The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period when the...

Author: Joan Pong Linton

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This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period when the values of a redefined patriarchy converged with the motives of an expansionist economy. Joan Pong Linton argues that the emergent romancefigureof the husband (subsuming the roles of soldier and merchant) embodies the ideal of productive masculinity with which Englishmen defined their identity in America, justifying their activities of piracy, trade, and settlement. At the same time, colonial narratives, in putting this masculinity to the test, often contradict and raise doubts about the ideal; and these doubts prompt individual romances to a self-conscious reflection on English cultural assumptions and colonial motives. Hence colonial experience reveals not just the "romance of empire" but also the impact of the New World on English identity.

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 27

The romance of the New World

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture General editor STEPHEN ORGEL Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University Editorial board Anne Barton, University of Cambridge Jonathan Dollimore, University of Sussex Marjorie Garber, Harvard University Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Nancy Vickers, Bryn Mawr College Since the 1970s there has been a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political and cultural history. While the earliest New Historicist work was criticized for a narrow and anecdotal view of history, it also served as an important stimulus for post-structuralist, feminist, marxist and psychoanalytical work, which in turn has increasingly informed and redirected it. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and of the concept of identity itself, on theatre as a political and economic phenomenon and on the ideologies of art generally reveals the breadth of the field. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theatre which makes use of the insights afforded by theatrical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our own history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time. Recent titles include Shakespeare's Troy: drama, politics, and the translation of empire HEATHER JAMES, University of Southern California Shakespeare, Spenser, and the crisis in Ireland CHRISTOPHER HIGHLEY, Ohio State University Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England ELIZABETH HANSON, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario Foreign bodies and the body politic: discourses of social pathology in early modern England JONATHAN GIL HARRIS, Ithaca College Writing, gender and state in early modern England: identity formation and the female subject MEGAN MATCHINSKE, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume

The Romance of the New World Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism JOAN PONG LINTON Indiana University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521594547 © Joan Pong Linton 1998 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1998 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Linton, Joan Pong. The romance of the New World: gender and the literary formations of English colonialism / Joan Pong Linton. p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in Renaissance literature and culture: 27) ISBN 0 521 59454 5 (hardback) 1. English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism. 2. English literature -American influences. 3. Literature and history - England History - 16th century. 4. Literature and history - England - History - 17th century. 5. National characteristics, English, in literature. 6. America — Discovery and exploration — English. 7. Masculinity (Psychology) in literature. 8. Gender identity in literature. 9. Colonies in literature. 10. Sex role in literature. 11. America - In literature. 12. Men in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR129.9'358dc21 97-30145 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-59454-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-59454-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-59457-8 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-59457-X paperback

To my mother, Wai Yen Lee and in memory of my father, Man Leung Pong and grandmother, Chou Kwai Chan

Contents

Acknowledgments

page xi

Introduction

1

1

Love's laborers: the busy heroes of romance and empire

13

2

Sea-knights and royal virgins: American gold and its discontents in lodge's A Margarite of America (1596)

39

3

Jack ofNewbery and Drake in California: domestic and colonial narratives of English cloth and manhood

62

4

Eros and science: the discourses of magical consumerism

84

5

Gender, savagery, tobacco: marketplaces for consumption

104

6

Inconstancy: coming to Indians through Troilus and Cressida

131

7

The Tempest, "rape," the art and smart of Virginian husbandry

155

Coda: the masks of Pocahontas

185

Notes Works cited Index

192 243 261

IX

Acknowledgments

I wish to honor, first of all, Stephen Orgel, Patricia Parker, Mary Louise Pratt, and David Riggs, whose support and guidance helped shape this work from its beginnings as a doctoral dissertation. My heart-felt gratitude extends to Judith Anderson and Susan Frye for their scholarly acumen and labor of care in helping me bring this book to fruition. I have likewise been blessed with good advice from Victoria Kahn and Margo Hendricks, whose insightful readings enabled me to rethink issues of genre, race, and gender. Colleagues at Indiana University have also been a source of encouragement. My thanks to Patrick Brantlinger, Linda Charnes, Peter Lindenbaum, and Nicholas Williams for reading and responding to portions of work in progress; and to Christine Farris, Kathryn Flannery, Robert Fulk, and Paul Strohm for their critical support in reviewing the book manuscript at various stages. I wish to also thank Mary Fuller, Kim Hall, and Marion Trousdale for giving me the opportunities to share my work in the conference and seminar sessions they arranged; and Jeffrey Knapp and Peter Stallybrass for providing responses to conference papers that enabled me to reshape my arguments in places. On a more personal note, I am indebted to Randall Nakayama for questions that always hit the mark, and to William Hamlin and Karen Robertson for sharing their scholarship on early modern colonialism with me. I am grateful to Jonathan Goldberg for his judicious advice on revising chapter 3, which appeared in ELH 59 (1992), and to Jennifer Summit for her skillful and sensitive editorial assistance. My gratitude, likewise, to editors at Cambridge, Josie Dixon, Linda Bree, and Chris Lyall Grant, for their excellent work and their enormous patience with me. The completion of my work owed much to a Killifer dissertation fellowship at Stanford University and two Summer Faculty Fellowships from Indiana University, which helped free up valuable time for writing. In less visible ways the pages of this book bear the traces of several important persons in my life: my first mentor Donald Hedrick, who

xii

Acknowledgments

introduced me to Renaissance Studies and inspired my interest in the field; my reading group from Stanford days - Derede Arthur, Sharona Ben-Tov, Anne Dewey, Rob Michalski, Marianna Papa, and Ming Bao Yue - whose conversations helped me shape a path of scholarship; my brothers and sisters who - because of our common roots and varied professions - stand for my first and ultimate audience to reach. I wish, in particular, to honor Anne Dewey, friend and interlocutor, for the hours we spent reading each other's work. I bequeath all my faults to my husband Jerry, for his good humor and unsinkable faith in my work; and to our son Tien, who brings us joy and enriches our life. But no words could unpack the gifts I received from my mother, who taught me her passion for literature, and my late grandmother, my illiterate first educator.

Introduction

In books eleven and twelve of Albions England (1612), William Warner celebrates Tudor voyagers as builders of England's commercial empire. This celebration is intertwined with a story featuring the medieval traveler Sir John Mandeville as a chivalric knight whose feats abroad win him both fame and the hand of Elenor, cousin of Edward III. Through this double narrative, Mandeville becomes the romantic precursor of Tudor voyagers, especially those who performed "enterprises rare" in service to the "Maiden Empresse," Elizabeth I.1 Warner is politically astute in mixing romance with an imperial vision. After all, as Stephen Orgel points out, Elizabeth's royal image is deeply invested in a chivalric fiction that defines "the essence of knighthood [as] service to a lady."2 Nor is Warner alone in this practice. In The Discovery of Guiana (1595), Sir Walter Ralegh presents himself as Elizabeth's knight traveling with a miniature portrait of his beloved queen and showing it to the natives he encountered. Ralegh saw the Discovery as a means of winning Elizabeth's support for his proposal to colonize Guiana.3 Although Ralegh failed in his purpose, English commercial and colonial motives clearly find expression in the romance themes of chivalric love and adventure in other worlds. The interplay between the romance and colonial discourse, which the writings of Warner and Ralegh illustrate, is the subject of this study. This discursive interplay is especially lively because both popular romances and New World narratives were products of print, and had gained currency within a shared nexus of production and readership. The period did not, for the most part, have a clear-cut division between romance and history.4 Romances were stories about historical figures and events, and English voyagers and colonists were only the most recent makers of history. To be sure, generic distinctions were beginning to emerge in Tudor literary criticism and historiography,5 but the new awareness also prompted self-conscious hybrids such as Albions England. The "intermixing" of the "historicall" and "inventive," as the title page advertises it, enables Warner both to claim the authority of historical truth and to

2


imagine a hero adequate to England's expanding commercial and colonial horizons.6 Indeed, as part of its traditional alliance with travel literature, the romance's popularization of history attests to the period's growing interest in narratives of travel and colonial enterprise in the New World. My focus is on accounts and promotions relating to the early phases of English colonial enterprise in the New World, dating roughly from the last quarter of the sixteenth to the first quarter of the seventeenth centuries. These writings fall under three main areas: piracy and goldhunting in the Spanish Caribbean, attempts at trade with the Indians, and the discovery and early settlement of Virginia. In negotiating between popular romances and colonial narratives, my goal is an analysis that accounts for both the making of English identity in the New World and the reciprocal effects of colonial experience on the English imagination. My approach draws on Tzvetan Todorov's conception of "genres in discourse." For him, "the choice a society makes among all possible codifications of discourse determines what is called its system of genres." In this light, "literary genres, indeed, are nothing but such choices among discursive possibilities, choices that a given society has made conventional." From a structural viewpoint, Todorov hypothesizes that "each type of discourse usually labeled literary has nonliterary 'relatives' that are closer to it than are any other types of literary' discourse."7 Thus while the interplay of genres brings together texts produced in different contexts, historicized readings of these texts allow one to shed light on another, and on the ways generic performances inflect ideological practices. Furthermore, as part of a dialogic process, genres are continually changing even as they are being codified and, as such, address readers and writers both in their imaginative constructions of everyday life and in their sense of agency in the world.8 This transformative dimension of genres underscores the dynamic relationship between texts and their historical contexts. From an historical perspective, both the romance and the travel / colonial narrative occupy the crucial early modern juncture at which the values of a new form of patriarchy converged with the motives of an expansive economy. By the 1570s popular romances registered a new emphasis on marriage. In these "marriage-minded" romances, a thematic shift has taken place from the fruitless dalliance of courtly lovers and the endless quests of chivalric knights to marriage as a productive closure to love's labor. The lover is now a prospective husband, and assumes (or compares himself to) the role of knight, merchant, or husbandman who ventures in hopes of spoils, profits, or harvest. This productivity char-

Introduction

3

acterizes what Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin see as a "performative masculinity," in their words "a recognizably modern model of masculine identity and male dominance" within an emergent form of patriarchy, one based on "narratives of individual performance" as distinct from an older form that was validated by "genealogical narratives."9 The result is a "nascent bourgeois" appropriation of courtly romance which appeals to the social aspirations of readers by presenting a hero who rises socially through marriage and personal enterprise. Not surprisingly, the term "adventure," associated in medieval romances with chivalric quests, acquired in early modern usage the specific sense of a commercial venture.10 As England's commercial horizon expands overseas, the hero of romance typically rejects the court as a place of idle love and frustrated ambition, and embraces adventure as the means to personal fame and gain. In the narrative invention of the New World, the domestic closure that gives husbands mastery of women as property finds analogous expression in promising adventurers the domestication of a rich and feminized land. In my description of a "nascent bourgeois" appropriation of the courtly romance, the term "bourgeois" applies to the textual creation of an ethos for a growing number of persons, largely urban-based, whose social mobility positioned them to negotiate the material changes that came with a developing market economy. My use of the term brings up the long-standing debate on "class" analysis in early modern scholarship, and a brief discussion of the subject is in order. Since Louis B. Wright talked about a middle-class culture in Elizabethan England,11 scholars have questioned the adequacy of the term "class" to the period's diversity of social estates.12 Some even wonder if there was a stable and identifiable social group to speak of from which middle-class ideology might have emerged.13 While such criticism is valid with respect to social formations, "class" remains a useful category of analysis, if only because Elizabethan writers customarily divided English society into three or four principal groups or ranks according to birth, land, money, and education, and individuals actively sought upward mobility based on these criteria.14 More important, a logic of social demarcation was beginning to emerge that went beyond the traditional estates. For example, agents in commercial and colonial enterprises were hardly reducible to "the middling sort," but came from all ranks, including courtiers, merchants, apprentices, servants, and so on, who ventured their wealth and abilities in hopes of economic and social gain. Such a logic, which I have conveniently termed "bourgeois," is most visibly elaborated in the period's marriage-minded romances. Within this imaginary space, social estate specifies the position from which an

4


individual acts and speaks as a social agent, while class pertains to social aspirations, one's identification with an ideal social group. In writing Jack of Newbery (1597), Thomas Deloney, a "balleting silk weaver" by trade, idealizes the clothier John Winchcombe, a figure of domestic and social mastery far exceeding in wealth and status both the author and the historical figure on which it is based. Such textual making of class identity is, in Slavoj Zizek's view, a name without a referent. It gains social currency when readers, in identifying with it, invest it with their own meanings and reproduce those meanings in their daily interactions and through the printing press. A concept of class thus takes on a plenitude of meanings, and these scattered semantic investments in turn acquire the illusive totality and coercive force of an ideology.15 From this perspective, individuals as classed subjects are not merely "interpellated" by ideology in the Althusserian sense but also actively create it. At the same time, it is also clear that figures of mastery such as Jack of Newbery are constructs both of class and of gender. These constructs find cultural and historical grounding in the early modern household, headed by a master whose authority extended both to wife and children and to unmarried servants and apprentices - the latter social inferiors who could aspire, in time, to establish their own households and become masters. As a site of fluidity between gender and class, the household provides a model for a range of social exchanges in which the domestic gender hierarchy comes to underwrite other forms of cultural difference. The effect is to naturalize asymmetrical social relations and thus to sanction the material inequalities implicit in or produced by these relations. Especially in humanist writings, as both Jonathan Goldberg and Lorna Hutson have shown, the household becomes the model and basis for reproducing the ideal state, the embodiment of a powerful ideal of domestic economy that is at once familial and national in its cultural mediation.16 Such mediation has implications that go beyond English society, when inequalities built into the ideal roles of mastery inform the colonial imagination. In this connection, my reading of colonial narratives has benefited from Stephen Greenblatt's focus on the anecdote in travel writings as a symptom of larger cultural and colonialist agendas and from Peter Hulme's interest in specific encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples and the discursive contexts in which colonial ideologies emerge.17 I bring to this conversation a feminist perspective,18 one that attends to the ways gender roles and values are built into genre practices.19 In developing a model of cultural interaction, I find particularly useful the anthropological concept of the "contact zone," which Mary Louise Pratt describes as "the space in which peoples geographically and historically

Introduction

5

separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict."20 The concept keeps us in mind of the active role of indigenous groups or persons in the encounters, even though their words and actions arefilteredthrough European accounts. Pratt's emphasis on "ongoing relations" further points to the cumulative nature of the contact experiences, although, as scholars have noted, European travelers often presumed to interpret and understand indigenous peoples upon initial encounter.21 This presumed knowledge suggests a narrative construction of experience to which the writers apply their own pre-existing cultural categories and assumptions about the New World and its peoples. In analyzing English travel narratives, Annette Kolodny has pointed to rhetorical strategies that gender the land as feminine. Patricia Parker and Louis Montrose have further shown that this rhetorical gendering is informed by political and economic motives.22 I would extend this gendering to the contact experiences of travelers and colonists, and suggest that these experiences are often couched in the familiarizing tropes of the domestic order and naturalizing roles of the husband. These romance constructs enable Englishmen both to inhabit an unfamiliar world and to project a sense of their agency in it. In this way, gender roles are not merely interpretive but generative: they provide a ready-made hierarchy of relations with which explorers and colonists negotiate a broader range of cultural differences. Such negotiation provides in turn a source of the cultural knowledge that shapes ongoing relations and is reshaped by them. We can better understand the process by considering gender roles in the romance and colonial narratives as a medium of exchange between England and America. According to Marx, exchange is made possible through the mediation of value, that "contentless thing" which establishes equivalence among heterogeneous entities. Roles are the specific social forms in which human exchange takes place and value acquires specific content. Both in textual and real-life situations, roles are the articulators of social values; they provide the means by which these values are negotiated in the course of exchange, or translated from one context to another. This formulation allows us to see how gender roles in the English romance, and the social values they articulate, can inform the construction of experience in the colonial narratives. To be sure, at the textual level at least, generative elements are inevitably selective in their framing of experience, and the effect is to occlude its full complexity. Analysis must therefore take into account both the generative and the selective textualization of cultural contacts that translate and appropriate America for domestic consumption.

6


Whether the ideal roles of the husband hold up to the test of experience is, of course, another question, one which the present study poses as the basis for understanding the reciprocal effect of the New World on the English. My reading confirms the record of early failures, a "troubled colonialism," as Jeffrey Knapp calls it, that reflects back on the English sense of nation.23 Specifically, colonial experience rendered in the narratives often contradicts the romance's constructions of mastery, thus raising doubts about Englishmen's identity and motives in America. Colonial promotions, on the other hand, tend to gloss over these doubts, and to present the romance of empire as history in the making. As Mary Fuller has already argued, "if the history of those early decades is about any one thing, it is about the ways in which the failure of voyages and colonies was recuperated by rhetoric, a rhetoric which in some ways even predicted failure."24 By contrast, individual romances, conscious of their own textuality, make unresolved doubts visible in their own fictions. In the process, these texts initiate a reflection on English cultural assumptions, bringing to crisis the contradictions - religious, economic, and political - already present in various ideals of English masculinity. If gender in the romance feeds the colonial imagination, it also functions as a principle of difference, a vehicle of critique, within a colonizing culture. In advancing the argument outlined above, chapter 1 discusses the emergence of the "marriage-minded" romance and maps its points of contact with the colonial narrative. In subsequent chapters, I examine the romance figures of knight, merchant, and husbandman as familiar models with which Englishmen define their identity and action in the New World. The trajectory taken by these masculine roles roughly corresponds to a chronology of plunder (chapter 2), trade (chapters 3, 4, and 5), and settlement (chapters 6 and 7), although such activities are often interrelated. Many an English commercial expedition turned to plunder when a treasure-laden carrack hove into view, and settling involved trade with indigenous tribes, often to provide necessities for basic survival. I should also point out that while contact with Indians provided the primary source of interest, the English also defined themselves in relation to their Spanish precursors in the New World, who served as both models and adversaries in the narratives. Finally, the colonization of Virginia also drew its lessons from Ireland.25 This is the case with the European scramble for gold and other precious metals in America, which fueled the rivalry between England and Spain. While the conquistadores enslaved Indians to mine the metals, beginning in the 1560s English voyagers to the Spanish Caribbean often preyed on Spanish transport ships and settlements. In retaliation, the Spanish subjected captive English pirates to the rigors of the

Introduction

7

Inquisition. For this reason, Anglo-Spanish rivalry in the New World inevitably translated into a rhetoric of Protestant resistance against the tyranny of Catholic Spain. In chapter 2 I analyze this Protestant rhetoric to show how it employs the gender roles of the romance in celebrating pirates like Sir Francis Drake as knights-errant defending the Protestant empire of Elizabeth. Despite the religious cover, however, the tensions between the spiritual and worldly aims of empire presented a problem for the writers of romance. My analysis here focuses on the first two books of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser expresses Protestant unease about the colonial enterprise; and A Margarite of America, in which Thomas Lodge undertakes a veiled critique of empire from a position of Catholic loyalist dissent. While plunder remained lucrative throughout the period, the 1580s saw a growing interest in America as a prospective market for English exports, among which cloth was the most important. Chapter 3 argues that domestic and colonial promotions for the cloth trade are in fact narratives of ideal manhood. In England, the history of cloth is one of a progressive male monopolization of the trade which displaced independent female weavers. Deloney's romance, Jack of Newbery, justifies this male monopoly as man's domestic mastery over women. In accounts of Drake's landing in California, a parallel mastery emerges in the "civilizing" of "savage" Miwoks through the agency of English cloth and religion. Both narratives define a model of commercial mastery through the subordination of other cultural subjects, Englishwomen and Indians, to the rule of the English commonwealth. If the sale of cloth was an expressed goal of colonization, its legality became a concern with the 1607 founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America. Chapter 7 discusses husbandry as not just the material fact of settlement but a georgic ideal of government through cultural reproduction. I trace this ideal in two tropes of husbandry: marriage as an assertion of lawful possession through cultivation of the virgin land, and education as a means of pacification through cultivation of the native soul. Hence the currency of the terms "planting," "planter," and "plantation" for the act, agent, and location of colonial culture. While both tropes operate in Chapman's Memorable Masque to align the cultivation of Indian minds with a royal marriage, the georgic ideal finds symbolic fulfillment in the Christian education of Pocahontas and her marriage to the settler John Rolfe. This propriety of domesticity and domestication is structured through a logic of oppositions. Not surprisingly, therefore, indigenous resistance to colonial education is constructed as an attempted rape both in the fiction of Caliban and in the 1622 Indian uprising in Virginia.

8


In the roles of the English husband outlined above, the humanist ideal of domesticity comes to underwrite a productive civilizing mission beyond English shores. Such productive masculinity implies the presence of an imaginary female body as an open boundary mediating in the exchange between Europe and the New World. My analysis engages two lines of inquiry: William Hamlin's argument that "representations of savagery and civility derived from early attempts at New World ethnographic description played a substantial role in the thinking of early modern Europeans as they meditated upon the meanings of humanity and civilization";26 and feminist scholarship on the gendered economics of the blazon and other figurations of the female body in defining the ways in which such imagination inhabits a range of colonial power relations.27 This focus on the figure of woman is not meant to dismiss the actual rapes of Indian women, however; the English were sufficiently concerned about such shameful conduct to attribute it to the Spanish.28 Nor do I intend to overlook other forms of exploitation within English society that engendered new masters in the name of domesticity. Rather, I would stress how such practices embodied and articulated the ideals of commercial mastery, ideals that find analogous expression in the context of colonial enterprises. In attending to these analogous developments, my analysis necessarily brings together texts that enact diverse generic possibilities in the production of a shared cultural fantasy. These texts may or may not be related by their reference to an exemplary historical event or set of events; such connection may be convenient, but is not a primary concern. Instead, my approach recognizes analogy as a habit of thought in the period's writings - the basis of a generative logic that discovers not merely the meaning of events but, with it, a motivating structure of desire.29 The desire for commercial mastery motivates the production of the consumer (the mastered) in both domestic and colonial contexts. The process entails a form of fetishism, organized around the sale of "trifles" or fashion goods, and expressed in the language of Renaissance magic. As I explain in chapter 4 the trifle is likened to a talisman or "phantasmic bait" that captivates one's fantasy through the eyes, thus enabling the magus (merchant) to produce desire in his subject (consumer). This trope of "magical consumerism," elaborated through the emergent discourses of eros and science, constructs Englishwomen and Indians as consumers within domestic and colonial contexts. The discourses align the Englishmen with both the affective and intellectual knowledge and the detachment that give them power over others.30 "Magical consumerism" points to a more generalized sense in this period of magic as an intersubjective means of ideological mastery. In the romance figure of

Introduction

9

Prospero (chapter 6), or the colonial figure of John Smith, this magic of mastery provides an "anti-conquest" model for the domestication of natives. Although periodically broken by desperate English campaigns (some led by Smith himself) to force Indians into trading their corn, the anti-conquest policy, sustained by the presumed magic of English mastery, lasted in Virginia until the Indian uprising in 1622. In more or less visible ways, the ideals of mastery discussed above inhabit the colonial narratives side by side with details of colonial affairs and current events. Thus the ideals are being articulated even as they are being tested by experience in specific and ongoing contacts. When experience falls short of the ideals, however, English assumptions and motives come into doubt. For instance, the ideal of commercial mastery belies the fact that while the English commodity, cloth, did not sell in Virginia, the Indian trifle, tobacco, was turning the English at home into consumers, into "civil savages," as they were called. Chapter 5 examines the cultural fiction invented to explain these commercial setbacks. In this fiction the figure of woman mediates in the fragile distinction between civilized and savage economies of consumption, between the tobacco trade and cannibalism. This gendered mediation came into practice with the marketing of Virginian tobacco in England, by which planters were "made men," and Englishwomen were exchanged for tobacco when they contracted to be wives in the colony. If the trifle tobacco makes visible the fluidity of the English self, the staple corn reveals a crisis of self-valuation within a colony that seemed, from its early years, unable to organize its priorities for survival. The traditional notion of a fixed social order, already undercut by England's developing market economy, proved totally inadequate to the challenges of a new environment. Nor was the problem helped by the colony's organization as a commercial enterprise and a unit of military defense. Chapter 6 takes up the crisis of self-worth and survival in two colonial episodes. The first is a dispute over provisions during "the starving time," the colony's first winter, that led to the deposing of its first president, Edward Maria Wingfield. The second concerns the factional rivalry arising from opposing policies on the treatment of Indians that led to the wounding of John Smith and his eventual departure. I approach this crisis through the projected inconstancy of Indians who were drawn into the factional rivalry through the trade of corn, and who made the most of their mediating position. Applied to Indians, the term "inconstant" is hardly innocent, especially in view of its traditional uses as a topos of femininity in the romances that encodes an opposing logic of masculinity as a fixed essence. In chapter 6 I juxtapose Shakespeare's self-critical rendering of

10


the trope in Troilus and Cressida, specifically in the heroic posturings in the Greek and Trojan camps, to the rivalry between colonial factions in Virginia. In their analogous and problematic applications to women and Indians, I also trace in each a self-fulfilling prophecy when Cressida and the Algonkian chief Powhatan turn out to be agents in their own rights. As Troilus discovers, a trade-like war fought in the name of woman becomes a system of competitive exchanges in which men's worth is ultimately defined by the inconstant value assigned to women. Likewise Smith, in his war-like trade with the Powhatans and Indian tribes - an activity often accompanied by force and campaigns of terror - finds that he does not fix the price of Indian corn or the value of English manhood. As the trope of inconstancy illustrates, the uses of stereotype mark a critical turn in the interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives. The deployment of a stereotype in a narrative enables one to substitute fantasies about others for critical reflection on one's own construction of meaning. This non-reflection is most pronounced in the colonial promotions, whose aim is to recruit investors. It is often characteristic of colonial narratives, as they purport to be eyewitness accounts or "true reports" of events. By contrast, a romance that foregrounds its own interpretive strategies is more likely to be critical of its stereotypes. The result is to unleash what Homi Bhabha sees as the "ambivalence" of the stereotype, that "by acceding to the wildest fantasies (in the popular sense) of the colonizer, the stereotyped Other reveals something of the 'fantasy' (as desire, defence) of that position of mastery."31 What lies at the heart of inconstancy is Troilus' fear of betrayal by Cressida, whom he has betrayed. The fear of betrayal may likewise be a subtext in some of the colonial narratives treated in the following chapters. For the four mythological heroes most frequently associated with the period's travelers to the New World are Jason, Theseus, Aeneas, and Odysseus: inconstant lovers to the mistresses of their travels because they would be true husbands. Perhaps the most powerful stereotype to emerge from the period's colonial discourse is the figure of the resistant native as rapist - a figure which had since then acquired special resonance within various histories and locations of colonial culture. In its early modern renderings, the stereotype draws on both the romance traditions of the wild man and travel accounts of cannibalistic tribes which, lacking the skills of agriculture, resort to raiding neighboring villages, eating the men, and raping the women. The stereotype explains the civilizing force of husbandry as the basis for an understanding of property and of civilized exchanges such as trade and marriage. This genealogy of the failed savage rapist, which Shakespeare both evokes and challenges in the anagrammatic

Introduction

11

cannibal, provides a context for my analysis of Virginian husbandry in chapter 7. In a play that presents the failed education of a resistant native, Caliban's "mimicry" of his master - to use Bhabha's term undoes the magic of Prospero's mastery. This magic is, after all, nothing more or less than the mastery of a native to which even a shipwrecked sailor like Stephano aspires in his cups. What is perhaps uniquely powerful about Caliban as stereotype is that he confronts popular audiences with their desire for mastery of other people. Significantly, narratives of mastery in the romances and colonial discourse were produced mainly by and for men who aspired to the position of mastery. Writers of romances and colonial narratives were often younger sons or men without inherited title who were inventing for themselves an identity and social agency, including men like Sir Walter Ralegh who had achieved high places in the court. A few were Catholics who advocated colonization because they feared persecution for refusing the oath of allegiance. Among investors, while many were aristocrats of the enterprising type, many more were from the rising classes of commercial wealth. Indeed, among other fund-raising activities, the Virginia Company held lotteries and distributed street ballads to recruit investors from all levels of society, appealing to men and even maidservants with the promise of wealth and eventual independence. If history is, as Foucault envisions it, "the entry of a masked 'other,' " 32 the masks of this history are the narratives of mastery by which English subjects not aligned with traditional positions of power create themselves to inherit the future. Such narratives typically achieve closure and coherence by excluding the historical agency of other cultural subjects. Yet the narratives do not succeed in erasing all the traces of exclusion, and every mask is potentially generative of another. For this reason, a critique of the period's colonial ideology must begin with the "other" texts of history produced from within a colonizing culture, texts which, even as we read them, are already enacting a kind of "translation," gesturing beyond the dominant constructions of experience, to unpack their motives and meanings, even though we cannot undo the effects of history. These perspectives of otherness appear at times in the self-critical romances: in Lodge's religious difference (chapter 2), in Cressida's "bi-fold" authority (chapter 6), or in Caliban, that invention of the outsider within addressing history in the language of romance (chapter 7). Through the respective detours of rhetorical critique, of a self-conscious textual tradition within the romance, of a romance's reflection on its devices, these texts invite us to don our masks as historical agents. This is especially necessary, since indigenous groups have left no written record

12


of their early contacts with colonists, a situation which seems to complete their historical silence. Yet our interpretation of history must engage not simply what is written, but also what is omitted. For we can never speak directly to the dead: they do not hear us and we have never really heard them. But in attending to the interplay between the romances and colonial narratives, I hope that we begin to hear a different reverberation, voices speaking from "non-places" and "spectral moments" that we have also helped to make.33

1

Love's laborers: the busy heroes of romance and empire

In 1573, George Gascoigne's "Adventures of Master F.J.," a tale of courtly adultery between a married lady Elinor and a nobleman F.J., set in an estate in northern England, first appeared in a collection of verses entitled A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Although Gascoigne hoped to gain courtly preferment by his story, it offended influential members of both the court and the clergy, and was suppressed in 1574 amidst charges of libel and immorality. In response, Gascoigne revised the story: he invented an Italian source and setting, removed the offending passages, and moralized the ending. The revised "Adventures" appeared in another collection called The Posies (1575), in a section entitled "Weedes." The story is preceded and thus framed by a poem featuring a certain Green Knight, an unrequited courtly lover who complains of lost labor and, bidding "farewell to Fansie," departs from the court in search of gainful employment abroad. Unfortunately for Gascoigne, this second publication, too, was suppressed in 1576 when a passage unrelated to the story offended yet other courtly personages.1 The suppression of offending works did not entirely remove them from social currency, however. Two decades later, William Warner was to redeem both Elinor's reputation and the Green Knight's fortunes in books eleven and twelve of Albions England (1596). Although Warner does not mention Gascoigne, the parallels in plot and character are too pointed to be merely coincidental. In Warner's story, the "Green Knight" is the disguise assumed at a tournament by Sir John MandeviUe - a courtly and Protestant version of the medieval traveler - who is secretly in love with Elenor, sister of King Edward III. Desire for this unattainable lady drives MandeviUe to leave the court and seek fame and honor throughout the world. His adventures intersect with the exploits of Tudor explorers, traders, pirates, and colonists - the builders of England's commercial empire who venture abroad in service to their lady, Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile Elenor, who has initially fallen in love with the Green Knight, discovers his true identity, and travels in search of MandeviUe. Their meeting in Rome, the papist den of iniquity, casts 13

14


doubts on her virtue, but these doubts are soon cleared and the lovers happily wed. Warner's moral for the story is that "love, right-labourd, wins a queen" (268),2 an apt reply to the complaint of Gascoigne's Green Knight. Because Gascoigne's satire on courtly adultery forms the pretext for Warner's recuperation of courtly values through marriage, Warner's revision of Gascoigne provides a self-conscious index to a generic shift within the romance towards the domestication of courtly love. If genres are, as Fredric Jameson claims, "social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact,"3 then it remains for us to examine the ways in which the generic shift outlined above served the needs and shaped the desires of writers and readers. In examining this generic shift, I shall argue that the goal of domestic closure in these works motivates a redefinition of love's labor from the quests of chivalric knights, which are potentially endless and without hope of reward from the lady, to marriage as a productive end to courtship. This emphasis on marriage points to the period's ideological reinforcement of patriarchy, a process led by Christian humanists and Protestant preachers, with the aid of the printing press.4 Beyond the emphasis on family values, the productive goal of love's labor accommodates the interests of a developing capitalist economy. As historians observe, marriage was perceived in this period as "a highly privileged status," and couples typically married only when they had accumulated the financial resources to keep an independent household. The beginning of the sixteenth century saw the development of "tighter control over secret betrothals and other forms of consent made in opposition to parents or parish." By the end of the century, there was in place "what amounted to class policy aimed at limiting access to marriage by the poor," often by limiting the financial contribution of wedding guests to the wedding, or by the minister's refusal "to read the banns or conduct marriages between poor people who might burden the poor rates."5 The convergence of patriarchal and capitalist motives in the marriageminded romances provides the ideological basis for an affective valuation of love. Specifically, these works inscribe within the heterosexual relationship the presumed inequality of the capitalist exchange. The move allows the antagonism and uncertainties of commercial competition to be displaced into the domestic arena and stabilized by the patriarchal gender hierarchy. The result is a "commerce" between the sexes in which domestic mastery serves the interests of masculine social success, and the sexual contract is made to underwrite the social contract. The emergence of a "capitalist structure of desire" in the popular romances rewrites

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15

desire in the courtly romance, first of all, by taking it beyond the court. As England's commercial horizon expands, upward mobility in the marriage-minded romance is channeled abroad. This outward direction for social aspirations redefines courtly romance in two ways. First, it encodes the theme of mobility with a gendered division between female error, a straying beyond domestic boundaries, and male errancy, a heroic and productive quest. Second, it rescripts the anti-courtly theme into a narrative dialectic in which the hero rejects the court as a place of idle pleasure and frustrated ambition, embracing adventure as the means to personal fame and gain. Whether or not his adventure ultimately returns him to the court - in the case of Warner's Mandeville it does - the hero recuperates his fortunes through marriage. This detour of ambition constitutes a new domestic masculinity, domestic in its assuming of familial and national interests, that propels him into an overseas arena of commercial and colonial action. I Much has been written on marriage and patriarchal family values in Elizabethan literature.6 In focusing on a redefinition of love's labor in the courtly romance, I hope to analyze the economic and cultural motives underlying this generic change. In this context, even anti-courtly fiction such as Gascoigne's "Adventures" can be seen as a negative example that validates the norm of marriage. The same can be said of George Pettie's A Petite Pallace of Fettle His Pleasure (1576). Of the twelve stories in this collection, ten deal with the passions and transgressions that ruin a couple's or a family's chances at happiness. Negative example is reinforced by positive in John Grange's The Golden Aphroditis (1577), "a pretie poeticall Pamphlet, shewing paganically, as well the lawful copulacion betweene Vulcane and Venus, as the vnlawfull combat between hir and Mars."1 This logic of opposition - defining the lawful through the unlawful - is further temporalized into a narrative of moral development in two works by Lyly. In Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and his England (1580), Philautus has first to suffer at the hands of a fickle lady before learning to seek happiness in virtuous courtship and marriage. Lyly's themes of reformed courtship and chaste marriage find imitation in Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1592), subtitled Euphues his Golden Legacie. In Lodge's Euphues Shadowe (1592), the death of a lovelorn knight leads a repentant cruel lady to commit suicide, a double tragedy from which two central characters learn to cherish each other in marriage. Even in a romance as little given to nuptial endings as The

16


Faerie Queene (1590-96), the heroines wander in search of their prospective husbands, and the knights undertake quests in hopes of winning fair ladies. Marriage is still the norm in racy stories like Barnabe Riche's "Of Apolonius and Silla," in which it serves as a moral expedient for one couple whose love affair results in pregnancy. Suffice it to say that by the 1590s, the nuptial ending had become so conventional that playwrights like Shakespeare could play on it in their romantic comedies. The brief survey above is by no means exhaustive, but it suggests the range of possibilities Elizabethan writers explore in redefining courtly love. The Renaissance did not, of course, invent courtly adultery or romantic love; both had a long history in medieval literature.8 For many of its features, the marriage-minded romance draws on established traditions: the poetry of Ovid and Catullus for its open sexuality; the fabliau and the novella traditions of Boccacio and Bandello for its love intrigues and misogyny (the ecclesiastical tradition as well for the latter); the Roman comedy of Terrence and Plautus for its nuptial ending; and the Greek romance of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus for its faithful lovers, exile, and providential reversal of fortunes. Yet the impulse for redefining love's labor comes from the period's humanist ideal of domesticity - or "mental husbandry," as Lorna Hutson calls it - one founded on a wife's chastity and obedience to her husband as the basis for the social order. Even as the relationship between husband and wife is likened to that between a king and his subject, so the family provided the model and material basis for reproducing the ideal state.9 Thus Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, translated into English in 1561, presents the domestication of courtly love. In this work, the lady is instructed not to dally with suitors but to marry should she happen to fall in love with one of them, and the model of married chastity is Elizabeth Gonzaga, who remains chaste married to the crippled and impotent Duke of Urbino.10 In Erasmus' colloquies on marriage and education, read as part of the English grammar school curriculum, the domestic ideal is generalized to all women. The humanist ideal of domesticity, reinforced by Protestant family values, was popularized through the churches and schools - and unofficially, by the 1570s, through an "emerging female literature." As Suzanne Hull explains, this corpus, written for and directed to women, consists of "practical guides, recreational literature, devotional works, and books relating to the controversy over the female sex." Produced by professional writers who were themselves products of a humanist education, these works communicated not only the roles and duties proper to women as domestic creatures but, more important, the idea that as the subservient sex "women took instructions from men."11 As part of this

Love's laborers

17

"female literature" the marriage-minded romance served as a tool albeit unrecognized - for educating readers into domesticity. This was the case even though romances and fiction in general frequently came under attack from humanist educators and religious writers as immoral and thus subversive to the family values they advocated. The morality of literary works should not be confused with their power to mediate social attitudes and relations. Although relations of power and gender are often reinforced through moralization, this is not the only means of doing so. Nor did the attacks hurt the popularity of these works.12 Rather, their continued currency suggests the public's receptiveness to their narrative and marketing strategies, which function more to naturalize than to moralize the patriarchal gender hierarchy. As Hull notes, romance writers were first to construct a female audience within their text as the subject of persuasion, the recipient of patriarchal instruction by formally addressing their works to "ladies" or "gentlewomen" in titles or dedications. The practice, which began in 1576 with Pettie's Petite Pallace of Pleasure, was soon adopted by "some of the most popular authors, such as Lyly, Rich, Lodge, Greene, and Sidney."13 In these dedications, authors typically claim that their works were meant solely to please and / or to instruct women, and many writers even phrase their address in terms of courtship. In the vein of the playful courtly lover, Lyly in Euphues and his England (1580) envisions copies of his book competing for attention with ladies' lapdogs. Barnabe Riche in his Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581) apologizes for his lack of skill as a lover, having only recently defected from the camp of Mars to the church of Venus. Robert Greene, whom Nashe calls "the ladies' Homer," promises in Mamilia (1593) to vindicate women's name and virtues. Even Lodge claims to have written A Margarite of America (1596), a deeply misogynistic romance of courtly intrigue and sensational violence, "for Ladies delight, and Ladies honour." All such claims of a special relationship between authors and their female readers are part of a self-conscious fiction fervently invoked, and inevitably denied when authors acknowledge their male readers, implicitly or explicitly, in the same or separate dedications. The commercial motive for such double dealing is quite obvious. Romance writers were eager to capitalize on the growing number of women with the leisure and literacy to read books while holding on to their traditional male readership. More important, as Juliet Fleming points out, the pose of the "ladies' man" harbored deep economic frustration and misogynist resentment, being adopted by writers disappointed in their courtly ambitions who marketed their work as "trifles" to please ladies. In the prefaces to the Petite Pallace, for example, Pettie invents an elaborate

18


fiction in which the author's "friend" has betrayed his trust by turning over his tales for publication - for the love of ladies. The "printer" then claims to have "gelded" the tales to render them suitable for female readers. Fleming sees Pettie's invention as paradigmatic of "the early English printed text [which] is often structured as a dirty joke, exchanged between men across the evoked but absent figure of a woman." 14 In its blatant duplicity, such double dealing in effect encodes differential modes of participation for male and female readers. The practice functions to enclose women as "captive audience" within the scene of story-telling while enlisting men as conspiratorial "outside observers." Barnabe Riche engages just such a strategy in Farewell to Militarie Profession. Having courted his female audience, Riche turns to "the right Noble Souldiers, both of Englande and Irelande," dismissing his "lovyng histories" as time-serving devices written to "please gentlewomen," and confessing that in better times he would have written martial histories for his fellows at arms. 15 A common excuse by which writers deflected criticism of their works as immoral, the error of romance was a recognized motif in Renaissance criticism and literary practice.16 Riche's confession enables him to blame the "error" of his writing on female readers, thereby maintaining his bond with male readers and his implied superiority within the gender hierarchy. The gendering of error extends to Riche's characters. In "Of Apolonius and Silla," the narrator Riche defines "errour" as that "which maketh us . . . many tymes to straie from that is right and reason," and love as the quintessential error: for the lover is so estranged from that is right, and wandreth so wide from the boundes of reason, that he is not able to deeme white from blacke, good from badde, vertue from vice; but only led by the apetite of his owne affections, and groundyng them on the foolishnesse of his owne fancies, will so settle his likyng on such a one, as either by desert or unworthinesse will merite rather to be loathed then loved. (67) The motif of error as "straying" (from the Latin errare, to wander) suggests a realm of reason and propriety that lovers transgress through their passions and desires. Although the generic pronoun "he" points to the error of love as a universal human condition, this condition takes on a distinct gender when the narrator promises "right curteous gentilwomen" that "you shall see Dame Errour so plaie her parte with a leishe of lovers, a male and twoo femalles, as shall woorke a wonder to your wise judgement" (68). Not only are the source and receivers of error female, but the story focuses exclusively on the errors of female characters: Silla who, "outraged with the extreamitie of her passion," leaves home to follow her beloved (70), and Juliana, who "yeeldeth herself to

Love's laborers

19

her owne desires" (80), and whose pregnancy as a result requires an expedient marriage. Riche's gendering of error not only excuses his writing of romance but provides a natural basis for the double standard in sexual conduct so common in marriage-minded romances. Whether wandering abroad or in their own homes, women are by nature prone to error, and it is towards a masculine domestication of this female nature that the goal of marriage motivates the narrative. In this light, the gendering of error directly implicates the romance theme of errancy. Whereas the knight may wander at will in his quest for fame and honor, the lady travels at considerable risk to her virtue and her good name. In Book I of The Faerie Queene, the defeat of the female monster Errour initiates the Redcrosse Knight into his spiritual quest. Yet he confuses the chaste Una, his lady and companion in adventure, with the whorish Duessa. If the confusion involves a perceptual error on the part of the Redcrosse Knight (one of many for that matter), it only illustrates what the marriage-minded romance generally assumes: the dominance of a patriarchal male perspective which both equates female errancy with an erring female sexuality and requires its domestication by male sexual prowess in marriage. Domestic closure is the lot of Una even though the Redcrosse Knight soon leaves her to undertake further quests on behalf of the Faerie Queene. The association of female mobility with female sexuality, as Patricia Parker has shown, was as much concerned with property as with propriety within the economy of the household, and these concerns were intensified by the shift towards privatization that the household was undergoing in early modern England. Where the household constitutes the primary nexus of patrilineal property relations, a wife's sexuality in her fertile years poses the threat of adultery and, with it, the misappropriation of property and inheritance. Hence the motive to confine female sexuality within the increasingly privatized space of the household, a motive fully expressed in the period's conduct books and other popular literatures directed to the propertied classes.17 Within this context, domestic closure in the romance represents a narrative attempt to preempt the adulterous potential of female sexuality by putting the virgin through her wanderings so that her errant sexuality ends rather than begins with marriage. The romance thus transforms patriarchal anxieties into a narrative of masculine wish-fulfillment. Such wish-fulfillment is, moreover, grounded in the period's legal and economic practice. According to Tudor law, a man acquires through marriage legal control over his wife's property and business decisions. This explains why in the romances the courtship of a prospective husband is often compared to the labor of the soldier, merchant, or

20


husbandman, who is entitled to his spoils, his profits, and his harvest. In Pettie's "Amphiaraus and Eriphile," the shy suitor, Don Infortunio, uses all three terms of comparison to talk himself into courting the widow Eriphile: "Tush," saith he, "the merchant often flieth the seas, though not sure to return with gain; the soldier often ventureth his body in the field, though not sure of booty; the husbandman still tilleth the ground, though not certain to save his seed: but what yet hope of good hap carrieth all these to their enterprises; and why should not the same hope work the same effect with me? Yes, nothing venture nothing have! I will pursue my purpose whatsoever come of it!"18

Like any commercial venture, love's labor is speculative. Infortunio's name suggests he will lose his labor; nevertheless his speech reveals what lovers may expect: that the fortunate man will possess his lady, just as successful men of trade will realize returns on their investment. The equation of sexual possession with property shows how narrative fiction and legal prescription converge in the redefinition of love's labor. In turning from property to propriety, we will find that chastity, too, was in this period a legal concept engendered by marriage. Defined as "purity from unlawful sexual intercourse" (OED), the concept of married chastity for women protects a husband's exclusive sexual rights to his wife.19 In Pettie's "Sinorix and Camma," the virtuous wife calls her would-be seducer a "pelting merchant venturer," and the narrator warns that "love towards the married is ever without law" (I: 27, 48). The term "merchant adventurers" generally referred in this period to members of trading guilds licensed with exclusive commercial privileges.20 By analogy, marriage entitles the husband to membership in a trade club from which the lover is excluded as interloper. At the same time, however, the analogy of marriage to protected trade also shows the extent to which commercial practices posed a threat to patriarchal property relations. Nor would licensed trade be any less formidable than commerce in general, if we consider the public outcry against monopolies that had arisen by the turn of the century. A case in point is the Merchants Adventurers, a monopoly (as distinct from the generic name for licensed traders) whose public image John Wheeler tried to promote in A Treatise of Commerce (1601). Wheeler describes commerce as a natural human activity which encompasses all sorts of social relationships: For there is nothing in the world so ordinary and natural unto men, as to contract, truck, merchandise, and traffic one with another, so that it is almost unpossible for three persons to converse together two hours, but they will fall into talk of one bargain or another, chopping, changing, or some other kind of contract. Children, as soon as ever their tongues are at liberty, do season their

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sport with some merchandise or other . . . The Prince with his subjects, the master with his servants, one friend and acquaintance with another, the captain with his soldiers, the husband with his wife, women with and among themselves, and in a word, all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth after marts, markets, and merchandising.21

Although the term "commerce" almost always has a broader range of meanings in early modern usage than it does now, Wheeler's portrayal of individuals from all walks of life "chopping and changing" reflects what Lawrence Stone has termed the "commercialization of social relationships" that attended England's development of a market-oriented economy.22 Wheeler appeals to universal human nature and aims specifically to allay fears about commercial exchanges, but the very equation of "exchange" with "change" suggests uncertain outcomes against which there can be no safeguard. Indeed, for many of his contemporaries, the period's economic and social changes were far from natural or reassuring. As Jean-Christophe Agnew explains, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marked a crucial moment in England's developing capitalist economy, when "public marketplaces yielded primacy to the market network," and exchange within localized boundaries was increasingly overtaken by a "new boundless and silent trade." Both the shifting social relations and the fluidity of monied exchange created the perception of a "Protean social world" in which "the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency, and reciprocity in commodity transactions" all came into question. This "problematic of exchange" draws attention to the social antagonism already implicit in market exchange, in which the profit motive presumes gain for one trading party at the expense of loss to the other. For Agnew, "the professional theater of the English Renaissance became in effect a 'physiognomic' metaphor for the mobile and polymorphous features of the market." In exploring the questions of representation, the theatre engaged the problematic of exchange both in miming new social relations and in improvising a new social contract with its audience.23 In extending his argument, I would point out that the problematic of exchange is likewise explored in the period's marriage-minded romances, many of which turn out to be stage plays or sources for them. This exploration is made possible through the genre's cultivation of the "commerce" between the sexes, most obviously seen in numerous references to the love match as a "mart" or "market." Commercial motives and romantic love are not, as Stone claims, mutually exclusive; rather, the fluidity of these cultural categories underscores the extent to which they are mutually defining.24 In analyzing the commercial en-

22


coding of eros, then, I am interested in how market anxieties - implied antagonism and presumptive loss - are managed by being displaced onto domestic relations. For it is through such displacement that patriarchal values accommodate capitalist interests, and heterosexual affect comes into valuation amid a world of competitive exchanges. If the romance creates a domestic space of otium, and it does to an extent, this space cooperates with a commercial space of negotium. The generic concerns and strategies discussed above are fully visible in The Merchant of Venice. Set in domestic Belmont and commercial Venice, the play presents the making of a marriage as a series of social exchanges in which patriarchal and capitalist motives converge. The world of Belmont, as Lynda Boose points out, is presented as a "mythic and fictive space . . . outside of and prior to the [drama's] fiction," both transcending the negotiations and "restructuring] . . . the terms of consent" in the Venetian world. 25 Boose's description captures the symbolic valence of Belmont as a space of romance which has always been the possession of a dead father, a father whose very absence makes present, through his will, the workings of patriarchy. Yet I would suggest that, in the unfolding action, Belmont does not so much restructure the contractual relations of commercial Venice as adapt them to the will of the dead father. In this way, the adjustment enables a patriarchal system to continue to operate through its complicity with the developing economic and social institutions of capitalism.26 This complicity explains why the marriage contract entails the unlikely union of a patrimony on the one hand and usury on the other, with male friendship serving as go-between. The marriage of Portia involves, first of all, a "lott'ry" or riddle contest in which her dead father chooses his future son-in-law. The contest ensures that the marriage will not be a traditional, endogamous arrangement which preserves class lines, but one which brings into the estate of Belmont the most enterprising of suitors. 27 As it turns out, the patriarchal exchange is fully informed by the logic of capitalist investment, a logic epitomized both in the competitive risk-taking of the lottery and, as Lars Engle suggests, in the solution to the riddle. Of the three caskets, "only the lead casket, with its injunction to give and hazard, stands for the dynamic of exchange." By contrast, the inscriptions on the gold and silver caskets promise the suitor respectively "what many men desire" and "as much as he deserves," neither of which involves capitalist exchange (2.7.5, 7). 28 Indeed, Bassanio can be said to fulfill the capitalist logic to the utmost by hazarding on borrowed money. Bassanio's loan, furnished by Shylock with Antonio as "surety," introduces into the patriarchal bond two other forms of exchange - usury and male friendship.

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Significantly, all three exchanges operate in a conceptual framework which closely maps commercial interest with procreation, and the effect is to bring out the contradictory purposes underlying these transactions. As winner of the marriage lottery, Bassanio acquires sole "int'rest" in Belmont and exclusive rights to reproduce his line of inheritance, the losers being sworn to give up sex forever (3.2.221).29 The patriarchal bond thus guarantees both economic and sexual privileges for the chosen son-in-law. At the same time, however, both these aspects of patriarchal inheritance are vulnerable to diversion through usury and male friendship. If the negotiations in Venice initially help to finance Bassanio's courtship, they turn out to hinder his marriage to Portia. The threat usury poses to patriarchal inheritance is economic, although presented in terms of sexual reproduction. In his defense of the practice as an indirect form of interest (1.3.72-73), Shylock compares usury to Jacob's appropriation of lambs from the flock he tends for his uncle and father-in-law, Laban. The biblical story concerns a contract by which Jacob obtains the wages Laban tries to withhold from him; the contract allows for a trick which, over time, enriches Jacob and impoverishes Laban. Shylock thus sees himself as the son-in-law who takes his share of wealth by indirect means, in contrast to Bassanio who inherits directly. From the perspective of landed wealth, however, the practice of usury diverts the stock - in Laban's case, livestock - of patriarchal inheritance. Joan Ozark Holmer has come across a contemporary text which compares the usurer to Laban; for her, the play is ironic towards Shylock in his identification with the implied victim Jacob.30 I would suggest the irony is more complicated, and that it implicates Venetian society and its banking system in which the Jew is only an agent. What Shylock sees in Jacob is his own skill at usurious contracts. But the fact that Shylock's wife is Leah and not Rachel suggests he is, more than he realizes, the exploited rather than the cunning Jacob. For Leah is the wife given to Jacob when he was laboring without profit, while Rachel is the wife of his desire, purchased with his financial success. It is especially telling that Shylock should reveal his wife's name at a moment when he discovers what little control he has over his property. Shylock's plight would hardly dispel the threat he poses as usurer to Venetian society, and to a system hefiguresas the exploitive Laban. On the other hand, the threat that male friendship poses to patriarchal inheritance is erotic, albeit obscured by Antonio's opposition of friendship to usury in his challenge to Shylock: "when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?" (1.3.129-30). The remark seems to reject commercial interest as the impossible offspring of barren metal, if we confine the meaning of metal literally to the substance from which

24


currency is coined. But the remark has a different import if we recall the figurative sense of metal which the OED defines as "the 'stuff of which a man is made, with reference to character."31 In this sense, Antonio's statement could also be construed as a claim that friendship does not take a breeding, by virtue of (for) barren mettle, from (of) his friend. The breeding of barren metal thus refers, not to usury, but to the erotic side of male friendship, an unproductive sexuality, from the perspective of patriarchal inheritance, which dissipates the lineage. Antonio suggests as much in his self-image as "a tainted wether of the flock" (4.1.114). That usury should present an overt, and friendship a hidden, threat to patriarchal inheritance can be explained in terms of the period's cultural stereotypes. On the one hand, friendship was idealized as the equal exchange between "bosom lovers" based on a "like proportion / Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit" (3.4.14-15). On the other hand, in early modern Europe the Jew as usurer was the fetish for what was most threatening about capitalist exchange, an exchange between presumed equals which issues in inequality.32 But the play also unsettles these stereotypes by showing that usury extends, beyond commercial practice, to affective relationships, to the affective use individuals make of one another. In this sense, both Shylock's bond and Antonio's friendship will take a toll on Bassanio's marriage. Portia's famous courtroom line, "Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?" (4.1.172), pointedly suggests the difficulty of differentiating the two - at least from the standpoint of her domestic interest. To set up an operational definition for affective usury, let us turn to the moment in the play when Shylock, in lending money to Bassanio, holds Antonio to a "merry bond" exacting in its forfeit a legal indulgence in violence. Affect enters into the logic of usury when Shylock substitutes emotional satisfaction for commercial interest. Shylock's bond sets in motion a chain of affective usury which develops alongside the financial. In binding his body to Shylock, Antonio binds Bassanio to himself in an emotional debt, one which comes due when the loan defaults and Shylock demands his bond. Antonio would pay his friend's financial debt, "pay it instantly with all my heart," if it ensures his place in Bassanio's heart. Hence Antonio's parting request to his friend, when execution seems certain, to "bid [Portia] be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love" (4.1.279; 274-75). These words draw from Bassanio the response that he would sacrifice all, including his wife, for his friend's life. Whether or not the response is exaggerated by the extremity of the moment, it reveals Antonio's claim on Bassanio's affections. Significantly, Bassanio's emotional debt is anticipated by Portia as the barrier to their nuptial consummation. Thus while hastening to wed, she defers

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the marriage bed until the debt is settled, "for never shall [Bassanio] lie by Portia's side / With an unquiet soul" (3.2.305-06). Portia's settling of her husband's debt requires nothing short of affective usury itself. In defeating Shylock, Portia disguised as the doctor renders a legal service for which she refuses financial payment, obtaining from Bassanio instead an object of affective value, the ring which solemnized their marriage. When the ring reappears in Portia's possession as "evidence" of marital infidelity on both sides, Antonio, at whose urging Bassanio gave away the ring, is implicated as "th' unhappy subject of these quarrels" (5.1.238). As the cause of domestic crisis - a crisis arranged and staged by Portia - Antonio is made to guarantee her husband'sfidelityin the domestic contract that follows: ANTONIO. I

once did lend my body for his wealth, Which, but for him that had your husband's ring, Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forefeit, that your lord Will never more break faith advisedly.

(5.1.249-53)

Whereas Antonio was bound to Shylock before by the flesh, he is now bound to Portia in the soul. Antonio's pledge not only subordinates friendship to marriage but, given his potential to disrupt Portia's erotic fulfillment, amounts to an exclusion of homosexual intimacy which establishes the primacy of heterosexual love in marriage. Undertaken in the name of spiritual transcendence, the pledge marks an irreversible turn in the elaboration of patriarchal morality.33 As ring-bearer in the new domestic contract, Antonio receives in exchange news of the safe return of his argosies and merchandise. His commercial vicissitudes throughout the play can now be seen as an extended Petrarchan conceit in which the lover's ship/soul finds shelter, alas, at the wrong port. Considering the affective satisfaction Portia extracts from Antonio, in retrospect we have to agree that, in refusing money for his delivery, "[her] mind was never yet more mercenary" (4.1.416). Portia's ring trick has been seen as a female challenge to the male bonding that underlies a patriarchal sex-gender system.34 But insofar as such bonding threatens patriarchal marriage and inheritance, her challenge ultimately serves the interest of the system. Indeed, the marriage contract exacts a personal cost on Portia herself. To keep a husband faithful, she relinquishes her role in the male-dominated world of commerce, her doctor-self communion with which constitutes, by her own definition, marital treason. In addition to the exclusion of homosocial intimacy, marital fidelity is founded on the wife's denial of her own ability to practice the masculine skills of law and finance, her potential to rival her husband in the

26


heterosexual exchange. She is once again the "unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed," whose place is to receive instruction from her husband "as from her lord, her governor, her king" (3.2.159, 165). In this light, the ring trick enacts the usurious logic by which heterosexual love acquires affective meanings or values from individuals who are thereby excluded from their enjoyment.35 This double process of use and exclusion informs what one critic calls the pervasive condition of alienation in the play's world.36 For if commercial usury deals in alienable metal or money, affective usury deals in human mettle, skills and affects the alienation of which constitutes self-loss. In this light, the play thematizes patriarchal marriage as a series of usurious contracts which binds individuals to their own exploitation. It is no accident that Shylock, who supplies both the logic and the financial resource to affective usury, is also the play's overt "alien" (4.1.361). While his status as an alien legally barred from owning land conditions his practice of usury, his unlanded wealth excludes him from participation in the patriarchal exchange. Jessica's elopement with his treasures exposes him as a father powerless either to command his daughter's obedience or to choose his son-in-law. His alienation is complete when the maiden ring given him by Leah is exchanged for a monkey by his daughter. Once a signifier of Shylock's unadulterated possession of a wife, Leah's ring is now set adrift in the commerce that his own practice enables, never to return - unlike Portia's ring - with renewed bonds of domestic closure. Shylock's alienation thus confirms by contrast the workings of patriarchal authority, the will of Portia's dead father who bequeaths not just an inheritance but a social prescription. This social prescription can now be formulated as a patriarchal cooptation of the capitalist logic of usury. Specifically, the play shows how the usurious logic, identified as a source of homosocial violence in the commercial world, is adopted in the domestic arena as a means of patriarchal regulation, a control over homosocial intimacy. In the process, the commercial antagonism among men is absorbed into the domestic tensions between the sexes. In playing out this patriarchal prescription, the most deeply complicitous agent is Portia herself, who assumes not only the voice of the father in the lottery at Belmont but also the voice of the law in the Venetian court. Through her legal and domestic victories, Portia replaces Shylock as the figure of coercion, and the domestic contract she imposes on Antonio and Bassanio opens up tensions not only between wife and husband, but also between the wife and the male friend. In this light, the play provides no clear winners except the logic of affective usury itself, which plays men and women against each other in the interest of patriarchal marriage and inheritance.

