton’s introduction. According to Kris Lane, the period 1568–85 was also one of unmitigated piracy

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Valerie Forman by the English and that from 1585 to 1603 of privateering by them in the Caribbean. The purse as both obstacle and non-obstacle might be emblematic of the relationship between piracy and trade. In its illegitimate form piracy was a risk and obstacle to overseas mercantilist ventures, but its legitimate form, privateering, financed much of Elizabeth’s investment in the Levant Company, out of which the East India Company was formed. For the complex relationship between trade and piracy see Barbara Fuchs. While Twelfth Night might be the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to address this paradox so acutely, the play is certainly in dialogue with others concerned with the isolation and alienation of its more explicitly mercantile characters—most notably The Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice. See Perry’s and Spencer’s essays in this volume. If the play denies the contradictions necessary to history, it does still register them in its failure of resolution. On the one hand, they bring Illyria to a halt; on the other, they serve as a reminder of the impossibility of an autonomy that disavows materiality. Furthermore, while Orsino defers the ending to a fantasized future, it is Feste who has the play’s final words. Like the play itself, his song is haunted by history. A lamentation of and to history, the song places the individual’s “progress” alongside the material concerns and social conventions that the “individual” must negotiate: “For the rain it raineth every day” (5.1.379, 384, 388, 392). It is important to remember, however, that the “profits” of the play are enabled by the figure of Autolycus, who makes a living through thievery and deception, and whose agency and profit depends (like Viola’s) on an exchange of clothing and also a counterfeit identity that extends Autolycus’s earlier impersonation of himself—a form of counterfeiting that takes autonomy to such an extreme as to render the individual independent of himself. For a reading of the play’s losses in relation to Autolycus’s activities see Barbara Correll’s essay in this volume. In addition to Winter’s Tale, Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1623/4) and Massinger’s The Renegado (1630) place the logic of redemption in dialogue with historical forces and the processes of investment.

Bibliography Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Chaudhuri, K.N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640. New York: August Kelly, 1965.

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Fisher, F.J. “London’s Export Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. W.E. Minchinton. London: Methuen, 1969. Fuchs, Barbara. “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation.”ELH 67 2000: 45–69. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics, Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Goldberg, Jonathan. “Textual Properties.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 213–17. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kastan, David. “All’s Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy.” ELH 52 (1985): 575–89. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lane, Kris. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas 1500–1700. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. Minchinton, W.E. “Introduction.” In The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. W.E. Minchinton. London: Methuen, 1969. Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Norman, Marc, and Tom Stoppard. Shakespeare In Love, 1998. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish.” RES 13 (1987): 23–45. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik. London: Routledge, 1975. Slights, Camille.“The Principle of Recompense in Twelfth Night.” Modern Language Review 77 (1982): 537–46. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage.” In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 289–320. ——. “Marx’s Coat.” In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer, 183–207. New York: Routledge, 1998. Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects, The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

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Chapter 8

Gift Exchange and Social Hierarchy in Thomas Deloney ’s J A C K O F N E W BU RY Michael L. LeMahieu

Since every jack became a gentleman, / There’s many a gentle person made a jack. —Shakespeare, Richard III (1.3.72–3)

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isting the “theoretics of gift exchange” as one of two areas that have remained underexamined in both economics and economic literary criticism, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen write, “the problem for gift theorists lies in the relationship between gift exchanges and selfinterest or profit” (28–9). They note that theorists such as Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde divide “economic actions into the supposedly incommensurable realms of market and gift,” associating the latter with more “primitive” societies. Writing in the same volume, economists Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio argue that insofar as such theories “establish the gift as the initial social act,” they often elide the question of the distinction between gift exchange and self-interest by simultaneously attempting “to subsume all later economic forms and to create an imagined space for an alternative to an all-pervasive capitalism” (389). Gift exchange thus functions as the absent center of capitalism, both historically determinate of market exchange and structurally alien to it. More recent treatments of gift exchange break with this model. In her study of gift-giving practices in sixteenth-century France, Natalie

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Zemon Davis argues that despite “big shifts in systems of gift and exchange, there is no universal pattern of evolutionary stages, where a total gift economy dwindles to occasional presents.” Instead, Davis argues, “gift exchange persists as an essentially relational mode” (9). As such, gift exchanges do not solely reinforce existing relations, they can also constitute new ones, and therefore one cannot assert, as Mauss did, that all gift-giving practices constitute a fundamentally conservative mode of exchange. Where Mauss’s classic study emphasizes that through gift exchange “a hierarchy is established” (74), Davis focuses on the ability of gift exchange to forge new social relations “across boundaries of status and literacy,” claiming that gifts “gave expression to the highly strained but genuine reciprocity between unequals in the social and economic order” (42).1 This is not to say that gift transactions never serve to reinforce existing socioeconomic relations; rather, they do not necessarily perform any fixed social function. As a result, practices of gift exchange must be situated locally and interpreted in the context of their particular forms of life.2 Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury represents gift transactions occurring in contexts that are neither identifiably “primitive” or “modern.” First published in 1597 but set during the reign of Henry VIII, the text inhabits the “transition period” from late feudalism to early capitalism, clothing the historical figure of John Winchcomb in the costumes of early Tudor absolutism even as it augurs some of the economic modes, social relations, and cultural productions of early capitalism.3 The text exemplifies what Richard Halpern sees as a shift in the sixteenth century from “the visible or patent form of sovereign political power” to “an invisible and resolutely latent form of economic domination” (5). While Deloney’s protagonist clearly performs a series of acts that occur within the visible structures of absolute monarchy (mustering of troops, the royal progress), his exchanges within these structures allow him to benefit in a more “latent” manner. Jack invests his virtue in the bodies of his servants and then presents it as a gift. While at times these transactions serve to reinforce dominant social structures, often they foster cross-class relationships and serve as a catalyst for social mobility. Deloney uses gift transactions to mediate the multiple social and economic conceptions at play in his text: virtue as identity and as property, entrenched and emergent forms of socioeconomic relations, Jack’s self-interest, and England’s social good. The socioeconomics of Deloney’s text remain ambivalent, oscillating between its representations of social mobility and stable hierarchy. Mihoko Suzuki has noted, “Jack of Newbury may on the surface appear to affirm existing social arrangements, yet it also gives

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voice to a profoundly subversive questioning of the natural fixedness of the social hierarchy” (190). Deloney represents gift exchange as a relational mode between social actors, neither fundamentally “conservative” nor “subversive.” While at times gift exchange serves to reinscribe social identities and hierarchies, it can also disrupt static notions of identity and even produce new identities. *** Deloney initially presents Jack as a passive recipient of gifts rather than an active pursuer of gain, and thus attempts to separate his representations of gift transactions from questions of self-interest. From the outset, he emphasizes Jack’s personal virtue and its social value. The title page advertises Jack’s “charitable deeds and great hospitality” as well as “how hee set continually fiue hundred poore people at worke, to the great benefit of the Common-wealth” (2). The dedicatory epistle continues in the same vein, praising “the most necessarie Art of Cloathing,” and also calls attention to the necessity of rewarding such virtue with gifts: “Many wise men therefore . . . most bountifully haue bestowed their gifts for vpholding of so excellent a commoditie, which hath been, and yet is, the nourishing of many thousands of poor People” (3). The material success of clothiers depends less on their own commercial practices, Deloney intimates, than on the rewards of “wise men,” which are warranted by the social value of clothiers’ virtue, their great benefit to the commonwealth. In its stress on the necessity of public recognition, the epistle establishes on a collective level a pattern that continues throughout the narrative on an individual level: Jack is repeatedly praised in terms of his personal virtue, and his rise from apprentice to master-clothier and member of parliament results from others’ recognition of that virtue in the form of gifts. In presenting Jack’s virtue as a guarantee of his worth, Deloney stages a common sixteenth-century cultural narrative that represented social mobility as the inevitable result of virtues such as honesty, industry, and frugality. Citing Jack of Newbury and Thomas Heywood’s Four Prentices of London as exemplars, Halpern demonstrates how such “lessons in diligence and thrift” purport to justify in ethical terms the economic, social, and political prosperity of one group of people and the concomitant subjection of another (88). This narrative of social mobility emphasizes the innate ethical qualities of the individual subject and conceives of what Marx describes as “two sorts of people” (873), a dichotomy that separates the thrifty from the prodigal, the diligent from the lazy. In gauging internal value by

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an external standard, in making visible and material signs of wealth serve as stale indicators of intangible and abstract concepts of virtue, such a narrative depicts social mobility as beneficial to an orderly society, for only the virtuous advance in wealth, status, and power. In representing Jack’s rise in these terms, Deloney’s text can be read as implicitly endorsing the unprecedented degrees of wealth and status achieved by merchants and craftsmen in Tudor England, which placed them in ambiguous, and potentially upsetting, positions within the social hierarchy.4 However, Jack of Newbury is at once more traditional and more unconventional than such a reading would make it seem: more traditional in that it is less of a Horatio Alger story of the sixteenth century than it is that of a successful courtier, and more unconventional in that Deloney’s “courtier” employs the “conservative” mode of gift exchange to advance socially, economically, and politically.5 While Deloney devotes the opening pages of the text to Jack’s virtue, he spends more time emphasizing the public recognition of that virtue.6 Jack’s initial promotion occurs when his “good gouernment and discretion [was] noted of the best and substantiallest men of the Towne,” which in turn causes his dame to consider herself “not a little blest” (7), indicating that his reputation for virtue, rather than his virtue per se, proves most instrumental in his rise. Laura Stevenson notes, “Jack’s diligence and thrift serve him well—but not because they make him rich. His virtues bring him to the attention of people in a position to better his condition; Deloney thinks in terms of preferment, not self-made men” (147). Jack’s virtue thus possesses contingent rather than intrinsic worth, and its value hinges on his ability to represent it; his virtue’s exchange-value, that is, takes precedence over its use-value. The importance of virtue’s performative dimension and its public recognition, emphasized in thinkers from Ben Franklin to Max Weber, was one Deloney would have been familiar with from Latin and humanist precedents. Jack reiterates the importance of reputation and public recognition in a short chapter devoted to 15 portraits in his house featuring men who achieved greatness despite their lowly births. He exhorts his servants “to imitate the like virtues, that you might attaine the like honors: for which of you doth know what good fortune God hath in store for you?” (55). While the emphasis remains on the gifts of divine providence, Jack, playing the role of humanist pedagogue, represents virtue as an imitable quality. Those who imitate successfully, he continues, “shall of the best bee esteemed, and spend their dayes in credit” (55). While critics have focused on this fundamentally performative conception of

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virtue in Deloney’s text and the material benefits that flow from it, they have not given as much due to the distinctly economic character of Jack’s performances and the exchanges that almost invariably accompany them.7 For Jack to present his virtue as a gift, for its exchange-value to have any purchase, the abstraction that is “virtue” must assume tangible form. Throughout the narrative, Jack’s virtue finds such form in the bodies of his servants, who function as the material bearers of his virtue. In attempting to gain the blessing of his second wife’s father, for instance, Jack gives the man a presentation of “all his seruants at worke, and euery office in his house” (26). Deloney quantifies Jack’s embodied value by numerically cataloging the extent of his wealth: “Two hundred men,” “An hundred women,” “Two hundred maidens,” “The number was seauen score and ten,” “Full fiftie proper men,” “Full foure score Rowers,” “full forty men,” “full twenty persons” (26–7). Because his virtue is indexed to the number of servants who embody it, a greater number of bodies yields a greater amount of virtue. The doubled value of Jack’s servants is that they are both representable and representative, quantitative and qualitative, and thus constitute the collective body of his virtue. This process of embodiment renders Jack’s virtue fungible, and allows him to enter into cycles of exchange by presenting it as a gift. Through these transactions, Jack both reinscribes his private identity as the head of his household and assumes different public identities in his encounters with the queen and king. Jack’s identity production within the household supports Mauss’s thesis that cycles of gift exchange are inextricably bound to the establishment and maintenance of social hierarchy. His relations to royalty, however, offer a different vision of the socioeconomic effects of gift exchange. In Jack of Newbury, the economic form of “archaic” societies anticipates some of the social relations of “modern” economies. Jack reiterates his superior subject position through a process of gift exchange in his negotiations with his prospective father-in-law. As a result of the wealth displayed in the inventory of his household, the man readily gives his blessing to the marriage; Jack, however, requires that he give more: “But Father . . . what will you bestow with her?” (28). Despite having just exhibited his own wealth and knowing full well the extent of the man’s poverty, Jack demands a dowry. He receives 20 nobles and a weaning calf, although “Each weeke ten good fat Oxen he [Jack] / Spent in his house for certainty” (27). Despite its relative worthlessness, Jack accepts and immediately requites the gift, making “more reckning of the womans modestie, than her

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Father’s money” (28): Father, and Mother, all the thankes that my poore heart can yeeld, I giue you for your good will, cost, and curtesie, and while I liue make bold to vse me in any thing that I am able; and in requitall of the gift you gaue mee with your daughter, I giue you heere twenty pound . . . [and] as much broade cloath as shall make you a cloake and my mother a holiday gowne, and when this is worne out, come to mee and fetch more. (29, emphasis added)

The status of Jack’s wife within this exchange is ambiguous. Initially, Jack demands that her parents “bestow” something with her, as if he were giving them a gift by taking her in marriage. With his requital, however, he speaks of “the gift you gaue me with your daughter,” indicating that the bride comprises part of the overall gift. Viewed from another perspective, the bride, like Jack’s servants, does not possess any intrinsic value in the exchange, but serves as an occasion for Jack to demonstrate his virtue by bestowing a generous gift. It is not the content of the gift that counts, but the act of giving it. David Parker reads this episode as Jack’s test of his father-in-law’s honesty; when he passes the test, Jack rewards his virtue: “He asks for a dowry, and when he finds that the old man is willing to pauperize himself for his daughter’s sake, he showers him with gifts” (177). More importantly, the exchange affords Jack an opportunity to display his own virtue. By reciprocating with a greater gift, Jack can display his wealth—the sign of his virtue—and reestablish his social superiority. The socioeconomic logic of this gift exchange is fundamentally conservative, articulating and reinforcing dominant relations and institutions. This logic is reversed, however, in Jack’s exchanges with his superiors, where gift exchange provides Jack with a vehicle for social mobility and Deloney with a mode of social critique. Jack’s encounter with Queen Katherine encapsulates all of the elements discussed up to this point: virtue as performance, embodiment, and gift. Commanded by the queen to produce six men for the army, “according to his abilitie” (30), Jack elaborately equips 150 of his servants, all with newly tailored uniforms. He appropriately clothes the bearers of his virtue, himself included, as one dresses to perform a role, and then positions himself at the head of this company, outfitted in the accouterment of a knight. Jack offers these men as a gift to the queen, and for each additional body he presents, the value and magnitude of his virtue increase. Jack’s servants’ white coats give tangible and quantifiable form to his virtue; as individual bodies the servants only “count” to the extent that their coats serve to increase the embodied

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value of their master’s virtue. In other words, Jack “invests” his virtue in the bodies of his servants.8 Insofar as they are not reducible either to their individual bodies or to Jack’s virtue, the servants in their white coats provide the tabula rasa on which Jack can create his own virtuous identity. Similarly, when Jack presents them as a gift to the queen, they are not the exclusive property of either the donor or the recipient, but the material basis upon which a “relational mode” is established between them. Jack’s appearance initially inspires confusion and even elicits opprobrium. In addition to the justices, who “did not a little wonder what hee should be” (30), the queen immediately demands to know “what those white coats were?” (31). And although most of the gentlemen present commend his actions, some of the others, “enuying heereat gaue out words that hee shewed himself more prodigall then prudent, and more vaine glorious then well aduised” (30). These “true” gentlemen, rather than viewing Jack’s ostentatious show as a display of his great loyalty, view it as a threat to the order and stability of the social hierarchy, “seeing that the best Nobleman in the Countrie would scarce haue done so much” (31).9 Jack’s gift exceeds not only what one in his social position would normally offer, it also exceeds what most noblemen give. Thus, his entry into the cycle of exchange upsets the hierarchy that it purportedly reinforces. As a result, he is at pains to prove that in addition to his loyalty, he also possesses humility; he must demonstrate that although he acts like a gentleman, he knows he is nothing more than a “poore Clothier,” lest a reputation for extravagance and pride supplant his reputation for thrift and diligence. When the queen does in fact mistake him for a gentleman, extending her hand to be kissed, Jack is quick to correct her: “Most gracious Queene . . . Gentleman I am none, nor the sonne of a Gentleman, but a poore Clothier, whose lands are his Loomes, hauing no other Rents but what I get from the backes of little sheepe, nor can I claime any cognisance but a wooden shuttle” (31). Jack plays on the ambiguity of his identity: he appears in the vestments of a knight and his actions are those of a feudal lord, yet he claims to be nothing but a “poore Clothier.” This last act of self-fashioning is somewhat duplicitous, for the chapter title advertises his great abundance: “Of Iacke of Newbery his great wealth, and number of seruants” (26). Jack dissembles in his role as a gentleman, but he also disassembles that same role. The queen’s response validates Jack’s performance, recognizes his virtue, and requites his gift: “Welcome to mee Iacke of Newberie . . . though a Clothier by trade, yet a Gentleman by condition, and a faithfull subiect in heart” (32). The

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role Jack outwardly projects returns to him in an amplified form. Despite the status of Jack’s trade, the queen nevertheless names him “a Gentleman by condition,” and the name, more than simply describing the role he plays, makes that role real, as Constance Jordan notes, “[the queen] augments the value of this role to a point at which it acquires a certain reality” (186). Jack’s initial investment of virtue returns with interest. The queen validates his performance as a loyal gentleman at the same time as she acknowledges his humility, and in addition to her corroboration, Jack gains other, more tangible benefits from the exchange. Not only does she bestow upon him “a rich chaine of gold” (33), but it is also through this encounter that he receives his entry into court and a promise of the queen’s favor, benefits that serve him well in his later confrontation with Cardinal Wolsey. Unlike the exchange of gifts with his father-in-law, this episode does not reinforce dominant social positions, but produces upward social mobility; while Jack remains a “Clothier by trade,” that capacity no longer excludes him from consideration as a “Gentleman by condition.” Moreover, the persistent ambiguity of his subject position allows him to continue his self-fashioning through gift exchange. The episode also provides Deloney with an opportunity to stage a potentially “subversive questioning” in a displaced historical context. Insofar as one can view Deloney’s representation of Queen Katherine as a proxy for Queen Elizabeth, the former’s recognition of Jack’s worth in spite of his birth serves as model for the present monarch in dealing with her increasingly mobile subjects.10 Deloney reinforces this point when Jack presents the queen with an elaborate allegory in which the noblemen are represented as a monster, whose “name was Enuie,” that assails Jack because “I surpast him in heartie affection to my Souereigne Lord, and . . . offered all I had to serue my Prince and Countery” (32). During Jack’s encounter with the king, civic pageantry again provides a setting in which the ambiguity of his social position augments the value of his virtuous reputation, which he in turn presents as a gift. Receiving the king in his progress through Berkshire, Jack dresses his servants for another performance: “Iacke of Newbery cloathed 30. tall fellowes, being his household seruants, in blewe coates, faced with Sarcenet, euerie one hauing a good sword and buckler on his shoulder” (35). His own outfit, “a plain russet coate,” is much more humble than was his costume for the queen, and he accordingly adopts a more modest role: he informs the king’s messenger that he is “poore Iacke of Newberie, who beeing scant Marquesse of a mole hill, is chosen Prince of Ants” (35). Although the role initially appears self-effacing, Jack nonetheless plays the part

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of a king, and when the actual king’s messenger beckons him, he is anything but subservient: “[H]is Grace hath a horse, and I am on foote, therefore will him to come to mee” (36). Like the queen before him, the king grants a certain reality to Jack’s role by meeting him where he stands. And again, Jack immediately disassembles his role: “Iack of Newberie with all his seruants fell on their knees, saying: God saue the King of England, whose sight hath . . . brought great peace to the poore labouring people” (36). Following his pattern, Jack adopts a role above his social station, but after having that role recognized, he assumes a role no less performative: “a poore clothier.” After Jack presents the king with many gifts (a banquet, a pageant, a golden beehive representing the commonwealth), the king fulfills his obligation to reciprocate by offering to knight Jack, only to be refused: “I beseech your Grace let mee liue a poore Clothier among my people, in whose maintenance I take more felicity, then in all the vaine titles of Gentilitie” (49). While Eugene Wright (66–7) and David Margolies (152) read this episode as exemplifying Jack’s humility, Leonard Mustazza (175) claims that knighthood historically presented no real benefits, hence Jack’s indifference to “the vaine titles of Gentilitie.” Jack’s refusal can thus be read as virtuous within the terms of either a feudal or a capitalist socioeconomic order, prompted either by his respect for traditional order or his regard for material profit, respectively. The specific nature of his virtue relies upon a retrospective determination of the socioeconomic context of his exchange with the king. This temporal deferral corresponds to that which, for Pierre Bourdieu, characterizes all cycles of gift exchange: “[I]f it is not to constitute an insult, the counter-gift must be deferred and different, because the immediate return of an exactly identical object clearly amounts to a refusal” (5). By refusing the king’s countergift, Jack strategically extends the period of deferral in the text’s economy of gift exchange, which is neither necessarily feudal nor capitalist. “To abolish the interval is also to abolish strategy,” Bourdieu remarks, from which one can infer that to extend the interval is also to extend strategy. By refusing to accept the king’s gift, Jack places him in a position of suspended, or deferred, obligation—a strategy that pays off later in his appeals for commercial reform. Moreover, by refusing the name the king offers him, Jack persists in his ambiguous subject position, which allows him to continue assembling and disassembling various social roles, at the same time as the king’s deferred role of debtor overshadows his indisputable position of political power.11 After these encounters with royalty, Jack is in a position to trade on his social rank by engaging in cycles of gift exchange outside of his

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immediate household, and he takes advantage of this opportunity not to render his subject position ambiguous, but to cement his position of superiority. In one of the narrative’s final episodes, Jack refuses to “lay his action against” Randoll Pert, a London draper who owes Jack 500 pounds. “Misery is troden downe by many,” Jack proclaims, “and once brought low they are seldome or neuer relieued: therefore he shall rest for me vntoucht, and I would to God he were cleare of all other mens debts, so that I gaue him mine to begin the world again” (74). When Jack, now a member of Parliament, encounters the bedraggled and downtrodden Pert working as a porter in London, he demands that Pert promise to repay his debt when he becomes sheriff of London. In addition, Jack gives him a gift of “a faire sute of apparel, Marchantlike, with a faire blacke cloake, and all other thinges fit to the same: then he tooke him a shop in Canweeke streete, and furnisht the same shop with a thousand pounds worth of cloath.” Pert, of course, turns this capital into great profit, eventually becoming sheriff, “at what time he payed fiue hundred pounds euery pennie, and after dyed an Alderman of the Citie” (77). On the one hand, this cycle of exchange functions “to establish hierarchy,” reinforcing Jack’s superior social position by reemphasizing his superior virtue. Before Jack assists Pert, he chides him for lacking such virtue: “But this hath your prodigalitie brought you to, your thriftlesse neglecting of your business, that set more by your pleasure than your profite” (76). Insofar as Pert lacks Jack’s virtue, he also lacks his success; inasmuch as he emulates Jack’s virtuous example, then, he achieves Jack’s success. On the other hand, however, Deloney uses this cycle of exchange to present a critique of social attitudes toward the poor and to offer a vision of individual social mobility as beneficial to society as a whole. It is not through the punishment of vice that the poor (in virtue as well as wealth) will rectify their ways, but through the gift of a virtuous example. The imitation of such virtue, Deloney implies, will lead to individual social mobility that will ultimately benefit the commonwealth, just as one sees in the case of Jack.12 Because it is not peculiar to any one socioeconomic formation, gift exchange is an effective means for Deloney to affirm social relationships he deems desirable and also to forge new ones that would be otherwise precluded by established social structures. Jack strategically enters into cycles of exchange, and tactically presents gifts in order to achieve socially sanctioned mobility. The relationship between gift exchange and social structure in Jack of Newbury functions as a type of relational mode, one that fosters cross-class relationships in Deloney’s representations of sixteenth-century England in much the same way

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that Davis finds gift practices functioning in sixteenth-century France, by “softening relations among people of the same status and of different status and . . . preventing their closure” (9). In preventing the closure of relationships, the deferred exchanges of a gift economy provide Deloney with a means of mediating competing socioeconomic structures, and for presenting a social critique that is nevertheless staged within the structures of the dominant political system.

Notes 1. In her foreword to Mauss’s study, Mary Douglas remarks: “[G]ift cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions” (ix). 2. David Cheal notes in his study The Gift Economy, “the same form of behavior may have many different meanings according to local context, and it may therefore appear in a wide range of interaction episodes with different social effects” (3). 3. This doubled temporality is reflected in generic accounts of the text, which call attention to the presence of traditional jest-book, fabliau, and romance elements at the same time as they classify it as an early example of novelistic discourse. And this generic treatment, in turn, frequently finds support in another proleptic classification: Jack of Newbury is a “middle-class” or “bourgeois” text. For an account of various attempts to situate Deloney’s text in this manner, see Salzman, 101–4. 4. For an example of Elizabethan social commentators’ difficulties in situating merchants and craftsmen within the social hierarchy, see Mulcaster, 145–89. In discussing the historical shift from household to capitalist cloth production, and the economic displacement of women that it entailed, Linton points to “the problem of formulating an identity and social consciousness that accommodate the disparate realities of money and status within a still largely feudal hierarchy” (24). See also Cressy 29, 36–7; and Stevenson, 77–91. 5. In calling Deloney’s text “A Horatio Alger Story for the Sixteenth Century,” Mustazza makes a similar point, noting the degree of calculation and self-interest that factors into Jack’s performances. 6. The appearance of new civil laws treating libel attests to the increased importance of a virtuous reputation in the sixteenth century: “the penetration of commodity relations is manifested in the novel equal of intangible reputational loss with monetary exchange value” (O’Malley 84–5), a phenomenon Marx and Engels describe as the bourgeoisie resolving “personal worth into exchange-value” (475). 7. Constance Jordan has pointed to the fundamentally performative aspect of Jack’s character, maintaining that the text’s “chief interest lies in its portrayal of the figure of the role-player and the remarkable effects his play achieves” (184).

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8. On the sixteenth-century meanings of “invest,” both in terms of clothing and of economics, see Valerie Foreman’s “Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of Twelfth Night” in this volume. 9. As wealth became an increasingly common route to social mobility, contemporary commentators such as Mulcaster also expressed their displeasure: “For all the means to make a gentleman, it is the most vile to be made for money. Because all other means bear some sign of virtue, this only means is too bad a means, either to match with great birth or to mate great worth” (158). 10. Evelyn Tribble similarly notes the displaced historical context of Jack’s encounters with royalty, describing how “the complex semiotics of civic pageantry” (148) in Jack of Newbury operate as “a framed space for the articulation of subject interests” (149) and “a way of reimagining the relationship between bourgeois autonomy and royal authority” (157). 11. As Bourdieu argues, “Until he has given in return, the receiver is ‘obliged,’ expected to show his gratitude towards his benefactor, or, at least, to have regard for him, to refrain from using against him all the weapons he otherwise might” (6). 12. While Deloney’s attitude toward social mobility in Jack of Newbury is, as Suzuki states, “potentially subversive,” one also sees in it what Scott Cutler Shershow describes as a conservative ideological view of poverty that links the idea of the gift and the idea of work. See his “The Work and the Gift: Notes Toward an Investigation” in this volume.

Works Cited Amariglio, Jack, and David F. Ruccio. “Literary/Cultural ‘Economies,’ Economic Discourse, and the Question of Marxism.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Ed. Woodmansee and Osteen. London: Routledge, 1999. 381–400. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Cheal, David. The Gift Economy. London: Routledge, 1988. Cressy, David. “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England.” Literature and History 3 (1976): 29–44. Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Deloney, Thomas. Jack of Newbury. The Novels of Thomas Deloney. Ed. Merritt E. Lawlis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Douglas, Mary. Foreword. The Gift. By Marcel Mauss. New York: Norton, 1990. vii–xviii. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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Jordan, Constance. “The ‘Art of Clothing’: Role-Playing in Deloney’s Fiction.” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1981): 183–93. Linton, Joan Pong. “Jack of Newbery and Drake in California: Domestic and Colonial Narratives of English Cloth and Manhood.” ELH 59 (1992): 23–51. Margolies, David. Novel and Society in Elizabethan England. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 469–500. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1925. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions. 1581. Ed. Richard L. DeMolen. New York: Teachers College, 1971. Mustazza, Leonard. “Thomas Deloney’s Jacke of Newbury: A Horatio Alger Story for the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Popular Culture 23 (1989): 165–77. O’Malley, Pat. “From Feudal Honour to Bourgeois Reputation: Ideology, Law, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism.” Sociology 15 (1981): 79–93. Parker, David. “Jack of Newbury: A New Source.” English Language Notes 10 (1973): 172–80. Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Stevenson, Laura Caroline. Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Suzuki, Mihoko. “The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney.” Criticism 38 (1996): 181–217. Tribble, Evelyn B. “ ‘We Will Do No Harm with our Swords’: Royal Representation, Civic Pageantry, and the Displacement of Popular Protest in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newberie.” Place and Displacement in the Renaissance. Ed. Alvin Vos. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen. “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. Ed. Woodmansee and Osteen. London: Routledge, 1999. 3–50. Wright, Eugene P. Thomas Deloney. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

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Chapter 9

Taking Excess, E xceeding Account: Aristotle Meets THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Eric Spencer

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ow does Aristotle’s anti-mercantile critique of interest from Book 1 of the Politics find itself issuing, incongruously enough, from the mouth of Shakespeare’s Venetian merchant? I will answer in what follows that the play reproduces, for its own reasons and in its own register, the philosophical double bind disclosed in but unassimilated by the Aristotelian analysis of money: namely, that the symbolic mediation money performs is at once indispensable and inaccurate, a necessary mechanism of community and an inevitable source of injustice, the vessel and perversion of value—in short, an artifice of culture that must and cannot be escaped, and that leaves its ambiguous mark on all human transactions. I am interested, then, not in the indirect path of textual transmission and influence that brought the Aristotelian critique of money to Shakespeare’s attention, but instead in the problem both writers encounter as they try to imagine the relationship between money and justice, or more generally, between the arbitrary but indispensable tools of measurement and the measureless but equally indispensable claims of love. Moreover, because money pushes relentlessly into the frontier between the measurable and measureless, between price and pricelessness, both Aristotle and Shakespeare find the discussion of value inevitably wrapped inside a discourse of limit and excess; thus

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Aristotle (a great categorizer and maker of distinctions, and thus a great creator of boundaries) locates virtue in moderation, in the flexibly and circumstantially determined space between extremes, and derives essence from a telos that circumscribes nature and action. Shakespeare, more ambivalently, has Antonio object to taking “excess,” which he understands as the fruit of unbounded greed, while he also affects a boundless generosity. Similarly, Portia wishes she might “exceed account” for Bassanio’s sake, and offers her apparently boundless coffers to redeem Antonio, while also, as Lars Engle notes, orchestrating events so as to protect and even supplement her investments (92–8). I suggest, then, that we read Antonio’s Aristotelian scorn for usury in relation to those interpenetrating but discontinuous early modern loci of excess particularly relevant to The Merchant of Venice: selfless love, judicial equity, and theological grace.

Aristotle’s Problem Aristotle’s problem with money is a version of the old antagonism between apples and oranges. When, as logical novices, we are introduced to these incompatible fruit, we learn that to compare qualitatively different objects or ideas as if they were equivalent—that is, measurable by a single standard—inevitably distorts one or the other in the name of a spurious conceptual tidiness. Since both apple and orange occupy the same stratum of logical abstraction, an orange cannot be reduced to an instance of appleness, to be measured against the cluster of properties that uniquely define an apple. You cannot characterize an orange as a coreless, thick-skinned, pulpy, and thus highly unsuccessful approximation of an apple. You might legitimately compare their weight or vitamin C content, abstracting a quantifiable dimension from their uniquely constitutive constellation of properties, but you could only liken, not equate, their flavors, since no flavor unit that apples and oranges share, such that we could standardize the comparison, exists. As Aristotle argues in the Categories, only quantities invite equation; qualities must settle for likeness, leaving behind the irreducible remainders of unique essence. Yet we find installed at the center of our social lives an instrument, money, whose acknowledged function is to equate apples and oranges, or symphonies and sausages, or indeed anything at all. As Shakespeare has Timon of Athens put it, money “will make / Black white, foul fair, wrong right, / Base noble, old young, coward valiant” (4.3.28–30), lines Marx seized on in the 1844 manuscripts to characterize how money dissolves qualitative distinction in the

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undifferentiated (and, for him as for Timon, morally corrosive) quantitative space of exchange value. Bridging quality and quantity with such disquieting ease, money thus draws attention to the inherent instability plaguing theories of justice that depend on commensuration. For if money scandalizes by its indiscriminate powers of equation, how is justice to balance fairly the incommensurable variables brought before it, to make measure equal measure, without sinking under the weight of unassimilated remainders? The moneychanger’s scale, carried provocatively into the Venetian court by Shylock, makes from this perspective a troublesome symbol of justice, for its promise of evenhanded objectivity entails the ruthless suppression of incommensurable qualities. It is no surprise, then, that Aristotle’s most sustained discussion of money occurs in Book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics, the book devoted to justice. Notoriously brief, digressive, and unsatisfactory, Aristotle’s economic remarks (especially NE 5.5) nevertheless demand attention, according to Scott Meikle, because they “[formulate] with unrivalled clarity the problem which lies at the heart of the theory of value, and hence at the heart of economic theory” (27). Because, he claims, neoclassical economic orthodoxy collapses use and exchange values into the single category of utility—relegating use value to the museum of exploded medieval daydreams—it implies “that there are no ultimately incommensurable values” (107).1 Aristotle resists precisely this conclusion; he wants to know how money, as a quantitative measure of value for qualitatively incommensurable objects, can leap the categorical gulf separating quantity and quality, exchange value and use value, such that fair exchange, which for Aristotle requires true commensuration, is possible. How do you calculate the value of a bed, he asks, such that you may determine, say, how many shoes to give for it? Money performs this service, but how? As it turns out, near the end of NE 5.5 Aristotle admits explicitly, “it is impossible that things differing so greatly from one another should in reality become commensurable,” but he nevertheless blandly reassures us that “it can be done adequately by relating them to need,” by which he seems to mean the interdependence that results from division of labor. But he never considers how such need might be measured, beyond the assertion that “there must be some unit, and it must be established by arbitrary usage” that “makes everything commensurable”—that is, the unit of established currency. Unfortunately, everything depends on the adequacy of this measure, since he has already insisted that “there is no community without exchange . . . no exchange without equality and no equality without

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commensurability” (1133b). He is left with a kind of pragmatically effective economic justice, based on market values (scholastic philosophers and canonists would follow him in this), but without logical or metaphysical underpinning. So use and exchange values simply will not coordinate, and Meikle takes Aristotle’s economics seriously because it insists that this is a problem, rather than a license to accept market value and its dynamics as the only available objects of economic study, as modern nonMarxian and non-Keynesian economics does, and thus permanently to bracket use value as intractably subjective. He rises to this polemical, and highly Aristotelian, conclusion: When exchange value enters an activity, the real end of that activity becomes a means to the end of exchange value, so that the real end is compromised or destroyed. In this way exchange value enters thought, culture, and morals. The nature of everything tends to become secondary to this universal form. . . . Looked at in this light, the analysis of exchange value is the main problem in modern social philosophy. (199–200)

Shakespeare’s Problem I will return to the contemporary resonance of Aristotelian monetary theory in my final section. But whether or not exchange value, understood as a way of commensurating the incommensurable, is the main problem of modern social philosophy, it is certainly one of the main problems of Shakespeare’s Venice. Characters must repeatedly weigh incommensurable values in the balance: Bassanio notoriously pursues a lady “richly left” (1.1.161) who is also, in non-pecuniary “worth” (167), “nothing undervalu’d to Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia” (165–6), and he borrows to fund this enterprise from the friend to whom he already owes, as he says, the most “in money and in love” (131)—a friend, moreover, who offers him, with a similar indifference to divergent categories of value, both “[m]y purse [and] my person” (138). The equation that might square all these interpenetrating financial and affective accounts, and the unit of account that could encompass them, are hard to imagine. Portia’s suitors must weigh the symbolic value of the casket metals against Portia’s desirability and their own worth; Morocco, determined to “weigh [his] value with an even hand” (2.7.25) thus scorns silver, “ten times undervalu’d to tried gold” (53) on the mistaken assumption that Portia’s value (not to mention his own) corresponds literally and not merely analogically

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to the value of gold, so that to associate Portia with anything but gold is to undervalue her. Jessica sings Portia’s praises to Lorenzo through a figure of comparison designed to frustrate comparison: Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match And on the wager lay two earthly women, And Portia one, there must be something else Pawned with the other, for the poor rude world Hath not her fellow. (3.5.78–82)