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27

The displacement of antagonism from the commercial to the domestic arena marks the convergence of capitalist and patriarchal motives in the romance. If in presenting the domestic contract as a site of unresolved tensions, The Merchant of Venice registers its ambivalence at this convergence, other romances are less resistant and more inclined to accommodate these tensions within the Petrarchan trope of "loving combat" or "warring love." Not only is courtship conducted in the language of commerce in these romances, but the presumed inequality of capitalist exchange is itself inscribed into the heterosexual relationship. Through a narrative logic that both draws on and reinforces the inequality of the gender hierarchy, the uncertainties men face in commercial competition is stabilized by the domestic exchange. In Pettie's "Germanicus and Agrippina," Germanicus tells his beloved Agrippina that marriage is, compared to the single life, a "trade of life more commendable in the world, more honourable amongst all men, and more acceptable in the sight of God" (I. 81). What this "trade" involves is the pleasure of erotic exchanges which reproduces the family, whereby they [fathers] plainly shew that the cause why they begot them [children] with pleasure, and bring them up with pain, is to have them enter into that trade of life, wherein not only themselves may live happily abounding in all pleasure, but also by the fertile fruit of their body, make their mortal parents immortal. . . (I. 85) Germanicus not only invokes Jovinian's dictum on the procreative purpose of marriage, 37 but also rewrites it. As his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that in the erotic, as in market exchange, one partner's gain presumes the other's loss. In the marriage, the woman assumes the burden of "presumptive loss" in the loss of her virginity. But the loss is only temporary, or rather, a kind of investment to be recuperated through future increase, the birth of an offspring. Thus he exhorts Agrippina to observe her own mother, "follow her example, and make no conscience to lose that which she herself hath lost, which, except she had lost, we had lost so rare a jewel as your seemly self are" (I. 86).38 Germanicus' persuasion illustrates the gender inequality built into the erotic exchange, an inequality naturalized by the reproductive cycle and authorized by parental example. The suitor's adoption of parental authority sets up for a moment of narrative irony when Agrippina's father, Octavian, counsels against the marriage, revealing a seam in this narrative of domesticity. In Greene's Mamillia, the inequality remains even when recognized, implying that women may choose whether or not to engage in, but not the terms of, the exchange. Mamillia takes the only choice open to virtuous women when she says, "I doe not meane to

28


chaunge virginitie with marriage, for it would be too hard a bargaine." 39 In his tale of Mandeville and Elenor, Warner goes so far as to debase the women's side of the "bargain" in relation to the men's. As the heroine's confidant Dorcas reasons, women should marry young, when they "haue that [which] may delight." A woman's beauty is not only perishable, but vulnerable to competition in the marriage market: "Admit we bring them [men] Portions great, and beautie sought of Many, / Alas, what bring we one that might not els haue hap't to any?" (Albions England 296-97). Presented as the "female" point of view, the argument places the real choice in the heterosexual exchange squarely in the hands of men. II The masculine advantage in the heterosexual exchange provides a formula for the hero's social rise through marriage, often within a courtly setting, whether or not the court sustains his rise. In Pettie's version of Roman history, for example, Germanicus is "a young gentleman of small living, of the kin, and in the court of Octavian" who marries the emperor's daughter to the envy of courtiers (I: 71). The story makes clear that he earns his position through imperial conquests and that he is brought down by the envy of courtiers, his achievements winning the emperor's favor and thereby Tiberius' deadly hatred. Such envy toward a latecomer indicates Petty's own frustration with an aging Elizabethan court unable to accommodate a younger generation of aspirants. As a soldier who achieves honor outside of the court, the anticourtly Germanicus speaks especially to younger sons among readers for whom soldiering offers a respectable living - one which Pettie, himself a younger son, adopted. What emerges is a domestic masculinity which, grounded in the family, reaches beyond the court to the defense of the nation. Indeed, even romance writers not inclined to the military profession were deeply invested in the double sense of domestic masculinity. A particularly interesting case is John Lyly, a scholar from a clerical family who was actively seeking courtly patronage when he wrote his Euphues romances. Elsewhere I have analyzed how fully euphuism, the prose style made fashionable by Lyly in these works, integrates a rhetoric of affective commerce into the courtly conversation. I have argued that this affective calculus enacts the epistemological dilemmas Lyly confronts in negotiating between courtly patronage and the literary market. 40 Lyly's marketview of the self is integral to his invention of domestic masculinity, with its appeal to national sentiments. This appeal is apparent in the contrast between the anti-courtly Anatomy of Wit, set in Naples, and the praise of

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Elizabeth's court in Euphues and His England. Despite its exemplary virtue and domesticity, however, Elizabeth's court is no refuge for Lyly's protagonists. Both are, after all, quintessential outsiders. While Euphues returns to his native Athens to pursue affairs of state, the Neapolitan Philautus marries a lady of Elizabeth's court but prefers life in the country. Lyly was satirized in his own day for his euphuistic style, but the popularity of his romances41 suggests that the court served as a symbolic referent for the public's social aspirations, even though most people would not expect to find employment there. In Tom a Lincoln, Richard Johnson renders this symbolic twist in a narrative of bastardy, an accident of "history" woven into English national mythology. Part I (1599) presents Tom as the bastard of King Arthur raised by a commoner. In his travels, Tom fathers a bastard upon Caelia, Maiden Queen of Fairyland, an unmistakable reference to Elizabeth I. In Part II (1607?), Arthur's public acknowledgment of his son unleashes a string of murders in the court: Tom's mother by a jealous Guenivere, and he by his wife, Princess Anglitora, a court lady turned courtesan. Tom's death is avenged by their son in an act of matricide which effectively severs his ties to the court, now a place of female influence inimical to men. The outcome of the story is a new English heroism emerging through brotherhood, when the heir's crime is erased by a magical potion of forgetfulness administered by his bastard brother from the court of Fairy. Although excelling in knightly deeds, the brothers have, by the end of the story, "left the noble feats of Chiualry" (94) to assume their role as principal citizens of Lincoln.42 Theirs is a common end that cancels the socially instituted inequalities between men. The two parts of Tom a Lincoln were published at a time when bastardy had reached a peak in English society, with the highest incidence occurring among young men and women of low financial status and high physical mobility, precisely the ranks of apprentices and servants from which Johnson came.43 In defining a heroism away from the court, the story departs from the Robin Hood type of romance, in which courtly corruption is localized in dispensable figures like evil ministers and the hero ends by returning to the court, his nobility reclaimed. Despite its corruptions, therefore, the court has all along functioned as the image by which the hero is interpellated into his true identity. By contrast, in Tom a Lincoln the foreclosure of noble claims signals a refusal of interpellation which sets the hero's development in the direction of an ideal bourgeois manhood. Admittedly, Tom's illicit love with Cealia remains a problematic episode. It suggests that the hero has played into the courtly game. Unless, that is, the Queen of Fairy

30


represents the unattainable lady of romance here seen to be easily attained, and passed over, by bourgeois virility. After all, her court is only a temporary foothold, a station of rest and recreation in the course of Tom's travels. From this perspective, the episode underscores the role of gender in the making of class identity, providing the chapbook version to the sexualized power relations of Elizabeth's court.44 Unlike courtiers, however, a writer like Johnson, appealing to readers whose social aspirations lay outside the court, could afford both to use the court as a space for engendering a bourgeois identity and then to leave it behind. In this relation the Queen of Fairy, given her association with Elizabeth, becomes both a marker of the hero's upward mobility and a figure he will overgo. Tom's departure from Caelia's court occasions her suicide, an act which recalls Virgil's Dido, and endows Tom's travels with the imperial significance of Aeneas' mission.45 In her dual relation to Elizabeth and Dido, the Queen of Fairy thus serves as a figure of translation, deflecting English masculinity outward from courtly aspirations into the world of adventure. This outward mobility accommodates the motives of commercial and colonial expansion in Tudor England. In addition to The Faerie Queene and the Aeneid, Tom's adventures draw on travel tales and naval accounts. His expedition to Portugal may be an allusion to "a contemporary British expedition (possibly one of Sir Francis Drake's occasional raids on the Portuguese coast)"; his travels in Africa and his meeting with Prester John suggest familiarity with Mandeville's Travels.46 These topical connections may be merely coincidental, but the work's popularity shows a market existed for works that appealed to the desire for prosperity through commercial opportunities abroad.47 Thus, even while retaining the symbolic valence of the court, the Elizabethan domestic romance charts an expanding commercial and colonial horizon on which a bourgeois hero emerges. There is nothing coincidental, however, about the allusion to the 1596 capture in Cadiz of the Spanish galleon "wealthy 'Andrew'" at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice (1.1.28). The capture, current in the minds of Elizabethans,48 relates to the European scramble for gold in America, to which Portia's marriage lottery is thematically linked. The lottery mobilizes an international contest which Bassanio compares to the quest for the golden fleece: Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, For the four winds blow in from every coast Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,

Love's laborers Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond And many Jasons come in quest of her.

31 (1.1.171 -76)

The quest for the goldenfleeceis a common trope in the period for goldand treasure-hunting, and pirates like Drake and Martin Frobisher were often celebrated in the ballads as Jasons.49 The play captures this sense of collective fantasy when Gratiano, hearing of Bassanio's success, announces to friends: "we are the Jasons, we have won thefleece"(3.2.249, emphasis added). Whereas the mythic Jason obtains thefleeceto reclaim his usurped kingdom, latter-day Jasons ventured abroad to find the patrimony that eluded them at home. Indeed, as early as the 1580s, romance-writers were capitalizing on the popular interest in commercial and colonial ventures. In exploiting the timely topicality of naval events, their works created a social dynamic in which bourgeois pride is expressed through anti-courtly adventure. Foremost among these writers was William Warner, whose Syrinx, or a sevenfold history first appeared in 1584 and again in 1597. Dedicated to George Carey, then Baron Hunsdon and promoter of numerous voyages of trade and plunder, Syrinx recommends itself to seamen. The work comprises seven interlocking adventures, all but one of Warner's own invention, supposedly told by shipwrecked men to their rescuers. In the voice of the ship's master, one of the stories commends sailors for their "rare virtue" in forgoing unprofitable pleasures on land to brave the perils at sea, physical and spiritual. The shipmaster advises that sailors may pray to their own god in a foreign temple: For though there be necessity that they kneel by the shrine, yet it is not necessary that they kiss the saint. In zeal, not in show consisteth devotion, and a speedy return is in such case the surest resistance; or if sifted beyond God's forebode, then a godly martyrdom is a glorious enlargement.50

The instruction regarding martyrdom may refer to English sailors who, through illegal trade and plunder, ran foul of Spanish authorities in the West Indies and suffered, among other punishments, the tortures of the Inquisition. Several such accounts appeared shortly before the publication of Warner's Syrinx.51 Apart from the dangers of foreign tyranny, Syrinx addresses the issue of authority and class difference among crew members. In the first story, two noblemen among a crew of exiled Median sailors "fall to quarrels of their private superiority," thereby igniting a general mutiny. The moral is delivered by one Chebron, a fellow "amongst the inferior sort," who declares that "a noble man exiled is to be fashioned to his altered fortune," and that "authority should be denied to such as desire it, and offered to those that refuse it" (23). A story like this would speak to the

32


experience of English voyagers confronted with the discrepancy between social status and professional rank, command at sea being "traditionally the prerogative of a gentleman." 52 Drake, for one, had his authority challenged during his voyage of circumnavigation, when he was still a commoner. The problem was serious enough to require the execution of a gentleman, Thomas Doughty, followed several days later by a ceremony in which Drake stripped his ships' commanders of their offices and then reinstated them under his own authority. Mindful of the social division between sailors who were mostly commoners, and soldiers, many of whom were gentlemen, Drake reportedly told his men, "I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariners, and the mariners with the gentleman." 53 In the final tale, Syrinx contains the first English romance to broach the subject of colonial rule. The story features a queen Dircilla who, shipwrecked on an island, comes to be accepted by the islanders as their sovereign, and to civilize them in "religion . . . manners, diet, apparel, dwellings, provision, and such like" (185-86). The tale follows on the heels of a similar one in Sir George Peckham's True reporte of the late discoveries of the new-found landes, published in 1583 to recruit investors for a proposed colony in North America. Peckham cites the authority of "Ecclesiastical Historiographers" in his account of two Roman missionaries who not only aided the king and queen of India in ruling the country, but also "by faire promises, and by force of Armes together" abetted the Emperor Constantine in converting and colonizing "all the Indians countrie." 54 Unlike Peckham's story, Warner's ends with the colonizer's departure. Dircilla, having been reunited with her long-lost husband, returns with him to their country, leaving the island an improved place. The home-bound motif of this story attests, in one respect, to the force of literary convention. The stories in Syrinx are modeled on the Greek romance, which usually ends in the reunion of separated lovers and their restoration to their rightful places in their own society. At the same time, the story also reflects the period's conception of colonial enterprise, one which is still oriented to the home country as the frame of social reference, the measure of one's achievement. Convention and circumstance thus combine to shape the means by which the romance writer addressed the cultural expectations of his time. In fact, commercial writers of romances were often the ones to celebrate the achievements of English voyagers, as in Henry Robarts' A most friendly farewell. . . to the right worship Sir Frauncis Drake knight

(1585). Knighted in 1580 after his circumnavigation, his opening of the spice trade in the East, and his immensely lucrative piracy in the West Indies, Drake was naturally the model of outward and upward mobility

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on whom Robarts might stake his class pride: "As long as my tongue can speake, or my simple hand holde penne to wryte, I will euer renowme your worship, and them whose service for Countrey hath bene such as neuer English gentleman or other yet atchieved but you. As for those who do not appreciate Drake's greatness, "therein they shewe their basenesse, which is vnanswerable to the mindes of the valiant." Drake is a hero who undertakes foreign enterprises for honor and "the desire to doe his countrey good: for it is well knowen to you all, that he hath all thinges for worldly causes at will, yet leaueth all, his good Ladie, with all his familie and friendes, to betake himself to the hazarde of fortune."55 It is significant that, instead of courtly pleasures, the hero leaves behind domestic comforts: the bourgeois hero has come into his own as a householder. Robarts likewise romanticizes English overseas traders in Haigh for Devonshire (1600), although here bourgeois manhood finds expression as sexual prowess instead of spice routes and naval exploits. In the adventures of the merchant William and his servant James, the former gains gentry status by marrying the daughter of an English farmer, the latter finds wealth and title abroad by marrying a rich and noble Spanish widow. While William's marriage requires inspection of his virile equipment by the father-in-law, James' is contracted through a lusty performance in bed. Robarts has no doubts where a man's outward mobility translates upwards. Indeed, upward mobility through marriage forms the basis for national pride, since masters like William can hope to have Englishwomen while the like of James are good enough for foreign noblewomen. English pride is equally visible in the area of national defense, a matter of special concern to Tudor merchants who rely on safe shipping for the success of their overseas trade. To defend the English coast from French pirates, William becomes admiral to afleetof six ships "furnished and manned in warlike manner" by the merchants of Exeter. Their victory at sea brings "great wealth and more honour to the country," honor enough, in fact, to prompt a visit from Henry VIII and his noblemen.56 The local celebrations and games provide a country version of the courtly tournament, marking both the merchants' independence from and their association with the court. Despite the romance's disavowal of courtly ambition, overseas commercial and colonial enterprises in this period often brought together London's merchants and wealthy members of the court. The high risk and enormous financial outlays necessitated such joint ventures for mutual benefit and protection. In 1577, the backers of Drake's circumnavigation included members of the Privy Council (Leicester, Walsingham, Sir Christopher Hatton), merchants of the Muscovy Company, as well as

34


the shipping magnates John and William Hawkins. Although the queen would not allow royal ships to be used, she gave "tacit approval" and probably "made an investment of money."57 At times the alliance was more than just business. For example, John Hawkins, who was at one time a slave-trader and pirate to the Spanish Indies, had married the daughter of Benjamin Gonson, treasurer of the queen's navy, and later succeeded him in that position.58 In this way, the joint pursuit of colonial and commercial opportunities extended both the commercial reach of the court and the social influence of merchants. Outward mobility appealed to Elizabeth's courtiers, especially for those who felt their power or chances of preferment restricted by the court. Sidney in 1582 supported Sir Humphrey Gilbert's proposal of a voyage of discovery to North America in return for rights to "thirty hundred thousand acres" of land in the projected colony. He might have had a share of action in the New World had this flower of chivalry survived the military campaign in the Netherlands. Leicester, active earlier in the Netherlands, was later involved in piracy and the eastern spice trade. Sir Walter Ralegh had ambitions which included possessions and trade in Ireland, trade and settlement in Virginia, and gold mining in Guiana. Since 1585 Ralegh and courtiers like Lord Hunsdon, Lord Rich, and the Earl of Cumberland promoted commercial and privateering voyages.59 And the list goes on. The courtier's desire for outward mobility is elaborated through the romance opposition of court and adventure, as we can see from Spenser's presentation of Ralegh's colonial ambitions in Colin Clouts come home againe. In this maritime pastoral, Spenser criticizes Elizabeth's court as one in which "vaine votaries of lasie loue professe," and calls upon his patron to "auenge thy selfe on them for their abuses" (lines 776, 794). This requires the heroic labor of building Elizabeth's maritime power: if the queen is "Ladie of the Sea," Ralegh is "Shepherd of the Ocean" (lines 66, 166).60 Spenser's message is pure and simple: anti-courtliness and adventure form the prelude to a recuperation of courtly fortunes. Through the mediation of romance, then, the courtier comes to participate in the bourgeois trajectory of social ambition in which commercial power becomes the means to upward mobility and social influence. This trajectory of ambition is nowhere more vividly captured than in the literary connection mentioned earlier between Gascoigne and Warner, and the social contexts it traverses. A courtier on the fringes of the patronage system, Gascoigne was well versed in the vicissitudes of ambition. Warner, on the other hand, was a popular writer celebrated in his own time. Not only did he enjoy the sustained patronage of Henry and George Carey, the first and second lords Hunsdon, but the con-

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temporary acclaim of Albions England earned him a reputation as "the English Homer and English Euripides." 61 Both writers present their heroes - Gascoigne's Green Knight, and Warner's Mandeville - as courtly lovers, the one unrequited while the other wins his lady. Together, these characters bear out in complementary ways the romance's imaginary relation to England's overseas commercial enterprise. Despite their divergent fortunes, love's labor is, for both heroes, the measure of courtly ambition. The misfortunes of Gascoigne's Green Knight are clearly autobiographical. 62 In the section of the poem entitled "The greene Knights farewell to Fansie," the knight fails in courtly poetry and the aristocratic sport of hunting. Likewise Gascoigne attempted without success to secure either poet laureateship or sustained patronage at the court, "representing] his own 'failing' career," as Jonathan Crewe points out, in the poem "Gascoigne's Woodsmanship." 63 The poet entered military service in the Netherlands after failing even at the genteel practice of farming: the same circumstances lead the knight to profess arms. In the section "The continuance of the Author, upon the fruite of Fetters," Gascoigne explicitly identifies with the character he created: But now to turn my tale from whence I came, I saie his lottes and mine were not unlike: He spent his youth (as I did) out of frame, He came at last (like me) to trayle the pike. He pyned in pry son pinchte with privie payne, And I likewise in pry son still remayne.

(377)

Imprisonment marked the nadir of what was for Gascoigne a downwardly mobile career at the court. In true anti-courtly fashion, the source of the Green Knight's misfortunes is a lady, as the speaker in "Dan Bartholomew of Bath" reveals: That selfe same name which in his will he wrote, (You knowe my minde) when he was out of tune a, When he subscribde (which may not bee forgote) Howe that his name was Fato Non F[o]rtuna. And as I gesse because his love was Una, That played hir prankes according to hir kinde, He wrote these wordes hir best excuse to finde.

(135)

One can taste Gascoigne's bitterness at his lack of preferment in this unflattering picture of an inconstant Una, an allegorical name for Elizabeth. If the knight once paid court to Una, "to wryte in verse and rime, / To wray my griefe, to crave reward, to cover still my crime" (381), he now sees his "fansie" as a self-delusion he must abandon. In the

36


section entitled "The complaint of the greene Knight," Gascoigne explains the meaning of the color green: I say my Fortune is the root, whence all these griefes did grow. Since Fortune then (quoth he) hath turnde to me hir backe, Shall I go yeeld to morning moane, and cloath myself in blacke? No no, for noble mindes can beare no thraldome so, But rather shew a merrie cheere, when most they wade in wo. And so will I in greene, my careful corpse aray, To set a bragge amongst the best, as though my heart were gay: Not greene bicause I hope, nor greene bicause I joy, Nor greene, bicause I can delight in any youthfull toy: But greene, bicause my greeves are alway fresh and greene, Whose roote is such it cannot rot, as by the frute is seene. (375)64 In refusing to continue the courtly game of the lover's complaint, the Green Knight leaves the court as a place of "carefull idleness." So too the poet: in bidding farewell to fancy, Gascoigne converted a downwardly mobile career at the court into an outward mobility which committed him both in words and action to England's overseas commercial interests. We know that he was employed by Walsingham as a spy in Antwerp for the English government, from where he wrote in 1576 of the Spanish oppression of English merchants in The Spoil of Antwerp. In his preface to Sir Humphrey Gilbert's A discourse of a discoverie for a new

passage to Cataia (1576), Gascoigne lent a pen to his friend's argument for a northwest overseas trade route to China. In 1577, Gascoigne finally received courtly employment, the long-awaited reward from which only death could relieve him, and did, within the year. In retrospect, we may find a fitting epitaph to Gascoigne's life in his Epilogue to the Green Knight poem. The poet here confesses that the knight has not abjured his fancy entirely, having kept his "firelock piece." At once phallic and noncourtly, the "petronel" - "a kind of large pistol or carbine" (OED) stands as self-ironic testimony to Gascoigne's overblown ambitions as well as his masculine anxieties. If downward mobility is channeled outwards in Gascoigne's poetry, in Warner's romance outward mobility leads upwards, providing the means to regain one's courtly ambitions. Gascoigne's and Warner's protagonists thus inhabit different ends of the same romance trajectory, the one ending where the other begins, with departure from the court. The court Warner portrays is, like Gascoigne's, a place of which one soon wearies: "so much it hath of Vanitie and painfull idleness" (Albions England, 279). Mandeville, like the Green Knight, refuses the courtly game of complaining: "For, though not meanely passionate, he fared not as those, / Whose melancholie fooleries be Pylots to their woes" (268). In punc-

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turing the Petrarchan conceit of the soul's shipwreck as a courtly pose, Warner sets the course of love's labor for his hero, like Gascoigne's, in the active life of adventure. And yet there is a crucial difference between the two characters which accounts for the separate courses they travel. Unlike Gascoigne's knight, who departs in bitterness towards his lady, Mandeville undertakes adventure in the name of Elenor. This difference in attitude signals a recuperation of courtly values in Warner's revision of Gascoigne. It explains why, for Mandeville, the "Green Knight" is a disguise which he must discard, why his travels constitute a term of love's labor which will return him to the court and his lady. Mandeville's good fortune comes, in part, from the love of Elenor, who journeys in search of him, and in turn his travels provide a framework for celebrating the "history" of Tudor voyages. As expected, female errancy begets error: Elenor's journey is intermixed with a fabliau of a traveling wife who takes money from one man and gives her body to another; and Elenor's masked appearance in Rome leads Mandeville to mistake her for a "curtizen" (308). At the same time, however, Elenor's wandering, hailed as an act of "mapping Lands," ushers in an account of "Elizabeth's now-Monarchie ore seauenteene Crownes of old" (297-98). Likewise, Mandeville's adventures explicitly link him, through the shared term of "labours," to the exploits of Tudor voyagers and empire builders.65 Book eleven of Albions England chronicles the travels of Sebastian Cabot and Sir Hugh Willoughby, explorers to North America and Russia during the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor, as well as the services of Richard Chancellor and Anthony Jenkinson, agents of Queen Elizabeth I in the Muscovy and Levant trades. Book twelve catalogues the exploits of Elizabethan pirates, traders, and slave-traders to the Spanish Indies, as well as explorers and first colonists in America.66 Among them, several had fought in the Armada campaign; Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher were known for their attempts to discover an overseas trade route to China; and Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish won fame as England's first and second circumnavigators charting the nation's commercial seaways to Asia. Warner cites a personal reason for celebrating the Tudor voyagers: his father "was one of those / Did through the Seas of Isie Rockes the Muscouites disclose" (271). But in his revision of Gascoigne, Warner's personal investment embodies a social and historical dimension. Between the two writers twenty eventful years of English voyaging had taken place, and the nation's overseas commercial interests had expanded from Europe and the Near East to Russia, the Far East, and America. At the time books eleven and twelve of Albions England were published, the exploits of Tudor voyagers had already been reported, collectively in the

38


first edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations (1589), and individually in ballads, broadsheets, pamphlets, and colonial promotions. Warner's work has neither the informative value of Hakluyt's collection nor the timeliness of street news. Instead, Albions England enrolls Tudor voyagers in the pages of national history, a history emplotted by the expectations of romance, the desire of a MandeviUe whose "loue, welllabourd, wins a queen." Indeed, romance had a place in the making of history when we consider voyagers such as Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Grenville, commoners whom Elizabeth elevated to knighthood. Through their commercial and colonial labors, they too, in their own way, won a queen. Warner's celebration of these men in the figure of MandeviUe thus completes the trajectory of ambition initiated by Gascoigne's Green Knight, a completion which recuperates courtly values for a generation of bourgeois heroes. If this brief survey is indicative of the social motives of generic changes, then to follow the genre's expanding horizon is to trace the formulation of a cultural narrative in which courtly love and chivalric adventure are transvalued and appropriated to the aspirations of an age.

Sea-knights and royal virgins: American gold and its discontents in Lodge's A Margarite of America (1596)

So forth they rowed, and that Ferryman With his stiffe oares did brush the sea so strong, That the hoare waters from his frigot ran, And the light bubbles daunced all along, Whiles the salt brine out of the billowes sprong. At last farre off they many islands spy, On euery side floting the floods emong: Then said the knight, Loe I the land descry, Therefore old Syre thy course do thereunto apply. That may not be, said then the Ferryman Least we vnweeting hap to be foredonne: For those same Islands, seeming now and than, Are not firme lande, nor any certein wonne, But straggling plots, which to and fro do ronne In the wide waters: therefore are they hight The wandering Islands. Therefore do them shonne; For they haue oft drawne many a wandering wight Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight. Yet well they seem to him that farre doth view, Both faire and fruitful, and the ground dispred With grassie greene of delectable hew, And the tall trees with leaues apparelled, Are deckt with blossomes dyde in white and red, That mote the passengers thereto allure; But whosoeuer once hath fastened His foot thereon, may neuer it recure, But wandereth euer more vncertein and vnsure. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590), II.12.10-121 This Arwacan promised to bring me into the great river of Orenoque, but indeed of that which he entred he was utterly ignorant, for he had not seene it in twelve yeeres before; at which time he was very yoong, and of no judgement: and if God had not sent us another helpe, we might have wandered a whole yere in that labyrinth of rivers, yer [sic] wee had found any way, either out or in . . . for I know all the earth 39

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The romance of the New World doeth not yeelde the like confluence of streames and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take: and if wee went by the Sunne or Compasse, hoping thereby to goe directly one way or other, yet that way we were also carried in a circle amongst multitudes of Islands, and every Island so bordered with high trees, as no man coulde see any further then the bredth of the river, or length of the breach.

Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of Guiana2

Of the six books of The Faerie Queene, Book II deals most directly with the colonization of America. The Proem refers to Peru, the Amazon River, and Virginia, and the episode of Mammon in canto 6 points to the Spanish discovery and mining of gold in the New World. In associating gold-mining with Mammon, Spenser voices English envy of Spain's claim to New World riches. But the negative association also has a bearing on English colonial designs, especially those of his patron Ralegh, who financed and undertook voyages to Guiana in search of gold. As Thomas Cain observes, the willing descent of Guyon, the knight of Temperance, into the hellish mine of Mammon is an implicit warning to Ralegh against the lure of American gold. Although the 1590 publication of The Faerie Queene predated Ralegh's voyages to Guiana, his desire for gold and empire had long been known to his circle.3 If there is any hint that Ralegh acknowledged this warning, it would be a passage from his Discovery of Guiana (1596), written to promote discovery and mining of gold in that region. The passage, quoted above, recounts the troubles he and his men encountered infindingan entry into the Orinoco, the river rumored to flow through El Dorado, the fabled kingdom of gold richer by far than Peru.4 His description recalls the perilous journey from The Faerie Queene, also quoted above, in which Guyon, aided by his spiritual guide, steers clear of the "wandering Islands" which have ensnared "many a wandering wight." In the first place, the "multitudes of Islands" among a "labyrinth of rivers" in Ralegh's account resemble the "many islands . . . / On euery side floting the floods emong" in Spenser's narrative. Again, Ralegh's claim that the "high trees" bordering the islands obstructed the sailors' view echoes Spenser's depiction of the "tall trees" on the islands as enticing snares. Ralegh's geographical description renders an objective world for Guyon's journey, even as it infuses Ralegh's with the allegorical significance of a spiritual quest. In this connection, the figure of the guide emerges as a crucial point of comparison. While Guyon avoids danger through the spiritual guidance of the ferryman, Ralegh's "utterly ignorant" Arwacan manages to get the crew lost. Providence intervenes, however, by sending "another helpe," three natives in a canoe who (upon

Sea-knights and royal virgins

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coercion) lead the crew to safety and shelter in an Indian village. Ralegh even gives the name "Red crosse" to the river on which the natives appear (381). In doing so he compares himself with the hero from Book I of The Faerie Queene, who strays from his spiritual quest but is redeemed in the end. Ralegh showed signs of his reform upon his return to London in October 1595. It was reported that he "goes daily to hear sermons, because he hath seen the wonders of the Lord in the deep; 'tis much commended and spoken of."5 The exchange between Ralegh and Spenser illustrates the ease with which a colonist casts his voyage within the allegorical horizon of romance. Significantly, Ralegh's identification with both Redcrosse and Guyon brings together religious and colonial concerns of empire which Spenser has kept separate in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene. According to Cain, the two books "portray two senses of Britain as empire: in the first, a sovereign state; in the second, a colonial empire like Spain's"; the first offering elaborate praise for a Protestant empire under Elizabeth, the second containing negative references to America as colonial empire.6 In particular, Spenser is careful to avoid any association between Elizabeth and mercenary colonial ventures. In Book I, the presence of Una symbolizes the progress of the spiritual church in the world;7 in Book II, Guyon's and Arthur's invocations of Gloriana underscore the very absence of her spirituality from the colonial arena. Thus, even in providing fictions for the colonial imagination, Spenser's romance maintains a critical distance from them, espousing a spiritualized ideal of empire which is implicitly dissociated from the specific acts of empire-making. If the separate portrayals of the two aims of empire reflect Spenser's sense of their incompatibility, their joining by Ralegh effectively invokes spiritual goals as a gloss for worldly ones. Ralegh's "revision" of Spenser participates in the age's romance of empire, which draws on the Protestant rhetoric of empire and the chivalric theme of knight errancy to justify the acquisition of American gold and riches. The strategy functions to displace responsibility: both knight errancy and the Protestant rhetoric sublimate mercenary motives to the love and worship of Queen Elizabeth I. In identifying with Redcrosse and Guyon, Ralegh has chosen knights in service to royal virgins, Una and Gloriana, who are recognizable representations of Elizabeth. Religious justification is all the more necessary when we realize that the primary means of acquisition was piracy; indeed, that piracy was a way of financing voyages of discovery.8 It is thus in the name of England's royal virgin that her pirates and gold-seekers wander abroad to perform their feats of empire.

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Because Protestant rhetoric is so central to the romance of empire, its reception depends to a large extent on the religious sympathies of individuals. We have seen differences even in the ways Spenser and Ralegh insert themselves into this discourse. The presence of Catholic subjects in Elizabeth's England further ensures that the Protestant ideology would not go unquestioned. If The Faerie Queene registers Protestant unease about the colonial enterprise, then, from a Catholic perspective, Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America (1596) presents a critique of the religious rhetoric used in justifying this commercial venture. Josephine Roberts has called the work a "dystopian vision of the New World," linking the romance's unrelenting evil and sensational violence to Lodge's first-hand knowledge of European "treachery inspired by the prospect of great wealth." 9 Lodge's literary career, Catholic affiliation, and privateering experiences have long been documented; but it is only recently that critical interest has turned to the relation between his privateering and his writing. Written, as Lodge claims, in 1591-92 during a privateering voyage, and published a year after Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana, A Margarite is no doubt informed by the Protestant romance of gold and empire. It remains to examine how Lodge's Catholicism infuses his dystopian romance with a critique of empire. As we shall see, the critique functions by means of a subversive revision of the Protestant discourse. Like Ralegh, Lodge revises passages from The Faerie Queene to advance his own ideological position. But unlike Ralegh, who turns colonial ambitions into Protestant chivalry, Lodge questions the spiritual aims of empire by presenting a royal virgin, Margarita, whose name invokes spiritual values but whose character embodies the English desire for American gold. More specifically, the ironic portrayal of Margarita is a parody of Una and, through Una, an indirect criticism of Elizabeth. Such criticism should come as no surprise: as Patricia Parker and Achsah Guibbory have shown in their works on Spenser and Donne, Elizabeth's male subjects often express deep ambivalence toward her power over them. 10 In Lodge's case, criticism of the royal virgin reveals the extent to which England's pursuit of gold in the New World plays into the politics of religion both at home and in Europe. Because Lodge's work must be understood within its historical and discursive contexts, my analysis begins with the development of a Protestant rhetoric of empire from English piracy in the New World and the resultant escalation in AngloSpanish hostility, to its convergence with the chivalric theme in Elizabethan politics.


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Although news of the abundance of gold in America reached Europe by the end of the fifteenth century with the publication of Columbus' Letter, it was not until Elizabeth's reign that English voyagers actively sought gold in the New World. The first three Tudor rulers were preoccupied with domestic instability, foreign wars, and the Reformation. Mary Tudor, married to Philip of Spain and subscribing to the papal donation of the Americas to Spain and Portugal, placed restrictions on English colonial exploration. But in the years from 1551 to 1555, Richard Eden had published in three books English translations of the accounts of Spanish discoveries in the New World. The Spanish conquest of Mexico and Cusco uncovered such a wealth of gold, silver, and other treasures as to inflame the period's popular imagination. When Elizabeth lifted the restrictions on colonial exploration, therefore, "it was the appeal of gold primarily that held English eyes on America." 11 By then, however, Spain already occupied many of the goldrich areas, and the English had to devise other means to obtain their share of New World riches. While Spanish colonists enslaved Indians to mine the gold and silver, English traders sold African captives for slaves to Spanish masters, and English pirates looted Spanish settlements and transport ships. According to Kenneth Andrews, the first slaving voyage was undertaken by John Hawkins in 1562.12 In the same year, English privateers, "properly licensed by the English government" (then at war with France) to despoil French shipping, "freely included Spaniards among their victims." 13 The queen and her council publicly condemned but privately invested in the Spanish ventures. By 1585, Elizabeth officially declared Spain a rival nation, at last providing legal cover for this plunder. 14 Of course, English piracy drew reprisals from Spain, which included slave labor in the Spanish galleys and the rigors of the Inquisition for captive English sailors. For this reason, Anglo-Spanish clashes in the New World inevitably translated into a religious rhetoric of Protestant resistance to Catholic Spain. In 1568, while engaged in the slave trade and piracy along the Spanish Main, John Hawkins lost a number of his men to the Spanish authorities. In his account of this voyage, Hawkins compares the sufferings of his men to Foxe's Protestant martyrs: If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of this Sorrowful Voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written; there should need a painful man with his pen, and as great a time as he, that wrote the Lives and Deaths of the Martyrs.15 Hawkins' clash with the Spaniards in the New World filtered directly

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into Anglo-Spanish tensions on the home front. As David Beers Quinn explains, the clash coincided with a conflict on domestic matters, lasting from 1568 to 1573. Philip intervened to aid a rebellion and a series of plots against Elizabeth, while she impounded bullion on its way to the Netherlands, allowed "volunteers" to aid the insurgent Dutch and released privateers to prey on Spanish shipping.16 Given these circumstances, it is little wonder that Protestant rhetoric in domestic and colonial discourses should form a common front against Spain. In subsequent accounts of voyages, famous seadogs like Francis Drake, Richard Grenville, and Martin Frobisher emerged as champions of the Protestant cause fighting the Catholic tyranny of Spain, aiding the cimarrones or runaway slaves against their Spanish masters, and converting natives to the one true faith.17 As Louis Wright has amply documented, the use of Protestant rhetoric in these colonial narratives marks the beginnings of a claim that English voyagers had "a manifest destiny to circumvent Spain and to create an empire of their own overseas." The claim includes the providentialist idea advanced by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs that England is an elect nation with the divine mission to spread the true gospel to the world.18 The pirates certainly cultivated this sense of mission. When Martin Frobisher set sail for Meta Incognita in 1578, the patron-seeking poet, Thomas Churchyard, was on hand to praise him as a "labourar in the Vineyard," one of the chosen few who serve not only in the "vnfolding of hard matters and hidden secrets," but also to "bryng Infidelles too the knowledge of the omnipotente God, yea, albeit great wealth and commoditie maie rise to vs by their labours" (A.vii).19 This is the same providentialist sense of the New World as divine revelation destined for English possession that prompted Ralegh to his pious exercise in London, after "he hath seen the wonders of the Lord in the deep" of Guiana. On voyages, Drake reminded sailors of their godly mission by conducting religious service twice a day, before dinner and before supper. "He kneeled, he read the psalms for the day, and the crew spoke the responses; and at times he read from a book with pictures . . . It was Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs.'" 2 0 In a commendatory verse to George Peckham's True reporte of the late discoveries . . . of the newfound landes (1583), Drake describes the colonization of America as "the path to Fame, the proofe of zeale, and the way to purchase gold." 21 Religious performance aside, proof of zeal is also rendered textually through the vilification of Spain, the development and dissemination of what is later known as the "black legend" of Spanish imperialism, a body


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of literature condemning Spanish brutality in the colonization of the New World. Ironically, the practice draws on Spanish sources, most important of which is Bartolome de las Casas' Brevissima Relation de las Indias (1552). An indictment of Spanish enslavement, rape, torture, and decimation of Indians, the Relation was translated into English and published under the title The Spanish Colonie in 1583. This work provides ready proof of Spanish greed and cruelty in the New World, and the preface contains a Protestant polemic exhorting the Dutch (then rebelling from the Spanish Hapsburg) to keep the true faith lest God should unleash the Spanish scourge on them, as he did on the pagan Indians.22 In 1584, a passage from the Relation appeared in Richard Hakluyt's A Discourse of Western Planting, a work promoting the colonization of Virginia written at the request of Ralegh and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.23 Hakluyt is no doubt writing in support of his patron, whose "main purpose in his Virginia enterprise was to establish a base from which English ships could operate against the Spanish Indies and the treasure fleet."24 By laying claim to American gold, Hakluyt argues, Elizabeth could stem the source of wealth with which Philip finances his campaigns and thus frustrate his designs on Europe. Hakluyt's work brings colonial concerns into the theater of European politics. But if Elizabeth heeded his words, she was far more interested in the prospect of gold than in plans for colonization. Not only did she invest in plunder, but she favored known pirates like Hawkins and Frobisher with her personal attention.25 Both men were knighted in the queen's name by the Lord Admiral Howard during the Armada campaign.26 By far the most honored pirate was Drake. In 1580, upon his return from his voyage around the world, he was knighted by Elizabeth herself on board his flagship, over the vehement protest of the Spanish ambassador.27 The loot from this voyage brought the queen £326,580, forty-seven times her investment.28 Pirates who were already knights received even more prestigious titles. Ralegh, since 1585 an active planner and promoter of privateering ventures, was in 1587 named Captain of the Queen's Guard.29 George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, was elevated to the Order of the Garter in 1592, about the time that his fleet participated in the famous capture of the Madre de Dios. That haul was to enrich Elizabeth by £90,000, thirty times her investment.30 The special relationship between the queen and her knighted pirates formed part of the chivalric fiction already present in Elizabethan politics. Thus Ralegh claims to have carried on his journey through Guiana a miniature of his lady, Elizabeth, which he showed to the local chiefs both as a token of her beauty and as a pledge that England would defend them from Spanish tyranny. In 1593, Cumberland lived up to his

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title as Garter knight by taking on twelve Spanish hulls for refusing to lower their flags to Elizabeth's. When Drake landed at Santiago on the queen's Accession Day in 1585, he ordered the firing of ordnance in her honor. The celebration opened the way to looting of the city, although with disappointing results.31 Drake's rapacity was reconcilable with the Protestant rhetoric of empire since Elizabeth had, by 1585, declared Spain a war rival against which privateering was legal. With the onset of war, English sea-knights came increasingly to be identified with Protestant patriots. On his 1587 expedition to Cadiz, Drake surprised and sacked a Spanish shipyard, dealing a temporary blow to Philip's war preparations. The incident is celebrated in a poem by Thomas Greepe, to which is appended Drake's letter to the martyrologist John Foxe warning of imminent Spanish attack. Dedicated to Cumberland, the poem compares Drake's performance with the bravery of Gideon, the prophecy of Daniel, and the stratagems of Ulysses (A4v, Civ, C2v). Because the knight has valiantly beaten the enemy, England can rejoice in the victory God has given to "thy Queene that pearle of choyse" (A4v). The poem ends by imploring God to save Elizabeth and her "Nauie and royall bande" in order "His sacred word long to maintaine" (C3v).32 The image of Elizabeth inspiring her sea-knights to godly deeds of empire directly invokes her role as Protestant virgin of reform defending her nation against the pope and Spain. This role had been idealized throughout her reign in the figures of Judith, Esther, Deborah, Astraea, Eliza, Diana, Gloriana, Cynthia, the peerless pearl, and many others. As E. C. Wilson documents in Eliza s England, these figures of Elizabeth are celebrated in courtly poetry and popular ballads, in court and town pageants, in sermons, plays, and progresses. While the idealizations of the queen are of Protestant invention, through much of her reign it was possible for loyal Catholic subjects to share in her veneration. 33 In particular, Roy Strong explains, the rituals and symbolism surrounding the queen's Accession Day festival constitute an elaborate form of Protestant chivalry, a cult of Elizabeth which filled the void left by the removal of the cult of Mary. Again, the rituals of the Order of the Garter celebration reinforced a national pride associated with the pre-Reformation cult of Saint George. For the celebrations are rich in religious symbolism applicable to both Protestant and Catholic devotion. 34 This shared religious symbolism became increasingly tenuous, however, with the escalation of Anglo-Spanish rivalries which culminated in war. The defeat of the Armada marked a decisive shift in rhetoric, with Protestantism becoming almost synonymous with national pride in


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the popular literature. Sermons and ballads were printed glorifying England's victory and defending the possession of plundered goods as the spoils of just war. 35 In 1589, Hawkins' and other accounts of English captivity and heroism on the sea were reprinted in the first edition of Hakluyt's Principall Navigations. These accounts helped to consolidate the myth of Elizabeth as Cynthia, "Empress of the Ocean." In turn, as a Protestant equivalent of Mary's role as "Star of the Sea" in Catholic devotion, the figure of Cynthia served as the symbol with which voyagers advanced their overseas interests. In 1589, Drake exploited Cynthia's relation to the moon when, for a New Year's gift, he presented Elizabeth with a fanne of ffethers, white and redd, the handle of golde, inameled with a half moone of mother of perles, within that half moon garnished with sparks of dyamonds, and a few seed perles on th'one side, having her Majestie's picture in it, and on the back-side a device with a crowe over it.36 Ralegh, too, draws on the myth in his complaints of love to Cynthia during a period of banishment from the court. Spenser lends a voice to Ralegh's complaints in Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595), turning his patron's frustrations into an indictment of the idleness and abuse of love in Cynthia's court. In this way, Spenser's "maritime pastoral" transforms exile from court into an opportunity for Ralegh, as "shepheard of the Ocean," to enlarge Elizabeth's maritime empire. The imperial theme finds full elaboration in The Faerie Queene, which combines Protestant ideology and the romance of empire with the figure of the virgin Queen as its symbolic center. As we have seen, Spenser's romance warns against the acquisition of gold in the name of religion. But the Protestant glorifications of empire it inspired are far less circumspect in applying romance fiction to colonial activities. In alluding to the quests of Redcrosse and Guyon in his Discovery of Guiana, Ralegh imaginatively extends Elizabeth's Protestant empire, via the allegory of Spenser's romance, to a land he believed was rich with gold. When news of Drake's death at sea reached England, Charles Fitzgeffrey mourns "divine Eliza's champion," and calls on Spenser, Drayton, and Daniel to eulogize him: "Let famous REDCROSS yield to famous DRAKE / And good SIR GUION give to him his launce." Drake is a "new Alcides" severing the heads of "the Spanish hydra"; more daring than Ulysses, and equally loyal to his English Penelope; another Perseus, keeping England's Andromeda "from the monsters of the sea" (st. 115, 29, 154-57, 74, 91).37 In these works, Protestant chivalry is the quintessential expression of English pride. Not all of the queen's subjects could, however, share in this upsurge of

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Protestant Englishness. In particular, Catholics must have found the romance of empire a poor excuse for the pursuit of gold. This is not to say that Catholics were disloyal38 or that they were more spiritual than Protestants, only that some of them had the virtue of disillusion. A major source of this disillusion was Elizabeth's preference for plunder to colonization, an issue of importance to Catholics contemplating exile to escape the stiff fines of £20 per month for nonconformity. According to Adrian Morey, Elizabeth initially approved a plan "to found a colony for Catholics in America. For this plan, Sir Humphrey Gilbert made assignments to three Catholics: Sir George Peckham, Sir Thomas Gerrard and Sir William Gatesby." 39 Even after Gilbert's death, Catholic promotion for the plan continued, although with obvious difficulties. The queen lent no financial support to it. Furthermore, two promotions for the colony, Peckham's True reporte of the late discoveries . . . of the new-found landes, and Christopher Carleill's Discourse upon the entended voyage to . . . America, failed to recruit investors. As John Parker observes, "considering the Catholicism of the major promoters of the colony, it was impossible to use religion as an appeal to gain the merchants' support, for London's merchants were, in the main, conformists to the Queen's church." Catholic hopes for religious freedom in America were dashed in 1584 when Elizabeth, faced with mounting Anglo-Spanish hostilities, jailed Peckham for his religious activities.40 In fairness to the queen, neither did she support Ralegh's plan to establish a colony in Virginia. Although she granted him a patent, he had to muster the funds himself- often through privateering - for the enterprise. Such were the ironies confronting Elizabeth's Catholic subjects, ironies Thomas Lodge must have well digested by the time he published A Margarite of America in 1596. As Edward Tenney observes, although Lodge did not openly profess Catholicism until 1596, circumstances suggest a much earlier conversion to the faith: If we assume that Thomas is the Lodge mentioned as a recusant in Paris in April 1580, then the otherwise mysterious events of that year and later stand clear. It explains why Thomas was refused the M.A. degree at Oxford, why the Privy Council called him in for questioning, why he was imprisoned, why Gosson called him a vagrant and what Gosson meant by saying that he was hunted by the heavy hand of God; it gives an added reason why his Protestant father should disinherit him and why Thomas was so willing to transfer his property to William [his brother]. In view of the Catholic tone of his writings and his later open avowal of Romanism, there is good reason to suspect that he was no sudden convert but that his apostasy dates back to his student days at Trinity College, Oxford.41 Lodge's Catholicism would also explain his choice of careers. Roman


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Catholics were barred from public office, the holy orders, the practice of law, and from teaching in the University. What remained open to them was the life of a commercial writer, soldier, or exile.42 Lodge was to pursue all three options, writing plays, pamphlets, and romances, and soldiering on two privateering voyages, before his exile to France following the publication of the openly heretical Prosopopoeia Containing the Teares of. . . Marie, the Mother of God in November of 1596. Although Lodge engaged in privateering, he had, like other Catholics, hopes of colonial exile. In Euphues Shadow (1592) he writes of America as a possible haven from religious persecution.43 But given his dystopian view of the New World in A Margarite of America, it seems that his own privateering experience had dampened this hope. Nevertheless, Lodge's disappointment with America's possibilities did not lessen his disillusion with the Protestant rhetoric of empire, a disillusion which prompted this pirate to a critique of empire in A Margarite. II In 1591 Thomas Cavendish set sail with 350 men on a voyage of plunder, trade, and discovery around the world. Only three years earlier, he had become England's second circumnavigator - second only to Drake. This voyage would be even more ambitious, aiming to establish trade routes to the Far East and Japan. But the expedition turned out to be a disaster from which only 90 men returned, having survived nautical errors, storms, hostile attacks, and extreme privations.44 If Drake's naval successes made it possible to romanticize his plunder, Cavendish's voyage epitomizes the kind of failure which no words can salvage. Divergent accounts of the voyage,45 each attempting to vindicate one party and cast blame on another, all present the same picture of a violent world in which greed and necessity overtake any pretension to spiritual ideals or knightly goals. While these accounts purport to tell what happened, Lodge's response to the voyage takes the form of the deeply ironic and tragic romance, A Margarite of America. His choice of narrative reflects his distance from the specific dispute surrounding the voyage and, more importantly, his sense of the connection between the romance and privateering. Lodge first made the connection in an earlier work, Rosalynde (1590), by claiming that it was written on a voyage of plunder to Terceria and the Canary Islands, in his own words, "hatcht in the stormes of the Ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perillous seas." Whether this actually happened is, of course, beside the point. The rhetorical import lies, rather, in the metamorphosis of sea surges into feathered bird, a

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spontaneous transformation of voyage into story suggestive of the sprezzatura which befits Lodge's double persona of artless "souldier" and artful "scholler" (I: 4). 46 In A Margarite, Lodge again emphasizes the link between voyage and story, but to a different purpose. It is to reveal the frame of mind in which he composed the romance, his authorial stance in the work. As Lodge says in his dedication to Lady Elizabeth Russell, A Margarite was written "in those straits christned by Magellan" (III: 3). Lodge's reference to this place underscores its ideological significance for the period, not only as a station in the Americas and a gateway to Asia, but as a world theater for staging a nation's maritime sovereignty.47 It was "christened" for Catholic Spain in 1520 after Magellan executed mutineers at Port Saint Julian (a site along the coast just above the Strait); it was "rechristened" for Protestant England in 1578 when Drake executed at the same spot the supposed traitor, Thomas Doughty. 48 During the 1591 disaster, the Strait was a major point of contention between Cavendish and his crew. With the approach of winter, as food, water, clothing, ammunition, sails, and tackles dwindled, and as manpower diminished through sickness, death, and desertion, Cavendish exhibited a terrible resolve to sail through the Strait, a resolve checked only by the crew's repeated threats of mutiny. 49 Since Cavendish never managed to land at Port Saint Julian, we will never know what he might have done there. But we may infer something about Lodge's narrative strategy: by fixing the scene of his writing at the Strait, he effectively locates his romance within the religious and ideological coordinates of that fateful world theater. It is within these coordinates that the world of privateering comes into focus. In his address to Gentlemen Readers, Lodge refers to Cavendish, "whose memorie, if I repent not, I lament not." Recalling the conditions of his ship, Lodge presents a world turned upside-down, a literal Ship of Fools. Although in England the Ship of Fools tradition had competition from the ship of exploration, the latter applies only to travel and experience as safeguards against foolish learning. 50 The moralizing continues to apply to voyages for mercenary gain. Thus in A learned and Godly Sermon (1581), John Madoxe exhorts "all men, but especially . . . all Marryners, Captaynes, and Passengers, which trauell the Seas," to avoid the soul's "shipwracke" by listening to "the heauenly fraught and spirituall marchandize" of preachers: for "wee cannot serue bothe God and Mammon" (Av, Cir). 51 Even romance writers find it necessary to reconcile their venturesome ships to moral goals. 52 Thus Spenser has the Redcrosse Knight and his "jolly Mariners" striking their sails to advance Gloriana's spiritual empire. And prior to the publication of A Margarite,


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Lodge portrayed the tyrannical cruelty of famous pirates in a series of tales.53 In the present instance, then, Lodge's portrayal of a privateering Ship of Fools plays on existing tradition. In doing so, he adopts the classic pose of the satirist who is implicated in the corrupt world he satirizes. This satiric pose is relevant to his composition of A Margarite. As Lodge explains: The place where I began my worke, was a ship, where many souldiers of good reckning finding disturbed stomackes; it cannot but stand with your discretions to pardon an undiscreete and unstaied penne, for hands may vary where stomacks miscary. The time I wrote in, was when I had rather will to get my dinner, then to win my fame. The order I wrote in, was past order, where I rather observed mens hands lest they should strike me, then curious reason of men to condemne mee. (4)

His references to "place," "time," and "order" invoke the rhetorical idea of decorum, based on the assumed correspondence between order in words and order in the world. In the statement "the order I wrote in, was past order," Lodge attributes the indecorum of his romance to the disorder of his ship-world. The hint at censorship in the remark that follows further strengthens our sense that linguistic indecorum is the basis of Lodge's satire. His remark can be construed in two ways: first, that his indecorous writing is the result of carelessness, his being too preoccupied with physical defense to worry about censors; second, that he need not worry, because ship life was too mean and brutish for anyone to take a censorial interest in his writing. In the first case, the satire is unintentional. In the second, Lodge's ship becomes the constructed space in which his satire may actually evade detection. Both the impulse to satire and the desire to evade censure make for what I see as a veiled critique of empire in A Margarite of America. The means of this critique is a calculated indecorum to which the romance draws attention from the start. An examination of the opening lines will give us a foretaste of how this indecorum operates in the romance: The blushing morning gan no sooner appeare from the desired bed of her old paramor, and remembring hir of hir Cephalus, watered the bosome of sweete floures with the christal of hir teares: but both the armies (awaked by the harmonie of the birds, that recorded their melody in every bush) began to arme them in their tents, and speedily visit their trenches . . . (43)

These lines employ the conventional terms of romance, the "blushing morning," "sweete floures," and "christal . . . teares," in a familiar allusion to the loves of Aurora. Convention opens up, however, a world of duplicities. Aurora rises from "the desired bed" of her old lover Tithonus only to weep the loss of her new and young lover Cephalus.