Shylock, scales in hand, seeks to execute a bond that absurdly equates 3000 ducats and a pound of Antonio’s flesh, according to an inscrutable calculus of hatred. Bassanio, meanwhile, tells Antonio that he is “married to a wife / which is as dear to me as life itself; / But life itself, my wife, and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life” (4.1.281–4). And when Portia/Balthazar demands Bassanio’s ring in recompense for his service, Antonio urges the reluctant Bassanio to let Balthazar’s “deservings, and my love withal, / Be valued above your wife’s commandment” (4.1.450–1).2 Such messy confrontations between incompatible forms of value have understandably encouraged readings of the play that enlist the forementioned forms of excess—love, judicial lenience, grace—to argue that Shakespeare wishes to disentangle what his characters keep snarling and celebrate a cornucopian affect free from commercial calculation; but as much recent revisionist work suggests, neither the nature of the problem nor the language of the play can sustain this distinction, however much Antonio in particular insists on it. I take issue, however, with some of this work because I think the ubiquity of such evaluative conundrums in the play, its relentless thematizing of value, suggests that the play consciously stages this impasse, rather than foundering on a contradiction its ideology wishes unsuccessfully to mask.3 Such, at any rate, is what I take away from Antonio’s most Aristotelian moment. To Shylock’s barbed question about the propriety of asking a dog you have just kicked to kindly lend you money, he retorts If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends—for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend?— But lend it rather to thine enemy, Who if he break with thee, thou mayst with better face Exact the penalty. (1.3.129–34)

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Antonio would have money either serve friendship or seal enmity; he will “neither lend nor borrow / By taking nor by giving of excess” (1.3.61–2) because in his eyes Shylock’s “bonds” instrumentalize other people for the end of contractually specified and guaranteed profit. His own ventures, by contrast, are apparently “squand’red abroad” (21) insouciantly and his profits redistributed with the kind of deliberate indifference to strict accounting that suits the insular gemeinschaft of gentility. Insofar as medieval and early modern Europe took a standard line on usury, Antonio embodies it here, construing interest as antithetical to Christian brotherhood. But tucked inside this primary objection to usury, as if its fitness went without saying, “breed for barren metal” actually makes a different claim. Its ultimate (though probably not proximate) source in Politics 1.10 bears quoting: It is the business of nature to furnish subsistence for each being brought into the world; and this is shown by the fact that the offspring of animals always gets nourishment from the residuum of the matter that gives it birth. . . . [But] the gain in which [retail trade] results is not naturally made, but is made at the expense of other men. The trade of the petty usurer is hated most, and with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process currency was meant to serve. Currency came into existence as a means of exchange; usury tries to make it increase. This is the reason why usury is called by the word we commonly use [i.e. tokos, breed or offspring]; for as the offspring resembles its parent, so the interest bred by money is like the principal that breeds it, and it may be called “currency the son of currency.” Hence we can understand why, of all modes of acquisition, usury is the most unnatural. (1258a–b)

Note that Aristotle never calls metal literally “barren.” He does not simply celebrate the natural at the expense of the artificial; rather, he objects to the teleological misalignment that results when we exchange goods for money rather than money for goods.4 This exchange is unnatural not because the obviously inorganic money lacks reproductive organs—a silly argument Aristotle has been accused of making—but because, treated as an end, it usurps the role of teleological terminus properly belonging to substantive human happiness. That is why he makes “at the expense of other men” the logical antithesis of “naturally made.” It follows that Aristotle’s apparently sloppy analogy between monetary “offspring,” in the form of indistinguishable coins, and organic offspring, which merely resemble their progenitors but remain unique, makes sense; he suggests that

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usury results in stagnant repetition or duplication (hence “currency the son of currency”) rather than teleologically meaningful fertility, which implies development, change, qualitative growth. Similarly, Antonio’s “breed” refers sarcastically to Shylock’s implied analogy between “gold and silver and ewes and rams” in the story of Jacob and Laban’s sheep; when Antonio questions the analogy, Shylock shrugs, “I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast” (1.3.92–3). That is, where Shylock sees productive thrift as linked to a providential sequence of cultural inheritance—“This Jacob from our holy Abram was, / As his wise mother wrought in his behalf, / The third possessor . . .” (69–71)—and thus as an assertion of communal solidarity, Antonio sees a sterile detour from Jacob’s “venture,” unpredictable and dependent on trust in divine favor, to Shylock’s blasphemously self-sufficient, contractually guaranteed “thrift.”5 Incongruously, then, the “excess” Shylock takes for the use of his money, condemned by opponents of usury as illegitimate because it involves no risk, or requires no productive work on the part of the lender, or purports to rent that which can only be consumed in use, not returned to its owner—in short, because it represents wealth without a legitimizing material or metaphysical referent, something out of and for nothing—this excess is also a denial of excess, insofar as it seeks to circumscribe contingency by contractual stipulation, and to submit the incalculable energies of natural creation to strict quantitative accounting. Shylock lies open simultaneously to condemnation for rigidity and for extravagance—or more exactly, for the extravagance of his rigidity. Of course, it could be objected that such an incongruity derives from my own confusion of quite different senses of the word “excess.” But this instability of the categories of limit and excess, I want to argue, plagues Merchant and the discourse of money and value generally, rather than originating in my own sloppy reasoning. For instance, following orthodox opinion, Antonio would justify his merchandizing on the grounds that he “ventures,” takes upon himself the risks as well as the profits of his enterprises, instead of trying to bind fate through the risk-free profits of usury. But when Salerio plausibly suggests that Antonio’s melancholy stems from worry over his risky ventures, Antonio denies it; later, he signs Shylock’s “merry” bond, over Bassanio’s objections, because he is breezily confident of his ships’ return. Antonio seems accustomed to dependable profits; his risk has become purely theoretical. Moreover, the play doesn’t bear out Antonio’s vehement insistence that interest and enmity are inseparable, that money so lent cannot breed as it were socially or spiritually. After all, the fruits of Shylock’s

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usuries fund Bassanio’s successful venture to Belmont. Correspondingly, the assumption that brotherly solidarity results from free lending rings false, if we can judge by the failure of Venice’s merchant community to come to Antonio’s aid; in contrast, Shylock effortlessly secures ready coin from Tubal. Above all, though, Antonio’s position is markedly conservative even for 1596. Calvin had long since dismissed the Aristotelian position on usury as “frivolous and contrary to common sense, and he insisted that the only way God’s word on usury could be understood was according to the rule of equity” (Jones 11).6 I will return to equity presently. Here let me simply point out that as usury became increasingly a “crime of intent, rather than a factual, contractual matter” it passed beyond juridical control into the forum of the conscience, and “economic expediency was left as the only sure way for society to judge when usury occurred and whether it was bad” (Jones 5).7 Not surprisingly, it was less and less often considered bad. Indeed, despite many anxious pamphlets on the matter, and despite Antonio’s absolute distinctions, “[c]ollaboration, not predation, better describes the relations between men like Cecil and Howard and men like Ingram and Cranfield” (Leinwand 97). In other words, the extensive credit relations permeating Elizabethan and Jacobean England created both (limited) social mobility and a network of volatile, ambivalent but nevertheless substantial affective bonds. In this context, Antonio’s gift-economy largesse reads less as an assertion of affective primacy than as an overcompensation for his own social mobility. As evidence of this preoccupation with mobility, Leinwand cites Salerio’s fanciful gentrification of Antonio’s ships in 1.1; Salerio likens them to “signiors or rich burghers” who “overpeer the petty traffickers / That cursy and do them reverence” (12, 14) and assumes that Antonio will imagine, with something like Richard II’s self-pitying taste for royal tragedy, “my wealthy Andrew, docked in sand, / Vailing her high top . . . / To kiss her burial,” or “dangerous rocks, / Which touching but my gentle vessel’s side / Would . . . / Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks” (27–34). Although Salerio presumably misconstrues Antonio’s immediate source of melancholy, Leinwand reads Antonio, in the light both of Salerio’s status-conscious flattery and of Antonio’s intense attachment to the aristocratic “Lord” Bassanio, as wishing to “give over the mercantile exchange values with which his merchandising aligns him in order to recur to an idealized version of values no longer in the ascendant.” Indeed, Leinwand even links Antonio to the late Elizabethan privateering merchants, whose “anarchic and unpredictable energies were soon harnessed” by the creation of such firms

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as the East India Company (119); as such an adventurer, now fully installed at the top of the city hierarchy, Antonio cultivates the melancholy that follows from his “unrealizable commitment to extricating himself from the burgerlich exchange function” (15) and restoring to his activity its moral value as a hazardous adventure rather than a comfortable living. Vitriolic hatred of Shylock results, a hatred requiring that Antonio distinguish absolutely between himself and the Jew, partly through a hollow appeal to risk. What then of Portia, who gives herself entirely to Bassanio and wishes that she might “exceed account” in order to make this gift incalculably rich, who is the play’s chief spokesperson for the free gift of mercy, who forgives Bassanio’s surrender of her ring—who, in short, seems to embody the creative excess epitomized in the unrepayable largesse of theological grace. Does Portia manage to sidestep the reductive quantification of monetary exchange, which the play seems to link with Shylock’s rigid legalism? If so, does she also avoid Antonio’s overdetermined and thus suspicious vehemence? We might approach the question by quoting William Perkins on the matter of paying and forgiving debts: justice, he asserts, requireth that every man should pay his debt. And common reason tells us that words and promises cannot pass for payment, but due debt must be satisfied. Now every Christian man is in great debt to God. That debt is obedience to his law, for Christ came to save us from the rigour of the law, not to free us from obedience to it. But how do we pay the debt? Even as he doth who oweth L10,000 and craveth to pay it by a penny a year. For so we . . . have nothing better to tender to God, but a few good desires and groans of the heart, and a silly poor endeavor: all which is unto that which the law requireth like one penny to L10,000.

Venetian law stipulates that Shylock’s “due debt” must also be satisfied, but his denial of payment not specified in the bond, and his refusal to apply Perkins’s logic, as Portia articulates it—“in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation” (4.1.198–9)—might be understood to sanction Portia’s turning of the letter against him, which she presumably mitigates with appeals to mercy on the part of the Duke and Antonio. But this conclusion (a thumbnail sketch of Danson’s subtle and thorough argument) is less appealing if we apply it to Elizabethan secular institutions of equity. Although equity courts, most prominently the Court of Chancery, no doubt did often rectify miscarriages

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of justice attendant on the inflexibility of the letter of the law, equity could also be made to serve less disinterested motives. A good example is the legal instrument known as equity of redemption, developed under Elizabeth and consolidated in the early seventeenth century, which “minimized the possibility that landowners would lose their land when they mortgaged it in order to raise cash, or used it as security for the debts they incurred” (Sugerman and Warrington 111). Because young gentlemen “frequently fell prey to unscrupulous lenders, who extended credit to them on the expectation of their majorities and inheritances”—a situation imaginatively exploited with various levels of hysterical embellishment in Elizabethan popular writing—and because a mortgaged estate worth many times more than the original loan could be seized by a creditor, equity of redemption worked so that “one could mortgage property and remain in possession so long as the payments were made on time” (Jones 68–9). This looks like a close temporal analogue to the spiritual payment schedule Perkins outlines earlier: pay your penny on time, however inadequate it is to the ultimate discharging of the debt, and you will not lose your mortgaged soul. Unfortunately, it is easy to take indulgent spiritual or temporal creditors for granted, especially when the latter occupy subordinate social positions. As Sugerman and Warrington point out, the assumption “that it was the landowners’ natural privilege to take loans on security and then be relieved from the terms of the bargain, persisted until well into the nineteenth century” (125). Thus equity promises freedom from unjust rigor, because it allows judgments outside the letter of the law, but at the same time widens the range of possible interpretations, to the potential benefit of those whose interpretations are more likely to stick. This, at any rate, is Terry Eagleton’s argument; Shylock, he contends, as a vulnerable outsider in the Venetian community, has only the letter of the law to protect him: “The victimized need a fixed contract, however hard-hearted that may seem, because they would be foolish to rely on the generosity of their oppressors . . . If mercy is gratuitous, then the dispossessed can never quite know when their superiors are likely to be seized with a spontaneous bout of geniality” (41). From this perspective, Portia’s exposure of literalism’s impossibility risks being a denial of law altogether; how could Shylock foresee and nominate in the bond every possible contingency? (Deliberately provocative as always, Eagleton jeers, “one might just as well claim that Shylock’s bond is deficient because it does not . . . specify whether Antonio should be sitting down, suspended from the ceiling or dressed in frilly knickerbockers at the time of

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cutting.”) Less aggressively, Eagleton identifies the play’s resulting problem as the paradox “that to preserve the structure of the law you must transgress what it actually says,” and that Portia’s radical literalism, unlike Shylock’s more conventional variety, dissolves the law entirely. The release promised by equitable interpretation opens one to the injustice of a power that wishes to circumvent its own laws. Like the reductive measurements of money, the procrustean dimensions of the law are intolerable necessities.8 Such exposure of the restraint lurking beneath apparent liberation has, of course, become a standard gesture in studies of early modern English literature. Thus, Hiram Haydn could long ago posit a “Counter-Renaissance” rebellion against the orthodox ideal of limit, citing among many others Pico’s “Oration” and Sidney’s Apology, with its celebration of man as “set . . . beyond and over all the works of that second nature,” a transcendence of natural limit “which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry” (qtd. in Haydn 331). In response, critics like Jean-Joseph Goux and John Guillory can suggest more skeptically that the premodern discourse of limit differs from the modern one insofar as the latter simply tends to eschew direct, normative, juridical policing of boundaries in favor of what Richard Halpern calls “virtual regimes,” which harness (always with incomplete success) transgressive or “vagrant” energies such that individuals perceive their subjection not as the heavy hand of authority but as the expression of their freedom. For example, in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Halpern reads humanist pedagogy and rhetoric, the apparatus of “style production,” as among the institutions that, by pursuing their own by turns elitist, antihierarchical, or antimercantile cultural agendas, nevertheless created the conditions for bourgeois hegemony. Thus, for Halpern, Sidney’s untrammeled and vagrant maker, “freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit,” however potentially liberating his humanist/rhetorical selffashioning, participates in a larger “discourse of capacities which explained vertical movement exclusively by means of quasi-ethical powers within the individual” and thus worked nicely to “explain downward mobility and to cope ideologically with the swelling tides of the new poor” (89–90). It is not far from this justification and reabsorption of excess to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which benignly and mysteriously reroutes the rapacious excesses of a free market to the end of maximum communal benefit. And it is not far back from this deus ex mercato to the God of Paradise Lost, who converts the willful transgressions of erring creatures into ever-richer redemptive opportunities, that is, converts excess to measure through

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a measureless grace. If, then, apparent liberation seems always to reveal, under critical scrutiny, its hidden enabling constraints, perhaps constraint similarly shelters a surprising seed of liberation.

Our Problem? We have, perhaps, inherited this tangle of restraint and release. At the end of The Coiners of Language, Goux argues that the free play of the signifier so fundamental to postmodern thought presupposes an “exchangist conception of the sign,” and that the resulting “reign of the token entails the illusion of the autonomy of the purely symbolic,” an illusion that is in truth “the culminating lie of the exchangist abstraction” (140). He concludes that an adequate (i.e., I assume, disillusioned) description of the cultural “drama” that corresponds to our economic instruments would require “highly complex ethical, metaphysical, philosophical, and mythical significations of the type Aristotle invokes in the Nichomachean Ethics, where he examines the institution of money in the context of the ethical notion of justice and not as an autonomous economic procedure” (143). Thus Meikle’s uneasiness with the tyranny of a “universal form,” his resistance to the universal commensurability of a money economy, dovetails with Goux’s suspicion that the apparently liberating antifoundationalism of postmodern thought might be a rattling of chains. In Cultural Capital, John Guillory levels a similar charge at liberal pluralism, which, in celebrating a multitude of peacefully coexisting relative values, in effect celebrates “the absolute commensurability of everything” (323), precisely the charge leveled by Meikle at neoclassical economics: in both cases, the logical origin of such commensurability is the money form itself. But it is not merely a matter of recognizing and then throwing off our chains. Eagleton implies that for the benefit of the vulnerable, we require consensual fictions like the law (and we might add language and money) despite our knowledge that such fictions rest on nothing more than differance and a prayer, and despite our responsibility to limit through practical action the injustices of these fictions. Recall now Aristotle’s puzzlement over the failure of money to achieve true commensuration and thus to ensure reciprocal justice, while people nevertheless gladly continued to employ it as an adequate medium of exchange and measure of value. The modern economics of marginal utility would, of course, dismiss Aristotle’s project both for misconstruing the motive of exchange, which is in truth not proportional justice but relative advantage (in the eyes of the parties to the

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exchange), and for cherishing the notion that one could measure value or utility, which on the contrary results from the unique, radically contingent, and thus immeasurable circumstances surrounding every act of personal valuation. These assumptions lead the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, for example, to dismiss the chimera of measurement (and thus of strict commensurability) in language suggestive for my purposes: value, he says, “consists solely in a comparison of the importance of different wants. The judgement ‘Commodity a is worth more to me than commodity b’ no more presupposes a measure of economic value than the judgement ‘A is dearer to me—more highly esteemed—than B’ presupposes a measure of friendship” (45).9 This remark, collapsing as it does the distinction between assigning commodity value and assigning human value, unsettlingly yokes humanity and commodity—dare I say daughters and ducats?—even as it offers to free us of a restrictive economic illusion. Even more suggestively, however, Von Mises’s eagerness to banish measurement as a comforting but misleading fiction causes him to underestimate the utility of the fiction. At the moment of exchange, money decrees the equal value of the goods exchanged, and we join in this pretense, if only to facilitate what we know, having calculated marginal utilities, to be an unequal exchange. What Aristotle asks is why this fiction works. The Merchant of Venice similarly asks why, even if, the fictions of law and language and love work, how we satisfy ourselves that justice and meaning and mutual surrender can result from, and despite, the incommensurability of letter and spirit, of language and truth, of love and being worthy of love. It also wonders how, even in the absence of this satisfaction, we can do without such fictions. Indeed, the play is not above hinting—through Antonio’s “I hold the world but as a the world . . . / A stage where every man must play his part” (1.1.77–8)—that the fictions of the stage might also number among our inadequate necessities.

Notes 1. Meikle has recently extended this argument in “Quality and Quantity in Economics: The Metaphysical Construction of the Economic Realm.” 2. In “The Sum of Something: Arithmetic in The Merchant of Venice,” David Bady notes that Cardano’s Ars Magna of 1545, “the work which most strikingly extended the Renaissance’s knowledge of equations, denoted equality with Latin valet, corresponding to Antonio’s ‘valued

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Eric Spencer ’gainst’ ” (11). I would add, however, that Antonio (like Jessica in the forequoted encomium) has in mind not equation, but inequality: he wishes his claim, valued against Portia’s, to tip the scales in his favor. If the language of arithmetical equipoise is at work here, it is canceling itself out. See, for example, Walter Cohen’s “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” For my money, the best “cornucopian” reading of the play is Lawrence Danson’s The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice.” This argument retained practical as well as theoretical force in Elizabethan England. Jones quotes the following remark from the notes Burghley (hardly an unworldly hair-splitter) prepared during the 1571 Usury Bill debate: Usury, he writes, “decayeth merchandise. . . . Merchandise resteth in eschange properly, wares for wares; improperly wares for money. Unnaturally monny for monny” (55). Marx reproduces Burghley’s (and Aristotle’s) logic when he distinguishes between transactions of the form C-M-C’, where money (M) facilitates the exchange of one useful commodity (C) for another (C’), and transactions of the form M-C-M’, where commodities are valued not for any specific useful quality they possess, but only because, as exchange value, they mediate the accumulation of money. See Engle (87–92) for the multiple resonances of the Jacob and Laban parable for Shylock’s situation. Of course, Calvin here attacks Aristotle on the latter’s own turf; Nichomachean Ethics 5:10 was a locus classicus for legal and theological discussions of equity. Much early modern criticism of Aristotle similarly fails to acknowledge his influence. Perkins’s Epieikeia is perhaps the best-known treatise amalgamating Aristotelian and reformed thought on equity. See, however, Charles Spinosa’s “The Transformation of Intentionality: Debt and Contract in The Merchant of Venice,” which reads the play as registering not the eclipse of contract, but a legal sea-change from a culture of custom and the culture of contract, where contract requires the articulating and specifying of intentions, in contrast to the unspoken, even instinctual, character of customary relations. For a defense of Shylock’s behavior more nuanced, but no less provocative, than Eagleton’s, see Luke Wilson’s essay in this volume, “Monetary Compensation for Injuries to the Body, A.D. 602–1697.” Wilson argues that Shylock opposes Portia’s “coercive Christian epieikeia” with a “counter-literature of the list,” conceptually analogous to the schedules in Anglo-Saxon law and modern insurance which affix a standard (rather than circumstantially, subjectively assessed) value to lost or damaged body parts: in Shylock’s view, as in the list’s, once [a body part is] severed or damaged, it’s no longer yours, no longer implies any whole from

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which it comes, no longer shares in the identity of the person injured. I want to see this attitude neither as a barbaric vestige of primitive law nor as the representative of a pernicious new order of alienation and commodification, but as the potentially progressive entailment of a Shakespearean poetics of the list that, with its roots in England’s Anglo-Saxon past, reaches deep into the modern. (17–18) For my purposes here, note how in Wilson’s argument arbitrary quantification becomes not simply the regrettable, or even sinister, suppression of unique quality, but a complex, pragmatic adjustment to existence, in opposition to Antonio’s “obscene, narcissistic, and perversely self-destructive” pursuit of “absolute risk” (18). 9. Economics has apparently been anti-foundational longer than literary criticism. Hardly a spokesman for New Left liberalism, Von Mises sketches here, without in the least provoking the ire of William Bennett, the idea that value rests on a purely differential and relative system without origin or transcendent anchor.

Bibliography Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Oswald. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1962. ——. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Oxford University Press, 1946. Bady, David. “The Sum of Something: Arithmetic in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 10–30. Cohen, Walter. “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” In Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Ed. Ivo Kamps. London and New York: Verso, 1995. 71–92. Danson, Lawrence. The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Engle, Lars. “Money and Moral Luck in The Merchant of Venice.” In Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 77–106. Goux, Jean-Joseph. The Coiners of Language. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1993. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Literature and the Genealogy of Capital. Cornell University Press, 1991. Haydn, Hiram. The Counter-Renaissance. New York: Grove Press, 1960. First published 1950. Jones, Norman. God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

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Leinwand, Theodore B. Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Meikle, Scott. Aristotle’s Economic Thought. Oxford University Press, 1995. ——. “Quality and Quantity in Economics: The Metaphysical Construction of the Economic Realm.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 247–68. Perkins, William. Epieikeia; or, A Treatise of Christian Equity and Moderation. In The Works of William Perkins. Ed. Ian Breward. Abingdon, Berks.: Sutlon Courtenay Press, 1970. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, ed. Kenneth Myrick. New York: Signet, 1965. Spinosa, Charles. “The Transformation of Intentionality: Debt and Contract in The Merchant of Venice.” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 370–409. Sugerman, David, and Ronnie Warrington. “Land law, Citizenship, and the Invention of ‘Englishness’: The Strange World of the Equity of Redemption.” In Early Modern Conceptions of Property. Ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves. London: Routledge, 1996. 111–43. Von Mises, Ludwig. The Theory of Money and Credit. Trans. H.E. Batson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. First published 1924.

Chapter 10

The Lead Casket: Capital, Mercantilism, and T H E M E R C H A N T OF VENICE1 Mark Netzloff

A number of recent discussions of The Merchant of Venice, including essays by Walter Cohen, Thomas Moison, Michael Nerlich, Lars Engle, and Michael Ferber, have emphasized the range of economic contexts and concerns that are evoked in the play. Despite their differences, these readings generally follow the precedent established by Cohen, and link the play’s economic language and commentary to the institutions and social relations approximating that of “capitalism.” Cohen asserts that the play, and the character of Antonio in particular, can be seen as “the harbinger of capitalism” (771). Yet, in the same passage, Cohen also describes the ethos represented by Antonio as “native [i.e., European] bourgeois mercantilism” (771). I wish to highlight two important problems implicit in Cohen’s statements: the presentation of capitalism as a unitary object of analysis; and the conflation of capitalism and mercantilism. This essay attempts to complicate the use of the term “capitalism” in critical accounts of the play by noting the important differences between early modern forms of capital and capitalism as a mode of production. As Fernand Braudel points out, descriptions of capitalism as a coherent economic system derive from the mid-nineteenth century, and even Marx does not refer to “capitalism” in this sense at any point in his writings (The Wheels of Commerce 237). In the early modern period, capital represented an

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unsettled, semantically flexible array of ideas and objects encompassing “wealth, money, funds, goods, principal, assets, property, patrimony” (Braudel, Wheels of Commerce 233). Despite the varying applications of the idea of capital, these definitions nonetheless deal with tangible objects and economic assets, actual sums of money or moveable wealth rather than more abstracted forms of value. In the early modern period, capital possessed multiple incarnations, yet was defined in relation to its material forms. Marx appropriately terms the economic thought of the early modern period the “Monetary System,” a set of economic assumptions that represented value only in terms of the circulation of money (Grundrisse 103, 327). In other words, even when manifestations of capital became increasingly ubiquitous in the early modern period, these forms of capital were nonetheless conceptualized within the residual categories and practices of mercantilism. I also wish to emphasize the significant distinctions between capitalism and mercantilism, the latter of which represented the dominant economic ideology of the early modern period. Mercantilism is more accurately seen not as a coherent economic system, but rather a set of ideas shared by many early modern economic thinkers. One of the primary assumptions underlying mercantilist economics was an equation of value with its material embodiment in bullion and coin. Later political economists, including Adam Smith and Marx, would critique mercantilism for its conflation of value with material wealth, an overdetermined attention to foreign trade that failed to recognize the social relations and conditions of production that serve to enable the creation of value. As a result of its bullionist conception of value, mercantilist economic philosophy advocated state policies that functioned to bring about a balance of trade, attempting to increase the nation’s exports while also preventing an overseas drain of the nation’s precious stock of bullion and coin. Of course, the balance of imports to exports necessarily alters based upon the fluctuating value of the nation’s currency in other markets. Thus, these two mercantilist principles—a materialist or bullionist conception of value and a desired balance of trade—were intrinsically competing factors within the national economy, a tension that exposes the ways that mercantilist economic ideology failed to represent a unified system of economic thought. Nonetheless, mercantilism made an important contribution to the construction of a national economy, recommending the state’s intervention in currency valuation, exports, and other economic matters, a statist approach that differs sharply from the laissez-faire policies advocated in subsequent centuries by capitalist political economists.2

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In contrast to the inherent contradictions and tensions that are held to characterize mercantilist economics, the analysis of early modern capitalism consistently emphasizes capital’s increasing and unproblematic ascendancy. Marx’s discussion of “The General Formula for Capital” in volume one of Capital establishes a precedent for this narrative, focusing on the role of commodity circulation as the “starting-point” and “first form of appearance of capital” (247). In Marx’s historical analysis, the sixteenth century serves as a point of origin for capital, which he links to the creation of “world trade and the world market” (247). However, contrary to the sense of inevitable emergence and consolidation in this narrative of origin, Marx emphasizes the disjunctions inherent in the process of early modern capital formation. In his discussion of commodity circulation, Marx notes how increasingly complex networks of international commerce undermined the mercantilist alignment of value with its material forms. Through circulation, the money-form (coin and bullion) disappears in exchange, as goods are exchanged for other commodities; in this process, the money-form is even replaced by immaterial forms of credit and bills of exchange, demonstrating the blurred boundaries between commodity exchange and money exchange. Contrary to a mercantilist conception of value wherein money functions either as an objective measure or transparent medium of exchange, the money-form itself becomes a commodity of relative and fluctuating value. Furthermore, in emerging capitalist forms of commerce, the goals of exchange extend beyond a single direct transaction, and are instead predicated on a constant process of circulation that exceeds identifiable markers set by participants or objects, thereby becoming an untraceable, disembodied process, a “limitless” movement that enables the creation of surplusvalue through circulation (253). The formation of capital is thus accomplished not only through a process of materialization, in terms of the commodification of the money-form, but also based upon an underlying abstraction, the disappearance of material goods and money through exchange, which may reappear in the form of profit. Because mercantilist economic ideology associated its desired goal of a balance of trade with national wealth in the form of a stock of “treasure” (reserves of bullion and coin), the results of commodity circulation potentially undermined a dominant economic expression of early modern English nationhood. Early modern texts frequently commented on what they perceived as a pervasive infiltration of the rules of economic exchange into the realm of social relations. In an often-cited passage, John Wheeler observed in A Treatise of Commerce (1601), “all the world choppeth

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and chaungeth, runneth and raveth after Martes, Markettes, and Marchandising, so that all things come into Commerce, and passe into Trafficque (in a maner) in all times” (Sig. B1v).3 The increasingly impersonal, disembodied, and abstracted character of early modern exchange challenged the ability of texts to define social relations in the language of the market.4 The “intellectual confusion” so often ascribed to early modern mercantilist thought may have resulted from the contradictions inherent in efforts to render disparate and even contradictory economic phenomena as a coherent, systematic whole.5 The dominant economic language of The Merchant of Venice inherits these disjunctions, evincing the congruencies as well as divergences of mercantilist and proto-capitalist economic ideologies and conceptions of value in the early modern period. This essay will examine how the play’s representation of the lead casket serves to offset the destabilizing effects of mercantilism’s embodiment of value in coin and bullion. I contextualize the play’s endorsement of proto-capitalist mechanisms of exchange within a contemporary effort to differentiate the forms of capital formation found in the “golden fleece” of English domestic manufacture from the taint of Spanish imperialism. The Merchant of Venice naturalizes emergent forms of capital by translating economic innovation into the stable and traditional categories of class hierarchies, landed property, and the patriarchal household. Part of the play’s strategies to recuperate value entail a linguistic obfuscation of the distinctions and tensions between material currency and the forms of representative currency, such as credit or bills of exchange, which increasingly facilitated international trade and domestic borrowing. The “credit” that Antonio advises Bassanio to seek in his name—“Try what my credit can in Venice do” (1.1.180)— contrasts with the materiality of the types of surety Antonio mentions earlier: “fortunes,” “money,” “commodities” (1.1.179). Antonio’s “credit” possesses an economic and semantic flexibility that allows it to take both material and abstract form. The power of Antonio’s “credit” is indicative of early modern economic practice, as Craig Muldrew has shown, wherein most market relations were informal and “done on trust, or credit, without specific legally binding instruments” (169). In the language of early modern economics, “credit” functioned as both measure of value and commodity. Antonio’s “credit,” for example, serves as the means and medium of exchange, representing his ability to transmute abstractions (his will, or his “credit,” i.e., reputation) into the material substance of a lent sum of money. Yet credit also acts as a commodity within Antonio’s metaphor of making credit “be rack’d, even to the uttermost” (1.1.181). Here he gives the abstraction

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the properties of metallic currency, its ability to be figuratively “racked” or stretched. The lending of hard currency’s material form to immaterial types of exchange and credit therefore serves to regularize disembodied mechanisms of exchange by making them follow the rules of “real” currency. Yet by embodying the value of his credit, Antonio also makes it susceptible to debasement and devaluation, a position comparable to the unstable status of early modern currency. The Prince of Morocco, the first of Portia’s suitors, attempts to condense value into material form; but he does so in order to have this material embodiment of value—gold, precious gems—reflect an objective standard of value that lies outside exchange, use, and potential manipulation. In this sense he reflects the contradictions of early modern mercantilist thought, which similarly attempted to embody value in coin or bullion so as to retain these objects as measures of value. Passing quickly over the lead casket, which he associates with motives of profit (“Men that hazard all / Do it in hope of fair advantages” [2.7.18–19]), Morocco tries to choose between gold and silver, metals that serve as intrinsic indices of value and, by extension, reinforce social markers of distinction. Morocco uses language applicable to the adjustment of specie in his effort to “weigh” and “rate” his value by his own “estimation” (2.7.26). Yet he realizes that without an outside measure he cannot adjudicate his own value, despite the intrinsic worth bestowed by his status as a “noble prince” (2.7.2). Morocco therefore makes Portia that measure of value, claiming in his rejection of the silver casket that her value exceeds that of “tried gold” (2.7.53), the distilled essence of the metal after it has been rubbed on a touchstone or melted in a fire (Fischer 80). In early modern economic practice, the melting of precious metals was also the means to take coins out of circulation, to hoard this wealth for oneself, literally, to “gain what many men desire” (2.7.37), but to do so for one’s own profit and not for the common good.6 Even as he attempts to distill a purified material form of value, Morocco’s comments evoke the inevitably manipulable and commodified status of value in the early modern period. Morocco contrasts Portia’s “mettle” with numismatic forms of value, determining Portia’s worth in opposition to that of engraved coins bearing the image of Elizabeth: “They have in England / A coin that bears the figure of an angel / Stamp’d in gold, but that’s insculp’d upon” (2.7.55–7). His comparison is an appropriate one with which to emphasize Portia’s value since the angel was one of the few coins whose rate of valuation remained stable, and even increased slightly, during the Tudor period (Fischer 41). Elizabeth was frequently

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praised for forestalling the debasement of English currency and restoring it to its “natural” value with her 1560 recoinage.7 William Camden blamed devaluation on Henry VIII’s desire for quick profit, and praised Elizabeth for her ability to call in and remint base metals, thereby restoring the purity of the currency (Remains 176).8 Yet although Elizabeth’s recoinage may have stabilized the English pound, the £40,000 profit that it produced for the crown surpassed the profit of £30,000 gained through Henry VIII’s 1544 debasement of the pound, a fact that reveals the economic motives underlying efforts to restore the integrity of the English currency (Feaveryear 54, 84).9 Thus, there are contextual reasons for Morocco to distinguish Portia’s intrinsic value from the unstable and commodified form of the English coin. Whereas Morocco emphasizes the quality of the metal, Arragon determines value based on the casket’s inscription, the “stamp of merit” (2.9.39) or social forms in which value is figured. But Arragon’s choice of the silver casket illustrates how numismatic and social forms fail to indicate “weight” or intrinsic value. Arragon castigates the “undeserved dignity” (2.9.40) of newly acquired social privilege most of all because of its creation through processes of exchange, the fact that “estates, degrees, and offices” are “deriv’d corruptly” (2.9.41–2). He therefore proposes to adjust social hierarchies through “use,” to have honor “new varnish’d” (2.9.49). But to test one’s “mettle” in this way, like that of the “metal” of specie, serves to efface its “stamp of merit,” the insignia of the monarch that establishes the legitimacy of its status as value, the coin or aristocrat’s ability to signify worth. In fact, the debased testons of Henry VIII, which were copper coins thinly covered with a silver surface in order to pass as currency, became known as “copper noses” due to how their silver portraits of King Henry wore away through use, revealing an interior base metal (Fischer 25; Camden, Remains 175). Thus, while signifiers of rank may be susceptible to the corruption of economic factors, efforts to penetrate to some underlying essence (“th’ interior” beneath the “show” that attracts the “fool multitude” [2.9.28, 26]) only efface the stamp of authority that authorizes merit and value, without whose insignia even the noble venturer fails to distinguish which caskets are merely “[s]ilvered o’er” (2.9.68). Although Arragon attempts to polish the coin of honor in order to expose the difference between its true and counterfeit incarnations, his recommendations mimic the practices of early modern “coiners,” who would illegally melt, heat, clip, or treat coins with chemical solvents in order to extract precious metals from the currency (Gaskill 123–99). Thus, while

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Morocco and Arragon attempt to embody value and choose their caskets according to codes of nobility and status, their positions are rendered as analogous to those of the hoarder and counterfeiter, figures who served debilitating and illegal roles in a mercantilist system of value. Unlike Morocco’s definition of value as an objective measure removed from the realm of exchange, or Arragon’s embodiment of value in social hierarchies, Bassanio’s choice of the lead casket endorses “a dynamic of exchange” and conforms to the dependence of Elizabethan mercantile practice on “a velocity of circulation” achieved through the increased circulation of money and commodities (Engle 23).10 Yet despite the proto-capitalist implications of the lead casket, its acquisition is nonetheless linked to the landed property of Belmont, not the commodity circulation of the Venetian Rialto. Bassanio appropriately refers to his recently confirmed union with Portia as his “new int’rest” (3.2.221). In contrast to the ability of Portia’s estate to generate riches, Bassanio’s status is compared to the devaluation of specie, as he is “abridg’d” or reduced “From such a noble rate” (1.1.126–7— emphasis added).11 Although Bassanio can claim inherent value because of his status as a gentleman—“all the wealth I had / Ran in my veins” (3.2.254–5)—his status is dependent on a supply of capital to keep that bloodstream circulating; the written words reporting the bond’s forfeiture are appropriately said to issue forth Antonio’s “lifeblood” (3.2.266). In this self-characterization Bassanio distances himself from a class-specific attitude toward value best represented by Morocco, which attempted to embody value in its material forms, a stance similar to mercantilist thought’s own limited conception of value in terms of its accumulation in coin and bullion. Bassanio instead adjudicates his value in terms of a circulating body of capital that is represented, not embodied, by the letter indicating Antonio’s losses. This disembodied paper, similar in form to credit or a bill of exchange, is nonetheless likened to Antonio’s body, and depicted as bleeding capital in the form of lost “ventures” and shipwrecks (3.2.266–71). In the early modern proto-capitalist credit system, Marx argued, material forms of money are not so much transcended as re-embodied in human form, a process that “humanizes” capital while also forcing social relations to follow the rules of the market.12 In this process of capital formation that transforms and commodifies social relations, the language of economic exchange becomes an increasingly crucial means to regularize disruptive social change. As Fernand Braudel comments, “any active economy will break away from its monetary language” and necessitate more innovate representational