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Appropriately, the two-timing deity announces the new day to a deceptive world in which the harmony of birds heralds the arming of warriors. This duplicity is in turn mirrored in language, in which the assonance of sounds ("harmony" and "arm") belies a dissonance of sense (birdsong and war). In this way, the romance reflects on the doubleness of its narration and the double purpose of its narrator, who both reports the betrayals in his world and puts on them the best blushing face of Aurora. In staging the doubleness of its narration and narrator, A Margarite alerts readers to the "condition of its meaningfulness." 54 First, it is a doubleness that mocks the conventions of romance through subversive imitation. Given its story of an encounter between Old and New Worlds in which gold is the underlying attraction, A Margarite can be said to mock the period's use of romance in glorifying the mercenary acts of empire. Second and more specifically, the mockery targets the figure of the royal virgin by presenting a double, ironic vision of the title character, Margarita, whose name invokes spiritual ideals but whose character embodies the English desire for American gold. Finally, Lodge's romance parodies crucial elements from Book I of The Faerie Queene, namely, the royal virgin Una, and the narrative movement from magical illusion to miraculous vision. Since Elizabethans associated Una with Queen Elizabeth, and saw Spenser's book as an elaborate praise for the spiritual aims of her Protestant empire, Lodge's parody thus offers itself as a critique of the Protestant rhetoric of empire. If the relation between two worlds can be summed up in the courtship of two people, then Lodge's romance presents the Old World's encounter with the New as a disastrous, one-sided love affair. The story begins with imminent war between Mosco and Cusco, averted at the last moment by a match arranged between the Moscovian princess Margarita and the Cuscan prince Arsadachus. The match fails, however, to content both parties. While Margarita pines after Arsadachus, he tries to seduce her companion Philenia. Failing in this, he commits a series of treacherous murders before abandoning Margarita to return to Cusco. Margarita follows her beloved to Cusco only to find that he has murdered his own parents and married Diana, the mistress on whom he has fathered a child. The story ends tragically when Arsadachus opens a box given him by Margarita and, driven mad by its contents, slays Diana, their child, Margarita, and himself. The narration of unregenerate evil in Arsadachus tends to generate sympathy for Margarita, a sympathy confirmed by the narrator's explicit praise of her. 55 Yet explicit praise does not obscure his implicit irony regarding her unrequited love for Arsadachus. This irony is especially pointed in the remark that Margarita loves blindly, "thinking all that


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golde which glistered" (20, 35). On the explicit level, the remark points to an innocent princess taken in by the charming evil prince. Appropriately, the name Arsadachus, derived from "arsadine," a gold-colored alloy of copper and zinc,56 implies falseness. But an implicit criticism emerges when we realize that Arsadachus is indeed prince of Cusco, the famous Inca capital which the Renaissance imagination equates with infinite stores of gold. In this light, the material wealth he represents is itself false gold, and in desiring him, Margarita mistakes material for spiritual values. In the meeting of two worlds, then, Margarita embodies the European desire for American gold, a desire which is of necessity onesided. If the setting of Cusco points to European mercenary interests in the New World, the setting of Mosco locates these interests in a specifically English arena. The name Mosco may refer to England's first joint-stock company, the Muscovy or Moscovian Company, formed in 1553 when the Spanish and Portuguese blocked English trade routes to the East. The Company can be compared to the financial arm of Elizabeth's court, for among its members were many peers and holders of high office, such as Leicester, Pembroke, Cecil, Walsingham, Nicholas Bacon, and William Borough, treasurer of the Queen's Navy.57 Primarily searching for gold and spices of the East, the Company's official goals were to develop trade with Russia and to find a northern passage to China. Unofficially, however, many members including courtiers and London merchants financed slaving and privateering ventures to America, in which, as seen earlier, the queen also took part. Among the merchants was Sir Thomas Lodge, one-time Mayor of London and governor of the Moscovian Company, who was father of our author.58 The Company remained very much in the public view: in 1596, its voyagers and agents were celebrated in William Warner's Albions England, books eleven and twelve, alongside pirates and explorers. Given these facts, it is possible to argue that a Moscovian court revolving around a royal virgin and with dealings in the New World provides an estranged perspective from which to view the English scene. From such perspective, the narrator's double vision of Margarita - his combination of explicit praise and implicit irony - constitutes a veiled critique of the values and motives that informed the English enterprise in America. This double vision, which pervades the romance, operates on the discrepancy between name and character. In her analysis, Anne Falke has shown that the name "margarita," Latin for pearl, and its variant "marguerite," French for daisy, have traditional associations of innocence, female chastity, the kingdom of heaven, and the power of spiritual healing; and that these associations, deliberately woven into the

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narrative, form a fabric of praise for Lodge's heroine. 59 At the same time, however, these associations invoke a set of ideal expectations against which her character is measured - and found wanting. As the embodiment of the English desire for American gold, Margarita will reveal a sexual nature that belies the spirituality of her name. Margarita is chaste - being driven by an obsessive desire for a man who will not have her. She is innocent - to the point of moral blindness. In order to win the love of Arsadachus, she agrees to lie for him, and thus unwittingly furthers his evil design. Although she should not be blamed for his crime, her failure to face up to either his falseness or her own deceit is disturbing. 60 Indeed, the narrator's sexual pun on lying further suggests that Margarita's sexuality is the basis of her spiritual deficit. When lying for Arsadachus does not win his favor, Margarita, "being laide in her bed, fared like Orlando sleeping in that bed his Angelica had lien with Medor" (48). This comparison pinpoints the moment in Orlando Furioso when Orlando finally realizes that Angelica has played him false. But unlike Orlando, who rages and goes mad, Margarita continues in denial. "Fond that I am, the more neare am I to my fall," she murmurs and falls asleep (49). The double vision of Margarita thus draws on both sides of the misogynist dichotomy which idealizes female spirituality and debases female sexuality. This ironic portrayal of Margarita strikes at the figure of the royal virgin, whose spirituality is central to the Protestant romance of empire. In her various roles - of which Una is our focus - the figure of the royal virgin is associated with Queen Elizabeth, in whose name Englishmen plundered and colonized.61 At crucial instances, in fact, the ironic portrayal of Margarita constitutes a parody of Una, each instance functioning to implicate Una's spirituality in Margarita's sexuality. Through this parody Lodge invokes the spiritual aims of a Protestant empire in order to hint at baser motives. Let us focus on the parody of chastity. Una's chastity is demonstrated through her encounter with a lion, that emblematic beast which recognizes virgins and royalty. When Una encounters the lion, she has been judged unfaithful and abandoned by the Redcrosse Knight. In sparing the royal virgin, the lion not only fulfills its emblematic function but shows signs "as [if] he her wronged innocence did weet" (1.3.6.3). As Claudette Pollack has noted, some details of this episode have close parallels in Lodge's romance (8). 62 And yet while the encounter with the lion vindicates Una's wronged innocence, it only confirms Margarita's frustrated sexuality. When the beast devours her maid who "had tasted too much of fleshly love," Margarita laments in self-pity: "I live, in that I have had time so long, to love with neglect, and to pine in the delay" (81).


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Beyond its value to her character, Una's innocence is a spiritual power which enables her to help in the rescue and spiritual reform of the Redcrosse Knight. At their betrothal, her innocence is matched by her appearance, "so faire and fresh, as freshest flowre in May" (1.12.22.1). The union of Una and the Redcrosse Knight, though brief, is blessed by "an heavenly noise," ravishing the spirit of all present. This spiritual quality is, again, compromised in Margarita. With a name so reminiscent of the heavenly kingdom, she promises her lover an earthly empire "Believe me good prince, if Mosco cannot suffice to please you, Europe and the worlde shall be sought to satisfie you" - a promise suggestive of her own imperial appetite (96). The image of Una as freshest flower of May is echoed in Margarita who, "apparrelling herselfe freshly like Maie," proceeds to tell a lie to win her lover's favor (36). Far from exercising the power of spiritual healing attributed to her name, she succumbs to Arsadachus' corruption. It has been said that Margarita falls prey to corruption because she is too loyal and trusting (see note 60), but the narrator's comment suggests otherwise: "So great is the simplicitie of women, who are soone led where they most like" (34, my emphasis). The narrator not only suggests that she falls through her desire for Arsadachus, but does so by lumping the peerless Margarita with the common run of women. Her desire can even be called idolatrous, when Arsadachus' departure leaves her watering his portrait with drops of her tears and blood. We may better appreciate Lodge's irony by resorting to his anonymous work Prosopopeia Containing the Teares of. . . Marie, published six months after A Margarite and shortly before his exile to France, and dedicated to two Margarets, the Countesses of Cumberland and Derby.63 This openly Catholic devotional work adopts the voice of the Virgin Mary to exhort readers to turn from worldly gold to gold of the spirit. Christ is this "true Gold" in the Prosopopeia (III: 23), as opposed to the false gold of Arsadachus; and the tears of Mary mourning Christ's death are "tears of great worth" (III: 79), a phrase recalling the "pearl of great price." Clearly Mary represents the Catholic ideal of female spirituality to which Margarita can be only the fallen counterpart. A Catholic perspective is thus implicit in the ironic portrayal of Margarita, who in her moments of sexual frustration and spiritual capitulation bears textual resemblance to Una. The result is a subtle reversal of the Protestant bias built into the romance of empire, one which specifically involves the struggle between the royal virgin and her counterfeit double in Spenser's Protestant romance. In exposing her double, Duessa, as the papist whore of Babylon, Una marks the triumph of the one true Church and Bride of Christ for which she stands. As a

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parody of Una, Margarita not only fails to expose whoredom, but wishes for the sexual fulfillment that her double, Diana, enjoys, thereby defusing any issue of religious struggle. In its focus on the spiritual blindness of the royal virgin, the religious reversal is further relevant to Elizabethan politics. Like Una, Margarita the peerless pearl and Diana the chaste moon goddess are symbols of Elizabeth. In this way, the failure of spiritual vision in Lodge's romance - which as we shall see reverses the visionary impulse of romance itself - ultimately implicates England's royal virgin. The plight of the royal virgin in the romance finds a reflection in Elizabeth's court. The queen's own favorites, Leicester, Essex, and Ralegh, all managed to court her with elaborate gallantry and secretly to marry their mistresses. Her anger did not outlast her need for their assistance, however. In the case of Ralegh, the wayward knight was recalled from banishment to plan a series of spoiling ventures on Spanish shipping. 64 Significantly, in Ralegh's American exploits, the double reference to Elizabeth as sacred virgin and to the New World as erotic bride constitutes a topos for colonial possession. As Jeffrey Knapp has noted, Hakluyt in his dedication to Ralegh, which is appended to a translation of Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World, "allegoriz[es] Virginia as a substitute Elizabeth." 65 Though presently barren like Elizabeth, Virginia is expected to bear fruit under the cultivation of Ralegh. The substitution thus assigns a sexual role to the New World bride, thereby maintaining the spiritual worship of Elizabeth at home. The same topos operates in two promotions for the exploration and mining of gold in Guiana. In the Discovery, Ralegh urges timely investment in Guiana as "a land that hath yet her maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought," while appealing to the queen in her role as Protestant virgin to supplant Spanish influence in the region. The work was written in part to counter the general disappointment with Ralegh's voyage which brought home no gold, and the allegations that the ore samples he had collected were either fool's gold or gold purchased elsewhere to fool others. But to little avail: the queen refused to see Ralegh or to invest in his colonizing enterprise. 66 To plead for Elizabeth's acceptance of Guiana, George Chapman once again invokes the virginbride double in De Guiana, carmen epicum (1596). Chapman's song is designed to impress his audience through the epic scale of its imperial vision. He presents "Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of gold, / Whose forehead knockes against the roofes of Starres," submitting to England like a sister and daughter (18-19). 67 He imagines Ralegh setting sail, being brought "Bridegroome-like . . . to his Argolian Fleet" (156-59). The simile likens Ralegh to Jason, whose myth of the


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golden fleece is generally used in the period to glorify piracy and the search for gold. As Jason, Ralegh becomes Medea's proxy, wielding "his Eliza-consecrated sword" to open the "aged throte" of England and infuse her "vaines" with riches from his conquests, namely Guiana (9-12). By analogy, Elizabeth and Guiana assume different aspects of Medea, respectively, the Medea who aids Jason-Ralegh in his conquests, and the Medea who renews the economic lifeblood of England. As expected, the two Medeas illustrate the spirituality of Elizabeth, "whose barrennesse / Is the true fruit of vertue" (24-25), and the sexuality of Guiana who will yield "honor'd progenie" because no "Gallique humours putrifie her bloud" (172-74). Espoused to virtue, the English Jason must nevertheless leave to engender increase upon Guiana. The high point of the poem is the last section, delivered in the voice of divine fury. It begins with Elizabeth blessing Ralegh's journey: Then in the Thespiads bright Propheticke Fount, Me thinkes I see our Liege rise from her throne, Her eares and thoughtes in steepe amaze erected, At the most rare endeuour of her power. And now she blesseth with her woonted Graces Th'industrious Knight, the soule of this exploit, Dismissing him to conuoy of his starres

(148-54)

and culminates in a vision of a new Golden Age in Guiana under the rule of Britania: There makes Societie Adamantine chaines, And ioin their harts with wealth, whom wealth disioyn'd. There healthfull Recreations strowe their meades, And make their mansions daunce with neighborhood, That here were drown'd in churlish Auarice. And there do Pallaces and temples rise Out of the earth, and kisse th'enamored skies, Where new Britania, humblie kneeles to heauen, The world to her, and both at her blest feete, In whom the Circles of all Empire meet.

(175-84)

The visionary ending subsumes the tensions from the double liaison of the imperial knight to the spiritual unity of Britannia, "in whom the Circles of all Empire meet." That Chapman should choose the vehicle of romance for this vision is not surprising. The impulse of romance, A. Bartlett Giamatti observes, is visionary, moving from magical illusion into miraculous vision. Thus in The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight's error is the result of an illusion created by the magician Archimago, and the knight's reform is accompanied by the exposure of this illusion, as well as a vision of the

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heavenly city, New Jerusalem. Likewise in De Guiana, the vision of a spiritual empire emerges from the Argolian knight's deeply problematic reliance on Medea's magic for his conquests. There is an important difference, however. In Chapman's poem, the source of the problem lies not with the knight but with the royal virgin. The Medea analogy implies that Elizabeth's power is a negative one which Ralegh will turn to positive ends in his empire-making. The movement from necromancy to the vision of romance thus involves a disillusion with female power - in this case, the power of Elizabeth over her male subjects. If Chapman's disillusion with Elizabeth focuses on a gender reversal with respect to the vision of romance, Lodge's parody of the royal virgin compasses a reversal of the visionary impulse of romance itself. His story begins with the expectation of miracle: Margarita is "she, who was ordained to be the miracle of love." But, as the narrator explains, this miracle turns out to be a form of self-delusion, an image of a false conceit: "for when Minecius courted his Philenia, Margarita conceited her Arsadachus; and by perceiving the true heart of the one, supposed the perfect habite of the other" (12). The double sense of "habite" suggests a failure to see past clothing into character. This failure in spiritual vision is ironically revealed through a device of magic. On her way to Cusco in search of Arsadachus, Margarita meets the magician Arsinous, who conjures an image of the prince by reading from a book, which image she pursues and embraces before realizing her error. The episode raises the question of whether Margarita can distinguish the real Arsadachus from an illusion, or whether she has not all along projected onto the Cuscan an image of her own desire. Margarita's embrace of illusion is more than a reflection on blind desire; it calls into question the very means by which the Old World constructs its image of the New. Her journey to Cusco is sustained by illusions produced from the magician's book: hereon [Arsinous] opened his book and read, and sodainely a pavilion was picht, the table was reared, the dishes served in, with all kinde of delicates, the music exceeding pleasant, so that Margarita was ravished to behold this. (84) The word "ravished" calls to mind the figure of the "ravished observer" in the discovery narrative, who stands transfixed in wonder before the "plenitude and . . . sensual richness" of the New World. As Wayne Franklin and Patricia Parker point out, such "wonder," pertaining specifically to the eye or gaze, entails two moments of response: a visual enthrallment to the land's abundance, followed by a visual mastery and possession of that abundance, turning it into a "catalogue" or "inventory" of potential commodities. 68 Since its first appearance in Spanish


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accounts of the New World and their English translations, this topos of wonder has come to be a standard narrative device in English colonial promotions, a way of making vivid in the readers' imagination what they could not physically see or possess. Given the commercial prospect implicit in the "inventory," the topos of wonder served both as a means to attract investments to colonial projects and, as was so often the case, as a narrative substitute deferring the promised returns that the projects failed to realize. Thus Thomas Hariot in A briefe and true report of the newfound land of Virginia (1588) offers a catalogue of commodities as "the fruits of our labours," both to dispel charges that the project was unproductive and to show that its "continuance . . . may returne you profit and gain."69 This use of wonder extends to descriptions of glittering streams and mountains in accounts of failed English expeditions in search of gold, the Guiana promotions being only the latest examples. In 1578, Martin Frobisher brought home from Newfoundland 200 tons of worthless ore believed to be gold. With the ore "locked up, under quadruple locks," another voyage was organized, with a huge promotion but no returns.70 A 1585 account of Virginia reports sightings of gold that never materialized.71 Gold fever had run its course two decades later when Jamestown colonists mocked the "golden inventions" of gold-seekers, exposing the commercial "inventory" of wonder as the mere deception of rhetorical invention.72 Within this discursive context, Margarita's ravishment denotes the visual enthrallment of wonder, while the magician's book hints at the textual production of wonder, both of which point to the vision's power of illusion. In fact, A Margarite undermines the visionary impulse of romance through a persistent deflation of wonder. The first deflation occurs in the preface, when Lodge describes the Strait of Magellan, the scene of his writing: in which place to the southward many wondrous Isles, many strangefishes,many monstrous Patagones withdrew my senses; briefly, many bitter and extreme frosts at midsummer continually clothe and clad the discomfortable mountaines; so that as there was great wonder in the place wherein I writ this, so likewise might it be maruelled, that in such scantie fare, such causes of feare, so mightie discouragements, and many crosses, I should deserue or eternize anything. (3)

The "wondrous Isles," the "strange fishes," the "monstrous Patagones," and even the unseasonable cold are all part of the familiar vocabulary of wonder, and passes for entertainment in an age when travelers to the New World like Ralegh still make room in their accounts for Mandeville's monstrosities. And yet, rather than inspiring Lodge to religious awe or poetic eloquence, these wonders of the deep turn out to be a

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perfunctory opening for a complaint about the horrible conditions he endured, and the marvel that he could have written anything at all! In the narrative proper, the deflation of wonder is consistently directed at the duplicity not only of Arsadachus but also of those around him. The following lines describe the first impression he makes on the Moscovian court: But among all other subtile demeanours in Court, this one was most to be admired, that Arsadachus shoulde make signes of great deuotion toward Margarita, and deluded her with most hatefull doublenesse; it was wonderfull to see him counterfet sighes, to faine loue, dissemble teares, to worke treasons, vow much, performe little; in briefe, vow al faith, and performe nothing but falshoode. (20)

If the narrator sees through the performance, "Margarita (poore princesse) thinking all that golde which glistered . . . seemed not to suspect whateuer she saw, nor to count it wrong, howsoeuer shee endured" (20). The operative word here is "seemed," implying a willful blindness to the prince's mischief. Not surprisingly, when accused by witnesses of heinous murders, the guilty Arsadachus "shooke off al their objections with such constancie, that it was to be wondered" (42). Here again, the double sense of "constancie," both honesty and unchanging persistence, casts doubt on the prince's act. In this light, the wonder, directed at the constancy of the act, is at best an equivocal statement of credence in the actor. As the narrator goes on to say, it is Arsadachus' angry threat of departure that produces a judgment in his favor. To appease him, the emperor of Mosco tortures one witness and banishes the other. In these instances, the deflation of wonder indicts Mosco as much as it does the Cuscan prince: it suggests how alike both parties are in their duplicity. As Pollack shows in her study of Lodge's literary allusions, the character of Arsadachus combines the consummate grace of Castiglione's courtier and the manipulative genius of Machiavelli's prince.73 In Mosco, Arsadachus outshines the courtiers in courtship and tourneys, and outmaneuvers the machiavels in treachery. For their part, Moscovians remain blind to his evil because they see in this New World native a mirror of their own cultural identity. One may suppose that Lodge, having no knowledge of Cuscan manners, resorts to European fictions for his character. But in the process the text enacts the making of New World identity as a form of cultural misrecognition. Lodge's text further reflects on its own production of wonder when it compares the Cuscan prince to fabulous flora and fauna. Thus Arsadachus' father warns him to beware of flatterers and "preuent them in their subtilties; as the Nibias doth the sea dragon" (18). But instead his own "sinister behauiour" gives out signs of his evil, just "as the bird Lenca


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flying toward the south foretelleth stormes" (19). Ironically, Arsadachus warns against himself when he tells of the Sinilan, which kills anyone close by when "the plant swelleth and beareth his floure" (54). None of these species appears in the natural histories available to the Renaissance.74 Since there is no shortage of fabulous plants and animals to be culled from the pages of Pliny or travel narratives, it is clear that the author is playing with his readers. In these ludic moments, Lodge's text becomes the magician's book, encoding and dissolving its own power of illusion. If the Cuscan prince vanishes behind a surface of similitudes, by implication, the gold and wealth of Cusco are merely an illusion of the text. In this light, it is only appropriate that Margarita's gift to Arsadachus upon advice from the magician Arsinous should likewise disappear into thin air, leaving behind a foul odor. Even as the gift - a gem in a box - symbolizes Margarita's virginity entrusted to Arsadachus' safe keeping, the foul odor it becomes registers a vanishing trace of a staled desire for the Cuscan prince and New World riches. Nor is it surprising, at the story's end when Mosco has conquered Cusco, that the magician should be left there to govern. Such imperial disillusion is an exercise for which the romance prepares its readers even from the title, A Margarite of America. To first-time readers, the name Margarite suggests the peerless pearl of romance, whose spirituality signifies the spiritual aims of empire. However the indefinite article points not to the symbol, but to a commodity, albeit precious, which abounds in America, and which sailors would hope to bring home from their voyage. The pearl Lodge brings back from his disastrous voyage is the story itself, which he claims to have taken from a Spanish work obtained in a Jesuit library during a raid on Santos. No book was found to substantiate the claim; only the circumstances of plunder, which were, after all, the source of Lodge's romance. In the end, the narrative leaves readers with its duplicities: dazzling descriptions of wealth and sensational violence, and the spiritual blindness of a royal virgin that winks at the Protestant romance of empire.

Jack ofNewbery and Drake in California: domestic and colonial narratives of English cloth and manhood

In the course of the sixteenth century, the English cloth trade rose to domestic and international prominence through a shift from household to capitalist production. Thomas Deloney's prose romance, Jack of Newbery (1597), recapitulates this historic rise of the cloth trade in the personal achievements of the clothier John Winchcombe. As the trade continued to expand, cloth was among the first English products to arrive in the New World. In 1579, on his voyage around the world, Sir Francis Drake landed in California where he and his men were allegedly worshipped as gods for distributing English cloth to the Indians. This colonial episode first appeared in the 1589 edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations. Both the prose romance and the colonial narrative are promotions for the cloth trade. But at the same time, cloth can be said to "make" the Englishman by giving him two faces: as producer at home and colonist in America. In focusing on Winchcombe and Drake " 'founding" figures in the domestic and colonial enterprises - the stories of cloth are in fact stories of an ideal bourgeois manhood elaborated through the economics and politics of cloth-making. If we realize that both Deloney and Hakluyt had ties to the Clothworkers of London (a confederation of clothiers and tradesmen in various finishing crafts), the relation of cloth and manhood becomes a historically specific one. A silk-weaver by profession, Deloney was active within this economic network, and "many of his works show him to be a willing, or perhaps even a hired, spokesman for the clothiers of England."1 For his part, Hakluyt was from 1577 a pensioner of the Clothworkers' Company; as a student of Christ Church, Oxford, he was subsidized by the company in his theological studies. The pension continued until 1586 despite his overtly nontheological activities, such as his 1582 publication of Divers Voyages touching the Discovery of America. Theology was not at odds with commerce, however; as preacher, Hakluyt would repay the Clothworkers' kindness in his colonial promotions.2 Through their publications, then, both Deloney and Hakluyt gave voice to the aspirations of 62

Jack ofNewbery and Drake in California

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Clothworkers, aspirations linking their sense of self-worth to the production and sale of cloth. In light of their background, it is not surprising that both Winchcombe and Drake should exemplify a bourgeois heroism based not on noble birth or high office, but on commercial skill and the practice of a trade which enriches the individual tradesman as well as the commonwealth. The term "bourgeois heroism" is borrowed from Laura Stevenson's extensive study of Elizabethan popular literature in praise of successful merchants, clothiers, craftsmen - in general, men of trade. As Stevenson points out, however, "Elizabethan praise of bourgeois men was expressed" not in terms of their commercial achievement but "in the rhetoric - and by extension, in the terms of social paradigms - of the aristocracy." Such paradoxical praise reflects the problems of formulating an identity and social consciousness which accommodate the disparate realities of money and status within a still largely feudal social hierarchy.3 I would argue, however, that bourgeois heroism is more than just an appropriation of aristocratic values. Even in adopting the language of chivalrous service, this heroism emphasizes service to the commonwealth, signaling a reorientation of the self from regional feudal loyalties to an alignment with a centralized nation-state. This coordination of changes in individual "psychical makeup" with the changing structures of society, what Norbert Elias calls "the civilizing process," was mediated in early modern Europe by humanist writings on the proper social habits and domestic relations among individuals. This civilizing process, as Barbara Correll reminds us, served in the formation of gender identities. Specifically in the discourses of Erasmus on civility and domesticity, a bourgeois male selfhood is already being formulated in relation to both the social hierarchy of the court and the gender hierarchy in the household. Thus humanism, in negotiating between these social and gender hierarchies, underwrites an ideological shift that made possible the articulation of bourgeois difference from the feudal aristocracy.4 In Tudor England, humanist education helped to consolidate the crown's power by disposing individual behavior and consciousness to governance by a civil state whose power structure is said to reproduce that of the household. While such education inducted a number of talented commoners into high office, it fostered more generally among the rising bourgeoisie an idea of man as the mediator of domestic and civil authority. In the popular Elizabethan praise of wealthy citizens, this sense of masculine agency in service to the nation characterizes their "noble" spirit and "gentle" craft, investing aristocratic terms with bourgeois pride. Whereas aristocratic terms gloss over individual com-

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mercial success, the focus on masculine agency naturalizes it as a function of sexual difference. Such gendering of class identity is, after all, mirrored by the period's economic inequality between the sexes. In thus naturalizing such inequality, Elizabethan celebration of the bourgeois hero effaces the material conditions that enabled men to advance while women lost ground in the trades. Economic inequality between the sexes appeared first in the cloth trade when the shift from household to capitalist production spurred a progressive male monopoly on weaving and displaced hitherto independent female weavers. As Alice Clark notes, the trade was traditionally open to female membership. The term "webster" is the feminine form of "webber" or weaver, and women's names regularly appeared in the rolls of the cloth guilds until the Statute of 1511 forbidding maids and women to weave worsteds. The exclusion of female weavers was most complete in the wool trade, where the growth of capital had been most rapid. By the early seventeenth century, "it was unusual to find women connected with the clothing trade, except as wage earners" relegated to the lowpaying, unskilled jobs of spinning and carding.5 Jack of Newbery idealizes the history of male monopolization of the trade in the story of one man, and redefines the economic displacement of female weavers as man's domestic mastery over women. And yet Deloney's idealized world of the clothier was itself a far cry from the current problems facing the Clothworkers, who were from the 1570s onwards virtually shut out of European markets by rival monopolistic parties. By the 1580s, the Clothworkers had turned to potential American markets to sell their products. Their efforts gave rise to yet another chapter in the writing of English bourgeois masculinity - this time as colonists. In the accounts of Drake in California, colonial manhood finds expression in the "civilizing" of Indians, an act that, beginning with the "gift" of cloth and religion, ends in the taking of England's first possession in the New World. My analysis will reveal the structural analogy underlying the domestic and colonial definitions of masculinity. Both require the subordination of others - of Englishwomen and Indians - to the domestic and civil ideals that constitute not only England as a nation, but also the identity of the Englishmen who labor in its behalf. I Jack of Newbery celebrates the clothier in the semi-legendary figure of John Winchcombe. The preface states what the story will illustrate, that clothiers enrich the commonwealth, and that their trade "hath been, and

Jack of Newbery and Drake in California

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yet is, the nourishing of many thousands of poor people."6 In brief, Jack rises from an apprentice weaver to become the owner of a thriving business. His social importance obligates him to certain forms of conspicuous consumption, but even these expenses serve the needs of society. A ten-day feast given at his second marriage greatly relieves the poor. His patriotic outlay for war suits and feeds 150 soldiers where only six are required. The pageants he devises for the visiting Henry VIII and his queen alert the sovereign to the enemies of trade and the commonwealth. And lest Jack should be taken for a social climber, he refuses elevation to knighthood, knowing his proper place in society. This portrait of the worthy clothier makes it easy to overlook Jack's indebtedness for his success to his first wife, the childless widow through whom he inherits his business. Tudor laws guaranteed a widow's right to at least a third of her husband's estate, but upon remarriage her property belonged to her new husband.7 In Jack's case, marriage to the widow brings him an "estate . . . reasonable good," in addition to "a house ready furnished, seruants ready taught, and all other things for his trade necessary" (8). The issue of indebtedness does arise, however, during the couple's first domestic dispute, when she tells him: "I, pittying thy pouerty, made thee a man, and master of the house, but not to the end I would become thy slaue" (17). But the rest of the narrative puts a different slant on matters, attributing Jack's economic and social rise to his sound domestic government. Indeed, this is the quality for which the widow married him in the first place.8 Although it is not clear that Jack ever gains mastery over the widow, his authority as husband is never put to the test.9 Moreover, death soon removes her from the story, and Jack's second marriage, this time to his servant, fully establishes his manhood as master and husband. Through a domestic rearrangement, therefore, the narrative enacts its own inscription within the patriarchal economy. And yet, it is significant that the narrative should raise the question at all of who made Jack a man; significant that the widow should have the chance to put Jack in his place, even as he displaces her economically in marriage. It is as if the narrative, in its own making of a man, must retain the traces of what manhood displaces as a register of its achievement. This is a pattern that repeats itself as the story unfolds, recapitulating in one man's success the history of the male monopolization of an industry. Jack's rise entails the economic displacement of not just one woman, but of numerous independent women weavers from the cloth trade. This systematic economic displacement of women is made visible in the story through two ballads glorifying Jack and male weavers. The implied social process is justified as the making of a man.

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Before launching into a specific analysis, a few words are in order on the general relation between the ballads and the story. Deloney was known to his contemporaries as the "Balletting Silke weauer of Norwich." His street ballads convey his keen sense of the form as a vehicle for social and political commentary. 10 It is therefore only to be expected that the ballads in Jack ofNewbery would serve some important function, as indeed they do. They draw on a tradition which blends historical events and popular imagination into a cultural mythology, and are thus appropriate to the semi-legendary status of Deloney's hero. Specifically, this cultural mythology speaks to a national identity that is inseparable from the idea of manhood. Of the four ballads to appear in Jack of Newbery,11 two are traditional ballads in which the nation's and women's honor are equated in the rivalry between England and Scotland. "Flodden Field" celebrates the battle in which Henry VIII, in defense of his sister Margaret, slays her husband, James IV of Scotland. "The Faire Flower of Northumberland" relates the betrayal of a noble English maid by a Scottish lord and her rescue by two English knights. These ballads of the nobility rally English manhood to the defense of national and domestic boundaries. In the prose narrative, Jack exemplifies both aspects of manhood in ways that fully identify him with his trade, thereby adapting aristocratic heroism to bourgeois resources. Although Jack does not take part in Henry's campaign against Scotland, his act of clothing 150 soldiers is itself a symbolic display of national pride, the importance of which is emphasized by the queen's reward of a gold chain. The episode thus defines Jack's identity, not by knightly valor, but by the performance of his own trade. Again, Jack's trade is his means of defending women, the knightly deed that "The Faire Flower" celebrates. The ballad, sung by Jack's female workers, defines them not by their productive capacity as laborers, but by an upper-class femininity in need of protection. Such protection is symbolically displayed in yet another act of clothing: "the King and Queene and all the Nobility," we are told, "heedfully watched these women, who . . . were all attired alike from head to toe" (33). Their uniform attire identifies them as Jack's workers, being preserved by the work and economic security he provides from the dangers of sexual seduction. Through the interplay of ballads and story, the "art of clothing" 12 emerges as the weaving of a symbolic text or narrative which constitutes the clothier as an agent in society. It is a narrative of bourgeois selfcreation in which one's profession, not birth, justifies one's being. This fantasy of the self-made man is sustained by the same reverse logic by which Deloney's romance authenticates Jack's worth as a clothier. Just


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what the fantasy entails, especially for the women Jack supposedly rescues, we are about to discover in the remaining two ballads. As with the two discussed above, these ballads feature the women in order to further the definition of bourgeois manhood; they mark two moments in the story in which Jack is judged and approved by two patriarchal figures. The first ballad occurs just before Jack's second marriage, when he shows his "house" (as Deloney calls it) to his future in-laws. The ballad details the different rooms in which more than a thousand workers are engaged in various stages of cloth-making.13 Apart from weavers, quillers, spinners, and carders, there are wool-pickers, shearers, rowers, dyers, and fullers, who are in turn served by a kitchen staff consisting of a butcher, brewer, baker, five cooks, and six scullion boys. Suffice it to say, the "house" that Jack built is one of the workshops for large-scale capitalist production which supposedly fueled England's commercial expansion and supported its growing population. This vast productive capacity is summed up in one man, Jack, and filtered through the awestruck eyes of the prospective father-in-law who appears at the end of the ballad: The old man that did see this sight, Was much amaz'd, as well he might: This was a gallant Cloathier sure, Whose fame for euer shall endure.

(21)

The old man does not notice, however, the other side of this prosperity - the displacement of women from the skilled labor of weaving to the unskilled labor of spinning and carding. These women appear in the ballad beside the male weavers and the children, content with their place at work: Within one roome being large and long, There stood two hundred Loomes full strong: Two hundred men the truth is so, Wrought in these Loomes all in a row. By euery one a pretty boy, Sate making quills with mickle ioy: And in all other places hard by, A hundred women merily, Were carding hard with ioyful cheere, Who singing sate with voyces cleere. And in a chamber close beside, Two hundred maidens did abide, In petticoates of Stammell red, And milke-white kerchers on their head:

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The romance of the New World Their smocke-sleeues like to winter snow, That on the Westerne mountaines flow, And each sleeue with a silken band, Was feately tyed at the hand. These pretty maids did never lin, But in that place all day did spin: And spinning so with voices meet, Like Nightingales they sang full sweet.

(20)

This picture of cheerful industry and harmonious division of labor would seem to have glossed over the economic displacement of women. But traces of this displacement linger in the description of the women singing "like nightingales . . . full sweet" with "voices cleere" and "voices meete." In the first place, the simile miniaturizes the women and trivializes their labor, turning them into entertainment for the men. More important, the reference to nightingales recalls the myth of Philomela who, being raped and deprived of speech, tells her story and avenges her violation through her skillful weaving. By inviting comparison of Philomela with the women workers, the reference draws attention to two crucial changes. First, unlike Philomela, the women are no longer weavers but carders and spinners. This revision would be no great surprise to contemporary readers familiar with previous changes Philomela underwent at the hands of Elizabethan writers. While Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses preserves Philomela's skill of weaving, Thomas Cooper in his Thesaurus, and others after him like Pettie and Gascoigne, change her skill to embroidery.14 The ballad's revision only makes the myth conform to the gendered economics of the cloth trade, thereby normalizing into cultural mythology the economic rape of women - the loss of their trade as weavers. Significantly, weaving is not just a means of production but a means of expression. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin observes, weaving, especially Philomela's, was from classical times identified with the woman's voice, which male "dominance can only contain, but never successfully destroy." And as Leonard Barkan further shows, the Renaissance understood the myth of Philomela to be concerned with communication.15 In this light, the ballad's revision ratifies a further violation of the women workers: within the male economy, they can no longer weave the text of their economic violation. This loss of expressive power brings up a second point of revision. In the traditional tale, Philomela turns into a nightingale only after her rape is avenged, and even then she continues to lament her shameful rape in mournful nocturnal song. In the ballad, the women sing with cheerful nightingale voices, oblivious to their own plight or to the desire for revenge. The ballad further indicates approval of these cheerful voices by


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describing them as "meete," that is, fit and proper, fully appropriated by the masculine narrative. And so, ironically, the women are made to acquiesce in their economic rape with their own voices. They are the only workers in the ballad to be clothed by their master - clothed symbolically by the masculine text. The rewriting of classical myth introduces an element of literariness unusual in the ballad. Enclosed in a written narrative, this importation of high form into low points to the gendered dynamics of oral and written traditions in English society as well as the cloth trade. Writing in this period was a masculine skill; as such, it marked a difference between the role of male weavers (like Deloney) in promoting the trade and the traditional role of female weavers in the oral transmission of skills.16 The intrusion of the literary into ballads on weaving can thus be seen as an assertion of male hegemony within weaving, a traditionally female space of expression. In the ballad above, this assertion is ventriloquized through the singing women. It is no accident then that, within their workplace, we know how they sing but not what they sing. By contrast, the men's point of view finds voice in "The Weauers Song," which morally justifies their monopoly on weaving by rewriting yet another classical myth of a female weaver. The song is presented to Henry VIII: "Then came his Highnesse where he saw an hundred Loomes, standing in one roome, and two men working in euery one, who pleasantly sung on this sort . . ." (31). Their singing invites not only royal praise, a chummy "well sung, good fellowes," but royal favor, the grant of a hundred angels and four bucks each year to celebrate the weavers' trade (32). From the start, the song makes clear that men were not weavers when "our trade to flourish did begin," once again preparing for the displacement of women that manhood requires in the context of the cloth trade. The song invokes a mythical past, "when Hercules did vse to spin, / and Pallas wrought vpon the Loome." This arrangement is obviously not to the men's liking. For while the reference to Pallas ascribes a female origin to weaving, the reference to Hercules suggests female tyranny in the figure of Omphale, who makes the hero dress in women's garments and do women's work. As the song unfolds, the female tyranny is associated with the unruliness of biblical giants who "did fight with speares like Weauers beames," a likely reference to monopolies against which clothiers were competing. This misrule ends in David's slaying of Goliath, a triumph of technology over size (of which more later). Having spanned the ages of man, the song enters the history of Greeks and Trojans in which the proper division of labor begins to manifest itself:

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The romance of the New World But while the Greekes besieged Troy, Penelope apace did spin, And Weauers wrought with mickle ioy, though litle gaines were coming in. For loue and friendship [did agree, To keep the bands of amitie.] Had Helen then sate carding wooll, (whose beauteous face did breed such strife) She had not been Sir Paris trull, nor caus'd so many lose their life. Yet we by loue did still agree, &c. Or had king Priams wanton sonne beene making quills with sweet content, He had not then his friends vndone, when he to Greece a gadding went. For loue and friendship did agree, &c.

(31-32)

As one would expect, Penelope does not weave but spin. More important, by revising the Trojan War story, the song emphasizes the place of cloth-making within the orbit of English domesticity - the ideology of the household in which productivity and propriety are merged. The classical Penelope who undoes her weaving to stave off suitors during her husband's prolonged absence is here replaced by one whose productive spinning keeps her busy and chaste while the men fight to regain Helen. Conversely, Helen's idleness and Paris' "gadding" abroad lead to adultery and then to war, the violation of domestic and national boundaries. Neither would have happened, the song suggests, had Helen sat carding wool, and Paris been making quills, a duty which reduces him to a boy! It remains then for men to maintain the integrity of these boundaries. In the song, men appear either as warriors to defend women's propriety or as weavers to make use of women's production - to make cloth "with mickle joy" out of the thread Penelope has spun. Sung to a refrain (in all but the last stanza) of harmony between the sexes and among men, the song moralizes the gender division of labor that gives men as weavers economic control of cloth production. Insofar as the clothier emerges from the ranks of male weavers, as Jack does, the making of a man is predicated upon the economic unmaking of women, albeit redefined as man's domestication of women's labor and virtue. The conflation of propriety and productivity in Deloney's work is indicative of the merging of the period's economic interests and patriarchal values. Historically, the exploitation of cheap female labor facili-


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tated the rise of the clothier and the industry's transition to capitalist production. Ironically, the shift to capitalist production disrupted the family as a unit of production. But the disruption only broadened the economic base of domesticity to apply to the industry as a whole.17 As early as 1535-36, one writer cites the rescue of women from idleness and thereby from whoredom as a potential benefit of increased production: if every parishe in Englonde spente but 40s. in shertes and smokkes and other lynnyn besyde that that is made with in the realme, grete nombre of yonge maydens and women may be set to spyne lynnyn cloth, which lyvith idully in hordome and bawdery . . ,18

From a different angle, in his proposal of "a project for dyeing cloth in England," William Cholmeley stresses industry's need for female labor in terms of "housewifery": And as it is in spyces, so it is in sylkes, so in wynes, which do us more hurt then good, in lynnen cloth, thredde, and all other thingis, wherof many (suche as be profitable) myght be made in the realme, if housewifrye dydflorisheamonge us.19

From such statements of economic "reality," it is an easy step to idealizing producers like Jack as masters of an extended domesticity. In the case of Jack, his place of production is his "house," and his authority extends beyond his immediate family and household servants to all workers and their kin. Not only does he provide for his house, but he defends it from external threats. When an idle gossip, given to drink, teaches Jack's wife to scant provisions for the workers, Jack both corrects the wife and forbids the gossip to visit. When an Italian gentleman tries to seduce a kinswoman of one of his weavers, Jack drives the foreigner away with a nasty prank. When his maid is made pregnant by a nobleman, Jack devises a scheme to teach his social better about domestic responsibility and even pays him to marry the girl. Clearly, as master of his house, Jack asserts a social power that goes well beyond its domestic boundaries. Jack's domestic authority is the basis of a social power that reaches the highest level of civil government. When excessive taxation of tradesmen hurts clothiers and their dependants, Jack presents the problem to his sovereign in two pageants. In the Battle of the Anthill, Jack is the king of the anthill defending his worker ants from the butterfly, or Wolsey, to whom Jack attributes blame for the taxes. Then in the procession of the golden beehive, Jack reminds Henry of his obligation to those subjects who labor to enrich the commonwealth. The procession takes place within the boundaries of Jack's well-ordered house, and the instruction moves its royal audience to bestow a knighthood on the "yoeman clothier."

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Jack's refusal of a knighthood is usually taken by scholars as a sign of bourgeois ambivalence toward the Tudor social hierarchy and its implied values. 20 In his refusal, Jack voices explicit acceptance of his place in a fixed society: "To the end I may still keepe in minde from whence I came, and what I am, I beseech your Grace let me rest in my russet coate, a poore Clothier to my dying day" (38). At the same time, however, the title seems almost irrelevant given the extent of his social power as seen in his treatment of an idle gossip, a foreigner, a nobleman, even the king. We may better understand this ambivalence if we consider Jack as a masculine subject produced by an interplay of discourses, the discourse of domesticity and the discourse of the moral economy, both of which find a common ground in the idea of the Christian commonwealth. The portrait of Jack's domestic mastery draws on official doctrine in which the household is the model and basis of the commonwealth. 21 Invented by Christian humanists and popularized in sermons and domestic conduct books, the doctrine had wide currency in Elizabethan England. According to this doctrine, the husband is the head of his household, just as the king is head of his commonwealth and Christ the head of his church. By implication, the husband is the mediator of both civil and religious authorities to his household dependants. 22 Through the devices of subordination and analogy, the doctrine provides a rhetorical formula for a hierarchical society. On the one hand, the subordination of household to commonwealth renders the gender hierarachy the basis of the social hierarchy. On the other hand, the structural analogy between the two hierarchies renders each the justification of the other. Insofar as the doctrine ensures a man's place in the gender hierarchy, it induces acceptance of his place in the social hierarchy, as Jack's explicit refusal of knighthood suggests. At the same time, Jack's success story appeals to a moral conception of economy which imposes social aims on economic processes. It is a "biblical economy," as Joyce Oldham Appleby describes it, "undergirded by God's injunction to Adam to work by the sweat of his brow and Amos's direful warnings to those that 'swallow up the needy.'" Codified in the policies and statutes of the Tudors, the moral economy initially addressed the disruptive forces of economic expansion and the market system on England's feudal, agrarian society.23 As capitalist enterprise took hold in the country, the moral economy provided the language with which commonwealthmen argued for official sponsorship of economic projects through the granting of royal patents. 24 In their writings, production becomes the measure of the nation's wealth, and industry the basis of social order. As God's deputy and head of the commonwealth, the king enacts policies in the best interest of his subjects. His helpful


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servant is the producer, who provides the needed labor to relieve the poor and restrain the idle. In this world of commercial enterprise, social ranking no longer represents the measure of man as producer. Henry's offer of knighthood underscores precisely the disparity between Jack's social status and his social importance. Both the patriarchal and economic discourses inform Jack's identity as clothier. The name of clothier embraces the domestic mastery that displaces women - the widow and the independent female weavers - to give a man his place in society, the place "from whence I came, and what I am," that Jack wishes not to forget.25 In turn, domestic mastery accommodates the clothier's dream of social power. As we have seen, insofar as Jack expands the scope of his "domestic" authority through his economic enterprise, he achieves a social power that transcends the limitations of his class. This social transcendence enables the clothier to go above the heads of ministers to deal directly with the king. For it expresses faith in a godlike sovereign who knows the true value of his subject, as Henry does in praising the clothier's trade: "no trade in all the Land was so much to be cherished and maintained" (36). Within the context of the Christian commonwealth, this fantasy of a subject's direct relationship with his sovereign is the secular equivalent of the soul's direct relationship with God. The producer's social transcendence thus aligns him with the other transcendent signifiers in the masculine text the king and God. It is no accident, then, that Deloney's celebration of the clothier should be set in the reign of Henry, who presided over not only the early expansion of the cloth trade, but more important, the emergence of domesticity and the moral economy as official ideology. The period was not without problems for clothiers, as Deloney's story testifies. Foreign wars disrupted overseas trade and the taxes levied to support them burdened producers. Furthermore, as Jonathan Crewe remarks, the recall of Henry as a symbol of "awesome masculine rule" is often problematic if not parodic, "partly because of Henry VIIFs virtual inability . . . to produce male 'issue.' " Thus Henrician nostalgia operates on a pun on "remembering," suggesting a restoration of the potent "member" to a symbolicfigurewhose lack of it in the first place is to be suspected, or from whom one will have wanted to take it away. What the pun thus implies, and what is often apparent in the Elizabethan recall of the Henrician, is a cultural and even individual dialectic of disempowering (forgetting) and reempowering (remembering).26 In the present instance, Richard Wilson observes, Deloney's use of Henrician nostalgia glosses over the problems confronting clothiers at

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the time the work was written.27 The temporal displacement is all the more necessary for this masculine narrative, since the present woes of clothiers were associated with a female ruler, Elizabeth I. From the 1560s onwards, the Clothworkers of London were engaged in a dispute with parties that monopolized the European trade - the Merchants Adventurers, and Sir Francis Walsingham, who held successive licenses for the export of cloth.28 Not only was Elizabeth's government unable to settle the dispute, but her habit of granting patents to courtiers as rewards for services rendered had given rise to scandalous monopolistic practices.29 Given these circumstances, the allusions in "The Weaver's Song" to the female tyranny of Omphale and to David's defeat of Goliath acquire a certain political topicality. The contest between David and Goliath, in its valuing of technology over size, captures the Clothworkers' view of their cause against monopolies. As G. D. Ramsay explains, the Clothworkers were mostly producers of finished cloth (as Jack is) and of finished clothing such as caps and shirts. The Merchants Adventurers, on the other hand, were licensed to export undressed or unfinished cloth, a practice which threatened the livelihood of clothiers. The trade dispute began when a 1566 statute requiring that "for every nine cloths shipped undressed one must go fully dressed" met with objection from the Merchants Adventurers. The dispute was complicated by the difficulty of enforcing the statute and by the royal grants given in 1574 to Walsingham of a license to ship 8,000 undressed cloths, and in 1578, of a further license for the annual export of 30,000 cloths undressed. These setbacks, coupled by the trade depression of 1587, led to increasing bitterness on the part of Clothworkers in the 1590s.30 The Merchants Adventurers defended their practice by "maintaining that cloths dressed at home lost value in the market abroad because English workmanship was inferior to the foreign."31 Such a defense was unacceptable to the clothiers, however. In comparing clothiers to David, the song suggests that their skill in finishing cloths, like David's sling, is the superior technology by which they will eventually prevail over monopolies whose size and strength, like Goliath's, provide only a temporary advantage. If the clothiers hope to triumph over monopolies as David did over Goliath, then, given her role in the scandal of monopolies, Elizabeth is archaized as Omphale, the female tyranny that undermines the trade of the clothiers. In this light, the story's nostalgic return to Henry's reign displaces yet another woman - Elizabeth herself. The traces of her displacement are visible in the pageantry surrounding Henry's visit to Jack's house, which closely parallels in parts the account of Elizabeth's 1579 visit to Norwich.32 She is only the most imposing figure of female power among others - Omphale, the widow, and women


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weavers - whose displacements render coherent Deloney's narrative of bourgeois manhood. II Ironically, it was the persistence of female tyranny that required yet another narrative of English manhood - this time not as domestic producers of cloth but as colonial traders. Virtually shut out of the European market, the Clothworkers had by the 1580s set their sights on potential markets in America. 33 Among colonial advocates, Richard Hakluyt, a pensioner of the Clothworkers for almost ten years, was foremost in promoting their interests.34 In A Discourse of Western Planting (1584), Hakluyt advocates colonization as a means to trade, emphasizing cloth above "a thousande triflinge thinges" that Englishmen could sell to the Indians. "Seinge the savages . . . are greately delighted w th any cappe or garment made of course wollen clothe," he writes, "yt is manifeste wee shall finde greate utteraunce of our cloth." When it comes to the "utterance" or sale of cloth, Hakluyt shows his partisan sympathies for the Clothworkers. Indeed, he envisions that the colonial trade would equal and even surpass the European market: "Nowe if her Ma tie take these westerne discoveries in hande and plante there, yt is like that in shorte time wee shall vente as greate a masse of clothe yn those partes as ever wee did in the netherlandes, and in time moche more." Hakluyt couches his colonial promotion in the language of the moral economy, a language we have seen earlier in Deloney's advertisement for the clothier. According to Hakluyt, the colonial cloth trade is the means whereby all occupations belonginge to clothinge and knittinge shalbe freshly sett on worke, as cappers, knitters, clothiers, wollmen, carders, spynners, weavers, fullers, sheremen, dyers, drapers, hatters and such like, wherby many decayed townes may be repaired. The occupations Hakluyt names recall the production line in Jack of Newbery and the finishing crafts affiliated with the Clothworkers. More than that, the colonial trade would benefit the commonwealth as a whole: In somme this enterprise will mynister matter for all sortes and states of men to worke upon: namely all severall kindes of artificers, husbandmen, seamen, marchauntes, souldiers, capitaines, phisitions, lawyers, devines, Cosmographers, hidrographers, Astronomers, historiographers, yea olde folkes, lame persons, women, and younge children by many meanes wch hereby shall still be mynistred unto them, shalbe kepte from idlenes, and be made able by their owne honest and easie labour to finde themselves withoute surchardginge others. Since idleness and want lead to thieving and mutiny, Hakluyt concludes

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that the labor created by the colonial cloth trade would help maintain moral and social order in the country.35 The intersection of Hakluyt's colonial and Deloney's domestic promotion of the cloth trade sheds important light on the domestic origins of the English colonist. More specifically, it provides the discursive connection whereby the domestic narrative of bourgeois manhood may extend to the colonial arena. The process is not one of direct translation because, with trade as the primary objective, the household had little place in this early phase of colonization.36 Instead, wefindthat domestic and colonial narratives operate analogously to define two realms of action for Englishmen: domesticating women at home, converting and civilizing savages abroad. The tasks are analogous in that both constitute Englishmen, in the roles of producer and colonist, as agents of civil and divine authority subordinating others to the rule of the Christian commonwealth. Specifically in the colonial arena, this sense of bourgeois male agency underwrites the opposing cultural categories of Christian versus pagan, civilized versus savage. Constructed upon such polar stereotypes, cultural differences in the colonial discourse efface the distinctions of class that operate in the domestic narrative. The effect, as we shall see, is to universalize English bourgeois manhood. The civilizing of savage Indians is a common justification for colonization in the Renaissance. Europeans believed that "the process of transcending savagism required conversion to Christianity and the adoption of civil manners."37 Thus Christopher Carleill sees colonization as a means of "reducing the savage people to Christianitie and civilitie."38 To reduce is the operative word for the period, one which embraces the original meaning, "to bring back, restore" (from the Latin re + ducere) and the applied meaning, "to bring into order and obedience," if necessary by compulsion (OED). The term reflects the Renaissance subscription to the monogenetic theory that Indians were Adam's progeny who were separated from the Europeans by the flood and had since degenerated in religious understanding and civil ways.39 Reducing savages to Christianity is a task cut out for Englishmen, as Sir Francis Bacon recommends in his essay "Of Plantation": "And above all, let men make the profit of being in the wilderness, as they have God always, and his service, before their eyes."40 Hakluyt in his Discourse also assures readers that "the people of America crye oute unto us their nexte neighboures to come and helpe them, and bringe unto them the gladd tidinges of the gospell," although the only "success stories" he could name are Catholic ones.41 But Indians are not civilized by religion alone, and it remains for the English colonist equipped with cloth and clothes to civilize them in


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manners as well as religion. In Sir George Peckham's A true reporte of the late discoveries . . . of the new-found landes . . . (1583), religious remarks open an argument in which clothing and civility function as a tautological unit: It is wel known that all savages, as wel those that dwell in the South, as those that dwell in the North, so soone as they shall begin but a little to taste of civilitie, will take mervailous delight in any garment be it never so simple: As a shirt, a blewe, yellow, redde, or greene Cotton cassocke, a cappe or such like, and will take incredible paynes for such a trifle. Claiming to "have heard the reporte made sundrye times," Peckham turns around and says that "the people in those partes are easily reduced to civilitie both in manners and garments." 42 Economic motives are here moralized, and Indians clothed by the civility of the colonial text. In this way, the argument of civility facilitates what Louis B. Wright describes as "the alliance between piety and commerce in English expansion." 43 In the famous episode of Sir Francis Drake's landing in California, clothing becomes the inducement to spiritual awakening for the Indians. In 1579, on their way to span the world, and after a series of raids on Spanish settlements along the Pacific coast of South America, Drake and his men sailed north and landed in California. From the English perspective, the sailors were greeted with awe by the Indians who took them for gods. The local chief yielded scepter and crown to Drake, who then took possession of the land for Queen Elizabeth under the name of Nova Albion. These events were reported in two accounts: The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea . . . begun in the yeare of our Lord 1577, published in the 1589 and 1598 editions of Hakluyt's Principall Navigations; and The World Encompassed, published in 1628 by Sir Francis Drake the younger, the sailor's nephew. In the judgment of David Beers Quinn, The Famous Voyage may have been compiled from different sources by Hakluyt himself. If such were the case, Quinn argues, the disproportionate space given in this account to the California episode would reflect his sense of its importance in English colonial enterprise. The World Encompassed, "in existence in some form before 1589," was "compiled for and partly by Drake with the assistance of Reverend Philip Nichols between the summer of 1589 and the end of 1592 (or perhaps 1591)."44 My analysis will refer to these texts as the Hakluyt and the Drake narratives. The California episode is crucial to the making of the English colonist in that it adapts a European fiction to the specific requirements of the English cloth trade. The notion that Indians perceived Europeans as gods dates back to Columbus and Cortez, accounts of whose under-

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takings were translated into English respectively in 1555 by Richard Eden and in 1578 by Thomas Nicolas. 45 In the California episode, this colonial fiction is reinforced by a Christian allegory constructing Englishmen as divine agents sent to civilize the savages. As we shall see, the allegory asserts its presence at the point when cloth appears on the scene as the crucial semiotic identifying Englishmen with gods. This "ethnographic allegory," to use James Clifford's term, 46 is further naturalized in both the Hakluyt and Drake accounts as a "first encounter," an unrehearsed and therefore genuine exchange. According to the Hakluyt narrative, English cloth is directly responsible for the supposed Indian misconception of Englishmen as gods: In this Bay wee ankered the seventeenth of June, and the people of the Countery, having their houses close by the waters side, shewed themselves unto us, and sent a present to our Generall. When they came unto us, they greatly wondred at the things which we brought, but our Generall (according to his naturall and accustomed humanitie) courteously intreated them, and liberally bestowed on them necessarie things to cover their nakednesse; whereupon they supposed us to be gods, and would not be perswaded to the contrarie: the presentes which they sent unto our Generall were feathers, and cals of net worke.47 That Europeans wonder at the natural beauty and fecundity of America while the Indians wonder at the artifacts of European culture is a common topos in colonial narratives. But the passage leaves no doubt that it is English cloth and not indiscriminate "things" that elicits such capacity for religious reverence in the Indians. Cloth functions less directly in the Drake narrative; instead, it is the Englishmen's appearance that causes Indians to believe they have seen gods. On June 21, the sailors had to land because of a leak in the ship: which when the people of the countrey perceiued vs doing, as men set on fire to war in defence of their countrie, in great hast and companies, with such weapons as they had, they came downe to vs, and yet with no hostile meaning or intent to hurt vs: standing, when they drew neere, as men rauished in their mindes, with the sight of such things as they neuer had seene or heard of before that time: their errand being rather with submission and feare to worship vs as Gods, then to haue any warre with vs as with mortall men.48 In these lines, the narrative paces readers through successive English readings of "Indian" intentions, a process which reduces the Indians from warlike threat to spiritual submission. The expression "rauished in their mindes" recalls in particular the scriptural evocation of divine power. It is at this point that English cloth enters as a sign of English humanity, that is, of both the colonists' kindness and mortality: our Generall, with all his company, vsed all meanes possible gently to intreate


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them, bestowing vpon each of them liberally good and necessary things to couer their nakednesse; withall signifying vnto them we were no Gods, and had neede of such things to couer our owne shame; teaching them to vse them to the same ends, for which cause also wee did eate and drinke in their presence, giuing them to vnderstand that without that wee could not Hue, and therefore were but men as well as they. Notwithstanding, nothing could perswade them, nor remoue that opinion which they had conceived of vs, that wee should be Gods. (54) Thus despite the gift of cloth and other attempts to disclaim their godly nature, the English succeed, it would seem, only in reclaiming this unshakable belief in the Indians. In both narratives, the Indians' "imperfect understanding" is in fact a perfect validation of the colonist's deepest desire, the desire to be god, to enjoy the Indians' total submission, body and soul, without confronting the blasphemous implications of their desire. For the fiction disavows English participation or even endorsement, attributing its creation instead to savage idolatry. In this "first encounter," the value of cloth is the enhanced value of Englishmen as gods in "Indian" eyes. More important, the explanatory power that cloth invokes is the originary myth of Eden itself. I refer specifically to the almost identical description in both narratives of how the Englishmen liberally bestow upon Indians "necessary things to cover their nakedness." This unmistakable scriptural reference points to the moment after the Fall when Adam and Eve first know shame. Although they devise a garment of fig leaves to cover their nakedness, God teaches them instead the use of animal skins. The Edenic reference invokes a biblical typology in which God's clothing of the fallen couple finds repetition and fulfillment in the colonists' clothing of Indians. In the process, the English not only impose their sense of shame on the Indians but, by construing the latter as fallen, invent for themselves the mission of saving souls. Thus through the gift of cloth, the narratives implant a Christian frame of reference into a narrative of implied commercial possibilities in the New World, a structure of belief in which Elizabethan readers and potential investors in the colonial trade may fully participate. Indeed, the allegory is powerful precisely because it is also associated with cloth and clothing in the domestic context. In An Anatomy of the Abuses in England, for example, Philip Stubbes resorts to the Edenic myth in discussing the excess of apparel in England. This is what happens to Adam and Eve after they have eaten the forbidden fruit: This done, their eyes were opened, thei saw their nakednes, & were not a litle ashamed . . . & sewed them garments of fig leaues together, to couer their shame withall. Than the Lord, pittying their miserie & loathing their deformity, gaue

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them pelts and felles of beasts to make them garments withall, to the end that their shameful parts might lesse appeare.