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models to conceptualize emergent economic phenomena (The Structures of Everyday Life 440).13 In The Merchant of Venice we witness the incomplete status of this project in the early modern period, which is reflected in the complex economic role assumed by each character, including Bassanio. Similar to both Shylock and Antonio, Bassanio’s economic survival is dependent upon both credit and “thrift” or profit (1.1.175–6). Bassanio’s status as a gentleman defines him in terms removed from production, a position resembling that of the usurer. As a “venturer,” he is also situated as a middleman in the circuits of exchange. More than the consummate “prodigal” consumer in the play, Bassanio also operates as an investor. Like the members of the gentry involved in commercial ventures in Elizabethan England, he utilizes the capital provided him by Antonio to turn a profit, to win Portia.14 Bassanio is able to displace the stereotypical image of his prodigality assigned to him by Shylock (2.5.15) by becoming less like a young member of the gentry and more like a member of the merchant class. His final lines in the opening scene—“I have a mind presages me such thrift / That I should questionless be fortunate” (1.1.175–6)—reflects this new role as a merchant adventurer to Belmont. Marx, in his discussion of “PreCapitalist Relations,” points to the early modern adaptation of usury to a capitalist mode of production precisely through the credit system’s ability to transform borrowing from its role in an economy of “extravagant consumption” to capitalist conditions wherein the borrower was given a loan based on his new role as a “potential capitalist” (Capital 3.735). As demonstrated by the transformation of Bassanio into a “venturer,” The Merchant of Venice is situated within a contemporary debate that attempted to justify England’s entrance into a colonial economy by uniting the heroic dimension of colonial expansion, a chivalric discourse appealing to England’s gentry, with the interests of commerce and capital. Antonio’s “wealthy Andrew” (1.1.27) shares its name with the Spanish galleon captured by Sir Francis Drake in 1596, the same year as the play’s initial performance. The comparison of Portia to the golden fleece (1.1.169–72, 3.2.241) further evokes an image frequently used to represent the precious metals of the Americas.15 In Doctor Faustus, Valdes praises Faustus’s power to bring “from America the golden fleece / That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury” (1.1.130–1). Similarly, Henry Roberts, in a poem dedicated to Drake and Sir John Hawkins, commends the privateers, who, “Searching with paine, the Confines of the earth, / . . . / . . . fetch more woorth, than Iasons fleece” (Sig. A3). But most English voyages searching for

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American gold, like Martin Frobisher’s, proved chimerical.16 Particularly in its representation of Morocco and Arragon, The Merchant of Venice distances its economy from an older chivalric model of “adventure,” one still evoked in the literature of English privateering of the 1590s, foregrounding instead an emergent ethos of capitalist “venturing.”17 As a result of English adventurers’ constant inability to find precious metals in the Americas, English commercial ideology attempted to differentiate English colonialism from Spanish imperialism by locating the sources of England’s own wealth within more traditional, stable, and perhaps mundane networks of commerce. Many early modern texts, for example, applied the metaphor of the “golden fleece” to domestic woolen and cloth industries in conscious opposition to the quick profit of New World gold.18 The character of Merlin in Jonson’s The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610) points to the employment of the poor in the cloth trade to justify calling it England’s “golden fleece,” due to which they “need no foreign mine, / If industry at home do not decline” (ll.186–90). As Marx has argued, the historical development of merchant’s capital through trade and exchange occurred in opposition to capitalist manufacture and industry (Capital 3.446). Domestic industry and foreign trade are thus seen as competing forces within the national economy. The Merchant of Venice reconciles tensions between these economies by reinscribing the mercantile pursuit of the money-form, the “golden fleece” of specie, as a courtship of a source of wealth—Portia—that is severed from the taint of merchant’s capital and instead associated with landed property, the most traditional form of domestic production. Nonetheless it is extremely misleading to connect Portia too literally to any set of social relations. Although her role as the mistress of Belmont would seem to associate her position with the landed property of the rural gentry, she does not represent domestic production so much as forms of wealth that transcend economic circulation and exchange. Despite her suitors’ commodification of her as the embodiment of value (Morocco), status (Arragon), or capital (Bassanio), or even the self-commodification expressed within her statements to Bassanio following his casket choice (3.2.152–67), Portia’s economic resources remain noticeably absent from representation, devoid of evident origin, production, and circulation. Whereas the capital running through the circuit of Shylock–Antonio–Bassanio is overly conspicuous, Portia’s resources remain outside the play’s frame of analysis because they are not tied to the same forces of scarcity and devaluation as those of the characters situated in the economic realm of Venice. In

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this representation of Portia and the Belmont estate, Carol Leventen notes, “patriarchal power is deftly, unobtrusively posited as existing independent of time and space, independent of history,” unlike the inextricably historicized economic realm of Venice (69). In contrast to the doubtful resources of both Shylock and Antonio, Portia instinctively dismisses the news of Antonio’s forfeiture with the proposal to pay off Shylock, even to six times the debt owed (3.2.298–302). At the play’s conclusion, Portia also serves as the messenger of the news of the return of Antonio’s argosies (5.1.275–7). This ultimate recuperation of Antonio’s fortunes is not subject to the same economic, legal, or even natural rules that circumscribe characters’ actions throughout the play. Significantly, the final deus ex machina is associated with a reflux of capital, a closure to circulation and exchange as merchant’s capital finally returns home. In this sense, Portia serves to domesticate the threat of capital formation to the national economy, translating economic innovation into the residual categories and hierarchies of landed property and the patriarchal household. The play’s closure also serves to transform its Venetian setting, where women possessed significant legal and economic rights in the early modern period, to an English context in which women’s rights to property and legal representation were more narrowly defined (Leventen 62–5). The “domestication” of the play’s setting serves to “domesticate” Portia, ultimately annulling the possibility of her own economic and sexual agency, and effectively translating her role from virago to angel of the house. The increasingly abstracted and ubiquitous qualities of economic phenomena thus produced a compensatory emphasis on the domestic economy in its most literal and immediate sense, as “household management.”19 This focus on the stability of the household offered a means to manage the potentially disruptive possibilities of social and economic change. The romantic comedy of the play’s fifth act expands the analogy of economic and sexual forms of circulation and exchange.20 By enabling the play’s closure through the resolution of the ring exchange, Portia attempts to extricate marriage and the familial household at Belmont from homosocial networks of exchange at Venice. This concern over the infiltration of economic norms into sexual behavior and marital rules is also earlier evoked in Bassanio’s casket choice scene. As Bassanio observes while deliberating over the golden casket, gold “works a miracle in nature, / Making them lightest that wear most of it” (3.2.90–1). In his allusion to female sexual license (or “lightness”), Bassanio’s comment further evokes representations of ethical lightness, a concern that in the late Elizabethan

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period was often associated with the contaminating circulation of Spanish gold.21 Walter Raleigh, in his Discoverie of Guiana, complains that Spanish gold “creepeth into Counsels, and setteth bound loyalty at liberty,” an anxiety concerning the number of English receiving stipends from Spain (qtd. in Knapp 198).22 The dangers of foreign trade were perceived as reducing all values—even marital or national fidelity—to equivalences subject only to the rules of the marketplace. Early modern English texts frequently associated the problem of what Marx terms “world money” with its supposed Spanish source.23 In the process, Anglo-Spanish economic and national rivalry was figured within the languages of gender and sexuality, as the economic promiscuity of imperial Spain was constructed as antithetical to the stability of the English domestic economy. Donne sarcastically comments in “Elegy 11: The Bracelet” on his wish that his lost bracelet, a love token from his mistress, were instead “Spanish stamps, still travelling, / That are become as Catholic as their king” (ll.29–30). Similar to Arragon’s anxiety over the effacement of the “stamp of merit,” the seal of the monarch legitimizing value on either coin or peer, the Spanish coins circulate regardless of national boundaries or affiliation. Donne depicts the universal acceptance of this “Catholic” currency as a contaminating force that ruins the countries in which it circulates: France, Scotland, and the Netherlands (ll.39–42). The anxiety over the dominance of Spanish currency obscures how this economic hegemony provided a means to stabilize the chaos of early modern exchange: among the countries mentioned by Donne, 400 different currencies circulated in the Netherlands and 82 in France in the early seventeenth century (Braudel, Wheels of Commerce 196). Donne distracts attention away from England’s subordinate position in the global market, as a marginal outpost whose own treasure of specie was drained overseas, and depicts Spain, the nation supposedly dominating the mercantile system, instead destroying itself and its neighbors through the economic monopoly and promiscuous circulation of its “world coin.”24 Although an influx of specie was seen as essential to English commercial development, the economic effects of Spain’s supersaturation with imported bullion were already evident in the late Elizabethan period; the influx of New World gold had caused massive inflation and a consumer economy wherein consumption could not keep up with inflated prices and devalued specie (Braudel, Wheels of Commerce 174–5). In Bassanio’s formulation, the prospect of gold is therefore rendered as a form of danger, “the guiled shore / To a most dangerous sea” (3.2.97–8). Many early modern texts interpreted Spain’s economic

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and political decline as poetic justice, the necessary result of unfettered imperialist expansion.25 Bassanio’s reference to the prospect of quick profit as “The seeming truth which cunning times put on / To entrap the wisest” (3.2.100–1) is in keeping with arguments that attempted to distinguish England from its Spanish rival based on differing economic as well as colonial practices. The representation of gold as “Hard food for Midas” (3.2.102) resembles one of Theodor de Bry’s most striking images from his virulently anti-Catholic travel anthology America (1594), that of Amerindians enacting a symbolic revenge on avaricious Spaniards by pouring molten gold down their throats.26 Donne also applies the image of Midas to colonialism in “Elegy 20: Love’s War,” wherein he depicts the failure of English colonization in the Americas as a “Midas touch” that provides wealth but not the means for the colonies’ survival: “And Midas’ joys our Spanish journeys give, / We touch all gold, but find no food to live” (ll.17–18). Bassanio’s likening of the pursuit of gold to Midas posits an alternative model for value production, one that counters the materialist conception of value that characterizes early modern mercantilism and its most dominant participant, the colonial empire of Spain. In his analysis of early modern economics in the Grundrisse, Marx returns to the figure of Midas in order to contrast mercantilism’s consistent efforts to embody wealth in the money-form from the immaterial and abstracted forms of value that enabled the formation of capital in the early modern period: Where wealth as such seems to appear in an entirely material, tangible form, its existence is only in my head, it is a pure fantasy. Midas. On the other side, as material representative of general wealth, it is realized only by being thrown back into circulation, to disappear in exchange for the singular, particular modes of wealth. It remains in circulation, as medium of circulation; but for the accumulating individual, it is lost, and this disappearance is the only possible way to secure it as wealth. (Grundrisse 233–4)

For Marx, mercantilist economic thought constituted a “fantasy,” a desire to reduce value only to its material embodiment in bullion and coin. Marx repeats the language of Sir Thomas Smith’s critique of Tudor economic policy, which in the latter’s view attempted to adjudicate value “after our own fantasies” of economic self-sufficiency and recuperated integrity. By contrast, the creation of wealth is realized only through entrance into what Smith termed “the universal market

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of the world,” the realm of exchange and circulation that defies concerns of borders and sovereignty (86). Mercantilist thought mistook the function of money, rendering equivalent abstract forms of value with their material embodiment by equating reserves of coin and bullion (as “treasure”) with national wealth. Mercantilism, for Marx, merely “grasped the semblance of things,” perceiving wealth exclusively in terms of precious metal—what Bassanio might refer to as a focus on “ornament” (3.2.74), the outward signs of value— rather than analyzing the processes that enable value to be produced (Capital 3.455).27 In the mercantilist system, specie assumed the functions not only of both measure of value and master commodity, but also of index of national power (Grundrisse 227). Yet the desire to increase national prestige by hoarding bullion, although an initial stage of capital accumulation, ultimately impoverished early modern Spain, the nation that had attempted to monopolize the extraction of bullion and circulation of specie (Grundrisse 225). Thus, for Marx, capital can only accumulate through a willingness to give it up, put it back into circulation, and allow its use by and for others (Grundrisse 234). In this context, the inscription of the lead casket—“Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.16)—reflects this emphasis on the creation of value through submission to a constant process of circulation that entails the possibility of loss. Thus, these proto-capitalist modes of exchange and value production ultimately resisted and exceeded their incorporation into a nationalist rhetoric and economic program. Early modern texts, including Shakespeare’s play, consequently formulated and adapted tropes—“venturing,” “the golden fleece,” “Midas”—that attempted to create a national frame of reference for non- and extra-national economic phenomena. As a result, the commercial expansion of the English nation through international commerce was justified not in terms of the accumulation of value in the embodied form of treasure, but instead in relation to the production of capital through an ongoing process of circulation. Yet while this process offsets the instabilities of devaluation and depletion associated with mercantilism, emergent forms of capital also created new dangers relating to the disappearance of material wealth and the abstraction of value. The Merchant of Venice minimizes the risks and hazards inherent in a process of capital formation by translating emergent forms of exchange within the residual mercantilist language of embodied material value. These efforts necessarily elide the preconditions of capital, effacing the processes of abstraction and limitless circulation upon which capitalist value production depends, and instead conceptualize

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a manageable realm of exchange in which capital always returns to and reinforces the stability of the domestic sphere.

Notes 1. An expanded version of this essay will appear in my book England’s Internal Colonies. 2. For a discussion of early modern mercantilism, see Heckscher; Magnusson; and Finkelstein, esp. 247–66. 3. I discuss this passage more fully in England’s Internal Colonies. 4. For a related discussion, see Agnew 9–10, 41–6 and Fumerton 173–7. 5. The phrase is from John Maynard Keynes’s critique of mercantilism; see Rich and Wilson 4.505. 6. On the historical conditions prompting hoarding in the early modern period, see Marx, Capital 1.227–32. 7. For Elizabeth’s contemporary statement on the recoinage, see Tawney and Power 2.195–9 and Hughes and Larkin 150–4. 8. For other comments on the recoinage, see Camden’s History 57–8. The 1560 recoinage was even listed on Elizabeth’s tomb among the primary accomplishments of her reign (Gaskill 125). 9. Other estimates calculate Elizabeth’s profit even higher, at £50,000 (Challis, New History 248). 10. On the early modern development of the idea of a “velocity of circulation,” see Foucault 185. Although Thomas Gresham never formulated what has come to be known as Gresham’s Law, that debased metals circulate faster, Elizabethan economic policies in many ways embodied this principle (see Foucault 171; Braudel, Wheels of Commerce 196 and The Structures of Everyday Life 460, 467; and Rich and Wilson 5.291). 11. Compare 1.3.107 and 2.7.26. 12. According to Marx, “In the credit system, man replaces metal or paper as the mediator of exchange. However, he does this not as a man but as the incarnation of capital and interest . . . Money has not been transcended in man within the credit system, but man is himself transformed into money, or, in other words, money is incarnate in him” (“Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” qtd. in Leinwand 23). 13. For a similar point, see Agnew, Worlds Apart 9. 14. Rabb calculates that 1,200 gentlemen participated in overseas commercial ventures in this period (27). Robert Ashton finds that 28 London aldermen serving in 1603 had overseas investments, 22 had investments in overseas trade, and 18 were involved in more than one branch of overseas trade (35–85). 15. This image is similarly used in Carew, Coelum Britannicum (1635) (ll.332–3) and The Jew of Malta 4.2.108. For other examples of this

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

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topos, see Gillies 136 and Peyré 106–23. In addition, the Order of the Golden Fleece was the chief chivalric order of early modern Spain. On Frobisher, see Stefansson, esp. 2.48–50. For further discussion of this transition, see Nerlich 1.164, Helgerson 163–81, Leinwand 110–39, and Linton 43 ff. William Vaughan, a Welsh writer on colonization, additionally refers to the Newfoundland fishing industry as England’s “golden fleece” in The Golden Fleece (1626). For a related discussion, see Williams 11. See Newman: 31–2. For further discussion, see Helgerson 181–91 and Knapp. Compare similar comments in “A Report of the truth of the fight about the Isles of Azores” (Selected Writings 75). On “world money” (which Marx also terms “world coin”), see Capital 1.240–4, Capital 3.449, and Grundrisse 229. Despite Donne’s attempt to differentiate English commerce from Spanish currency, in 1601 the Royal Mint issued special coins intended to replicate the Spanish currency, the real, for use by the East India Company; however, Indian traders refused to accept these coins because they did not recognize the English images and inscriptions stamped on them (Challis, Tudor Coinage 145–6). See, e.g., Payne Sig. B2v–B3. John Lyly also applies the Midas image to Spain: see Midas (1589) 2.1.95–115, 3.1.1–69, and 4.1.168–200. For a similar point, see Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 96.

Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Ashton, Robert. The City and the Court 1603–1643. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ——. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume II: The Wheels of Commerce. Trans. Sian Reynolds. 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume I: The Structures of Everyday Life. New York: Fontana Press, 1985. Bry, Theodore de. Americae Pars Quarta. Frankfurt, 1594. Camden, William. The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Queen Elizabeth Late Queen of England. Ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970. ——. Remains Concerning Britain. Ed. R.D. Dunn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Carew, Thomas. Coelum Britannicum (1635). In Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640. Ed. David Lindley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 166–93.

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Challis, C.E. The Tudor Coinage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. ——, ed. A New History of the Royal Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cohen, Walter. “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” ELH 49 (1982), republished in Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A.J. Smith. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Engle, Lars. “ ‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 20–37. Feaveryear, Sir Albert. The Pound Sterling. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. Ferber, Michael. “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice.” ELR 20 (1990): 431–64. Fischer, Sandra K. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Finkelstein, Andrea. Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Gaskill, Malcolm. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Heckscher, Eli F. Mercantilism. 2 vols. 1935 Rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hughes, Paul L., and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Jonson, Ben. The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Leinwand, Theodore B. Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Leventen, Carol. “Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice.” In The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Valerie Wayne. New York: Harvester, 1991. 59–79. Linton, Joan Pong. The Romance of the New World: Gender and Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Lyly, John. Midas. Ed. Anne Begor Lancashire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. Magnusson, Lars. Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language. New York: Routledge, 1994. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Ed. J.B. Steane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. ——. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1973. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume one. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1976. ——. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume three. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1981. ——. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988. ——. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1973. Moison, Thomas. “Which is the Merchant Here? And which the Jew’: Subversion and Recuperation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. New York: Methuen, 1987. 188–206. Muldrew, Craig. “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England.” Social History 18, 2 (May 1993): 163–83. Nerlich, Michael. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, Volume 1. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Netzloff, Mark. “Writing Britain from the Margins: Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Projects for American Colonization,” Prose Studies 25, 2 (2003), forthcoming. Newman, Karen. “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. Payne, John. The Royall Exchange. London, 1597. Peyré, Yves. “Marlowe and the Argonauts.” In Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 106–23. Rabb, Theodore K. Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Raleigh, Sir Walter. Selected Writings. Ed. Gerald Hammond. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Rich, E.E., and C.H. Wilson, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume 4: The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ——. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume 5: The Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

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Roberts, Henry. The Trumpet of Fame: Or Sir Fraunces Drakes and Sir Iohn Hawkins Farewell: With an Encouragement to all Sailers and Souldiers that are Minded to go in this Worthie Enterprise. London, 1595. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Shershow, Scott Cutler. “Idols of the Marketplace: Rethinking the Economic Determination of Renaissance Drama.” Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 1–27. Smith, Sir Thomas. A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England. Ed. Mary Dewar. Charlottesville, VA: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1969. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, ed. The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 2 vols. London: Argonaut, 1938. Tawney, R.H., and Eileen Power, eds. Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. London: Longmans, 1924. Vaughan, William. The Golden Fleece, Transported from . . . the New-FoundLand by Orpheus Junior. London, 1626. Wheeler, John. A Treatise of Commerce. London, 1601. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Chapter 11

The Fiend gives Friendly Counsel: Launcelot Gobbo and Polyglot Economics in T H E M E R C H A N T O F VENICE Steven R. Mentz

A

s the New Economic Criticism has emerged in early modern studies, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has been the most important primary text. The play was singled out as exemplary of the mutual implication of the literary and the economic in Marc Shell’s seminal work, Money, Language, and Thought.1 Reading Shakespeare’s play as an exploration of competing economic discourses, Shell explores the play’s exposure of the “apparent commensurability (even identity) of men and money” (48). This insight has become a (perhaps “the”) keystone of New Economic Criticism.2 As Shell’s methodology has become standard, the time appears ripe to reexamine its blind spots, in an effort to improve models of economic criticism and to explore whether the economic discourses of early modern literature might contain a somewhat broader critique than Shell suggests.3 With this task in mind, I return to The Merchant of Venice, but while Shell concentrated on the economic theories espoused by Shylock and Portia, I redirect attention to the clown, Launcelot Gobbo. At the risk of placing too much weight on a minor character, I shall argue that Launcelot occupies a crucial place for the economically minded critic. He is the play’s most vocal servant and thus speaks from a practical,

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transactional perspective on economic exchange that the play’s wealthy characters—and Shell’s methodology—tend to ignore. Like other minor characters, including Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale and Lucio in Measure for Measure, Launcelot, if his voice is heard, destabilizes the play’s ideological binaries. He reconfigures a tug of war between paired opposites (merchant/usurer, Christian/Jew, mercy/justice) into a polyglot collection of mutually implicated critiques. The discourses that Shell has isolated remain crucial, but they are no longer the only perspectives available on economic exchange in the play. Shell places the issue of “generation”—natural and mercantile—at the heart of The Merchant of Venice (48), and he joins this insight to a standard reading of the play as a struggle between Portia and Shylock. Shell’s focus on economic discourses transforms the debate between competing legal or moral notions of “mercy” and “justice” into a dispute between Portia’s fantasy of abundance and cornucopia (82) and Shylock’s “usur[y] of words” (49). Examining “the relationships between . . . literary exchanges and the exchanges that constitute the political economy,” Shell argues that The Merchant of Venice does not resolve the “tension” between Portia and Shylock, and in fact he believes the play’s comic resolution is tinged with “suggestions of a tragedy to come” (82). Shell’s narrow focus on two economic systems oversimplifies Shakespeare’s suggestive critique of the relationships between economic exchange and human interaction. Importantly, Shell never really explores how the economic wishes of the wealthy characters are put into practice by servants like Launcelot Gobbo.4 Shell’s focus on the major characters is by no means rare in Shakespeare criticism, but it is especially significant here because it parallels a broader weakness of economic discourses. As Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio have observed, there is a tendency in various forms of economics to exclude or marginalize alternative ways of understanding social phenomena. In a shrewd reading of the fundamental similarity between radically opposed forms of economic discourse— neoclassical economics on the one hand, and postmodern theoretical uses of the term “economy” on the other—Amariglio and Ruccio note that both types of economics insist on the explanatory power of a single metaphor or model: rational individual choice for neoclassicists; libido for Lyotard, Baudrillard, and other postmodernists; the gift for Mauss and his school, and so on.5 As Amariglio and Ruccio write, “these theories universalize and reduce the spheres in the play of forces by attaching them to some essential principle or other” (388). For the subfield of New Economic Criticism, the most common “essential principle” is Shell’s fundamental similarity between

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the orders of money and language. This notion has become so widely disseminated that a conservative scholar like Frederick Turner can cite it as a commonplace in his paean to market values, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics.6 As the sometimes-unstated basis for so much New Economic Criticism, this focus may be obscuring other ways of reading the economics of literary texts. One risk of Shell’s approach, I believe, is that it can conflate metaphoric exchange and literal exchange while ignoring the additional meanings that cling to the words used to describe men and money in early modern culture. Early modern explorations of economics usually bear traces of multiple discourses. In early seventeenthcentury England, for example, the modern senses of capital, debt, and interest were still under construction, and terms like “reckoning” and “debt” still carried strong theological senses. In such a culture, neither Portia’s beneficence nor Shylock’s usury can be just about the “identity” of men and money. Shell gives useful attention to the religious politics of the play, but I suggest that his reading remains overly abstract for a play so determined to make economic bonds physical. In The Merchant of Venice, the persistent presence of the body behind the bond surprisingly enables the happy conclusion of the trial, as Portia’s pedantic focus on the real things symbolized by Shylock’s bond—Antonio’s blood and an accurately weighed pound of flesh— allows her to break the usurious contract. Renewed attention to the bodies involved in other acts of exchange, in particular the stealing of Jessica from Shylock’s house, can add to the critical discourse what both Shell and Portia ignore: the slippage and opportunities of the moment of exchange itself. Moments in which items (or persons) of value change hands, as Launcelot’s perspective can remind us, are not easily made into stable ideological markers; they have an unsettling tendency to upset ordered categories. Close attention to the actual exchanges in the play suggests that Shakespeare sketches a third economic position through Launcelot Gobbo. (If, as a few moments in the text suggest, Launcelot is in fact Muslim—one of “Hagar’s offspring,”7 as Shylock calls him—then he also represents a third religious alternative. As I discuss later, however, his influence on Jessica’s conversion seems to require him to be at least nominally Christian.)8 In placing Launcelot Gobbo’s brief appearances in the play in dialogue with the conventional positions of Shylock and Portia, no fewer than three new understandings of economic relationships emerge: Launcelot critiques Shylock, parodies Portia, and carves out space for his own role as facilitator of exchange. Reading Launcelot closely replaces the conflict between justice and

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mercy with a delicate tracing of three possibilities, which are better seen as co-critiques than zero-sum competitors. In this way, focusing on Launcelot can advance both the salutary theoretical goal of “a pluralist or postmodern economics” and also maintain focus on actual economic agents and transactions.9 Launcelot directs the play’s attention to the arbitrary, extraideological nature of transactions themselves. Although his observations appear mainly in footnotes, Shell does not fail to note that Launcelot is the play’s primary go-between: he leaves the service of Shylock and enters that of Bassanio, thus becoming the first Venetian to abandon the rich Jew; he discusses (and perhaps suggests) converting to Christianity with Jessica; he helps steal Jessica from her father; and he impregnates a Moorish woman (Shell 58n, 79n). It may be argued that in bringing Jessica to Lorenzo he acts more as stage pander than economic middleman, but Shell’s connections between literary and economic systems remind us that the dramatic function of the pander parallels the middleman’s role in economics. The servant–pander– middleman connects the meta-economic theories of Portia and Shylock to the literal acts of exchange in the play. Launcelot speaks for a range of economic discourses that complicates the abundance–scarcity binary that Shell considers the core of the play’s economics. In the six scenes in which Launcelot speaks, he reveals a series of reasons to deny Shylock and Portia exclusive control over the play’s economic ideologies. In his first scene (2.2), Launcelot critiques Shylock’s version of rational choice theory; in the following scenes (2.3–5), he embodies exchange while making a direct assault on Shylock’s house and daughter; and in his final brief appearances (3.5, 5.1), he parodies Portia’s theory of generative excess or abundance. These three models shift the play from Shell’s binaries to a tripartite critique. This understanding of the play’s economics is less conceptually neat than Shell’s, but I believe it shows that Shakespeare—a successful businessman not a social theorist—dramatizes the insufficiency of bipolar theories in economic discourses. Reading the economics of The Merchant of Venice through Launcelot Gobbo, as well as through Shylock, Portia, or Antonio, reveals a world of overlapping economic discourses, and thus provides a salutary challenge to the theoretical orthodoxy of New Economic Criticism.

The Fiend and Rational Choices Launcelot Gobbo enters the play in debate with himself about his future. His confusion about whether he will stay with Shylock or seek

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more speculative employment with Bassanio parallels other risky economic decisions in the play: like Bassanio he will trust himself to one desperate throw, and like Antonio he will place himself in potentially dangerous bondage, in this case to a poor master. It may be argued that Bassanio, whose servants wear “rare new liveries” (2.2.109), would not seem poor to Launcelot, but their dialogue makes it clear that the clown knows his new employer does not have Shylock’s money. Launcelot notes that Shylock has “enough,” while Bassanio has “grace,” and Bassanio describes himself as a “poor gentleman” in contrast to the “rich Jew” (2.2.145–6, 150). In the debate between the fiend who would have him run and his conscience which would have him stay, Launcelot Gobbo mangles language like a typical Shakespearean clown.10 More importantly, Launcelot displays a preference for motion over stasis that establishes his symbolic connection to economic exchange. More than any other character in the play, Launcelot advocates and facilitates change. His monologue is a picture of stasis, but the solution at which he arrives—the “friendly counsel” of the fiend—is to exchange masters, to run, and to keep the economy in circulation: The fiend is at mine elbow and tempts me, saying to me, “Gobbo . . . use your legs, take the start, run away.” My conscience says, “No. Take heed, honest Launcelot . . . do not run, scorn running with thy heels.” Well, the most courageous fiend bids me pack. “Fia!” says the fiend; “away!” says the fiend. “For the heavens, rouse up a brave mind,” says the fiend, “and run.” Well, my conscience hanging about the neck of my heart says very wisely to me, “My honest friend Launcelot, being an honest man’s son …” Well, my conscience says to me, “Launcelot, budge not.” “Budge,” says the fiend. “Budge not,” says my conscience. “Conscience,” says I, “you counsel well.” “Fiend,” says I, “you counsel well.” To be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with the Jew my master who (God bless the mark!) is a kind of devil; and to run away from the Jew, I should be ruled by the fiend, who, saving your reverence, is the devil himself. Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation; and in my conscience, my conscience is but a kind of a hard conscience to offer to counsel me to stay with the Jew. The fiend gives the more friendly counsel. I will run, fiend; my heels are at your commandment, I will run. (2.2.1–32)

The dilemma of choosing between “the devil himself” and Shylock, who is a “kind of devil,” gets solved when Launcelot chooses motion over rest. The “friendly counsel” is the counsel that always prefers to make an exchange and seek a new master to replace the old one.

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Launcelot embodies transactional desire, the desire always to make another exchange. As he emphasizes at the close of his monologue, he “will run.” Against this imperative to make a transaction neither the “hard conscience” of loyalty nor the lure of Shylock’s wealth can stand. As Launcelot eschews Shylock’s wealth for Bassanio’s poverty, he parodies Shylock’s apparent faith in rational economic choice. He follows his desire for change rather than deferring to existing social bonds or even what seems to be his economic self-interest (i.e., having a rich master). Launcelot follows whichever counsel seems more “friendly” to him. Even Shylock, who stands to lose his (admittedly less than industrious) servant, accepts the primacy of individual choice in economic transactions, as he facilitates the transfer by “preferring” his servant to Bassanio (2.2.145). Launcelot’s speech, however, points out the limits of rational choice theory. His decision appears wholly arbitrary. Both the fiend and conscience “counsel well,” and there is a devil on either side of the equation. There seem no firm criteria for resolving this dispute, beyond Launcelot’s desire for change. His shift of masters, however, despite its moral and logical emptiness, is crucial for the play’s plot, since it provides him with access to both Shylock’s and Bassanio’s houses, thus enabling the stealing of Jessica to take place under the protection of Antonio’s friend. Launcelot’s version of economic desire—his internal dialogue with the fiend at his elbow—empties the rationality from Shylock’s rational choice. His decision to switch masters will prove essential for the plot, but it has no clear rational basis. The remainder of this scene, which contains more of Launcelot’s lines than any other, examines the limitations and possibilities of the choice the servant has made. The elaborate game of disguise he plays with his “sand-blind” father provides Launcelot with a kind of anonymity; when Launcelot chooses to move, his father cannot stop him any more than Shylock can stop Jessica. In a speech that reprises his decision to leave Shylock, Launcelot finds in the lines of his palm a reason to take the risk and leave his master: “I shall have good fortune!” (2.2.158–9), he proclaims. Like other upwardly mobile characters in the play, notably Jessica, Gratiano, and Lorenzo, Launcelot sees a chance for success and leaps at it.

Transactional Economics and the Middleman As the Jessica–Lorenzo subplot develops in act 2, Launcelot Gobbo assumes the role that Shell sees as definitive for him: he is the gobetween. Here his contributions to the plot provide what neither

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Shylock nor Portia present: an image of how transactions—economic, sexual, and religious—actually happen. Launcelot accepts money from Jessica (2.3.4) as well as from Bassanio; he allows Lorenzo to communicate with Jessica in Shylock’s house; and he facilitates a transfer that is economic as well as sexual: Jessica sends the casket of ducats down before she herself joins Lorenzo (2.6.33). Launcelot’s practical role in these transactions emphasizes how the acts of exchange associated with the transfer and conversion of Jessica threaten both Shylock and his economic order. Launcelot’s role is not limited to serving as a transfer station for cash and information. He is also the “merry devil” (2.3.2) in Shylock’s house who appears to have influenced Jessica’s decision to leave, much as another “fiend” has convinced Launcelot himself to leave his master. Launcelot in fact names Jessica as a Christian while she still lives with Shylock, at the cost of imagining that her mother was unfaithful: “if a Christian do not play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived” (2.3.11–13). The Christian in question may be either Jessica’s true father or her soon-to-be husband, as Launcelot garbles his tenses, but in either case Launcelot’s speech brings a hostile Christian into Shylock’s home. (It is because of his influence on Jessica’s conversion to Christianity that I doubt that Launcelot is Muslim, despite the textual evidence just noted. More than any character in the play, however, Launcelot crosses between religious communities.) Launcelot’s desire to promote mobility, which has already led him to accept the fiend’s “fair counsel,” undermines Shylock’s jealous paternal care. He reminds the play that not only money, but also sex, race, and religion can be exchanged. The conflict between Shylock’s possessiveness and Launcelot’s mobility becomes the structural basis of the dialogue in 2.5, when Launcelot arrives at Shylock’s house ostensibly to bring him to Bassanio for dinner, but in reality to deliver a covert message from Lorenzo to Jessica. All of Launcelot’s words and actions in this scene mimic and undermine Shylock’s futile attempts to control his own household. After Shylock calls Jessica down twice to no avail, Launcelot apes his words—“Why, Jessica!” (2.5.6)—and down she comes. Launcelot’s description of his supposedly ill-omened nosebleed, “it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o’clock i’ th’ morning, falling out that year on Ash Wednesday was four year in th’ afternoon” (2.5.24–7) parodies Shylock’s dream of moneybags and replaces its financial imagery with the Christian holy calendar. Shylock’s advice to his daughter to keep the windows closed is reversed by Launcelot’s reminder that she

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should “look out at windows for” (2.5.40) Lorenzo and his men. Even Shylock’s snide attack on his former servant’s work habits and his revelation that he only preferred him to “have [Launcelot] help to waste / [Bassanio’s] borrowed purse” (2.5.49–50) emphasizes how all Shylock’s attempts to wield power backfire. Launcelot, more directly than Lorenzo, breaks Shylock’s control of his economic and sexual resources.

The Economics of Cornucopia The scarcity of resources of which the theft of Jessica is one symbol in act 2 gives way in the play’s final acts to the cornucopia of Portia’s beneficence. Launcelot Gobbo, having finished breaking up Shylock’s home, continues to provide a skeptical reaction to the play’s nowdominant ideology. His final words in the play announce the return of Bassanio to Belmont with oblique reference to Portia’s cornucopia: “Tell [Lorenzo] there’s a post come from my master, with his horn full of good news” (5.1.46–7). In Launcelot’s punning language, the post-horn has become the horn of excess. A new abundance of supply has overtaken the play, including both Portia’s extra-Venetian wealth and the verbal dexterity that allows her to release Antonio from Shylock’s bond. This abundance makes unnecessary the hard questions that have dominated the first three acts of the play. As Shell notes, however, “No single bond is genuinely canceled and redeemed” (82). In this New Economy, resources are available for everyone, and Shylock’s money is dispersed to provide for the poorer Christians. In this state of affairs, Launcelot no longer functions as a middleman, and his role becomes purely comic. His words, however, quibble against the utopian progress of the main plot. Even cornucopia must be integrated into a real economic system in which all forms of exchange have consequences. He mockingly reminds Jessica that her brave new world may not remain as easy as it seems: “This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs; if we all grow to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money” (3.5.22–5). Too many Christians will cause the price of pigs to climb out of control: the joke implies that the old economic order of Venice, in which monetary value and supply and demand governed transactions, may be thrown into disarray by the conversion of Jessica (and later Shylock) and the mercy of Portia. Excess will create future scarcity: the understanding of economics that Launcelot has gained while working for Shylock and Bassanio leads him to suspect Portia’s happy

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kingdom. Unlike his new master, he does not believe uncritically in the bounty of Portia’s largesse. Launcelot is also involved in a final offstage sexual transaction that leads him to contaminate the figural language of excess. He has gotten a Moorish woman with child, and being reminded of this fact leads him to a series of quibbling puns: “It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for” (3.5.40–3). Here the verbal excess that has renovated the play in Portia’s hands gets out of control. In Launcelot’s punning treatment, too much leads to Moor: this unnamed character provides a glimpse of the problematic future of Launcelot’s incessant, restless desire for exchange. He had previously predicted that he will have “fifteen wives” (2.2.160), but it is not clear whether the unnamed Moor will be among that number. Having crossed from Shylock to Bassanio and helped Jessica cross from Jew to Christian, Launcelot cannot be prevented, it seems, from “more” transactions. I concur with Shell and other critics about the unsettled nature of the ending, and I believe that Launcelot’s language in the final acts provides a veiled critique of the hazard-abundance model that saves Antonio’s body (and the play’s comic heart) from Shylock. By way of contrast with Shylock’s insistence on his “bond,” Launcelot Gobbo embodies the problems that arise from the “more” that he and the other Christians receive. The 15 wives await, and there will be more fiends at his elbow tempting him to run with friendly counsel. Launcelot represents an economic system dominated by exchange that Portia’s mercy cannot contain. Attention to Launcelot Gobbo, then, leads to a broader economic reading of the play than the traditional Portia–Shylock conflict. Shakespeare suggests that the servant, rather than the merchant, the usurer, or the heiress, represents the inexorable urge to exchange that was part of the emerging ideology of early capitalism.11 Launcelot’s perspective provides a different alternative than Portia’s to the dramatic and legal conundra of the bond. His polyglot nature reveals that economic exchange itself will continue to cause social disruption even after the usurious bond has been magically broken. He shows that choice may not always be rational and abundance not always beneficial. If this go-between is taken to represent the transactional silver that lies between Shylock’s greed for gold and Portia’s lead that becomes gold, than his niggling presence in the final acts serves as a reminder that the Old Economy has not been forever banished. The play situates him as an easily overlooked third term between Shylock

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the greedy and Portia the merciful, and in this context it seems noteworthy that Launcelot alone works for both Jews and Christians. He is the one representative of a potentially multicultural Venice, or, in the terms of New Economic Criticism, a pluralist economics. As New Economic Criticism continues to expand in early modern cultural studies, returning to the play that helped launch this critical method helps remind us that economics is a difficult term to pin down. In a play that addresses economic discourses as explicitly as any work of early modern literature, the servant Launcelot Gobbo has “more” to say about these matters than at first meets the eye.