Stubbes' purpose in recounting the Edenic myth is to moralize on clothing. For him, God's clothing of Adam and Eve is an example to all Christians to observe outward as well as inward simplicity: Although the Lord did not cloth them so meanly . . . yet, no doubt, but he would that this their meane & base attyre should be as a rule, or pedagogie, vnto us, to teach vs that we ought rather to walke meanelye and simplye, than gorgiously or pompously; rather serving present necessitye, than regarding the wanton appetits of our lasciuiouse mindes.49

Through this inner-outer correspondence, Stubbes establishes "necessitye" as the moral criterion for propriety in clothing. In the Nova Albion episode, it is clear that the criterion is observed in the colonial context as well. Both the Hakluyt and Drake accounts describe the clothing distributed to Indians as necessary - necessary, that is, to cover one's shame rather than to protect one from the elements. If Indians have to be taught the shame of nakedness, the accounts imply that the English are mindful of their own and the Indians' spiritual condition. Equally resonant is the sense of clothing as the physical medium to spiritual reform. Although the gift of clothing occasions "Indian" idolatry, the accounts suggest that this is due to a lack of instruction in the true God. At the same time, it would seem that this cloth-induced idolatry gives Englishmen material with which to mold souls. After the initial meeting, the Indians returned to make their "sacrifice," the women "tearing their flesh from their cheeks." Troubled by the sight, the Hakluyt account reads, "our Generall, with his companie, went to prayer, and to reading of the Scriptures, at which they were attentive and greatly affected with it" (185). The Drake narrative further embellishes the situation, with "our Generall" teaching the Indians about the true faith, and begging God "to open by some meanes their blinded eyes, that they might in due time be called to the knowledge of him, the true and euerliuing God, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, the saluation of the Gentiles" (56). "Spiritual" entails civil subordination when the Indian chief yields crown and scepter to "our General" in a ceremony sealed, according to Hakluyt, with "a generall Amen, as it were, giuen" by the chief and his people (185). Drake adds that the Indians sang and danced in triumph, "because they were not onely visited of the gods (for so they iudged vs to be), but the great and chiefe God was now become their God, their king and patron, and themselues were become the onely happie and blessed people in the world" (59-60). This action, and the subsequent christening


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of the land as Nova Albion, represent the Indians' subordination to Christian rule. In this way, the accounts complete the professed colonial aim of "reducing the savage peoples to Christianitie and civilitie," through religion and cloth - and an allegory that appeals to the Christian sensibility of English readers. So far my analysis has omitted crucial details from the narratives that potentially disrupt the allegorical reading of the "first encounter." First of all, the nakedness of Indians, the basis for demonstrating the efficacy of English cloth, comes into question when both Hakluyt and Drake qualify their descriptions, admitting that while Indian men go naked for the most part, the women wear skirts of bulrushes around their hips and deerskins over their shoulders.50 It is furthermore doubtful that the Indians accepted the gift of cloth. The Hakluyt account reports that, after the Protestant service, the Indians "restored againe unto us those things which before we had bestowed upon them" (185). Finally, the English evidently had so little confidence in the Indians' submission that they greeted the approaching crowning party with "warlike readinesse" and "a most warlike show" (58, 185). And yet both accounts find these discrepancies unproblematic, their narrative stance attesting the power of allegory to provide meaning and coherence. While the Hakluyt narrative presents them without comment, Drake rationalizes them as further evidence of English superiority. Thus Drake interprets the restoration of gifts by Indians following the Protestant service as a sign of inward contentment: Our Generall hauing now bestowed vpon them diuers things, at their departure they restored them all againe, none carrying with him anything whatsoeuer hee had receiued, thinking themselues sufficiently enriched and happie that they had found so free accesse to see vs. (56) The desire for access reinforces the claim that Indians take Englishmen to be gods, a claim Drake reiterates at every possible turn.51 Whether or not the discrepancies are reconciled, it is clear that in both accounts, the Edenic allegory of "first encounter" continues to condition meaning, designating Englishmen as - not gods - but agents of God on a mission to civilize savages through the agency of cloth and religion. The Nova Albion episode is historically significant in the colonial development of the Edenic allegory; it greatly influenced promotions for the colonial enterprise in Virginia. In Nova Britannia (1609), dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, Treasurer of the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson describes Virginia as "a wilderness" and its inhabitants a "sauage people, who haue no Christian, nor ciuill vse of any thing." Their condition calls for "a mutuall enterchange and commerce" with Englishmen, who would

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civilize them in return for "nothing at their hands, but a quiet residence to vs and ours." Such interchange, Johnson adds, would benefit especially the cloth trade: "But of all things, that God hath denied that countrie, there is want of Sheepe to make woollen cloth, and this want of cloth must alwais bee supplied from England, whereby when the Colony is thorowly increased, and the Indians brought to our ciuilitie (as they will in short time) it will cause a mighty vent of English clothes." 52 The cloth trade did not, however, develop as expected in these early years of settlement; instead, tobacco farming became the trade that first established English colonists in Virginia. As colonial prospects for the cloth trade dimmed, references to the clothing of savages grew in symbolic value in the argument for colonization, revealing the distance between the symbol and the facts of commerce. The case became acutely evident after the massacre of English colonists in 1622, when John Donne was asked to address members of the company to boost morale and allay fears about the colony's financial future. In A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation 13 November

1622, Donne invokes the Edenic allegory, presenting the making of clothes as the first of three occupations to which God "descended" for the sake of human redemption: "When man was fallen, God clothed him; made him a Leather Garment." Investors and colonists are promoters of God's work, Donne continues: "GOD taught us to make cloathes, not onely to cloath our selves, but to cloath him in his poore and naked members heere." Such work would bring "both Spirituall and Temporall benefit" for all.53 In his 1625 Discourse on Virginia, Samuel Purchas is still exhorting potential investors and colonists to bring to Virginia "the principall of English commodities, Cloth and Wooll, with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus."54 Our detour through Virginian materials brings us back to the 1628 version of the Nova Albion episode. Printed half a century after the events it describes and four decades after it was written, the account remains untouched by the commercial setbacks to English cloth in Virginia, "sealed off," as it were, from history. Yet Drake's account only makes visible what underlies the Virginia promotions, the persistence of an ideology in the face of contradictory experience. It shows us that colonial promotions testify not so much to the truth of events as to the cultural motives that structure their meaning. Thus even into the twentieth century, and long after attention had turned from the promotion of English cloth, history books still retain the imprint of the colonists' dream of being gods in the eyes of other peoples.55 During England's early commercial and colonial expansion, however, cloth had played into the cultural fantasy. As the signifier by which a


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bourgeois English manhood is constituted in domestic and colonial discourse, cloth defined the analogous roles of producer and colonist whose actions order and maintain the Christian commonwealth. These roles define reciprocally analogous ones for women and Indians that exclude them from action in the domestic and colonial scenes. The "clothing" of women displaces women from control of production and propriety, just as the "clothing" of Indians displaces Indians from possession of their land and thereby ground of meaning. Such textual "clothing" projects on both women and Indians a lack which the producer or colonist would fill. In sum, then, it is the English desire for the "utterance" of cloth (as Hakluyt and his period put it) that invests the artifact with such discursive power.

Eros and science: the discourses of magical consumerism

The sixteenth century saw a developing anxiety in England about the domestic consumption of foreign trifles or fashion goods. Although writers in this period do not use the term "consumer," they do have a definite and often negative view of consumption in the sense of using up valuable resources. This view of consumption is based on two assumptions of what historians call the Tudor moral conception of economy. The first is that a nation's resources are limited, so that consumption of non-essential goods will inevitably exhaust the stock of daily necessities. Hence the division between basic necessities or commodities, and fashion goods or trifles, toys, baubles, fancies, and vanities, etc., a division which moralizes economic values. The second assumption equates production with the increase of personal and national wealth, and consumption with its depletion. Specifically in the context of international trade, production is linked with a trade surplus and consumption with a trade deficit. Since England's trade balance with other nations is at stake, it is no surprise that the anxiety regarding domestic consumerism finds its target in foreign trifles.1 Thus while moral writers condemn consumers for their pride and idolatry in worshiping their own image before God's, economic writers point to the drain on personal and national wealth when foreign merchants buy cheap English raw materials with which to fashion trifles, and then resell these items at a profit to gullible English consumers. As Jeffrey Knapp has shown, colonial advocates, in addressing these complaints, offer the prospect of commerce in America, where the English can play the role of "clever merchants" selling worthless trifles to Indians. The challenge is for Englishmen to break out of their economic "insularity" by leaving their "island paradise" to pursue commercial enterprise abroad. Knapp further explains how Spenser's Faerie Queene contributes to this colonial ideology by presenting the Redcrosse Knight as a hero who, in slaying the monster Errour, breaks out of his own narcissistic error to assume the epic quest of empire.2 In building on Knapp's analysis, I wish to focus on trifles as a key term 84

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in the period's discursive production of the consumer. Trifles serve the process precisely because they are perceived to be worthless. As such, they epitomize the unequal exchange central to the period's conception of a consumer market, in which one party (the merchant) profits at the expense of the other (the consumer). In the context of a colonial market, trifles embody a binary logic whereby commercial advantage translates into cultural superiority. Yet the very perception of trifles as worthless indicates a fundamental misrecognition of their nature and function, a form of fetishism, if you will, expressed in the language of Renaissance intersubjective magic. My purpose in this chapter is to examine the role of the trifle in this emergent concept of magical consumerism. The concept extends English mastery from the producer of goods for domestic and foreign markets that we have seen in chapter 3 to the producer of desire in other cultural subjects as consumers. This new direction for English mastery takes on a gendered valence, to which Spenser's episode provides an allegorical initiation. Errour, referred to as she, is half-serpent, half-woman.3 In defeating Errour, the Redcrosse Knight in effect exorcises the erring, female part in himself, establishing his masculinity as a precondition for his imperial task. Within the larger cultural fantasy, this gendering underwrites both the association of domestic consumption with female error and the assertion of masculine dominance over Indians in colonial commerce. As yet without a language of its own, the concept of magical consumerism enters into early modern usage through the gendered discourses of eros and science. Specifically, both eros and science are discourses of knowledge whereby Englishmen assume positions of power with respect to other cultural subjects. It is through such mediation that Englishwomen and Indians emerge as trifle-lovers in the domestic and colonial arenas. Yet, insofar as these discourses operate by constructing complicitous "others," magical consumerism comes into crisis when these cultural others, as subjects in their own right, turn out in practice to be uncooperative or even resistant.

According to Marx, fetishism involves a mystification of the commodity which conceals the value of labor. 4 Although referring specifically to the social relations of industrialized production, Marx's formulation sheds light on the trifle. As Joan Thirsk observes, the period respected "goods whose raw materials were recognized as having a substantial value" and "despis[ed] those whose value lay principally in the labour conferred upon them." 5 In disparaging trifles as items made from cheap scraps of

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cloth and leather, the period attributed their popularity to their mysterious power of creating desire in individuals. As Sir Thomas Smith claims in A Discourse of the Commoneweal of this realm of England (written in 1549 and published in 1581), the "shine" and "glitter" of trifles can "make any temperate man to gaze on them and to buy somewhat, though it serve to no purpose necessary." 6 For contemporaries, Smith's description of trifles turning any temperate man into a consumer has unmistakable overtones of magic. Specifically, his reference to "gazing" points to the power of trifles to captivate one's fancy or fantasy through the eyes, thereby overpowering the faculty of reason. The process parallels that of magic, the trifles functioning like talismans or "phantasmic baits" with which a magician gains control of his or her subject. Significantly, the parallel inscribes into the commercial exchange the inter subjective dynamics of magical manipulation. Behind the mystery of trifles stands a magus-like merchant who uses them in directly producing his consumers. Unlike Renaissance magic, however, which considers both sexes to be agents and subjects of manipulation, commercial manipulation exhibits a distinct gender specificity. As trifles become affordable to the middling sort and even the lower ranks, Smith's image of the temperate man gives way in the popular literature to images of women and effeminate men as trifle-lovers.7 Among examples too long to list, the most remarkable is the construction of female fancy around the looking-glass, an item of fashion which, in the course of the sixteenth century, had gone from a luxury of the rich to an almost universal trifle, being sold as "penny ware" and even "half-penny ware." 8 In the popular literature, the looking-glass becomes the threshold to all items of fashion, mediating one's fancy to oneself, revealing the self to have always been the object of one's own fancy. Nowhere is this narcissism, this error of fancy, more satirized than in women of fashion. As William Warner claims in Albions England, this "new-found pride" in "buskes, perrewigs" and "fardingales" is so rampant among women that the Narcissus myth itself could use a gender reversal. "Though Echo and Narcissus haunt, and hurt, each Sex and State, / . . . Yet cheefly they with women kinde preuailed haue of late," Warner remarks, identifying Echo with male flatterers.9 Indeed, the narcissism of the looking-glass can be seen to channel the cultural and conventional expectations implicit in the mirror tradition towards the imaging of women as consumers. In "Pride's Fall," a ballad popular in the time of James I and possibly earlier, a fashionable German wife confesses that her narcissistic pride has led her to abandon "God's holy Bible book" for a looking-glass, turning from the worship of God to self-idolatry (HO). 10 So firmly is her fancy imprinted with

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images of fashion that it shapes the offspring in her womb, and she gives birth to a monstrous two-headed child, with painted faces and curled locks, attired in "flaunting ruffs" and "laces," holding in one hand a looking glass and in the other a rod - both a mirror and a scourge of her error (111-12). Invoking the mirror tradition, the German wife presents her fall as a negative example, and calls upon "fair English dames" to print her "woful misery" in their hearts, inviting them to recognize their error in hers, so that they may repent their "wantounness . . . in time" (114). Ironically, it is not through the looking-glass but in turning from their self-image to the exemplary morality of the mirror tradition that the women will misrecognize themselves,11 and thus fall captive to a cultural fantasy that constructs them as consumers. If the female consumer is implicated in an erring fancy, then, by contrast, the ability to capitalize on this fancy without being drawn into error marks the merchant's masculine self-possession. This gendered dynamics of commercial manipulation draws on the discourse of eros, which elaborates ideas of intersubjective magic through the gendered exchange between lovers. As loan Couliano points out, the period identified the techniques of eros with those of magic, the love token with the talisman and the lover's talk with the magician's spell.12 This assumed parallel provides romantic drama with the stock situation of a father accusing his daughter's suitor of witchcraft. Where erotic and commercial motives overlap, the result is the image of the merchant or pedlar who charms women with his trifles and his talk of love. A particularly revealing example appears in John Dowland's Second Booke of Songs or Ay res (1600), in which a pedlar addresses women by way of courtship: Fine knacks for ladies, cheape, choise, brave, and new, Good penniworths, but mony cannot move; I keepe a faier, but for the faier to view, A beggar may bee liberall of love, Though all my wares be trash the hart is true. The pedlar targets women's fancy in presenting wares "for the faier to view." To make up for what his "trash" lacks in material value, he offers his true heart and liberal love. The phantasmic bait is here supplemented with verbal enticement. The ear becomes the route from the eye to the heart, sublimating female fancy to male love, simultaneously tracing the consumers' fancy to its source of manipulation in the pedlar. "Great gifts are guiles, and looke for gifts againe," the pedlar goes on to warn. Because his love shapes the objects of consumer fancy - "my trifles come, as treasures from my mind" - their value exceeds their cost in materials.

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Any item among his "pinnes, points, laces, and gloves" is transformed by love, as it were, to a "pearl" hidden in its "shell." 13 Through the sublimation of fancy to love, affective and commercial values become mutually constitutive in the ballad. The pedlar no doubt uses love as a pretext for commercial gain, but love comes into valuation precisely because the trifle is worthless. More important, this sublimation is the means whereby the pedlar engages fancy without falling prey to its error, a means which relates, again, to the workings of intersubjective magic. As Couliano explains, to induce desire in a subject the magus must first produce it in himself; but he must then remain detached from the desire in order to manipulate his subject. 14 Likewise in commercial exchange, the language of love enables the pedlar to engender fancy in consumers while he himself remains detached from fancy. This detached knowledge of what the subject desires becomes the basis of the pedlar's male charm over female and effeminate consumers. It is true that fashionable women are said to "bewitch" men; yet by turning men into gazers they are themselves equated with the trifles they wear and are thus represented as commodities. 15 Gender identities apply even if consumers are of both sexes. As Autolycus tells us in The Winter's Tale, one of his trifles, a ballad sung to the tune of "Two Maids Wooing a Man," so captivates the crowd that "you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; 'twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse" (4.4.602-03). 16 While both sexes are affected, the symbolic castration of male consumers leaves no doubt as to their effeminate condition. The reified charm of the pedlar has its counterpart in the practice of commercial writers "courting" a female audience with their romances or trifles, as they are also called. Despite their mixed readership, these writers frequently adopt the pose of the lover addressing female readers as the sole cause of their labors. In his Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), Riche confesses he has left the camp of Mars to follow "Venus bande." 1 7 In Pettie's Petite Pallace of Pleasure (1576), three prefatory letters suggest that a friend R.B. has published the tales, without the author's consent, out of his love for and desire to please women. The reference to publishing locates the production of eros within what was by the sixteenth century a well-organized operation of capitalist production, the commercial press. As Suzanne Hull observes, writers of romances were the first to address women in their dedications, an attempt no doubt to capitalize on the growing market of upwardly mobile women with the leisure and literacy to read books. 18 Significantly, in courting female readers with love stories, these writers are producing the very desire romantic love - that constitutes women as consumers and themselves, by implication, as enterprising suitors. Their lover's pose thus provides not

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just another instance of the mixing of love and commerce, but a medium for its cultural reproduction. But the lover's pose does not obscure the writer's economic dependence on female patrons, the need, as Riche puts it, "to frame [himjself to [their] contentations" (4), which compromises his masculinity by implicating him in the erotic desire he produces. This awareness of compromise, far from dispelling the male privilege of manipulative charm, calls for a deeper investment in the gender divisions that naturalize this privilege. In Pettie's case, by having the "friend" play the lover, the author keeps aloof from his female audience. Pettie even invents an editor who claims to have printed only "gelded" copies of the work, implying the existence of a virile original which not only exceeds the demands of female fancy but remains uncompromised by it.19 Riche, for his part, invents a gentleman who, in trying to please women, decorates himself with "female" trifles and is thus taken for a female cross-dresser (8-9). By portraying the gentleman's effeminization as literally "buying" into female fancy, Riche asserts a masculine detachment from the fancy he serves.20 Indeed, masculine detachment enables "a man to bryng himself into credite" by framing works for the fancy (10).21 Extending beyond romance writers to trifle merchants in general, "credit" is a term both of profit and self-esteem, a basis for the definition of an English commercial identity. Thus Fulke Greville extolls the merchandizing of trifles in his poem Of Commerce: "For there by dearness what can credit lose, / Where Fancie's value is so infinite?" he asks (st. 393). Greville locates personal credit within a cosmic process of commercial alchemy, a series of exchanges which yields, at every stage, a surplus. In the mythic beginning, the exchange between art and nature - agriculture, winemaking, weaving, mining - produced commodities that exceeded the demands of mere survival to create a civil government: "So finely Art and Nature mixe in one, / As made Pow'r rich with more than was her own" (st. 371). With the invention of sailing, the exchange between distant shores established a circulation of goods which provided not just necessary goods for some but profits for others. All of this progress is owing to the innate activity of exchange: For traffick is a quintesence [sic] confected Of mixt complexions, in all living creatures; The miracles of which may be collected Out of thosefinewebs which on Nature's features Art works to make men rich that are not good; A base, wheron all governments have stood.

(st. 375)

Traffick is that "quintessence" which outnatures nature: it realizes the

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surplus or credit that partially reclaims fallen nature, "mak[ing] men rich that are not good." Traffick thus provides the material base - a foundation which is spiritually unreclaimed - "whereon all governments have stood." How so? For Greville, the wealth and property acquired through commerce forms the basis of self-possession, a personal alchemy which induces individuals to self-government: for "how can men's spirits mutiny here, / Where each man's private, to himself deer?" (st. 425).22 Greville is here arguing specifically for free trade in a market unfettered by monopolies. And yet his equality extends only to English merchants, for in the same poem he envisions overseas markets where Englishmen may exchange worthless trifles for land and staples (st. 391-92). Such unequal exchange is precisely the formula for trade in the New World, although it is not clear how colonists could know what Indians desire in order to frame goods for their fancy. As in the domestic discourse of eros which simply assumes that the lover knows what his lady desires, so in the colonial discourse commercial magic assumes a superior knowledge whereby Englishmen turn Indians into consumers. In colonial narratives, such as Thomas Hariot's Brief and true report of Virginia and accounts of John Smith's dealings with the Indians, which Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Hulme have respectively made familiar to us, this superior knowledge is identified with what we today call science.23 II If the image of Indians as consumers made for good colonial propaganda at home, it also filled a compelling and compensatory need among early colonists, in view of the confusion and adversity they experienced in America. Since an understanding of the situation sheds important light on the colonial discourse of magical consumerism, a brief excursion in this direction is in order. From the start, as Peter Hulme points out, the colonists were faced with the contradiction of their technological superiority to the Indians, coupled with their failure to produce food for survival.24 What was for them a source of cultural advantage in the making of their colonial identity was thus rendered problematic by the material conditions of an unfamiliar land. Despite reports of the New World's beauty and abundance, early colonists discovered that the land did not readily yield its bounty. Refiners found no gold, and English agricultural methods produced little harvest.25 Wracked by necessity, the colonists found themselves inevitably drawn into exchanges with Indians from which they emerged without ideological advantage. Far from experiencing the easy exchange of trifles for Indian gold and silver

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promised in the Spanish accounts of the West Indies, the English were often reduced to trading copper and hatchets for corn and other victuals, or to a dependence on Indian hospitality. The land itself thus became part of an indigenous economy that privileged Indians as producers over colonists as consumers. It is this perception of disadvantage that colonial ideology seeks to reverse by dispossessing Indians as producers and remaking them as consumers. Pivotal in this reversal is the representation of the New World's beauty and abundance as a dangerous sensual enthrallment that colonists must resist in order to harness its bounty.26 In Book II, canto 11 of The Faerie Queene, nature's assault on the self through the senses is allegorized as a siege on the Castle of Temperance by various beastly troops, which culminates in the fight between Arthur and the monstrous Maleger. Not only is Maleger explicitly identified with Indians in his use of arrows - "headed with flint, and feathers bloudie died, / Such as the Indians in their quivers hide" (2.11.21) - but the shower of arrows his army lets fall on the Castle is likened to "a great water flood" washing away the "hope" of the "sad husbandman," suggesting not just the self's loss of sexual control but literally the loss of agricultural labor which was so threatening to the colonists in Virginia (11.11.18). At the same time, the allegory both captures the English fear of the military prowess of Indians, and naturalizes their technology, the bow and arrows, as sensual weapons. Significantly, the fight between Arthur and Maleger reenacts the classical struggle between Hercules and Antaeus, which Renaissance mythographers interpret as the triumph of reason or spirit over the senses. In replaying the role of Antaeus, son of Gaia, who remains invincible as long as his body is in contact with earth, Maleger represents the Indian's sensual attachment to the land which gives him a temporary physical advantage over Arthur. By extension, Arthur's Herculean labor of lifting Maleger-Antaeus in the air, thus severing him from the source of his strength, points to the sensual detachment by which English colonists will ultimately prevail. If sensual detachment enables the colonist to defeat the sensual Indian, defeat spells dispossession for the Indian. In this connection, Arthur's defeat of Maleger alludes to the final combat in the Aeneid, in which the dying Turnus hurls a stone at Aeneas. By repeating Turnus' action, Maleger activates the expectation that he, too, will lose both life and land to Arthur, his dispossession thus fulfilling the English goal of colonial possession in America. The opposition of sensual dispossession to detached possession is not just a fiction of romance but fully operative in James Rosier's True Relation of the Discovery of the Land of Virginia (1605). The pamphlet,

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which recounts a voyage of reconnaissance led by George Waymouth, was meant to interest potential investors in an American settlement.27 In Rosier's narrative, the crew had been exploring along a river for some time when, "by the direction of the omnipotent disposer of all good intents," they come upon a land, whose pleasant fertility bewraieth it selfe to be the garden of nature, wherein she only intended to delight hir selfe, having hitherto obscured it to any, except to a purblind generation, whose understanding it hath pleased God so to darken, as they can neither discerne, use, or rightly esteeme the unvaluable riches in middest whereof they live sensually content with the barke and outward rinds, as neither knowing the sweetnes of the inward marrow, nor acknowledging the Deity of the Almighty giver . . . 28

In living "sensually content," Indians know only the outward condition of the land, being blind to its hidden wealth. Their sensuality becomes ground for providential dispossession, and it remains for English colonists in their sensual detachment to "discern," "use," and "rightly esteeme" nature's riches, to recognize in other words the true value of commodities the land provides. What the garden has to offer is left to the imagination, however, for the captain decided to set sail without landing. But it is precisely this kind of rhetorical excess that promises prospective investors a seductive New World waiting for English possession. More important, in his emphasis on a detached knowledge of the land, Rosier expresses what I would call the "scientific" attitude of his time. Understood in the broad sense of "knowledge," Renaissance science was conceived as a productive pursuit, in Bacon's view an inquiry into nature that yields not mere "words" but "works."29 The productive spirit of science acquires an explicitly commercial valence in Thomas Hariot's Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, which turns the

"chaotic" abundance of the land into an "inventory" of commodities.30 His temporal ordering of categories purports to "vex"31 nature into conformity with a colonial time-table: "marchantable" commodities for immediate extraction, "commodities for victual and sustenance" of colonists who remain behind, and "commodities for building and other necessary vses" should the men choose to settle. The language of science thus fulfills what English technology has failed to do: translate the New World from a hostile indigenous economy into a tractable colonial economy. If scientific detachment enables colonists to manipulate the land to their commercial ends, it can easily be extended to the commercial manipulation of its "naturall inhabitants" (Hariot 24). Renaissance science provides a language for magical consumerism because, in the first place, it still participates in the conceptual categories of magic,32 and, secondly, it parallels the discourse of eros in the

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gendering of inequality. As Evelyn Fox Keller has shown, the rhetoric of science is in this period explicitly gendered in its emphasis on masculine sensual detachment as the basis for acquiring knowledge of a feminized nature. 33 Such detachment is objectified in scientific instruments or, in Bacon's words, "mechanical devices" which enable the "virile" scientist to probe nature's "secrets" without succumbing to her sensual thrall (Bacon 539). This knowledge, described in the terms of sexual mastery over nature, is precisely what the Indians are constructed as lacking, being sensually attached to the earth. In Hariot's report, the inventory of nature is matched by an inventory of scientific inventions, a parade of wonder works before credulous Indians: Mathematicall instruments, sea compasses, the vertue of the loadstones in drawing yron, a perspective glasse whereby was shewed manie strange sightes, burning glasses, wildefire woorkes, gunnes, bookes, writing and reading, spring clocks that seeme to goe of themselues, and manie other thinges . . . These devices "were so straunge vnto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend," causing them to mistake the Englishmen for gods or at least immortal men sent by the gods. Bolstered by the colonists' immunity to diseases deadly to the Indians, their godlike image finds its place in a deeply gendered cultural hierarchy. As Harriot explains, the Indians traced their origin to a woman; because the English had neither women among them nor interest in sexual relations with native women, some Indians "were of opinion that wee were not borne of women, and therefore not mortall, but that wee were men of an old generation many yeeres past then risen again to immortalitie." 34 English scientific and sexual detachment thus confirms, by contrast, the sensual idolatry of Indians, yielding yet another round of a fiction from the days of Columbus. 35 The use of "magic technology," to use Peter Hulme's term, 36 is reportedly the means by which one colonist survived captivity among Indians. In 1607, John Smith arrived in Jamestown under the command of Captain Newport. Sent on a surveying expedition, Smith's team was ambushed and he was taken by the Indian chief Opechankenough. To win the goodwill of the chief, Smith writes in his True Relation of. . . Virginia (1608), I presented him with a compasse diall, describing by my best meanes the vse thereof: whereat he so amazedly admired, as he suffered me to proceed in a discourse of the roundnes of the earth, the course of the sunne, moone, starres, and plannets. (I: 47)37 In his discourse on astronomy, Smith presents himself as one holding the secrets of the universe in his compass. The instrument allows the captive

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to captivate the earthbound Indian with his celestial knowledge, all the while maintaining a superior detachment while the latter "amazedly admired." A subsequent version of the episode brings out the magical significance of the compass. In chapter three of The Proceedings and Accidents of the English Colony in Virginia (1612), written by Smith's devoted follower(s), the captain is said to have "inchanted these poore soules [the Indians] being their prisoner" (I: 215).38 The compass appears as a "Globe-like Iewell," the shape suggesting its function as a talisman to summon nature's powers. Indians "marvailed at the playing of the Fly and Needle, which they could see so plainely, and yet not touch it, because of the glass that covered them" (1:217). The transparency of glass objectifies both the colonist's detachment and the Indians' enchantment, empowering the former as manipulator of nature and other human beings while barring the latter from that power. In demonstrating the use of "that Globe-like Iewell," Smith can be said to exercise the intersubjective "magic" of science. If descriptions like "marvailed" and "amazedly admired" associate the Indian with the consumer whose fancy is held captive by a trinket, it is because the logic of scientific superiority parallels that of magical consumerism. The parallel is clearly visible in Smith's commercial dealings with Indians. The Proceedings reports a trading session with the Indian chief Powhatan consisting of English copper and hatchets for Indian corn and victuals. Smith was under the command of Newport, who is portrayed as a bungler giving Powhatan all he wanted, "thinking to out braue this Salvage in ostentation of greatnesse, and so to bewitch him with [his] bountie" (my emphasis). The plan backfires because, Powhatan hauing his desire, valued his corne at such a rate, that . . . we had not foure bushells for that we expected to haue twentie hogsheads. This bred some vnkindnesse between our two Captaines; Newporte seeking to please the vnsatiable desire of the Salvage, Smith to cause the Salvage to please him. Powhatan's desire is both easily sated by Newport's potlatch tactics and "vnsatiable" in Smith's estimation, who proceeds to turn it to English commercial advantage: . . . smothering his distast to avoyd the Saluages suspition, [Smith] glanced in the eyes of Powhatan many trifles, who fixed his humor vpon a few blew beades. A long time he importunately desired them, but Smith seemed so much the more to affect them, as being composed of a most rare substance of the colour of the skyes, and not to be worne but by the greatest kings in the world. This made him halfe madde to be the owner of such strange Iewells: so that ere we departed, for a pound or two of blew beades, he brought ouer my king for 2. or 300. Bushells of corne; yet parted good friends. (I: 216)

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Like the pedlar in the domestic discourse, Smith captivates the Indian's fancy through the eyes, "glanc[ing] in the eyes of Powhatan many trifles." Again, like the pedlar, Smith talks up the value of his trifles; the difference is that in doing so the pedlar uses love, while the colonist uses an inside knowledge or "science." As in the compass story, the trade episode contrasts Smith's celestial knowledge with Powhatan's earthbound ignorance, reproducing the dichotomy we have seen in The Faerie Queene between sky and earth, reason and sensuality, that underlies Arthur's victory over Maleger. In relating the "rare substance" of the beads to the color of the sky, Smith hints at their talismanic efficacy in summoning the powers of the sky, powers that befit kings. This detail is moreover presented as a sales pitch, a ruse to tempt the Indian into error, to "spellbind" Powhatan with the narcissistic desire for power and greatness, while Smith himself remains detached from that desire. That the rivals in trade "yet parted good friends" suggests the consummate skill with which Smith "bewitches" Powhatan, so that the latter remains oblivious to the inequality of the exchange. Ill In colonial as in domestic discourse, trifles are central to the making of Englishwomen and Indians as consumers. As we have seen, the process operates on a notion of magical consumerism, in which trifles - a pedlar's trash, the pages of a romance, a compass, a few blue beads - captivate the fancy or imagination through the gaze. In Lacanian terms, this marks the imaginary moment in which the subject - the Indian or Englishwoman - is inducted into the symbolic order which constitutes him or her as a consumer. In turn, the imaginary moment is framed within parallel discourses of knowledge, eros and science, which insert a maguslike merchant or colonist, as mediator of desire, into the position of power within the symbolic order. Aligning himself with the symbolic, the mediator of desire can be said to "possess" power only insofar as it is confirmed through the fancy of his subject. The aura of his magic is, in other words, the illusion of an absence or lack that constitutes his symbolic power. In domestic as in colonial discourse, this absence is grounded in specific historical circumstances. To turn first to the domestic discourse of eros, the aura of magic helps to create an image of commercial mastery around a class of "masterless men" emerging from England's transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy. Pedlars and romance-writers were the epitome of masterlessness in this period. Although pedlars, like actors, were subject to laws

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against vagrancy, the latter could find protection from the law through the patronage of a lord or the king. Likewise, as Tessa Watt notes, the distinction had begun to appear in the sixteenth century between trained musicians, who were employed in noble and royal houses, and "pedlarscum-ballad-singers," unskilled performers who had no stable affiliation with any one master, but traveled abroad to sell their songs and trifles.39 More dignified but equally masterless were the commercial romancewriters. While many dedicated their works to noble patrons, few enjoyed the security of continued patronage. A fortunate few found careers at court in service to no master but to a sovereign mistress. As for the rest, some were scholars who failed to secure courtly patronage, and others artisans who had to supplement a meager living by their writing. Writers like Pettie and Riche were soldiers at a time when the feudal aristocracy was in decline and diminished in its power to support military affinities. In publishing their works, these writers had all come to seek a more remunerative commercial patronage. The masterless status of these men explains the special appeal to mistresses in the ballads and romances, although the women are no substitutes for masters and, as seen before, the audience for these works was of both sexes.40 More specifically, for male writers of popular romances the absence of an imposing master-figure makes possible the articulation of a new concept of mastery, one based not on hereditary title but on erotic power over women as an index to commercial success. In thus acceding to the place of the master, masterless men in effect write themselves into power as both symbolic manipulators and manipulators of symbols in the social construction of meaning. Such a role for men is, of course, just as fictive as the role of women as consumers subject to erotic mastery in their fancies. Even so, the reciprocal construction of these roles genders the imaginary and symbolic functions as feminine and masculine, enfolding a feudal social hierarchy into a capitalist gender hierarchy. The image of commercial mastery is crucial to the formulation of an ideal bourgeois male self in the period's popular literature. There were, of course, female pedlars and romance writers in this period, but they were not part of this image-making.41 From the little we know of female ballad-singers and ballad-sellers, it is clear that they were mostly poor women with little education who were often whipped and jailed for actual or suspected offenses. Although they too were perceived to play a social role, it was hardly a dominant one. Even in the case of the famed Moll Cutpurse, presented in The Roaring Girl as one who both sings against the exploitation of poor women and is a fancier of the fashions,42 Moll's packaged ambivalence would not compromise the image of male

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mastery. Not only was this image given currency by the increasing affordability of chapbook romances and "the ubiquity of the ballad at all social levels,"43 but, given the involvement of romance writers and romance pedlars as creators and distributors of these works, the commercial press itself became the social medium for making, out of the absence of old masters, new men. As in domestic practice, the colonist likewise writes himself into a position of power through the mystifying language of science. We have already seen that English commercial magic over the Indians compensates for the colonists' lack of skill as producers, the failure of English technology to feed them.44 Considering the Indian resentment and hostility aroused by English demands for food, and the English fear of Indian fierceness and skill in battle despite the technological advantage of guns over arrows, it was all the more necessary that the colonists' scientific superiority should function as a means to circumvent violent confrontation through the manipulation of native fancy.45 In presenting a picture of Indian credulity and error, English colonial writers cannot be accused of inventiveness: they are simply adapting a topos of New World writing to their own circumstances. In the compass demonstration, as Hulme points out, it is convenient for Smith to have possessed the right tool at the right time - convenient, that is, for the colonist's identity-making.46 And yet one wonders how far Smith's compass and knowledge could have charmed the Indian chief, who had traveled across the seas and lived among the Spaniards from 1561 to 1571. The name Opechankenough, "he whose soul is white," adopted upon his return to America, indicates his resistance to Jesuit attempts to convert and civilize him. His slaying of Spanish missionaries further suggests his extreme distrust of European motives in America.47 Both Spanish secrecy and the temporal distance of the massacre had kept it hidden from the English. Had Smith known about this prior contact, he might have interpreted his own encounter differently and allowed the chief at least the knowledge of his experience.48 As it turned out, ignorance bolstered Smith's view of the Indian as an awe-struck savage taken in by a superior science. Smith's commercial magic likewise diminishes considerably if we compare the account in The Proceedings discussed above (pp. 93-94) to an earlier version of the same event written by Smith himself. In the True Relation, Smith claims to have "some few bunches of blew Beades" for which Powhatan offered "a basket of two pecks" of corn, an offer Smith raised to "three pecks at the least." There was no mention of Smith captivating Powhatan's fancy with the beads; only that the latter "seemed contented and desired more," and that the two agreed to further

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trading the next day. While the amount of beads to be traded is not specified, the amount of corn involved was "two bushells," not the two or three hundred bushels that The Proceedings later reports (I: 71). In other words, while both versions credit Smith with a skill in bargaining that upstages his superior, Newport, the later report frames this skill with the aura of commercial magic, magnifying a hundredfold or more his power to manipulate the Indian chief. The magnified version is adopted in Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, which further generalizes the scope of his commercial magic, turning the beads from the fancy of one consumer into a fetish for an entire tribe. According to Smith, Powhatan's half-brother, Opechankenough, was in like manner fitted (at the like rates) with blew beads, which grew by this meanes, of that estimation, that none durst weare any of them but their great kings, their wives, and children. (11.157) This new revelation adds another spin to what is by now an old colonial yarn, 49 and one rather suspects that Smith is polishing his image for posterity, The Generall Historie being published in 1624, long after his colonial career in Jamestown came to an unceremonious end. 50 The issue here, however, is not so much the factual accuracy of any one of the accounts as the attitudes they help to define, attitudes that inform the colonists' relations to Indians. The chiefs and their families might well have worn the blue beads as a marker of their rank, but this does not necessarily mean that they were persuaded to do so by Smith's description of the beads' talismanic power, especially if the description had originated, not with Smith, but from a later work written by his followers. Even if the sales pitch had come from Smith, the accounts do not tell us whether the Indians had understood him or, more obvious still, whether the beads were not assimilated, as signs not talismans, into a system of social ranking already in existence. The foreclosure of an Indian perspective marks the limits that magical consumerism imposes on English interpretations of colonial encounters. By the same token, these accounts reveal much about the making of the English colonist, and the intertextual connections we have noted further suggest that Smith's commercial magic over Indians is not just one man's self-aggrandizement but, indeed, a product of collective fantasy, albeit individually fabricated. In manipulating Indian fancy the colonist is, like the pedlar and romance writer, inducting his consumers into a symbolic order that constitutes the conditions of meaning in his own world, obliterating the possibility of other cultural or gender perspectives by projecting his desires onto others. In both the domestic and colonial

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discourses, then, to know one's consumers is in effect not to know, but to captivate, to manipulate, to produce in them the inescapable "knowledge" of what they desire. What if consumers could look without becoming captive to this knowledge? What if they looked and recognized nothing of what they desired? This was certainly the case with the Indians, if we consider the many times they fled into the woods with their corn at the approach of Smith's trading party. Their subterfuge only hardened Smith's resolve to hunt down the Indians and force them to trade at gunpoint. In a famous episode, Smith is said to have fought his way out of a trade session turned hostile by grabbing the chief Opechankenough's locks in one hand while pointing a gun at his heart with the other. Here, English technology does not so much charm the "sensual" Indians as intimidate them into cooperation, Smith's gun unmanning as it were the great physical as well as social stature of their chief. Indeed, for all his proclaimed skill in commercial manipulation, Smith seems singly oblivious to the Indians' counter-manipulation. A particularly striking episode involves an agreement in which Smith was invited by Powhatan to come unto him, and if he would send him but men to build him a house, bring him a grinstone, 50. swords, some peeces, a cock and a hen, with copper and beads, he would loade his shippe with corne. (I: 242)

According to an account written by several of his followers,51 Smith sent some soldiers, including several Dutchmen, to build the house. Anticipating Indian trickery, he and his men surprised Powhatan and his people in order to accomplish the promised trade before they had a chance to slip away. Without Smith's knowing, however, the account alleges, Powhatan had already won over the Dutchmen and sent them, along with his own men, to Jamestown, where they obtained in Smith's name more than 300 hatchets, 50 swords, 8 peeces, 8 pikes, pike-heads, powder, and shot (I: 250). In retaliation, Smith stormed Powhatan's "house" only to find it empty. Instead of admitting they had been outmaneuvered by the Indians, the English predictably blamed "those damned Dutch-men [who] had caused Powhatan to abandon his new house . . . and to carrie awaie all his corne and provision" (I: 256).52 At stake throughout the episode is the problem of Indian subterfuge, which undermines the colonists' confidence in the superiority of their knowledge. The problem crystalizes in a reported conversation during the surprise "visit" Smith paid to Powhatan. When the chief asks what Smith hopes to "get by war, when we can hide our provision and flie to the woodes, whereby you must famish by wronging us your friends," Smith replies that no matter what deception the Indians use against the

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English, "we have a rule to finde beyond your knowledge" (I: 247-48, emphasis added). In assuring Powhatan - and himself- of the long reach of English intelligence, Smith is warning the chief against further evasion, and perhaps even basking in a moment of tactical victory - one which turned out to be short-lived. Not only do the ensuing events reveal Smith to be ignorant of Indian motives but, as Powhatan's response to Smith's remark makes clear, the colonist has no control over what Indians desire. Powhatan's response is framed in the terms of reciprocity, terms which claim the moral high ground of friendship and mutual satisfaction in exchange as a protest against forced trade. He complains that he has treated Smith most kindly among his "Werowances" or chiefs, but has received "the least kindnesse" in return. Praising Newport's generosity in giving him "what [he] desire[s]," such as "swords, copper, cloths, a bed, tooles . . . gunnes," the chief rebukes Smith for being the only one "of whom I can have nothing but what you regard not: and yet you wil haue whatsoeuer you demand" (I: 248; my emphasis). Powhatan's response suggests not only that Smith is trading worthless ware for his valuable corn, but that Powhatan's desire is for English weapons, precisely the European technological advances that threatened the survival of his people. More important, if Smith denies Powhatan's desire, the reason is that Indians with guns would pose an immediate threat to the safety of the colonists. Far from the foolish consumer enchanted with trifles and trapped in the error of his fancy, therefore, Powhatan shows himself to be shrewdly aware of the high cultural stakes he is playing for in this exchange. If the image of Indians as gullible consumers is rendered problematic by those on whom it is projected, likewise the discourse of eros-based consumerism meets with domestic challenge. I am not here referring to the period's satires on the female consumer or attacks on the romance for its lewd influences on female readers. Such writings in fact reproduce the attitudes and assumptions that eroticize the dynamics of commercial manipulation. A most telling case is the fictional character Euphues, a "surfeiter of love" who finds all women to be foul monsters underneath their perriwigs, paint, and fashionable attire.53 Euphues, however, is the creation of John Lyly, one of the hottest commercial romance writers to court a female readership. I am referring rather to feminist writings which challenge these attitudes and assumptions, and expose the literary conventions that underwrite the complicitous though opposing erotic and moralistic constructions of women as consumers. The first of these challenges is Jane Anger Her Protection of Women, which directly responds to one "surfeitor of love," probably Euphues, according to Simon Shepherd. Euphues' diatribe, appearing first in

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Euphues his Censure to Philautus, "was reprinted separately in September 1587 by Edward White," a timely provocation for Anger's pamphlet, written late in 1588 and printed in 1589.54 In singling out the "surfeitor of love" for criticism, Anger engages the trope of eros-based consumption, not in its usual identification with women, but in a reverse application to a special kind of men, those who "do not only seize upon us but devour us" (35).55 As Anger sees it, the surfeiter attacks women for their supposed love of fashion because they would not grant him the sexual favors he seeks. For in fact men like him are "greedy grazers" on women's bodies, and would "pursue their pastime" even if women "clothe [them]selves in sackcloth and truss up [their] hair in dishclouts" (38, 39). Because it is "through their desire" that "we are made ill" by their words, Anger cautions her female readers to believe little of what men say about women. In particular, when you hear one cry out against lawns, drawn-works, periwigs, against the attire of courtesans, and generally of the pride of all women: then know him for a wolf clothed in sheep's rainment and be sure you are fast by the lake of destruction. (44) Remarkably, in defending "courtesans" along with "all women," Anger rejects the moral division between good and bad women that a masculinist discourse uses so effectively to maintain a female participation. Her sermon-like tone mocks not only preachers but those who appropriate the authority of the form in their outbursts against women. However passionate, Anger's was a lone voice which produced no response in a male-dominated market of ideas, the commercial press. While her pamphlet was not reprinted, Euphues' diatribe was reprinted not only in 1587 but, by 1636, in nineteen editions of the Euphues romances. 56 And yet, despite the neglect of the press and the reading public, Anger's feminist argument did not disappear. It resurfaced in 1617, almost thirty years later, in Ester Sowernam's Ester hath hang'd Haman, a response to Joseph Swetnam's Arraignment of Lewd, froward, idle, and unconstant women, printed in 1615. Like Anger, Sowernam turns mysogynist arguments back on the Swetnams of the age:57 "When men complain of beauty and say that 'women's dressings and attire are provocations to wantonness and baits to allure men', it is a direct means to know of what disposition they are." Sowernam's approach is effective in that it points beyond specific arguments to the social construction of meaning as the basis for undoing vicious perceptions of women. The Swetnams may shape the conventions of meaning, but in doing so they are implicated in them. As she58 puts it in a punning syllogism, A common inn cannot be without a common sign. It is a common sign to know a

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lecher by complaining upon the cause and occasion of his surfeit; who had known his disease but by his own complaint? (Shepherd 109)

The reference to inn and sign evokes both a system of signification and an image of a tavern or stew where men may purchase their surfeit. Sowernam thus sets the scene for an imaginary encounter in which the surfeitor is made to recognize himself as a subject in the symbolic order he has helped to shape. Given the conventional and arbitrary relation of sign to inn, a surfeitor may complain against women as "accidental causes" of their lechery, but the "direct cause" - the fancy that links sign to inn - comes from the surfeitor himself (Shepherd 108). Within the inn, an arena of male prerogative, women as sexual objects are both inscribed by the symbolic order and excluded from its authority. In admitting women as "accidental causes" in the creation of meaning, Sowernam reveals a certain complicity with the male-centered symbolic order. At the same time, she also offers a powerful challenge to its gendered fictions - such as the construction of female fancy around the looking-glass - in her scenario of male fancy within the inn. Of course, to the extent that her rhetorical charge comes from the negative moral associations of the inn, she falls into the same moralizing strategy of the surfeitors, and thus diverts attention from the issue of gender in the social production of meaning. Constantia Munda is more direct in The Worming of a mad Dogge: or, a soppe for Cerberus the Jaylor of Hell,

another response to Swetnam published in 1617. Her59 work targets the press as the means by which "every scandalous tongue and opprobrious wit, like the Italian mountebanks, will advance their peddling wares of detracting virulence" (Shepherd 130). In exposing these "bayters of women" for commercially motivated frauds,60 Munda puts them in their place among pedlars of trifles, dispelling in a sentence the male charm that the pedlar supposedly wields over women. But the image of women as consumers is not so easily dispelled from the popular imagination. One reason is that Swetnam and other womenbaiters continued to enjoy popularity with the reading public, while the feminist message of Munda and Sowernam, like Anger's, went the way of silence. At the same time, popular fashion capitalized on the practice of cross-dressing in which women, by wearing masculine garments, challenged the gender hierarchy that dress codes symbolized.61 This commodification of a gender transgression thus turned it into a conspicuous form of consumerism. Given the threat that both posed to the gender hierarchy, it is not surprising that, in popular literature and drama, unruly women and female cross-dressers alike are represented as Amazons, and thus exiled from the realm of civility to the fringes of

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imagined savagery.62 The author of Hie Mulier (1621) jokingly claims that female cross-dressers are so "barbarous" they "make the rude Scithian, the vntamed Moore, the naked Indians, or the wilde Irish, [seem like] Lords and Rulers of well gouerned Cities."63 Jokes and hyperbole aside, the cross-gender, cross-cultural comparison reveals the extent to which gender and savagery are intertwined in English fantasies about other peoples. If savagery accounts for female transgression, sensuality serves as an explanation for the Indian recalcitrance to English colonial needs and objectives. In The Historie ofTravell into Virginia Britania (1612), the exsecretary of the Jamestown colony William Strachey calls the skin dye Indians use "either for the Custome of the Country, or the better to defend them . . . from the stinging Muskeetoes" by the current cosmetic names of "fucus" and "vnguent." He further describes how Indians, male or female, "friendly communicate the secrett" of their recipes to one another; however, they are concocted of "earth, hearb, or roote," unlike "our great Ladies" who keep secret "their oyle of Talchum, or other Paynting white and redd." His comparison at once encodes gender, class, and commercial meanings. Not only does it feminize Indians as a people, and ascribe their common sharing to a failure to observe social distinctions, but it presents them as naturals, hence non-commercial, their earthy preparations contrasted with the "pretious" trifles that comprise the ladies' toilet. In the description following, the utility of the body paint as a mosquito repellent is completely forgotten, and replaced by the image of sensual Indians drying their annointed bodies in the sun, "which the Sun kissing oft, and hard, addes to their paynting."64 Overtly erotic, the description reinforces in the mind of English readers the Indians' sensual connection to the earth, thereby erasing any threat of "masculine" resistance. In its erotic feminization of Indians, Strachey's description bears an inverse symmetry to the image of the female crossdresser in Hie Mulier as more savage than male savages. In these independent instances, gender and colonial ideologies have reached across two worlds and found each other allies.

Gender, savagery, tobacco: marketplaces for consumption

In Book V of the Cosmographia, Sebastian Minister briefly recounts the first voyage of Columbus to the West Indies. The crew had landed at the island of Hispaniola, their presence causing the islanders to flee into the woods. The Spaniards pursued them and, capturing a woman, brought her back to their ship. They filled her with "delicate meates and wyne," clothed her in "fayre apparel," and then let her go. "And as this womanne returned to her companie," we are told, "some being moued by the lyberalitie declared vnto her, came by greate multitudes to the sea bankes, bringinge golde with them, which they chaunged for earthen pottes, and drinking glasses." The islanders somehow made known that they fled because they mistook the Europeans for cannibals who lived to the south, and even "made greuous complaynt to our men, of the beastly and fearse maners of these Canibales": when soeuer they take any of them vnder the age of xiiij yeares, they vse to geld them, and franke them vntyll they be very fat, as we are wont to do with capons or hennes: and as for suche as drawe towarde xx. yeare old, to kyll them forthwith and pull out theyr guttes, and eate the same freshe and newe, wyth other extreme parts of the bodye, poudering the residue with salte, and keping it in a certayne pickle as we do iegottes or sansages [sic]. Yet eate they not the women, but reserue them to encrease, as we do hennes to lay egges. And if thei take any old women, they kepe them for drudges.1 In this description of a first encounter, an indigenous woman mediates in the exchange between the Europeans and inhabitants of the New World, dividing civilized from savage, translating the indigenous fear of neighboring cannibals into a friendly commerce with overseas travelers. Appearing in 1544, Minister's account echoes a passage from Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World, first published in 1511, which relates both the dressing of the native woman and the subsequent trade without linking these incidents as cause and effect. Minister's report is thus our first of Europeans using a fashion model to hawk their wares in the New World. The report also differs considerably from that of Columbus in his journal of the voyage, of which a digest survives.2 First, the woman was 104

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one of several mediators, albeit the only female, used to initiate friendship with Indians; moreover, this strategy brought about trade in all cases but hers. In fact, her case is more likely one of many rapes by Columbus' men suppressed in the official accounts but reported in others.3 Second, despite the Spanish sense of advantage in trading "trifles" for gold and gems, the Indians were parting with only paltry pieces such as nose rings and bracelets,4 and in many cases, with balls of cotton thread.5 Such exchange did not suggest the high esteem for Spanish trifles that was expected to produce huge profits in trade. Such discrepancies may lead us to conclude that Columbus is telling the truth while Minister is being fanciful, were it not for the errors and evasions that scholars have detected in Columbus as well.6 I would suggest that the discrepancies in their accounts encode different motives. In his Letter on the first voyage, it is clear that Columbus belittles the island trade because he expects a "very profitable trade" to take place in the mainland, in what he thought were "the territories of the Grand Khan." For this reason, and given the presence of gold in the islands, he favors the mining of gold on Hispaniola, by friendship with local chiefs if possible, and by conquest if necessary.7 If Columbus's journal reveals his disregard for the island trade, Minister's version suggests his interest in it. More important, Miinster's selective emphasis on the female model underscores the role of gender in structuring a friendly and - to Spanish perception - unequal exchange with the New World, one in which Indians are constructed as gullible consumers. The figure of the indigenous woman is crucial to this friendly inequality because, as a transgressor of cultural boundaries, she signifies both openness to another culture and betrayal of her own. As such, her display of Spanish trifles serves to entice her own people into an amicable but losing bargain. Conversely, in Miinster's account of a later voyage, the woman's failure to initiate friendship explains the failure of trade. At Insula Crucis, Columbus' men are said to repeat the same "liberalise" with several native women. However, while the islanders were attracted by the sight of the women "gorgiously decked" in Spanish attire, they fled at the first hint of Spanish approach (30). As Miinster explains, these Indians were cannibals, enemies to all and thus incapable of commerce. By substituting cannibal hostility for flight, Miinster not only retains gender as the mark of unequal exchange, but presents cannibalism as the exception that proves his rule of friendly trade. He goes on to report that trade resumed after Insula Crucis, the crew exchanging pins, bells, and glasses for gold and pearls. Whereas the digest of Columbus' journal was not published until 1825, Miinster's and Martyr's accounts went into numerous editions both

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during and after the authors' lifetimes. In England, book five of Cosmographia was made available to readers in a 1553 translation by Richard Eden, entitled A treatise of the newe India. Two years later, Eden published his translation of Martyr's Decades. While these and other englishings did not gain an immediate audience, they were revised, augmented, and reprinted in a single volume by Richard Willes in 1577, about the time that England's maritime literature came into currency within the popular imagination.8 In translating accounts of Spanish and Portuguese enterprise in the New World, Eden's aim was to urge Englishmen to similar efforts. The English were initially attracted by reports of American gold, although from the 1580s onwards there was growing interest in trade. In a 1583 colonial promotion, Sir George Peckham builds on Spanish example by describing trifles as "friendly signes" that help to circumvent the language barrier between Christians and savages, and thus to initiate trade.9 The focus of this trade was English cloth and apparel, then in great need of new overseas markets. In 1585, smocks and caps were among the merchandise the English brought over to Virginia, where Sir Walter Ralegh planned to establish a colony. Ralegh can be said to indulge in wishful thinking when he translates Wingandocan, the name by which some Algonkians referred to themselves, as an address to Englishmen meaning "you weare good clothes, or gay clothes."10 The projected trade did not flourish, however; instead, tobacco cultivated in the West Indies and marketed by Spanish merchants was making a conquest of English consumers. Yet these setbacks did not prevent another, textual form of negotiation through which the English invented a commercial identity. I will examine, among other instances, the episode from book VI of The Faerie Queene, in which the heroine Serena, straying beyond the bounds of civilization, is captured, stripped, displayed, and almost eaten by cannibals. Apart from its acknowledged Irish subtext,11 the episode bears a striking structural parallel to Minister's passage analyzed above. Especially by presenting Serena as an object of erotic display, Spenser introduces into his colonial fiction of cannibalism an opposing fiction of voyeurism, a detached consumption of female flesh that turns commerce into a civilized masculine performance. Spenser's fiction, I will further argue, reveals much about the period's cultural assumptions and commercial experience. Despite their opposition, both cannibals and voyeurs embody different attitudes toward a developing domestic market for the consumption of trifles, including erotic literature. Within this context, cannibalism objectifies anxieties about consumption, while voyeurism manages those anxieties by displacing consumption from the commercial to the erotic arena. By


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conflating these attitudes in the commodified woman, the Serena episode illustrates the compatibility of gender and colonial ideologies. The categories of gender and savagery likewise informed the period's controversy over the domestic consumption of the trifle tobacco, which rendered problematic the assumed superiority of the civilized English to the savage Amerindians. For advocates as well as opponents, tobacco came to embody a cultural otherness that points to the fluid status of the English self, a fluidity stabilized only through the intervention of gender. In analyzing the controversy, I locate the shared assumptions underlying divergent positions that gender tobacco as female and consumers as male, and the practice of smoking as either a sensual enthrallment to tobacco that degenerates men or an assertion of male self-possession through the mastery of tobacco. Together, these opposing positions advance an ideal domestic mastery as safeguard of English civility against foreign and even savage influences. Beyond the domestic controversy, gender also functions to buffer or displace colonial anxieties, especially with the successful cultivation of a marketable strain of tobacco in Virginia. Even as the trade established the colony's economic viability, it set into motion a program of colonial domesticity - the exchange of tobacco for Englishwomen as wives to settlers - which insured the colony's social survival free from intermarriage. I The first encounter marks a telling narrative moment when European travelers find themselves in the position of cultural otherness, as cannibals, before gaining the acceptance of natives in commerce. If cannibalism is, as scholars have argued, a projection onto natives of the colonialist fantasy of incorporating other cultures and their resources,12 then the narrative turn to friendly commerce marks a displacement of colonialist intention onto other, "hostile" natives. As seen in Minister's account, such displacement creates the opposing categories of friendly and hostile natives that in turn explain the outcomes of specific encounters. For English writers, however, the narrative of first encounter is inevitably problematic, mediated by an acute sense of belatedness in the New World. A prime example is Ralegh's description of an initial meeting with Arawak villagers in Discovery of Guiana (1595), an episode that both replays Columbus' landing at Hispaniola and attempts to assert a colonial identity, in the process locating English masculinity in the direction of domestic mastery. Like Columbus and his crew, the English were initially mistaken by the villagers for "men-eaters, and Canibals." As it turned out, the mistake

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was the result of lies spread by Spanish colonists to prevent the villagers from "com[ing] to speach with us." The lies were disproved "when the poor men and women had seene us, and that we gave them meate" and trifles. In return for the English kindness, the men "confessed" that the Spaniards had "daily" raped their wives and daughters. By contrast, English soldiers were models of sexual restraint, as Ralegh protests] before the Majestie of the living God, that I neither know nor beleeve, that any of our company one or other, by violence or otherwise, ever knew any of their women, and yet we saw many hundreds, and had many in our power, and of those very young, and excellently favoured, which came among us without deceit, starke naked. It is doubtful, of course, that women who had been victims of daily rapes by the Spaniards would come unguarded among yet another group of European men. The Spanish rape of native women was an atrocity well publicized by the "Black legend," and Ralegh may well be recycling familiar charges for purposes of propaganda. But as he would have it, the English had no trouble with the women because their restraint won the trust of the men: "I suffered not any man to take from any of the nations so much as a Pina, or a Potato roote, without giving them contentment, nor any man so much as to offer to touch any of their wives or daughters."13 The implied comparison of wives and daughters to farm products locates English restraint within an agrarian conception of property as the basis of such civilized exchanges as commerce and marriage. In their commerce with the villagers, the English managed not only to overcome their mistaken identity as cannibals, but also to transcend the stigma of rape associated with their Spanish rivals, arriving on the threshold of a distinct identity - as husbands - in the New World.14 For Ralegh as for Columbus, friendly commerce was only the prelude to the mining of gold. In De Guiana, carmen epicum (1596), George Chapman celebrates his patron's golden dream by presenting Ralegh "bride-groome like" setting sail with his crew for Guiana to dig in her womb-like mines and bring forth "honor'd progeny."15 Chapman envisions the role of husband as a masculine performance that, but for the mere assertion of domestic propriety, amounts to a "gang rape" of Guiana. Both Ralegh's implied identity of the husband and Chapman's bridegroom simile belong to an ongoing fiction of husbandry in the New World, which has a pretext in the colonial discourse of Ireland.16 In this connection, Spenser's story of Serena can be said to explore yet another dimension of the fiction: the heroine is now a figure of English femininity threatened by cannibal rapists, and domesticity marks the endangered


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boundary between civility and savagery. Spenser's story is all the more interesting when we consider its structural analogy to Munster's scenario at Insula Crucis, which involves women and cannibals in a failure of trade. Spenser's familiarity with Minister most likely stems from the 1577 edition of Eden's translations; the same edition contains Martyr's Decades, which provides, as David Read shows, a descriptive and thematic source for the episode of Mammon's cave.17 As with Munster's scenario, the Serena episode focuses on the figure of woman as mediator in the exchange between civilized Europeans and savage natives. Like Munster's female models, Serena crosses the boundaries of her culture, thereby becoming an object of display before potential consumers. Like Munster's cannibals, Spenser's savages are described as a "nation" not given "to any trade" such as farming or "aduentrous merchandize," living instead on "stealth and spoile" and on "the flesh of men" (8.35.3, 5, 7; 36.2).18 These parallels suggest that, like Minister, Spenser is constructing consumers and marketplaces, paradoxically against a projection of failed colonial commerce. At the same time, the analogy makes visible differences that account for the projected failure. Whereas Minister presents islanders as commercial consumers, in Spenser's fiction consumption is not overtly commercial but erotic. If Munster's women display Spanish trifles and attire to the islanders, Serena as object of display is despoiled by the savages of her iewels deare, And afterwards of all her rich array; The whiche amongst them they in peeces teare, And of the pray each one a part doth beare. Now being naked, to their sordid eyes The goodly threasures of nature appeare: Which as they view with lustfull fantasyes, Each wisheth to him selfe, and to the rest enuyes.