Notes 1. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Further citations are given in the text. 2. As Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen summarize Shell, his “core insight” is that money is “an internal participant in the logical or semiological organization of language.” Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999), 15. 3. For other critiques of the current state of New Economic Criticism in this volume, see Douglas Bruster, Barbara Correll, and Mark Netzloff. 4. As I note later, Shell does mention Launcelot, but significantly mainly in his notes. 5. See Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio, “Literary/Cultural ‘Economies,’ Economic Discourse, and the Question of Marxism,” New Economic Criticism, 381–400. Further citations are in the text. 6. Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 81. For a brief debunking of Turner’s “sunny and ontologizing view of the market,” see Barbara Correll in this volume. 7. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Kenneth Myrick, ed. (New York: Signet, 1965): 2.5.43. Further citations are given in the text by act, scene, and line number. 8. For Shell’s brief description of Launcelot as a Muslim, see 52. 9. See Regenia Gagnier and John Dupré, “Reply to Amariglio and Ruccio,” The New Economic Criticism, 405. 10. Karen Newman notes that the other major quibbler in the play, and the other source of economic fecundity, is Portia. See “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and the Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 30.

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11. For an important distinction between early modern mercantilism and capitalism, see Netzloff in this volume. Netzloff notes that The Merchant of Venice appears to have anticipated a semi-Marxist understanding of capitalist circulation and exchange.

Works Cited Amariglio, Jack, and David F. Ruccio. “Literary/Cultural ‘Economies,’ Economic Discourse, and the Question of Marxism.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. London: Routledge, 1999. 381–400. Newman, Karen. “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Kenneth Myrick. New York: Penguin, 1965. Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982. Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Chapter 12

Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Cl ause in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE R o b e r t F. D a rc y

“If you deny it,” Shylock warns the Venetian Duke on the question

of his bond, “let the danger lightly / Upon your charter and your city’s freedom” (4.1.37–8). In his usual way of cutting to the heart of the matter, Shylock here reminds the Duke that Venice’s sovereignty rests on the integrity of its legal system, which alone can guarantee that the lucrative commercial enterprises that make the city’s independence possible remain fair and equitable, and thus free from protectionist interference. Though the suit Shylock brings is technically domestic, the threat he observes more pointedly touches Venice’s foreign interests, the source of the city’s legendary prosperity. Portia’s task in this scene, then, is to rescue Antonio without jeopardizing the reputation of Venetian commerce abroad: she must demonstrate the law’s commitment to free and fair exchange with foreign merchants even as she denies and penalizes Shylock as an “alien” (4.1.344). The Merchant of Venice here dramatizes a delicate problem of early modern international commerce by which nation- and city-states engaging in open trade needed to convince one another that their mutual economic interests and those of their citizens were being met even as they competed fiercely for larger profits at market.1 Faced with this problem in miniature, Portia carefully navigates the waters of commercial law that Shylock warns are too perilous: she safeguards

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Venice’s reputation for balanced justice with a smooth legal argument as fraudulent as her lawyer’s garb but nevertheless believed by the parties involved to have a legitimate basis in existing law. Whether she realizes it or not, Portia’s skillful performance at the Venetian court is a direct and particularly revealing application of her training at Belmont. There, under her father’s indirect tutelage, she has already learned the process by which foreigners may be made to lose when they entrust the outcome of their suits to the mechanism of a local trial. In light of the odds against any foreign suitor choosing the right casket, Bassanio’s success must be a function either of some uncanny bit of luck or talent or else, more likely, of his status as a geographic and cultural insider to Belmont, the only such insider among the trial’s participants.2 Even if his edge is nothing more than a regional familiarity with the formula used to conceive the trial in the first place, Bassanio’s success at Belmont where so many others have failed must owe something to his status as an insider and to the privileged information that status brings. Bassanio’s advantage should be considered a serious problem for a trial that advertises itself as open and amenable to foreign interest. The risk of the casket trial, like the one Shylock addresses to the Venetian court, is that any partiality of its mechanism may be exposed at its outcome when the losing parties who submitted their suits to its judgment, having believed in its fairness, would have cause to retaliate. At stake in the trial, after all, is far more than a simple determination of Belmont’s bloodline: because each entrant has promised as a condition of entry not to seek another wife afterward, the trial effectively sterilizes some of the more influential members of a generation of foreign bachelors, disrupting local dynasties all over the Mediterranean and Europe. From a strictly competitive point of view, Belmont’s casket trial is extraordinarily effective as an economic tool because it manages to insure one’s own advantage while seriously compromising the strength of one’s competitors, even as it makes a convincing show of even odds and equal chances for all. Bassanio never indicates that he is aware the casket trial may be rigged in his favor, although the combination of Portia’s personal preference for Bassanio and her presence in the room as he picks his casket has raised more than a few critical eyebrows over the years (see, for example, Barber’s irritation about this, p. 174). In trying to determine whether Portia gives Bassanio some clue as he picks his casket, however, one passes over the simpler idea that, if indeed the trial is derived of local wisdom, a lifetime of ideological training should be sufficient for a local boy like Bassanio to make the right choice, that

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is, the choice that would be obvious to insiders but overlooked by anyone without local training. It would be better, after all, for minimizing the trial’s risk of failure that Bassanio not fully realize the advantages he enjoys, that he remain psychologically convinced of his entitlement to success and unable to expose directly the trial’s inequity. The Lord of Belmont himself, as the trial’s creator, would not even have needed to appreciate fully the character of his own trial for it to work in the particular way that it does. Such are the advantages in an economically competitive world of letting ideologically preferential tests silently organize and control the distribution of a culture’s wealth even as its members adopt the language of liberality. The question of Portia’s own awareness about the trial’s being rigged must be considered apart from that of her father and eventual husband, however, given that she consciously understands the usefulness of disguise and duplicity in manipulating occasions of seemingly fair determination and she employs them in her stunt at the Venetian court. Her impersonation of the male lawyer come to interpret Shylock’s claim is designed specifically to make the parties involved “think we are accomplishèd / With that we lack” (3.4.61–2). In this mode of deliberate deception, Portia applies as the basis for her legal opinion a technique of linguistic and statutory hairsplitting that has already had precedence earlier in the play. When Antonio makes his initial request for the loan, Shylock needles him for what must be one of the merchant’s long-standing declarations: “Methoughts you said you neither lend nor borrow / Upon advantage.” “I do never use it” (1.3.65–6), Antonio replies, thereby equivocating about his own financial dealings through a technicality of language: He clarifies his earlier claim by denying participation not in interest lending per se but specifically in its “use,” or what some Venetians (and Elizabethans) would call “usury,” money lending or borrowing at exorbitant, or illegal, rates of interest.3 Antonio’s participation in less “usurious” forms of interest transaction apparently has not counted, Shylock now learns, all these years whenever Antonio found occasion to disdain the business conducted by the lending Jew. Shylock probably also exposes a form of Venetian doublespeak when he complains that Antonio “lends out money gratis, and brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice” (1.3.39–40). While he seems to suggest that Antonio charges no interest whatsoever in his dealings, his notion that Antonio forces the interest rate down implies they are, in fact, in some sort of fiscal competition with one another. Shylock’s word “gratis” may more revealingly refer to something like an institutional practice during the Italian Renaissance

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of dealing in interest under cover of commerce or by a system of interest-free lending to circumvent laws in Italy that forbade usury on religious grounds. As the historian J. L. Bolton describes this practice, Italian banks routinely gave monetary “gifts” of gratitude to their patrons—“at about 7–15 percent annual rate of interest”—for allowing the use of their moneys “gratis” (342). In addition to these gifts, Italian merchants and bankers developed the bill of exchange, a form of money changing that involved borrowing from a remitter in one country and later repaying to a foreign agent the amount’s equivalent in the new local currency. The exchange rate was set at the sale of the bill, and was always slightly higher than the standing rate, so the entire process normally (contingent upon unusual rate fluctuations during the interim of the bill) yielded a payout in surplus of the original sum drawn, that is, at interest. Furthermore, if the period of repayment for a bill of exchange expired, the foreign agent who anticipated payment could still collect the money by billing the original lender, who would then apply the charge to the drawing customer after appending an additional handling fee. As an example of this arrangement, in 1463, two men in Florence drew 500 ducats from the Medici Company to be repaid in English currency to an agent in London at a rate of £47 sterling per ducat. Six months later, when the bill came due, instead of traveling to London to conduct their business and pay the English agent the agreed-upon sum in pounds, the men paid 535 ducats directly back to the Medici Company to resolve the bill (Roover 111–13). Despite the fact that this transaction amounted to a six-month loan at an annual interest rate of 14 percent, Bolton reports, the arrangement was perfectly “licit” at the time: “The merchants argued and the theologians agreed that an exchange transaction was not a loan” (343). The question I wish to pursue here has really less to do with international markets or the advantages and subtleties of ideological insiderism and strategic deception and more to do with the familial hegemonies on which such economies depend and try to imprint their own image. Specifically I am interested in Portia and in the role that daughters play within the larger economic machinery in which they facilitate the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next. The play invests in this question by presenting two radically alternative models of daughters whose marriages during the play enact this transfer. While Portia’s obedient participation in such a transfer is clear, the play’s other daughter, Jessica, demonstrates how devastating a daughter’s refusal to yield to the demands of her father may ultimately be for the economy of a single household. Despite the fact

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that Jessica is the one who demonstrates the clearer autonomy in her choice of a husband, however, Portia in her unfailing obedience to her father is the one who learns to internalize a tendency toward disguise and secrecy. The casual mockery of the Venetian boys, retold by the Venetian men, who repeat Shylock’s frantic catalog of losses with an emphasis on his now missing “stones” (2.8.20), reveals the ease with which a relationship can be drawn in the Venetian consciousness between a daughter’s sexuality and her father’s. The sexual control of daughters becomes tied in an immediate way to a father’s testicular authority. If Jewish usury, miserliness, and endogamous marriage law all become vaguely suggestive of an arrangement of incest in the Venetians’ minds, by which Jessica’s elopement is a figurative castration of her father, Shylock’s failure to keep the apertures of his home closed and sealed loses for him not only his daughter but his economic authority and his sexual virility, too. Seizing on the sexual pun on an occasion of clear economic consequence for Shylock’s family and lineage, the Venetians reveal as much about their own familial economies as they do about the one governing this Jewish household. For Jessica is not the only daughter in the play kept shut in her home by paternal authority: In Belmont, flanked by the caskets arranged by her own father, Portia explains to Bassanio, “I am locked in one of them” (3.2.40). In what follows, I will argue that Portia’s disguise in the Venetian courtroom is an extension of the secrecy and subterfuge she comes to associate with the economic organization of family, by which she allows her father’s mechanism to steer her entertainment of the suitors as though into a form of sexual service. What appears a liberality in that mechanism, however, which offers Portia blindly to any and all comers, is more secretly a closed arrangement, an incestuous hoarding and withholding of the daughter until such time as a paternal surrogate and endogamous match can arrive in Bassanio’s person. *** When Shylock lists “two sealèd bags” and “two rich and precious stones” as part of his missing treasure (2.8.18,20), he is naming the pair of jewels and bags of coin that Jessica took with her when she eloped, but his anatomical bags and stones are also under threat here, as recent readings of the play have helped to amplify (Shapiro, chap. 4). The symbolic significance of Shylock’s stones is clearly manifold: beyond simple sexuality, testicles symbolize political and social virility, too. And no doubt the Venetians who taunt Shylock see him as lacking

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the “stones” not merely to perform sexually but also to manage his and his family’s affairs. Yet the sexual resonance persists: Shylock’s missing stones invoked on the occasion of his daughter’s elopement suggest however subtly a broken devotion, the castrating emasculation of a lover or husband scorned or cuckolded. In this case, the broken relationship between Shylock and Jessica is symbolically incestuous, by the logic of the metaphors at work here. Alongside a parallel register of symbolic incest in The Jew of Malta (2.4.47–54),4 this report of Shylock’s agony helps establish the idea that the tropological Jewish miser is also a father harboring a story of incest, and that hoarding money is correlated with enclosing one’s daughter in an incestuous embrace. Shylock is thereby denounced as an enemy to multiple economies of circulation and exchange, making Jessica’s elopement with a store of her father’s money seem a double thwarting of his efforts and therefore a compound delight to mercantilist Venice. Shylock’s attempt to preserve and ensconce his daughter in his home is tied in the play to a wrongful urge to incest and also, more generally, to the refusal of the Jew to engage in economies of “free,” or unprotected and unbiased, exchange. For the play to preserve the logic of its own anti-Semitism, one would expect that the other father–daughter pairing in the play—that of Portia and the dead Lord of Belmont—would exemplify a reverse configuration to that of Jessica and Shylock. Indeed, critics have tended to interpret Portia’s condition favorably when compared to Jessica’s, as Marjorie Garber does in her interpretation of the casket trial: “Her father’s will is finally one of free will, which leaves her sufficient to stand, though free to fall, and the choice of the three caskets is presented in contrast to the absolute tyranny of Shylock over Jessica, in which daughter and ducats are indifferently interchangeable” (40). Yet this appearance of freedom and liberality is an illusion too easily dispelled. The trial of the caskets is set up to appear to promote a liberal attitude toward difference (i.e., toward foreign suitors), and its resulting match—its ultimate endogamy—is supposed to seem a chance accident, thereby forestalling scrutiny of its mechanism for any potential bias. In addition, the fact that Portia favors Bassanio, the winning suitor, is supposed to suggest the trial’s innate benevolence. An audience is easily satisfied that the same moral compass calibrating the father’s trial should govern the good daughter’s choices, too. Yet the basis for Portia’s interest in Bassanio—why she favors him over all the others—is unclear, and is tainted by a key paternal intrusion: “Do you not remember, lady,” Nerissa reminds Portia when Bassanio first arrives, “in your father’s

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time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier, that came hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat?” (1.3.93–5). Bassanio turns out to be a living relic from Portia’s “father’s time,” and as such proves an insider to the Lord of Belmont’s former life. Insider status is clearly important to Portia, who engages with Nerissa in what Annabel Patterson calls the “xenophobic mocking scene” during which the two women deride the various suitors for their personality flaws, each in confirmation of national stereotypes (17). Marianne L. Novy calls these suitors “ethnic outsiders” (139), similarly capturing the exogamous character of the majority of suitors drawn to Belmont. The preference Portia expresses for Bassanio might be her own best unconscious approximation of the choice her father would have made for her, if he had been alive to do so. She appears to choose, in other words, through the eyes and with the concealed prejudices of her father. But because these prejudices are also clearly her own, the illiberal manipulation of daughters that is under discussion here is not only about the reproduction of lineage but also the reproduction of ideology. Portia inherits her father’s ideology through her subjection. She doesn’t choose, she submits; but in her affirmation of that submission and in her affirmation of the choice of husband made for her through this mechanism, she shows she has not only submitted to her father’s prejudices but also internalized them. The groundwork for understanding this suppression of her own potential will and the ensuing replication of a “familial” ideology as a sign of incestuous compliance can be laid in examining the language Portia uses as she relates her experience of being put on the international marriage market. In her first sentence in the play, Portia tells her waiting-woman, “my little body is aweary of this great world” (1.2.1). Portia’s body grows “aweary” during the process of securing her husband, and indeed the onus on her of admitting so many suitors to her estate to give them audience is taxing both mentally and physically. Her name registers the degree to which she serves as a port, or portal—literally the means of entry to a wealthy woman’s dowry—which might help explain the weariness she feels as the social opening through whom all suits must go. More importantly, “a-weary” has been glossed in Eric Partridge’s dictionary of Shakespearean slang as exhaustion brought on by “lovemaking.” Although Partridge’s definition decodes a line from another play, the experience of entertaining numerous suitors nevertheless leaves Portia room to refer unconsciously to her experience as what one might call a form of liberal sexuality or social prostitution, qualified though that formulation must be. In lamenting that “my little

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body is aweary of this great world,” Portia may allude, even without full knowledge of her speech, to the sexual nature of the service into which she has been conscripted by her father. And the notion that she is at her father’s sexual command signals her participation in a psychological form of incestuous compliance. To speak of Portia as “participating” in incest by way of her psychosexual “compliance” to her father’s will complicates questions about her agency: she is at once prevailed upon over and against her own will to relinquish her agency, yet she also stands to inherit, even if only as a vessel, the substantial material advantages secured by her father’s insulating strategies. Despite the material advantages secured for her through the relinquishment of choice, however, the ideological inheritance of this materiality nevertheless includes the total subordination of her agency—especially her sexual agency—to a psychological dependence on the father.5 Material inheritance, in this case, despite its gains for her, depends on the evacuation of her own daughterly agency. Indeed, the Lord of Belmont’s assurance of his ability to control Portia through the casket trial cannot be materially based, since Portia would still stand to inherit her father’s estate regardless of any covert manipulation of the trial’s outcome. Not even the legal authority behind his will could successfully prevent her from whispering the solution to a given suitor if she wished to do so, as many critics have marveled. Portia’s respect for the trial’s mechanism, then, appears to grow out of a psychologically compelling sense of bond. She tells Nerissa: “O me, the word ‘choose’! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father” (1.2.19–22). For reasons that seem psychologically profound to her, Portia believes her own will is cut off from the process of selecting the man she will marry. Rather than seeing the incest plot as a radical departure from a normal father–daughter marriage arrangement, it might be useful to consider incest obligation as the muted force of compulsion that would make a daughter dutiful to her father, allowing him to control her sexuality and its economic consequences even after this father is dead, and despite her own profound wish to be free to make her own sexual choices. After all, the incest obligation in question here is not one that need correspond to a material sexual relationship. In the realm of unconscious logic, Portia’s state of choicelessness and the sexual duty she shows to a father arranging her marriage suit from the grave is clearly not a material gesture of incest compliance but a psycho-symbolic one. From a materialist perspective, much work has been done to show how the Renaissance traffic in women is an act not limited to the

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brothel and how in fact daughters are commonly used as commodities of transaction in marriage suits. As Harry Berger, Jr., has written in relation to this play, “Fathers can use children as money, for example, to pay back their debts” or indeed to preserve their wealth, and “this naturally causes problems for daughters who find themselves assigned the role of commodity in the alliance market.”6 Yet I read Berger’s summary of the use of children in callous mercantile exchange as the preferred public record of how fathers estimate their children’s value in an open economy. This decoding is preferred, that is, specifically by members of a mercantile culture attempting to broadcast their devotion to fair exchange over and above nepotistic or endogamous bonds. If an endorsing participant in a free-market economy detects any harshness in the paternal offering of daughters to the world’s market, this harshness can only be significant as an unfortunate element in a necessary familial arrangement—an unavoidable coldness in the mercantile father. Despite their ostensible love and fondness for their children, and for daughters in particular, fathers nonetheless are expected to offer them as tokens of liberal exchange, and this is collectively understood as the hard bottom of the pot of paternal–filial relations, softened though it may be by the gestures of love and kindness that fathers can make in compensation for their economic machinations. This “regrettable” story about fathers and daughters suggests that a loving paternity is really only a front for less feeling designs at the core of that office, a notion Montaigne suggests when he writes of his own effort “by pleasant relations to foster in my children a lively and unfeigned affection and good will toward me.” “Love and affection,” Montaigne suggests, are the new humanist tools of paternity because “command and fear are no longer its weapons” (285). If fathers err in this chore, then, it is by cultivating too little devotion in their children, while a great intimacy would be the sign of an accomplished paternal effort. And while the fathers’ efforts are entirely strategic, the children’s loving responses must be “lively and unfeigned”—perhaps even excited, in the best examples, to incestuous devotion, under the humanist father’s careful administration. Here one should remember that Shylock’s misery—the state to which the “miser” is etymologically reduced—is due in part to the exogamous character of his own daughter’s elopement, as Shylock regrets: “Would any of the stock of Barabbas, / Had been her husband rather than a Christian” (4.1.291–2). Shylock mourns the loss of his daughter to a Christian husband and the resulting pollution, if not utter loss, of his Jewish lineage. And one continues to hear the incestuous undertones of this regret when Shylock refers not just to

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a New Testament Jew, the criminal Barabbas, as a better progenitor for his daughter’s children, but also it seems to his own Marlovian counterpart, Barabas from The Jew of Malta. As a reference that would surely have been audible to contemporary audiences, Barabas is the name of Shylock’s intertextual double. “Would any of the stock of Shylock,” Shylock seems to say, “Had been her husband.” Again, Shylock’s crime with respect to his daughter is a hoarding incest, a desire to have her for himself and not share her beyond the boundary of the Jewish community or even the walls of his own Jewish household. Yet despite the overt critique of Shylock as an incestuous miser, his paternity is not much different from that of the dead Lord of Belmont, as I’ve attempted to show. The marital conclusion for Portia, safeguarded by a father who appears to have entered his daughter in the free circulation of the world’s marriage market, and therein to have shown a willingness to share his wealth liberally, is nevertheless an endogamous and insulating match—the fulfillment by a Christian, in other words, of Shylock’s thwarted wish. Portia’s father has managed to secure an enclosing sanctuary for his daughter despite the elaborate show his casket mechanism makes of a liberal xenophilia, an openness with respect to his daughter’s betrothal of announcing equal chances of suit for all, equal access to his personal holdings of the world’s wealth. Shylock’s real error in light of these parallel events at Belmont seems not to be his usurious hoarding and endogamous, or incestuous, wish with respect to his daughter—not, in other words, the overt charges levied against him by the Venetians—but rather his failure to disguise his profit-seeking and commanding paternity through a contrary show that would effectively disarm any encroaching critiques of the unseemly business of mercantile men.7

Notes For their direct and indirect help in guiding this piece to its present form, I wish to thank Linda Woodbridge and Scott Cutler Shershow; Rebecca Lemon, Michelle Ephraim, Braden Hosch, Adam Kitzes, and Jeff Theis; and, with deep gratitude, Susanne Wofford. 1. In his Discourse of the Commonweal written in the first half of the sixteenth century and published in the second, Thomas Smith explained the cooperative benefits of international trade: “God has ordained that no country should have all commodities but that that one lacks, another brings forth, and that that one country lacks this year, another has plenty thereof commonly that same year, to the intent men may know that they have need one of another’s help and thereby love and

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society to grow amongst all men the more” (62). Yet the cooperative benefits generated their own cautions: “We must always take heed that we buy no more of strangers than we do sell them; for so we should impoverish ourselves and enrich them” (63). Smith is conspicuously silent about the potential for reversing this imbalance, where England might enjoy the profit of a surplus. Though it is sometimes seen as exotic or other-worldly, Belmont is nonetheless a scant twenty miles from Venice (3.4.85) and would have fallen into the general category of what the Elizabethans would have called “Italian.” Competing with the Neapolitan, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the Scot, the German, the Moroccan, and the Spaniard, Bassanio from nearby Venice clearly has the inside track. For Medieval and Renaissance linguistic distinctions between usury and other forms of interest lending, see Nelson, pp. 16–24 and Divine, pp. 3–4. On this parallel, see Charney, for example, and also Michelle Ephraim. Ephraim’s work on this play in particular has helped steer my conception of it. For a reading that suggestively affords Portia greater agency and greater complicity in the economic arrangements at Belmont, see Engle. “Marriage and Mercifixion,” p. 2. For an excellent discussion of the play with a focus on gift-giving and the traffic in women, see Newman. The classic critique of this form of political economy is Rubin. In his illuminating study of modern critical receptions of the play, Richard Halpern notes the myriad political and theoretical complexities in reading Shylock as a mere mirror (Judenspiegel) to his Christian counterparts. While I have been arguing for the general similarities between Jewish and Christian households in the play, the salient difference that finally stands out is the Christian business of concealing self-interest so that its mechanisms are invisible. In a sense, the mirroring roles are reversed here: the Christians present the image that Shylock is expected to adopt as his own. They punish him for not accepting their ideological image, although it is unlikely they ever intend to allow him to practice the secret strategies that image helps conceal.

Works Cited Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Berger, Harry, Jr. “Marriage and Mercifixion in ‘The Merchant of Venice’: The Casket Scene Revisited.” Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 1–9. Bolton, J. L. The Medieval English Economy: 1150–1500. London: J. M. Dent, 1980.

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Charney, Maurice. “Jessica’s Turquoise Ring and Abigail’s Poisoned Porridge: Shakespeare and Marlowe and Rivals and Imitators.” Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 33–44. Divine, Thomas F. Interest: An Historical and Analytical Study in Economics and Modern Ethics. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1959. Engle, Lars. “Money and Moral Luck in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Ephraim, Michelle. Deborah’s Kin: Playing the Jewish Woman on the English Renaissance Stage. Dissertation. University of Wisconsin, 1998. Garber, Marjorie. Coming of Age in Shakespeare. 1981. New York: Routledge, 1997. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare among the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Montaigne, Michel de. “Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children.” The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958. Nelson, Benjamin N. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Newman, Karen. “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. Novy, Marianne L. “Giving, Taking, and the Role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice.” Philological Quarterly 58 (1979): 137–54. Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. 1947. New York: Routledge, 1996. Patterson, Annabel. “Introduction.” The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. London: Prentice Hall, 1995. Roover, Raymond Adrien de. The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank: 1397–1494. New York: Norton, 1966. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Smith, Thomas. A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England. Ed. Mary Dewar. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969.

Chapter 13

Usury and Counterfeiting in Wilson’s T H E T H R E E L A D I E S O F L O N D O N and T H E T H R E E L O R D S A N D T H R E E L A D I E S O F L O N D O N , and in Shakespeare ’s M E A S U R E FOR MEASURE 1 Te r e s a L a n p h e r N u g e n t

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n The Three Ladies of London, written in 1581 (Mithal xxi), and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, composed in late 1588 (Mithal xxiii), Robert Wilson presented a cast of aptonymically titled characters to allegorize the detrimental effects of greed on a community’s affective bonds. Wilson’s version of this age-old morality tale is suffused with allusions to contemporary concerns about moneylending and counterfeiting, which are represented by his characters Usury and Fraud. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which, in a sense, tells a similar story about the corrupting influence of power, incorporates tropes on usury and counterfeiting throughout the play. The following essay demonstrates how these three dramas chart the gradual and contested acceptance of moneylending, and reveal a corresponding increase in anxiety about counterfeiting. These plays reveal how usury and counterfeiting were being recoded as symbolic reflections of an emerging system of credit relations. I propose that as moneylending gained

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legitimacy, counterfeiting became ideologically charged with the illicit connotations traditionally evoked by usury as a threat to economic transactions and social stability. Despite the fact that early modern dramas characterized usurers as malevolent parasites on society, the plays analyzed here also illustrate an emerging perception that moneylending also created constructive communal bonds within an emerging culture of credit.

Changing Views of Moneylending The Three Ladies of London depicts Lady Lucar’s rise to power and her overthrow of Ladies Love and Conscience. Usury is Lady Lucar’s chief henchman; his evil deeds bring about her success and allegorize the injurious effects of moneylending on society. For example, Usury reduces Love and Conscience to abject poverty by taking possession of their house, raising their rent, and eventually forcing them to sell their gowns and to seek refuge with Hospitality. Usury then kills Hospitality, attempts to murder Good Neighbourhoode and Liberalitie, and attacks True Friendship, who goes into hiding. The poverty inflicted by Usury eventually allows Lucar to corrupt Love by marrying her to Dissimulation; their union causes Love to transmute physically into a two-headed monster named Lust. Meanwhile, Usury reduces Conscience to selling brooms in the streets. When she learns of Love’s marriage, Conscience becomes so demoralized that she accepts Lucar’s money and agrees to become her bawd, observing: “I thinke you lead the worlde in a string, for every body followes you. / And sith every one doth it, why may not I doe it too” (1360–1).2 At this significant turning point when Conscience capitulates to Lucar, Usury provides the bribe money and “the box of all abomination” into which Lucar dips her fingers and marks Conscience’s face with the signs of her demise. At the conclusion of the play, Lucar, Love, and Conscience are condemned and imprisoned by Judge Nemo (Nobody); yet Usury— along with his follow vices, Fraud, Dissimulation, and Symony—escapes punishment.3 The personification of moneylending as a ruthless murderer and hard-hearted oppressor is problematized in the play, however, by the appearance of an honorable moneylender: Gerontus, a Jewish moneylender living in Turkey. Mercadorus, an unscrupulous Italian merchant and devotee of Lady Lucar, refuses to repay a loan from Gerontus and threatens to “turn Turk,” forswearing his own religion, country, and family, which would also absolve him of all his debts. Gerontus intervenes before Mercadorus takes the oath of conversion and forgives

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the debt because Gerontus is unwilling to be responsible for the merchant’s forsaking of his religion. Mercadorus immediately gloats over his successful cozening of the Jew. According to H.S.D. Mithal, Gerontus is the earliest example of a Jewish character in an extant English play,4 and Mithal speculates that Wilson devised Gerontus’s goodness in order to emphasize the immorality of Mercadorus (xx). Whether or not Wilson’s Jewish moneylender was created merely to critique the Christian merchant, Gerontus provides an example of moneylending conducted in an ethical manner (e.g., guided by love and conscience), and perhaps signals a reassessment of assumptions about moneylending.5 And, in fact, in Wilson’s subsequent play, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, the portrayal of Usury is less clearly negative. Usury returns in the early scenes of The Three Lords—written seven years after The Three Ladies—and boasts, “the longer I liue, the greater loue I find” (641); furthermore, he claims that he may be used “by license of the law” (867). Yet Conscience contradicts his claim, accusing him of lying: “Vsury slanders both law and state, / the law allowes not though it tollerate, / And thou art sure be shut out at heauen gate” (881–3). This conflict over the legality of Usury alludes, in general, to changing attitudes toward moneylending in England during the late sixteenth century, and, more specifically, to the state’s ambiguous policies on moneylending. In 1571, Parliament approved the Act Against Usury,6 which established a severe penalty for interest charges exceeding 10 percent—triple forfeiture of the principal and nullification of the contract. Lenders charging 10 percent or less were subject to forfeiture of only the interest and their contracts remained legal (Jones 62–3, 92, 117; Tawney 160). By 1600, the significant difference between these two penalties effectively established 10 percent as the standard interest rate for loans, although officially any interest rate remained illegal (Jones 79; Tawney 165–6). In The Three Lords, Wilson acknowledges this unofficial acceptance of moneylending when the lords capture and brand Usury: Sirra, pollicy gives you this marke, doo you see, A little x, standing in the midd’st of a great C, Meaning thereby to let all men vnderstand, that you must not take aboue bare x. pound in the hundred at any hand, And that too much too, and so be packing quietly[.] (1953–57)

While the branding of Usury stigmatizes him by marking him a criminal, it also establishes 10 percent interest as a permissible amount, dramatizing the effects of the 1571 usury statute. Usury does not

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appear again after he is stamped; apparently he no longer poses a threat within the world of the play. The shift in Wilson’s depictions of Usury in these two plays, from murderer of communal fellowship to tolerated social practice, illustrates the growing acceptance of moneylending between 1581 and 1590. The legitimation of moneylending during the early modern period was a protracted and contentious process and inspired numerous pamphlets, sermons, and dramas that denounced all forms of moneylending. To illustrate how vexed responses were to the new usury legislation, William Ingram compares the controversy that followed the 1571 usury statute to the debates over abortion that have ensued in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 (315). Craig Muldrew points out that the very definition of usury was undergoing a transformation; it was during “Elizabeth’s reign that the charge for lending came to be termed an interest rate rather than usury” (114). Many anti-usury tracts, such as Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse Upon Usury (1572), condemned any return on a loan above the principal. Other tracts supported a policy of toleration, such as The Execution of Neschech and the confyning of his Kinsman Tarbith or A Short Discourse shewing the difference betwixt damned Usurie, and that which is Lawfull (1616) that warns “forbidding of all Usury, is the very maintaining of damned Usurie” (42) and advocates “tolerating tenne in the hundreth” (32). Interestingly, the author recognizes his contemporaries’ rhetorical efforts to divide moneylending profit into “unlawfull Usurie” and “lawfull Interest” (19); however, although he favors allowing some profit on moneylending, he still refers to this lawful amount as usury. By 1604, when Measure for Measure was probably written (Lever xxxi–xxxv), not only had 10 percent interest become the standard rate, but also Parliamentary factions were beginning to call for an official reduction of interest rates, not because usury was considered immoral, but in order to stimulate the economy (Jones 175–98). As Norman Jones has emphasized, this shift from a theological to an economic perspective on moneylending signals a significant change in early modern English attitudes, which Jones attributes to the influence of Protestant theology (176). Yet despite increased toleration, popular opinion toward moneylending remained mixed, and plays that depicted usurers as greedy parasites and, later, as social climbers enjoyed immense popularity between the 1580s and 1630s (Stonex; Wright; Jones 173). Lorna Hutson’s extensive research suggests that humanist writings encouraged self-interested thrift and significantly influenced “the sixteenth-century’s ideological struggle over the

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legitimation of usury” (42). She writes, Of course, the usurer continued to be named throughout the sixteenth century as the antithesis of all good neighbourhood and true friendship between men. Nevertheless, Bullinger’s writings had established a conceptual space in which practices of calculation and prudence relating to the provision of the individual household need not be condemned wholesale as usurious and unneighbourly. (44)

Hutson traces humanist arguments explaining how interest-bearing loans could coexist with Christian charity and good neighborhood (41–5); these arguments provide additional explanation for the transformation of Usury in Wilson’s two plays. While The Three Ladies depicts moneylending as categorically evil, and The Three Lords portrays the practice as conditionally tolerated even though officially scorned, Measure for Measure suggests increasing official acceptance of moneylending. The play’s one objection to moneylending is expressed in Pompey’s frequently quoted complaint about his arrest for being a bawd: “Twas never merry world since of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by order of law” (III.i.263–4).7 Pompey’s remark not only records his opposition to usury, but also suggests growing toleration of moneylending by implying that when Angelo resurrected the laws against prostitution, which had been unenforced for 14 or so years, he also legalized moneylending. Such a move would be consistent with Angelo’s “precise” characterization, since by the late sixteenth century many Protestant theologians espoused lenient policies toward moneylending (Maus 1995, 157; Jones 14–24; Nelson xxiii, 29–108). Marc Shell suggests that prior to deputizing Angelo, the Duke had tolerated both usury and prostitution (126–7). The implication that Vincentio tolerated, and Angelo legitimated, moneylending suggests the growing acceptance of this economic practice. Yet Pompey’s comment reveals that legalizing moneylending remained controversial, and his juxtaposition of usury and prostitution sets up an implicit link between the economic and the sexual that the play repeatedly promotes.

Counterfeiting and Credit in Early Modern England While depicting a growing acceptance of usury, The Three Ladies of London, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, and Measure for

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Measure offer evidence of increasing anxiety over counterfeiting. As moneylending gained acceptance, I propose that the stigma traditionally attached to usury as a threat to economic and social welfare was transferred to counterfeiting. Similarly to beliefs about moneylending, early modern attitudes regarding counterfeiting and other forms of coining—including clipping, edging, and sweating—were ambivalent and contradictory. Malcolm Gaskill describes the difficulty that Tudor and Stuart authorities had in convincing the populace of the seriousness of coining; even though most coining offenses were declared high treason in 1555, many depositions attest that “this was not a ‘real’ crime in the eyes of the people” (132). Inconsistent enforcement intensified the problem: “[coining’s] public image was ever-changing in that it was condemned and condoned at different times by governers [sic] and governed alike” (198). Counterfeiting and moneylending were similar in that they were both officially illegal, but were commonly practiced.8 However, while usury was gradually gaining acceptance under Elizabethan and Stuart rule, counterfeiting was increasingly the focus of royal proclamations and statutory prohibitions (Gaskill 125–7). Wilson’s plays dramatize the emerging distinctions between moneylending and counterfeiting. In The Three Ladies counterfeit coins are never mentioned; in fact, in a scene in which they might be expected to appear, where Dissimulation gives Simplicity several gold coins to carry to Love, there is no suggestion that the coins are not authentic (990–1009). In contrast, in The Three Lords counterfeit coins circulate in several scenes. This play also depicts an accumulating tension between Usury and Fraud, who represents counterfeiting in the play both conceptually and as the source of all the counterfeit coins. Fraud tricks the poor peddler, Simplicity, into exchanging his shillings for fake gold coins. Then Usury becomes irate when he discovers Simplicity “uttering copper for gold” (1368)—in other words, passing counterfeit coins. Usury calls this an “odious” crime and threatens to chop off Simplicity’s ears and deprive him of his freedom. Fraud convinces Usury to spare Simplicity’s ears and confiscate his possessions instead. Soon Usury scolds Fraud for bragging about his counterfeiting trick while Simplicity is nearby: “What a foole were you to speake before he was gone, now you haue lost your part of this too, for he will goe complaine, you will bee sought for, and I made to restore these things againe” (1418–20); just as counterfeit coins undermine the value of authentic currency, Fraud’s schemes threaten to devalue Usury’s wealth. Valerie Forman points out that both counterfeit and legitimate coins threaten the concept of the authentic: “Money is like

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counterfeiting; it is already a force that disrupts the relation between sign and referent. Counterfeiting, then, mimics and reproduces a discrepancy that money itself generates” (“Marked Angels” 9). In other words, the very concept of “authentic currency” is oxymoronic. Ironically, the antagonism between Usury and Fraud in The Three Lords reveals the tenuous distinctions between the authentic and the counterfeit, the licit and the illicit. As the tensions between Fraud and Usury mount, Usury becomes increasingly aligned with the interests of the state; not only does he wish to maintain the integrity of the currency, he also admonishes Fraud, Dissimulation, and Symonie not to betray London to the Spanish Armada. Fraud tries to convince Usury that they all should leave London to join the Spanish “enemie” because “in London, men are growen so full of conscience and religion” (1427–8), and he believes their “credite may rise again with [the Spaniards]” (1432–3). But Usury is quite pleased with the status of his credit in London. At this point, Usury parts company with his former companions, and Fraud warns that Usury can no longer be trusted. Significantly, when Usury is branded soon afterward, Fraud is at the court disguised as Skil and actually helps to restrain Usury while he is burnt; thus, in this last scene in which Usury and Fraud appear together, the threat that Fraud poses to Usury is violently enacted. It is also this violent act that confers a mark of legitimacy upon Usury, ostensibly severing his association with fraudulence and limiting him to the realm of the licit. The animosity that Wilson dramatizes between Usury and Fraud represents the inevitable tension emerging in what Craig Muldrew terms “the culture of credit.” Muldrew proposes that during the early modern period the distinction between social and economic credit had not yet arisen, and that one’s creditworthiness was inextricably linked to one’s reputation (2–3). He states that the years between 1550 and 1580 “were the most intensely concentrated period of economic growth before the late eighteenth century” (20–1), and he traces the development of a resulting “culture of credit,” which involved “a highly mobile and circulating language of judgement . . . about the creditworthiness of households attempting both to cooperate and compete within communities increasingly permeated by market relations” (2–3). According to Muldrew, the culture of credit was “most influential on social relations” from 1580, “when litigation had reached its height and the concept of credit became pervasive in much discourse, to the early eighteenth century” (4). He continues, “It was in this economic crucible that the maintenance of

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the social ethic of credit as trust became so important” (4). And, I would add, it was under these conditions of increasing emphasis on trust, “honesty,” and “fair dealing” (127) that the act of counterfeiting was correspondingly vilified. Counterfeiting, which increases the supply of currency and lowers the value of money, posed an increasing threat to the foundation of trust upon which credit relations relied. Meanwhile, increased toleration of moneylending—one form of credit—helped facilitate the emergence of the culture of credit; and, in turn, growing reliance on credit relations supported the legitimation of interest. In The Three Lords, Fraud utters false “counters” again when he is apprehended immediately after the branding scene. He convinces the officer, Diligence, to accept 200 Angels as “pawne” to allow him to take a less public route to jail and avoid being seen with an officer, “or if any my friends should suspect me with you, and dog vs, and see me committed to Newgate, I were vtterly discredited” (2059–61, emphasis added). Fraud’s ironic concern over being “utterly discredited” underscores the inherent tension between counterfeiting and credibility. Valerie Forman, whose work informs my understanding of counterfeiting and credibility, explains that inherent in the concept of counterfeiting is a tension between imitation and opposition (“Material Dispossessions” 2); Fraud’s concern over his own credit illustrates this very tension. A counterfeit is, by definition, the opposite of the authentic; at the same time, it imitates the authentic. Fraud’s success at counterfeiting depends upon society’s trust in the authenticity of the currency system, which is why Fraud hopes his “credite may rise” with the Spaniards. Yet at the same time, what Fraud utters is discredibility, because fraud erodes the system of credit that it parasitically relies upon.

Social and Economic Credit in M EASURE FOR M EASURE Measure for Measure similarly ponders the problem of credit and credibility through images of usury and counterfeiting and links these issues to the ever-present tension between personal desire (sexual, political, or economic) and public duty. In the opening scene of the play, the Duke sets in motion his test of Angelo’s mettle and credit with a speech admonishing Angelo not to waste his virtues. The Duke’s speech evokes several biblical passages, including, significantly, the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30), the controversial passage about usury that addresses the theme of indebtedness for

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one’s god-given talents. The Duke lectures Angelo: Spirits are not finely touch’d But to fine issues; nor nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use. (I.i.35–40)

The Duke’s rhetoric not only confers his authority upon Angelo, but also casts the Duke in the role of the divine “creditor” who lends his/her “excellence” and demands in return “both thanks and use.” The Duke mimics the role of the usurious traveling master in the parable of the talents who leaves his talents (coins) in the charge of his servants and then returns to assess their investments. Angelo recasts the Duke’s usury metaphor into the language of coining: “Let there be some more test made of my metal, / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamp’d upon it” (I.i.48–50). Angelo fears that he will prove a counterfeit, a fear that the Duke reiterates: “Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (I.iii.53–4). By suggesting that the Duke may coin a counterfeit, Angelo’s metaphor allows him to evade the responsibility of the servant in the parable and shifts the responsibility for his own falseness onto the Duke who stamps him. In the Duke’s absence, Angelo’s obsession with images of counterfeiting intensifies. When Isabella visits Angelo to learn if he will pardon her brother, he compares Claudio’s “crime” to murder via images of forging counterfeit coins: It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. ‘Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made, As to put mettle in restrained means To make a false one. (II.iv.42–9)

In his effort to compare begetting illegitimate children to committing murder, Angelo can only articulate the former action metaphorically as an act of counterfeiting, another criminal offence. Counterfeiting, like murder, was a felony; but, as Gaskill’s research shows, it was inconsistently prosecuted. Similarly, within the world of the play, sexual

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activity outside of marriage is officially a felony, but the law has been ambivalently enforced. Angelo likens illegitimate children to counterfeit coins in order to invalidate the former. However, his comparison simultaneously exposes the ideological agenda underpinning any effort to create a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate, whether in regards to children or coins; in both instances, the interests of the power structure are upheld through the distinction. Both illegitimate offspring and counterfeit coins debase and undermine the authorized system of circulation and transfer of property; moreover, such breakdowns in the hereditary or monetary systems threaten the authority of the state. Furthermore, Angelo’s images of counterfeiting emphasize his preoccupation with his new authority and his temptation to abuse it. Immediately after Angelo expresses his disdain for counterfeiters, he paradoxically reveals his own falseness by propositioning Isabella. His secret desire to replicate Claudio’s crime and his willingness to abuse his authority in order to garner illicit pleasure, renders him, figuratively, a counterfeiter. In the ensuing dialogue, the issues of illicit sex, sexual politics, counterfeiting, and usury converge. In Angelo’s counterfeiting metaphor, women become the illegal mold, or “restrained means,” in which counterfeit currency is “coin[ed]” with a forbidden stamp. Thus, his proposal attempts to turn Isabella into a counterfeiter’s mold and a counterfeit coin by placing her in danger of producing an illegitimate child, and by threatening to debase her purity and render her unfit for the nunnery. Moreover, by demanding that Isabella trade sex for her brother’s pardon, Angelo’s proposition also would render her a kind of prostitute. Therefore, his metaphor marks a shift away from the traditional, pejorative association of usury with prostitution and forges a new ideological link between counterfeiting and prostitution. The ideological supplanting of usury with counterfeiting is advanced further in Angelo’s metaphor of children born out of wedlock as illegitimate, counterfeit coins; this rhetorical image revises the Aristotelian notion of usury as unnatural breeding (because money should be sterile) and establishes counterfeiting, instead of usury, as the source of unnatural or illegitimate profit. Angelo’s rhetorical strategy attempts to deny female agency (both political and economic) by describing women as merely vessels—the counterfeiter’s mold—and only men as active counterfeiters.9 Isabella takes up Angelo’s counterfeiting metaphor and tries to shift its focus from male dominance to male responsibility in order to shame him into retracting his hypocritical offer. When Angelo insists that not

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only men, but women too, are frail, Isabella counters: Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, Which are as easy broke as they make forms. Women?—Help, heaven! Men their creation mar In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail; For we are soft as our complexions are, And credulous to false prints. (II.iv.124–9)

Isabella’s description of women as “credulous to false prints” draws upon Angelo’s counterfeiting metaphor to illustrate how easily women are “mar[red]” (i.e. debased) by men who seek to profit by them. In addition, I believe Isabella’s choice of “ten times” to measure the vulnerability of women to the “false prints” of men alludes to contemporary usury laws (her “ten” evokes 10 percent interest)10 and suggests that women fall prey to unscrupulous men because they trust them as creditors trust lenders. Significantly, when Isabella publicly proclaims Angelo’s vices to the Duke, he exclaims, “Nay, it is ten times strange!” (V.i.45), to which she replies, “Nay, it is ten times true” (V.i.48). Thus, Isabella’s metaphors of usury and counterfeiting portray women as well-meaning participants in a culture of credit, while some men, like counterfeiters, abuse this culture of trust for their own profit. *** Although Isabella struggles against Angelo’s effort to use and debase her, her effort in act II to hold the mirror of her brother’s “counterfeiting” up to Angelo’s “more gross” (II.iv.82) “counterfeiting” fails due to her own insufficient credit. As Angelo points out, if she—a powerless woman—tried to “proclaim” (II.iv.150) him publicly, “Who will believe [her]?” (II.iv.153): My unsoil’d name, th’austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i’th’state Will so your accusation overweigh, [ . . . ] Say what you can: my false o’erweighs your true. (II.iv.154–6,169)11

In terms of social credit, Isabella is bankrupt; indeed, her “testimonies against [Angelo’s] worth and credit” (V.i.243) prove fruitless until the revealed Duke lends her his credit in the final scene, the full cost of which she only learns when he asks her to repay her debt by marrying him.

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The Duke, in fact, desires to restore his own credibility and to create a culture of credit in which all his subjects are indebted to him. He promises to expose “seemers” (I.iv.54) in order to “let the subject see, to make them know / That outward courtesies would fain proclaim / Favours that keep within” (V.i.15–17). Jonathan Dollimore argues that the Duke’s staging of the “public recognition of his own integrity” exposes “integrity as a strategy of authority”; he adds, public integrity legitimates authority, and authority takes sufficient priority to lie about integrity when the ends of propaganda and government require it . . . the Duke knows that these same ends require that integrity should be publicly displayed in the form of reputation. (83)

The Duke plots to reestablish his reputation, overwriting his 14 years of benign neglect, by publicly destroying Angelo’s credibility. Ironically, he adopts figures of usury and counterfeiting in order to construct his aura of integrity for the purpose of controlling his subjects. Marc Shell points out that the Duke plays the role of bawd and usurer (127) in the sense that he uses human beings as money in order to gain “a kind of profitable advantage or use” (125). The Duke’s ambition to render his subjects profitable further supports my reading of him as the usurious taskmaster in the parable of the talents, who returns home to reward and punish his servants accordingly. In addition to wanting to make his subjects profitable, the Duke also wishes to make them legitimate; but in order to achieve this end, the Duke must counterfeit as a friar. Shell argues that this “power of disguise” allows the Duke to plot the “commercial exchanges” of “Mariana’s maidenhead for Isabella’s and Barnadine’s head for Claudio’s” (123). The Duke’s disguise suggests that the culture of trust necessary for a credit economy must be founded paradoxically upon counterfeiting; however, such counterfeiting is rendered permissible when (and only when) it is performed by the Duke. In order to render his wayward subjects profitable and legitimate, the Duke imposes matrimony upon them as both reward and punishment to reestablish previously thwarted “decorum” (I.iii.31), and to redefine categories of legitimacy and illegitimacy. Marriage is essential to the network of credit that he wishes to build, since it denotes kinship patterns that determine a variety of social, economic, and legal relationships. Daryl Palmer writes, “Rituals of marriage make it possible for a given culture to monitor and confirm . . . relationships” (37). Drawing upon observations of the early modern writer, John Wheeler, who noted that all manner of people and things “come

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into Commerce, and pass into traffique,” Palmer employs the term “miscegenation” to describe early modern anxieties about the disruptive effects of merchandising upon the social order; “miscegenation makes a culture nervous because it violates cherished notions of kind” (37). Palmer’s suggestion that marriage practices reveal a society’s notions of categories as well as its attempts to control those categories offers an explanation for why the Duke would believe that he could confer legitimacy and profitability through marriage. If early modern Londoners viewed the effects of merchandising as a form of miscegenation, as Palmer posits, than it makes sense that marriage would be perceived as a curative for unregulated economic and sexual traffic. In a sense, Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London can be read as a blueprint for the Duke’s fantasy of marriage as the controlling mechanism that reestablishes social order. In Wilson’s allegory, love can be purged of lust, honest industry can legitimate filthy lucre, and charity can overcome greed; and all this is accomplished by marrying Love, Lucre,12 and Conscience to the proper husbands—Pollicy, Pompe, and Pleasure, respectively. However, in Measure for Measure, marriage plays an integral role in the “pass[ing] into traffique” of everything and everyone; and the Duke himself exposes this function of marriage with his proposal to Isabella: he reveals that Claudio still lives and immediately says, “Give me your hand and say you will be mine. / He is my brother too” (V.i.490–1). This implicit exchange of brother for marriage is uncomfortably close to Angelo’s offer of brother for sex, and calls into question the distinction between marriage and prostitution, licit and illicit sex, that the commanded marriages were suppose to reestablish. What Natasha Korda refers to as the “fiction of reciprocity underlying the institution of Christian matrimony” (10) attempts to obscure the Duke’s economic and political motivations for repositioning his marginal subjects within the framework of acknowledged social positions in the culture of credit. Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London depicts the utter destruction of communal bonds based on hospitality and friendship when Usury prevails, unchecked. But in his sequel, Usury’s role as a necessary, though unsavory, character in London society is acknowledged; meanwhile, Fraud takes on the role of arch-nemesis of the state. In Measure for Measure, usury not only appears to be legal, but also is presented as a rhetorical ideal (through allusions to the parable of the talents) for relations between monarch and subject; profitability becomes the measure of the “good” subject. The Duke employs

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both usury and counterfeiting as strategies to create an illusion of trust and integrity. Within this culture of credit, he attempts to make his subjects indebted to him. Yet Angelo and Lucio’s preference for death over their respective marriages exposes the false foundation of this illusion. Isabella’s silence in the wake of the Duke’s marriage proposal leaves the audience wondering whether she also prefers death to marriage, and whether any of the Duke’s subjects will repay him with either “thanks” or “use.” Thus, while Measure for Measure depicts the emergence in the early seventeenth century of new credit relations that came to define social intercourse, it also registers the inevitable ideological snags and gaps that resulted from the corresponding revaluation of moneylending, counterfeiting, and the status of creditors and debtors.

Notes 1. I wish to thank Katherine Eggert, Richard Halpern, Valerie Forman, Andrew Cowell, and Marjorie McIntosh who have read drafts of this paper and provided invaluable insights and guidance. 2. All citations for the Wilson plays are from the Garland edition of H.S.D. Mithal’s An Edition of Robert Wilson’s “The Three Ladies of London” and “The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London” Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1959. Reprint: The Renaissance Imagination: Important Literary and Theatrical Texts from the Late Middle Ages through the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 36, ed. Stephen Orgel. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988. 3. Lloyd Edward Kermode points to the harshness of the three ladies’ punishments while the male vices escape prosecution as evidence of the gender bias in the play; see “The Playwright’s Prophecy” (77–8). Interestingly, Amy M. Froide says that in most urban bridewells women “vastly outnumbered men”; see “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England” (236–7). Natasha Korda employs recent research on singlewomen such as Froide’s to expose the omission in Measure for Measure of “the punitive regulation of singlewomen”; see “Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure” in the present volume (2–3). In light of Korda’s assessment of Measure for Measure, The Three Ladies of London does reflect the contemporary judicial system’s severe treatment of women. 4. Mithal notes that Stephen Gosson refers to an earlier play, The Jew, in The School of Abuse (1597), but that play has not survived (xix). Mithal compares Gerontus to three other instances of a Jewish character in extant Elizabethan drama, and to four examples in extant Jacobean drama, in order to show that Gerontus is the only favorable portrayal of a noble Jew (xix–xx).

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5. Wilson’s unusually positive depiction of a Jewish moneylender in The Three Ladies may be countered in The Three Lords when the more common, negative stereotype is presented: Usury is described as having been born in London of Jewish parents (1441–2). Kermode reads Usury’s Jewish parentage and Venetian connections as subtle indications of Wilson’s “personal hatred for the alien presence and its effects in England” (75). However, the typically pejorative connotations of Jewish usurers in early modern texts is complicated in The Three Lords: Usury is rendered a London Jew at the very point when he breaks from his evil companions and gains a stamp of legitimacy. 6. For a detailed account of the 1571 Usury Statute, see Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1989). For historical accounts of the gradual acceptance of moneylending in Western societies, see John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Harvard University Press, 1957) and Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (University of Chicago Press, 1969). 7. All citations from Measure for Measure are from the Arden edition, edited by J.W. Lever (Methuen Ltd, 1965. Reprint: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1998). Pompey’s comment refers to, while comically denying, the traditional association of usury and prostitution in anti-usury texts. Early modern texts, following classical and medieval precedents, contain numerous comparisons of bawds and prostitutes to usurers and their money; e.g., in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605) Quicksilver tells the usurer, Security, “Thou feed’st my lechery, and I thy covetousness” (II.ii.16); and in Rowley’s A Match at Midnight (1633) the usurer is scolded, “As I have been bawd to the flesh, you have been bawd to your money” (Wright 180–1). The English Usurer (1634), an anti-usury tract compiled by John Blaxton, claims: “Aristotle sayth, that usurers and bauds may well goe together, for they gain by filthy means all that they get.” 8. For a discussion of the pervasiveness of moneylending in early modern England, see Marjorie K. McIntosh’s “Money Lending on the Periphery of London, 1300–1600,” Albion 20.4 (1988): 557–1. 9. Korda, who compares the relatively gentle treatment of the unwed and pregnant Juliet to the death sentence issued against Claudio, demonstrates how Measure for Measure “runs counter to contemporary legislation” that held women solely responsible for illegitimate children (4). 10. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 6 links the phrase “ten times” with the concept of usury as part of the procreation theme. The speaker describes producing a child as repaying one’s debt for one’s own life: “That use is not forbidden usury” (line 5). He proceeds to play upon the phrase “ten times” in the following lines: Of ten times happier, be it ten for one; Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, If ten of thine ten times refigured thee. (lines 8–10)

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By raising the controversial issue of usury and repeating the term “ten” fives times, the sonnet reiterates the allusion to 10% interest, albeit by negation. The speaker argues that in contrast to the idea of usury as unnatural breeding, having even ten children (“ten for one,” which would be 1,000%, an exorbitant return rate) is not usurious. 11. The editors of The Arden Shakespeare Measure for Measure note that this last phrase “as paradox also suggests the lightness of false coin” (64), further emphasizing how Angelo’s counterfeiting metaphor signals his own hypocrisy. 12. In The Three Ladies, this lady’s name is spelled “Lucar.” In The Three Lords, the same lady’s name is spelled “Lucre.”

Bibliography Blaxton, John. The English Usurer, or, Usury Condemned . . . . London, 1634. Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Eastward Ho. Ed. R.W. Van Fossen. Revels edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Reprint: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Dollimore, Jonathan. “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure.” Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. (First published 1985.) 72–87. The Execution of Neschech and the confyning of his Kinsman Tarbith or A Short Discourse shewing the difference betwixt damned Usurie, and that which is Lawfull . . . London, 1616. Forman, Valerie. “Marked Angels: Counterfeits, Commodities, and The Roaring Girl.” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1–30. ——. “Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economics of Twelfth Night.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Gaskill, Malcolm. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Ingram, William. “The Economics of Playing.” A New History of Early English Drama. Ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Jones, Norman. God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1989. Kermode, Lloyd Edward. “The Playwright’s Prophecy: Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London and the ‘Alienation’ of the English.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. Volume II. Ed. John Pitcher. London: Associated University Press, 1999. Korda, Natasha. “Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure.” Money and the Age of Shakespeare. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003: 237–50.

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Lever, J.W. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. Methuen, 1965. Reprint: Surrey, England: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1998. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ——. Introduction to Measure for Measure in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: Norton, 1997: 2021–7. McIntosh, Marjorie K. “Money Lending on the Periphery of London, 1300–1600.” Albion 20.4 (1988): 557–71. Mithal, H.S.D. An Edition of Robert Wilson’s “The Three Ladies of London” and “The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London.” Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1959. Reprint: The Renaissance Imagination: Important Literary and Theatrical Texts from the Late Middle Ages through the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 36. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Nelson, Benjamin. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Noonan, John T. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Palmer, Daryl W. “Merchants and Miscegenation: The Three Ladies of London, The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice.” Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Ed. Joyce Green MacDonald. New Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. Surrey, England: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998. Shell, Marc. The End of Kinship: “Measure for Measure,” Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Stonex, Arthur Bivins. “The Usurer in Elizabethan Drama.” PMLA 31 (1916): 190–210. Tawney, R.H. “Introduction” to Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse upon Usury, 1572. London: G. Bell and sons, 1925. Wilson, Robert. The Three Ladies of London. In An Edition of Robert Wilson’s “The Three Ladies of London” and “The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London.” Ed. H.S.D. Mithal. Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1959. Reprint: The Renaissance Imagination: Important Literary and Theatrical Texts from the Late Middle Ages through the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 36. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New York and London: Garland, 1988. Wilson, Thomas. A Discourse Upon Usury. Ed. R.H. Tawney. London, 1925. Wright, Celeste Turner. “The Usurer’s Sin in Elizabethan Literature.” Studies in Philology 35 (1938): 178–94.

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Chapter 14

Middleton and Debt in T I M O N O F AT H E N S John Jowett

This paper takes as a premiss that Timon of Athens was written in collaboration by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. It applies a critical hermeneutics based on collaboration to the play’s varying representations of money. The historical study of debt and the culture of debt in early modern England undertaken by Craig Muldrew offers a valuable perspective on Middleton’s contribution to the play, and this is consistent with Middleton as a writer whose economic view of humanity is unremitting. However, the scenes Middleton wrote do not simply represent the networks of credit and trust that Muldrew describes; they show those networks in a disturbing state of collapse.1 The case for collaboration is set out in detail by R.V. Holdsworth.2 In a sustained series of tests, Holdsworth identifies areas where the two writers have quantifiably different traits. He correlates these traits with Timon of Athens to show that one section of the play repeatedly corresponds with Middleton’s writing, and that the other section repeatedly corresponds with Shakespeare’s writing. The characteristics examined include contractions, grammatical preferences, oaths and exclamations, the wording and envisaged staging in stage directions, inconsistencies and spelling variations, function words, and rare vocabulary. This evidence is backed up with a mass of parallels of word, thought, and idea. Holdsworth’s tests are for the most part significant individually.

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By repeatedly affirming the same pattern of division, they produce findings that are almost impossible to reconcile with any explanation other than an actual split in authorship between Middleton and Shakespeare. Yet few critics to date have responded constructively to the status of Timon of Athens as a part-Middleton play. There are various reasons for this, not the least being that Holdsworth’s study has not been fully published. Furthermore, the problematic position of the author in current critical thought also encourages agnosticism. Jeffrey Masten, for example, regards attribution study with suspicion, arguing that it is based firmly on the ideology of single authorship.3 Yet it is precisely the interaction or, in Masten’s term, “intercourse” of the agents that defines the particular sociality of a given text. To say that Shakespeare and Middleton wrote Timon of Athens is to recognize both division within and different contiguities outside the text. I wish to argue that the copula-phrase “Shakespeare and Middleton,” in which the word “and” simultaneously separates and joins, enables a more productive reading of the play in relation to the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the moment at which it was written. As must be accepted as a predictable symptom of collaboration, the exact boundaries of authorial stints are at times blurred by inadequate evidence. Nevertheless, the outlines of a division of labor are reasonably clear. By proportion, Middleton assumed responsibility for about one-third of the play. By subject matter, Middleton took the first banquet scene (1.2), the central scenes with Timon’s creditors and Alcibiades’s confrontation with the Senate, and most of the episodes figuring the Steward Flavius. This outline, though based on other criteria, accords with what a straightforward and indeed simplistic binary division between the styles and themes of the two dramatists would lead one to expect, and therefore immediately indicates a credible distribution of labor. In Timon of Athens as elsewhere, Middleton, the ironic satirist, shows social relationships built on foundations of greed and self-interest. His theater is most characteristic when it deals with the objective and material world of the city, and is always at a remove from the world of nature. In some cases, however, Middleton’s contribution does not accord with the stereotypical view of Middleton as ironic city comedian and reflects less familiar dimensions of his writing. For example, the episode in 4.3 in which Timon recognizes true friendship in his Steward—the remarkable exception to the “exceptless” hostility he elsewhere shows to his visitors in the woods, and as such the lynchpin of the critical interpretations of Wilson Knight and, more recently,

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Ken Jackson—results in the first instance from Middleton adding this passage to a scene otherwise by Shakespeare.4 Here Middleton writes as a sentimentalist rather than a satirist.5 But the authorial divide is exemplified nowhere more tellingly than in the terms “gold” and “debt.” The word “gold” occurs far more often in Timon of Athens than in any other Shakespeare play: there are 36 instances, distantly followed by Comedy of Errors at 19. Yet, if Holdsworth’s attributions are right, this key word can have been written by Middleton in no more than three instances;6 they otherwise fall within a Shakespeare stint that is little more than half the length of a typical Shakespeare play. As might be expected, the vast majority of occurrences are to be found in the long sequence of action in the woods outside Athens where Timon actually discovers gold in the ground and uses it both as a physical projectile and as a form of economic power. It is Shakespeare, then, who deals with physical, material money, or at least the idea of it, for the focus is on the metaphorical and ultimately idealizing figurations of gold. Timon enjoys a life in which boundaries and limits do not exist, and nature unnaturally gives forth coins as offspring: “the dog coins gold.” The legend of Midas never seems far away. This is a life in which money transcends the very calculus on which it is based.7 And the absence of any need to account for money leads Timon to suspend judgment on what’s feigned and what is sincere in human behavior. However, although Spanish bullion had increased the supply of gold in Europe, the greater general increase in trade meant that the demand for gold was racing further and further ahead of the supply. For this reason money tended to be hoarded, and so the supply of coin in circulation diminished further. It is clear from the work of Muldrew that the majority of transactions took place without the exchange of money. In early modern England barter was extraordinarily widespread, and so too was deferred payment. Muldrew shows that it was not coinage but debt that was the mainstay of the early modern economy.8 Credit created complex relationships based on trust, without which, according to Robert South, there could be “no correspondence maintained either between societies or particular persons.”9 Traditionally, “faithful” service had been a premiss of feudal dependency, but in the early modern period this culture was challenged by a new model, based instead on the idea of a civil society in which service was owed to the monarchical state.10 The moral emphasis shifted from fealty to financially based principles of credit, honesty, and

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conscience. The division of Timon of Athens into a world of gold and a world of debt reflects two contrasted aspects of a world in which gold was in short supply and debt was ubiquitous. Shakespeare works variations on the fantasy that is the exact opposite of what was: the fantasy of material prosperity in the civil world nourished by the limitless fecundity of mother earth in bringing forth gold.11 The assumptions here ultimately resemble those of the fairy tale. The leading poet of debt is Middleton. In this he is the more realistic poet, for the absence of gold was the overall economic reality. It is particularly Middleton who presents the play’s pre-Hobbesian world of possessive individuals in a society that lacks the overarching Hobbesian figure of the monarch. If, literally speaking, Timon is a mere subject of the state in the Athenian republic, within the aesthetic economy of the play as a tragedy it is Timon who occupies the initial position of a king. Timon’s king-like role is seen most fully in 1.2, the longest scene in Middleton’s hand, where he is the epitome of the giftgiver and patron. But kings too had to petition for money. Debt was one of the most fundamental characteristics of the Renaissance court and its economy. Patronage of the arts, Platonic glorifications of the patron, the transcendence of economic prudence in bestowing gifts, the splendors of banquet and masque, all flowed from the hidden munificence of the creditor.12 This general truth applied conspicuously to the debts and wastefulness of King James, of whom it was said long before he even travelled south to England, in terms that anticipate Timon of Athens, “He lives only by borrowing.”13 This borrowing funded habits of extravagant patronage and reliance on self-serving friends. In the early scenes both Shakespeare and Middleton provoke the analogy, showing how Timon, like James, was particularly fond of hunting (1.2.186–91; 2.2.8–15, 185) and acquiring jewels (1.1.1–18, 168–76, 213–16).14 Middleton took this potentially dangerous analogy further. It happens that Timon’s Steward is almost always identified by function rather than by personal name.15 Lines such as “Plutus the god of gold / Is but his steward” (1.1.277) may indeed activate an ironic pun on James, whose surname “Stuart,” or, as some historians spell the name, “Stewart,” in either form is simply Scots for “Steward.” If so, attributes of James are distributed between Timon, the James-like wastrel, and the Steward, who represents the characteristics of stewardship that should properly be denoted by the royal name. It is Middleton who, as noted earlier, takes primary responsibility for the episodes in Timon of Athens dealing with the Steward, and the reference to Plutus that initiates the theme of stewardship occurs in a passage at the end of 1.1 that Holdsworth attributes to

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Middleton. As Holdsworth notes, Middleton describes Plutus as “The lord of riches” in Game at Chess (5.3.12). Though it can be as problematic as productive to attach a categorical label such as “Puritan” to a writer such as Middleton, there is undoubtedly a recurrent Calvinist edge to his writing from the sermonizing poem Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased onwards.16 And indeed, the Middleton scenes of Timon of Athens articulate a Puritan critique of extravagance.17 The deeply ironical presentation on stage of conspicuous consumption by royalty and those who ape royalty is a Middleton trait. By satirizing spectacular entertainment of the kind acted at court Middleton ensures, as in other plays, that royalty is put clearly in view. Hence it is that the staging of a banquet and masque with ironizing commentaries from bystanders in 1.2 resembles scenes in later Middleton plays such as Women Beware Women, where the element of satire against the court, its absolutism, its corruption, its conspicuous extravagance, and its false self-theatricalization, is unmistakable.18 More literally speaking, Timon is merely a lord in a city state governed by a senate. Though initially occupying a powerful position, he has less excuse than a king for the munificence that spills into selfindulgent display. He might remind us that the play was written at the height of the Jacobean craze for the “prodigy house.” Such edifices encouraged leading courtiers to indulge in social display of the kind shown in the play—though not least by entertaining the very figure conspicuously absent in Timon’s republican Athens, the monarch. The bustle in the indeterminate spaces of Timon’s halls, lobbies, and offices suggests that the house is indeed large. So too, in a less immediately dramatized way, were his lands, which once stretched to Lacedaemon, as it were over the horizon, beyond the confinement of political border and ordinary measurement. Timon has lost those lands because he has not exercised the first obligation of a landowner, the duty of financial prudence.19 This failure closely relates to the absence of a family on whose behalf to exercise such qualities. Timon has no heir, and possesses merely for his own benefit, without obligation to the future. The play makes the point clearly in the opening lines of Middleton’s 1.2. Ventidius’s father is not mentioned in 1.1, but in 1.2 it becomes apparent that he must have refused to redeem his son from prison by paying off his debts. Now he has “gone happy”—meaning that he has died prosperous, though the unresolved ambiguity between financial and spiritual senses of “happy” is typical of Middleton’s wordplay; Ventidius says, he “has left me rich.” Timon responds by doubling his already financially imprudent behavior

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of bailing out the debtor in the way that Ventidius’s careful and wealthy father would not. He now refuses repayment of the money: “Faults that are rich are fair.” Timon immediately goes on to invoke the “true friendship” he finds in his guests. The word “friends” could, in the period, refer either to friends in the modern sense or to other members of the hierarchical family, as Timon himself recognizes: what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ’tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes! (1.2.99–102)

Timon’s brother-like friends, or like-minded brothers, are his family. He locates his substance not in his own wealth or body, nor in his household or family, but in the temporary and consumption-oriented “family” he thinks he has constructed around him, positing the interpersonal “command” friends have over each other as a substitute for the authority of parents and older relatives. Timon’s confusion is between hierarchical one-way gift-giving, as from father to son, or from lord to patron, and the socioeconomic foundations of friendship based on reciprocity. But despite his hopeless Utopianism, he refers to debts of obligation that in their more usual manifestations would have been clearly understood in early modern England. It is the actual nature and validity of obligation that are at stake. Timon’s role as host, an ambiguous position of first among equals, creates a theoretical uncertainty as to what lies beyond the paternalism of the moment’s giving. For the audience, however, the uncertainty is readily resolvable: it is only Timon who throws feasts, and the possibility that there will be reciprocation is highly unlikely to be realized when there is little evidence of reciprocation in the present. One way of viewing the play’s disturbingly strong male orientation is in the light of the usually man-to-man nature of such debts and obligations in early modern England. The family can be hierarchical only because it generates offspring by marriage, whereas the faux egalitarianism of Timon’s society is built on a misogynistic exclusion of women. This is seen pointedly when the lady masquers in 1.2 are exposed to Apemantus’s insult “the worst is filthy, and would not hold taking, I doubt me,” and then are immediately ushered offstage to enjoy an “idle banquet” within. The phrase indicates that Timon provides them with a slight meal of sweetmeats, fruit, and wine, in contrast with the “great banquet” on stage: nibbles in another room for the ladies, who are treated like servants or indeed as “filthy”

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whores, while the men, having leered at the ladies and danced with them, proceed to the gift-giving, the final phase of the strictly homosocial great banquet. For Timon, the truth about the bonds tying his unnatural family of friends comes to light in satiric scenes involving his servants and the moneylenders, who are the same “friends” who have been seen at his table in their functions as lords and senators. The scenes enact pure city comedy in Middleton’s most characteristic vein; there are close parallels with incidents in plays such as A Trick to Catch the Old One (especially the creditor scenes, 2.2, 3.1, and 4.3), Michaelmas Term, and Your Five Gallants, where again the symptomatic figures are usurers and creditors. In Mad World Follywit disguises himself as a thief and robs his grandfather Sir Bounteous; on the same occasion he stays at Sir Bounteous’s house in the guise of a lord, obliging him to provide compensation because he also has supposedly been robbed while Sir Bounteous’s guest.20 By this device Follywit induces Sir Bounteous to pay him, Follywit, as it were in return for robbing him. Compress the circulation of gifts and money in Timon of Athens and the result sounds like a similar con-trick: Mark how strange it shows. Timon in this should pay more than he owes, And e’en as if your lord should wear rich jewels And send for money for ’em. (3.4.25–8)

In other words, the receiver tricks the giver into paying, as though it were the giver who had been the original beneficiary. In these creditor scenes, the “friends” characteristically speak a Middletonian prose that allows for neither emotional bond nor the reality of obligation. It is aggressively spare, a diction of insincerity and guarded social negotiation, a language that lies removed from the generously and insistently communicative expression of self to which Timon aspired. The audience is assigned to the position of hostile critic. Words such as “friendship” and “honour” can be perceived as no more than code words for mercenary relationships. “What a wicked beast was I to disfurnish myself against such a good time when I might ha’ shown myself honourable!” says Lucius, by way of refusing to lend Timon money (3.2.45–6); the fact that such diction has strong Middleton parallels is symptomatic of the particular edge that Middleton repeatedly gives to empty cliché.21 The excuses are palpably invented, and there are three strangers on hand to express their disgust. Because they are strangers—“I never tasted Timon in my

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life” says one of them—they, at least, can speak without their words becoming subject to Middleton’s scoriating irony. Their condemnation is univocal, clear and simple: “O see the monstrousness of man,” “Religion groans at it” (3.2.73, 77).22 These episodes with the creditors are simple and theatrically parsimonious, in pointed contrast to the extravagant and dramaturgically complex banquet scene. The absence behind that earlier ostentatious theatricality is displayed visually in the stage property of the empty box that Timon’s servant Flaminius takes to Lucullus in search of silver in 3.1. This box is as pungently emblematic as the chain of pearl in Your Five Gallants, the skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the ring in Chaste Maid, or the severed finger in The Changeling.23 In each instance a fundamental truth about the play’s social world is summarized in the use of a stage property. In this case the emblem is of credit. What lies in the box is signified outwardly: by precedent, by social practice. As long as Timon is “that honourable, complete, freehearted gentleman of Athens” (3.1.10–11) the container promises content. The truth, known already to the audience, lies in the opposite but equally logical possibility that Timon’s creditworthiness has collapsed. Flaminius’s box provides the first focus for Middleton’s vertiginous inflation of the quantities of money. That is to say, inflation of virtual money, for it is wealth too vast and intractable ever to appear humbly on stage and do the work demanded of it. It is a wealth in the mind, like the fictitious country estates of Michaelmas Term, or the Welsh mountains of Chaste Maid—or Timon’s own vanished lands. Wealth such as the gold Timon discovers in the woods can be displayed on stage, but Middleton ensures that the sums invoked in the creditor scenes are, like those vast estates, beyond meaningful presentation. There is a clear contrast with Shakespeare’s more sober “Five” and “Three” talents at 1.1.97 and 145. It has been suggested that the characteristic of Middleton’s treatment of the “talent” is that, unlike Shakespeare, he failed to understand its value, and for this reason stipulated absurdly large quantities.24 But even if Middleton was unfamiliar with the talent in Attic contexts, he knew his bible well, and it is hard to believe that he would have been unaware that a single talent was a huge sum. It amounted to over 50 lb. of silver—a possible but considerable load to be carried any distance by a single person.25 If Lucullus were by some miracle to actually fulfil Flaminius’s request for 50 talents, he would need to supply him with in excess of a tonne of silver, hugely more than could conveniently be carried in a little box. The inflation continues exponentially in the following scene,