(41.2-9)

In tearing Serena's clothing, the cannibals destroy a "civilized" commodity in order to possess "peeces" of her. Indeed, their erotic appreciation for Serena is such that they would sacrifice her and then eat her: "Of her dainty flesh they did deuize / To make a common feast, and feed with gurmandize" (38.8-9). To compare the Serena episode with the Insula Crucis scenario, it becomes clear that while Minister suppresses erotic for commercial possibilities by clothing his female models, Spenser focuses on eros as a foreclosure of commerce in his colonial fiction. Unlike Munster's cannibals, who flee from commerce, Spenser's savages would prevent it by physically consuming the potential mediator, mistaking her for their dinner. Significantly, by using the pronoun "him

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selfe" for individual cannibals, Spenser at once characterizes them as an all-male "saluage nation," encoding thereby a gendered fantasy of savage behavior. Overtly moral in its allegorization, this fantasy posits, more transparently, a commercial logic which constitutes civilized and savage as opposing categories. If the erotic consumption of Serena exposes a savage nature untried in commerce, it defines a civilized identity crucial not only to colonial trade but also to the domestic market, a place of growing importance for writers of romances like Spenser. On the moral level, the episode contrasts the "lustfull fantasyes" Serena's naked body arouses in the cannibals with the shame it produces in her knight, Calepine. As the narrator insists, Calepine comes upon the erotic scene "by chance, more than by choyce," and he defends Serena's honor, without even knowing who she is, by slaying the cannibals (46.7). These details serve to defuse any suspicion of lewdness on his part while confirming the same in the cannibals. Moral distinctions blur, however, when we realize that the cannibals provide the occasion for Calepine as well as Spenser's readers to enter the erotic scene. Such voyeurism informs the entire episode, but is most visible in the display of Serena's naked body in stanza 42. Here the cannibals' "lustfull fantasyes" turn out to be images which, taken in combination, render a civilized world: Her yuorie necke, her alabaster brest, Her paps, which like white silken pillowes were, For loue in soft delight thereon to rest, Her tender sides, her bellie white and clere, Which like an Altar did itself vprere, To offer sacrifice diuine thereon; Her goodly thighes, whose glorie did appeare Like a triumphall Arch, and thereupon The spoiles of Princes hang'd, which were in battel won.

(1-9)

In these lines, we have entered the imaginative world of the blazon, where body parts become architectural fixtures and objects of domestic comfort, and the scale of objectification escalates as the stanza progresses. The device of the blazon, by associating Serena's body parts with pillows, altar, and triumphal arch, invites readers as voyeurs to participate in a sexual fantasy of masculine power, a cultural script in which they act as princes and high priests in the conquest and sacrifice of woman. Thus, while explicitly portraying savage fantasies that lead to the physical consumption of Serena, Spenser implicitly projects a marketplace for the voyeuristic consumption of female sexuality. In this light, Calepine can be seen as the voyeur's agent in the text. His late arrival on the erotic scene, coupled with his slaying of the cannibals, signify a


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violent assertion of moral dominance after the fact, a projection and punishment of forbidden desires in cannibals. Indeed, moral distinctions turn commercial once voyeurism enters, as the opposite of cannibalism, into the exchange between civilized and savage. The voyeur enters the text as a commercial subject through the blazon, a device which Nancy Vickers has shown to be thoroughly inscribed by commercial motives. To summarize her argument, the blazon is the rhetorical equivalent of the display and merchandizing of the female body, deployed within a triangulated discourse in which a male seller praises his female wares to a potential male buyer.19 On the other hand, Spenser's portrayal of cannibals as lacking in commerce belongs to the western tradition of dualistic representation. This tradition, Kilgour explains, constructs cannibalism as the direct or physical incorporation of a desired object, an act which, by denying the possibility of present mediation between subject and object, precludes any future communion with the desired object.20 In Spenser's fiction, this denial of mediation is seen in the cannibals' anticipated feast on the desired object, Serena. In mistaking the mediator for food, they threaten to foreclose the circulation and reproduction of pleasure. By contrast, the voyeur engages, as buyer or seller, in the mediated pleasure of the text, the fiction of woman as a fair text that can be infinitely reproduced and circulated for profit and enjoyment. If the cannibal represents the commercial deficit of Indians, the voyeur stands for an English commercial sophistication in which Spenser as romance writer fully participates. Within this framework of voyeuristic mediation, Spenser's romance explains the failure of colonial trade by constructing Indians as cannibals whose unmediated appetite for women makes them obviously the wrong kind of consumers. Of course, display also serves non-commercial motives in Spenser's narrative, but not in contradiction to commercial ones. In the first place, the sacrifice of Serena can be seen as a veiled Protestant reference to the cannibalistic associations of the Catholic host, the dogma of its transubstantiation into the body of Christ. Such a reference illustrates the dualism of Protestant logic, a logic which has its parallel on the erotic-commercial continuum. By insisting on the Catholic interpretation of the host as literal and fleshly, the Protestant logic asserts its own understanding of the sacrament as a proper, temperate feeding, sublimating cannibalism to spiritual communion.21 Likewise, by insisting that savages eat women, the civilized male subject claims a detached consumption of female erotica. On the erotic-commercial continuum, then, the figure of woman stands for the ambiguity of consumption which, differentially resolved into either food or sexual entertainment,

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constitutes cannibalism and voyeurism as the fictional divide between commerce-less savages and commercial Englishmen. Indeed, the notion that a woman can be taken for a commodity has its genesis not in colonial but in domestic discourse. It is in this sense that Serena, a female figure from the civilized world, holds the key to the domestic origins of Spenser's colonial fiction. In the popular English satires, commodification is presented as the fate of the female consumer who, like the wandering Serena, strays from home and from domestic duties to flaunt her latest fashions. In transgressing the bounds of domesticity, the female consumer turns into an object of display and erotic consumption in the eyes of men. Thus Stephen Gosson in his Pleasant Quippes for Vpstart Newfangled Gentlewomen compares women of fashion to whores, insisting that all items of their apparel "worke vaine gazers painfull thrall," ensnaring men into lascivious thoughts and actions. A typically outrageous example is his revelation about aprons. First, Gosson describes their intricate handiwork and wonders to what purpose they might be put, since, as he reasons, "were they in worke to save their cotes, / They need not cost so many grotes." In dismissing their obvious purpose, Gosson offers his own juicy assessment of aprons: When shooters aime at buttes and prickes, they set up whites and shew the pinne; It may be aprones are like tricks to teach where rovers game may winne, Brave archers soone willfindthe marke, But bunglers hit it in the darke.22

The stanza contains a series of body puns involving archery and attire. "Butts" are mounds on which targets are set, usually "whites," or white targets. The "prick" and "pin," terms for the bull's-eye and its marker, also denote ornaments fixed in the surface of garments, such as the apron.23 While butts and pricks imply sexual intercourse, the reference to "rovers" emphasizes its randomness. The analogy is a bit strained, of course, with the whites and pins on the apron guiding bunglers to sneak up from behind to get at their targets. If the innocent apron alone provokes such sexual gamesmanship, we need not inquire into the more intimate busks and hoops and worsted stockings. As in Spenser's presentation of Serena, Gosson's device is the blazon; the difference is that Gosson brings out the commercial sub-text which remains implicit in Spenser. Thus while Spenser displays the female body through the agency of cannibals, Gosson does so by probing piecemeal into female attire, stanza by stanza, investing each with his prurient imagination of body parts and sexual pleasures. While Spenser presents


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cannibal fetishism with the body, Gosson fetishizes clothing as the source of desire. Furthermore, by characterizing upstart women as consumers, Gosson locates his blazon in the context of a growing domestic market for trifles. Within this context, as we shall see, cannibalism and voyeurism represent different positions with respect to the English anxiety about domestic consumerism. The anxiety about consumption is a response to the period's transition from an agrarian to a market-oriented economy, as seen in the recurrent claims, "acres of land are metamorphosed into trunks of apparel," and "gorgeous apparell and sumptuous diet . . . eat up England."24 The image of cannibalism in the latter charge objectifies the fear that domestic consumerism will lead to "no end of consuming of substance," land being the stable basis of one's social status and identity.25 The assumption is that the nation's resources are finite, so that the consumption of non-essential goods will inevitably deplete the stock of daily necessities. Focused primarily on the pursuit of fashion, consumption is said to deprive the gentleman of his estate, the heir of his inheritance, the retainer of his maintenance, and the poor of their share of charity. Even peasants are said to sell or mortgage their lands to purchase "stately bandes and monstrous ruffs," thereby exchanging their means of production for thefleetingforms of fashion.26 Central to this anxiety about consumption is the fear that the excess of apparel consumes the distinctions of class and gender. While both sexes are attacked for their excess, a certain gender-coding is at work focusing blame on the female or effeminate consumer. Hence the images of the fashionable wife whose love of finery consumes the wealth of her doting husband, and the claim that excess in apparel effeminates the wearer. As Lisa Jardine sees it, "the fear of the inversion of authority between men and women has a primitive force which is not to be found in the threat of the upstart courtier to usurp his 'rightful' lord."27 Such clear division is unnecessary however: gender relations are inverted precisely because upstart female consumers have the economic power to patronize the male professions, so that some men find themselves dependent on women for their livelihood, and their masculinity thus compromised. English commercial manhood is said to have been compromised in two ways. The first charge is that women's love for the "far fetched and dear bought" enriches foreign merchants at the expense of work and profits for domestic producers. Gosson's Pleasant Quippes, for example, is especially aimed at French fashions. The attack finds a powerful symbolic focus in Queen Elizabeth, the grand-daughter of a London merchant, whose extravagance in apparel increased with her advancing old age. In the 1596 edition of Pleasant Quippes, the title page features a

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woodcut of Elizabeth, elaborately gowned, with her scepter in one hand and a globe in the other, at least implicitly associating her with the upstart female consumer Gosson anatomizes. Perhaps the woodcut was added to the work after it had been approved by the censors, but it was clearly in violation of a 1563 proclamation prohibiting circulation of the queen's portraits. 28 Although the second edition exercises self-censorship by showing the same picture without the regal insignia,29 it is important to note that the prior slip had occurred in the one aspect where Elizabeth was perceived as not exceptional, but representitive of Englishwomen.30 In this light, Gosson's woodcut participates in what Jeffrey Knapp has shown to be a current view of England as an insular kingdom enervated by the consumption of foreign trifles,31 a kingdom, one might add, presided over by a female consumer par excellence. The second charge is that women's fickle and insatiable desire for fashion and novelty undermines any fixed standard of workmanship, hence the basis of professional identity. As Barnabe Riche complains, addressing fellow soldiers in his collection of romances, Farewell to Militarie Profession: But what occupation, or handy craft, might a man then followe to make himself riche, when every science dependes upon new fangled fashions? for he that to daie is accompted for the finest workman, within one moneth some newe found fellowe comes out with some newe found fashion, and then he beares the prise, and the first accompted but a bungler; and within an other moneth after, the second shall be served with the same sauce, and thus there is no artificer that can hold his credite long.32 The reference to "credit," a term of both profit and self-esteem, together with the pun on his own name in asking how a man might "make himself riche," reveal the extent to which the bourgeois male self is invested in the idea of a profession, and the anxiety this engenders in a market driven by fashion. For Riche, a man's work and ultimately his self becomes a negotiable value, contingent on the ever-changing and fickle desires of women. Riche was one of the first writers of romances to direct his "trifles" explicitly at the growing market of female readers. The title of his work says it all: in bidding farewell to his military profession, Riche bemoans "the miserable condition of this our present time," when the decline of the feudal aristocracy and its military affinities reduces a soldier like him to "courting" female consumers with love stories (10). Juliet Fleming has shown that romance writers often address women readers in the terms of courtship. 33 Formulaic as these addresses may seem, they refigure the economic dependence of male writers on female patrons as a form of gender inversion, the power that a woman


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temporarily wields over her suitor before she marries him or succumbs to his pleas. In both charges discussed above, the threat of gender inversion is not simply a primal fear, but is grounded in economic and social changes that gave women as consumers economic power over men of the crafts and trades. Women's power in the marketplace accounts for the upstart female consumer singled out for voyeuristic consumption in satiric blazons like Gosson's. This topos of the female consumer consumed serves as substitutive revenge for the anxiety of self-loss - the loss of livelihood, authority, and self-esteem - that men suffer within a developing domestic consumer market; substitutive in the sense that women are blamed for a perceived injury the source of which can be neither localized nor contained. By representing women as commodities, voyeurism places them below men on the commercial food chain, thus enabling the male subject to defer confrontation with the consumption of his masculinity by the market process. The erotic consumption of the female consumer provides a discursive and social context for Spenser's own practice as a writer with courtly ambitions, who nevertheless sought a wider patronage through the commercial press. Especially in the Serena episode and its surrounding narrative, Spenser develops a strategy which not only engenders the motive of revenge but eventually erases the economic and class tensions informing such a motive, producing a fictional colonial encounter in which gender alone mediates in the definition of English civility and its savage otherness. The episode appears in a canto which directly addresses female patrons, and in a book which invokes one patron in particular, Spenser's "soueraine lady Queene," Elizabeth (1.6.4). The queen's sovereign status is echoed by the "soueraine power" that "ye gentle Ladies" exercise over the "hearts of men," against the abuse of which the narrator cautions, lest the god of Love should punish them for their "tyranny" (8.1). The implied link not only endows female readers with a power they do not, by rank, command, but also aligns the queen, as reader, with her middle-class counterparts. His warning about tyranny - a courting of female readers by way of putting them on notice - puts a new twist on the meaning of courtesy in a book devoted to this cardinal virtue in Spenser's fashioning of the gentleman for the court of Elizabeth. Specifically, the warning refers to Mirabella, a type of the proud fair, whose story precedes and frames the story of Serena. Mirabella is a damsel "of mean parentage and kindred base" who, on account of her beauty, has been "lifted up to honorable place," being courted by many knights and squires (7.27). For slaying men's hearts, however, she is punished with public exposure of her "scorn" and "disdain." As she confesses,

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The romance of the New World Thus I triumphed long in louers paine, And sitting carelesse on the scorners stoole, Did laugh at those that did lament and plaine: But all is now repayd with interest againe.

(8.21. 6-9)

True to the mirror tradition, Mirabella presents her prideful fall as a negative example to her audience. Her bottle of tears and wallet of repentance anatomizing her irrecuperable condition as a woman or "leaky vessel" (stanza 24). The figure of the proud fair humiliated here provides a parallel to the topos of the female consumer consumed, both perpetrating a male revenge on ungrateful women. Remarkably, the phrase "repayd with interest againe" inscribes into the courtship of the upstart woman the logic of commercial exchange. This is an instance of the economics of class and gender that underlies the pastoral world of book VI, bringing to its theme of courtesy overtones of calculation that critics have already noted.34 While Mirabella's story is distinctly marked by the economics of class and gender, such markings are absent from the story of Serena, which foregrounds instead the interplay of gender and savagery. Serena is neither an upstart consumer nor a proud fair. Yet her transgressions, like Mirabella's, are gender inversions. Serena wanders both physically without male protection, and in her fantasy, believing her lover unfaithful "who all this while endured for her sake, / Great perill of his life, and restlesse paines did take" (33.8-9). Her plight is moreover linked to Mirabella's by similar references to their "vncomely case" (7.38.2; 8.51.1). For Mirabella, the description refers to her faults being anatomized, displayed to public view. For Serena, it indicates her "inward shame" at her naked body, she being "a woman spoyld of all attire" (8.48), the word "spoyld" meaning not just stripped but, more insidiously, tainted. This latter suggestion that Serena is damaged goods becomes especially pointed if we realize that the word "case" is a Renaissance pun on the female genitals.35 In this light, the erotic display and consumption of Serena comes down to a piece of her anatomy. This suggestion of rape without an actual rape is certainly consistent with Serena's treatment at the hands of the cannibals, their priest forbidding defilement of the sacrificial victim. Ironically, her ordeal also matches her error, which is, after all, based on unsubstantiated doubts about her lover, although her doubts are to a degree justified by his extended absence. Such congruence fulfills an explicit principle in Spenser's book of courtesy: that the punishment of discourtesy fit the crime. Thus Calidore claims, in defending his slaying of Maleffort, that "it is no blame / To punish those, that doe deserve the same" (1.26.4-5). And Mirabella confesses she must persist in self-exposure "till I haue sau'd so


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many, as I earst did slay" (8.22.9). Yet the narrative attests to something excessive about Serena's ordeal that belies the aims of courtesy by presenting it as a "savaging" that must be attributed to cannibals. Indeed, that Serena's error should land her in savage territory suggests how fragile are the boundaries of civility, how necessary is the fiction of cannibals to the securing of these boundaries. At the same time, by presenting the erotic consumption of woman as a colonial fiction, Spenser effaces the material conditions in the domestic arena that motivated this practice. This effacement in turn helps to naturalize both gender and colonial ideologies by rewriting contemporary colonial accounts of cannibalism. Both Minister and Martyr, along with other writers of the New World, report that the cannibals eat only men, reserving young female captives for procreation and older ones for other labors.36 Their accounts allow cannibals at least an understanding of sex conducive to social survival. In contrast, by presenting a female victim among male eaters, Spenser creates a savage nation that gratifies present hunger only to threaten its future perpetuation. This radical improvidence at the level of sexual economy serves, then, as the natural sign of a commercial lack that reciprocally defines sexual mediation as the natural basis of commerce. Female sexuality thus becomes the reason for turning women into commodities, and physical appetite the condition that disqualifies cannibals from commerce. Serena is snatched from the jaws of cannibals only to feed the civilized hunger of the voyeur. II The Serena episode reveals the period's perception of the fluidity of the self, a fluidity stabilized through the mediation of gender in the exchange between civilized and savage. Such ideological production is not just a matter of textual practice but also constitutes a part of the commercial exchange between England and the New World, as seen in the colonial tobacco trade. The story of tobacco in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a story of the commercial and cultural exchange between England and the New World. In economic terms, tobacco was the first commodity to establish English colonists in America following John Rolfe's successful domestication in 1612 of a mild Trinidad tobacco in Virginia. The raising of tobacco thus represented a triumph of "civilized" methods over "savage" materials. Yet as early as the 1590s, when smoking became fashionable in London, the "savage" weed had been seen as a foreign trifle that turned the "civilized" English into gullible consumers. Because the English were then unable to produce a

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marketable strain of tobacco, the trade was monopolized by Spanish merchants, obviously to English economic disadvantage. As an object of economic and cultural ambivalence, tobacco became the focus of an emerging controversy in which the status of the self was fully implicated in commercial exchange. In examining both sides of the controversy, we shall find that tobacco, both as something imported and as something inhaled, signifies an otherness within that undoes the boundaries between civilized and savage. In thus providing an index to the self's fluidity, the commodity tobacco marks the insertion of a conventional idiom for subjective change into the objective process of commercial exchanges. Significantly, the terms "change" and "exchange" are substitutable in Renaissance usage, revealing the extent to which the status of the self is perceived to be negotiable, like the value of a commodity, subject to the open-ended competition of the marketplace. What is at stake in this competitive exchange between civilized and savage, domestic and colonial, is the assertion of mastery over self and other, a mastery elaborated through an explicit gendering in the discourse of tobacco. The gendering of tobacco, then, sets the imaginary scene for a colonial trade in which the colony's success is formulated in terms of economic and domestic mastery, and Englishwomen, sent to be wives in Virginia, were actually exchanged for tobacco. A brief summary of the history of the product will be useful. Tobacco produced no stir when it was first introduced into England, probably in the 1560s by John Hawkins, returning from one of his slaving voyages to the West Indies. Much of what the English knew then about tobacco came from foreign sources and translations. Among these, medical works describe tobacco as a cure for pox and, by virtue of its hot, dry fumes, a purge for the body's cold, wet humours. Accounts of the New World report both the herb's dietary power to sustain users for days without food, and its use in religious rituals deemed devilish in European eyes. Once tobacco-smoking became fashionable in London in the late 1590s, it provoked a strong reaction by providing a focus for economic and moral concerns about the domestic consumption of foreign trifles. The extravagances and affectations associated with smoking were satirized in the works of various writers. Joseph Hall in his Satires (1597-99) compares the smoker to a building with towered chimneys, in one of which "th' unthankful swallow" has built its nest and stopped the wholesome and hospitable vent of culinary odors.37 Ben Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) exposes the dietary wonder of tobacco as a threadbare excuse of the gallant who cannot afford to pay for his dinner. Henry Buttes, too, condemns the immoderate use of tobacco in


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his Dyets Dry Dinner (1599), otherwise a work in praise of the herb's medicinal and dietary virtues. In 1602, the first wholesale attack on tobacco appeared in Philaretes' Werk for Chimney-Sweepers; or, A warning for Tobacconists, which drew a reply in A Defense of Tabacco. These and subsequent works gave rise to the tobacco controversy in England.38 The controversy brings out tobacco's ambivalence as a cultural signifier, its adaptability to divergent ideological positions and constructions of cultural identity. As Jeffrey Knapp has argued, Elizabethan writers on tobacco, both advocates and attackers, "share certain assumptions about tobacco that are based on prior physiological, economic, poetic, and theological claims, claims that are themselves analogous and cohere around the central premises concerning England."39 I would stress, however, that such ideological production, by implying a direct parallel between tobacco and English cultural identity, effaces the very alienness of American tobacco which, inhaled or imported into the body or body politic, engages England in an exchange with America. Indeed, there is a spectacular dimension to tobacco consumption - smoking, a novelty then much spoken of - that dramatizes such an exchange. With respect to the consumer, smoking objectifies the incorporation of an other which visibly transforms the self.40 Beyond the effects on the self, the practice also literalizes the economic process of consumption by turning into smoke both the commodity and, by extension, the wealth spent in its purchase, what we may call paying through the nose. Whether tobacco consumption is perceived to be beneficial or destructive depends, of course, on the value of smoke to various advocates and attackers. But in bringing together economic and physical aspects of consumption as an integral process with moral and social consequences, the novelty of smoking channels divergent positions into a discourse which reveals the complex relations between economic and cultural value systems. Specifically, in both attacks and defenses, tobacco activates a shared conventional vocabulary for human change and commercial exchange, terms which become mutually constitutive in negotiating an English identity in relation to the New World. The figures of colonial exchange the "civilized" English, the "savage" Indian, and the medium tobacco find their respective places as human, animal, and vegetable states in the hierarchy of beings within the Tudor cosmology. This interplay of terms generates a semantic field in which the consumption of tobacco brings about either a degeneration to or regeneration from savagery, depending on whether the herb is seen to be harmful or beneficial to the consumer. Furthermore, given the inhalation of tobacco as the material cause of

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human transformation, the smoker is seen to enter into a direct relationship with the herb, the outcome of which is either self-mastery or enslavement to tobacco's influence. The idea of transformation is central to The Metamorphosis of Tobacco (1602), a mock-heroic poem in praise of tobacco attributed to Francis Beaumont. Against a savage American landscape informed by an Ovidian framework of natural and human changes, the poem emphasizes the civilizing power of tobacco, "which at the Caribes banquet gouern'st all, / And gently rul'st the sturdiest Caniball." Smoking, the poet claims, abates the cannibals' appetite for human flesh. Inhaled during "bloodie feasts" and rituals, the herb has the power to frame "their cruell minds" to "fond mirth," taming them "with pleasing sleepe." More wonderful still, tobacco gives to Indian priests the power of "barbaric poetry" as a means to mastery over others (10).41 Here, Beaumont not only blithely contradicts colonial accounts linking native uses of tobacco with devil-worship, but extends to civilized smokers similar effects of poetic inspiration. Indeed, his poem is proof of this, as one of the commendatory verses suggests.42 Inspired by smoke, then, Beaumont invents not one, but three myths of origin to account for the virtues of tobacco and to establish England's claim to America's riches. Reserving the details for later discussion, I would here point out that the effect of the myth-making is to downplay the economic concerns confronting England with respect to tobacco. Not only does the praise of tobacco serve to put the best face on England's late entry and dismal showing in the colonial scramble,43 but by locating tobacco in its American setting, the poem diverts attention from problems of domestic consumption that strike much closer to home. By focusing on tobacco's native purity, Beaumont can dismiss the adulterations and affectations of tobacco as creations of the "hypocritical]" world of trifles, the marketplace where English smokers were filling the coffers of Spanish merchants (10). In this way, he even avoids tobacco's negative associations with theaters, taverns, and brothels so frequently cited in the satires. Still, economic realities in both the domestic and colonial arenas clearly put a strain on Beaumont's mythologizing. In each of the stories, tobacco's mythic origins invariably decline into present strife and conquest. If the praise of tobacco skirts practical issues by emphasizing its native powers, the attack on tobacco focuses on its destructive effects on individual and national health and wealth. As Jarnes I argues in A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), smoking causes degeneracy through habituation to a "venomous" herb and imitation of "the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, godless and slauish Indians" (103, 100).


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Because "habitant, alteram naturam" both imitation and habitual use will corrupt the smoker from without and within (109). In deploring the habitual use of tobacco, James is in fact defining a process which we today call addiction. Where we would resort to clinical description, James invokes the analogy of drinking to explain the power that tobacco exercises over inveterate smokers: And as no man likes strong headie drinke the first day (because nemo repente sit turpissimus) but by custome is piece and piece allured, while in the ende, a drunkard will haue as great a thirst to bee drunke, as a sober man to quench his thirst with a draught when hee hath need of it: So is not this the very case of all the great takers of Tobacco? which therefore they themselues do attribute to a bewitching qualitie in it. (109-10)

The attribution of "a bewitching qualitie" to tobacco endows the herb with the power of a fetish. New World accounts concur: native uses of tobacco in religious ceremonies are often reported as a form of idolatry or devil worship. In this connection, addiction to tobacco, fetishized as enslavement to its magical powers, reduces civilized English consumers to the status of savage Indians. What makes the English idolatry of tobacco even more grievous in James' eyes is that it has economic and national implications beyond spiritual and physiological ones. The addictive power of tobacco, combined with Spanish monopoly of the trade, render the herb an exorbitant trifle.44 From 1579 to 1603, the price of imported tobacco ranged from 12s. to 90s. per pound, and official figures show that in 1602, 16,128 pounds of tobacco entered the country through the Port of London alone.45 Among the gentry, James complains, some spend up to £300 or £400 a year on the "precious stinke" (110), not to mention "the estate of many mean Persons" which are "soe decayed and consumed" that they are "driuen to unthriftie Shiftes" to support their habit (113).46 James' dislike of tobacco did not prevent him from making a profit on the import, however. In 1604, the crown imposed a tax of 8s. 6d. per pound of tobacco, over and above the regular customs duty of 2d. per pound.47 The imposition in effect legitimized the trade through civil regulation. James' attack on tobacco is further elaborated by his first poet pensioner, Joshua Sylvester, who in Tobacco Battered (1614) denounces the "Indian Tyrant" for keeping thousands of Englishmen "under slauish Yoak." Comparing the smokers' addiction with the subjection of slaves to their master, Sylvester argues that tobacco has drawn the English into a "pitifull Exchange" with the New World (line 136).48 In trading "our broken Wares" for "this Trash of Theirs," he says, we English have "brought but Vengeance in" (lines 121, 122, 124). What appears to be a favorable commercial exchange has in fact wrought irreparable change in

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consumers. Habitual use shrinks their bodies, bringing them "daily neerer to the Pigmie's Size," because tobacco smoke "inly choak / And dry them up (like Herrings)" (lines 490, 496-97). Not only does smoking "dis-nerve the Body, and dis-apt the Mind," but it "decayes and marres the memory" and "molests" the conscience (lines 619, 620, 660-61). For this reason, Sylvester dubs tobacco the "Circean drug" which, acting on the smoker, "would soon his best to a Beast exchange" (lines 554-55). In this pitiful exchange with the New World, therefore, the English consumer has degenerated from "knowing" Christian to undersized savage, and from best to beast, all for "beslav[ing] himselfe to a dead Vegetall" (line 535). The allusion to Circe suggests, as in the Counterblaste, the magical perception of tobacco as a fetish, and opens up the issue of yet another pitiful exchange: "Spiced with som forrain Spels / So to bewitch the Wise," the drug ensnares the English fly in the "Spanish Cobweb" (lines 557, 561-62). The Circean reference is one of the more blatant examples of the gendering of tobacco which pervades both sides of the controversy. Mediating strategically in the exchange between civilized and savage, gender functions to define mastery of self and other. The figure of Circe is especially appropriate in this regard, since the sorceress is associated with female sensual enthrallment in both domestic and colonial settings, an instance of which is the Circean figure of Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss.49 In enthralling English smokers and turning them into beasts, then, Circean tobacco represents a species of New World enchantment, spiced with Spanish spells, brought home to English society. Nor does the sorceress preside simply over the self's degeneration. In Tobacco Tortured; or the filthie fume of Tobacco refined (1616), dedicated to James, John Deacon warns against the consumption of social distinctions through the expense of Circean smoke: Thus thou mayest plainly perceiue how these their intoxicating Tobacco fumes are able (in an vnperceivable and Circean manner) to transforme nobilitie into gentrie, gentrie into yoemanrie, yoemanrie into husbandry, husbandrie into maunuarie, manuarie into manubiarie, manuiabiarie into a vagrant and retchless roguerie, and what not besides?50 By transforming wealth into smoke, tobacco consumes the material basis for social stratification, revealing not just the fluidity of the self but the slippery slope that constitutes the entire social order. In its application to tobacco, then, the Circe myth refigures as a form of gender inversion the smoker's loss of personal, economic, and social self-mastery. For Sylvester, this translates into a consumption of virility, tobacco smoke dessicating the "Seed of generation" (line 479). Likewise, James points


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out that smoking, "accounted . . . effeminate among the Indians themselues," takes away a man's will and ability to defend his country (110). If, for attackers, the Circe myth signifies enslavement to tobacco, for advocates the myth provides a paradigm for the assertion of male selfmastery by resisting this enslavement. Henry Buttes, in misnaming Sir Walter Ralegh as introducer of tobacco into England, calls him "our English Ulyssis" who has "farre fetcht . . . and deare bought" the "treasure."51 The phrase, "far fetched and dear bought," commonly used for foreign luxuries and fashion goods, here takes on epic overtones of Ulysses' travels and homecoming. By implication, Ralegh has overcome the Circean magic of the New World and returned with his precious trifle to his English Penelope. The association of Ralegh with Ulyssean selfmastery is no doubt problematic, given Ralegh's reputation as an avid smoker. But insofar as self-mastery arises from a desire for home, the faithful Ulysses represents a powerful model of bourgeois domesticity, one used especially to romanticize the exploits of commercial voyagers as a means to domestic, in its double sense of nation and family, enrichment.52 In this context, Ulyssean domesticity marks the boundaries between English and foreign and also, in the case of tobacco, civil and savage. Again, of course, in linking Ralegh to Ulysses, Buttes misreads the gender politics of Elizabeth's court, where the English Penelope was in fact Ralegh's ruler, beyond the scope of his domestic authority. Spenser in Book III of The Faerie Queene was certainly aware of Ralegh's delicate position when he presents Elizabeth as tobacco-giver, in the figure of Belphoebe, who applies "divine Tobacco" to heal the wounds of the squire, Timias (5.32). Yet Elizabeth aligned with the praise of tobacco is consistent, albeit contrasted, with Circe aligned with its condemnation. Even as the queen's anomalous power with respect to the domestic gender hierarchy is enlisted in countering the Circean associations of tobacco, her power is simultaneously being normalized by being cast in the role of tobacco's glorifier. In this relation, Beaumont's presentation of Elizabeth in his tobacco myths can be seen to play out the bourgeois translation of her power in a mock-heroic metamorphosis of tobacco.53 In each of the three myths Beaumont creates, the figure of Elizabeth emerges to glorify England's claim to American tobacco, and to cleanse the herb of its negative, outlandish associations. First, tobacco is a herb created by Earth with the aid of Pandora, after Prometheus, their champion and co-rival of the gods, is punished for his transgression. Composed of the best distillations from the natural elements, and "inflam'd by the holy fire," tobacco imparts "to men the gifts of heau'nly mirth" (18). As instigator in the creation of tobacco, Pandora fills a role

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well known to the period as afigureof Elizabeth's bounty to her subjects. The second story follows from Jove's rape of Pastora in Wingandekoe. When jealous Juno turned her rival into the herb tobacco, Jove infused it with his heavenly power and "fram'd it as a Micro-cosme of good" (27). Tobacco's native place now bears the name of Virginia, because "a more beauteous Nymph," Elizabeth, is "worshipt there" (19). In this way, Elizabeth becomes the de facto heir to Pastora's legacy of tobacco, without being soiled by rape. The third story has it that the gods and muses were ignorant of tobacco, for the herb has all this time lain hidden among Indians in Wingandekoe, like a treasure guarded by mythic beasts. Tobacco then came into the possession of Elizabeth, who has "vncontrol'd stretcht out her mightie hand, / . . . And tam'd the sauage nations of the West" (45). This "uncontrolled" extension into America asserts England's autonomy as a colonial power, represented as Elizabeth's appropriation of tobacco's power to tame savages without being mastered by it. In these stories, deference to the queen's power poses no challenge to the gender hierarchy in the poem, which asserts itself through the mastery of female tobacco by the male user. Tobacco's female gendering is implicit in its creation, its donors all being personified as female deities whom Earth addresses by the title of "Ladie" (16). Although the claim that tobacco inspires the "carcass" with "sweet life and breath" does not specify gender, enjoyers of tobacco all turn out to be male. Apart from general terms like "the man . . . himselfe" and "men," the poet also mentions Iolaiis and Cortez and his men "in the palace of great Montezume" (18). Tobacco is explicitly gendered as female in the rape of Pastora. Its subsequent discovery by the mythical physician Aesculapius finds a model in Syrinx, the maiden-turned-reed from which Pan fashions a pipe for his sylvan music. Imitating Pan, Aesculapius devises a pipe to enjoy tobacco's medicinal virtues (34). The analogy not only reinforces the mastery of male smokers, but deftly reverses the flow of the breath from inhalation to exhalation, so that what would have been the incorporation of an alien other becomes an expression of the inner self. Equally telling is the comparison of tobacco withflowers,who were once beautiful youths feminized by the loss of self-mastery, whether to the gods or to an image: Hyacinth, Narcissus, Adonis, Cyparissus. The comparison serves to mark the division between male and female. The youths were not turned into tobacco, Beaumont speculates, "because their louers grieu'd to see them burn'd" (41). Their escape from burning confirms the gender hierarchy implicit in the male consumption of female tobacco, a gendering which provides a counter-rhetoric to the attack on tobacco's consumption of masculinity, wealth, and status.


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Indeed, in the idiom of change, it seems that whereas tobacco turned into smoke is consumed forever, flowers may return to men. Such regeneration becomes especially significant when it appears in a masque that also makes an indirect defense of tobacco, as in The Masque of Flowers, sponsored by Sir Francis Bacon and performed before James on Twelfth Night, 1614. As Stephen Orgel has pointed out, the transformation of nature is a fixture of Jacobean and Caroline court masques designed to express "only the most benign aspects of absolute monarchy."54 In telling "of flowers return'd to men," Bacon's masque stages specifically James' power to make men, an appropriate compliment since the guest of honor, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, whose marriage to Frances Howard the masque celebrates, was also the king's favorite (line 317).55 Political considerations aside, the compliment might have a commercial valence if we notice the attention the masque gives to tobacco.56 The date of the masque is significant in this regard: it would seem that Bacon was trying to put in a word for what was in 1614 a budding colonial tobacco trade. In 1611, the English colonist John Rolfe had obtained some seeds from Spanish plantations in Trinidad. Having succeeded in raising this tobacco in Virginia, he was in 1612 able to test a small quantity of his product on English smokers.57 Rolfe's project would have interested Bacon, who was from 1609 onwards a patentee and adventurer in the Virginia Company. Bacon's colonial interest casts a new light on his masque, which may now be seen to promote the trade of tobacco as an extention of James' power over nature. Unlike Elizabeth as giver of beneficent tobacco, James' role is to confer on men the power of mastery, power to turn a savage herb into profitable cultivation. Appropriately, the celebration of the king's regenerative power is paralleled and anticipated by a song in the antimasque praising tobacco's power to revive men's spirits. The song is part of a contest between tobacco and wine, respectively championed by the Virginian idol Kawasha and the satyr Silenus. Although the contest produces no explicit winner, tobacco has implicitly the upper hand. Whereas Silenus manages only to express contempt for tobacco as an upstart fashion - "But now are come up worthies new, / The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew" (lines 230-31) - Kawasha is able to recite the commonplaces of tobacco's virtues: Silenus taps the barrel, but Tobacco taps the brain, And makes the vapoursfineand soot,58 That man revives again. Nothing but fumigation Doth chase away ill sprites, KAWASHA.

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The romance of the New World Kawasha and his nation Found out these holy rites.

(lines 234-41)

Again, following their antimasque combat, Kawasha exits after Silenus, suggesting that Kawasha has fulfilled his declared intention, that is, to force Silenus to "yield / And quit the field" (lines 241-42). Bacon's sole sponsorship of the masque to the tune of more than £2000 argues strongly for him "to have planned, or at least discussed or approved, the 'argument' of Flowers"59 although we have no indication that James noticed or acted on it. Until after 1616, there was no market demand or royal sanction for the importation of colonial tobacco.60 Yet there is a sense in which tobacco did make men's fortunes in the early years of Jamestown. By 1616, it had become "one of the staple crops of the Colony."61 In this year, "2500 pounds of tobacco [were] imported from Virginia and Bermuda, but the next year the total was 18,839 pounds, and in 1618 the figures rise to 49,518."62 By 1619, "a generous estimate of the Virginia Trade puts it at £100,000," which amounts to half the estimated national outlay for tobacco in 1612.63 It is true that, in these years, the colonial tobacco trade was riddled with problems. The taxes and royal imposts levied on the colonial import were extremely heavy. The competition from Spanish tobacco, still a superior product to the Virginian, was brutal. The negotiation for a monopoly of imports was a major cause in the dissolution of the Virginia Company. Above all, the exclusive planting of tobacco left colonists dependent for food and survival on Indians and English shipments, not to mention the English defections to Indian camps in times of shortages, blurring the line between civil and savage.64 This state of affairs gave the disenchanted ex-Jamestown colonist John Smith the excuse he needed to present his unflattering description of settlers "rooting in the ground about Tobacco like Swine," invoking once again the Circean overtones of New World enchantment.65 Amid these failings, however, one avenue of traffic thrived: the exchange of tobacco for Englishwomen, or "maids" as they were called, to be wives in Virginia, a commercial scheme which set into motion a domestic ideal, as it were, that redeemed the colony from its exclusive involvement with tobacco. The nubile maids were not, of course, the first Englishwomen to set foot in America. Women were among the families that emigrated under the leadership of John White in 1587, and a few women were among the first settlers of Jamestown. But the disasters that followed - the disappearance of White's entire settlement in 1588, later known as the Lost Colony, and the decimation of settlers during the "starving time" in 1609 - convinced promoters of the colonial enterprise that women should be


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sent only when a colony is strong enough to stand on its own. Reiterated in Bacon's essay Of Plantation, this colonial policy, by excluding women from a productive role in the founding of the colony, laid the gendered foundations for practices which defined them as men's property within the economic and social relations of Jamestown.66 In brief, conditions for sending women to the colony were met when Virginian tobacco became marketable in England and Europe. These conditions were fostered in large part by a change in economic organization which was in itself conducive to the formation of the patriarchal household as an economic unit in the colony. In 1609, under the second charter, the Virginia Company announced a plan to turn over corporate management of the colony to private ownership by 1616, in preparation for which Sir Thomas Dale, then governor of Virginia, undertook in 1614 to grant allotments of private "gardens" to farmers or free tenants who had fulfilled their seven years of indentured service to the company. Once private property came into being, and land could be cultivated for individual gain, tobacco production soared, and the harvest enabled a number of planters to purchase wives. In 1616, the colony had 381 persons, 81 of whom were farmers.67 In 1619, 90 maids were shipped to Virginia, followed by a hundred more the next year, all designated as wives for the tenants.68 Leaf tobacco was by now "current as silver" in Virginia, its price being set at 3s. per pound for the best grade and at 18d. per pound for the coarser grade,69 and the traffic in tobacco and Englishwomen had become a regular practice. The price of women fluctuated with the price of tobacco on the English market. On August 12, 1621, for example, the Virginia Company in London set the price of each maid at "120h waight of the best leafe Tobbacco," which comes to £18 sterling at the 3s. rate for tobacco (Kingsbury III: 493). Six weeks later, when the imported tobacco turned out to be of poor quality, most selling for 18d. and some for 2s. per pound, the Company wrote to the authorities in Virginia, requesting an abatement in the price of the import. At the same time, the Company raised the price of each maid to 150 pounds of the best leaf tobacco, which now amounted to a maximum value of £22 10s. per woman at the original 3s. rate, or £15 per woman at the current market value of 2s. per pound of tobacco. Amid fluctuations like this, what remained constant was the stipulation that in case any "maid" should die on the voyage over, "there must be proportionable addition vppon the rest."70 This traffic in women calls to mind Gayle Rubin's thesis that women function like commodities in male-dominated systems of exchange.71 More specifically, I would argue that when women are traded for tobacco, it reveals the extent to which a sex-gender system mediates in

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the colonial exchange to displace its attendant cultural anxieties. The material force of this mediation is most visible in the colonial experience of John Rolfe. Even as his seeding of commercial tobacco in Virginia represents a "civilized" triumph over "savage" native resources, his marriage to Pocahontas, an Indian "princess," raises anxieties regarding racial and cultural purity, anxieties in part allayed by putting her through an elaborate "civilizing" process. The trade of tobacco for Englishwomen serves a similar ideological function in allowing the planter to exchange an object of cultural otherness for one of domestic propriety. Indeed, the "savage" weed can be said to manage racial anxieties by displacing Amerindian women as the object of exchange.72 At the same time, through this exchange, colonial domesticity enacts a larger imperative to domesticate America. As an officer of the Virginia Company puts it, "the Plantacon [sic] can never flourish till families be planted, and the respect of wiues and Children fix the people on the Soyle" (Kingsbury III: 493). The goal of fixing people on the soil not only justifies English possession of Virginia (the nomadic habits of Indians being the standard legal argument for dispossessing them of their land), but, in doing so, revises the image of planters rooting about the soil for tobacco like Circe's swine. As long as the colonial exchange between civilized and savage can be displaced onto the exchange of Circean tobacco for a proper wife, the colonist maintains mastery over both as farmer and husband. In practical terms this economic and domestic mastery is facilitated by the Company's policy which entitles a farmer who purchases a maid for wife to the choice of a youth for apprentice.73 Insofar as a husband's domestic mastery depends on the wife's chastity, the good reputation of the women shipped to the colony became a necessary seal of approval. On August 12, 1621, the Company wrote that the maids it was sending all came with "good Commendations," enjoining the Council in Virginia to house and feed them until they were all properly married. When the price of maids was later raised, assurance of their honesty was likewise elevated. "We haue vsed extraordinary dilligence and care in the choise of them," the Company writes, "and haue received none of whom we haue not had good testimony of theire honest life and cariadge."74 The acquisition of a wife and an apprentice was clearly a privilege reserved for men of means. There were deviations, of course, as when a woman should "vnwarily or fondly bestow her self" upon a man who cannot afford her price in tobacco. In such a situation, since the Company "dare not infrindg" on "the libertie of Marriadge," it would request of Virginia authorities that the husband be forced to pay the "true quantitie of tobacco proporconed, and that this debt may haue


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p[re]cedence [over] all others."75 But on the whole, given the acute shortage of Englishwomen in Virginia in the early part of the seventeenth century,76 marriage remained a privilege of the rich. As Thomas Nicholls complains in his letter of April 2, 1623, to Sir John Worsenholme: "Women are necessary members for the Colonye, but the poore men are neu[er] the nearer for them they are so well sould." Nicholls' letter is worth our attention because it cuts through the pieties to reveal, and, in the process, unsettle the economics of domestic mastery. For lack of a woman, says Nicholls, he had to pay £3 sterling per year for his "washing and for soap." For all the women the Company sends, poor men might as well die in misery without anyone to care for them. "Wherefore for preuention I could wish women might be sent ou[er] to serue the Company for that purpose for certayne yeares whether they marry or no." 77 For Nicholls, a wife is nothing more than a personal servant one owns for life. And yet his "wish," by implying that women's labor was valuable in itself regardless of their marital status, provides the basis for an alternative view of women's worth, one which goes beyond the currency of tobacco. In fact, Nicholls' "wish" broaches the terms by which a colonial Englishwoman might wish to view her own worth. On March 30, 1624, the Virginia Council received a petition from one Jane Dickenson, a widow whose husband was slain in the 1622 massacre. She herself had been held captive by the Indians for ten months before being ransomed by one Dr. Potts for two pounds of beads, who in turn demanded 150 pounds of tobacco as the price for her freedom. In countering his demand, the widow requested intervention from the Governor and Council to secure "her releasement fro[m] his seruitude, Considering that it much differeth not from her slauery w[ith] the Indians." From his perspective, Potts was simply making a profit by the established rules of commercial practice which set the price of Virginia wives in tobacco. The scheme was, after all, unfair to only the gullible Indians, the colony's avowed enemies. For her part, by equating her servitude to Potts with slavery to the Indians, Dickenson reveals the exploitation of women that the colonial system allows. Dickenson further claims that as a widow she was no longer subject to the tobacco price assessed on wives, and that her service of ten months has more than repaid the price of the beads (Kingsbury IV: 473). In doing so, Dickenson not only holds Potts to the value of the bargain he made with the Indians but also shifts the basis of her worth from her status as a wife to her labor. The Potts-Dickenson case affords us a prime opportunity to observe the differential operation of a colonial fiction in the lives of men and women. As a captive of the Indians, Dickenson is a real-life counterpart

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to the wandering Serena, who falls into the hands of cannibals. In redeeming Dickenson from slavery and short-changing the Indians, Potts performs a commercial version of Calepine's martial labor. For Potts as for Calepine, the assertion of domestic value marks the boundary between civil and savage. In showing her "inward shame" after being rescued, Serena accepts the domestic propriety that strips her of her selfworth - a fictional female acceptance not forthcoming in Dickenson. Not only does her indifference regarding her slavery with the Indians or with Potts implicitly deny the "civil" superiority of colonists over the "savage" Indians, but in claiming the status of a widow, she takes the only escape open to women from the domestic bind of English and Virginian law which marks them as property. There is no extant record of any action taken on Dickenson's petition. But in itself the petition raises a voice of resistance, by or in behalf of a woman, to the attitudes and practice that pit her worth against tobacco. Of course, a single petition among these early records of colonial Virginia would hardly constitute a challenge to the patriarchalist legal and economic structures in which Englishwomen were already placed. What is worth noting about this development, however, is that it omits native women from the cultural exchange - or rather replaces native with English women. For despite their marginal position, native women were already articulated into systems of traffick in Minister's and Ralegh's accounts. The shift is significant because, to the extent that women were considered the property of men within their own culture, the presence of Englishwomen in Virginia turned it into Englishmen's domicile. In this ideological translation, the figure of Serena is pivotal in that it renders domesticity coextensive with civility. The exception that validates the rule is Pocahontas, that "nonpareil" whose possible prior marriage to an Algonkian was glossed over by her marriage to John Rolfe, and whose death in 1617 made possible her apotheosis as a cultural symbol behind which the Amerindian womanfinallydisappears.78

Inconstancy: coming to Indians through Troilus and Cressida

They are inconstant in everie thing, but what feare constraineth them to keepe. Craftie, timerous, quicke of apprehension and very ingenuous. Some are of disposition fearefull, some bold, most cautelous, all Savage. Generally covetous of copper, beads, and such like trash. They are soone moved to anger, and so malitious, that they seldome forget an injury: they seldome steale one from another, least their conjurers should reveale it, and so they be pursued and punished. That they are thus feared is certaine, but that any can reveale their offences by conjuration I am doubtful. Their women are carefull not to bee suspected of dishonesty without the leaue of their husbands. John Smith, in A Map of Virginia (1612)1 PANDARUS: Go to, a bargain made; seal it, seal it. I'll be the witness. Here I hold your hand, here my cousin's. If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together . . . let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokersbetween Pandars! Say, 'Amen'. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1602, 1609)2

In putting his name to A Map of Virginia, Smith presents himself as a veteran of the Jamestown enterprise offering the knowledge of his experience. He means not only to promote the colony but to advocate a specific approach in dealing with indigenous people. Descriptions of Indians such as the one Smith endorses are not disinterested observations but purposeful productions of a culture's knowledge of other subjects. They remind us that, as readers of colonial narratives, we have no access to Indians, even when they are presented as speaking subjects, except through the interpretive framework encoded by the narratives. In articulating this insight, Jane Tompkins raises the question of whether it is possible to separate fact from interpretation in our reading, or to locate an Indian point of view distinct from that of English colonists.3 As she observes, the failure to problematize these issues of interpretation condemns critics to taking sides with either Englishmen or Indians according to their own ideological positions, thus producing their own versions of history rather than a historicized understanding of past 131

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events. For Tompkins, there is no wholesale solution, except for vigilance and judicial weighing of individual texts. In alerting us to interpretive difficulties, however, Tompkins assumes that colonial narratives are coherent and self-enclosed accounts of colonial ideology, thus overlooking the fact that they must accommodate a new set of experiences to European cultural categories. In doing so, these texts often resort to rhetorical and interpretive strategies that were familiar to English readers and, in some cases, already subject to critique within the culture. Indeed, the presence of a literary market and readership locates colonial narratives, along with domestic literary productions, within a network of commercial and discursive relations which determined to a large extent the literary issues and fashions of the day. Within this context, colonial and domestic discourses may in fact employ the same textual strategies, albeit each adapted to its own social and historical contexts. Especially when specific domestic and colonial discourses are linked by a common topos, such as inconstancy, the critique of textual strategies in one suggests similar possibilities for the other. Admittedly, colonial writers drew most directly on other New World narratives for their description of Indian inconstancy, but these sources do not theorize their own production and thus do not provide a basis for self-criticism.4 Such description takes on a new twist, however, when juxtaposed with a domestic practice that aligns English travelers with classical false lovers - namely Jason, Ulysses, Aeneas, and Theseus.5 Drawn from Ovid's Heroides, these classical travelers are all deserters of women in foreign lands who have aided them in their quests. As part of the literary fashion of the day,6 the Heroides tradition provides a textual basis for cultural self-awareness - and self-rationalization. Even as the Heroides tradition stages the protests of wronged women, its colonial adaptation registers falseness abroad as the necessary counterpart of loyalty to domestic interests. A similar cultural fantasy inflects Smith's sense of "polytropic" improvisation in dealing with inconstant Indians. As Peter Hulme notes, the True Relation recounts a meeting with Opechankenough in which Smith replays the verbal guile of Ulysses in the land of the Cyclops!7 Indeed, scholars and Smith's contemporaries alike have accused Smith of fabricating lies or, at best, res gestae in his autobiographical True Travels (1630). Although Philip Barbour and others have since verified many details in this work, Mary Fuller cautions that Smith's writings inhabit "a middle ground where truths are more malleable, susceptible to multiple representations."8 This middle ground is also susceptible to an interplay with romance. In locating an intertextual nexus of travelers and false lovers, I wish to approach the colonial discourse on Indians through the romance's

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construction of inconstancy. As a topos of femininity epitomized in Creseyde, inconstancy has had a long tradition with established rhetorical strategies on both sides of the issue.9 Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is only the most timely and self-critical rendering of the tradition. Specifically, by foregrounding female inconstancy as an issue of access and perspective, the play offers a moment of distancing from the motives and mechanisms by which a culture mediates its knowledge of women. Thus Pandarus' match-making speech quoted above makes visible the male bias that presumes female inconstancy when lovers betray each other. This presumption, which conditions men's view of women in the play's world, sheds ironic light on Troilus' confession that he "cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar" (1.1.91). As the go-between who in effect comes between the sexes, Pandarus stands for a society in which a privileged male perspective denies access to female experience.10 The pandering of Cressida reduces her to a sexualized commodity, rendering her changeable in value in men's eyes even before she has a chance to prove herself inconstant. Significantly, by aligning woman's inconstancy with her commodification, the play identifies a moment of cultural ambiguity when war operates like trade,11 and the intrinsic worth of warriors comes into question. Thus Troilus, in defending Helen from doubts (including his own) about her value, praises her as "a pearl / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships, / And turned crowned kings to merchants" (2.2.81-83). Shakespeare's deflation of Marlowe's mighty lines12 here registers not only the extent to which heroic valor is invested in a woman, but the interpretive shift from epic to commerce that implicates the warrior's self-valuation. Troilus' speech marks the crucial moment when a heroic view of the self as stable essence is giving way to a market view of the self as negotiable value. Even as men stake their honor on a Helen or a Cressida, therefore, her devaluation, attributed to her inconstant nature, reveals only their projected anxieties. Inconstancy is thus not fundamentally moral but economic: it reveals the unstable valuation of the self, male and female, amid the competitive exchanges of a marketoriented society. As such, the play's engagement with inconstancy relates to not only contemporary English society but also the Jamestown colony, which was initially organized as a commercial enterprise. While the commodification of women in the Trojan War parallels the erotics of colonial promotion, I am interested in the extent to which colonists found themselves implicated in the selling of Virginia, inscribed by its framing logic of the trifle. Commercial pressures certainly exacerbated the fragile social relations in a colony that was, from the outset, unable to meet even

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the basic needs of survival. One result was the eruption of factional rivalries and questions of authority that toppled the presidency of Edward Maria Wingfield. Nor did John Smith find it easy to maintain his leadership through trade with the Indians - an increasingly forced trade by military means - for corn, the very stuff of English survival. My analysis locates theorized perspectives within Shakespeare's play from which to explore the construction of experience in the Jamestown narratives. I therefore juxtapose colonial rivalries with the "emulous factions" in the Greek army, and the war-like trade in Virginia with the trade-like war in Troy. Within these ongoing processes of competitive negotiation, one's sense of self-worth is inevitably pitted against that of other cultural subjects. Just as Troilus' self-image as "truth's authentic author" predicates betrayal by Cressida, colonial English manhood is defined through imputations of native treachery. In the final analysis, the Jamestown narratives provided a means for Smith to negotiate his reputation through the commercial medium of print. When A Map of Virginia was published in 1612, Smith's career as a colonist was effectively over. Sent home to England after a severe burn, Smith was never again to receive a colonial commission. As Barbour further notes, Smith was unaware at this time that the Virginia Company had shown considerable appreciation for his work in Jamestown.13 In turning to print, Smith had the help of loyal supporters in Virginia. Their co-authorship with him of the Map of Virginia provided a united front for his views on colonial relations.14 Likewise, their multiple authorship of The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, which Smith

appended to the Map, continued to praise the results of his work in the colony. Smith would reprint both works with changes in his Generall Historie of Virginia (1623), and the colonist would find the shifting images of his truth in the plural texts of a self. I In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the New World leaves its trace in an old romance, inspiring Trojan heroes with a proleptic desire for colonial possession. Thus Paris finds "the world's largest spaces cannot parallel" Helen (2.2.162). Troilus likewise imagines Cressida in erotic display: "Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl" (1.1.96). These remarks might point contemporary audiences to Virginia, where, as early as 1584, pearls were reported to abound and persons had proposed to settle.15 Although India may be associated in this period with both the East and the West, the play at one point gives it a specific location. In accepting Diomede as her lover, Cressida arouses in the eavesdropping Troilus a

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fury more fierce than the "hurricano," a term and phenomenon of Atlantic origin (5.2.168). Beyond its interest in a commodity, the play's focus on the erotic display and commodification of women captures a familiar trope in the period's colonial writings: the feminine figuration of the New World. Dating from Columbus' voyages to the Indies,16 the trope is, as we have seen, adopted by English voyagers who represent America as erotic bride and nurturant mother, projecting their needs and desires on the land.17 Even as Troilus needs a Pandar, the play brings out the pandering role of colonial promoters in praising the "treasures" of the New World to recruit investors for their projects. Thus Sir Walter Ralegh describes Guiana as "a land that hath yet her maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought," and John Smith invites adventurers to New England, "her treasures having never yet beene opened, nor her originalls wasted, consumed, nor abused."18 In tapping the rhetorical pulse of colonial promotions, the play also enacts a motive for such rhetoric. Locating erotic display in a moment of epic stasis, the first scene opens seven years into a war in which neither Grecians nor Trojans have anything to show for their labors and losses. With the Trojan War thus overlaid with colonial motives and commercial anxieties, the erotic interlude comes to occupy the gap between investment and returns. The cycle of investment and returns likewise structures English commercial expectations about the Virginia enterprise. Most colonial advocates and patentees of the Virginia enterprise under the first charter were interested in colonization primarily as a commercial venture, a basis for trade and commodity extraction, although investments had so far produced little profit. English attempts to colonize Virginia date back to 1584, when Ralegh received a patent from Elizabeth I to "plant" in that part of the country. Several undertakings were privately financed but failed to produce any profit for the promoters, and the disappearance of an entire colony of 150 settlers in 1588 raised fears about the future of settlements.19 In short, "none of the investment by the Virginia Company, which totaled £200,000 by 1621, was ever repaid, neither principal nor accumulated interest."20 Under these circumstances, colonial advocates were hard pressed to defend the enterprise against rising doubts of its worth, and resorted to the seductive feminization of the land by way of compensation. An example is James Rosier's narrative of a 1605 voyage to Virginia, which David Beers Quinn believes to be a promotion for the Jamestown settlement begun in 1606. Recounting the diverse commodities for "present habitation and planting" and "excellent places" for ship docks along the St. George River, Rosier includes a description of the rich neighboring land, which "verged with a greene bordure of grasse, doth

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make tender unto the beholder of her pleasant fertility, if by clensing away the woods she were converted into meddow."21 The erotic image both invites investors to possess Virginia and defers quick profits by pointing to the labor needed to render her fertility productive. The pattern repeats itself with the Jamestown colony, created in 1607 with great expectations, under the management of the King's Council for Virginia, later known as the Virginia Company of London. As before, the colony yielded no profits and, in the "starving time" of 1609, a population of 500 was reduced within six months to 68, and news of great misery and even cannibalism in the colony reached England. Even so, colonial promotions continued to extoll Virginia's potential fruitfulness. A 1610 pamphlet put out by the Company cites Lord de la Warr, the first man to be appointed governor and captain-general of Virginia for life: "let no rumor of the Countrie (as if in the wombe thereof lay not these elementall seedes of plenty and increase) waue any mans faire purposes, or wrest them to a declyning and falling off from the businesse."22 With Virginia's fertility thus hidden, investors must not even trust their informants. In maintaining the praise of American riches in the face of commercial failure, however, the quality of the settlers came increasingly into question. The change in emphasis is especially clear when we move from the promotions to the early narratives of colonial life in Jamestown. Referring to the "starving time," the authors of The Proceedings blame all parties involved in the enterprise: "It were to[o] vile to say what we endured; but the occasion was only our owne, for want of providence, industrie, and government, and not the barrennesse and defect of the countrie, as is generally supposed" (I: 276). The term "providence" refers to the annual supply of provisions which the Virginia Company in London sent to the colony, supplies which "never lasted six months." While the Company certainly underestimated the needs of settlers,23 the report blames the accidents of transport and the greed of transporters: "such a glutton is the sea, and such good fellowes the marriners, wee as little tasted of those great proportions . . . as they of our miseries" (I: 276). Besides the shortage of provisions, another complaint is the lack of industry among settlers who nevertheless partake of the general store. Indeed, during the first three years of Jamestown, the report claims, the fruitfulness of Virginia alone made up for both the idleness of colonists and the insufficient provisions from England. The report finally blames the commercial failure of the colony on the lack of government: "had we beene in Paradice it selfe (with those governours) it would not have beene much better with us" (I. 276). Although other narratives may differ in their assessment of the parties involved, The

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Proceedings has, without dispute, named the central issues in the colonial politics of Jamestown. When the economic success of Jamestown is linked to the quality of the colonists, it brings out the social complexities of colonial experience which promotional tracts generally neglect in their glowing reports on commercial prospects. At the same time, it also reveals the extent to which the colonists' self-worth is informed by the commercial logic of investment and returns. Faced not only with commercial failure but with a difficult struggle for survival, colonial writers invariably blame "idle settlers" for consuming provisions without putting in their share of labor. As John Smith reports, lacking strong leadership the settlers were so stricken with "despaire as they would rather starve and rot with idlenes, then bee perswaded to do anything for their owne reliefe without constraint." Smith had reason to complain: with provisions "now within eighteene dayes spent, and the Indians trade decreasing" around the settlement, he was sent to the Indian town Kegquouhtan "to trade for Corne" (I: 35). The "idle settlers" were a convenient target for criticism. But when complaints rose to the top against colonial leaders, they immediately raised questions of authority, and even the threat of political faction and mutiny.24 The settlement of Jamestown officially began on May 13, 1607 with seven members on the ruling council, appointed by the King's Council for Virginia. Within two years, six of them were incapacitated or discredited in one way or other. Bartholomew Gosnold took ill and died on August 2, 1607. Edward Maria Wingfleld, elected president of the colony on May 13, was deposed on September 10 by the council for abuse of office and attempted desertion. George Kendall was tried and executed for treason in November. As The Proceedings tells us, the colony had "small love" for John Martin's "never-mending sicknes" and his obsession with finding gold (I: 211-12). John Ratcliffe, who replaced Wingfield, was deposed a year later for having "riotously consumed the store," diverted resources towards building a "pallace in the woods," and attempted desertion (I: 229). John Smith, elected president in 1608 to replace Ratcliffe, and probably the colony's most able leader at this time, was ousted by the council a year later, when a gunpowder accident weakened his ability to compete in the power play. The only member who survived unscathed was Christopher Newport, who, as admiral of the fleet in charge of transporting settlers and annual supplies to the colony, was absent most of the time from the colony. Amid the factional politics, authority emerges as a vexing issue for the leaders, who were faced with new roles in a new world for which their English experience did not adequately prepare them. Although authority

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was tied to rank, individual leaders had to establish and maintain command over settlers through their ability to deal with the ongoing challenges of colonial hardships. These conflicting criteria of authority only complicated matters for a council whose members were not only divided by social status but, as the Proceedings puts it, "all strangers to each others education, quallities, or disposition" (I: 213).25 The tensions of authority that colonists experienced were continuous with the social changes that England and the rest of Europe were then undergoing, the shift from a view of society as a fixed order to one based on market contingencies, in which one's identity and self-worth are subject to negotiation in the open-ended, competitive process of social exchanges. Indeed, both the harshness of colonial conditions and the period's view of Virginia as a commercial venture exacerbated these social tensions. The problems of colonial leaders bear comparison to those confronting the heroes in Troilus and Cressida, especially in the Greek camp, where the authority of command is critically threatened by factions. The play provides insight into the colonists' understanding of Jamestown politics by dramatizing this crisis as fundamentally one of masculine self-worth in the face of social changes, a question of the self's constancy when heroes are caught in a competitive and unpredictable world. Thus Agamemnon attempts to rally a demoralized army by challenging his men to prove their "persistive constancy" in continued fighting (1.3.21). In doing so, he invokes the heroic ideal of the self as a stable essence untouched by the changes of Fortune: But, in the wind and tempest of her [Fortune's] frown, Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan, Puffing at all, winnows the light away; And what hath mass and matter by itself Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.