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where Lucius is understandably shocked to receive a request for “fifty—five hundred talents.”26 The real wealth is, in all this, conspicuously absent. The box is doubly inadequate: both for being empty and for being incapable of holding more than a mere fraction of the money needed if it were to be unexpectedly filled. The excess of absent money puts absurd quantification on Timon’s careless earlier gestures of generosity. Money is the bottom line only after the falsity of language as a currency has been exposed. But there is a middle term that involves actions that mediate between money and words. At the beginning of the first banquet scene Ventidius offers to “return those talents, / Doubled with thanks and service” (1.2.5–6). The suggestion that words of “thanks” and acts of “service” can correlate with “talents” in this way is a reminder of the word “talent” as it refers to personal attributes.27 Quite possibly, the “thanks and service” are in themselves measured as equivalent to the value of the talents, so that it’s the thanks and service that make up the 100 percent extra. This would not be an idle turn of phrase, for rendition of service was one way in which a financial obligation could be discharged. In other words, “talents” that might be deployed in offering “service” are used to help discharge the debt of “talents” in the primary financial sense. Middleton’s scene showing Alcibiades’s meeting with the Senate develops these ideas. As an impartial trial scene it makes little sense, not least because the audience is not told who is on trial. Rather than lament the scene’s incoherence in that respect, we might note that it too is about the social meaning of credit. Alcibiades’s protest eventually makes this clear: Though his right arm might purchase his own time And be in debt to none—yet more to move you, Take my deserts to his and join ’em both. And for I know Your reverend ages love security, I’ll pawn my victories, all my honour to you Upon his good returns. (3.6.75–81)

The debate comes into focus not on the crime under discussion, but on the economy of obligation. “Purchase,” “debt,” “security,” “pawn,” “returns”—the language is insistently that of credit and debt, as applied to actions and the obligations they generate. There is an element of wordplay similar to that already reviewed in the phrase “gone happy,” for instance in “good returns,” meaning “moral reformation,” “returns from battle,” and “repayment in return for mercy,”

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with Middletonian slippage between the moral and the mercenary. But the speech is on the whole literal. Alcibiades is establishing a debt of obligation to him, and demanding that the Senate should discharge this debt by showing mercy toward his soldier. When he says “Call me to your remembrances” he invokes himself and his very body as a figuration of his deeds. The wounds that he says ache at the Senate are like the writing in a bond, as the unalterable, definitive, and expressive marks of social debt inscribed on his body. Middleton’s critique of the culture of credit as described by Muldrew is in part developed by adducing acts that involve real expenditure, of one kind or another, and yet whose currency within the social economy depends on their symbolic value. In Timon’s case the excess flows, not due to some miraculous access to the infinite, as though bounty really were magic, but thanks to the sleight of hand of credit.28 In the acts of giving in 1.2, the expressions of friendship that Magnusson describes as the oil in the machinery of early modern commercial transaction are made dangerously literal. The performative utterance expressing unlimited goodwill that does its own work by criteria different from those informing actual transactions is naïvely translated into an act, a one-way transaction of unconstrained generosity.29 In this way Timon of Athens stages the proposition that in the world of credit to mean what you say would be what Shakespeare elsewhere calls “ridiculous excess.” The Puritan critique of language insisted on transparent sincerity, but credit and debt are facilitated by language of another kind. This structural insincerity—exposed by Timon’s insistence on over-matching words with deeds, and sardonically reexposed in Lucius’s self-condemnation as a “wicked beast,” again in Sempronius’s hypocritical protests that Timon has shown “but little love and judgement” and “disgraced” him by not giving him the first chance to show his love (3.3.10–13), and even in the First Stranger’s declaration that out of his love for Timon, he would have given Timon half his wealth if (but only if ) he had requested it (3.2.83–6)—potentially threatens the ontological foundations of economistic society itself. It is Shakespeare who identifies plenteousness as an attribute of feminized nature rather than male economic society. Here we encounter a remarkable and cogent dialogue between Middleton and Shakespeare as differentiated artistic presences. This dialogue is best expounded by moving backward through the text. At 4.3.187 Timon invokes the “plenteous bosom” of nature. The line occurs in a scene undoubtedly written by Shakespeare, and the idiom is Shakespearian. In Measure for Measure Lucio celebrates Juliet’s “plenteous womb” (1.4.42),

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comparing it with the fecundity of the earth. In Timon of Athens “bosom” is likewise used in the now obsolete sense of the womb: “Yield him … From forth thy plenteous bosom one poor root.” The earth is the “Common mother—thou / Whose womb unmeasurable and infinite breast / Teems and feeds all” (4.3.178–80). The generosity of nature is a Shakespeare theme, and the subversion of that idea is Shakespearian too. The striking phrase “plenteous bosom” is not found elsewhere, as far as I know, in the literature of the period.30 It is all the more remarkable that it should occur twice in Timon of Athens. The other instance is, as we have seen, in 1.2, a Middleton scene, and in a distinctively Middletonian episode within it at that, for the masque of the five senses is a device that Middleton presents again in both World Tossed at Tennis and The Triumphs of Truth.31 In Timon of Athens, as has already been suggested in relation to the role of the ladies, Middleton constructs an anti-heterosexual world of male “friendship.” Accordingly, the alienation of the phrase “plenteous bosom” from earth and nature is extreme. The bosom is now that of Timon himself: “The five best senses / Acknowledge thee their patron, and come freely / To gratulate thy plenteous bosom” (1.2.120–220). Coppélia Kahn has written of the play as a whole that “otherness is not maleness as distinguished from femaleness by means of desire and the problematics of eros, but rather, identification with the mother as opposed to alienation from her,” adding that both the identification and alienation are “projected onto the entire dramatic landscape.”32 This concept runs across the authorial stints but is developed in ways appropriate to each dramatist. It seems that Middleton wrote having already read a draft of the later scene by Shakespeare.33 Here is an instance of strong counterpoint between a Middleton scene and a Shakespeare scene, indeed between key ideas within key scenes, without any surrender of distinctive voice. In Timon’s house he is himself the source of all nutriment, wealth, and pleasure. The speech is the Cupid’s prologue to the masque. As this is one of two points in the play when women actually appear on stage, the issues of gender and the absence of natural procreativity are conspicuously relevant to the Cupid’s words. After all, the prelude to the Cupid’s arrival was the exchange in which a Lord says “Joy had the like conception in our eyes, / And at that instant like a babe sprung up” (1.2.106–7). Tears, like Timon’s gifts, are products of metaphoric wombs. Such words are fanciful, sycophantic, without substance to them, uttered in a world without real maternity. Here is another instance of the family reconstructed in the form of Timon’s

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society of friends. As gift-giver, he is a regendered and unnatural parody of female procreativity and nutrition, in particular the fecundity of nature herself. The pure artifice of economy, the pursuit of hollow relationships in the name of money, the repulsion of land and nurture to the realm of exploitable fantasy, these are strong Middleton themes. Whereas Muldrew draws a picture of creditworthiness and trust as functioning principles in early modern England, he also recognizes the anxieties surrounding default and its potential domino effect. Middleton similarly articulates the fear that credit arrangements might all too readily collapse. They threaten to do so because human nature is unnatural in at least two ways: it is both potentially cruel and—the more distinctively Middletonian point—it has become in essence artificial, synthetic. As coauthor, does Middleton offer something new and antithetical to Shakespeare, or does he participate in ideational flow and exchange? The answer is, of course, “both.” Both statements are true: that there is an onward flow from Shakespearian inversion of metaphysical and natural order to Middletonian reduction and denial, and that Middleton’s social drama is profoundly different from Shakespeare’s subjectivist drama. The onward flow, which could be traced in various details other than the example of “plenteous bosom,” enables the Middletonian to work in communication with the Shakespearian, and disallows any absolute disintegration of the text. The differences remain. In the encounter between the Steward and Timon in 4.3, Middleton accepts the residual possibility of real friendship at the point where money no longer matters, whereas for Shakespeare misanthropy makes no exceptions. Middleton writes a Calvinist satire directed against a materialist world, whereas Shakespeare transports us into a realm of extreme experience that has affinities with both madness and the religious absolute. In Middleton’s theater the language of worth is reduced to a form of labeling, empty in itself, of social positions within the debt economy, thus correlating money and its absence with human relationships and the language that sustains them. Shakespeare, in contrast, represents gold as the substance that has lost contact with the metaphysical ideal, in a world where metaphor still reigns supreme. These are broad generalizations, and, even though I have presented them within the context of a description of collaboration that recognizes confluence as well as divergence, they run the risk of being accused of authorial essentialism.34 But they indicate the scope of an internal dialogue within the text of Timon of Athens, and they suggest the ground on which have arisen, unawares, some of the major disagreements between the play’s readers. The play incorporates

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two concepts of how money means. On that account Timon of Athens is more dialogic, and it is richer.

Notes 1. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 2. R.V. Holdsworth, “Middleton and Shakespeare: The Case for Middleton’s Hand in Timon of Athens,” doctoral thesis, University of Manchester, 1982. See also David Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979); Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and, for a study that inconclusively challenges Holdsworth, M.W.A. Smith, “The Authorship of Timon of Athens,” Text 5 (1991): 195–240. 3. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4. G. Wilson Knight, “The Pilgrimage of Hate: An Essay on Timon of Athens,” in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, with Three New Essays, enlarged edition (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 207–39; Ken Jackson, “ ‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 34–66. For Knight, Timon’s recognition of “One honest man” has “the beauty of a blade of grass beneath the architrave of a cathedral” (p. 227). For Jackson, “This moment is religious in that it exposes the philosophical structure of religious possibility—the gift” (p. 65), the Steward’s gesture of offering his last money being the only example of a “gift” made without expectation of material, social, or emotional requital, and so an equivalent of Abraham’s willingness to kill his son at the behest of God. 5. For the tone of this passage, compare the final scene of Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy, in which the husband, about to be executed for murder, repents and seeks the forgiveness of his wife. For the authorship of A Yorkshire Tragedy, see Lake and Jackson. 6. The lines attributable to Middleton are 1.1.279, 4.2.51, and perhaps 5.1.4. The first and last are in short Middletonian passages in Shakespeare scenes. The three instances Caroline Spurgeon cites of metal as base and worthless (p. 345), “base metal” (7.6), “iron heart” (8.82), and “flinty mankind” (14.482), are all in Middleton passages: Shakespeare’s Imagery: And What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 345.

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7. Compare Marc Shell’s discussion of natural and mercantile “generation” in Merchant of Venice, in Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1982). 8. Muldrew, especially pp. 95–8. On credit in the aristocracy, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 505–46. 9. Quoted in Muldrew, p. 125. 10. Ibid., p. 133. 11. For discussion of “mother earth” and the extraction of minerals, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1982). 12. Lisa Jardine, Wordly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 93–114. 13. M. Fontenay, cited in David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956; repr. 1959), p. 191. 14. Quotations from William Shakespeare, Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, gen. eds. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). 15. “Flavius” occurs only at 1.2.154 (dialogue) and 1.2.175 (stage direction). 16. See G.B. Shand, “The Elizabethan Aim of The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased,” in “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS, 1982), pp. 67–77; Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For a skeptical review of Heinemann, see N.W. Bawcutt, “Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?” Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 925–39. Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Cranbury, NJ, London, and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2000), affirms Middleton’s theological Calvinism. 17. This critique is later echoed in John Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus, performed 1634, published 1637), a work that is structurally in some respects an anti-Timon. 18. Albert H. Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). 19. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 266–8. 20. It is perhaps no coincidence that the word “bounty” and its derivatives occur far more often in Timon of Athens than in any other Shakespeare play (18 instances out of 77 in the entire canon, which is an average of less than two per play). 21. Holdsworth compares Mad World My Masters 2.5.11–15 and Trick to Catch the Old One 2.1.126. 22. Middleton elsewhere personifies Religion in this way, and he writes “How virtue groans at this” in Nice Valour 1.1.245. There is a

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disconcerting erotic subtext to lines such as the Stranger’s “Nor came any of his bounties over me / To mark me as his friend” (3.2.79–80). The potential homoerotics of Timon’s spilth are never far in Middleton’s scenes. The box as an empty signifier recalls the empty box in The Spanish Tragedy, which is supposed to contain Pedringano’s pardon from the king. Middleton reworks the joke about the expected pardon that turns out otherwise and so seals the prisoner’s fate in 3.5 of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which was probably written at about the same time as Timon. Jackson, Studies in Attribution, p. 214. On the practical difficulties of conveying large quantities of bullion, see Stone, Crisis, p. 511. The hyphen follows H.J. Oliver’s 1959 New Arden edition. The Folio’s “fifty fiue hundred” would seem to be unidiomatic in the period as meaning 5500. Compare the crossover between the ethical and financial dimensions of terms such as “talents,” “credit,” and “returns” with Stephen R. Mentz’s comments on the residual theological sense of terms such as “reckoning” and “debt”, in this volume, p. 179. On Timon’s unrealistic desire to be released from economics, see Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 32–8. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 114–37. Magnusson points out that the language of friendship originated in courtly exchange before it was picked up as a way of consolidating bonds of trust between merchants. Timon presents ambiguity between the courtly and commercial registers. Based on searches in the Literature Online database (Chadwyck Healey, 1996–2001), http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/home/home.cgi?source⫽ config2.cfg. One-way influence from author to author, and two-way communication between authors, are routine parts of a collaborative process. Holdsworth shows that the overall evidence of significant parallels between scenes clearly confirms the collaboration hypothesis, in that there is a far greater incidence of such parallels within the separate authorial sections than there is between them. “ ‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 34–57. Though Middleton was evidently working within the same period as Shakespeare, his writing follows after Shakespeare’s wherever a sequence can be discerned. The alternative, it seems to me, is what might be termed a collaborative essentialism, one that is achieved by blurring the specific dynamic of the text that has been described.

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Bibliography Bawcutt, N.W. “Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?” Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 925–39. Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Heller, Herbert Jack. Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies. Cranbury, New Jersey, London, and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2000. Holdsworth, R.V. “Middleton and Shakespeare: The Case for Middleton’s Hand in Timon of Athens,” doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester, 1982. Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jackson, Ken. “ ‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 34–66. Jackson, MacDonald P. Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare. Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979. Jardine, Lisa. Wordly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1996. Kahn, Coppélia. “ ‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 34–57. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, With Three New Essays, enlarged edition. London: Methuen, 1949. Lake, David. The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Leinwand, Theodore B. Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Magnusson, Lynne. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. London: Wildwood House, 1982. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens, ed. H.J. Oliver. London: Methuen, 1959. Shakespeare, William. Complete Works, gen. ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Shand, G.B. “The Elizabethan Aim of The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased,” in “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich. New York: AMS, 1982. 67–77. Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1982.

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Smith, M.W.A. “The Authorship of Timon of Athens.” Text 5 (1991): 195–240. Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery: And What it Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Stone, Lawrence, and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone. An Open Elite? England 1540–1880. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Tricomi, Albert H. Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1642. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Willson, David Harris. King James VI and I. London: Cape, 1956, repr. 1959.

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Chapter 15

Singlewomen and the Properties of P overty in MEASURE FOR MEASURE Natasha Korda

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easure for Measure manifests a profound preoccupation with the place of singlewomen in post-Reformation society. What is at stake in this preoccupation, I shall argue, is the threat that singlewomen posed to an increasingly paternalistic state and to a patrilineal property regime pressured by demographic change.1 Recent historical demography has demonstrated that never-married singlewomen were far more numerous in northern Europe (and in England in particular) than in southern Europe and that their numbers continued to grow during the sixteenth century, reaching a peak of between 20 and 30 percent of all adult women during the seventeenth century in England (the numbers being higher in urban than in rural areas).2 If we add widows or “ever married” women to this calculation (who made up some 15 percent of the adult female population), we arrive at an astonishing aggregate figure of between 35 and 45 percent of all adult women living without husbands.3 What made singlewomen anomalous in post-Reformation society was thus not their rarity, but rather what Ruth Karras has termed their “lack of social space or social identity.”4 In a society in which marital status was a primary “category of difference,” Amy Froide has argued, singlewomen (who no longer had the option of becoming nuns) quite literally had no social place.5 Historians have only begun to ask, “How did these lone women live

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in a society which theoretically had no place in its social hierarchy, its ‘great chain of being,’ for the unattached female?”6 Unmarried “maids” in early modern England were expected to live as household dependents (i.e., with family, kin, or as servants in other men’s households) and, of course, to remain chaste until marriage. Those who lived independently risked being classified as “masterless women,” witches, or prostitutes (the term “singlewoman” was in fact often used synonymously for prostitute in the period)7 and were singled out for various forms of punitive attention, such as corporal punishment and compulsory labor in “bridewells” or houses of correction (women, according to Froide, “vastly outnumbered men in most of the urban bridewells”).8 The preponderance of women in such institutions in part resulted from singlewomen’s susceptibility to poverty. Those singlewomen not living as household dependents who could not find work as servants had few legitimate employment options; they often had to get by on unlicensed, ad hoc forms of economic activity, or were forced into prostitution or onto the poor-rates.9 Yet poor relief was available only to singlewomen who were accounted as “deserving poor” (i.e., the elderly, impotent, pregnant, or widowed); nevermarried singlewomen who were deemed able-bodied were classified as “undeserving” and were therefore not eligible. Only recently have historians begun to look at the feminization of poverty—or what Amy Erickson has termed “the systemic economic vulnerability imposed to varying degrees on all women”—in early modern England. The available evidence suggests, in Erickson’s view, that singlewomen “were the social group most vulnerable to poverty.”10 While this statement includes both never-married and ever-married (i.e., widowed or separated) women, the former, as just suggested, were even more economically vulnerable than the latter. Because widows were considered deserving poor, however, we have more accurate information about them as reflected in records of parish poor relief. According to the census of the poor taken in Norfolk in the seventeenth century, more than 60 percent of those in receipt of poor relief were women, most of them widows with young children.11 In Wighton in 1614/15, a staggering 90 percent of all recipients were women (of whom 70 percent were widows).12 As a dowryless singlewoman and unwed mother, Measure for Measure’s Juliet becomes an economic burden to the state, and therefore an object of penal attention: “What shall be done, sir, with the groaning Juliet?” the Provost of the prison asks Angelo, who responds, “Dispose of her / To some more fitter place; and that with speed … Let her have needful, but not lavish means; / There shall be

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order for it” (2.2.15–17, 23–5). Almost as soon as she appears, this specter of the placeless singlewoman is whisked away, removed from view until the end of the play. The dilemma posed by her lack of social space and identity is marked within the play by the peculiar imprecision of the site to which she is removed, which is designated only as “some more fitter place.” The Jacobean statute books were far less imprecise about designating the social space befitting unwed mothers: “Every lewd woman which shall have any bastard which may be chargeable to the parish, the justices of the peace shall committ such woman to the house of correction, to be punished and set to work, during the term of one whole year.”13 By contrast, the punitive regulation of singlewomen in Measure for Measure is effectively invisible except when the object of such regulation is defined as a prostitute or bawd (Mistress Overdone is summarily hauled off to prison). At the start of the play, all eyes are on Claudio, not Juliet, as the culprit to be punished by Angelo. We are immediately informed that “within these three days his head [is] to be chopped off” (1.2.62), but no mention is made of Juliet’s punishment. When the Provost informs the disguised Duke of their situation, he makes this discrepancy clear: “She is with child,” he says, “And he that got it, sentenc’d” (2.3.13). The punishment of the father, rather than the mother, of the illegitimate child in Measure for Measure runs counter to contemporary legislation, which viewed “bastardy … as the exclusive responsibility of women and a sign of their promiscuity.”14 While it is true that Juliet temporarily resides in the prison at the start of the play, she is kept there just long enough to confess to the Duke that her offense, in spite of her more lenient treatment, is “of heavier kind” (2.3.28) than Claudio’s, even though the sin was “mutually committed” (27). Thus, while the play refrains from staging the forms of punishment meted out to singlewomen who conceived bastards during the period, it nevertheless suggests in more subtle ways their greater culpability for this crime. Juliet’s interpellation as a criminalized singlewoman is thus only temporary; at the end of the play, her reputation and property are restored, her child rendered legitimate, and her status as a singlewoman effectively erased. The trajectory traced by Mariana likewise demonstrates the Duke’s power to transform a propertyless, placeless singlewoman into a propertied bride. At the start of the play, Mariana epitomizes the singlewoman’s lack of social space or identity. Residing—in what has become perhaps the most memorable of all liminal, literary spaces— “at the moated grange” (3.1.265), Mariana, like Juliet, is removed to the margins of a society in which sexually ambiguous singlewomen

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had no place. Mariana calls attention to her own lack of identity at the end of the play, when she appears, veiled, for her interrogation by the state’s governors. Until her putative husband hails her, she remains unclassifiable within what were the only socially recognized and legitimated categories of female subjectivity in the period—maid, wife, or widow: Duke. What, are you married? Mar. No, my lord. Duke. Are you a maid? Mar. No, my lord. Duke. A widow, then? Mar. Neither, my lord. Duke. Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife! Lucio. My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow nor wife. (5.1.172–81)

As an impoverished singlewoman living alone, Mariana’s chastity is immediately cast into doubt, as Lucio’s insinuation that she is a “punk” or prostitute makes clear. Mariana’s putative promiscuity is cemented when Angelo “pretend[s] in her discoveries of dishonour” (3.1.227), thereby removing her from the category of maid and effectively rendering her unmarriageable. In certain respects, however, Mariana bears closest resemblance to a widow, mourning the loss of her husband. The figure of the widow was less threatening to the social order than that of the never-married singlewoman, according to Froide, in spite of the fact that many of them lived alone, choosing not to remarry: “Widows had a public and independent place within the patriarchal society, singlewomen did not.”15 Froide’s observation applies only to propertied widows, however; for impoverished, propertyless widows, like unwed mothers, as we have seen, placed a significant burden on parish poor-rates.16 In the play’s final scene, the Duke seeks to transform Mariana into a propertied widow. Having married her to Angelo, he immediately orders the latter put to death, and designates Mariana as the recipient of his property: “For his possessions, / Although by confiscation they are ours, / We do instate and widow you with all” (5.1.420–2). In his next breath, however, the Duke makes clear that Mariana is not to remain a propertied widow, but is to use her newly acquired estate to remarry, or in his fiscal terms, “To buy you a better husband” (423). As satirical representations of propertied, “merry” widows in the period make clear, while such women may have had a “public and independent place” within early modern culture, their sexual and

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economic independence was subject to pervasive criticism. In Measure for Measure, this criticism is deflected onto the figure of Mistress Overdone, who, having been widowed nine times, chooses to remain single and earn her living as a brothel-and alehouse-keeper. Because Mistress Overdone may be classified within the socially proscribed categories of “punk” and bawd, however, the play does not hesitate to send her off to prison. As a “poor gentlewoman,” however, Mariana faces a different destiny; she is preserved at the moated grange until such time as she may be repositioned as a wife and thereby serve as a vehicle of patrilineal property transmission. From this perspective, the “poverty” of Juliet and Mariana, who are both designated as being of elite status, appears to be nothing more than a romantic fiction (including star-crossed lovers and a shipwreck), a temporary obstacle impeding marriages that appear all the more miraculous when they are achieved; the play’s impoverished gentlewomen thus both evoke and efface the very real dilemma posed by a growing population of impoverished singlewomen in post-Reformation society. It is the Duke’s repositioning of the play’s impoverished gentlewomen as propertied brides that appears to motivate his surreptitious strategy of surveillance and suasion, and to balance the scales of justice within the play. This balancing is reflected in the reciprocal, chiastic exchange of value that marriage represents in the Duke’s rhetoric at the end of the play: “Look that you love your wife,” he cautions Angelo, “her worth, worth yours” (5.1.495). Isabella is likewise transformed from singlewoman into wife by the balancing rhetoric of the Duke’s “measure for measure”: “Dear Isabel,” he says, “I have a motion much imports your good; / Whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline, / What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5.1.531–4). What is elided, of course, by the ideal equality of “worth” that marriage represents in the Duke’s utterances, is the wife’s loss of propriety (both her property and her legal identity) under coverture. As a contemporary commonplace regarding this legal fiction held, “the husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband.” The ruse of Measure for Measure’s solution to the problem posed by the figure of the placeless singlewoman is that marriage represents a reciprocal exchange of value or “worth” between husband and wife, and that this exchange “imports” the wife’s own “good.” From this perspective, the play’s narrative works effectively to insure that property never remains in the hands of its singlewomen. It is here that I would like to turn to the play’s most visible singlewoman, the novice, Isabella, whom we find poised at the start of the play on the threshold of a Clarissan nunnery, who famously

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responds to the Duke’s final proposal of marriage at the end of the play with silence. When compared with the play’s other singlewomen, Isabella might appear a kind of wishful, nostalgic relic of a former age in which singlewomen lived in, around, and (in the case of those who were impoverished), by the good graces of the nunneries, and therefore removed from the present, pressing dilemma such women posed during the period in which the play was written. Her poverty is more visible in the play because it is safely situated within the anachronistic enclave of the convent of Poor Clares. Yet (as Freud teaches) the most farfetched displacements and most disfigured figures often point to that which is most present and pressing. To grasp the significance of Isabella’s silence at the end of the play, and the textual indeterminacy it produces, we must first situate it in relation to two other significant silences that surround her, and that have received far less critical commentary: first, the play’s silence regarding the question of Isabella’s dowry, and, second, its silent invocation of the Rule of the Poor Clares. It is curious that the play makes no mention of Isabella’s dowry, given that it goes into such great detail regarding the dowries of its other impoverished gentlewomen. It might be objected that the play makes no mention of Isabella’s dowry simply because she is entering a nunnery and therefore would have had no need of one. Yet nuns were in fact generally required to have dowries, and often trousseaus as well, to recompense nunneries for their expenses and to signify their symbolic marriages to Christ. Maureen Connelly McFeely has suggested that because the Rule of the Poor Clares was distinguished by its strict vow of pious poverty (entailing a renunciation of communal as well as private property), Isabella would have had “no need of a dowry to become a Poor Clare.”17 The assumption that the Poor Clares were in fact poor, however, confounds what Penelope D. Johnson has called “documents of theory” (the Order’s written Rule) with “documents of practice” (records of what property they actually possessed).18 For while the written rule of the Poor Clares was distinguished by its adherence to the strictest form of pious poverty, the Order, commonly referred to as the Poor Ladies, in fact had strong ties to the aristocracy and amassed considerable wealth through its commercial interests throughout England. This was particularly true of the London house called the Minories, located without Aldgate.19 It is perhaps more than a coincidence that several of the Order’s noble patrons, founders, and abbesses were, like Shakespeare’s novice, named Isabella. Isabella of Gloucester, granddaughter of Edward III, for example, became abbess of the London Minories in 1421.

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The contents of her monastic “trousseau” demonstrates the disparity between the theory and practice of pious poverty, and the misconception that a Poor Clare would have had no need of a dowry; as a novice, she brought with her “a bed of cloth of gold of cyprus, black and red, with a testa, coverlet, curtains, and tapestries; a French Bible in two volumes, with two gold clasps enamelled with the arms of France … £40 in money, a belt of black leather with a buckle and pendant, and twelve plain round bars of gold.”20 In 1539 (the year of its dissolution), the house received £185 7s. 10d. in profits from its various commercial interests—including land, tenements, shops, and even a tavern and brewery—which it owned in London (an amount that does not include the income it earned from properties possessed in nine other counties), making it one of the wealthiest nunneries in England.21 The history of the divergence between the “theory” or doctrine of pious poverty as set forth in the life and Rule of Saint Clare, on the one hand, and the commercial practices of the London Minoresses, on the other, is a complex one, and exceeds the scope of this essay.22 It is worth mentioning, however, that in France and England the moderated Rule followed by the Minoresses was known as the Isabella Rule, after another Poor Clare of elite parentage who bore the name of Shakespeare’s heroine: Blessed Isabella, sister of Lewis, king of France, who composed this version of the moderated Rule for her monastery in France in the mid-thirteenth century. The Isabella Rule was transported to England in the late thirteenth century by Blanche, queen of Navarre, Blessed Isabella’s niece, who founded the house of Minoresses in London.23 This Rule quite explicitly sanctioned the holding of communal property from which the Minoresses might receive an income.24 When Isabella professes to desire “a more strict restraint” (1.4.4) than the moderated Rule followed by the Poor Clares in Measure for Measure, she thus voices what might have been Clare’s own response to her commercially minded, property holding English disciples. Isabella’s evocation of the figure of Saint Clare, and her implied critique of the Rule that bears her own name, creates an ideological tension that may help to account for the textual indeterminacy produced by her silence at the end of the play. On the one hand, her professed desire for a “more strict” Rule casts her as a figure of religious reform, distancing her from the commercial ventures of the English Minoresses, who had fallen away from the strict form of pious poverty envisioned by Clare. According to this reading, Isabella’s disillusionment with the Poor Clares leads her eventually into the arms

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of the Duke, thereby tracing a well-worn ideological path from chastity to Christian matrimony. From this perspective, Isabella would seem to be appropriated to the Duke’s project of reform. The unarticulated (but by implication, insufficiently strict) conventual Rule evoked at the start of the play is replaced by the state’s successful regulation and subjection of its placeless singlewomen. The aim of this regulation, to reposition the play’s singlewomen as propertied brides, is dissimulated, however, by the fiction of reciprocity underlying the institution of Christian matrimony in the Duke’s balancing rhetoric (“her worth, worth yours,” “what’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” “measure for measure,” etc.). According to this reading, the play elides the threat posed by the figure of the propertied singlewoman by remaining silent on the subject of Isabella’s dowry (i.e., “what is [hers]”) until the Duke seeks her hand in marriage. From another perspective, however, Measure for Measure’s evocation of the figure of Saint Clare troubles the Duke’s project of containment. For Clare’s strict adherence to the doctrine of pious poverty, which cast her as an ideal figure of reform, also positioned her as a threat to patrilineality. For the most significant and defining feature of Clare’s hagiography was her refusal as an elite, propertied singlewoman to serve as a vehicle of patrilineal property transmission: she “despiced and trampled under foot all honours, dignities, mariages, sumptuous apparell, Jewells, and all wordly pelfe … to dedicate her selfe a living temple to Christ Jesus taking him for the only spouse of her body.”25 A seventeenth-century translation of Luke Wadding’s The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare (based on Thomas of Celano’s well-known life of the saint) repeatedly emphasizes the lineage and patrimony that Clare and her disciples forsake to embrace the doctrine of pious poverty: “gentle woemen and Ladies,” he says, have “contemn[ed] their faire houses and sumptuous tables” and “refused the most honorable and advantageous allyances in the world, for to bind themselves, according to the example of her povertie, to an austere life.”26 Wadding grounds his justification of Clare’s subversion of patrilineality in an oxymoronic transvaluation of material into spiritual values: “Is it not a wonder,” he says, “that this Angelicall Virgin, having cast away all care of temporall things, should be in continuall care, how she might leave this Patrimonie to her children, that they might enjoy Nothing … And yet they will cease to wonder, that consider, what extraordinary priviledges this sacred Poverty hath annexed to it … ’Tis easily proved Povertie is the Riches which purchases Heaven.”27 By describing Clare’s strict adherence to the doctrine of pious poverty as her

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“Patrimonie” to her “children,” Wadding rhetorically disarms the threat that she poses to patrilineality. In Measure for Measure, the Duke’s program of reform consolidates secular and religious power in the person of the prince, and seeks to prove the scope and efficacy of that power through its stealthy repositioning of the play’s propertyless singlewomen as propertied brides. Yet the indeterminacy of Isabella’s destiny at the end of the play resists this forced solution and, in so doing, echoes the divergent destinies of the inhabitants of the dissolved nunneries in post-Reformation England. Lyndal Roper has argued that “as the Reformation was domesticated—as it closed convents and encouraged nuns to marry, as it lauded the married state … and as it execrated the prostitute—so it was accomplished through a politics of reinscribing women within the family.”28 While we can certainly see the politics of domestication at work in the enforced marriages at the end of Measure for Measure, in assessing the play’s resistance to closure, we should again be careful not to conflate ideology with material practice. For while former nuns were certainly encouraged to marry, there is very little evidence that many of them in fact did. Faced with few financial options, many former nuns chose to set up house together in their new locations.29 While it was financial necessity in part that kept these nuns together, there is evidence that wealthier nuns who were supported by their families likewise chose to live with other ex-religious. Thus, Elizabeth Throckmorton, who had been the abbess of a Clarissan nunnery in Norwich, “retired to her family … in Warwickshire with 2 or 3 of her nuns where in a private chamber of the family seat, she ever after to her death in 1547 lived a conventual life and in their proper habits, hardly ever appearing in the family … but prescribed to themselves the Rules of the Order as far as it was possible in their present situation.”30 The case of Elizabeth Throckmorton and other former nuns of elite and middling status who chose to set up house together make clear that some singlewomen did resist the Reformation’s “politics of reinscribing women within the family.” Perhaps, then, we may read Isabella’s silence at the end of Measure for Measure as registering this rift between political theory and material practice, and thereby the failure of the early modern state, through its domestic policies, to solve the problem posed by a growing population of placeless singlewomen.

Notes 1. The compound term “singlewomen” is deployed in a recent volume of essays edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide entitled

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). This groundbreaking volume has made a significant contribution to our understanding of various aspects of the predicament of singlewomen living in early modern Europe, and my discussion in what follows is deeply indebted to several of the essays contained in it. A longer version of this essay appears in Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 159–91. Reprinted by permission of the press. See Maryanne Kowaleski, “Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective,” pp. 52–3 and Amy M. Froide, “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England,” pp. 236–7, both in Singlewomen, ed. Bennett and Froide. On the high percentage of men and women never marrying (between 10 and 20% of the population) see E.A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 258–60; on women remarrying less frequently than men, and the higher number of widows than widowers see also Jacques Dupaquier et al., eds., Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past (London: Academic Press, 1981). Froide, “Marital Status,” p. 237. I am indebted to Froide for the terms “never married” and “ever married.” Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” in Singlewomen, ed. Bennett and Froide, p. 127. Froide, “Marital Status,” p. 237. See Amy Erickson, “Introduction,” in Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Erickson (1919; New York: Routledge, 1992), p. xxxv. See Karras, “Sex and the Singlewoman,” p. 131. See Froide, “Marital Status,” pp. 241–3 and 254–5. On employment opportunities for singlewomen see ibid., pp. 243–52. Erickson, “Introduction,” p. xxxvii. Tim Wales, “Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk,” in Land, Kinship and Life Cycle, ed. R.M. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 380. Ibid., pp. 360–1. Cited in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith, Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 73. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 19. Froide, “Marital Status,” p. 237. In spite of the fact that, in Erickson’s words, “for a substantial number of women, widowhood meant poverty,” the plight of the impoverished widow has been largely ignored by early modern scholarship (Erickson,

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18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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op. cit., pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.) B.A. Holderness, who observes that “Destitute or insolvent widows and old maids [sic] almost certainly outnumbered those who had property to live upon or savings to invest,” thus nevertheless excuses his “neglect of their plight” in his study of widows in pre-industrial society with the assertion that “the poor widow … is less important as a historical phenomenon than her wealthier contemporaries” (B.A. Holderness, “Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay upon Their Economic Functions,” in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R.M. Smith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 380). On the existence of a “poor widow subculture in the less wealthy London parishes,” see Vivien Brodsky, “Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 123. Maureen Connolly McFeely, “ ‘This Day My Sister Should the Cloister Enter’: The Convent as Refuge in Measure for Measure,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1995), p. 214, n. 26. Penelope D. Johnson, “The Cloistering of Medieval Nuns: Release or Repression, Reality or Fantasy?” in Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 29. Anne Francis Claudine Bourdillon, The Order of the Minoresses in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), p. 16. Ibid., p. 41, 44, 52. Ibid., p. 29. See Bourdillon for a table of gifts of real property to the three endowed Clarissan houses in England (the London house, Denny, and Bruisyard), Order, pp. 94–9. On the relative wealth of the nunneries at the time of the Dissolution, see Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), p. 20. For a detailed account of this divergence, see Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies, pp. 169, 250–3. Bourdillon, Order, pp. 3, 16. Walter W. Seton, ed., The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses Enclosid (MS. Bodl. 585), in A Fifteenth Century Courtesy Book and Two Franciscan Rules, ed. R.W. Chambers and Walter W. Seton, Early English Text Society (London: Kegan Paul, 1914), fol. 70r. Wadding, The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare, trans. Sister Magdalene Augustin (Douay: Martin Bocart, 1635), p. 101. Ibid., pp. 119, 132. Ibid., p. 95.

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28. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3. 29. Oliva, Convent, pp. 201–3. 30. Bourdillon, Order, p. 83.

Bibliography Archer, Ian W. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Aydelotte, Frank. Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913. Beier, A.L. “Social Problems in Elizabethan London.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (1978): 203–21. Bentley, G.E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941–68. Bergeron, David. “Women as Patrons of English Renaissance Drama.” Patronage in the Renaissance. Ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981. Bristol, Michael. Big-Time Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cerasano, Susan P., and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Chettle, Henry. Kind-Hartes Dreame. Ed. George Bagshawe Harrison. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966. Clark, Alice. Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1919. Dowling, Margaret. “A Note on Moll Cutpurse—‘The Roaring Girl.’ ” Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 67–71. Dunlop, Jocelyn O. English Apprenticeship and Child Labor. London: Unwin, 1912. Eccles, Mark. “Mary Frith, The Roaring Girl.” Notes and Queries, n.s., 32 (1985): 65–6. Erickson, Amy. Introduction. Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, by Alice Clark. Ed. Amy Erickson. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Feuillerat, Albert, ed. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. London: David Nutt, 1908. Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe’s Diary. Ed. R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times. London, 1620. Holderness, B.A. “Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay Upon Their Economic Functions.” Land, Kinship, and Life Cycle. Ed. R.M. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Howard, Jean E. “The Materiality of Ideology: Women as Spectators, Spectacles, and Paying Customers in the English Public Theater.” The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Ingram, William. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Korda, Natasha. “Household Property / Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker.” Theatre Journal 48:2 (1996): 185–95. Lemire, Beverly. Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1600–1800. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Levin, Richard. “Women in the Renaissance Theater Audience.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 165–74. The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse. London, 1662. McIntosh, Mary. “Thieves and Fences: Markets and Power in Professional Crime.” British Journal of Criminology 16 (1976): 257–66. McMullan, John L. The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld 1550–1700. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl. Ed. Paul Mulholland. The Revels Plays. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1987. Neill, Michael. “ ‘Wit’s Most Accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters.” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 341–60. Nelson, Alan H. “Women in the Audience of Cambridge Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 333–6. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Slack, P.A. “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England 1598–1664.” Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700. Ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Spufford, Margaret. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. London: Hambledon Press, 1984. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage.” Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sugden, Edward H. A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1925. Ungerer, Gustave. “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature.” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 42–84. Wadding, Luke. The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare. Trans. Sister Magdalene Augustin Douay: Martin Bocart, 1635.

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Walker, Garthine. “Women, Theft and the World of Stolen Goods.” Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England. Ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Weisner, Merry. “Spinning Out Capital: Women’s Work in the Early Modern Economy.” Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed. Renate Bridenthal et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. Westfall, Susan. Patrons and Performers: Early Tudor Household Revels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Chapter 16

Fetish and Poem: Ben Jonson’s Dilemma Katharine Eisaman Maus

An Elegy

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Let me be what I am: as Virgil cold, As Horace fat, or as Anacreon old; No poet’s verses yet did ever move, Whose readers did not think he was in love. Who shall forbid me then in rhythm to be As light and active as the youngest he That from the muses’ fountains doth endorse His lines, and hourly sits the poet’s horse? Put on my ivy garland, let me see Who frowns, who jealous is, who taxeth me. Fathers and husbands, I do claim a right In all that is called lovely: take my sight Sooner than my affection from the fair. No face, no hand, proportion, line, or air Of beauty, but the muse hath interest in; There is not worn that lace, purl, knot, or pin, But is the poet’s matter; and he must, When he is furious, love, although not lust. But then consent, your daughters and your wives, If they be fair and worth it, have their lives Made longer by our praises. Or, if not, Wish you had foul ones and deformed got,

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K at h a r i n e E i s a m a n M au s Cursed in their cradles, or there changed by elves, So to be sure you do enjoy yourselves. Yet keep those up in sackcloth too, or leather, For silk will draw some sneaking songster thither. It is a rhyming age, and verses swarm At every stall; the city cap’s a charm. But I who live, and have lived, twenty year Where I may handle silk as free and near As any mercer, or the whale-bone man That quilts those bodies, I have leave to span; Have eaten with the beauties and the wits And braveries of the court, and felt their fits Of love and hate, and came so nigh to know Whether their faces were their own or no; It is not likely I should now look down Upon a velvet petticoat or a gown, Whose like I have known the tailor’s wife put on To do her husband’s rites in, ere ‘twere gone Home to the customer; his lechery Being, the best clothes still to preoccupy. Put a coach-mare in tissue, must I horse Her presently? or leap thy wife of force, When by thy sordid bounty she hath on A gown of that was the caparison? So I might dote upon thy chairs and stools That are like clothed: must I be of those fools Of race accounted, that no passion have But when thy wife, as thou conceiv’st, is brave? Then ope thy wardrobe, think me that poor groom That from the footman, when he was become An officer there, did make most solemn love To every petticoat he brushed, and glove He did lay up, and would adore the shoe Or slipper was left off, and kiss it too; Court every hanging gown, and after that Lift up some one and do I’ll tell not what. Thou didst tell me, and wert o’erjoyed to peep In at a hole, and see these actions creep From the poor wretch, which, though he played in prose, He would have done in verse with any of those Wrung on the withers by Lord Love’s despite, Had he’d the faculty to read and write! Such songsters there are store of: witness he That chanced the lace laid on a smock to see And straightway spent a sonnet; with that other That (in pure madrigal) unto his mother

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Commended the French hood and scarlet gown The Lady Mayoress passed in through the town Unto the Spittle sermon. Oh, what strange Variety of silks were on the Exchange, Or in Moorfields this other night! sings one; Another answers, ’las, those silks are none, In smiling l’envoy, as he would deride Any comparison had with his Cheapside. And vouches both the pageant and the day, When not the shops but windows do display The stuffs, the velvets, plushes, fringes, lace, And all the original riots of the place. Let the poor fools enjoy their follies, love A goat in velvet, or some block could move Under that cover, an old midwife’s hat, Or a close-stool so cased, or any fat Bawd in a velvet scabbard! I envy None of their pleasures, nor will ask thee why Thou art jealous of thy wife’s or daughter’s case: More than of either’s manners, wit, or face. —The Underwood 42

Jonson wrote “An Elegy” in 1624. Although many have quoted the memorably witty opening lines, and David Riggs, in his biography of Jonson, considers it one of the most ambitious of the late poems, it has received almost no critical attention.1 Despite its length, I’ve quoted it in full in order that its strangeness be entirely clear, because that strangeness resides less in short passages than in the way those passages fit, or fail to fit, together. When I first read this poem as a graduate student, I couldn’t explain why the poem seems to veer wildly off course. How does Jonson get from the “ambitious” opening, in which he declares his impeccable artistic pedigree and lays claim to his unsurprising subject matter, feminine beauty, to the latter part of the poem, with its rape, bestiality, clothes-fetishism, voyeurism, masturbation, the retelling of a dirty story for the ear of its original teller? Why does Jonson “claim a right in all that is called lovely” only to wallow instead with a goat and a close-stool? The answers to these formal questions, I shall argue, are closely tied up with social and economic ones. Literary scholars have long credited Ben Jonson with pioneering important changes in the way authors were imagined and treated in seventeenth-century England. He did not, of course, singlehandedly invent the glorification of the author-function or the concept of intellectual property. But as one of

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the acknowledged major literary figures of the period, he occupied an enormously influential position, and he used it to help mold the way people would henceforth think about the relations of authors to their works. In 1616, Jonson—alone among his contemporaries—boldly collected his plays, poems, and court masques in a beautiful, elaborately annotated, and expensive folio edition, The Works of Benjamin Jonson. Although Jonson was ridiculed at the time for this selfmonumentalizing move, others clearly took less disapproving notice—not least John Heminges and Henry Condell, who in 1623 did for Shakespeare posthumously what Jonson had done for himself seven years earlier. Appropriately enough, they invited Jonson to write a prefatory poem for the new volume. Jonson responded with the first sustained piece of Shakespeare criticism, a poem that declines to comment upon individual plays but does initiate our culture’s long meditation upon Shakespeare-as-great-author. Nonetheless, exactly how Jonson makes the case for “strong authorship” has received little detailed attention. The strange progress of “An Elegy” suggests that this case proves more complicated, and more difficult to make, than we might anticipate. The first few lines of the poem both adumbrate an ancestry for Jonson and base that ancestral claim on a distinction between the actual and the implied author. The real Virgil was cold, the real Horace was fat, the real Anacreon was old, and the real Jonson, implicitly, is all three. But the classical writers possessed, and Jonson claims he has inherited, the gift of making their audiences forget those facts, at least temporarily. Jonson assumes, in other words, that the audience wants the poem as a form of access to the writer. At the same time, he suggests that the rhetorically skillful writer can create a ghost presence whom the readers will find more, not less, desirable than the real thing. Like Virgil, Horace, and Anacreon before him, Jonson traffics in the separation of a poet from text, reality from rhetoric. The poet is knowing (he may not really be in love) but his audience is gullible (thinks he’s in love). The audience responds to its own extrapolation from the poem. So the effect of the opening lines is elaborately to specify the place or identity of the poet: his real place—decrepit and fat—and his deceptive place, rendered as light, active, young, and in love by the mastery of poetic rhythm. But there’s an apparent problem with Jonson’s generalizations, that is, neither Jonson, nor his supposed antecedents, are associated particularly closely or exclusively with love poetry. Virgil wrote a few love poems in his youth, but in his epic “pius Aeneus” ruthlessly subordinates the claims of eros, as made by

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Carthaginian Dido, to a divine mandate to sail for Italy. Horace wrote some erotic odes, but the poems Jonson admired, and imitated most closely, were the stoically tinged epistles and satires. Anacreon is the only one of the three whose reputation rests on love poetry, and even in his case his erotic verse shares billing with his drinking songs. By contrast writers Jonson doesn’t mention—Sappho, Ovid, or Petrarch, for instance—seem much more closely and exclusively tied to the realm of erotic poetry. The demand that the poet “be in love” is, in other words, imposed by a reader, not something the poet naturally, or even rhetorically, finds himself equipped to provide. Who is this reader? Early on in the poem it seems to be nobody in particular. “Let me be what I am” “who shall forbid me then”—these formulations seem entirely impersonal, almost as if Jonson is talking to himself. In line 11, though, the situation changes. The addressee is no longer unspecified, but becomes someone “who frowns, who jealous is, who taxeth me”: one of the “fathers and husbands” with property rights to the women with whom Jonson is perhaps in, perhaps not in, love. Jonson claims that the inspired poet “loves, not lusts”; drawing a time-honored distinction between idealizing and carnal desire. Because he is not, he claims, interested in sexual possession, his relationship to the fathers and husbands ought not to be a competitive one. Yet his confrontational tone suggests otherwise: “I do claim a right / In all that is called lovely.” What is the nature of this right? Jonson’s artistic droit de seigneur is ironically imposed by the very jealous fathers and husbands that resent it, since, as we remember, the demand that the poet be in love is the reader’s demand. In other words, the husbands and fathers inconveniently block Jonson’s access to “the fair” even while insisting that, as a poet, he write about love. However cold, fat, and old, Jonson feels himself obliged to pose as a lover for his reader, but in doing so, puts that reader in the position of ambiguously cuckolded husband. Lines 19–42 represent themselves as Jonson’s attempt to reassure husbands and fathers that they have nothing to worry about, even while he accuses them of having little notion of what love is all about. Jonson’s “love, not lust” seems to suggest a distinction between thought and action, or spirit and body. But unfortunately for this distinction, the poet’s promiscuous attraction to the beautiful is imagined as helplessly synecdochic. “No face, no hand, proportion, line, or air / Of beauty, but the muse has interest in; / There is not worn that lace, purl, knot, or pin, / But is the poet’s matter.” How can Jonson sustain the distinction between love and lust when his attention is riveted by physical detail?

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Jonson could make that distinction by means of an allegorical referencing system whereby the “poet’s matter,” lace, purl, knot, and pin, are negligible in themselves, and gain significance only insofar as they gesture toward their origins in some greater truth. But at least at this point, he doesn’t make that point explicit. Instead he pursues the analogy between the reader and the jealous husband. Jonson’s elaborate conditional clauses in lines 20–6 might be paraphrased “If you have beautiful wives and daughters, consent to let me write of them lovingly; if you do not consent, then wish you had foul and deformed women that you could keep selfishly to yourself. Yet even ugly women, if they are dressed in silk, will attract poets, though not good ones.” The difference between the “sneaking songsters” and Jonson is interesting: he posits his vast experience, a corollary of his old age, as a cure for excessive materialism. I who live, and have lived, twenty year Where I may handle silk as free and near As any mercer, or the whale-bone man That quilts those bodies, I have leave to span. (29–32)

Worldliness inoculates the poet against naïve surrender to beautiful surfaces. Jonson doesn’t own the cloth any more than he possesses the women he supposedly “loves.” He’s in the position of the clothmerchant for whom the excessive familiarity of luxury textiles deglamorizes them. Likewise Jonson’s relationship with women seems the detached and objective appreciation of the connoisseur with experience and plentiful opportunity to make comparisons. He is interested in “all that is called lovely,” not in a particular woman, and perhaps his impersonal Platonizing appetite for the beautiful ought to calm the nervous patriarch. Nonetheless, the logic of this whole part of the poem is odd. First, Jonson tells his addressee not to mind if the poet “loves, not lusts” after a wife or daughter. Then he accuses the reader of believing that the clothes make the woman: “must I be of those fools / Of race accounted, that no passion have / But when thy wife, as thou conceiv’st, is brave?” Then he contrasts what I’ve called his detached connoisseurship with the rapt, uncritical gaze of the “sneaking songsters” who write poems to anybody in fancy attire. Moreover, “as thou conceiv’st” suggests that the reader shares the sneaking songster’s fixation on silk and velvet as aphrodisiacs. Jonson’s problem is apparently not that the distinctions between love and lust, beautiful and ugly women, bad and good poetry don’t exist, but that his reader can’t tell the difference.

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Now, Jonson’s concern with clothes-fetishism is a very persistent feature of his sensibility. In Volpone (1606) the hero believes he can seduce Celia by promising elaborate games of dress-up. In Epicene (1610) Truewit argues, “I love a good dressing before any beauty o’ the world”; in Bartholomew Fair (1614) John Littlewit gets aroused fondling his wife’s hat. In the 1629 play, The New Inn, a tailor acts out the elaborate fantasy Jonson also describes in ll.39–43 of this poem. Sexual fetishism, as its originally sacral name suggests, seems to mistake, or prefer, a dead object for a live god, a part for the whole, periphery for center, illusion for truth. “Normally” (I use this word, as will become clear, in a skeptical way), for the nonfetishistically inclined man, clothing is supposed to gesture toward, enhance, but withhold from view the real object of desire, the woman underneath. Moreover, clothing ideally functions in other gestural ways, pointing beyond itself to signify other facts about its wearer: professional occupation, status in the community, and facility with textile arts.2 But in early modern England the referential value of clothing was growing increasingly problematic. Sumptuary legislation was quickly becoming unenforceable as traditional status markers—silk, velvet, fur—were more commonly imported and thus easier to purchase. Then too, the way in which clothes indicated a more “real” body was questionable. In Epicene, the woman’s body is not merely a basis or foundation to which cosmetics, ruffles, and wigs may be applied, but is itself a mere collection of bits and pieces purchased in a series of shopping expeditions and assembled in a fantastic act of bricolage. “She takes her self asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes,” Tom Otter reports of his wife, “and about next day noon is put together again like a great German clock.” In “An Elegy,” Jonson is likewise interested in a form of clothes-fetishism that entirely exhausts itself in lust for opulent textiles. The woman, the presumptive object of desire, is completely out of the picture, replaced by the contents of her wardrobe. In all these cases, what has apparently disrupted the “natural” course of sexual desire is an appetite for goods newly available in early modern England, with its vastly increased shipping and mercantile sectors. In “An Elegy” Jonson construes female dress as a displaced form of male self-display: men dress their wives to show off their own wealth, what he calls their “sordid bounty.” By this point in the poem the drama of homosocial rivalry has completely superseded the purportedly universal topic of poetry, heterosexual love. And like most rivalries, the one played out between the buyer of expensive clothes and the man who admires them on—or off—the buyer’s wife is a

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complex mixture of envy, desire, and ambivalent cathexis. If men dress their women in splendid clothes, then they are intentionally positioning them as the objects of other men’s desire and risking becoming cuckolds. But this risk is exciting as well as potentially humiliating. The thrill of cuckoldry interests Jonson: witness Corvino in Volpone, a violently jealous husband who craves seeing his wife in another man’s arms. The husband is aroused by seeing other men aroused by what he, the husband, possesses; his property rights are complemented and enhanced by their envy and desire, which he, of course, cannot know directly but can only impute to them. Thus in Jonson’s account the ambivalence of cuckoldry is tightly connected, indeed structurally the same as, the ambivalence of reading. The husband/reader ascribes a desire to the interloper/poet that the poet may or may not actually feel but which he is obliged by the reader to simulate. The scandalous closet scene Jonson describes thus has an interesting circular structure of identification. The “poor groom,” a naif entranced by the unwonted luxuries entrusted to him, imagines himself in the place of the man who owns those luxuries, the husband. The husband, meanwhile, spies on the groom, “o’erjoyed” by the groom’s performance of envy and by the displaced way in which the groom acts as himself, “possessing” the slipper. Mimetic desire mirrors back on itself and in the process becomes all the more titillating. Moreover the “you” who watches the fetishist, arousing himself by a rehearsal of somebody else’s lust, is not merely the poor groom’s voyeur: he is also Jonson’s addressee, the person who told Jonson the story in the first place, and to whom Jonson is now re-telling it. In other words, the voyeur is not merely similar to, but actually the same person as, the reader who demands that poets be “in love” in order to find their poetry moving but then gets nervous about the consequences. Jonson on the one hand seems to accept the readerly demand that he be “in love,” however presumptuous that demand may seem in his, or Virgil’s, or Horace’s, or Anacreon’s particular situation. And he accepts that demand despite the practical problems raised by a poet whose objects of desire belong to his readers. In other words a certain degree of self-falsification, or pretence, or accommodation to the needs of others, apparently “comes with the territory” of writing poetry, in classical times or in the early modern present. But for Jonson, such accommodation can go only so far, and the poem clearly draws his line in the sand. The analogy between the reader watching a poet perform “being in love” and the master watching a servant’s fetishistic self-pleasuring is something Jonson

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both invokes—indeed perhaps invents—and violently resists. To the rhetorical questions “Must I be of those fools … ” or “Think me that poor groom … ” the answer is clearly supposed to be “no.” Whence comes this resistance? Jonson never claims, as we have seen, actually to be in love, only to be able to create that impression in his readers. What is at issue is the structure of the love he purportedly feels: his idealized apprehension of the beautiful is, he claims, entirely different from the “lust” aroused by material splendor and expense. But since “love” is always something ascribed by the reader, not actually lived by the poet, what happens if the readers are fetishists? Surely the love they attribute to the poet will necessarily be fetishistic, since it is a displaced image of their own preoccupations, just as the poor groom’s actions are a displaced and therefore arousing version of the sordidly bounteous husband’s. That is why Jonson must insist that he is not the poor groom, though he might seem to be. That is also why he must mark sharply the difference between his love and that of the degraded poets who respond to silk and city caps, or who quarrel over the respective merits of the Cheapside or the New Exchange as their forbears and betters argued in verse over the comparative beauty of beloved women. Jonson, in other words, associates “base” versification with fetishism. The bad poet, like the fetishist, is obsessed with the surface, with material objects considered not as signs but as things in themselves. Bad poets seem, like good ones, to be in love, but in love with the wrong things in the wrong way. The phrase “spent a sonnet,” which puns on “spending” as an orgasm, an utterance, and a commercial transaction, identifies fetishism with the readerly expectations such poems encourage and gratify. Jonson’s opening suggests that poems imply, or ought to imply, something invisible beyond or behind them, the mind of the author, as the woman’s clothes point beyond themselves to her body, her body to her soul. As the woman is to her clothing, in other words, the poet is to the poem: the reader’s true object of desire. Unfortunately Jonson can’t display this poetic essence directly, because it is by nature invisible, and available to his readers only as a form of surmise. He can, however, delineate his own expectations of what the poetic transaction will involve, by degrading or repudiating what it isn’t, or what he hopes it isn’t. That’s why the satire of clothes-fetishism runs away with the poem, and also why Jonson seems to protest too much, as the details of that fetishism increasingly overwhelm any possibility of an alternative. And as they do so, Jonson’s blustering refusal to pander to a fetishistic reader begins to look a lot like pandering itself.

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His description of groom and voyeur is startlingly frank and detailed for its period, encouraging fetishistic arousal even while inveighing against it. Jonson’s tendency to seem overinvolved with, and overexcited in every sense, by the vices he satirizes is one thing people commonly complain about: many critics see him as his own unwitting Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. A lot of the best recent Jonson criticism simply pretends not to notice his aggressive moralizing, as if doing so would somehow collaborate in Jonson’s own tastelessness or imbalance. But I think it’s possible to view his situation more sympathetically. It’s not surprising that Jonson should open his poem by declaring that the poem is the author’s trace or utterance, and that the reader’s prime motive for reading poetry is to figure something out about the author. He pioneers a notion of authorship in which the poem continues, and ought to continue, to “bear the mark” of the poet, constantly referencing its reader back to its source in the writer. Jonson is also quite aware of the relationship between this kind of gestural function and nascent notions of intellectual property. But even while Jonson seems to make a strong claim for the authorial property rights, the more commercial aspects of that property analogy disturb him, because that commercial aspect undermines the very gestural function, the referencing back to the author, that he wants to insist upon. It is commerce that divides the second part of the poem, the world of the Lady Mayoress, the Exchange, Cheapside, and Moorfields from the first part of the poem, the world of Horace, Virgil, and Anacreon, muses’ fountain and poet’s horse. Jonson’s participation in commercial London apparently endangers his enshrinement in the pantheon of great poets, indecorously confuses “love” with purchases, and, at the same time, gives “An Elegy” in particular and Jonson’s oeuvre in general much of its distinctive vitality. Unlike, say, Milton or Sidney—or even Shakespeare, who was a shareholder in the King’s Men—Jonson is directly and exclusively dependent upon the revenue he can bring in by his writing. He is what we would call a “professional,” one of the first in England. In this respect his poems, plays, and masques are a kind of commercial product. Unfortunately for Jonson, once literary talent and products can be bought and sold in the marketplace, they tend, like other marketable commodities, to come loose from the people in whom they originate. Jonson resists the tendency of commodity culture to prefer simplified, etiolated relationships between “free market agents” who need not share a common social framework or set of values. He represents many of his poems as byproducts of highly articulated social interactions among people who know each other: as epistles to

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like-minded friends or appreciative patrons, for instance, modeled upon similar transactions among classical elites.3 By insisting upon the potency of poetry as a form of intersubjective communication, and refusing to allow it to be fully deracinated from the network of subjectivities in which it originated, Jonson attempts to create what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls an “enclaved commodity,” an item of exchange that is nonetheless felt to be exempt, partially or fully, from the laws of commerce.4 In particular Jonson tries to subvert what Karl Marx, in Capital, calls “commodity fetishism”: the commodity’s tendency to conceal, and consumers’ ability to forget, the work that went into making it.5 Unlike most of his contemporaries Jonson eschews any pretense of sprezzatura, aggressively foregrounding his own poetic toil and the sheer difficulty of good writing: an emphasis that gains him some scorn but which I suspect he imagined would direct the reader’s attention away from the poem and toward the poet. At the same time he tends to romanticize feudalism, in which, as Marx claims, the relations between labor and the goods produced by labor are more transparent. Marcel Mauss’s distinction between the gift and the commodity is also relevant here.6 Just as Marx distinguishes the mystifications of commodity exchange from another kind of exchange, which manifests more plainly the social mechanisms of production, so Mauss distinguishes the movement of commodities in the marketplace, in which the commensurability is the criterion for exchange, from a “gift economy” in which the motivation for the exchange lies not in the desirability of the objects themselves but in their value as markers for something intangible: mutual esteem, intimacy, the alliance between giver and recipient. With gifts, “it’s the thought that counts.” In both Marx and Mauss, commodity markets look “fetishistic” insofar as they focus on objects of exchange per se, rather than upon the social relations of production and intimacy that exchanged objects might manifest and gesture toward. Jonson shares this prejudice. That difference in valuation is why, in “An Elegy,” the “stuffs, velvets, plushes, fringes, lace” of line 79 are designated by the morally denigrating term “riots,” while the superficially similar “lace, purl, knot, or pin” of line 16 is the proper “matter” of the innocent poet. For Jonson wants to write poems conceived as gifts, in a patronage situation in which the patron supports him for who he is rather than paying him by the line or the stanza. The poem is not merely a commodity, but the indication of a relationship, in a world structured by such gift-giving. Thus in Jonson’s most eloquent celebration of the patronage relationship, To Penshurst, not only is Jonson’s poem a gift in response to

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Robert Sidney’s own gift of hospitality, but all the riches of the estate, leaping into dishes and begging to be consumed, evince a suicidally disinterested desire to donate themselves to the cause of signifying the patron’s goodness and generosity. Unfortunately, even while the line between gift and commodity seems an important one, it simultaneously seems unstable, impossible to draw. No one is clearer on this point than Jonson, who gets himself thrown in jail for his violent satire of King James’s practice of selling knighthoods, the stuff of feudal honor. Knighthoods, Jonson claims, should not be sold; but his satire calls attention to the fact that they are, in fact, being sold to anybody who can come up with the requisite sum. Jonson’s deeply ingrained fondness for the gift does not prevent him from seeing that early modern Europe was tending the other way. Moreover he is himself an agent on the “commodifying” side, getting paid for his writing and making sure it is printed, in a way that a traditional gentleman-poet would despise. Jonson wants to use print publication to move beyond the contingencies of a temporally and geographically limited social world, to continue to signify the author to readers who never knew him personally. But to do so, he must deracinate his poems from their original contexts, selling them in the “stalls” where “verses swarm,” circulating them in a literary marketplace. Given his conviction that readers always, in any age, create a putative subjectivity for the author, and his concomitant awareness that his eventual readers cannot know him as well as his original patrons do, Jonson imagines misprision as inevitable. The poet who sells his works must resign himself to being misread. For Jonson such resignation does not come easily, because he finds the base conjectures of bad readers personally insulting. So he issues instructions to his readers in an attempt to ward off that eventuality; but his own entanglement in the commercial process he supposedly deplores makes his advice anything but straightforward. The distinction between gift and commodity is as valid, and as unstable, in the twenty-first as it was in the seventeenth century. Witness the Miss Manners column, which regularly berates couples who demand expensive wedding presents, or who charge admission to their receptions—breaches of etiquette that, depending on your perspective, either confuse the properly distinct spheres of market relations and intimacy, or scandalously reveal the actually material basis of all human relationships. The alternative to a debased commodity culture seems, in Marx, in Mauss, and in Miss Manners as in Jonson, alwaysalready gone: in Marx the nonfetishized commodity is an attribute of a lost feudalism, Mauss associates the “gift economy” with “archaic

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societies,” and Miss Manners invokes a pseudo-Victorian age of elegant propriety. Mysteriously, the conceptual power of the gift-as-alternative nonetheless persists—but always as endangered, as a form of nobility on the verge of disappearance. Even as Miss Manners insists on the separation of friendship from commerce, a perennially rising tide of boorishness seems to overwhelm her boundary. Even as Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, imagines his love for Bassanio as beyond price, he cannot set that friendship outside economic transactions. Even as Jonson insists that his poems not be fetishized, new patterns of readership and literary circulation threaten to collapse them into fetishes. Although gifts are perpetually linked with nostalgia, in Jonson’s case, that nostalgia had a certain biographical pertinence. By 1624 his career as a patronage poet, which had been thriving in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, was seriously endangered by changing court tastes. Increasingly cut adrift from patronage support, Jonson eventually attempted to reenter the frankly commercial world of the public playhouse, but found that, as a dramatist, he had lost his ability to please the multitude. He was the victim, at this point in his life, not least of his own earlier, self-monumentalizing gestures. The publication of his works-todate in the 1616 Folio seems to have had the effect of ossifying, in the mind of Jonson’s audience, his poetic style and characteristic preoccupations and making any innovations more difficult to accept. In later life Jonson produces a good deal of imaginative experimental work— romantic comedy, pastoral, morality play, love poetry—but his departures from his previous formulas are often received with indifference or contempt from readers and spectators who can’t understand why he doesn’t keep writing plays like The Alchemist. The oblique, even tortuous progress of “An Elegy” records Jonson’s simultaneous recoil from, and sense of immersion in, a social universe degraded by commerce but also unthinkable apart from mercantile analogies. The poem’s aggression suggests the desperation of a poet who understands that his immediate fortunes, and eventually his literary immortality, depends precariously upon the interpretive kindness of strangers.

Notes 1. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 279. 2. For an able discussion of this kind of signification see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing: The Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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3. For accounts of Jonson’s transactions with his readers see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 111–25 and Stanley Fish, “Author-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same,” Representations 7 (1984): 26–58. 4. Arjun Apppadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 23. 5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Laurence and Winslet, 1977), Volume 1, pp. 76–88. For anticipations of Marx’s critique of the commodity among a number of Jonson’s contemporaries, see David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 6. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1997).

I

N D E X

Aaron, Melissa, 68 Abbess (Comedy of Errors), 47, 48 abundance: and hazard, 185; in Jack of Newbury, 135; in Merchant of Venice, 184; of Portia, 180; scarcity and, 180 Act Against Usury (1571), 156n4, 203 Adriana (Comedy of Errors), 43, 46, 47 affect, and economy, 72, 73, 74 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 56, 100–1 The Alchemist (Jonson), 263 Alcibiades (Timon of Athens), 220, 227–8 alienation, 40, 82–3 almsgiving, 99 Amariglio, Jack, 129, 178 Americans, native, 81 Anacreon, 254, 255, 258 anamnesis, 54, 62 Andrew (ship), 166 Angelo: gold chain as identity marker, 49 Angelo (Comedy of Errors), 43, 44 Angelo (Measure for Measure), 210–11, 214, 238–9, 240; attitudes toward women, 210–11; on counterfeiting, 210–11; Duke confers authority upon, 208–9; and prostitution, 205 anticolonialism, 54 Antigonus (Winter’s Tale), 56, 57, 58 Antipholi (Comedy of Errors), 40 Antipholus E (Comedy of Errors), 43, 44, 45, 46, 47

Antipholus S (Comedy of Errors), 40, 43, 46, 47 Antonio (Merchant of Venice); bankrolling Bassanio, 42, 121; capitalism and, 159; on change, 49; credit of, 162–3; on excess, 144; and L. Gobbo, 185, 263; love for Bassanio, 263; and marine insurance, 29, 33; melancholy of, 149, 150–1; as moneylender, 191; on moneylending, 149–50, 191; nostalgia of, 31; Portia releases from bond, 179, 184, 189; pound of flesh from, 29, 30–1, 121, 179; recuperation of fortunes, 168; risk and, 33; ships of, 150, 166, 168; Shylock’s bond on, 152–3, 181; on use of “breed”, 149; on use of money, 147–8, 149; ventures of, 149 Antonio (Twelfth Night), 120–2, 123 Antony (Antony and Cleopatra), 11, 69 Apemantus (Timon of Athens), 224 Appadurai, Arjun, 261 apprenticeships, 3 archaic cultures: gift-giving in, 100; social expenditure in, 107 Archimedes, 7–8 aristocracy, 45, 57–8, 60, 119 Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics, 145, 154, 156n6; physics of, 7–8; on usury, 148–9, 150, 210; view of money, 80, 143, 144–6

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Index

Armada attack, and mathematical education, 4, 7 Arragon (Merchant of Venice), 164–5, 167, 169 art, in Winter’s Tale, 57, 60 Ashton, Robert, 172n14 Augustine, City of God, 87 authentication, in Twelfth Night, 121, 122–3 authenticity: of aristocracy, 119; of coins, 206–7; and counterfeiting, 206, 208; counterfeiting and, 206–7, 208; of Herbert’s Temple poems, 90; money and, 206–7 authors: access to, through work, 254, 260; actual vs. implied, 254; Jonson, and status of, 253–4 See also poets Autolycus (Winter’s Tale), 55, 59–60, 126n13, 178; as artist, 57; clothing of, 58, 59; Hermes vs., 55–6; lawlessness of, 55, 57; and market economy, 58 avarice, 82 “a-weary”, 195–6 Bacon, Francis, 83–4, 92 Bady, David, 155–6n2 Baker, Humfrey, 1–2, 3, 4, 7; The Wellspring of Sciences, 8 Balthazar (Comedy of Errors), 43, 45 Balthazar (Merchant of Venice), 147 Bankside, 1 Barabas (The Jew of Malta), 198 Barabbas (New Testament), 197, 198 Barrow, Isaac, 99–100 barter, 221 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 257 Bassanio (Merchant of Venice): Antonio’s love for, 150, 263; borrowing from Antonio, 42, 121, 146, 147, 149, 162; and casket trial, 165, 167, 168, 190–1; economic roles, 166; as gentleman, 150, 166; on gold, 168, 169–70; as investor, 166; L. Gobbo and, 181, 182, 184;

on ornament, 171; Portia and, 144, 151, 193, 194–5; poverty of, 181, 182; as venturer, 150, 166 bastardy, 239 See also illegitimacy Bataille, Georges, 55, 106–7 bawds, 205, 212, 239, 241 Bedwell, William, 12n4 Bell, Thomas, The Speculation of Usurie, 84 Belmont, Lord of (Merchant of Venice), 191, 194, 196, 198 Belmont (Merchant of Venice), 165, 167–8, 168, 184, 190, 191, 193 Bennett, William, 157n9 Berger, Harry Jr., 197 Bernard, St., 84 Bible: “free gift” in, 105–6; free will offering, 106; Geneva Bible, 105–6; Good News Bible, 106; literalism in interpretation, 87–8; signs and referents in, 87 See also New Testament; Old Testament bills of exchange, 192 Blackfriars Theatre, 72 Blanche, queen of Navarre, 243 Bloch, Marc, 100 Blundeville, Thomas, 7 bodily injuries: and degree of intent, 27; insurance against, 21, 25; legal classification of, 26, 27; monetary values on, 26 body parts: animation of, 32; insurance of, 19–20; life vs., 25, 31–2; lists of monetary equivalents, 21–2, 25; as unliquidated assets, 30; utility of, 30; value of, 21, 25, 28, 30–1; whole body vs., 31–2; worth of, 20, 28, 30, 32 Bolton, J.L., 192 Bounteous, Sir (Mad World), 225 Bourdieu, Pierre, 137 Bracton, Henri de, 26 Braudel, Fernand, 159, 165–6 Brenner, Robert, 124n4 bridewells, 238

Index Bristol, Michael, 57–8 brothels, 1 Bruster, Douglas, 49, 63n1, 83 Bry, Theodore de, America, 170 Bucer, Martin, 105 bullion, 160, 163, 171 See also metals, precious Burbage, Richard, 113 Burghley, Lord, 156n4 Burt, Richard, 64n9 Bush, President George W., 100 Calvin, Jean, 89, 150 Camden, William, 164 Camillo (Winter’s Tale), 59, 60 capital, 159–60; circulation of, 165, 171; formation of, 161, 165–6, 171 capitalism, 106; counterfeiting in, 117–18; early modern, 161; gift exchange and, 129; individual and society in, 40; investment and, 118; mercantilism and, 159, 160; transition from feudalism, 99, 130 Captain (Twelfth Night), 115–16, 122, 123 Cardano, Girolamo, 8; Ars Magna, 155–6n2 Carrier, James, 101 Catholicism, image of heart in, 90 Cavell, Stanley, 55 Celia (Volpone), 257 The Changeling (Middleton), 226 charity, 99; as circuit of exchange, 99; gift of, 104; indiscriminate, 102; and mutual obligation and benefit, 100; scientific, 102; and state-sponsored welfare, 101–2; worthy objects of, 105 Charterhouse statutes, 3 Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton), 9, 226 Chatham Chest, 21–2, 23, 24, 25, 27 Cheal, David, 139n2 Cheke, Sir John, 8 children: and capital investment, 41; legitimate vs. illegitimate, 97,

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209, 210, 239; value, in open economy, 197 Christenson, Ann, 46 Christianity: idolatry of gold and, 80–1; old vs. new dispensations, 85, 86, 88 Christians, Jewish nation as metaphor for, 86 Christian typology, 85, 87, 88 Christ’s Hospital, 3, 8 Chrysostom, St. John, 99 circulation: of capital, 165, 171; of commodities, 161, 165; of money, 165 City of God (Augustine), 87 civil society, 221 Clare, St., 243, 244 Clarissans See Poor Clares classical empiricism, 108–9 Claudio (Measure for Measure), 209, 210, 213, 239 Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra), 11, 69 Clinton, President Bill, 97, 98 clothing: as currency, 116; and economy, 117; as investment, 116; in Jack of Newbury, 131; Jonson and, 256–8, 259; in Twelfth Night, 116; in Winter’s Tale, 59 cloth trade, 167 Clown (Winter’s Tale), 59 Cohen, Walter, 159 coining, 164, 206 coin(s), 160, 163, 171; shortages of, 40; Spanish, 169; true vs. counterfeit, 164; value of, 163–4 See also money; specie colonialization, 62 comedy, as wish fulfillment, 114 The Comedy of Errors, 39–40, 122, 123; as farce, 49–50; gold in, 221; isolation vs. community in, 41; kinship in, 41, 49; language of judgement in, 45; as mystery play, 48; performed on Innocents Day, 48; structural discontinuities in, 40

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commensuration: exchange value and, 146–7; justice and, 145, 154; and liberal pluralism, 154; of men and money, 177; money and, 144–5, 154; of money and life, 30 commerce: family and, 41–2; farce and, 49, 50; friendship and, 228; isolation and, 40–1; kinship and, 48, 49; mathematics and, 7; nostalgia and, 49, 50; sociability and, 43, 47; of social bonds, 47, 48 commercial law, in Venice, 189–90 commodity/-ies, 92–3; circulation of, 161; credit, 162–3; culture, 40, 260–1; daughters as, 197; in early 16th century, 44; and farce, 49; fetishization of, 261; gifts vs., 261–3; language, 93–4; market expansion, 40; value of, vs. human value, 155 community, 41, 44–5, 109 Company of Merchant Adventurers, 8 compassionate conservatism, 100 compensation, for bodily injuries, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30 Condell, Henry, 254 conditional bonds, 30 Conscience, Lady (Three Ladies), 202 Cordelia (Lear), 11 cornucopia See abundance; excess corruption, in naval administration, 23 Corvino (Volpone), 258 counterfeiting, 114–15, 201, 202; in capitalism, 117–18; and casket trial, 164, 165; illegitimate children cf. to, 210; in Measure for Measure, 201; money cf. with, 206–7; murder cf. to, 209; prostitution and, 210; in Twelfth Night, 114–15; vilification of, 208; women and, 210–11 Courtesan (Comedy of Errors), 43–4 courtiers, 132