(1.3.26-30)

The analogy to winnowing suggests that heroic essence is an unmingled virtue which will eventually reveal itself as a mark of "distinction," setting the hero apart from the lightweights. Given the paralysis of epic action after seven years of fruitless fighting, the analogy serves not simply to place heroic virtue beyond the vicissitudes of time, but to defer proof of its worth in victory and spoils. The analogy is problematic, however: not only is the grain preserved because the chaff has served its purpose, but the grain realizes its essential value only when it is consumed. In exhorting his men to constancy, Agamemnon hopes to justify continued loyalty to his cause and obedience to his authority. Yet both his words and authority are immediately undercut by his subordinate, Ulysses.26

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In his speech on degree, Ulysses shows that the ideal of the self as a stable essence assumes a fixed cosmic and social hierarchy in which degree assigns to everything and everyone an "authentic place" (1.3.108). At the same time, he points to a flaw in this essentialist logic which not only destabilizes the social order on which it is based, but opens the position of rank and privilege to challenge from below. Because degree has no stable referent, it is known only through its effects, and effects can always be counterfeited: "degree being vizarded, / th'unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask" (1.3.83-84). 27 Agamemnon's "distinction" - the eventual revelation of essence - here gives way to "emulation" in which the lesser warrior displaces "his superior" (1.3.133).28 When rank is thus emptied of heroic essence, the "neglect of degree" results in "hollow factions" that destabilize authority from below. Indeed, Ulysses claims, the lack of heroic essence fuels an appetite for power so uncontainable that the entire social order becomes "an universal wolf" which "must make perforce an universal prey, / And last eat up himself" (1.3.123-24). 29 For Ulysses, not only is heroic essence an illusion, but the hero's honor, or his self-worth, is fully informed by the logic of the marketplace. In an attempt to coax a withdrawn Achilles to reenter the battle, Ulysses describes Achilles' rival Ajax as a thing "most dear in esteem / And poor in worth" (3.3.128-29). This deliberate reference to Ajax as a trifle locates the heroic self in an arena of competitive display which Ulysses implicitly compares to a market driven by fashion. The hero must persevere in deeds to "keep honor bright," for to have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mock'ry.

(3.3.153-55)

The "rusty mail" mocks the absent hero whose deeds are passed over for those of his emulators. The element of time, which Agamemnon downplays, here resurfaces as the source of anxiety. For the self is no longer seen to transcend time, but is caught up in its unrelenting progression: For time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand, And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer.

(165-68)

Whereas in Agamemnon's speech the hero is the maker of his honor, time now takes over as the active principle subjecting human worth to a sequential process of consumption that levels the social hierarchy. Under the temporal sway of fashion, emulation is no longer an appetite arising

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from individual members to consume the social order, but a pervasive condition which individuals do not control and from which they cannot hope to escape. If heroic emulation turns the social order into a selfconsuming "universal wolf," time in its "devouring]" of heroic honor is a "great-sized monster of ingratitudes" with "a wallet at his back" into which he puts "good deeds past" as "alms for oblivion" (145-48). Agamemnon's "persistive constancy" and Ulysses' market logic provide theorized positions from which to view the problem of authority and self-valuation in Jamestown, played out, as we say, in real time. In these early years, the problem was complicated by social distinctions and the short supply of food. When the English settled Jamestown, the social distinctions they brought with them continued to operate in their daily interactions.30 Because official rank in the colony did not always conform to the social hierarchy,31 tensions regarding authority arose with the mixing of degree, the very paranoia that Ulysses elicits in Agamemnon. This in part explains why Smith, the son of a yeoman, popular with soldiers and laborers, was held in contempt and suspicion by fellow members of the council. As The Proceedings tells us, Smith was held as a prisoner on the voyage over on suspicion that "he intended to usurpe the government, murder the Councell, and make himself king." Although a public meeting proved him innocent, Smith was, contrary to the instructions of the Virginia Company, not admitted to the council until the colony's chaplain, Robert Hunt, interceded on his behalf (I: 206-07).32 At the same time, the tensions of authority were specific to the material conditions of colonial existence. Given the preoccupation with food as the basic element of survival, the colony had become literally an economy of consumption in which the individual's self-worth is defined by access to food, and the recognition one gains for its timely acquisition is inevitably diminished in time by its depletion. In the Jamestown narratives as in Shakespeare's play, the value of the self emerges as the social aspect of fundamentally economic relations. Indeed, the economics of food was central to the politics of Jamestown when we realize that only a few officers, including the president, had access to the general store and the authority of distribution. When authority came with privileged access to provisions, however, the line between privilege and abuse of authority could easily be blurred in the general perception. Because in the colony's struggle for survival privilege for some meant privation for others, the distribution of food became the major issue that deprived Wingfield, the colony's first president, of his office. Apart from the lesser charges of Catholicism and favoritism, Wingfield was deposed "for ingrossing to his privat, Otemeale, sacke, oile, aquavitae, beefe, egs, or what not." Wingfield probably saw these

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luxuries as owing to his social position, and that he had treated everyone fairly according to his rank. Even disgruntled colonists admit that Wingfield distributed equally the "kettle" or common store of provisions. But inequities appear when we realize that the portion for each settler amounted to halfe a pinte of wheat and as much barly boyled with water for a man a day, and this having fryed some 26. weeks in the ships hold, contained as many wormes as graines; so that we might truely call it rather so much bran then corne, our drinke was water, our lodgings castles in aire. (I: 210)

Given such meager portions, it is easy to understand the resentment settlers must have felt toward the advantages of privilege. In his "Discourse" to the Virginia Company in London, the deposed Wingfield defends his conduct, as Agamemnon does, in terms of constancy and the authority of rank. Referring to himself in the third person, Wingfield presents himself as one who would not bow to political pressure. On several occasions, "the Councell demanded some larger allowance for them selues, and for some sick their fauorites; which the President would not yeeld vnto without their warrantes." Lest he should appear uncaring in his refusal, Wingfield goes on to explain that "Yf the President had at that tyme enlarged the proportion according to their requests, without doubt, in very short tyme, he had starued the whole Company. He would not ioyne with them therefore in such an ignorant murder without their own warrant." While his reference to murder appeals to the reader's emotions, Wingfield's sense of his constancy is clearly based on his adherance to the right use of authority: "the President protested he would not be partial, but if one had anything of him, euery man should haue his portion according to their places. Nevertheles that vpon their warrantes, he would deliuer what pleased them to demand." The term "warrant," used three times in this brief passage, denotes legal authority, which Wingfield associates with the treatment of settlers according to their assigned "portions" and "places." His refusal to be "partial" is thus not just a prudent decision regarding the overall welfare of the colony, but also is consistent with the authority conferred upon the council, which other members obviously have abused in pushing the demands of their "favorites." If the choice of third-person narration suggests a stable, omniscient perspective from which to view the volatile colonial politics, Wingfield's shift later to first-person narration is equally significant. In denying the charge of favoritism, he writes: "I had neuer bestowed the valewe of three penny whistles to my own vse, nor to the private vse of any other; for I never carryed any fauorite over with me, or intertayned any thear. I

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was all one, and one to all." A deliberate strategy which effectively divides the narrative into two parts, the shift marks a revealing moment in colonial experience. In the first part, Wingfield consistently refers to himself as the colony's president in the third person, and it is only after his deposition that he writes in the first person: "I will now wright what followeth in my owne name and giue the new President his title."33 This perspectival change creates first an objective stance in rendering an account of his office, and later the force of ethical appeal both in declaring the purity of his intentions and in exposing the malice of other council members. At the same time, the grammatical shift also captures the ease with which an officer loses his title - the instability of individual identity and authority in Virginia. This condition of instability casts into ironic relief Wingfield's own emphasis on ranks and places, and his protestation of constancy despite political vicissitudes, that "I was all one, and one to all." Whereas Wingfield was deposed for engrossing provisions, Smith rose to authority as president through his ability to procure food for the colony, often at considerable risk to himself. In one instance, as the Proceedings recount, Smith was held captive for about a month by the great chief Powhatan, but was able to win over his friendship and defuse his hostile intentions towards the English. Upon his release, not only did Smith's "relation of the plentie he had seene" in Powhatan's territory revive the "dead spirits" of the settlers, but Powhatan himself sent along his men "loaded with provisions" to relieve the colony (I: 213).34 Smith did not, of course, have the full support of the colony, but its dependence for survival on his timely trade was undisputed, and became even more evident after Smith, having sustained a severe burn, returned to England. The Indians revolted when they learned of his departure, refusing to trade with the English or to relieve them with food. Of the hardship that followed, Smith's supporters write: "Now were we constrained to live only of that which Smith had only for his owne company, for the rest had consumed their proportions" (I: 275). If the remark conveys an ominous sense of the colony as a consumption machine whose time is about to run out, it is because attempts by other colonial leaders to trade with the Indians ended in disaster.35 A most revealing instance of the kind of support Smith inspires is a tribute the Proceedings pays to him not in times of want, but during a hiatus of relative comfort. Towards the winter of 1607, when the seasonal migration of fowl, fish, and game brought plentiful food to the colony, the narrative makes a point of Smith's assiduous trade with the Indians, which complemented the diet of the settlers: "we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia pease, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowl, and diverse

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sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them: so that none of our Tuftaffaty humorists desired to goe for England" (I: 212). The luscious variety of food with which Smith is associated presents a marked contrast to the dearth and misery the colony experienced both before and after his term. Significantly, support for Smith is defined through an implied social division between doers and talkers, between those who work and those who eat. The term "Tuftaffaty humorists," or "cranks in fancy clothes" as Philip Barbour glosses it, is one of many which single out for criticism the well-to-do among settlers as idle complainers who will nonetheless eat of the common store. Both with and without justification, the stereotype represents a persistent attitude among skilled artisans and laborers towards a sizeable group of gentlemen with servants who were often unskilled in any trade. 36 To be sure, not all idlers were gentry, and some gentlemen could evidently be persuaded to work alongside their social inferiors.37 Where persuasion failed, Smith imposed a strict order that "who would not worke must not eat." While providing for the sick to be fed by the labor of the able, Smith's order was directed at "distracted lubberly gluttons" who, if not forced to work, "would have starved, and have eaten one another" (I: 264-65). The order severs the valuation of the self from social position and directly links it to one's share of food in the colony. Thus linked to a precarious supply of a commodity which sustains life only by being consumed, colonial self-valuation can be said to deconstruct or devour Agamemnon's grain analogy. Instead, Smith's tenure as president - at least what he and his followers make of it bears out a Ulyssean view of honor as a value which changes with time and opinion. II The Jamestown narratives inhabit a post-illusionary moment in which inflated claims of colonial promotions had given way to a daily struggle for survival, and colonists must engage in trade with Indians who, however devalued as savages, are nonetheless producers of corn, a commodity by which the self negotiates its value. For Smith at least, trade was still the basis of his leadership as the colony's president. Smith's leadership was threatened, however, with the arrival of Christopher Newport, captain of the supply ships from England. Commissioned by the Virginia Company in London, Newport's duty was to carry out its policy of friendly engagement with the Indians, a policy that often interfered with Smith's colonial dealings. At the same time, the sailors who came with Newport engaged in an unauthorized private trade,

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jeopardizing the ongoing trade Smith had with the Indians. For these reasons, the new arrivals were not merely nuisances to Smith and his followers but contributed directly to the factional rivalry in Jamestown. The competitive negotiation of authority between Smith and Newport pervades The Proceedings, and is displaced outwards when the rivalry spills over into the colony's dealings with Indians. To the extent that the uncertain valuation of colonists is refigured as the inconstant disposition of Indians, economic and moral values have become mutually defining in colonial politics. The experience of Jamestown colonists finds a mirror in the postillusionary moment in Troilus and Cressida when Hector voices the general sentiment of Trojan princes that Helen "is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping." Yet Troilus' response - "What is aught but as 'tis valued?" - suggests that there is more at stake to Helen's valuation than appears (2.2. 50-51; 52).38 In explaining his position, Troilus appeals to the logic of investment: We turn not back the silks upon the merchant When we have soiled them, nor the remainder viands We do not throw in unrespective sieve Because we now are full.

(2.2.69-72)

The implied analogy of Helen to used goods indicates not just Troilus' low opinion of her, but his view of the war as a market economy in which Trojans and Greeks alike have invested seven years of manpower and resources in building up her value as the prize of victory. Should they now return Helen at a deflated value to sue for peace as Hector proposes, they would surely lose their investment. In other words, she is the object of displaced self-investment, from which they cannot divest their interest without compromising themselves or the system in which they negotiate their honor.39 For Troilus, the only acceptable course is to continue fighting in the name of Helen, in the hope that victory will elevate and fix, once and for all, the value of Helen's beauty and, by extension, that of Trojan honor.40 Yet the war is sustained at great cost to men's lives; hence Troilus' bitter irony: "Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus" (1.1.86-87). In the market of war, the very substance of heroic valor is consumed and reduced to a trifle, paint, which in turn produces the illusion of Helen's beauty and enhances her value to warriors. Insofar as Helen's beauty is only a metonymic extension of heroic honor, however, Troilus' irony ultimately applies to himself and his companions. For even as he privately complains that he "cannot fight upon this argument" of Helen's man-made beauty, Troilus

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publicly argues in favor of war, thereby committing heroes to the selfconsuming activity of painting their honor in their own blood. This desperate investment in honor makes visible the crisis of masculine selfvaluation underlying the paralysis of the war action, a crisis which can only be - and in fact has already been - managed by shifting the "theme of honor and renown" onto Helen (2.2.199). The displacement is especially clear when compared with the Greek camp, in which Ulysses uses the same logic of the trifle to describe the "emulation" among heroes without recourse to Helen. Whereas Ulysses sees the emulous Greek camp as the self-consuming "universal wolf," Troilus refigures Helen's passive role as merchandize into a threatening agency as the consumer of men. In Troilus' imagination, then, Helen not only undoes men's prerogative as consumers of women, but her inconstancy is a lack in value compensated for with the lives of heroes. When Troilus turns from Helen to Cressida, the economic valence of female inconstancy gives way to the moral, even as he loses critical distance with respect to his desire. The fact that Cressida can be "changed for Antenor" (emphasis mine) makes clear that the value of men or women is contingent upon the circumstances of negotiation within the economy of the Trojan War (4.2.90). Yet it is Troilus' agreement to the exchange, his betrayal of Cressida's love, that confirms her change in his eyes as the basis of moral judgment, a judgment fulfilled when she takes Diomede for a lover. Cressida's action triggers in Troilus' mind a crisis of self-valuation in which she has acquired a "bi-fold authority" (5.2.140).41 What threatens him is really her ability to choose, however circumscribed that choice, given her vulnerable position within a male-dominated system of exchange.42 From Troilus' perspective, sex entitles him to a proprietory interest in Cressida; at their love tryst, his reference to "reversion" and Pandarus' to "fee-farm," legal terms for the possession of property, imply as much (3.2.86; 47). In this context, her choice of Diomede threatens Troilus' investment in his own sexual authority. This explains why Troilus must continue to fight Diomede for Cressida: precisely because he sees her as inconstant, he must fix her value in order to recuperate his own. Although conditions in the play's world are very different from those in Virginia, Troilus' formulation of the Trojan predicament has a certain relevance for Smith, who finds himself caught between two impulses in colonial relations: to fix or to negotiate the value of Indians and Englishmen. In A Map and The Proceedings, Smith's predicament is played out in the context of colonial rivalry, when his negotiated authority with the Indians is undermined by Newport's coronation of Powhatan, and his monopoly on the official trade of the colony is

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hindered by the "free trade" conducted by Newport's mariners. What is perhaps even more disturbing for Smith and his supporters is that Indians turn out to be no passive mediators of English rivalry, but rather agents operating in their own interests. The coronation of Powhatan represents an attempt to "import" an English power structure into colonial relations, a symbolic "subinfeudation" of Indians to the English crown.43 As overlord of six tribes, however, Powhatan is not so ready to be subjected. In refusing to come to Jamestown for the ceremony, requiring the English to come to him instead, Powhatan asserts his authority as a "king" equal in authority to King James himself.44 After the ceremony, Powhatan shows his hand at manipulating symbols by bequeathing to Newport his old shoes and mantle. Although Smith's supporters express amusement at the whole affair, they are clearly worried that the coronation had upset the terms of exchange, social and commercial, that they had established with the Indians. In the Proceedings, the degree of their concern is seen in their objection to the few "costly novelties," such as "Bason, Ewer, Bed, Clothes," given to Powhatan as coronation presents: For we had his favour much better, onlie for a poore peece of Copper, till this stately kinde of soliciting made him so much overvalue himselfe, that he respected us as much as nothing at all. (I: 234, emphasis added) Whether or not Powhatan accepts the authority imposed on him, the report suggests, both the "stately" ceremony and Newport's "soliciting" have gone to the chieftain's head. Far from fixing the value of Indians, then, the coronation leads Powhatan to "overvalue" himself. Newport was not the one to suffer the consequences, however. The coronation, which took place in 1608 during Smith's presidency, undermines Smith's authority with Powhatan. The report thus brings out the underlying tensions between Smith and Newport, tensions stemming from their different approaches to the assertion of value and authority in their treatment of Indians. Newport was no doubt only carrying out orders from London, but his attempt to fix Indians within an English system of values conflicts with Smith's negotiation of value in commercial and social exchanges. To be sure, Smith's idea of exchange was a far cry from the conditions of a free market. As the colony's cape merchant and now president, Smith had held the sole privilege of trading with the Indians, in principle at least eliminating competition from other sources.45 Yet supporters attribute his commercial success to his negotiated authority among the Indians, a control so complete that "hee as their market clarke set the price how they should sell" (I: 215). In the True Relations, Smith likewise boasts of

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"such confidence" the Indians had in him. Approaching the Fort to trade, "they would not come till I came to them, every of them calling me by my name, would not sell any thing till I had first received their presents, and what they had that I liked, they deferred to my discretion" (I: 61-63). For Smith, the fixing of value was a power he had earned and maintained through his colonial dealings. It was a measure of his personal authority over Indians, and could not be bought by gifts or finessed by ceremony. By contrast, Smith's supporters are convinced that Newport was "the author" of the coronation, and that to effect his scheme he "had so gilded all our hopes, with great promises, that both company and Councel" went along with him. Their opinion is reinforced by the perception that, as one whose transport duties required long absences from the colony, Newport had little understanding of its management. For this reason, his ceremonial assertion of authority is seen as a disruption of the routine of colonial exchanges that Smith had built, and that held the colony's body and soul together. In retrospect, his supporters see him as the only one to have seen through Newport's pretense: "I confesse we little understood then our estates, to conclude his [Newport's] conclusion, against al the inconveniences the foreseeing President alleadged" (I: 235). In the Generall Historie, Smith changes the first person into an omniscient narrator. Thus "our hopes" becomes "men's hopes": for "God doth know they little knew what they did, nor understood their owne estates to conclude his conclusions, against all the inconveniences the foreseeing President alledged" (II: 181).46 The most serious of these inconveniences was allegedly Powhatan's new-found arrogance, which not only complicated subsequent negotiations, but spoiled the colony's chances for a secure food supply for the coming winter. Before the coronation, the report claims, "we had the Salvages in that Decorum, (their harvest beeing newly gathered) that we feared not to get victuall sufficient had we bin 500." "Decorum" is here the operative idea, with which contemporary readers are familiar. It not only comprises the explicit terms of negotiation and implicit habits of reciprocity which bring predictability to commercial and social exchanges, but ascribes to the setter of decorum a rhetorical sense of control over those on whom decorum is imposed. In breaking the decorum set by Smith, therefore, Newport jeopardized the very basis of relations with the Indians on which the colony's survival depends. And there were more immediate problems besides. In preparing for "this strange coronation," colonists had not only to "neglect that time to make our provision, whilst it was to be had," but also, with all means of transport diverted to the ceremony, to "spend that victuall we had, tire

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and starve our men, having no means to carry victuall, munition, the hurt or sicke, but their owne backes" (I: 234). The colony is thus caught in the Trojan predicament in which men's lives and the means of their survival are consumed to fix the value of Indians. Yet Newport's style of wooing Indians is not the only obstacle to Smith's negotiation of value. In fact, from the time that Smith became the colony's market clerk, his role of setting prices in trade had been hampered by competition from other council members and by the "free trade" of mariners under Newport's charge, whose official duty was to transport settlers and annual supplies to Virginia.47 According to The Proceedings, The President and Councel so much envied his [Smith's] estimation amongst the Salvages (though wee all in general equally participated with him of the good therof) that they wrought it into their understandings, by their great bounty in giving 4. times more for their commodities then he appointed, that their greatnesse and authority, as much exceeded his, as their bounty, and liberality; Now the arrivall of this first supply, so overjoyed us, that we could not devise too much to please the mariners, We gave them liberty to truck or trade at their pleasures. But in a short time, it followed, that could not be had for a pound of copper, which before was sold for an ounce. Thus ambition, and sufferance, cut the throat of our trade, but confirmed their opinion of Newports greatnes. (I: 215) The council was to blame for allowing the mariners to trade on their own, for as early as 1606 instructions from London had explicitly warned against such trade: You must take Care that your Marriners that Go for Wages Do not marr your trade for those that mind not to inhabite for a Little Gain will Debase the Estimation of Exchange and hinder the trade for Ever after and there fore you Shall not admit or Suffer any person whatsoever other then Such as Shall be appointed by the president and Councel there to buy any Merchandizes or Other things whatsoever.48 Thus through both the folly of the council and the unrestrained trade of the mariners the colony loses the advantages that Smith had won in previous negotiations with Powhatan. If Indian opinion of Newport and the council improves as a result, their inflated greatness is paid for by the colony through the deflated value of English copper in the exchange for Indian commodities. The references to the "envy" and "ambition" of rivals suggest the paranoia of factional politics, a convenient paranoia, one might add, which screens out a more threatening reality: the active role of Indians in the transactions. For to recognize the agency of Indians is to admit that Smith does not represent the colony as the sole consumer of Indian corn

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with the power to dictate the terms of exchange, that is, to fix the relative values of Indians and Englishmen. Rather it is to acknowledge that presented with a choice of English traders, Powhatan has become the consumer playing Newport and the council against Smith to his own advantage and at the expense of the colony's best interest. This ability of Indians to turn the tables on the English in trade brings to mind the "bifold" authority that Troilus confronts in Cressida. From Smith's perspective, Indians who prove themselves equal to colonists in commerce are bound to betray English interests.49 Such betrayal is nothing less than the implied antagonism between trading partners in the period's conception of capitalist exchange, in which one's gain is the other's loss.50 But beyond the threat of an equal there is the sense that, thanks to Newport and the council, Smith no longer has the Indians' confidence. In compensation, the Proceedings resorts at this point to a transvaluation of colonial relations from the economic to the moral. In the first meeting between Powhatan and Newport arranged amidst a flurry of friendly overtures on both sides, the fear of Indian betrayal suddenly arises: "Arriving at Werowocomo, Newports conceipt of this great Salvage bred many doubts, and suspitions of treacheries; which Smith, to make appeare was needlesse, with 20. men well appointed, undertooke to encounter (with that number) the worst that could happen" (I: 215-16). At the height of friendliness, Smith is prepared for the worst of Indian treachery. Smith includes the episode in the Generall Historie, appending a couplet to explain that he undertook precautions knowing "all is but one, and selfe-same hand, that thus / Bothe one while scourgeth, and that helpeth us" (II: 155). Citing Fotherby's translation of Ovid in Atheomastix,51 Smith moralizes the incident as inscrutable providence manifest through the "savage" ways of Indians. Whether or not Smith's show of force deterred the "Salvage" from his treachery, the meeting turned out to be a trade session in which Powhatan easily had the better of Newport. It would seem that the chief was skilled in negotiation after all, as long as those skills were directed at Smith's rival. As if "scorning to trade as his subjects did," Powhatan reportedly said: "Captain Newport it is not agreeable with my greatnes in this pedling manner to trade for trifles, and I esteeme you a great weroans. Therefore lay me down all your commodities together, what I like I will take, and in recompence give you that I thinkefittingtheir value." (I: 217) In flattering Newport with the title of a "weroans" or chief, Powhatan deftly shifts the trade from a negotiated exchange - a "pedling manner" beneath both their greatness - to one in which he, Powhatan alone, sets

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the price. Powhatan is aiming precisely for the upper hand that Smith claims to have won in his trade with the Indians. Newport, we are told, falls for the speech and is maneuvered into trading much more copper for corn than Smith had previously negotiated with the neighboring Chickahominies.52 As Smith sees it, Powhatan's friendly advances were a cover for more sinister designs to acquire English tools and weapons in trade. Such designs were in part thwarted by colonial policy funneling all trade into the hands of the market clerk, thus preventing hungry English settlers from exchanging their tools and weapons for food with the Indians. From this perspective, Newport no doubt seemed oblivious to Indian treachery when he sent twenty swords to Powhatan in return for twenty turkeys. In trading weapons for food, the report says, Newport encouraged the Indians to "insolencies" which Smith later had to put down. For when Smith refused to continue the exchange initiated by his superior, the report tells us, Indians resorted to ambush and surprise in order to seize weapons from settlers. In response, Smith hunted the Indians, "terrified [some] with whipping, beating, and imprisonment," suppressing their "revenge." The suppression of Indian "insolencies" was at the heart of colonial debate concerning the means of controlling indigenous inhabitants. Smith's action went against not only "the command from England . . . not to offend them," but also the "authority bearers" in Virginia who, as the Proceedings scornfully puts it, "(keeping their houses) would rather be any thing than peace breakers." Whereas the council protested Smith's "cruelty" to Indians, his supporters point out that, without incurring any killing, his policy "brought them in such feare and obedience, as his very name would sufficiently affright them" (I: 220-21). In the True Relations, Smith claims to have "affrighted" a captive "first with the rack, then with Muskets" into making a confession of Indian treachery. Supposedly, their plan was to take the English by surprise: "with a great feast, he would so enamor Captain Nuport and his men, as they should ceaze on him, and the like traps would be laied for the rest" (I: 89-91). The suggestion of danger lurking behind an offering of food confirms only too readily Smith's image of Indian treachery. Yet even if Smith could make up for Newport's blunders through his skill in negotiation and his military vigilance, he could hardly control the "private and damnable trade" of Newport's mariners, which involved the illegal transfer of English weapons to Indians. By the second supply, The Proceedings claims, the mariners already had "private factors" or agents in the fort, so that "within 6. or 7. weekes after the ships returne [to Virginia], of 2. or 300. hatchets, chissels, mattocks, and pickaxes

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scarce 20 could be found, and for pike-heads, knives, shot, powder, or any thing (they could steale from their fellowes) was vendible." Evidently, settlers secretly traded tools and arms "with the Salvages, for furres, baskets, mussaneekes, young beastes or such like commodities," and then exchanged these exotic items "with the sailers for butter, cheese, biefe, porke, aquavitae, beere, bisket, and oatmeale; and then faine, all was sent them from their friends." The black market trade was hard to control, since it was extremely profitable: "one mariner in one voyage" obtained enough furs to sell in England for £30 (I: 239-40).53 Through this trade, mariners not only failed to supply the colony's needs, but compromised its defense. Indeed, the two concerns were no longer separable - a sorry statement on the effects of the coronation and the trade in arms. Shortly after the coronation, the council sent Matthew Scrivener to Werawocomoco to trade for corn, but there "he found the Salvages more ready to fight then trade." The upshot was that Scrivener managed to obtain at Namontack only "3. or 4. hogshead of corne" and some red dye (I: 240). The meager haul "so affrighted us all with famine" that Smith took his men to Nandsamund to collect on a promised contribution. In Smith's own words, "these people also long denied him not onely the 400 Baskets of Corne they promised, but any trade at all," telling Smith that they had been "so commanded by Powhatan." Smith and his men, thus "constrained to begin with them perforce," discharged their muskets and set fire to the first house they came to (I: 242). The English extracted from the Indians half of their harvest, and a promise, "for sparing them this year, the next yeare . . . to plant purposely for us" (II: 191). In this way, Smith set the pattern for a warlike trade with Indians. Smith's extreme measures show how quickly the English run out of options in their dealings with Indians and how easily they resort to violence when the colony's survival is at stake. While Newport's coronation of Powhatan destroyed Smith's "decorum" of exchange with Indians, and the mariners further emboldened them with weapons against the English, suppression became for Smith the best deterrent. But when force replaces negotiation in defining value and authority, colonists cannot but expect Indians to turn against them at every opportunity. For this reason, the comment in A Map of Virginia that Indians are inconstant in everything is a self-fulfilling judgment. Smith's concern with advantage and control in colonial exchanges guarantees he will discover treachery when Indians turn out to act in their own interest or to follow not his, but Powhatan's, command. This is not to downplay Powhatan's hostility towards English colonial intentions, but to take stock of what the judgment ignores.

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Smith's own career - his quick rise to presidency and his sudden wounding and departure from the colony - testifies to the vicissitudes of reputation. The contingencies of self-valuation do not, of course, preclude a distinction between reputation and the "truth" about oneself, especially when labor is presented as the measure of a man's worth to the colony. Yet the distinction quickly blurs, and the inconstancy of selfworth intensifies with Smith's own awareness of the medium of print through which an ex-colonist like himself ultimately enters the marketplace of opinion. The commercial press is the arena in which he must now negotiate his value by engaging in competitive exchanges, selfvindications and recriminations with his former rivals. Such exchanges would furthermore have an impact on the future of colonial enterprises. To the extent that his account gains credence from readers, especially potential investors and officers of the Virginia company, it would win continued support not only for the colony but also for the policies he favors. To this end, Smith extends the colonial opposition between workers and eaters, doers and talkers, to the struggle in the press. In a selfacknowledged conclusion to A Map,54 Smith claims that the credit of "true actors" is consumed by the fabrications of "ingenious verbalists."55 Coming after a first-person description of the terrain, commodities, and inhabitants of Virginia, the claim aligns Smith with "true actors" who write from experience. Recalling his career in Jamestown, Smith casts his rivals in the role of "verbalists" whose ignorance leads them to misinform readers. There were the "meerely projecting, verbal and idle contemplatours" who, without venturing beyond Jamestown, would "affirm" lies about non-existent stores of gold and victuals "in the behalfe of our transporters" in exchange for "victualls from their ships." The Proceedings states it was the practice of mariners "to report in England wee had such plenty and bring us so many men without victuall" (I: 239). Of "the effects of meere verbalists," Smith's supporters write: "But the most mischiefe was, our gilded refiners with their golden promises, made all men their slaves in hope of recompence; there was no talke, no hope, no worke but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold." The authors implicate John Martin and Newport, while making clear that "Captaine Smith would not applaud all those golden inventions, because they admitted him not to the sight of their trials." Indeed, "never any thing did more torment him, then to see all necessarie business neglected, to fraught such a drunken ship with so much gilded dirt" (I: 218-19). In thus siphoning off the general store, these "locusts" consumed the very material basis for colonial action and success. They did nothing "but devoure the fruits of other mens labours," and sought to return to

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England when they realized that Virginia provided neither "such plenty of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected" nor the amenities to which they were accustomed, such as "faire houses, . . . feather beds and downe pillowes, Tavernes and alehouses in every breathing place" (I: 176).56 While projectors are localized in Jamestown, the transporters spread their lies in England. Travelling back and forth between the two places, these men never stayed long enough to acquaint themselves with the colony's affairs, but "al mens actions or relations they so formally tuned to the temporizing times simplicitie, as they could by their ignorances seeme much more, then al the true actors could by their experience." Their abuse was "much worse then the rest" because, "the business being builded upon their fained experience, the planters, the mony, time, and meanes have still miscarried." These verbalists were able "to delude the world" because colonists devoted to the enterprise in Virginia were not present in England to expose them. Even when a "true actor" like Smith accuses them of "a faire tongue and dissembling heart," it is at great expense to the credibility of the colony and the self-worth of colonists (I: 176). Implicit in Smith's attack on time-serving verbalists is his own sense of urgency about the commercial venture of Jamestown. In their efforts to recruit investors, these men have so greatly overpraised the enterprise that its performance would inevitably fall short of promised returns. As a result, verbalists condemn the enterprise to playing out the temporalized logic of the trifle, the cycle of inflated commercial expectations which, unmet, deflates the value of the enterprise. Directed at Christopher Newport57 and applicable more generally to colonial promoters, Smith's charge reveals the anxiety of colonists caught in the gap between investments and returns. If investors are financially "abused" by the promises of verbalists, colonists stand to pay a far more personal cost, for even as the colony is reduced to a trifle in failing to fulfill these "strange promises," the colonists' role in its creation and management will be trivialized (I: 176). Their own self-valuation is thus fully implicated in the colony's commodification, a process which operates against their best intentions and beyond their control. Despite his claim to constancy as "true actor," both Smith's anxiety and his self-promotion call to mind Ulysses' market view of the world and self, which equates heroes with "new-born gawds," a punning reference to trifles as market idols, their value inflated and deflated according to the public's idolatrous and fickle pursuit of fashion (3.3.175).58 In thus demystifying heroic worth as a stable essence, Ulysses claims for himself the role of merchant manipulating the market value of

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heroes through his rhetorical inflation or deflation of public opinion. Likewise, Smith's rhetorical skill enables him to be his own merchant by asserting his authority in difficult situations - among Indians in fact. Recounting his captivity among the Indians, The Proceedings writes that "hee so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not only diverted them from surprising the Fort, but procured his owne liberty, and got himselfe and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Salvages admired him as a demi-God." Smith's demeanor refers to the words and conduct with which he supposedly "inchanted those poore soules (being their prisoner)."59 Although it is doubtful that the Indians understood his discourse in this initial encounter, the fact that Smith was declared a chief by Powhatan confirmed for supporters Smith's special status with the Indians. This is obviously a convenient instance in which inconstant natives turn out to be trustworthy after all. The reference to Smith as a "demi-God" in the eyes of Indians draws on a topos from colonial narratives dating back to the voyages of Columbus. By locating European divinity within the Indian perception, the topos asserts European superiority as a function of cultural difference. Awareness of textual derivation, however, renders subsequent uses of the topos increasingly problematic.60 Both the emphasis on Smith's rhetorical skill and the qualified reference to his "demi" divinity reflect this unease, as does Smith's reprint of the Proceedings in the General! Historie, which omits the reference altogether. As Barbour suggests, while the accounts of Smith's captivity in the Proceedings have been "credited . . . entirely to Thomas Studley," they "seem more likely to have been the work of John Smith, perhaps aided by others" (I: 195). If this indeed was the case, then the subsequent omission of the demi-God reference would be even more significant, since the difference in authorship is eliminated. The reprint locates what was a report of a cross-cultural encounter within a space of cultural consciousness and self-consciousness: whereas the report could still resort to "Indian" error in its praise of Smith, for him to repeat it would betray not merely vanity but a vanity that accepts mere words as the basis of colonial self-valuation.

7

The Tempest, "rape/ 5 the art and smart of Virginian husbandry

In The Tempest, a failed attempt by Caliban to rape Miranda constitutes the event on which a power structure is ratified. For Prospero, who has already taken over control of the island when Caliban was a child, the attempt justifies his enslavement of Caliban. Caliban disagrees: had he succeeded, he "had peopled else / This isle with Calibans" (1.2.150-51). Begetting his own lineage would have legitimized his title to the island and recast his action in a different light. The unrepentant Caliban draws an angry response from Miranda. Calling him an "abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take," she reminds him that I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes, With words that made them known.

(1.2.353-58)1

Miranda sees the failed rape as a sign of Caliban's failed education, but a more complicated picture emerges from the exchange if we notice the implied parallel between rape and education. The reference to education as "print" suggests not just a means of inscription but also a current metaphor for impregnation, the imprinting of a paternal image in the womb. 2 In teaching Caliban her language, then, Miranda's attempt to imprint him with her cultural values and meanings (taught her solely by her father) comes to mirror his fantasy of engendering copies of himself upon her. For Caliban, then, her education of him thus operates as a form of cultural rape, to which his attempted rape of her serves as a symbolic payback. In pointing to rape and education as both strategies of cultural reproduction, I do not mean to pit "savage" rapist against "civilizing" virgin and thus to reduce the politics of gender and race to romance stereotypes. Rather, as strategies for the reproduction of culture, their implied parallel marks a point of "radical ambivalence" 3 in the text of 155

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The Tempest that implicates an emergent discourse on colonial settlement, with its aim of reproducing English culture in America. Specifically in promotions for the Virginia enterprise, we encounter a discourse which, by figuring the land as a nubile virgin4 and natives as savages, represents colonization as both a lawful marriage and a cultivating of souls. Hence the general currency in this period of the terms "planting," "plantation," and "planters," used respectively for colonial settlement, colony, and settlers. The image of the plant as a discrete vital system both naturalizes the colony's relation to the land and reinforces the agency of planters as self-sufficient proprietors. In its metaphoric senses, "planting" suggests both the husband's lawful sexual possession of his wife and a humanist conception of Christian education. A part of what Anthony Low calls the period's "georgic revolution" in values,5 this colonial discourse of husbandry creates the planter from within, as one whose capacity for self-government, projected outwards, husbands the land and the native. I have traced this development in the early narratives of Virginia and Guiana in the 1580s and 1590s (see chapter 1), and will here focus on the narratives of Virginia after the founding of Jamestown in 1607, where the tropes of husbandry - marriage and education - converge in Chapman's Memorable Masque and the figure of Pocahontas. In these instances, what emerges is a colonial hierarchy in which gender and race are mutually defining, and subordination to English husbandry is mediated through a feminine image of the native(s). Within this discursive context, The Tempest both enacts and disrupts the fiction of husbandry through the adversarial masculinity of Caliban, in the process making visible the fiction's inherent contradictions. My analysis is not concerned with the play as a reflection of historical events in Virginia. Indeed, given the indefinite location of the island's setting, the play can be said to engage in a fantasy of origins, a preconstruction of colonial politics narrated through the plot of the family romance. Within this family romance, Caliban's failed rape precedes and justifies the virgin's choice of a European husband.6 To Ferdinand, who labors for his love, Prospero offers his daughter "as my gift, and thine own acquisition / Worthily purchased" (4.1.13-14). The gift-purchase exchange marks the propriety, in economic and moral senses, of domestic closure from which Caliban is excluded by his designation as a rapist. Although Prospero initially suspects Ferdinand for a rapist, a potential Caliban,7 the suspicion also supplies the pretext for Ferdinand to differentiate himself from Caliban by demonstrating his sexual restraint. This differentiation captures Homi Bhabha's notion of "mimicry" as "the colonial desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a

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difference that is almost the same, but not quite"* The native will never accede to the place of the husband because the difference, however small, is absolute. Thus the impropriety of the native rapist guarantees the propriety of the European husband, and spiritual husbandry is predicated on educating the ineducable. This is the case not despite but in view of Caliban's capacity for language,9 if we notice that the logic of propriety goes beyond a specific instance of attempted rape to inhabit the characters' shared linguistic universe. Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, who speaks "[his] language" (1.2.429). By contrast, the very language Caliban learns defines him as brutish, demonic, and an anagrammatic cannibal. In "learning to curse," he merely fulfills the telos of a language that at once offers spiritual husbandry in the ideal and ensures its failure in practice. As Kim Hall observes, "the emphasis on linguistic prowess serves in some ways to efface crucial similarities between Ferdinand and Caliban," similarities that in turn "suggest that the 'real' difference between Caliban and Ferdinand is racial, not moral or sexual."10 In dramatizing the role of language in mediating propriety, however, The Tempest also brings to crisis the ideology it produces. Never explicitly rendered, the crisis is elaborated through the romance's reflection on its own devices. Especially in the figure of Prospero as magus, whose language produces in others the effects he desires, the play explores the ideological enchantment that lies at the heart of the romance. Through him, the play engages the fantasy of colonial encounter in which European cultural superiority translates as "magic" in indigenous perception (see chapter 4). That Caliban plots to sieze Prospero's books points to their ideological content as the source of power. Significantly, for all their imputed power, the books yield only a logic of usurpation, suggesting there never was an authorizing source for the colonial husband. Prospero himself, I will argue, takes power by usurping the place of maternal nurture within the gender and generational dynamics of the family romance. Within this generic construct, indigenous resistance takes shape as the return of a usurped mother, Sycorax, through the agency of her son. Although the dead mother never comes to voice within the family romance,11 the gendering of resistance as a maternal genealogy haunts not only Prospero but the colonial fiction of husbandry as well. Caliban can be said to truly sieze Prospero's books when he frames rebellion in the language of romance. When Caliban speaks romance, it makes possible a critique of colonial ideology in the intertextual, intergeneric space between the play and colonial promotions. Through him, The Tempest invents another perspective within a colonizing culture

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from which to examine its motives and assumptions. Of course, the figure of Caliban provides only a critique of colonial ideology asfictionwithout dismantling the articulation of this fiction in colonial practice.12 Thus the colonial fiction operates like a self-fulfilling prophecy in the discursive translation of America into an English possession. Caliban's rebellion finds resonance in the 1622 Indian uprising when Samuel Purchas retrospectively constructs this event in which 349 colonists perished13 as a failed rape of Virginia by her savage kinsmen, even as she awaits her English husband. I Although attempts at colonizing Virginia began in the 1580s, it was not until 1607 that Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, was established. One reason for the delay was Queen Elizabeth's lack of interest in the colony for which she had granted a patent and to which she had lent her name, preferring instead the more lucrative adventures of trade and plunder, and the colonization of Ireland closer to home. More important was the incorporation of the Virginia Company under James I which provided the organizational support for the enterprise. The dynastic succession, marked by a gender change in royal image, produced corresponding changes in the image of the colonist. Whereas Elizabethan writers imagined travelers to the New World as husbands who enriched the domestic bower of England, Jacobean colonial promoters described colonists as the offspring of the nation extending English government to America. If Elizabeth was, in the historical hindsight of Samuel Purchas, "our Virgin mother" who initiated England's maritime enterprise,14 James was the paternal figure under whom colonists came into manhood as husbands. In A Good Speed to Virginia (1609), Robert Grey invokes the familial analogy by comparing England to an overburdened mother who has had too much of "the blessings of the womb," so that she "hath not milke sufficient in the breast thereof to nourish those children which it hath brought forth" (B3v, B4r).15 Emphasizing familial continuity in colonial settlement, Robert Johnson in Nova Britannia (1609) writes of England's "superfluous" people "planting] themselues so happily, and their children after them," in conformity with "the lawes, language, and religion of England for ever" (19).16 Both Grey and Johnson are referring to the rapid increase in London's population since the 1590s and the influx of large numbers of rural poor displaced from feudal estates.17 Not only does England's uncontrolled fertility require an outlet in Virginia, but


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her maternal indulgence ill equips her surplus children for the rigors of colonial life. For this reason, the young colony must come under the firm hand of paternal discipline: therefore the Magistrate must correct with al sharpenesse of discipline, those vnthriftie and vnprofitable Drones, which live idly: for there is a law giuen to the sonnes of Adam to labour, and to the daughters of Eue, with the sweate of their browes to get their liuing, and therefore it is an Euangeligall precept that they which will not labour must not eate. (D4v)

At once biblical and practical, Grey both recalls God's sentence on the fallen Adam and points to the dire need for farmers to render the colony self-sufficient in the basic production of food. His evangelical precept, "they which will not labour must not eat," reiterates John Smith's injunction against idle settlers. The emphasis on husbandry marked a shift in policy made possible by the reorganization of the Virginia Company from a private into a jointstock operation. In 1609, under its second charter, the Company announced dividends in land of 50 acres for each share of £12 10s, as well as for planters who pay their own way to Virginia. This recruitment drive added 802 investors in 1609 and 123 in 1610 to the existing 31, and a second drive in 1612 netted another 211 new members.18 In Nova Britannia, the promised land dividend raises confidence about the colony's future: "Our plant, we trust, is firmly rooted, our armes and limmes are strong, our branches faire, and much desire to spread themselues abroad" (8). In News from Virginia (1610), Richard Rich tells prospective settlers that he is in London only to announce the good news: "I must not loose my patrymonie; I am for Virginia againe."19 In turn, planters could expect to endow their own lineages in the New World. Thus Gray: "we sow, we set, we plant, we build, not so much for ourselues as for posteritie" (Dr). Within this patriarchal economy, the sharp discipline of the magistrate likewise echoes official policy written into the second charter, whereby colonial authority was no longer in the hands of a council and its president but a single governor with extensive powers to "correct, punish, pardon, govern, rule," etc. Severe in restricting the conduct of settlers, these laws were in 1611 augmented by Sir Thomas Dale to include martial laws.20 Inevitably, English colonial possession meant the dispossession of Indians, a process justified by legal and religious arguments that draw on Spanish and Irish precedents. Positions range from a recognition of the property rights of Indians to the argument of conquest and enslavement as a just response to indigenous resistance.21 Among English advocates of colonization, few would agree with William Crashaw "that the natives

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actually desired English settlement," and that "everything [including land] must be purchased, and with native consent." But in the early years of Jamestown, most were averse to conquest, equating it with Spanish brutality in America.22 This anti-conquest sentiment should not obscure the existence of militaristic elements from the beginning of this enterprise, such as John Smith and his men's campaigns of terror on Powhatan and neighboring tribes in order to force the sale of corn or to retaliate for losses in combat. But, officially at least, following Smith's departure a pacifist vision prevailed.23 As Robert Johnson proposes to English readers, colonists were to educate and convert Indians "by faire and louing meanes, suiting to our English natures" (Nova Britannia 12), extending the task of husbandry beyond the cultivation of the land to that of the Indian soul. The case for colonization is most succinctly laid out by Robert Grey. The earth is Christian man's "fee simple by deede of gift from God," although in large part "wrongfully usurped by wild beasts, and . . . brutish sauages," meaning Indians (vB2). Colonization is thus a means of reclaiming what rightfully belongs to the "civilized." The process could be facilitated by educating Indians into Christian civility, so that they will "yeeld to discipline and gouernment," accepting the very English laws that dispossessed them (vC2). Grey further points out that, given their nomadic habits, "these sauages haue no particular propertie in any part or parcell of the Countrey, but only a general residence there." Invoking the Golden Age rule that "there is not meum & teum amongst [Indians]," Grey concludes that they cannot complain of being wronged even "if the whole lande should bee taken from them." On the contrary, as long as Indians will, "by lawfull graunt," yield as much land "as wee can or will desire," the English will "hue peaceablie" among the Indians and not "supplant" them (C4r). Grey's argument is typical of colonial promotions both in its recourse to divine favor and in its construction of Indians as savages to be civilized by Christian education. Thus Johnson in Nova Britannia claims that once Indians are civilized through the use of clothing and training in skills, they "shall be most friendly welcome to conioyne their labours with ours, and shall enjoy equall privileges with us" (14). In the sequel The New Life of Virginia (1612) Johnson further describes husbandry as a "three-fold labor to be done upon your selues, upon your English, and upon the poor Indians," a kind of self-government that extends to others (16). Indians are considered educable because they are perceived either as "naturals" who have "unnurtured grounds of reason in them" (Whitaker 26), or as degenerates, made "barbarous" by the wrong kind of education (Gray C2).24 If their tractable nature makes them prime subjects for


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Christian education, then the planting of religion would be the prime end of colonization. In assuming English cultural superiority, Gray glosses over indigenous farming techniques reported in previous eyewitness accounts such as Thomas Hariot's Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1586).25 In publishing A Map of Virginia (1612), even the militarist John Smith included native methods of cultivation, emphasizing that "the greatest labour they take, is in planting their corne," and that "each houshold knoweth their owne lands and gardens, and most live of their owne labours." 26 Gray also overlooks the native hospitality that saved many a settler from starvation. Alexander Whitaker, minister of the colony, was more mindful of the facts when he writes that the "Pipsico and Choapoke . . . have beene friendly to us in our great want." Friends being few, however, Whitaker counsels the use of "defensive Armor" against "the naturall people" who are "faint-hearted (if they see their Arrowes cannot pierce) and easie to be subdued." Just how they are to be subdued Whitaker does not say, even as his counsel of defense is silent on the use of arms. Yet the militaristic option, retained in Grey's argument as lawful conquest, is certainly implied. Whitaker is not speaking merely of conversion in supposing that If we were once the masters of the Country, and they stood in feare of us (which might with few hands imployed about nothing else, be in short time brought to passe) it were an easie matter to make them willingly to foresake the Divell, to embrace the faith of Jesus Christ, and to be baptized. Whitaker believes that conversion would produce docile Indians immensely useful as laborers in "Buildings and Plantings," guides for "Discoveries of the Countrey," and providers for safe passage of colonists from place to place. 27 In comparison, John Smith is more honest than pious in admitting that his goal in "pacifying" the Indians is to "bring them to be tractable, civil, and industrious, and teach them trades, that the fruits of their labours might make us recompence." 28 Significantly, the idea of conversion implies the awareness that Indians are not blank slates but have prior cultural knowledge from which they are to be wooed. For this reason, Robert Johnson emphasizes the importance of treating natives according to their age and experience: Take their children and traine them up with gentlenesse, teach them our English tongue, and the principles of religion; winne the elder sort by wisdome and discretion; make them equal with your English in case of protection, wealth, and habitation, doing justice on each as shall doe them wrong. (18) Whereas children can be educated and adults won over by example, Indian priests are seen as resistant to English intentions. As early as

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1609, the Company targeted this group in an instruction to Sir Thomas Gates, then governor of Virginia, on the education of Indian children: We thinke it reasonable you first remoue from them their Iniocasockes or Priests by a surprise of them all and detayninge them prisoners, for they are so wrapped vp in the fogge and miserie of their iniquity, and so tirrified with their continuall tirrany . . . that while they Hue amounge them . . . you shall neuer make any great progres into this glorious work nor haue any Civill peace or concurre with them.29 In the name of Christian civility, the Company is authorizing the use of force and imprisonment in a power struggle with indigenous leaders for the soul of their people. Such struggle is hardly mentioned in the promotions, which present religious conversion as the natural solution to settling with the Indians. Chapman's Memorable Masque goes so far as to stage the conversion of indigenous leaders as a kind of marriage. Performed in celebration of Princess Elizabeth's marriage to the Elector Palatine, the masque features Indian priests and princes from Virginia attending the royal wedding. The colonial motives are sanctioned by Eunomia, or Lawe, the Virgine Priest of the goddess Honor, in two symbolic gestures ("Description," line 75).30 First she opens Honor's gates to Plutus, the god of riches bringing gold from American mines.31 Then she invites Virginian priests or Phoebades to turn from their "superstitious worship of the setting sun in the West and give homage to James, the rising sun in the East: To this our Britan Phoebus, whose bright skie (Enlightened with a Christian Piety) Is neuer subject to black Errors night, And hath already offer'd heauens true light, To your darke Region . . . ("Masque," lines 330-34)32 Through these actions, Eunomia reconciles English honor with the pursuit of American riches, and subjects Indian leaders to the colonial rule of James. The subjection of Indians is further paralleled with the deflowering of the bride through a play on the words Virginia and virgin, hence the shift from "Virginian priests" and "Virginian princes" to "knights of the Virgine land" and "Virgine Princes." 33 While the term "virgin" applies to both sexes, it reduces Indian priests and princes to a condition of uninitiated sexuality. The masque culminates in an invocation to Hymen to bless the nuptial union, through a horticultural image that applies equally well to James' role in colonial husbandry: There is a seed by thee now to be sowne, In whose fruit Earth, shall see her glories show'n,


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At all parts perfect; and must therefore loose No minutes time; from times vse all fruite flowes; And as the tender Hyacinth, that growes Where Phoebus most his golden beames bestowes, Is propt with care; is water'd euery howre; The sweet windes adding their encreasing powre, The scattered drops of Nights refreshing dew, Hasting the full grace, of his glorious hew, Which once disclosing, must be gatherd straight, Or hew, and Odor both, will lose their height; So, of a Virgine, high, and richly kept, The grace and sweetnes full growne must be reap't, Or, forth her spiritsfly,in empty Ayre; The sooner fading, the more sweet and faire. ("Hymn," lines 53-68)

The address engages James' interest both as a father presiding over his daughter's marriage and as a monarch presiding over the colonization of Virginia. The description of "a Virgine, high, and richly kept" refers directly to Princess Elizabeth, and indirectly to Virginia, as well as to virgin priests and princes. The allusion to the flower's crimson hue points to the myth of Hyacinth, a beautiful youth whom Apollo loves and accidentally slays in a contest. By extension, the gathering of the flower's hue both anticipates nuptial deflowering and eroticizes the violence of colonial subjection, given the customary association of James with the sun god, and the representation of Indians as sun-worshippers. Especially in reference to Hyacinth, the non-specific gendering of the pronoun "his" (line 62) in early modern usage keeps open simultaneously the possibilities of deflowering the bride, the colony, and the Indians. Within this sphere of possible meanings, the carpe diem urgency with which the flower is to be "reapt" - or "raped,"34 - before its hue and odor fade into "empty Ayre" touches on the importance of timing in the art of husbandry. For the husband, this perfect timing involves the kind of intersubjective mastery that the period perceives as the workings of magic. As loan Couliano observes, the period perceives the techniques of love as similar to those of magic. Like the magician, the lover gains control over his beloved by captivating her fancy or fantasy, thereby manipulating her desire towards the fulfillment of his ends.35 In Chapman's masque, Hymen has the same magical control over virgins: Love-scorch't Virgines, nourish quenchles fires; The Fathers cares; the Mothers kind desires; Their Gould, and Garments, of the newest guise, Can nothing comfort their scorcht Phantasies, But, taken rauish't vp, in Hymens armes, His Circkle holds, for all their anguish, charmes.