Court of Chancery, 151–2 Crawshaw, Richard, “The Flaming Heart”, 90 credit, 162–3; as commodity, 162–3; community and, 48; culture of, 40, 207–8, 212, 228; debt and, 40; emblems of, 226; household and, 46; informal, 40; kinship and, 47; language of, 227–8; networks, 44, 150, 212, 219; reputation and, 44, 45–6, 207; sociability of, 40; social meaning of, 150, 227; thrift and, 45; trust and, 208, 212, 221, 230 crossings, 54, 60 Crowe, Sir Sackville, 23 Cupid (Timon of Athens), 229 currency: authenticity of, 207, 208; balance of trade and, 160; clothes as, 116; debasement of, 164; exchange and credit, and, 163 Cymbeline, double-entry bookkeeping in, 2 Danson, Lawrence, 151 daughters: as commodities, 197; fathers and, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198 David, King (Old Testament), 89 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 101, 129–30, 139 debit and credit, in bookkeeping, 2 debt: culture of, 219; litigation, 44, 45–6, 207; as mainstay of economy, 221; networks of, 44, 45; salvation as cancellation of, 80; in Timon of Athens, 222, 227–8 deconstruction, 61 Defoe, Daniel, insurance scheme of, 19–20, 21, 22–3, 25, 27, 28–9 de-moralization of society, 103–4 Derrida, Jacques, 62, 75, 100, 107; “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, 107–9 Deuteronomy 16:10, 106

Index Digges, Leonard, 4; Arithmetical Military Treatise, 7 Diligence (Three Lords), 208 Dissimulation (Three Ladies), 202, 206 Dissimulation (Three Lords), 207 diversity, methodological, 75–6 Doctor Faustus, 166 Dollimore, Jonathan, 212 domestication: in Merchant of Venice, 168; Reformation and, 245 Donne, John: “Elegy 20: Love’s War”, 170; “Elegy 11: The Bracelet”, 169 double-entry bookkeeping, 1, 2 Douglass, Mary, 139n1 dowries, 133–4, 195, 238, 242, 243 Drake, Sir Francis, 166 Dromios (Comedy of Errors), 49–50 Duke (Measure for Measure), 205, 208–9, 211–12, 213–14, 239, 240, 241, 244, 245 Duke (Merchant of Venice), 189 Duke of Ephesus (Comedy of Errors), 42, 47 Eagleton, Terry, 152–3, 154 East India Company, 117, 151, 173n24 “economic”, 69 economic laws, 73–4 economics: and ethics, 83; neoclassical, 103, 145, 154, 178 economic vs. political power, 130 economies: affective, 73, 74; general, 106, 107, 109; restricted, 106, 107, 109 “economies”, 74 economy: clothing and, 117; domestic, 168; meanings of, 74, 83, 178; of obligation, 227–8; as separate sphere, 79, 83; and signification, 54; of surplus and loss, 106, 107 The Economy of Obligation (Muldrew), 44–5, 46

269

Edward I (Peele), 11 Egeon (Comedy of Errors), 40, 41–2, 47, 50 Elizabeth I, Queen, 136, 163–4 empiricism, Baconian, 92 Engle, Lars, 68, 144 Epicoene (Jonson), 9, 257 equations, 8 equity, 29, 33, 150, 151–2 Erickson, Amy, 238 Essay Upon Projects (Defoe), 19–20 Ethelbert, King, laws of, 20, 35n8 ethics, economics and, 83 Ewald, François, 28 excess, 55, 144, 149, 151, 180, 184, 185, 228 exchange economy, 30, 32, 40 exchange networks: homosocial, 168; marriage and, 46–7; trust, and, 43; in Venice, 168 exchange value, 94; commensuration and, 146–7; and confusion of subject vs. object, 82–3; “Jew” and, 86–7; use value vs., 80, 132, 145–6, 154 The Execution of Neschech and the confyning of his Kinsman Tarbith, 204 Falstaff, Sir John, 2 families: commerce and, 40, 41–2, 47; hierarchy of, 224; transfer of wealth within, 192–3 See also household(s) farce, 49–50 fathers: daughters and, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198; punishment of, 239 Feingold, Mordechai, 3 Feste (Twelfth Night), 119, 126n12 fetishism: bad poetry, 259; clothes, 257, 259; commodity, 261; disavowals and, 124; money, 81; sexual, 257; signification, 94 feudalism, 221; transition to capitalism, 99, 130

270

Index

Field, Richard, 7, 12n4 fire insurance, 22 Fish, Stanley, 85 Flaminius (Timon of Athens), 226 Florizel (Winter’s Tale), 58, 59 Follywit (Mad World), 225 foreign trade, 160, 167, 171 formalism, 61, 62 Forman, Simon, 55 Forman, Valerie, 206–7, 208 Foucault, Michel, 62 Franklin, Ben, 132 Fraud (Three Ladies), 201, 202, 213 Fraud (Three Lords), 206, 207, 208, 213 free will, 106 Freud, Sigmund, 124 friendship, in Timon of Athens, 224, 225 Frobisher, Martin, 167 Froide, Amy, 237, 240 Game at Chess (Middleton), 223 Garber, Marjorie, 194 Gaskill, Malcolm, 206, 209 gender-power relations, 60 general economies, 106, 107, 109 generic thinking/research, 70, 75 Geremek, Bronislaw, 99 Gerontus (Three Ladies), 202–3 gift: of charity, 104; double annulment in name of work, 98; “free”, 105–6; in Reformation thought, 105; sale vs., 101; of salvation, 104 gift economy, 99, 100, 261–3 gift exchange, 129–30; and capitalism, 129; dowry and, 133–4 (see also dowries); market exchange and, 101; and self-interest, 129, 131; and social hierarchy, 130–1, 133, 134, 135, 137–8; and social mobility, 134–5, 136, 138; social relations of, 130, 138–9; virtue in, 134, 136–7

gift-giving: in archaic cultures, 100; of Timon, 224, 229–30 gifts: commodities vs., 261–3; inexhaustibility, 109–10; “pure”, 100 Gilder, George, 101 Gl’Ingannati, 113, 116 Globe Theatre, 1; rebuilding of, 72 Gloucester, Isabella of, 242–3 Gobbo, Launcelot (Merchant of Venice), 177–8, 179–80; comic role of, 181, 184; father of, 182; as go-between, 180, 182–3, 185–6; and Jessica–Lorenzo subplot, 182–4; leaves Shylock for Bassanio, 180–2; and Moorish woman, 180, 185; motion vs. stasis, 181–2; as Muslim, 179, 183; and Portia, 184–6; and Shylock, 182–4 God, as antithesis of usury, 80, 83 Goffe, Thomas, The Tragedy of Orestes, 11 gold: American, 81, 167, 169; in Europe, 81, 169, 221; idolatry and, 81; inflation and, 169–70; as money, 82; New World, 169; Shakespeare’s representation of, 230; Spanish, 169, 221; in Timon of Athens, 221, 222 Goldberg, Jonathan, 119, 123 gold casket (Merchant of Venice), 163–4 golden fleece, 162, 166, 167, 171 good deeds, 104, 105 Good Neighbourhoode (Three Ladies), 202 Gosson, Stephen, 2, 94, 214n4 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 74–5, 153; The Coiners of Language, 154; Symbolic Economies, 53–5, 61–2 grace, free gift of, 104–5 grammar schools, mathematics in, 3 Greene, Robert, Pandosto, 56 Gresham, Thomas, 172n10 Grey, Dionis, 9

Index Guillory, John, 153; Cultural Capital, 154 Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 72, 73 Gurteen, S. Humphreys, 102 Hadden, Richard, 7, 8 Halpern, Richard, 63n2, 68, 130, 131, 153, 199n7 Hamlet, 2, 11 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 77n19 Hawkins, Sir John, 21, 24, 166 Haydn, Hiram, 153 heart, 90–1 Heminges, John, 254 Henry VIII, King, 164 Henslowe, Philip, 67 Herbert, George: “The Altar”, 90; “Avarice”, 82–3; “The Bunch of Grapes”, 87–8; “The Church Militant”, 80–1; “The Church Porch”, 80; “Dotage”, 93; “Faith”, 80; “The Jews”, 85–6; “Jordan” poems, 93–4; and Judaism, 83–4, 85–6; “Love Unknown”, 80; “Nature”, 91; “The Pearl”, 92; “Perirrhanterium”, 79, 80, 82; “Providence”, 82; “The Pulley”, 88; “The Quidditie”, 93; “Selfcondemnation”, 86; “Sepulchre”, 90–1; The Temple, 79, 85, 88, 90, 92; “Vanitie I”, 92; “Vertue”, 92–3 Hermes, 55–6 Hermione (Winter’s Tale), 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61 Heywood, Thomas, Four Prentices of London, 131 Hillman, David, 32 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 101, 103–4 hoarding, 163, 165 Holdsworth, R.V., 219–20, 222–3 homicide, compensation for, 20, 27–8 “Homily against Idleness”, 98 homo economicus, 69, 73

271

homo ludens, 69, 73 Hood, Thomas, 4, 7 Horace, 254, 255, 258 Hospitality (Three Ladies), 202 household(s): credit and, 46; economy of daughters in, 192; Jewish vs. Christian, 199n7 See also families houses of correction, 238 Hutson, Lorna, 204–5 Hyde, Lewis, 129 Hylles, Thomas, Art of Vulgar Arithmetic, 9 Iago (Othello), 2 idolatry, 121; financial, 80–1; temple and, 89 illegitimacy vs. legitimacy, 212 illegitimate children, 209, 210, 239; welfare and, 97 incarnation, and the temple, 89 incest, 194, 195, 196, 198 Ingram, William, 68, 204 injuries See bodily injuries Innocents Day, 48 insurance, 19–20; for bodily injury, 21, 25; boom of 1710, 22; fire, 22; fixed values in, 28; joint-stock companies, 22, 23; life, 25; marine, 22, 25, 29, 33; mutual, 22–3, 27; proprietary, 22; risk and, 33 intellectual property, 253–4, 260 intent, degree of, and liability, 27, 29 interest rates, 191–2, 204–5 investment: of capital, cf. with children, 41; capitalism and, 118; clothing as, 116; meanings of, 116, 117, 118 invisible hand, 103, 153 Isabella, St., of France, 243 Isabella (Measure for Measure), 209, 210–11, 213, 214, 241–2, 243–4, 245 Isabella of Gloucester, 242–3 Israelites, 87–8

272

Index

Jack (Jack of Newbury): encounter with king, 136–7; encounter with Pert, 138; marriage of, 133–4; and Queen Katherine, 134–6; as recipient of gifts, 131; refusal of knighthood, 137; servants of, 133, 134–5, 136–7; virtue of, 131, 132–3 Jack of Newbury: gift transactions in, 130–1; socioeconomics of, 130–1 Jackson, Ken, 221 James I, King: borrowing by, 222; selling of knighthoods, 262; and Timon of Athens, 222 Jameson, Fredric, Political Unconscious, 62 Jessica (Merchant of Venice): conversion of, 179, 183; disobedience of, 192–3; elopement of, 193, 194, 197–8; and L. Gobbo, 182, 183; praises Portia, 147; relationship with Shylock, 182, 183–4, 194; stealing of, 179, 182, 184 Jesus Christ: incarnation and sacrifice of, 85; pauper as image of suffering, 99 Jewish characters in English plays, 203 Jewish choice, 86 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 40, 194 The Jew (play), 214n4 Johnson, Penelope D., 242 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 116, 123 Jones, Norman, 204 Jonson, Ben: actual vs. implied author, 254; The Alchemist, 263; “An Elegy”, 251–3; Bartholomew Fair, 257; collected works, 254; and commodity culture, 260–1; and cuckoldry, 255, 258; dependent upon revenue from writing, 260; Epicoene, 9, 257; and intellectual property, 253–4, 260; and love poetry, 254–5; and

love vs.lust, 255–6, 259; moralizing of, 260; The New Inn, 257; patronage relationship and, 261–2; To Penshurst, 261–2; relation of poet to text, 254; relationship with women, 256; on selling of knighthoods, 262; Shakespearean criticism, 254; The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, 167; and sprezzatura, 261; Volpone, 257; on worldliness, 256 Jordan, Constance, 136 Judaism: figurative, 84; and the heart, 90–1; Herbert’s understanding of, 83–4, 85–6; idolatry in, 84; interior, 86, 91; materialism and, 91; objectification in, 84; Renaissance view of, 84; usury and, 83–4, 91 Juliet (Measure for Measure), 228–9, 238–9, 241 Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), 69 jury trials, 27 justice: commensuration and, 145, 146, 154, 155; and compensation for injuries, 29; debts and, 151; and equity courts, 151–2; market and, 55; and mercy, 178; money and, 143, 154; proportional, 154; reciprocal, 154; of Venice, 190 Justinian, 99 Kahn, Coppélia, 229 Karras, Ruth, 237 Kastan, David, 114 Katherine, Queen (Jack of Newbury), 134–6 Kempe (of Plymouth Grammar School), 7 Kermode, Lloyd Edward, 214n3 King (Jack of Newbury), 136–7 King’s Men, 72, 73 Kinney, Arthur F., 48 kinship, 212; in Comedy of Errors, 40, 41; commerce and, 48, 49; credit and, 47

Index Knight, G. Wilson, 220 Korda, Natasha, 213, 214n3 Kristol, Irving, 102 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, 233n23 Lane, Kris, 125–6n9 language(s), 108–9; commodification of, 93–4; of judgement, 45 lavishness vs. thrift, 45 law(s): economic, 74; external vs. internal, 84; Judaic, 84, 91 lead casket (Merchant of Venice), 171 Lear, King (King Lear), 11 Leges Henrici Primi, 20, 25, 26, 27 legibility, in The Winter’s Tale, 56–7, 58, 59, 60 legitimacy: illegitimacy vs., 212; in Winter’s Tale, 56–7 Leinwand, Theodore, 49, 50, 68, 150–1; Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, 71–4 Leontes (Winter’s Tale), 55, 56, 57–8, 60 letter vs. spirit, 84, 94 See also literalism Leventon, Carol, 168 Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked, 107–8 Lewalski, Barbara, 84–5 liability, 27, 29 Liberalitie (Three Ladies), 202 liberal pluralism, and commensurability, 154 liberation, restraint beneath, 153–4 life: commensuration of money and, 30; insurance, 25 limbs See body parts Linton, Joan Pong, 139n4 lists, literature and, 29, 31, 32, 33 literalism, 84; in Biblical interpretations, 87–8; of Portia, 153, 179 Little, Lester K., 100

273

Littlewit, John (Bartholomew Fair), 257 Lorenzo (Merchant of Venice), 147, 182, 183–4 loss(es): of body parts, 19–20, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30; capital circulation and, 171; counterfeits and, 171; economy of, 106, 107; in Shakespeare in Love, 113–14; of Shylock, 179, 193–4, 197–8; in Twelfth Night, 115, 119; in Winter’s Tale, 57, 58, 60, 61 love: economic parsing of, 69; poetry, 254–5 Love, Lady (Three Ladies), 202, 206 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 102 Lucar, Lady (Three Ladies), 202 Luciana (Comedy of Errors), 43, 47 Lucio (Measure for Measure), 178, 214, 228–9 Lucius (Timon of Athens), 225, 227 Lucullus (Timon of Athens), 226 Lust (Three Ladies), 202 Mad World (Middleton), 225 Magnusson, Lynne, 228 maiming, 27 Malvolio (Twelfth Night), 118–19, 122–3 Malynes, Geoffrey de, 25 Mamillius (Winter’s Tale), 56, 57, 58, 60 Mandeville, B. de, 83 Manners, Miss, 262–3 Margolies, David, 137 Mariana (Measure for Measure), 239–41 Maria (Twelfth Night), 119 marine insurance, 22, 25, 29, 33 mariners, pensions for injured, 23–4 market economy: Autolycus and, 55, 56; and court–class struggle, 57–8; Hermione and, 58; and Mercury, 56; and postmodern environment, 83; selling and stealing in, 58; social commerce in, 43

274

Index

Marlowe, Christopher, 85; The Jew of Malta, 40, 194 marriage: daughters as commodities in, 197; exchange networks and, 46–7; and network of credit, 212; as reciprocal exchange of value/worth, 241 Marshall, Alfred, 103 Marx, Karl: Capital, 261, 262; on capitalism, 159; on C-M-C vs. M-C-M transactions, 156n4; on developing capital through trade and exchange, 167; on formation of capital, 161; On the Jewish Question, 86; on mercantilist economic thought, 170–1; on Midas, 170; on monetary system, 160; on money and qualitative vs. quantitative exchange value, 144–5; on two sorts of people, 131; on usury and capitalism, 166 Masten, Jeffrey, 220 Masterson, Thomas, 7 materialism: Jonson and, 256; and Judaism, 91 See also worldliness Material London (conference), 71 mathematics: and insurance boom, 22; publishing, 4–7; in Renaissance literature, 11; in school curricula, 3 Mauss, Marcel, 74–5, 100, 101, 107, 129, 130, 133, 261, 262–3 Mazzio, Carla, 32 McFeely, Maureen Connelly, 242 meaning, thinking about, 54 Measure for Measure, 201, 208–13; counterfeiting in, 213–14; credit in, 208; interest rates and, 204; marriages in, 245; singlewomen in, 237; usury in, 213–14 Medici Company, 192 Meikle, Scott, 145, 146, 154 Mellis, John, 1, 3–4, 4, 7; How to Keep Books of Accounts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor, 2

Mercadorus (Three Ladies), 202–3 mercantilism, 160, 170–1; capitalism and, 159, 160 Merchant (Comedy of Errors), 46 The Merchant of Venice, 9, 40, 121; abundance–scarcity binary in, 180; alienation in, 29–33; capitalism and, 159, 171–2; casket trials, 162–5, 190–1, 194; commensurabilities in, 155, 177; domestication in, 168; economic language of, 159, 162; father–daughter pairings in, 194; lead casket, 29, 33, 163; literature of the list in, 21, 29; and New Economic Criticism, 177; as struggle between Portia and Shylock, 178; verbal usury in, 61 Mercury See Hermes mercy: justice and, 178, 179–80; of Portia, 151, 152 Merlin (The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers), 167 metals, precious, 82, 166, 171; melting of, 163 See also bullion; gold Michaelmas Term (Middleton), 225, 226 Midas, King, 170, 171, 221 Middleton, Thomas: and authorship of Timon of Athens, 219, 221, 223, 225, 229, 230; Calvinism in writing, 223, 230; The Changeling, 226; Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 9, 226; Game at Chess, 223; language of worth, 230; Mad World, 225; Michaelmas Term, 225, 226; as poet of debt, 222; The Revenger’s Tragedy, 226, 233n23; A Trick to Catch the Old One, 9, 225; The Triumphs of Truth, 229; and use of gold in Timon of Athens, 221; use of “talent”, 226; Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased, 223; Women

Index Beware Women, 223; World Tossed at Tennis, 229; A Yorkshire Tragedy, 231n5; Your Five Gallants, 225, 226 Mignolo, Walter, 62 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 153–4 Minories, 242–3 miscegenation, 213 Mithal, H.S.D., 203, 214n4 Mollat, Michel, 99 monetary system, 160 money: circulation of, 165; and commensuration, 144–5, 154; as end in itself, 80, 84, 91; fetishization of, 81; gold as, 82; as idolized signifier, 94; and justice, 143; language and, 179; resembling counterfeiting, 206–7; shortage of, 44; in Timon of Athens, 227; use vs. exchange value, 80, 91 See also coin(s); specie moneylending: changing attitudes toward, 203–4, 208; legitimacy of, 201–2; prostitution and, 205, 210; Protestantism and, 204, 205; theological to economic perspective on, 204; in Three Ladies, 202–3 See also usury Montaigne, Michel de, 197 More, Sir Thomas, 60 Morocco (Merchant of Venice), 33, 146, 163–4, 165, 167 mothers, unwed, 238–9 Mulcaster, Richard, 140n9 Muldrew, Craig, 162, 204, 207–8, 219, 221, 230; The Economy of Obligation, 44–5, 46 Murray, Charles, 102 Mustazza, Leonard, 137, 139n5 mutual insurance, 22–3, 27 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 105, 107 Nathan, Norman, 67 Nemo, Judge (Three Ladies), 202

275

neoclassical economics, 103, 145, 154, 178 Nerissa (Merchant of Venice), 194–5 neurotic nostalgia, 49, 50 New Economic Criticism, 61, 62, 68–9, 75, 83, 177, 178–9, 180, 186 New Economic Criticism (Woodmansee, Osteen), 10, 53, 61 The New Inn (Jonson), 257 Newman, Karen, 186n10 New Testament: 2 Corinthians 6:16, 89; Ephesians, 48; temple in, 85 See also Jesus Christ nostalgia: of Antonio (Merchant of Venice), 31; for archaic cultures, 107; and Jonson, 263; and King’s Men, 72; neurotic, 49, 50; for precommercialized society, 41; and singlewomen in nunneries, 242; in Twelfth Night, 122, 123 Novy, Marianne L., 195 numismatic chain of symbolization, 54 nunneries, singlewomen in, 241–2 nuns, marriage of, 245 objectification, 90, 91; in Judaism, 84; of subject, 82 object vs. subject, 87 Olasky, Marvin, 100, 102–3, 109–10 Oldcastle, Hugh, 1, 3–4 Old Testament: events as signs of Christ, 85; Exodus 20:25, 90; Exodus 35:5, 105; Ezekiel 36:26, 89; Jeremiah 31:33, 89; temple in See temple See also David; Solomon Olivia (Twelfth Night), 2, 114, 118, 122 open-ended structures, 108–9 Ophelia (Hamlet), 11 Oppenheim, Michael, 23

276

Index

Origen, 85 Orsino (Twelfth Night), 114, 118, 120, 122, 123 Osteen, Mark, New Economic Criticism, 10, 53, 61, 62, 129, 186n2 Othello, 123 Otter, Tom (Epicoene), 257 outdoor relief, 102 Overdone, Mistress (Measure for Measure), 239, 241 Pacioli, Luca, 1, 2, 4, 7 Palmer, Daryl, 212–13 Pandosto (Greene), 56 Paradise Lost (Milton), 153–4 Paris 1968 uprising, 54 Parker, David, 134 Partridge, Eric, 195 patriarchy, 57, 60 patrilineality, 237, 244 patronage, of poets, 261–2 Patterson, Annabel, 195 Paul, St., 91; Epistle to the Ephesians, 48 Paulina (Winter’s Tale), 57, 60 paupers: as image of suffering Christ, 99; working poor vs., 102 Peele, George, 8, 10–11 Peele, James, 8; How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the … Accompt of Debitor and Creditor, 2 Pepys, Samuel, 22, 25 Perdita (Winter’s Tale), 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Perkins, William, 98, 151, 156n6 personal responsibility, 105 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 97 Pert, Randoll (Jack of Newbury), 137 Physhe, N., 3, 4 Pietz, William, 125n7 Platonism, in Christianity, 85 Plutus, 222, 223 poetry: bad, as fetishism, 259; Herbert’s views of bad, 93–4; as

intersubjective communication, 260–1 poets: in love, 255, 258–9; relation to text, 254 See also authors Political Unconscious (Jameson), 62 Polixenes (Winter’s Tale), 55, 56–7, 59 Polonius (Hamlet), 11 Pompey (Measure for Measure), 205 poor, the: deserving vs. undeserving, 99, 238; relief, 238; work and, 97, 99 Poor Clares, 241–2, 245 poorhouse, 102 Poor Ladies, 242 Portia (Merchant of Venice), 183; abundance of, 178, 180; and Antonio’s penalty, 31; beneficence of, 180, 184; and casket trials, 146–7, 191, 193, 198; commodification of, 167; disguise of, 191, 193; domestication of, 168; economic resources, 167–8; epieikeia of, 29; excess and, 180; favoring of Bassanio, 144, 151, 194–5; focus on real things, 179; gold as value of, 163; as golden fleece, 166; and L. Gobbo, 179, 184–6; and letter of law, 151, 152; literalism of, 152, 153, 179; marital conclusion for, 168, 198; mercy of, 184, 185, 186; as mistress of Belmont, 167–8, 168; relations with father, 193, 195, 196; use of word “a-weary”, 195–6; Venetian law and, 189–90 Posthumus (Cymbeline), 2 postmodernism, 83, 154, 178 post-structuralism, 53, 61, 62, 107 poverty: holy, 99; pious, 242, 243, 244–5; singlewomen and, 238, 241, 242; as spiritual value, 99; welfare as fostering, 103 See also poor, the

Index prodigy houses, 223 profit economy: transition from gift economy, 99 profit(s), 189; of Antonio, 148, 149; capital circulation and, 161; counterfeiting and, 210, 211; and debasement of women, 211; deferral of, 123; flesh and, 30; investment in clothing and, 117, 123; in Jack of Newbury, 138; and King’s Men, 23, 72; in Measure for Measure, 212, 213; in Merchant of Venice, 163, 166, 167, 170, 198; of the Minories, 243; social place and, 118; usury and, 149, 204, 210; in Winter’s Tale, 126n13 property, singlewomen and, 240–1, 244, 245 proprietary insurance, 22 prostitution, 205, 238, 239, 240; counterfeiting and, 210; moneylending and, 205, 210 Protestantism, and moneylending, 204, 205 Provost (Measure for Measure), 239 Prynne, William, 94 public vs. domestic spheres, 46 “punks”, 240, 241 Puritanism: in language, 228; in Middleton’s writing, 223 Puritans, 81 Rabb, Theodore K., 172n14 Raleigh, Walter, The Discoverie of Guiana, 169 Ramus, Peter, Elements of Geometry, 12n5 “rash” criticism, 69–70, 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 83 rational choice, 185; theory, 180, 182 readers: access to authors through works, 254, 260; as cuckolded husbands, 255, 256; as fetishists, 259

277

reciprocity: of friendship, 224; in gift-giving, 101, 106, 107, 130; in Jack of Newbury, 134, 137; of justice, 154; in marriage, 48, 213, 241, 244 “reckoned” criticism, 69–70, 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 83 reckoning, 2, 3; schools of, 3–4 Recorde, Robert, 4, 8–9 redemption: equity of, 152; usury and, 80 Reformation: domestication and, 245; gift of grace in, 104 remarriage, 240–1 representation, monopolies on, 54 reputation: credit and, 44, 45–6, 207; virtue and, 132 responsibility, personal, 97, 105 restricted economy, 106, 107, 109 retaliatory violence, remedies as alternative to, 25–6, 28 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton), 226, 233n23 Richard II, King (R2), 150 Riggs, David, 253 risk: credit and, 43; ethic of, 29; management, 33; technology of, 28, 29 Roberts, Henry, 166 rock-and-roll bands, 72, 73 Roe v. Wade, 204 Roper, Lyndal, 245 Royal Exchange, Office of Assurances, 25 Royal Mathematical School, 3 Royal Mint, 173n24 Ruccio, David F., 129, 178 Russell, Sir William, 23 Salerio (Merchant of Venice), 149, 150 Salignac, Bernard, Principles of Arithmetic, 12n4 salvation: as cancellation of debt, 80; gift of, 104 scarcity: economy of, 106, 107, 109; of resources, 100, 184

278

Index

scene stealing, 53, 61 The School of Abuse, 214n4 schools: grammar, 3; of reckoning, 3–4 scientific charity movement, 102 seamen, compensation for personal injury, 19–20 Sebastian (Twelfth Night), 119, 120, 121, 122, 123 self-interest, 182; gift exchange and, 129, 131 selfishness, 109 sexual fetishism, 257 Shakespeare, William: adaptation of Pandosto for Winter’s Tale, 56–7; authorship of Timon of Athens, 221, 222, 226, 229, 230; Condell’s collected works, 254; economic basis of theatres, 67; extreme experience and, 230; gold in, 230; Jonson’s poem of criticism, 254; Judaism in, 85; plenteousness in, 228–9; Sonnet 6, 215–16n10; Sonnet 134, 2; subjectivity of, 40 Shakespeare in Love (film), 67, 113–14 sheepshearing, 57, 60 Shell, Marc, 61, 182, 185, 205, 212; Money, Language, and Thought, 177 Shepherd (Winter’s Tale), 57, 58 Shylock (Merchant of Venice): adherence to bond, 85; and Antonio, 168, 179, 184, 185; and Barabbas, 197–8; demand for pound of flesh, 29, 30–1, 121, 147; described by Gobbo, 179; excess and, 149; as Henslowe, 67; and Jessica, 183–4, 194, 197, 198; and L. Gobbo, 179, 180, 181, 182–4; legalism of, 151, 152–3; loss of bags and stones, 193–4; loss of Jessica, 179, 197–8; with moneychanger’s scale, 145, 147; on moneylending, 191–2; and

Portia, 178, 179; rational choice theory and, 180; rigidity of, 149; use of “gratis”, 191–2; usury of, 179; on Venetian sovereignty, 189 Sibbett, Trevor, 34n5 Sidney, Robert, 262 Sidney, Sir Philip, Apology, 153 signification, 154; in the Bible, 87; economy and, 54; fetishization of, 94 silence: of Hermione, 58; of Isabella, 242, 245 silver casket (Merchant of Venice), 163, 164–5 Simmel, Georg, 40, 41 Simplicity (Three Ladies), 206 Simplicity (Three Lords), 206 Simpson, A.W.B., 25–6, 27, 28 Singleton, Marion White, 93 singlewomen: compulsory labor, 238; corporal punishment of, 238; dowryless, 238–9; employment, 238; never-married, 237, 240; numbers of, 237; as nuns, 242; poverty and, 238, 241, 242; property and, 240–1, 244, 245; regulation of, 244; social place, 237–8, 239; threat to patrilineality, 237 Skil (Three Lords), 207 Slights, Camille, 124n1 Smith, Adam, 83, 153, 160; “The Wealth of Nations”, 103 Smith, Henry, 104 Smith, Sir Thomas, 170 Smith, Thomas (merchant), 7; Discourse of the Commonweal, 198–9n1 sociability: of commerce, 43, 47; thrift and, 45 social hierarchy; family and, 224; gift exchange and, 130–1, 133, 134, 135, 137–8 social mobility, 118; credit and, 150; gift exchange and, 134–5, 136, 138; gift transactions and,

Index 130; of market economy, 58; virtue and, 131, 132, 138 social place: and employment of money, 118; singlewomen, 237–8, 239 social policy, 102 social relations: economic exchange and, 161–2; gift exchange and, 130, 138–9 See also friendship socioeconomic attitudes, shift in, 98–9 soldiers, pensions for injured, 23–4 Solomon, King (Old Testament), 89 South, Robert, 221 Spain: bullion hoarding in, 171; coins of, 169; decline of, 169–70; gold of, 169, 221 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 233n23 specie, 164, 165, 169, 171 See also coin(s); money The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (Jonson), 167 Speidell, John, 3, 4 Spenser, Eric, 121 Spinosa, Charles, 156n7 Spivak, Gayatri, 63n2 Spurgeon, Caroline, 231n6 St. Mary’s Overie, 1 St. Olave’s Grammar School, 1, 3 Stallybrass, Peter, 116, 123, 125n6–7 stamp of merit, 164, 169 Stapler’s Company, 7 Star Chamber, 84 Stevens, Scott Manning, 95n14 Stevenson, Laura, 132 Steward (Timon of Athens), 220, 222, 230 stone, heart as, 90–1 structural functionalism, 61 structuralism, 107 “sturdy beggar”, 99 subjectification, of object, 82 subject vs. object, 87 Sugarman, David, 152 Suzuki, Mihoko, 130–1

279

Swetz, Frank, 4, 8 symbolic registers, 54, 61 symbolic signification, 60 symbolization, numismatic chain of, 54 Symonie (Three Lords), 207 Symony (Three Ladies), 202 synecdoche, 31–2 talents: indebtedness for, 208–9; parable of, 208, 212; value of, 226–7 Tale-porter, Mistress (Winter’s Tale), 59 Tartaglia, Niccolo, 7, 8 taxation, for pensions to injured soldiers and mariners, 23–4 temple: external vs. internal, 80, 88, 89; idolatry and, 89; incarnation and, 89; material vs. spiritual, 79 Terence, 114 theft, 53, 57 Theresa, St., 90 Thomas of Celano, 244 The Three Ladies of London (Wilson), 201, 202–3, 205, 206, 213 The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (Wilson), 201, 203–4, 205 thrift, 45, 107, 131, 204 Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 245 Timon of Athens, 144–5; attribution study of, 220; authorship of, 219, 221, 223; box in, 226–7; credit in, 228; debt in, 221, 222; gold in, 221, 222; male orientation, 224; money in, 227; nature’s generosity in, 228–9; “plenteous bosom” in, 228–9; strangers in, 225–6, 228 Timon (Timon of Athens), 220, 223–4, 229–30; absence of family, 223; banquets of, 224–5, 226; cf. with James I, 222; creditors of, 225–6; discovery of gold, 221; fecundity of nature and, 230; financial imprudence of, 223–4; friends of, 224, 225,

280

Index

228, 229–30; gift-giving of, 224, 229–30; home and lands of, 223; king-like role, 222; as landowner, 223; servants of, 225 To Penshurst (Jonson), 261–2 totalization, 108 trespass, actions of, for bodily injuries, 26–7, 28–9 Tribble, Evelyn, 140n10 A Trick to Catch the Old One (Middleton), 9 Trimpi, Wesley, 29 The Triumphs of Truth (Middleton), 229 trousseaus, of nuns, 242, 243 True Friendship (Three Ladies), 202 Truewit (Epicoene), 257 trust: and credit, 208, 212, 221, 230; in exchange, 43 Tubal (Merchant of Venice), 150 Turner, Frederick: Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics, 61, 65, 179 Twelfth Night, 123; as anti-topic, 114, 119; authentication in, 122–3; counterfeiting in, 115, 119; disavowals in, 124; exchange in, 118; objects in, 118–24; piracy in, 120; purse in, 120–2, 123; ring in, 118–19; Shakespeare in Love and, 113 Tyndale, William, 104–5 universities, mathematics in, 7 use value vs. exchange value, 132, 145–6, 154 “use” (word), 80 usury, 150, 191; act against, 156n4, 203; Aristotle on, 148–9; and exchange vs. use of money, 80; Herbert’s God as antithesis of, 80, 83; in Italy, 192; and Judaism, 83–4, 91; legitimation of, 204–5; materialism and, 91; in Measure for Measure, 208; and redemption, 80; verbal, 61

See also moneylending Usury (Three Ladies), 201, 202, 213 Usury (Three Lords), 203–4, 206, 207, 213 Valdes (Doctor Faustus), 166 value: bullionist conception of, 160, 163, 171; in coin, 160, 163, 171; commodity vs. human, 155; engraved coins and, 163–4; exchange See exchange value; measurement of, 155; use See use value velocity, 7 Vendler, Helen, 82–3, 92 Venice, 189–90 Ventidius (Timon of Athens), 223, 227 venturing, 149, 166, 171; adventure vs., 167 Vincentio (Measure for Measure), 205 Viola/Cesario (Twelfth Night): desire for Orsino, 114; and ring, 118; and Sebastian, 121, 122, 123 Viola (Twelfth Night): authentication of, 122; and the Captain, 115–16; cross-dressing of, 114, 115, 118; and Malvolio, 122–3 Virgil, 254, 258; “Pius Aeneus”, 254–5 virtue: in gift exchange, 134, 136–7; as imitable quality, 132–3; in number of servants, 133; and social mobility, 131, 132, 138; wealth and, 132, 134 Volpone, 40, 257, 258 Von Mises, Ludwig, 155 Wadding, Luke, The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare, 244–5 Warrington, Ronnie, 152 wealth: creation of, 170–1; intergenerational transfer,

Index 192–3; in money-form, 170, 171; as precious metals, 171; virtue and, 132, 134 Weber, Max, 98–99, 132 Weemse, John, 84 welfare: crime and, 97; illegitimacy and, 97; immorality and, 103; “queen”, 97; reform, 97, 105; as social entitlement, 98; statesponsored, 101–2, 109–10; work and, 97, 105 wergeld, 20, 27, 28, 30 West, Anthony J., 75 West, William N., 75 Wheeler, John, 212–13; A Treatise of Commerce, 161–2 widows, 238, 240–1 Wilson, Eric, 71 Wilson, James Q., 98 Wilson, Luke, 156–7n8 Wilson, Robert: The Three Ladies of London, 201, 202–3, 205, 206, 213; The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, 201, 203–4, 205, 213 Wilson, Thomas, A Discourse Upon Usury, 204 Wilson, William Julius, 97 Winchcomb, John, 130 The Winter’s Tale, 124 Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (Middleton), 223 wish fulfillment, and counterfeiting, 114–15 witches, 238

281

Wolsey, Cardinal (Jack of Newbury), 136 women: clothing of, 256–8, 259; counterfeiting and, 210–11; Jonson’s relationship with, 256; masquers in Timon of Athens, 224–5, 229; Renaissance traffic in, 196–7 See also singlewomen Women Beware Women (Middleton), 223 Woodbridge, Linda, 77n7 Woodmansee, Martha, New Economic Criticism, 10, 53, 61, 62, 129, 186n2 wool trade, 117, 167 work: and double annulment of gift, 98; poor and, 99; welfare and, 97, 105 work-ethic, 99, 103 workfare, 97, 105 workhouse, 102 works righteousness, 90, 91 worldliness: avarice and, 82; Herbert and, 82, 86, 93; and Jonson, 256 World Tossed at Tennis (Middleton), 229 Wright, Eugene, 137 A Yorkshire Tragedy (Middleton), 231n5 Your Five Gallants (Middleton), 225, 226