(lines 17-22)

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Hymen's power to "comfort" desiring virgins within the circle of his embrace points to sexual possession as the magic to "charm" their fancy. This magic of mastery appeals to the popular notion of women's fancy as errant and prone to error. Left to its own devices, the female fancy will wander beyond the bounds of domestic propriety, led on by desires that ornaments of gold and "garments, of the newest guise" can only stir but not satisfy. Yet this wandering fancy can be fixed by a husband's impregnation, for even as a seed is implanted in the womb, so the fancy is imprinted as an image or conception in the memory. Insofar as the plural form of "virgines" applies to Indians, they, too, must be ravished in their fancy by James' Hymen-like magic, lest they should escape their "desired" colonial destiny. The masque enacts a wish-fulfillment, of course, for the goal of religious conversion was hardly on the minds of early settlers. A proposal in 1606 for the education of Indian children generated donations but no action until 1618, and even then efforts were brief and doomed (of which more later). The English settlement of Virginia was not designed to inspire trust in Indians, let alone captivate their fantasy. Nor is it surprising that religious men like Whitaker should compare Indian priests, the targeted source of resistance, to "our English Witches": "They live naked in body, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no covering: Their names are as naked as their body: they esteeme it a vertue to lye, deceive, and steale, as their Master the Divell teacheth them" (Purchas XIX: 110). The priests are like witches36 not only in transgressing the bounds of English husbandry, but because they have the trust of their people. As he writes of one priest, If they [his people] would have raine, or have lost any thing, they have their recourse to him, who conjureth for them, and many times prevaileth. If they be sicke, he is their Physician; if they be wounded, he sucketh them. At his command they make warre and peace, neither doe they any thing of moment without him. (Whitaker in Craven, ed., 26) In attributing the trust of the people to the efficacy of the priest's magic, Whitaker fails or refuses to recognize that the power in this magic is a collective cultural memory that the colonists cannot easily dislodge. The feminized and demonized image of Indian priests finds a counterpart in Sycorax, the witch-mother of Caliban. The parallel reveals a complex engagement in Shakespeare's play with husbandry and indigenous resistance through the thematics of magic. That Sycorax was not native to the island, and had conveniently died before Prospero's arrival, would seem to remove her as a present threat to his power and legitimacy. Yet memory of her survives in Caliban, who asserts a prior


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claim to the island through her, and so the absent mother continues to haunt the son's struggle with Prospero. Resistance is thus not neutralized but temporalized through the gender and generational politics of the family romance - regenerated, if you will, as the legacy of a dead mother come to fulfillment in a son. If education targets Indian children for cultural imprinting (as colonial promoters advise), the figure of Caliban as rapist raises the specter of the child come of age, whose means of resistance threatens the very aim of colonial husbandry. In this respect, the play bears a striking contrast to Chapman's masque, which altogether excludes the possibility of resistance. The divergence of the two dramas has been a point of critical interest.37 Although both were performed in celebration of Princess Elizabeth's nuptials, each responded to a different set of generic expectations. Unlike the masque, the play presents an ostensible fiction in which James' royal image is not directly engaged, and is thus relatively free to explore possibilities that the masque forecloses in the interest of ideological coherence. Within the shared theme of marriage, a crucial difference between the two entertainments lies in their perspectives on the family as the model of gendered power relations for the reproduction of culture. For his part, Chapman focuses on nuptial consummation as an emblematic moment that fixes the domestic gender hierarchy, and that extends by analogy to the colonial cultural hierarchy. The virgin is instantaneously and permanently possessed by her husband, who becomes a father by her. Her maternal resources are thus appropriated for the reproduction of the status quo, pre-empting her emergence as a threat to the cultural order. In Shakespeare's family romance, education functions to reproduce culture by re-enacting familial power relations in the child's socialization. The process is supplementary, to use Derrida's term, in that Prospero's education of Miranda not only completes but substitutes for the nurture of her absent mother.38 Complications arise, however, when Prospero is faced with yet another absent mother, Sycorax, raising the question of whether the family can serve as a model for reproduction of one culture upon another. As the play shows, the supplementary operation of education depends for its success on the imprinting of the child's memory. This is clearly the case with Miranda, to whom Prospero is sole "schoolmaster" on the island (1.2.172). Miranda has no specific memory of her mother: in searching "the dark backward and abysm of time," she recovers only an image of nurses or ladies-in-waiting (line 50). This absence enables Prospero to substitute his own memory of Miranda's mother as "a piece of virtue," a convenient description true or otherwise, as it furnishes his only claim to paternity (line 56). Prospero goes so far as to usurp the

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place of the mother in what Orgel calls a "parthenogenetic fantasy" that turns his sufferings at sea - "I . . . / Under my burden groaned" - into a metaphoric labor, giving birth to Miranda's "memory" (line 156).39 Significantly, the memory Prospero is most eager to impress on his daughter is one of betrayal by a usurping brother. The "abysm of time" thus marks the site of maternal exclusion from which the father emerges as author of the child's consciousness upon a world of usurpations. For his part, Prospero attributes his authority over Miranda to his verbal magic. Under the spell of his words, he claims, she "[cannot] choose" but fall into sleep, a "good dulness" that enables him to control the information she receives (lines 185-86). There is room for selfdelusion in these remarks, of course. Miranda may well have fallen asleep from boredom or fatigue or any combination of reasons. Yet the result of sleep is the same regardless of how it is induced: it keeps Miranda from knowlege of the behind-the-scene maneuvers by which her father projects an image of power. Prospero himself measures the effect of his magic by the sympathy he stirs in Miranda, who, "not rememb'ring how I cried out then, / will cry it o'er again" (lines 133-34). The intersubjective nature of the exchange allows him to claim language as his medium of enchantment, to which his memory provides a specific, reproducible content. If, for Prospero, imprinting Miranda with "memory" represents the success of education, then Caliban's ineducability is really the failure of education to erase his memory of a prior cultural knowledge, a knowledge gendered maternal. In this context, he is ineducable not despite but as the result o/his having learned the master's language. At stake in his struggle with Prospero is not just a contested title, but the power of language to appropriate the natural world of the island. Prospero's learning, embodied in his books, constitutes the verbal magic that enables him to mobilize natural agents to torment Caliban, alienating the latter from his native world. The torment is not just physical, as in bites, pinches, and cramps, but the work of fantasy, as when Caliban feels "all wound with adders, who with cloven tongues / Do hiss me into madness" (2.2.13-14). The creatures of his native world are turned into duplicitous mediums, "cloven tongues," speaking the master's language, a language that divides Caliban against himself, subjecting him to another. At a moment which replays the Edenic fall into knowledge, Caliban articulates a resistive entrance into the power relations that Prospero's language mediates. Yet even as nature performs Prospero's language, it communes with Caliban in "noises, / Sounds and sweet airs" of the island "that give delight and hurt not," or in "a thousand twangling instruments


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hum[ming] about [his] ears," activating an aural register that belongs to neither speech nor writing. Or, in dreams, "voices" come promising riches that are always about to drop on him from the heavens, so "that when I waked, /1 cried to dream again" (3.2.132-40). Unlike Miranda's dull sleep, the voices in Caliban's dream testify to the obduracy of his memory, the return of a repressed legacy, a native tongue that, awake, he no longer knows how to speak. The poetry in these lines, which scholars have often noted, points to a "preverbal semiotic" which Julia Kristeva relates to the sublimation of loss - in western tradition, ultimately loss of the mother.40 Framed within the familial construct, however, the riches Caliban dreams of also infantilize him, reducing him to speechless orality within his native world. The poetry thus both marks and masks a moment in which the dream functions to translate colonial power relations into a familial narrative of repression. For this reason, the poetry should be read in tension with the curse, which Caliban delivers in the language of the master. In cursing, Caliban gestures beyond the dream to a maternal legacy from which, however alienated, he derives an historical agency - a genealogy of resistance to which I will return. In another sense, Caliban can and does go beyond the curse to use his master's language in its "proper" form as a means of resistance. In planning rebellion, Caliban appeals for help to Stephano, framing his "suit" in the formulas of the romance: As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, A sorcerer, that by his cunning hath Cheated me of the island. If thy greatness will Revenge it on him - for I know thou dar'st Thou shalt be lord of it, and I'll serve thee.

(3.2.41-43; 52-53; 56)

Caliban's suit resembles a "call to adventure," and his instructions for killing Prospero rehearse a well-used theme of the quest, which requires the destruction first of the magician's books, the source of his power. The reward for such endeavor is, predictably, a lady of unparalleled beauty, a "nonpareil," as Prospero calls Miranda (3.2.97). That Stephano twice refers to Caliban's suit as a "tale" points to his participation in the romance expectations it invokes (3.2.48, 80). In speaking the language of romance, Caliban finds the key to Prospero's magic. To be sure, Caliban speaks romance only while inebriated, thus making good Stephano's wisecrack that wine is "that which will give language to you" (2.2.81-82). And it is appropriate that the wine bottle should be called a "book," a parodic bible, if you will, by which Caliban

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swears allegiance to a new master. As John Gillies points out, the scene parodies a fantasy of a New World encounter in which the native (Caliban) worships "the god-like European (Stephano) who confers the gift of 'language' upon him." Gillies also notices a "more explicitly colonial" allusion earlier in the scene when the sight of "Caliban's prostrate body" reminds Trinculo "of 'a dead Indian' (2.2.33)."41 In this context, the conflation of bottle and bible recalls accounts of the devastating effects of alcohol on Amerindians, as well as their fetishistic worship of the Bible without the literacy to understand its contents. Paradoxically, it is in performing these stereotypes that Caliban discovers the means to undo Prospero's power. In drinking from the bottle, or "kissing the book" as Stephano puts it, Caliban comes to dissociate power from Prospero's person and to attribute it to his books: "for without them / He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not / One spirit to command" (3.2.89-91). We can better understand Caliban's paradoxical agency by turning to Homi Bhabha's notion of the stereotype as an "ambivalent mode of knowledge and power." In theorizing colonial culture as a locus for the articulation of multiple belief and agency, Bhabha reads the stereotype as a "non-repressive form of knowledge that allows for the possibility of embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official and one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division." Such ambivalence implicates power relations: "by acceding to the wildest fantasies (in the popular sense) of the colonizer, the stereotyped Other reveals something of the 'fantasy' (as desire, defence) of that position of mastery."42 In the play, the position of mastery is rendered parodic when every shipwrecked sailor claims it for himself. This is not to say that Caliban is fully aware of his duplicity as stereotype, beyond the effort to rid himself of a tyrannical master. In fact, Caliban never claims the role of master, and at one point even invites Trinculo's comment that he is a "natural," both a born slave and an uncultivated native (3.2.32). Yet in speaking the language of romance, the slave appropriates the magic of mastery, captivating Stephano's fantasy with promises of sex and power, "interpellating" in the Althusserian sense the drunken sailor as unlikely hero of romance into an act of rebellion against his own master. The duplicity of the stereotype thus masks an operation of mimicry that not only objectifies colonial desire but undermines colonial authority. As Bhabha explains, mimicry "conceals no presence or identity behind its mask," and thus mocks the power of the model to be exemplary.43 Especially in pandering Miranda to Stephano - "She will become thy bed, I warrant, / And bring thee forth brave brood" -


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Caliban mimics Prospero's prerogative as ruler and father to give away the island's prize possession to a "husband" he considers deserving (3.2.101-02). In doing so, Caliban enacts "mimicry's turn to menace," replaying the "rape" of Miranda - this time as a marital arrangement and, by extension, a mockery of Prospero's phallic sovereignty. Caliban's menace culminates in a plot to murder Prospero: "I'll yield him thee asleep, / Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head" (3.2.59-60). Among the methods of murder Caliban names, this one fully conjures the image of rebellion striking at the head of the political body, symbolically, the phallus around which the patriarchal and colonial power structure is organized. The nail-in-the-head plot invokes narrative echoes that render familiar Caliban's resistance, rewriting it as a betrayal of domesticity. One echo is the biblical story of Jael and Sisera in which Jael offers a bed and milk in her tent to the enemy commander Sisera, then murders him in his sleep by pounding a tent peg into his head. The murder is celebrated in the Song of Deborah not only as justifiable violence against an enemy of the people, but as violence accomplished in the guise of domestic, even maternal, comfort that reduces Sisera from vigilant masculinity to the symbolic infancy of sleep, andfinallyto death.44 Another analogue is a "true" story then widely current in which a woman, conspiring with her lover, murdered her husband in his sleep by driving a nail into his head. The deed remained hidden for many years until the woman confessed in a fit of conscience. An exhumation recovered a skull with a nail pierced through the brainpan and, although it was beyond identification, the woman was convicted and executed.45 Whether heroic or depraved, the figures of the maternal assassin and murderous wife bring to Caliban's plot a palimpsest of domestic betrayal that escapes the husband's vigilance. At one level, these feminizing echoes function to domesticate indigenous resistance. But in discovering such resistance within the assumed safety of domestic spaces, Caliban's plot also marks the limit of husbandry as a trope of cultural reproduction in colonial discourse. Indeed, the plot gains a touch of irony when located in the context of the New World, a place often reported in the travel narratives as lacking in iron, the material from which nails are made. In this light, the nail is an imported tool turned into a weapon against the importer; it functions as the non-verbal counterpart of the curse, a "rhetorical deformation" of the master's language.46 Like the curse, the nail is not simply a rejection of colonial husbandry but a hostile return for its "civilizing" effects. Unlike the curse, a verbal expression of an ill intention that may or may not materialize, the nail is a powerful symbol of resistance from a people whose intentions remain unrepresentable until performed.

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In the case of Caliban, the threat of the nail is both fully verbalized and ultimately foiled, suggesting that a strategy of containment is at work within the dramatic plot. Even so, there is little comfort for Prospero, who is caught napping, so to speak, and prevails only through the prompting of Ariel and the blunder of the co-conspirators. This explains why Prospero should feel compelled to "acknowledge" Caliban, "this thing of darkness," as his own, even though he plans to leave the island and abandon his slave forever (5.1.275-76). The gesture is Prospero's way of laying claim, through Caliban, to the "darkness" that escapes his vigilance: both the blindspot in Prospero's ideological vision that renders powerful his magic over Caliban and the maternal legacy in Caliban's memory that Prospero can never fully control. Within the play of power and knowledge, claiming the thing of darkness has nothing to do with reclaiming the soul of a slave. Thus Caliban's offer to "seek for grace" meets with Prospero's "Go to, away!" (5.1.296, 298),47 a rejection that ultimately divests spiritual husbandry of its Christian pretensions. II The location of a maternal genealogy in the native's (or "natural's") supposed link to nature reveals an inner compatibility between the georgic imagination and the family's mediating role in the reproduction of society. Both are informed by a supplementary logic: just as Prospero's education attempts to substitute for the nurture of absent mothers, husbandry is the art that improves nature by usurping the course of nature. Danger lurks, however, in nature's reassertion of its course, its reversion to wilderness, even as the absent mother threatens to return through the agency of her offspring. Hence the pessimism, from the georgic tradition's classical inception, that underlies the husband's persistent effort and vigilance, with its extension into political allegory. Such allegory is fully articulated in the "Mutability Cantos," in part Spenser's reflection on the unrest in Ireland. Given the importance of the Irish model for the English colonization of Virginia,48 a reading of the Cantos will help locate textual strategies for colonial husbandry, the better to analyze ideological inflections specific to Shakespeare's play.49 I begin by noting a structural parallel between Caliban and Mutability, both of whom press a matrilineal claim to title against rulers whose legitimacy is open to challenge. Thus Mutability, deprived of a patrilineal means to succession by the abdication of Titan, rises through the power of Chaos, her progenitrix "by the mothers side" (6.26.4), operating within the Zodiac or agricultural calendar to "pervert" nature's productions (6.5.4).50 Spenser's use of classical mythology is crucial in advanc-


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ing the allegory, yet thoroughly ambivalent. The monogenetic genealogy of the Olympian deities elides the difference between dynastic and colonial power struggles. At the same time, as one who "aspires / Rule and dominion to herselfe to gaine" (4.1-2), Mutability's means to power is not so different from Jove's, who rules by usurpation, erecting law upon a breach of law. Such double-edged disclosure instances what Kenneth Gross describes as "the odd, Lucianic irony that plays over the narrative, making a mockery of both established authority and the forces that rebel against it." For him, the irony reflects a "desire to hold lightly onto the blank superiority of order over change" (236).51 This play of irony extends to Nature's judgment which, even as it legitimizes Jove's rule, is twice effaced in the rendering. First, the narrator describes "great dame Nature" as veiled, so that no one knows "whether she man or woman inly were" (7.5). Given Nature's feminine title, the veiling suggests not so much gender indeterminacy or androgny as a masculine identification with the patrilineal order of Jove. Indeed, the narrative earlier refers to "the god of Nature," raising the possibility of a masculine deity behind the veil.52 In the second instance, Nature is earlier invoked in the masculine as a god, though whether this is intentional or in error is hard to tell. It is upon rendering judgment "Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist" (7.59.9). This effacement both mystifies nature as the voice of the established order and forecloses the possibility of a different judgment. As Low points out, Nature's judgment - that through time and change all things return to "their owne perfection" - reaffirms the georgic ideal.53 But the ideal is rendered in an "vnperfite" poem and in a world where, the narrator observes, Mutability still holds sway.54 If, aligned with Jove's rule, Nature issues in Mutability, it is because Nature has always had a share in the matrilineal legacy of Chaos. Whereas Spenser's narrator is resigned to Christian patience, Prospero would undertake the "perfection" of nature, or rather the appearance of perfection, through the use of magic. The result is an elaborate "nature show" that begins with the chaotic forces of a tempest in which Ariel appears in the guise of a Harpy snatching a banquet from the shipwrecked men, and ends with a "civilizing vision" in which Iris invites Ceres and Juno to bless the union of Miranda and Ferdinand. Although the work is done by Ariel, it enables Prospero to project the image of a magus powerful enough to turn elemental chaos to his own ends, coopting to the process the disruptive powers of the matron goddesses. For Juno the goddess of marriage is responsible for the storm that shipwrecks Aeneas' crew on the shores of Carthage, her beloved city, and Ceres the goddess of agriculture yearly abandons her work to grieve at

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the rape and loss of Persephone. These subtexts of a patroness' vengeance and a mother's grief are both invoked and suppressed through Ferdinand's implied relation to Aeneas55 and his betrothal to Miranda. Likewise the Harpy scene aligns the perfection of nature, its transformation from tempest to temperateness, with a narrative of domesticity. The Harpies are not just defilers of the food that would have fed Aeneas and his men; in Renaissance mythography, they signify whores and barren virgins, both inimical to the husband's virility. As sisters, the Harpy and Iris represent opposite faces of nature - the violent winds and the rainbow after the storm - and the order of their appearance enacts the domestication of nature. Yet this vision of domesticated nature fails to subsume the native, who is meanwhile plotting rebellion. Allegory finds its limits in the interrupted masque, and the vanishing nymphs and reapers further highlight the insubstantiality of Prospero's magic. For the aim of his magic is not environmental but inter subjective, the "baseless fabric of . . . vision" directed at individual fantasies (4.1.151). It is only a performance, and foregrounded as such in those moments when the play becomes conscious of its theatricality, and the perfection of ideology is revealed as the perfecting of an illusion. This theatrical dimension is embodied in Ariel and is best seen, again, through a comparison with Spenser's Nature. Ariel's service to Prospero recalls Nature's alliance with Jove, but Ariel's negotiation for his freedom indicates a contractual arrangement, not the natural order of things. In taking on the role of the Harpy, Ariel re-enacts the mystery of Nature's gender, but as a theatrical practice that casts boy actors in female roles.56 Having discharged his duties, Ariel's release into "the elements" is evocative of Nature's disappearing act (5.1.317). The effect, however, is not to mystify Ariel as an agent of nature but to demystify Prospero's control over nature. Ariel's exit leaves Prospero in the epilogue without magic, held captive "in this bare island" by the "spell" of his audience, pleading for applause to set him free (8). Prospero's appeal to the audience, which announces his transition from character to actor, marks a moment when Shakespearean theatre contemplates, in retrospect as it were, the art or "magic" of its own representations. In this reflection, the magic with which Prospero manages the crisis in husbandry turns out to be theatrical in its effects.57 The tempest that begins the play provides him with captive audiences for his indoctrination. Especially in the Harpy scene, his audience consists of characters physically immobilized by magic. By contrast, then, Prospero's plea to a real audience marks an inversion of his power over his captive audiences within the play. His magic, what has all along been


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his means of psychic mastery over others, becomes merely his fantasy enacted and dissolved before a public whose approval he seeks. The staging of Prospero's homecoming as the transition from character to actor is, in this sense, a significant metatheatrical gesture. For whereas the theatre can delineate a physical time and space of fantasy from the "real world," the line is not so easily drawn in everyday life. Prospero's homecoming fulfills a quintessential fantasy of the romance, the providentialist reversal of fortunes that restores the protagonists, after long suffering, to their rightful place in society. From the start, Prospero invokes such expectations when he reveals that his "zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star, whose influence" he "court[s]" by raising a tempest (1.1.181-83). In so doing he creates in effect a crisis, literally a "turning point" for his fortunes, one which sets the course for home despite his failure to sustain even a vision of husbandry on the island. The romance's diagetic management of a crisis thus provides closure to an ideological crisis that can have no resolution within the Play. This self-conscious fictionality is often overlooked in the critical debate regarding the relation between the play and the Virginia enterprise. Thus some scholars view Prospero's tempest as an allusion to the shipwreck of transported settlers in the 1609 storm off the coast of Virginia, while others see Prospero's homecoming as evidence against the presence of colonialist interest in the play.58 Given a topical focus, however, neither side can exclusively rule in or out a colonial context. On the one hand, the play makes no explicit reference to Virginia; on the other hand, as Jeffrey Knapp observes, active colonists in this period often had homecoming in their plans.59 Beyond topical considerations, as Peter Hulme and John Gillies further show, the terms "tempest" and "temperance" inhabit discursive networks that locate English cultural assumptions and colonial motives in the New World.60 At this level of analysis, it is not the factual evidence in texts but their ways of intervening in the discursive production that enable each to reveal something about the others. In its framing of a crisis as the plot of romance, I would suggest, the play has taken its measure of a cultural fantasy that structures official reports of the historical tempest. One such report, A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), presents the tempest as God's punishment for the "intemperate idleness" and the "tempest of dissention" among transported settlers, vices undermining the success of the colony. The arrival in Virginia some ten months later of shipwreck survivors marks a new beginning under divine guidance, one that will in time lead to prosperity.61 The 1609 tempest is thus narrativized as a crisis or turning-point

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in the colony's fortunes, even though the event was only one in a string of disasters that the settlers encountered. If the appeal to providence is by now formulaic,62 the description of the Virginia experience as a "tragicall comoedie" rallies settlers around a renewed commitment to husbandry. For an enterprise that has yet to turn a profit, such narrative reversal of fortune manages investors' expectations by deferring present returns to a projected future.63 The plea to planters that "we are too effeminate in our longings, and too impatient of delaies" may be directed at investors as well (23-24; emphasis added). For William Strachey, the masculine labor of planting a colony recalls Virgilian parallels of empire-founding. In A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption (1610), Strachey recounts the arrival in Virginia of survivors from the tempest. The commander Sir George Somers is said to sail up the James River "as Virgil writeth Aeneas did, arriving in the region of Italy called Latium, upon the bankes of the River Tiber." The "palizadoed" fort at Jamestown is compared to the land "Queene Dido might buy of King Hyarbas . . . and therein built her Castle of Byrza," preserving her chastity in the purchase.64 The convergence of Carthage and Latium in Virginia points to a colonial destiny that temporally recapitulates the Virgilian translatio imperii. Just as Carthage serves as a way station in Aeneas' journey to Latium, so Virginia in its present barrenness contains a greatness yet to come. If Aeneas' victory anticipates indigenous resistance and epic conquest, Strachey does not dwell on these implications. Moving on instead to focus on temperance, the management of time in productive labor,65 Strachey finds the selfmastery that translates, through time, into territorial mastery. Thus the epic translatio is, for now at least, passed over for a georgic translation of the New World into a colonial possession. As Robert Johnson exhorts would-be planters in Nova Britannia, by "husbanding these shares of land" through labor, "wee shall withstand and bring ourselues into a laborinth." Johnson here rewrites a topos in New World narratives, the labyrinth, which presents "an image of the traveler's difficult path through nature."66 In Virginia, such difficulty extends to the settler's task of raising crops for survival, vividly documented by reports of famine in a land of abundance. As promoters explain, the virgin land is barren not despite but because of her natural vegetation, which must be cleared for farming. In this relation, Johnson's "laborinth" refers to the cultivation that transforms the wilderness into a garden, an intricate maze of orderly production. His image of the "labyrinth" evokes the period's interest in horticulture and science to provide, in Bacon's words, "the clue to the maze" of nature.67 Armed with productive science, the husband's art and labor will engender


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plentiful yield, a "usury," as Johnson puts it, that repays investment with interest (26). In his optimism, however, Johnson glosses over cultural valences of the labyrinth that point to an underlying pessimism about the husband's control over nature's generative processes. The labyrinth hides the minotaur who threatens nature's reproductive potential by devouring virgins of both sexes, the very basis of reproduction. As the offspring of a bestial union, the minotaur's monstrous appetite points to a prior parental source of perversion. Thus Elizabethan versions of the labyrinth, which treat it as the snare of desire, often enclose not the minotaur but a female or maternal figure. George Pettie, in "Of Minos and Pasiphae," rewrites the myth by having Minos build the labyrinth to shield his wife from the sight of other men so that, within its lonely walls, Pasiphae is driven to mate with a bull.68 While Pettie is ironic towards all parties involved, other romance writers are more concerned with the maternal sexuality that saps the virility of men as potential husbands. One example is Acrasia in her Bower of Bliss, decked with the "suspended instruments" of knights who are thus "symbolically castrated," as Patricia Parker observes, reduced to infancy in the sleeping Verdant, or death in Mordant, or to various stages of bestial degeneration.69 Against this danger, the husband's control finds its champion in Guyon, the Knight of Temperance who storms Acrasia's bower and releases her victims. Especially in the release of Verdant, the gift of Spring and nature's renewal, Guyon's labor is aligned with husbandry as the basis of civility. Yet, as scholars have noted, temperance prevails only through an act of intemperance.70 The violent destruction of the bower points to an anxiety that exceeds its present object, for every woman the husband encounters - or the feminized nature for which she stands - is potentially a mother. A far cry from Johnson's rosy promotion, such evocation of georgic anxiety resonates nonetheless with the colonial experience of John Rolfe, for whom the labyrinth embodies more than just an agricultural challenge. One may say he was doubly husband in that he both developed the first strain of marketable tobacco in Virginia and married Pocahontas, hostage daughter of the Indian chief Powhatan. In his petition of marriage addressed to Sir Thomas Dale, then deputy governor of Virginia, Rolfe invokes georgic values, presenting himself as one who labors . . . for the good of the Plantacion, the honour of our Countrye, for the glorye of God, for myne owne salvacion, and for the Convertinge to the true knowledge of God and Iesus Christ an vnbeleivinge Creature, namely Pocahuntas: To whom my hart and best thoughtes are and have byn a longe tyme soe intangled &

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inthralled in soe intricate a Laborinth, that I was even awearied to vnwynde my selfe thereout. But Almighty God whoe never faileth his that truely invocate his holy name, hath opened the Gate and ledd me by the hand, that I might playnely see and discerne the safest pathes wherein to treade.71 As Hulme points out, Rolfe's "puritan rewriting" of the classical labyrinth omits mention of the minotaur, referred to in the period's sermons as the monstrous issue of "unnatural mixings" or miscegenation. Rolfe himself admits to fears that the devil has "made me to be in love with one, whose education hath byn rude, her manners barbarous, her generacion Cursed, and soe discrepant in all nurtiture from my selfe." Hence the elaborate "civilizing" process Pocahontas underwent before the marriage, culminating in her christening as Rebecca.72 Yet Rolfe would hardly be implicated in the monstrous issue - unless, that is, he sees himself as the bull Taurus or the cuckold-husband Minos. Or unless his fears are informed by Elizabethan versions of the labyrinth as the site of a degenerate maternal sexuality. In this light, the minotaur is not omitted but as yet unborn, and the bride Pocahontas is proleptically aligned with Pasiphae in her maternal potential, "her generacion Cursed." The alignment both implicates Rolfe in his desire and displaces him generationally from any effective intervention as husband. In the labyrinth of racial fears, the threat of degeneration is projected into the future, while the source of that threat is initiated from the past. Pasiphae and the minotaur are absent figures in a genealogy that both precedes and outruns the present management of the husband. This explains why Rolfe resorts to divine guidance in exiting the sensual maze. The deus ex machina marks a turning-point that surpasses all crises: it both sanctifies his love for Pocahontas and confirms his spiritual duty as husband, "convertinge an irregenerate to regeneration." The English Theseus not only erases his classical reputation as a false lover, but translates the labyrinth into "the Lordes vyneyard," where he labors "to sowe and plant, to nourishe and encrease the Fruytes thereof, daylie addinge with the good husband of the Gospell somewhat to the Tallent" (250-51). In this translation, Rolfe in effect enters another labyrinth of English values and motives, one he has helped to construct and in which he has already enclosed Pocahontas. I do not mean by this to diminish his feelings for her, but to situate them within the politics of her captivity. As the colonist Ralph Hamor reports, Pocahontas was captured by ruse to be ransomed with English defectors and firearms, as well as 500 bushels of corn. After two years of delays from Powhatan, an English party led by Dale went to the Indians to demand a trade, bringing Pocahontas along for the purpose.73 Some scholars have conjectured that she was in fact a willing hostage, citing a letter by Dale, who was also one of her


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"educators." According to this letter, Pocahontas declared at the meeting "that if her father had loued her, he would not value her lesse then olde swords, peeces, or axes: wherefore she would still dwel with the English men, who loued her."74 But the report is not corroborated by the accounts of others present, such as Hamor's, which related a meeting between Pocahontas and her two brothers, "who promised they would vndoubtedly perswade their father to redeeme her" (C2v; 10). Perhaps Hamor had omitted to report her speech, or Dale was the sole witness to it. In any case, Dale's letter reveals his sense of her as hostage, not to mention her disappointment with her father over the matter. Amidst the stalemate came Rolfe's petition of marriage, and it was nothing if not opportune. The petition provided necessary closure to the hostagetaking, circumstances which in retrospect came to bear the signs of a rape or raptus, an abduction made proper by marriage.75 The retrospective logic reveals husbandry as a fantasy that finds its object in practice. In the process, the fantasy reconstructs the colonial encounter, drawing attention away from those aspects that indicate trouble to come. In particular, Hamor tells of Indian resistance and English retaliation, which included the burning of houses, the "freeboot and pillage" of Indian possessions, and the wounding and killing of men, women, and children, always in the name of being "iustly prouoked" (Civ; 8). Yet such incidents pale in significance against the first official interracial marriage in Virginia. Completing his discourse two months after the wedding, he was already touting the benefits resulting from the union: "euer since we haue had friendly commerce and trade, not onely with Powhatan himselfe, but also with his subiects round about vs; so as now I see no reason why the Collonie should not thriue apace" (C2r; 11). Hamor's discourse was not published as an official promotion of Virginia, but it served well for propaganda at home,76 to which the appended petition by Rolfe and letters from Dale and Whitaker bore further assurance of authority. Ill Whether or not Pocahontas recognized the labyrinth of commercial and colonial motives in which she trod, her marriage to Rolfe forged a fragile peace between settlers and Indians as the colony began its territorial expansion. The English were aware that the marriage did not entitle a husband to land or rank within the Algonkian system of matrilineal succession and inheritance.77 This did not prevent Dale, who already had a wife in England, from asking for the hand of Pocahontas' younger sister. If his request places value in political marriages, Powhatan's

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refusal underscores the value of Pocahontas as peacemaker.78 In England, she became the "convert and consort" with whom the Company made its case before potential investors.79 What planters and promoters alike failed to recognize, however, was the discrepant aims attending her transatlantic roles. To the extent that her image of native submission draws investors, the resulting colonial expansion inevitably jeopardized the peace her marriage achieved in Virginia. Thus the ideological practice of husbandry sowed the seeds of future conflict. Pocahontas seemed to have sensed the shifting social roles and relations around her. John Smith recounts a visit he paid her at the Rolfe family's country estate in Brentford shortly before she was to return to America: "After a modest salutation, without any word, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented; and in that humour her husband, with divers others, we all left her two or three houres." When she spoke, she recalled the first encounter between him and her people, setting the past into sharp relief with the present: Were you not afraid to come into my fathers Country? Did you not cause fear in him, and all his people (but me)? And fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then, I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always [that] you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth. Yet Powhatan did command Ittamatomakkin to seek you, and know the truth, because your Englishmen will lie much.80

Although the exchange is filtered through Smith's retelling, "her silence and her abrupt turning away," Karen Robertson insightfully remarks, constituted "her voice" which does not readily serve his purpose.81 Indeed, recollected seven years after her death, Smith's account registers the effect of her presence on him through the different inflections of the word "fear." The first instance, "Were you not afraid," emphasizes the momentous danger and daring of Smith's scouting activities in Powhatan's territory from the early days of the colony. A bit of self-aggrandisement on Smith's part, no doubt, this daring is reinforced by the claim that he "cause[d] fear" in Powhatan and the others, while the qualification "(but me)" points to an emerging role for Pocahontas in the encounter. As Hulme has argued, Pocahontas' familial address may well refer to her tribe's adoption of Smith, in which she played a mediating role, establishing reciprocity between the parties. Within this context, the question "And fear you here I should call you father?" implies a rebuke of Smith for his lack of reciprocity, as seen in his prolonged absence from his adopted village. The Indians were unaware that Smith had survived the explosion that supposedly killed him, was deposed, and returned to England in disgrace. Nor did Pocahontas realize that he was on


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unfriendly terms with her sponsor in England, Lord de la Warre, a circumstance that might explain Smith's delay in visiting her.82 We may further detect in this last reference to "fear" a hint of Smith's own embarrassment at being called "father" by Pocahontas "here" in England. Smith's explanation is that he "durst not allow of that title, because she was a Kings daughter" and, indeed, he described her as such in a pamphlet addressed to Queen Anne. 83 But evidence suggests that both the court and the Company perceived her differently. Pocahontas was entertained at court but not lodged there, and the £4 the Company allotted for the weekly upkeep of her and her son at an inn, the Belle Savage, further indicates that she was not accorded the respect due a royal visitor. Such treatment could hardly have escaped Smith's notice. Indeed, his refusal of the title "father" only confirms her dawning sense of the disparate worlds they straddle, a disparity that falsifies the familial terms of adoption. In Smith's construction, then, her insistence on the terms of "father" and "child" is ironically pitted against an expectation that his word would be inadequate to the world he purportedly represents. The possessive form, "your Englishmen," includes Smith among those who "will lie much." The breakdown of the familial metaphor in this exchange has the effect of arresting in Smith's narrative the discursive translation of America into an English possession. But the arrest is only textual and momentary, nor did the peace sealed by her marriage long survive the peacemaker, who died on her voyage home in 1617. For planters, peace became a pretext for expansion, a process facilitated by the institution of private land-ownership in Virginia. Once the colony was freed from the centralized control of the joint-stock company, the result was an immense growth in individual initiative among settlers.84 Conditions were still calm upon Rolfe's return to Virginia after the death of his wife. In his letter dated June 8, 1617, to Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company in London, Rolfe writes: "Wee found the Colony (Godd be thanked) in good estate and injoying a firmer peace and more plenty." But the cultivation of tobacco was everywhere noticeable.85 From 1618 onwards under Sir George Yeardley as governer, both land grants and tobacco production increased rapidly, encroaching on the cultivated land of Indians who were thus forced into the woods. 86 Amid the rapid pace of colonial settlement, there was an attempt at the spiritual husbandry of Indians. In 1618, the Company directed Governor Yeardly to build an Indian "college" in Henrico supported by a land grant of ten thousand acres, and appointed George Thorpe as schoolmaster and "deputy for the Company." Along with Thorpe's mission, some settlers had by then also taken to educating Indian children in their

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own homes.87 But instead of building peace, their good intentions added to the rising tensions. On the one hand, English tactics in obtaining students tended to generate suspicion rather than trust among Indians. In 1617, Rolfe wrote that the Indians were "very loving, and willing to parte w[i]th their children"; by the end of 1619, colonial authorities found that most of the parents "are in noe sort willinge to sell or by fayer means to part w[i]th their Children" (III: 71; 228). The Virginia Council resorted to raids upon the natives, at times joining forces with Opechankenough against other tribes such as the Massituppamohtnocks, agreeing "to share all the booty of male and female Children" in addition to corn and land (III: 228). On the other hand, the kindness of some settlers created ill will among others. In May 1621, Thorpe and John Pory, then secretary to the Council in Virginia, complained to Sir Edwin Sandys that there is "scarcely any man amongst vs" who harbored good will towards the Indians. "Most men with their mouthes giue them nothinge but maledictions and bitter execrations beinge therevnto falselye caried w[i]th a violent misp[er]swation" that Indians had somehow wronged them. As Thorpe sees it, "if there be wrong on any side it is especially o[u]rs" for lack of Christian charity towards the Indians who are "(espetiallye the better sort of them)[,] of a peaceable & vertuous disposition." Thorpe was still hopeful that the conversion of Indians would pave the way to peaceful commerce, having planted "nere tenn thousand" vines on college land, creating a literal vineyard of the Lord.88 Thorpe's sympathy for the Indians clearly worried Company officials who, in a reply dated July 25, 1621, cautioned "vigilance that you be not hereby entrapp'd, nor that the savadge haue by this accesse meanes to surprize you" (III: 487). For this reason, the Indian uprising in 1622 only realized official fears. In A Declaration of the State of the Colony (1622), the Company's official account of the Indian uprising, Edward Waterhouse describes Indians as a people whose barbarous Sauagenesse needs more cultivation then the ground it selfe, being more ouerspread with inciuility and treachery, then that with Bryers. For the land being tilled and vsed well by vs, deceiued not our expectation, but rather exceeded it farre, beinge so thankfull as to returne an hundred for one. But the Sauages though neuer Nation vsed so kinely vpon small desert, haue in stead of that Harvest which our paines merited, returned nothing but Bryers and thornes, pricking euen to death many of their Benefactors, (in Kingsbury III: 549)

The parable of the sower refers to Thorpe and other educators of Indians believed to have perished in the attack,89 the briar symbolizing a deadly "return" on their spiritual tillage. The description lends support to those who wish to "extirpate" or "root out" the Indians in order that the plantation might flourish. It hardly seemed to matter that some settlers


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had escaped because an Indian, Pace, informed his English host of the coming attack. While Waterhouse's official report to the Company includes the incident, Christopher Brooke's widely popular Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia (1622) fails to mention Pace at all.90 The uprising marks the breakdown of the familial analogy when it comes to settling with the Indians. In his analysis of the rebellion, Waterhouse attributes English vulnerability to an over-familiarity with the natives: "the houses" in the plantations were "generally set open to the Sauages, who were alwaies friendly entertained at the tables of the English and commonly lodged in their bed chambers" (550). While the general friendliness of planters may be exaggerated (cf. Thorpe's complaint above), the attack is clearly seen as a violation of the domestic space and a betrayal of its implicit bonds of civility. Waterhouse blames the heavy loss of lives not only on the planters' lack of vigilance, but also on their pursuit of private interests, which resulted in a lack of concerted defense: And such was the conceit of firme peace and amite, as that there was seldome or neuer a sword worne, and a Peece seldomer, except for a Deere or Fowle. By which assurance of securitie, the Plantations of particular Aduenturers and Planters were placed scatteringly and stragglingly as a choyce veyne of rich ground inuited them, and the further from neighbors held the better, (in Kingsbury III: 550) Thus it was "particular" settlers who, by placing their interest above the safety of the colony as a whole, brought about the general destruction. For Waterhouse, their error undermines official authority, if we notice how closely his wording echoes the 1618 charter, which explicitly ordains that "no particular plantation be or shall be placed straglingly in divers places to the weakening of them but be united together in one seat" (104, emphasis added). The council in Virginia had likewise expressed concern that planters were ignoring the charter's instruction, so that as the colony expanded it failed to enclose its boundaries and keep out the enemy (227). Indeed, the paternalistic authority of the colonial government is fundamentally at risk in Waterhouse's poignant image of the colonists' unready defense: that neuer griefe and shame possessed any people more then themselues, to be thus butchered by so naked and cowardly a people, who dare not stand the presentment of a staffe in manner of a Peece, nor an uncharged Peece in the hands of a woman, from which they flye as so many Hares. (Kingsbury III: 556)91 Here the outlines of a fantasy emerges: first a staff, then an uncharged piece, and then a woman pointing it at her attackers. The physical threat

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of rape is momentarily present, but dissolves when the Indians turn to flee like hares, reducing the face-off to a scattering of small game. In this crisis moment, Englishmen are conspicuously absent where they are most expected: in charge of their weapons. This absence redefines the rape of Virginia as a figure of emasculation, the colonial family being defended by a woman with empty phallic symbols. Waterhouse insists, however, that the Indian attack "must needs bee for the good of the Plantation after," as it would unite settlers against Indians as the common enemy. After all, "the way of conquering them is much more easie then of ciuilizing them by faire meanes." By putting an end to domestic familiarity, settlers may "enjoy their [the Indians'] cultiuated places," even as "the Indians, who before were vsed as friends, may now most iustly be compelled to seruitude and drudgery." Waterhouse envisions a reversal of the disaster the colony had suffered by "turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sworde," although in doing so the English would be following the Spanish example they once rejected as inhuman (556-58). 92 In practical terms, colonial accounts heralded an aggressive, militaristic policy towards the Indians, one carried out among others by George Sandys, treasurer of Virginia and survivor of the uprising. Known to most readers today as a scholar and translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sandys' pen was perhaps even more effective than his sword. In his post1622 translation of Book 6, Sandys comments on the story of Lycian peasants turned into frogs: these depopulated a City in France, and now not a little infest Virginia in Summer: called Pohatans hounds by the English, of their continuall yelping. And as they croake and ride one upon another in shallow plashes: so Pesants baule and gamball at their meetings; soused in liquor, as frogs in the water. It is worth the observation, that a frog, though she have her heart and liver puld out, will skip up and down notwithstanding. (117) The coinage of "Pohatans hounds" seems, at first glance, an innocent enough name for frogs as inferior native equivalents of dogs, which the Europeans brought to America. But in naming Powhatan the coinage implicates his people, reducing Indian ceremonial dancing to an image of drunken, yelping peasants. Sandys then re-enacts Ovidian metamorphosis in Virginia, turning Indian farmers into an infestation of the land. The final "observation" amounts, with "scientific" detachment, to a veiled invitation to anatomize Indians who have so often been vilified as liverless and heartless, cowardly and cruel. His commentary echoes the dehumanization of Indians in the colonial narratives, though with a difference. While popular pamphlets clamor with such invective as "menmonsters," "bestiall soules," "Hell-hounds," and "off-spring of Hells


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damned brood," his learned magic quietly erases the Indian husband from the colonial landscape.93 In colonial promotions, the uprising serves to bolster England's proprietory claim to Virginia. As Samuel Purchas writes in A Discourse of Virginia, "England may both by Law of Nature and Nations challenge Virginia for her owne peculiar propriety, and that by all right and rites usuall amongst men." Among other reasons, he cites "the unnaturall outcries of so many unnaturally murthered, for just vengeance of rooting out the authors and actors of so prodigious injustice."94 In legitimizing English husbandry, Purchas reciprocally constructs the massacre as a rape of Virginia, the colony being "violently ravished by her own ruder Natives" (229), although the land is by no means damaged goods. It is rather the present threat of rape that leaves Virginia ever more urgently in need of tillage by an English husband: But looke upon Virginia; view her lovely lookes (howsoever like a modest Virgin she is now vailed with wild Coverts and shadie Woods, expecting rather ravishment then Manage from her Native Savages) survay her Heavens, Elements, Situation; her divisions by armes of Bayes and Rivers into so goodly and well proportioned limmes and members; her Virgin portion nothing empaired, nay not yet improoved, in Natures best Legacies; the neighbouring Regions and Seas so commodious and obsequious; her opportunities for offence and defence; and in all these you shall see, that she is worth the wooing and loves of the best Husband. (242; emphasis added)

The trope of failed rape thus functions to modulate a deadly disaster into a manageable crisis, one which calls for renewed investments. If from historical hindsight Purchas' fantasy of a "failed rape" reminds us of The Tempest, his solicitation of prospective investors echoes Caliban's pandering of Miranda to Stephano. I am not suggesting that Shakespeare was somehow prophetic, but rather that both instances of erotic commerce participated in the ongoing discourse of husbandry. Whereas Shakespeare dramatized a failed rape as a fictional possibility, the failed rape of Virginia became a significant fiction only when applied retrospectively in the aftermath of the Indian attack. The propriety of husbandry is undercut, of course, when the preacher and colonial promoter begins to pander like a failed rapist. Yet such comparison would not have occurred to Purchas, nor would he be amused, in whose writings the English husband is opposed to Indian rapists. Purchas goes on to offer readers a "map" of the land "wantonized," a foretaste of the "impetuous clippings and sweet embraces" of land and sea. His promotion culminates in the description of "a faire Bay, on which the Earth every way is a greedie gazing Spectator, except where the Ocean rusheth in to ravish her beauties" (242). In his catalogue of

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Virginia's natural endowments, Purchas emphasizes timber in particular, the extraction of which would both clear the land for settlement and supply the needs of England. Virginia, he writes, "will looke so much more cheerfully on you, how much more you shall disburthen her in this kind." Indeed, "Virginia by divine bountie is Magnae spes altera Britanniae," the great hope of another Britain, and as England hath wooed and visited Virginia, so herein Virginia will be glad and rejoyce to visit England, in her there-built ships, and to dwell here with us in thence-brought Timbers, and esteeme her selfe advanced to adorne our Towres, and take view of our Pomps and Spectacles. (247)

Purchas is here referring to Virginian wood used not only for houses but for ships that were so crucial to England's maritime expansion. Such a goal was especially urgent, since the rise of industries in Tudor England had led to extensive deforestation by the end of the sixteenth century.95 Purchas' wanton map thus parleys a voyeuristic rape of the land into a dream of empire.

Coda: the masks of Pocahontas

The romance of the New World reveals the paralogic inventiveness of generic interplay that authorizes English travelers and colonists as husbands in the discovery and domestication of America. Such tropings of domesticity underscore the centrality of colonial interests to English national identity, albeit located at the fringes of cultural consciousness. As retrospective constructions of experience, travel, and colonial narratives enact, through the trajectory of adventure and return, a domestic closure in the familial and national senses of the word. Within this trajectory, the traveler is the husband who travails abroad to enrich home and country. Thus Sir Francis Drake was eulogized for his piratical and commercial exploits as the husband bee who sweetened the domestic bower of Elizabeth his wife and the commonwealth hive of Elizabeth the queen. In colonial encounters, the trope of domesticity functions as a vehicle for transcending moments of crisis, thereby conferring upon travelers and colonists a degree of mastery in intercultural contact. In Ralegh's recounting of his meeting with Arawak villagers, as we have seen, the English transcended not only their mistaken identity as cannibals but, by differentiating themselves from Spanish rapists, their sense of belatedness in the New World. The quintessential husband in the Virginia narratives was John Rolfe, of course, who not only married Pocahontas but domesticated a marketable strain of tobacco. In his petition of marriage, Rolfe overcomes anxieties about miscegenation by claiming the role of spiritual husband. As Rolfe's case makes clear, it is not the man but the metaphor that sustains the symbolic framework of colonial husbandry. After all, Pocahontas received spiritual husbandry even before her marriage, and the peace cemented by the marriage provided further impetus for settlers to "husband" their shares of land in America. The emergence of the husband figure in diverse situations underscores its supplementary nature, the fact that all "husbands," named or nameless, are substitutions for an absent original. Indeed, the propriety of the English husband is ultimately justified, through the same logic of the supplementarity, by 185

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constructing indigenous resistance as a failed rape. What was once attributed to the Spaniards now comes to define the Indians. From our perspective today, the tropes of domesticity have undergone translation into another kind of romance. Even the real-life husband John Rolfe has faded from view and his historical marriage is replaced by a myth of the star-crossed love between Pocahontas and John Smith. Such substitution, too, is history in the making - but with a difference. Whereas the figure of the husband romanticizes history, the myth in rewriting colonial husbandry unhinges romance from history. In staging romance as a possibility never realized, the myth sustains a mirage of intercultural and interracial harmony that substitutes for a critical understanding of America's colonial history. An eighteenth-century development that asserts American independence from an English past, versions of the myth have continued to dominate the cultural mythology of the United States to this day.1 In these final pages, then, I would like to consider the implications of this shift from history to myth, especially as it relates to the masks of Pocahontas that have emerged from generation to generation, fully ventriloquized by dominant colonial and cultural interests. I want to acknowledge the spectral presence of the woman behind the masks, behind this study, the woman on the other side of history held hostage to romance, whose voice we have never heard nor will ever hear, but whose very existence has been disseminated into myriad thoughts and fantasies of nation. For while efforts to reconstruct her life are ongoing, the masks of Pocahontas are themselves part of our cultural inheritance. They bear the effects of a colonial history which native and immigrant Americans alike do not transcend, even as new masks appear in the place of earlier ones. The latest versions of the Pocahontas myth illustrate the power of film in inventing the past. Programs such as the History Channel and Biography for Kids on the Arts and Entertainment Network present the myth through pictorial and dramatic reconstructions of tribal life and colonial encounters, voice-over readings from selections of historical documents, and commentary from men and women subtitled as scholars and historians. While these representations simulate a project of historical inquiry, the 1995 Disney Pocahontas claims the license of cartoon animation. The result is a box-office hit that Janet Maslin calls "a 'Bridges of Madison County' for the Barbie set."2 Noting the film's success, Mai Vincent wryly observes that few viewers knew anything about Jamestown, Virginia or the real Pocahontas. If they did, they'd know that the curvaceous babe on screen, in love with a blonde Adonis who represents Capt. John Smith, was a naked 11-year-old when the burly, and

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reportedly disagreeable, John Smith, age 27, met her, somewhere around 1607. No matter. Viewers got not only an idyllic Pocahontas but a mischievous racoon named Meeko, a feisty hummingbird named Flit and a rambunctious pug dog named Percy.3

The headline to Kristin Tillotson's article - "Cartoons and Indians; Disney fudges facts to turn Indian heroine into Everybabe" - says it all.4 As the above headline and commentaries suggest, the problem is not that any version of the Pocahontas myth can erase a society's historical knowledge, but that all versions predispose the public to a distorted understanding of the colonial past. Thus Disney's president for distribution and marketing, Richard Cook, states that "in creating the film, Disney tried to be as faithful as possible to the original legend of Pocahontas."5 Anticipating protest from Native Americans, "Disney hired Indian consultants to lend authenticity to the four-year 'Pocahontas' project." In addition, "Indian actors who landed roles as voice talent include the Eskimo / Cree Irene Bedard (Pocahontas) and Russell Means (Chief Powhatan), a Lakota well known as one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM)" (Tillotson). As Means sees it, Pocahontas "is a historic and revolutionary film" for American Indians, because "we are finally, finally being treated with the justice that we deserve. This is the first time [in film] we're the good guys. You don't know what that's like growing up." 6 Admittedly, the film "largely portrays Indians as noble characters living in harmony with nature while casting a group of greedy Englishmen as villains" (Tourtlelotte). Yet, as Minnesota-based Ojibwa activist and AIM co-founder Vernon Bellecourt points out, "the concept oversimplifies the very complex historical relationship between native America and immigrant America, and glosses up the despicable truth about the slaughter of millions" (Tillotson). Along with the demonizing of English colonists, the clash of native voices indicates the producers' skillful manipulation of identity politics to Disney's corporate commercial advantage. In a sense, what is truly historic about the Disney and other celluloid versions of the Pocahontas myth is the numbers they reach, and the very young age of children they are targeting with the mass media's underlying commercialism. Biography for Kids features teenage narrators presenting stories to their junior peers, their messages alternating with commercials. In its appeal to a broad audience, Disney's Pocahontas is, as Disney animator Glen Keane puts it, "an ethnic blend whose convexly curved face is African, whose dark slanted eyes are Asian and whose body proportions are Caucasian" (Tillotson). The latest mask of Pocahontas is thus a stereotype of "all-of-us" from which the Native American has conveniently disappeared, a celluloid embodiment of social justice, if you

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will, without any reference to lived relations. The result is a mass mediation of social consent through a politics of exemplary identity that has met with little social resistance. For a preview of Pocahontas in New York's Central Park on June 12, 1995, Disney raffled off 100,000 tickets in a lottery. The "public relations coup" drew "an estimated 110,000 men, women, and children,"7 drawing such comments from children as "everyone should be treated equal" or that the movie "showed Indians and white people cooperating."8 The preview was just the beginning of cinema runs, videos, and sound-track sales, not to mention Oscar and Annie awards that would likely boost sales.9 More important, for young viewers without knowledge of colonial history, the preview was an event that created "memory." Its material traces linger in souvenirs such as "$25 blankets, $15 ball caps, and $5 ponchos" and become part of the fabric of everyday life and the imaginations of children (Tourtlelotte). Other spin-off products also rendered the myth consumable, be they Pocahontas chocolate bars from Nestle, Pocahontas party goods from Hallmark, "Pocahontas books and soundtracks," or "Pocahontas sneakers and sandals for boys and girls."10 The international toy company Mattel announced it was "making more than 50 products related to the movie."11 Reuters Business Report names Burger King as having "manufactured 55 million plastic replicas of Pocahontas, British settler John Smith, Chief Powhatan and other movie figures to offer as a free gift with its children's hamburger meals." In the headline "Pocahontas about to invade US retailers, restaurants," the hostage has become the voice of corporate aggressiveness.12 Indeed, if the headline gives any hint of anticipated sales, may not this corporate mask of Pocahontas apply to consumers as well? The "corporate takeover" of Pocahontas raises questions of how we as scholars and teachers might define a critical practice that is responsible to history. The issue is more urgent though by no means limited to those of us in the United States, working within the mass-mediated culture of the Pocahontas myth. By responsibility to history I do not mean adherance to some totalizing "truth" about the past or future that so often plays out as a politics of identity. Rather, I am interested in a cultural conversation in which native as well as immigrant Americans can participate from our disparate historical positions and disconnections. In a sense, our relation to a colonial and immigrant past illustrates the general condition of historical experience as a rupture with the past. A critical responsibility to history thus necessitates our reaching across disconnections to make of disparate experiences a viable future. Such constructive agency would enable us, in Derrida's words, "to learn to

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live, finally," addressing the specters of the past and future "in the name of justice."13 Because justice requires that we realize the implications of our actions and choices, our critical responsibility entails attention to the history we are making in the politics of everyday life - where learning to live is, in effect, a way of living. Coming to these questions at the end of this study, I would like to say that our cultural work extends beyond our scholarship into the classroom, where most of our students have grown up with one version or other of the Pocahontas myth. In doing so, we should not aim merely to correct the myth's distortions of history, or to teach the fictions that supported practice within early modern English colonialism in America. After all, replacing a John Smith with a John Rolfe does little to engage the power of the Pocahontas myth, and it is only one of many myths that have constituted, for many Americans, a national heritage. Rather, in order to question the authority of received knowledges and traditions, students must first develop the skills to make knowledge for themselves. Such skills enact an understanding of fiction as made knowledge knowledge that can be challenged and transformed, a process that transforms students into makers of knowledge for themselves. In this light, a pedagogy that enables students to transform knowledge needs to emphasize what it means to be an agent in history rather than the "truth" about the past. For it is in recognizing their own historical agency that inhabits their fiction-making that students make of their learning ways of living and acting in the world that are critically responsible to the legacies of the past as well as to the possibilities of the future. Such critical understanding of history and of historical agency locates teachers and students in a larger cultural moment, when the project of decolonization and the theorizing of pedagogy intersect in the college classroom. As a result of oppositional practices in domestic and global arenas, and the critiques of disciplinary knowledges and practices, Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, "new analytical spaces have opened up in the academy, spaces that make possible thinking of knowledge as praxis, of knowledge as embodying the very seeds of transformation and change." Because decolonization targets the very power relations, often institutionalized, that underlie a culture's productions of knowledge, a decolonizing pedagogy "does not entail merely processing received knowledges (however critically one does this) but actively transforming knowledges. In addition, it involves taking responsibility for the material effects of these very pedagogical practices on students."14 In envisioning such a praxis, I return to Foucault's notion of the "event" in "effective" history. For him, an event is retrospectively

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constructed both because it is known through its effects and because the historian poses questions in the present. The retrospective emphasis allows students to overcome their own sense of historical disconnection in the analysis of past events, not to regain the past, but to critically engage with their representations. The emphasis on effects locates these representations within the context of human interactions and power relations. As Foucault explains, "effective" history deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked "other."15 The agency of the "masked 'other'" is neither a denial of identity nor a morphing of identities, but a realization that any recognizable identity, insofar as it falls within a cultural category, is already a mask behind which the subject is always other, always in passing. In its retrospective construction, Foucault's "masked 'other'" is a deconstruction of identity that nevertheless takes into account its historical effects. As such, it provides a way of dealing with the representations that attempt to manufacture social consent through the mask of Pocahontas or any exemplary model of identity. In analyzing the structure of Foucault's "event," Robert Young observes that "the same structure can be utilized by the historian so that the writing of history can itself become a disruptive event and consequently a form of political intervention." 16 I would say the same structure can be extended to empower new generations of students to realize their potentials as agents in history. Indeed, the pedagogical dimension is already implicit in Foucault's formulation, which presents "event" in resistance to those intellectual habits arising from a "pedagogical tradition" rooted in the metaphysics of concept and category, in centrisms and unified identities. For him, such tradition constrains divergent thinking and reduces intelligence to the "categorical art of avoiding error." 17 While Foucault does not develop the pedagogical implications of the "event," there is room for speculation. Of course, in its singularity the event will hardly amount to a model that is always replicable within the structured activities of the classroom. Again, as a retrospective construction, the "event" has no value in prediction. But then its best use in the classroom may well be the reflection it makes possible for students and teachers, individually and collectively. Such reflection promises the possibility of integrating learning and living as different registers of the same ongoing construction of experience. For

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the classroom, at once fictive and real, is that non-place where students enter as masked "others" into a world not yet of their making, yet already in their making, and the masks of Pocahontas shield them in their making of social justice.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 William Warner, Albions England (1612; reprint. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), 267-314, especially 289. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), sees this as part of the "popularization of history" for upper- and middle-class audiences, including merchants interested in the commercial prospects of the East and West Indies (202-36). In Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), David Riggs finds that some of the more compelling presentations of historical figures, such as Shakespeare's, reflected an awareness that the hero, quite apart from his exemplarity, "could be understood . . . as a more restrictively 'historical' phenomenon" (13). 2 Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," Genre 15 (Spring / Summer 1982): 41. 3 Louis A. Montrose discusses Ralegh's relation to Elizabeth I within a larger context of gendering in The Discovery of Guiana. See "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (Winter 1991): 1-41, especially 7-14. 4 Thus George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589; reprint. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), recommends writing "a litle brief Romance or historicall ditty in the English tong," citing as examples the stories of King Arthur, Sir Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwicke, etc. (57; fol. 33-34). 5 For relevant discussions, see Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1-21; T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950); Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Ann Arbor: University of Toronto Press, 1967); and F. Smith Fussner, Tudor History and the Historians (New York: Basic Books, 1970). 6 The terms appear on the title page to the 1612 edition of Albions England in a description of the poet's method. 7 Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10-11. 8 Thomas Kent, Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 127-56. 192

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9 Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 188, 196, 198. I have borrowed the term "nascent bourgeois" from Howard and Rackin. 10 The OED defines "adventure" in its commercial sense as "a pecuniary risk, a speculation, a commercial enterprise." 11 Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958). 12 See, for example, Montrose, "The Work of Gender," 19-22. 13 J. H. Hexter argues in "The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England," Reappraisals in History (London: Longmans, 1971), 71-116, that there was from the Middle Ages onwards a certain fluidity of status between landed and non-landed wealth, but no dramatic migration of merchants and professionals into the ranks of the old aristocracy. Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), suggests that formulations of bourgeois identity in this period are, at best, abortive attempts. For her, bourgeois ideology was not fully formulated until the eighteenth century. 14 J. P. Cooper, "Ideas of Gentility in Early Modern England," in Land, Men, and Beliefs: Studies in Early-Modern History, ed. G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 43-77. 15 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87-129. Identification of the subject with a concept is the most direct means of matching name with referent(s) or signifier with signified(s). Zizek discusses other forms of semantic investment, as when the name "Jew" is invested with "a cluster of supposedly 'effective' properties (intriguing spirit, greedy for gain, and so on)," and then identified with all Jews (96). 16 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), 17-51. Jonathan Goldberg, "Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3-32. 17 Stephen Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 561-80; reprint, in Greenblatt's Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16-39; "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V" in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18-47; Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1697 (London: Methuen, 1986), and "Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Colonial Discourse," in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker, et al. 2 vols. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), II: 17-32. 18 I emphasize "conversation" in the spirit that Jean Howard has called for in

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Notes to pages 4-10 "Feminism and the Question of History: Resituating the Debate," Women's Studies 19 (1991): "to stress the ways in which differences among political critics have led to more adequate approaches to an historicized cultural analysis [has] kept the horizon of critical possibility in motion" (151). Mary Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse." Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 3-25; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 126-54; Louis Montrose, "The Work of Gender." Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4. Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576-1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12. Nicholas P. Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America." William and Mary Quarterly 3rd. ser. 30 (1973): 595-98. William M. Hamlin, The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), xx. On the blazon, see Nancy Vickers, " 'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95-115; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies. On the figuration of the body, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 23-63, 93-112; and Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 186-215. Such conduct was expressly prohibited by English military law in the colonial expeditions. As early as 1584-85, English soldiers on an expedition to Virginia were forbidden to have sexual relations with indigenous women, although it is hard to say how fully instructions were followed. See David Beer Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 1:138. I here draw on Michel Foucault's notion of an episteme in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 17-45, and Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the polysemy of a "generative scheme" behind the "logic" of practice in Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), especially 109-13. My discussion draws on loan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Specifically, my coinage of "magical consumerism" extends his discussion of how the period perceived the workings of love to be a form of intersubjective magic. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 82.

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32 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 154. 33 The concepts of "non-place" and "spectral moments" are drawn respectively from Foucault (150), and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1995), xx. I LOVE S LABORERS: THE BUSY HEROES OF ROMANCE AND EMPIRE 1 Gascoigne refers to the displeasure of court and clergy in his preface to The Posies, reprinted in The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 7. All subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. In an essay appended to her edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres: From the Original Edition of 1573 (New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1975), 69-73, Ruth Loyd Miller argues that Adventures might have offended the Earl of Oxford. 2 All citations are from William Warner, Albions England (1612) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971). 3 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Press, 1981), 106-7. 4 Kathleen Davies, in "Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage," in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (New York: St. Martin, 1981), 58-80, emphasizes the role of print in popularizing and reinforcing existing ideas on marriage and domesticity. This does not invalidate Mary Beth Rose's argument, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), that "the Protestant idealization of marriage gained a distinct ascendancy as the predominant, authoritative sexual discourse" (5). 5 John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages 1600 to the Present (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 15, 85, 87-88; Martin Ingram, "Spousals Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts c. 1350-c. 1640," in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 55-56. 6 For two especially insightful studies, see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England(London: Routledge, 1994), and Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: a Feminist Account of Shakespeare's Histories (London: Routledge, 1997). 7 John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis, 1577 (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints), A3r. 8 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): "The terms that serve to define, or mediate, what we consider to this day to constitute romantic involvement were put into place definitively - at least for the time being sometime between the beginning and the middle of the twelfth century, first in southern and then in northern France" (8). The topos ofmolestiae nuptiarum, or the pains of marriage, was "cited by almost every antimatrimonial writer of the Middle Ages" (13).

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9 As Susan Dwyer Amussen shows in An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), this analogy is a common topos in political and familial writings of the early modern period, and persisted until the time of Locke (34-66). For a discussion of patriarchalist theory, see Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 37-53; also Jonathan Goldberg, "Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3-32. 10 Joan Kelly, Women, History & Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19-50. As Kelly observes, the imposition of married chastity was integral to the transition from the feudal to the modern state, a change that deprived the Renaissance court lady of the active political role that her medieval counterpart enjoyed. 11 Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), 1, 28, 134. On the growing pressure on women to marry in this period, see Valerie Wayne ed., Introduction to Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12 Eighty-nine recreational works were printed from 1550 to 1574; from 1575 to 1599, three hundred more popular works of fiction were published (Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient, 57, 71-75). 13 Hull, ibid., 8, 128. Hull analyzes the social and economic context for the emergence of female readership on pp. 1-30. 14 Juliet Fleming, "The Ladies' Man and the Age of Elizabeth," in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 166. 15 Barnabe Riche, Riche his Farewell to Militarie profession (1581), reprinted as Eight Novels Employed by Dramatic Poets of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), 8. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 16 In Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Patricia Parker traces the motif of romance as "error" to the criticism of Renaissance Aristotelians and the works of Italian authors like Ariosto (16-31). 17 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 105-06. For a historical study of marriage and property relations in early modern England, see Amussen, An Ordered Society, 67-94. 18 In George Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), 1:120. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 19 Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 114. 20 Sir Percival Griffiths, A Licence to Trade: The History of English Chartered Companies (London: Benn, 1974), 3-16. 21 John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (Middleburgh, 1601), ed. George


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Burton Hotchkiss (New York: New York University Press, 1931), 316. The guild's name of Merchants Adventurers was authorized by Henry VII in 1485, but did not come into official use until 1579. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 100. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 49-50; 9-11. Agnew further elaborates: "Profound and abiding social antagonisms had long preceded the introduction of market mechanisms into the cycles of ordinary life, and these differences had been acknowledged, if not legitimized, in the emblematic division of feudal society into those who worked, those who prayed, and those who fought. But it was precisely the dissolution of this structure of estates - which never, of course, quite existed in the pristine form of the medieval emblem - that led so many Britons to ponder the character of exchange that bound their society together" (8). A point raised in critiques of Stone's book by E. P. Thompson, "Happy Families," Radical History Review 20 (1979): 42-50; Alan Macfarlane, "The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, by Lawrence Stone," History and Theory 18:1 (1979): 103-26; Randolph Trumbach, "Europe and its Families: A Review Essay of Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 by Lawrence Stone," Journal of Social History 13 (1979): 136-43; and Richard T. Vann, "Review Essay: The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800," Journal of Family History 4 (1979): 308-15. For Pierre Bourdieu, however, the ideological opposition of cultural categories (Stone's commerce and love) makes possible their interaction and conflation in practice. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Bourdieu w r i t e s : " t h e sense of l i m i t s and of the l e g i t i m a t e transgression of limits . . . i s the basis at once of the ordering of the world . . . and of the ritual actions intended to authorize or facilitate the necessary or unavoidable breaches of that order" (124). Bourdieu's ritual analysis applies well here, given the ritualistic roots of commerce (Agnew, Worlds Apart, 17-27). Lynda E. Boose, "The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 248. I agree with Hutson's analysis of the relationship between romance and the world of credit and contractual relations in The Usurer's Daughter. See especially her analysis of The Merchant of Venice. My analysis of the convergence of patriarchal values and capitalist exchange is indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's comments on "the complicity between cultural and economic value-systems," In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 166. My thanks to Randall Nakayama, whose question helped me to formulate clearly the class issue embedded in Bassanio's winning of Portia and the patrimony. Lars Engle, " 'Thrift is Blessing': Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 32-33. All references to the play are from the Pelican edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Press, 1977).

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30 Engle, " Thrift is Blessing,'" 28-32. Joan Ozark Holmer in " 'When Jacob Graz'd His Uncle Laban's Sheep': A New Source for The Merchant of Venice'' Shakespeare Quarterly 36,1 (1985), 64-65. 31 According to the OED, the word "mettle" was "originally the same word as me tar and denoted the "figurative uses of metal" but this common origin had been obscured as the literal and figurative senses diverged. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the transition period when both spellings were current in figurative usage. The OED defines "mettle" as (1) quality of disposition and temperament; (2) of a horse, or occasionally of other animals: natural vigour and ardour; spirit; (3) of persons: ardent or spirited temperament. All definitions are relevant to Antonio, although the second applies only indirectly, in his comparison of himself to a "tainted wether" (4.1.114). 32 Walter Cohen, in "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism," ELH 49 (1982), notices parallels between the play and the antiusury campaign during the last third of the sixteenth century (767-68). Cohen's analysis of Shylock and Antonio in terms of the tensions "between Jewish quasi-feudal fiscalism and native bourgeois mercantilism" certainly explains why Shylock becomes the fetish or scapegoat within the socioeconomic dynamics of the play's world (771). However, his reference to Marx's discussion of industrial capital and labor seems somewhat anachronistic (773). Hutson, in The Usurer's Daughter, further elucidates the ideological importance of usurer to the emergence of new contractual relationships (41-44). 33 Antonio's pledge illustrates the Lacanian concept of the point de capiton, which Slavoj Zizek explicates in "The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalysis and. . . , ed. Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman (New York: Routledge, 1990), 89-95. 34 See, for example, Karen Newman's essay, "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 15-34. Also Engle, "Thrift is Blessing,'" 37. My position is closer to that of Boose, "Comic Contracts" who points to the paternal figure behind the scene orchestrating through Portia the comedy's contract with its audience. I am not sure, however, that we need to identify the father figure with the playwright. 35 Newman, "Portia's Ring," sees Portia's ring as a floating signifier which picks up surplus meanings as it passes back and forth between Portia and Bassanio (29). In pointing out the other side of the usurious logic, my analysis is indebted to Derrida's treatment of "usance," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207-71. 36 Cynthia Lewis, "Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice" South Atlantic Review 48:4 (Nov. 1983): 19-31, relates this pervasive condition of alienation to contemptus mundi or estrangement from the world, in my opinion an ideological cover for the alienation affective usury entails. 37 As Bloch points out, Medieval Misogyny, the procreative justification for marriage derives from Jovinian (31). 38 The focus on the "recuperable" loss of virginity glosses over the risk that childbearing and childbirth posed to women in this period. 39 Robert Greene, The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), II: 64.


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40 I discuss the euphuistic style in "The Humanist in the Market: the Rhetoric of Exchange in Lyly's Euphues Romances," in Framing Elizabethan Fiction: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Prose Narrative, ed. Constance C. Relihan (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996), 73-98. 41 Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), states that the Euphues romances totaled seventeen editions by 1636, several of which are combined publications (35). 42 Richard Johnson, The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln, ed. Richard S. M. Hirsch (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 94. 43 According to David Levine and Keith Wrightson, "The Social Context of Illegitimacy in Early Modern England," in Bastardy and Its Comparative History, ed. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), evidence collected from twenty-four English parish registers "show that there was a sharp peak in the incidence of bastardy between 1591 and 1610 and then a marked decline to a new equilibrium level that obtained until the middle of the eighteenth century" (158). 44 Arthur F. Marotti, " 'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982), 396-428. The larger discussion of sexualized power relations in the court is framed by Joan Kelly in Women, History & Theory, 19-50. 45 The difference is that Caelia dies by water, while Dido's body is consumed by fire. Johnson's episode, in History of Tom a Lincoln, reflects ironically on Elizabeth's image as Dido-Elissa, derived from a different strain of the myth from Virgil's, in which the queen in her virginal resolve repulses the false lover Aeneas. 46 Ibid., 97, 99. 47 Tom a Lincoln reached its sixth edition by 1631, and its thirteenth by 1688. 48 Thomas Deloney's "The Winning of Cales" in The Garland of Good Will celebrates the plunder thus: "The great Saint Philip, I The pride of the Spaniards, / Was burnt to the bottom / and sunk in the sea, / But the Saint Andrew, I and eke the Saint Matthew, I We took infightmanly, / and brought them away" (lines 61-68). See The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 368. 49 "Thomas ellis in praise of frobisher," in Ballads from Manuscripts, ed. W. R. Morfill (Hertford: Ballad Society, 1873), II: 282-83, which compares Martin Frobisher, a known pirate and gold-seeker since the 1570s, to Jason and Alcydes. The ballad "In Prais of Seafaring men, in hope of good Fortune," in The Early Naval Ballads of England ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: Richards, 1841), 15, compares seamen to Jasons in a farewell to Sir Richard Grenville on his 1585 voyage to the Indies. Henry Robarts, The Trumpet of Fame, or Sir Francis Drake's & Sir J. Hawkins' Farewell (1595), asks these pirates to "fetch more worth than Jason's fleece" in their expedition of plunder on Spanish treasure fleets. Finally, George Chapman's De Guiana carmen epicum (1596), in The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 353-57, a promotion for Ralegh's proposed project of mining gold in Guiana, features Ralegh as the bridegroom Jason.

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Notes to pages 31 -34

50 See Wallace A. Bacon's edition of Warner, Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1950), xxi, 58, 69. All subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 51 Warner might have in mind John Hawkins' third voyage to the West Indies. Hawkins' A true declaration of the troublesome Voyage of John Hawkins to the parts of Guinea and the West Indies, in the years of our Lord 1567 and 1568 (London, 1569) was the first to compare English sailors to Foxe's Protestant martyrs in the enormously popular Actes and Monuments, first published in 1563. Over a decade later, memories of the mishap were resurrected in the accounts of three sailors who survived the ordeals of the Inquisition. Warner would have read David Ingram's Relation (1582) and Miles Phillips' Discourse (1583), but not The Rare Travels of John Hortop, which appeared in 1591, seven years after the publication of Syrinx. Hawkins', Ingram's, and Phillips' accounts were reprinted in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 2 vols. (1589; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). See The vnfortunate voyage made with the Iesus, the Minion . . . by M. John Hawkins (II. 553-57); The Relation of David Ingram of Barking . . . (II. 557-62); and A discourse written by one Miles Phillips Englishman . . . (II. 562-80). The accounts by Hawkins, Phillips, and Hortop subsequently appeared in the second edition of Principall Navigations (1600; reprint, 12 vols., Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906). See X: 64-74 (Hawkins); IX: 398-445 (Phillips); and The travailes of Job Hortop, . . . (IX. 445-65). 52 John H. Parry, "Drake and the World Encompassed," in Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577-1580, ed. Norman J. W. Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10. 53 Julian S. Corbett, Sir Francis Drake (1890; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969), 75; for accounts of the incidents mentioned, see 62-75; A. E. W. Mason, The Life of Francis Drake (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1941), 79-117, esp. 113-17; E. F. Benson, Sir Francis Drake (New York: Harper, 1927), 108-39. Parry, in "Drake and the World Encompassed," however, clarifies the point that democratic equality was not the issue for sixteenthcentury Englishmen but "a fighting ship under a unified command" was (10). 54 David Beers Quinn, ed. Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (London: Hakluyt Society, 1939), II. 455-57. 55 Henry Robarts, A most friendly farewell . . . to the right worshipful Sir Frauncis Drake knight (London, 1585), A3v, Blv, A4r. W. T. Jewkes, "Sir Francis Drake Revived: from Letters to Legend," in Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577-1580, ed. Norman J. W. Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), discusses Robarts' complaint as evidence of "the lack of publicity" given to Drake's achievements during his lifetime (113-15). Such complaint may also be a ploy to sell pamphlets, however. If official secrecy resulted in the delayed publication of Drake's The World Encompassed (1626), Hakluyt managed to print parts of it in his 1589 and 1598 editions of the Principall Navigations. Finally, Drake was not particularly slighted by writers and certainly not by ballad-writers. 56 Henry Robarts, Haighfor Devonshire (London, 1599), F2v, F3v. 57 Parry, "Drake and the World Encompassed," 3.


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58 James A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins: The Man and His Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 302. 59 For Sidney's agreement with Gilbert, see Malcolm William Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (New York: Octagon, 1967), 284-87. David Beers Quinn, Raleigh and the British Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1949), discusses Ralegh's commercial and colonial involvements. For a discussion of promoters of privateering voyages, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 161-62. 60 See Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 544, 537, 538. 61 Bacon, Syrinx, xix-xx. 62 Roger Pooley, ed., The Green Knight: Selected Poetry and Prose of George Gascoigne (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982), provides a brief account of Gascoigne's life of "failed enterprises" (7-12). 63 Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 125. In the same chapter on Gascoigne, Crewe gives an interesting reading of The Adventures of Master F.J. in terms of the author's frustrated courtly ambitions. 64 Another explanation for the meaning of "green" appears in "Dan Bartholomew of Bath," an explanation which Gascoigne evidently had revised by the time he wrote the Green Knight poem: In his Ensigne these collours gan he chuse, Blacke, white, and green,firstblacke for morning mone, Then white for chaste, because he did refuse, (Thenceforth) to thinke both even of hir alone. A bende of greene: for though his joyes were gone, Yet should it seeme he hoped for a daye, And in that bende his name he dyd displaye.

(The Poesies, 135)

Reprinted in The Complete Works, ed. Cunliffe. 65 Apart from the common term "labour" linking Mandeville's adventure to Tudor voyages, other connective devices include using the conclusion to Mandeville's travels to forecast "our English voyages, euen in our times" in the following chapter, or suggesting Mandeville's prior presence at places visited by Tudor voyagers: "here Mandeuil, perhaps, had bin" (Albions England, 270, 284). 66 Other voyagers include Thomas Wyndham, William Tower son, John Hawkins, Richard Grenville, John Chilton, John Oxnam, Edward Fenton, Luke Ward, and John Davis.

2

SEA-KNIGHTS AND ROYAL VIRGINS: AMERICAN GOLD AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN LODGE'S A MARGARITE OF AMERICA

1 All references to The Faerie Queene are from the edition by Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1978). 2 Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana is reprinted in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations,

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3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Notes to pages 40-43 12 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), X: 380. All subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Thomas Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 92-98. In "Elizabethan Tobacco," Representations 21 (Winter 1988), Jeffrey Knapp states that Spenser could not be warning in 1590 about an enterprise which Ralegh undertook five years later (29). But Ralegh's plans did not mature overnight. In fact, even the goals of the early Virginia voyages included the acquisition of gold through either piracy or discovery. As Kenneth R. Andrews explains, "Raleigh had been one of the most active promoters of privateering since the onset of war [with Spain in 1585], and it was a natural and logical sequel for a man of such ambition to employ his privateering resources in the search for gold." Again, "privateering could cover the expenses of colonization" and was, in some cases, "indeed the only way of maintaining such an enterprise." See Elizabethan Privateering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 192, 196. Ralegh was evidently the last of the gold-seekers to be smitten by the legend of El Dorado. Robert Silverberg in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), provides an overview of the historical search for the fabled kingdom, and the specific circumstances of Ralegh's enterprise (307-51). G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals (London: Routledge, 1938), Part 2, 52. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene, 101. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 217, 272, 277, 281. Kenneth R. Andrews discusses the extent of Ralegh's involvement in plunder, "Elizabethan Privateering," in Raleigh in Exeter 1985: Privateering and Colonisation in the Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Joyce Youings (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1985), 1-20. Although Ralegh's career at court prevented him from being a "pirate or patron of pirates," he participated "in the role of privateering promoter, organizer of ventures of single ships, squadrons or huge fleets, and as a privateering captain, admiral and conquistador of the sea" (9). Josephine Roberts, "Lodge's A Margarite of America: A Dystopian Vision of the New World," Studies in Short Fiction 17 (Fall 1980): 407-15; 413. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 54-66; Achsah Guibbory, "'Oh, let me not serve so': the Politics of Love in Donne's Elegies;' ELH 57 (1990): 811-33. John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam: Thieme-Nijmegen, 1965), 108. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530-1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 108. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 16. Andrews, "Elizabethan Privateering," 3. The vnfortunate voyage made with the Iesus, the Minion, andfour other shippes, to the partes of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568, by M. John Hawkins. Principall Navigations (1600; reprint 12 vols., Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903-1905): X. 64-74; quote taken from page 74. By contrast,


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the many occasions in which the crew eluded bad weather or Spanish "treason" serve as evidence that God is on the English side (73-74). 16 David Beers Quinn, Raleigh and the British Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 19-20. 17 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 3-24. 18 Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory, and the Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 329. 19 Thomas Churchyard, A Prayre, and Reporte of Maister Martyne Forboishers Voyage to Meta Incognita (London: Andrew Maunsell, 1578). 20 A. E. W. Mason, The Life of Francis Drake (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1941), 137. 21 David Beers Quinn, Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1939), II: 438. These themes are recurrent in the other commendatory verses to Peckham's book. 22 William S. Maltby in The Black Legend in England, 1558-1660 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967), provides a detailed discussion of the "black legend" in English history. See especially 12-35; 58-81; 100-16; 117-33. 23 The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 257-61. 24 Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 191. 25 According to E. C. Wilson in England's Eliza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), "Elizabeth took share in Hawkins's slave trade and lent a large ship of her own, the Jesus, for his second voyage in 1564. She gave him a farewell audience at Enfield, and she welcomed him when he returned. She sent him her physician when he was taken by mistake for Hatton and stabbed" (285). As for Frobisher, Andrews writes: "In the 1560s, Martin Frobisher was arrested three or four times on piracy charges but ended up being employed by Cecil as a ship's captain on government business ("Elizabethan Privateering," 6). In 1576, when Frobisher set out on his first voyage to find a northwest passage to China, the queen was reported to have waved farewell from a window as the ships passed the palace at Greenwich, and to have sent an envoy to bestow her blessing on Frobisher (Richard Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, VII: 204). Before setting sail on his second voyage, this time in search of gold, Frobisher received from Elizabeth a golden chain as a token of her approval. See William McFee, The Life of Sir Martin Frobisher (New York: Harper, 1928), 74. 26 James A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins: The Man and His Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 432. 27 "His ship she caused to be drawne up into a little creek neere Depford upon the Thames . . . And in it being consecrated for a memoriall with great ceremony, she was banquetted, and honoured Drake with the dignity of Knighthood" (E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza, 286, from Camden). See also E. F. Benson, Sir Francis Drake (New York: Harper, 1927), 173-78. Julian Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1889), II: 306-41, especially 310-20. Mason, Life of Francis Drake, 190-205. 28 Neville Williams, The Sea Dogs: Privateers, Plunder and Piracy in the

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Elizabethan Age (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 261. See also Benson, Sir Francis Drake, 174-75. 29 According to Andrews, Ralegh "played a major role" in the 1592 looting of the Madre de Dios, the 1596 plunder following the sack of Cadiz, and the 1597 landing at Fayal ("Elizabethan Privateering," 12). 30 According to George C. Williamson in George, Third Earl of Cumberland 1558-1605 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), the title of Knight of the Garter is only one of several rewards Cumberland received in that year (105-10). The value of the spoils from the Madre de Dios are discussed in Williams, Sea Dogs, 261; Benson, Sir Francis Drake, 174-75. 31 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, X: 104-5. 32 Thomas Greepe, True andperfecte Newes of the woorthy and valiaunt exployts, performed and doone by the valiant Knight Syr Francis Drake (London 1587). 33 Other discussions of contemporary interpretations of Una appear in Ray Heffner, "Spenser's Allegory in Book I of The Faerie Queene" Studies in Philology 27 (1930): 142-61; Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene, 59; Nohrnberg, Analogy of The Faerie Queene, 217-18. C. Bowie Millican, "Spencer's and Drant's Poetic Names for Elizabeth: Tanaquil, Gloriana, and Una," Huntington Library Quarterly 2.3 (Apr. 1939): 251-63. Robin Headlam Wells comments on the Marian imagery of Elizabeth in Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth (London: Croon Helm, 1983), 17-18. 34 Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 114-86. 35 For sermons, see Edmond Harris, A sermon preached at Brocket Hall (London 1588) and Simon Harward, Solace for the Souldier and the Say lor (London 1592). Among ballad-writers, Thomas Deloney in 1588 went to press three times with four ballads. "The ouerthrow of proud Holofornes, and the triumph of vertuous Queene Judith" was entered in the Stationers' Register on March 23; "The Queenes visiting of the Campe at Tillsburie" and "The Happie Obtaining of the Great Galleazzo" on August 10; and "The straunge and most creull Whippes which the Spanyards had prepared to torment English men and women"on August 31. See Francis Oscar Mann's notes to these ballads in his edition of The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Other ballads eulogize the pirates turned Armada heroes, with Drake appearing in several ballads as lover of the queen. See James Orchard Halliwell, ed., The Early Naval Ballads of England (London: Richards, 1841), 17-27. 36 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (1823; reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1966), II: 119n, quoted by E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza, 286. Like most Renaissance symbols, the crow is ambiguous in meaning. See, for example, Valeriano Bolzani's glosses on cornix and corvus in Hieroglyphica (1602) ed. P. Frelon (New York: Garland, 1976). A possible association is the upstart crow as Drake's reference to his own upward mobility, a reference that would seem to defy the term's generally pejorative application. Yet another possibility is the water crow or cormorant, a predatory bird suggestive of Drake's career as a pirate. 37 Charles Fitzgeffrey, Sir Francis Drake his honorable Life's commendation, and his tragical death's Lamentation (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1596).


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38 While agreeing that many of Elizabeth's Catholic subjects remained loyal to her, historians differ on the extent of that loyalty and the division of attitude between clergy and laity. Arnold Pritchard argues in Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), that the Catholic laity adopted an "essentially passive attitude" until the Gunpowder Plot (39). In The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1978), Adrian Morey states that while the priests were on the whole militant, "there was little evidence that the English Catholics were prepared to take their politics from their priests" (90). On the other hand, Peter Holmes in Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 182845, and J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 149-54, believe there was no clear division between priests and layfolk. 39 Morey, The Catholic Subjects, 136. 40 John Parker, Books to Build an Empire, 115. 41 Edward Tenney, Thomas Lodge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935), 89 n.2. Tenney's opinion follows from his discussion of Lodge's life and education (78-89). Trinity was the place which "nurtured many of the Roman persuasion" (57). There is reason to assume that "Thomas was the Lodge" in question, as his name appeared along with that of Thomas Loddington, Lodge's cousin (79). The granting of the MA degree was contingent upon the supplicant's subscription to the articles of the Protestant faith, which requirement "had been made more exacting in February and May of 1580" (80). Discovered recusants faced, among other penalties, the confiscation of their property. Tenney's deduction also points forward to his discussion of Lodge's works, in particular, Robin the Devill, Catharos: Diogenes in his Singularities and Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Senses, all containing Catholic doctrine and published in 1591 when Lodge was off on a privateering voyage and out of reach of the authorities (104-10), as well as the openly heretical works, The Divel Coniured, and Prosopopeia Containing the Teares of. . . Marie, the Mother of God, published in April and November of 1596, shortly after which Lodge left England to live in France (147-49, 152-54). 42 Tenney, Thomas Lodge, 90. 43 Tenney, ibid., 110, discusses this point and cites the following passage from Euphues Shadow: "Thou art greeued in that thou art banished thy country, dispised of thy prince, exiled from the court, beguiled of thy contents, as if to a wiseman all countries are not one? . . . Why, my Anthenor, all exile is but opinion, and good husbandmen thriue as well in America as in Asia . . . " {Complete Works, II, 102). 44 David Beers Quinn, ed., The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish 1591-1592 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 20-33. 45 Cavendish's account appears, with passages suppressed, in Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), XVI, 146-77; entire in Quinn, Last Voyage, 51-143. John Jane's account appears in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations 1X1, 389-416; and Anthony Knevet's in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes XIV, 177-89.

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Notes to page 50

46 References to Lodge's works are from Edmund Gosse's edition of The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883). 47 In Writings and Correspondence, Hakluyt explains the strategic importance of the Strait in 1580 (140). See also David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America 1481-1620, (New York: Knopf, 1974), 288. Although the English never did succeed in taking the Strait, the idea was pursued in the 1570s and 1580s. See Zelia Nuttall, ed. New Light on Drake (London: Hakluyt Society, 1914), 11. 48 Antonio Pigafetta's diary account of Magellan's trial and execution of mutineers at Port Saint Julian appears in Donald Gordon Payne, Magellan and the First Circumnavigation of the World (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 106. Payne analyzes the controversy surrounding the incident (106-11). Drake's trial and execution of Doughty at the Port was likewise controversial, being riddled with the political infighting between Cecil's party favoring peace and Walsingham's party favoring war with Spain. See Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, 62-75; Benson, Sir Francis Drake, 108-39; Mason, Life of Francis Drake, 100-10; Derek Wilson, The World Encompassed: Drake's Great Voyage 1577-1580 (London: Hamilton, 1984), 84-90. English sailors had Magellan's executions on their minds when they landed at Port St. Julian, for they identified the spruce mast and bones they found on shore with Magellan's gibbet and mutineers. Most historians believe that Doughty was guilty of insubordination rather than sedition, and that Drake sacrificed him to assert the authority of his own command. Benson, Sir Francis Drake, stresses, however, Drake's belief in Doughty's guilt (127), dismissing Corbett's argument, Drake and the Tudor Navy, that Drake's action amounted to a "rechristening" of the Strait (72). But such interpretation overlooks Drake's reputation as "a brilliant manipulator of men" (Wilson World Encompassed, 95). It also downplays the religious symbolism attending the execution. As witnesses corroborate in their accounts, the event commenced with a Protestant service in which both Drake and Doughty participated. Just before he was to be beheaded, Doughty proclaimed his innocence, and remarked on the shortness of his neck, a jesting reference comparing himself to the Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas More. 49 Quinn, Last Voyage, 24-33. 50 Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools had four English versions, two editions each of the translations by Watson (1509, 1517) and Barclay (1509, 1570), compared with twenty-eight German editions from 1494 to 1670. Brant's remarks on geography as vain curiosity were retained by Barclay but largely omitted by Watson, except for a few lines on the discovery of the New World. See Fr. Aurelius Pompen, The English Versions of The Ship of Fools (New York: Longmans, 1925), 14-19; 222-27. The first praise of exploration is John Rastell's Four Elements (1520), in which Experience is seen teaching Studious Desire about the wonders voyagers reveal of the New World (lines 659-879; 1049-134). 51 John Madoxe, A learned and Godly Sermon, to be read of all men, but especially for all Marryners, Captaynes, and Passengers, which trauell the Seas (1581).


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52 David Quint, "The Boat of Romance and Renaissance Epic," in Romance: Generic Transformations from Chretien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 178-202, observes that the negative and positive treatments of the merchant's boat in literature owe much to the implicit distinctions between epic and romance expectations. 53 These tales were appended to Lodge's historical romance, The Life and Death of William Long beard, the most famous and witty English Traitor, borne in the Citty of London (1593). Reprinted in The Complete Works. 54 James Clifford, "Of Ethnographic Allegory," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 101. 55 Thus Josephine Roberts, "Lodge's A Margarite of America," claims that Margarita's virginity makes her "an effective symbol for the innocence of the New World, which will be all too vulnerable to the deceptions and assaults of civilization, as demonstrated by Arsadachus's seduction" (412). I cannot imagine, however, how an Old World native comes to serve as a New World symbol, and vice versa. 56 The OED cites several usages of the term "arsadine" (also "arsedine," "assidue," "orsidue," etc.): Nashe in Saffron Waldon: "As day-light [is] beyond candle-light, or tinsell or leaf-gold aboue arsedine"; in Lenten Stuffe: "A London vintner signe . . . fringed with theaming arsedine"; and Jonson in Bartholomew Fair: "Puft vp with the pride of your . . . Arsedine." 57 T. S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), discusses the goals (2-3) and membership of the Muscovy company (9-16). His "Biographical Appendix" contains valuable information on individual members (75-132). His later book, The Early History of the Russia Company 1553-1603 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), provides a broader view of the continuing membership through Elizabeth's reign. The names cited in the text are taken from both sources. 58 Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, 110-29. The backing for the first slaving voyage "consisted of two elements: [Hawkins] himself, Benjamin Gonson (treasurer of the queen's navy) and William Winter (surveyor of the queen's navy); and a syndicate of big London merchants headed by Sir Lionel Ducket and Sir Thomas Lodge" (110). "Hawkins's second voyage had the support of the queen, the earls of Leicester and Pembroke and Lord Clinton, Lord Admiral of England, in addition to that of Gonson, Winter, and the Londoners" (117). See also James A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins, 78-116, 142-202. 59 Anne Falke, "The 'Marguerite' and the 'Margarita'" in Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America," Neophilologus 70 (1986): 142-54. 60 I am referring to Arsadachus plot to murder Thebion, who has aided the prince in previous murders and must now be silenced. To enlist Margarita's help, Arsadachus tells her that Thebion plots to kill her father and usurp the kingdom. Roberts reads "Lodge's A Margarite of America," events as follows: "Through the manipulation of Margarita's trust, Arsadachus succeeds in turning her into an unwitting ally by convincing her that in order to

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prevent her father's death she must claim to have had a dream in which one of the villain's enemies murdered the king. The gullible Margarita follows the instructions and thereby helps to incriminate an innocent man, who dies as a result of her well-intentioned lies" (412). This reading oversimplifies the moral issue involved here. Although Thebion is innocent of treason, he is certainly not an innocent man. Of course, even a guilty man deserves a trial and not murder. Indeed, Margarita herself raises this basic issue of justice when she asks why Thebion shouldn't be charged openly, and even offers to "discover it [the treason] presently and plainely." But her doubts are evidently quelled when Arsadachus claims that subterfuge is necessary to win her father's affection towards him, so that "both our fortunes shall be bettered, our marriage hasted, and our fames magnified" (35). Margarita's abdication from justice renders her all the more culpable. E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza, 273-320, and Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, 108-10,117. Claudette Pollack, "Lodge's A Margarite of America: An Elizabethan Medley," Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1976), 8. Prosopopeia was published in November, 1596. According to Tenney, in January, 1597, Lodge was sworn into the University of Avignon, where he pursued a degree in physic {Thomas Lodge, 158). Edward Edwards, The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1868), I: 142-43. Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 39. Silverberg, The Golden Dream, 336. Chapman's poem is appended to A Relation of the second Voyage to Guiana performed and written in the yeere 1596. by Laurence Keymis Gent. Both were reprinted in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, X: 441-46; 446-51. Line references to De Guiana carmen epicum are cited from Phyllis B. Bartlett's edition of The Poems of George Chapman (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 353-57. Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 22-24, 106; and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 147-48. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, VIII: 350. McFee, The Life of Sir Martin Frobisher, 76-81. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, VIII: 331. The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1612), reprinted in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), 3 vols., ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), I: 218. Pollack, "Lodge's A Margarite of America," 3-4. See James Clyde Addison Jr.'s notes to his edition of A Margarite of America (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanstik), 67n, 70n, 136n.

Notes to pages 62-64 3

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JACK OF NEWBERY AND DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA: DOMESTIC AND COLONIAL NARRATIVES OF ENGLISH CLOTH AND MANHOOD

1 Eugene P. Wright, Thomas Deloney (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 17. 2 G. D. Ramsay, "Clothworkers, Merchants Adventurers and Richard Hakluyt," English Historical Review 92 (1977): 514-21. 3 Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6. 4 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen, 1978). As Elias explains, Europe's transition from the feudal aristocracy to the centralized state provided "the representatives of a small, secular-bourgeois intellectual class, and thus Erasmus . . . an opportunity to rise in social station, to gain renown and authority" (73). Barbara Correll further elaborates the role of gender in the making of bourgeois male identity in "Malleable Material, Models of Power: Woman in Erasmus's 'Marriage Group' and Civility in Boys'' ELH 57 (1990), 241-62. 5 Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; reprint, New York: Kelley, 1968), 97-124, especially 102-03. For a parallel discussion, see Pearl Hogrefe, Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), 50-58. Conditions were markedly different for women weavers in England's declining silk trade, which remained relatively non-capitalized. Silkwomen were guild members throughout the fifteenth century, and later on weavers of both sexes were protected by statute against foreign competition (Clark, Working Life, 138-40). See also Marian K. Dale, "The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century," Economic History Review IV (1932-34): 324-35. Indeed, the wool trade would seem to provide the first index to the decline of economic status for English women workers, since other trades remained open to female apprentices and members well into the eighteenth century. See K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 270-76. Critiques of Clark appear in Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), xiv-xvii; and Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 30-41. Their discussions revise Clark's overall thesis but do not affect her points about female weavers in the cloth industry. While disputing Clark's claim that women's work was highly valued in preindustrial Europe, historians agree that "medieval women had more access to high-status and independent employment than women did later" (Hanawalt, Women and Work, xv). Although in most trades the rise of capitalist production occurred in the eighteenth century (a century later than Clark suggests), cloth was evidently the exception. From the late Middle Ages through the early modern period, capitalist production in the cloth industry was largely organized on the "domestic" or "putting out" system, and a few very rich clothiers like John Winchcombe and Henry Stumpe operated on the

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"factory" system. See G. D. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1965), and E. Lipson, The History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (London: Cass, 1965). 6 Francis Oscar Mann, ed. The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 7 See Hogrefe, Tudor Women, on the widow's inheritance and laws governing the property of the femme coverte (12-13, 23); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1550-1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 136-37. In Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 281-85, Alan Macfarlane distinguishes between the wife's personal property (chattel) that becomes the husband's upon marriage, and her real estate that remains hers unless formally transferred to her husband. To this property, the husband has rights of use during the marriage, or, by a provision termed "courtesy," during his lifetime should she predecease him (272-75). In Jack of Newbery, it would seem that Jack controls and eventually inherits both chattel and real estate. 8 James Lee Traylor, "The Thematic Use of Courtship and Marriage in Thomas Deloney's Novels: A Study in the Origins of Realism in Elizabethan Fiction" (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University 1977), 45-48. 9 Constance Jordan, "The 'Art of Clothing': Role-Playing in Deloney's Fiction," English Literary Renaissance 11.2 (Spring 1981), 185. 10 According to Mann, Works, several of Deloney's ballads published in 1588 rode the crest of national pride during the Armada campaign. "The ouerthrow of proud Holofornes, and the triumph of vertuous Queene Iudith" was entered in the Stationers' Register on March 23; on August 10, "The Queenes visiting of the Campe at Tillsburie" and "The Happie Obtaining of the Great Galleazzo"; August 31, "The straunge and most creull Whippes which the Spanyards had prepared to torment English men and women." On the other hand, some of his works were considered subversive. In 1595, he was among several jailed for printing the "Book for the Silk weavers," a complaint (now lost) against foreign competitors in the silk trade. A year later, copies of his "Ballad on the Want of Corn" (also lost) were burned for its potential to incite the poor and discontented. Strype's edition of Stow's Survey of London (1720) says that the ballad was evidently offensive to Elizabeth I, "as it contained in it certain vain and presumptuous matters, bringing in the Queen, speaking with her People Dialogue wise in very fond and undecent sort" (vi-ix). See also Wright, Thomas Deloney, 18, 26-29. 11 There are also two shorter songs on manly prudence and the choice of a wife (Mann, Works, 4, 7-8). 12 The phrase is Deloney's. Jordan uses it to refer to the role-play by which Jack both expresses his social aspirations and "tests the limits of his world" ("The 'Art of Clothing,'" 188). I see our approaches as complementary. While Jordan focuses on specific moments in Jack's gradual creation and assumption of an ideal self through the symbolism of clothing, I emphasize his participation through the practice of his trade in society's symbolic order that structures class and gender relations.


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13 Eric Kerridge provides the following assessment of the ballad in Textile Manufacture in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985): "In his Pleasant History of John Winchcombe (1633), Thomas Deloney tells us 'Jack of Newbery' had two hundred looms and two hundred men who 'wrought in these loomes all in a row', the authenticity of which may be judged for the fact that this John Winchcombe the elder expired a hundred years and more before Deloney put pen to paper, that our poet says he was a broad cloth weaver when he was really a kersey clothier, and that no building in the world could have accommodated such a long row of looms" (177). In addition, Kenneth G. Ponting in The Woollen Industry of SouthWest England (London: Adam & Dart, 1971) remarks that hand-spinning was one process "which very few people ever succeeded in bringing to the factory . . . It is doubtful whether Stumpe or Jack of Newbury or Hodgkin did this" (24). In this light, the ballad's location of spinners in Jack's factory would seem to be a deliberate invention to emphasize Jack's domestication of his female workers. 14 DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 30, 37-40. 15 Patricia Klindienst Joplin, "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours," Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984), 31. Classical examples of weavers cited include two versions of Philomela by Sophocles and Ovid, Penelope, Arachne, the bacchantes in The Bacchae, and the wives in Lysistrata (25-28, 31-33, 47-48). Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), discusses the figure of Lavinia, Shakespeare's remake of Philomela in Titus Andronicus, who refuses to be silenced by the double mutilation of tongue and hands, but finds a means to expose her rape and rapists (243-48). Her determination bears a marked contrast to Deloney's acquiescent women. 16 David Herlihy in Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) discusses the important role played by women in the oral transmission of skills and values. Both on the continent and in England, there were "women's workshops" where young girls learned from women instructors and supervisors the skills needed for adult life. Such skills included cloth-making, for the women's workshops "played a central role in cloth production . . . over the first half of the Middle Ages" (86-91). As more and more men took up cloth-making, the skills of the trade were no doubt also passed on by men to apprentices of both sexes. On the other hand, literacy remained a male privilege, since girls usually learned to read but rarely to write while boys were taught both skills. This situation continued even as education became more widespread and affordable in early modern England. In The Growth of English Education 1348-1648: A Social and Cultural History (Union Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), Michael Van Cleave Alexander further notes that education for women suffered a "staggering blow" with the Reformation (122). 17 Clark, Working Life of Women, notes that "the labour of women predominated" in "the two textile trades through which capitalism made in England its most striking advances - the woollen trade, and in later years, the cotton

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trade" (98). The association of spinning and carding with domestic propriety for working women bears comparison with the more prestigious "domestication of embroidery" in this period, the subject of Rozsika Parker's brilliant analysis in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women's Press, 1984). As Parker shows, the period's emerging notion of embroidery as an essentially feminine skill "conceals the fact that up to the eighteenth century the majority of embroiderers to the Kings were men" (60). More specifically, in the sixteenth century embroidery "served two functions: endowing an education with elevated class associations, and making an education, which might otherwise have been deemed dangerously masculine, safely feminine" (73). R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds. Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. (New York: Longmans, 1924), III: 127-28. Ibid., 145-46. Jordan, "The 'Art of Clothing,'" 184-88; Wright, Thomas Deloney, 54-55; Laura Stevenson O'Connell, "The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale: Aspects of an Adolescent Social Consciousness," in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 267-90, esp. 285. My discussion of Jack's "social power" is indebted to Stevenson, who sees its thematization in the story as "a serious attempt to reconcile chivalric motifs and bourgeois service" (272-73). However, while Stevenson finds the work "circumscribed by precapitalist assumptions" in its adherence to the values of the elite (274), I would point to the aim of social transcendence implicit in Jack's use of power. Such social transcendence, as I shall argue later, derives from an economic perspective of social relations which no longer conforms to traditional views of the social hierarchy. Traylor in "Thematic Use of Courtship" traces a thematic parallel between the two kinds of government throughout the narrative (48-51). I do not, however, share his optimistic assessment of women's place within the domestic and social arrangements indicated by this doctrine. In England, the efforts of Tudor humanists and preachers are an important part of what Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, calls the "reinforcement of patriarchy" through state propaganda and the Protestant pulpit (109-13). Gorden Schochet examines political traditions of Tudor patriarchalism in Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 37-53. Ann Rosalind Jones discusses class-specific elaborations of the same ideology in sixteenth-century conduct books in her essay, "Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics," in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 59-63. Jonathan Goldberg analyzes pictorial representations of patriarchalism in "Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images," Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3-32. In An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), Susan Dwyer Amussen


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points to the persistence of the analogy between family and state until the time of Locke (34-66). Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 52, 24-30. Joan Thirsk discusses this point in the Introduction to Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). See especially 1-4. Acceptance of the social hierarchy does not preclude social aspirations. J. P. Cooper's "Ideas of Gentility in Early Modern England" in Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early-Modern History, ed. G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 43-77, examines the criteria for acquiring nobility discussed in various works in the period. Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 4 8 ^ 9 . In " 'A Mingled Yarn': Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers," Literature and History 12.2 (1986), Wilson sees Jack of Newbery as "nostalgically evoking a world of fellowship and social mobility that was, in fact, fast coming to an end with the exclusion of journeymen from mastership in their guilds" (172). As Ramsay points out in "Clothworkers," the two sides in this dispute were never entirely clearcut, given the overlapping membership of the two corporations (512). Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects. Thirsk finds that the scandal continued through the reign of James (51-77). According to Ramsay, "Clothworkers," the statute further directs that "all cloths made in Kent and Suffolk might be exported only when dressed," and Walsingham's 1574 license included Kentish and Suffolk cloths (504-05; 508-11). Ibid., 504. Mann briefly explains this point in his notes to Deloney, Jack of Newbery, 29, lines 12-36 and, 43 line 42 (Works, 514, 517). According to Ramsay, although the crown abolished monopolies in 1601 and in 1614 withdrew privileges from the Merchants Adventurers, these changes came too late for the Clothworkers ("Clothworkers," 513). Ramsay refers to the preface to the 1589 edition of Principall Navigations in which Hakluyt singles out as his patron one Richard Staper, since 1576 an elected warden of the company who actively defended its claims against the Merchants Adventurers. Indeed, Ramsay sees the work as a "deft but weighted collection of writings pointing to the longer range trades as a national or potential national asset," and creating the climate of opinion which led to the demise of the Merchants Adventurers in 1614 ("Clothworkers," 521). I discuss Hakluyt's ties to the Clothworkers in the introduction to this chapter. The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), II: 235-37. This arrangement refers specifically to the Virginia enterprise run by a joint stock company interested in realizing profits from the voyages. The one exception was John White's settlement in Virginia in 1585, which disappeared

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without a trace after 1586, and which history was to mythologize as the "lost colony." See Robert D. Arthur, The Lost Colony in Literature (Raleigh: North Carolina Dept of Cultural Resources, 1985). By contrast, the New England settlements, organized around households, were not primarily concerned with trade. Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 124. Anthony Pagden traces this view of barbarism to classical and Christian sources in The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15-26. Quoted by Sheehan, Savagism and Civility, 117. This statement is reproduced in one form or another by all colonial advocates. In Good Speed to Virginia (1610), for example, Robert Grey exhorts prospective colonists thus: "Oh how happy were that man which could reduce this people from brutishness, to ciuilitie, to religion, to Christianize, to the sauing of their soules." See Wesley F. Craven, ed. Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia 1609-1613 (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), sig. C3. For a comprehensive discussion of the monogenetic theory, see Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 207-53, especially 222-51. Hugh G. Dick, ed. Selected Writings of Francis Bacon (New York: Random House, 1955), 91. Bacon goes on to say that "when the plantation grows in strength, then it is time to plant with women as well as with men; that the plantation may spread into generations, and not be ever pieced from without" (92). Hakluyt, Original Writings, ed. Taylor, 216-17. David Beers Quinn, ed. Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), II: 461. This is the focus of Louis B. Wright's inquiry in Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion 1558-1625 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943). David B. Quinn, "Early Accounts of the Famous Voyage," in Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage 1577-1580, ed. Norman J. W. Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 34, 41, 42. Columbus himself spread the fiction in his Letter on his first voyage, of which many contemporary editions and translations were printed. See J. M. Cohen, ed. and trans., The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 118-19. Another instance appears in Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World, translated by Richard Eden in The First Three English Books on America (1555), ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: Constable, 1895), 66. The Cortez connection can be traced to Francisco Lopez de Gomara, The Conquest of the Weast India (1578), trans. Thomas Nicholas (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1940), which relates both this fiction (57, 81, 83, 161, 167), and another, that Moctezuma, the ruler of Mexico, believed Cortez to be Mexico's new conquerer sent by the Aztec gods (163, 172). Later versions of the "Indian" perception of European divinity in the writings of Jose de Acosta, Thomas Hariot, Ralph Lane, and John Smith are discussed in


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Sheehan, Savagism and Civility (164-65) and Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (17). Stephen Greenblatt engages the fiction from the perspective of the elaboration of power through the invention and containment of its subversion in "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V" in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18-47. William Hamlin discusses English versions of the myth in "Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Hariot, and Ralegh in the Americas," Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 405-23; especially 405-11. 46 Clifford, "Of Ethnographic Allegory," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 98-121. Clifford sees ethnography as "a performance emplotted by powerful stories," stories which are allegorical in that they "simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional moral, ideological, and even cosmological statements" (98). He further notes that "more or less explicit biblical or classical allegories abound in the early descriptions of the New World" (101). 47 Sir Richard Carnac Temple, ed. The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporary Documents Concerning Sir Francis Drake's Circumnavigation of the World (\926; reprint, New York: Cooper Square, 1969), 184. The Hakluyt narrative also appears in Principall Navigations, 12 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1904), IX: 319-26. 48 Temple, The World Encompassed (53). Subsequent page references are cited parenthetically in the text. 49 Stubbes, Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespere's Youth (1583), ed. F. J. Furnivall, (London: Trubner, 1877-79), Part I, 36, 37-38. For a parallel interpretation of the clothing of Adam and Eve, see the portion of Rypon's sermon on Magdalene quoted by G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 404-05. 50 According to the Hakluyt version, "The men goe naked; the women take bulrushes and kembe them after the manner of hempe, and thereof make their loose garments, which being knit about their middles, hang downe about their hippes, hauing also about their shoulders a skin of deere, with the hair upon it" (184). Drake gives a moralized description: "Their men for the most part goe naked; the women take a kinde of bulrushes, and kembing it after the manner of hemp, make themselues thereof a loose garment, which being knitte about their middles, hanges down about their hippes, and so affordes to them a couering of that which nature teaches should be hidden; about their shoulders they weare also the skin of a deere, with the haire vpon it" (54). 51 Drake writes that the Indians "came now the second time vnto vs, bringing with them, as before had beene done, feathers and bagges of Tobah for presents, or rather indeed for sacrifices, vpon this perswasion that we were gods" (55). Again, the Indians "came downe with their presents; in such sort as if they had appeared before a God indeed, thinking themselues happy that they might haue access vnto our Generall . . . and no doubt they thought themselues neerest vnto God when they sate or stood next to him" (55-56).

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54 55

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Notes to pages 82-86 At the Englishmen's departure, the Indians, "seeing they could not still enioy our presence, they (supposing vs to be gods indeed) thought it their duties to intreate vs that, being absent, we would yet be mindfull of them, and making signes of their desires that in time to come wee would see them againe, they stole vpon vs a sacrifice, and set it on fire ere we were aware, burning therein a chaine and bunch of feathers" (63). Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 1863. 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), I: 7, 18, 22. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds. The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953), IV: 265, 267. The other occupations are those of carpenter, to build God's house on earth, and shipwright, to ferry the faithful and their converts to heaven. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), XIX: 252. For example, see Julian S. Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, 1898. 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, 1912), I: 290-93, and E. F. Benson, Sir Francis Drake (New York: Harper, 1927), 160-61. EROS AND SCIENCE: THE DISCOURSES OF MAGICAL CONSUMERISM

1 For a discussion of the moral conception of economy, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 24-51. 2 Jeffrey Knapp, "Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene 1," ELH 54 (1987), 801-34. Reprinted in Knapp, An Empire Nowhere. 3 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978), 1.1.14-26, especially stanza 14. 4 Sut Jhally discusses the historical relation between fetishism and magic in Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (London: Pinter, 1987), 53-56. 5 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 15. 6 Sir Thomas Smith, A Discourse of the Commoneweal of this realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 64. 7 Smith, ibid., warns against "excesses" of apparel in men as the sign and source of effeminacy. The English were more dreaded by their enemies, Smith claims, "when our gentlemen went simply and our servingmen plainly without cut or garde [decorative incision and trim in garments], bearing their heavy sword and buckler on their thighs instead of cuts and gardes and light dancing swords; and when they rode carrying good spears in their hands instead of white rods [canes] which they carry now more like ladies or gentlewomen than men, all which delicacies make our men clean effeminate and without strength" (82-83). 8 As Neville Williams writes in Powder and Paint: A History of Englishwomen's Toilet, Elizabeth I-Elizabeth //(London: Longmans, 1957), "Large quantities of mirrors came over to England from the great international market in the Netherlands - many of them being of Venetian manufacture. 'Penny ware


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looking glasses' became a frequent entry in custom accounts; their wholesale value in 1558 was eight shillings a gross, and 'half-penny ware' mirrors half that price" (11-12). 9 William Warner, Albion's England (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), book 9, 217. Also mentioned in Williams, Powder and Paint, 11. 10 All citations are from F. W. Lairholt, ed., Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume (London: Percy Society, 1849), Early English Poetry Series, XXVII, 106-17. 11 I use the term "misrecognize" as formulated by Jacques Lacan in "The Mirror Stage," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 6. In this connection, "Pride's Fall" illustrates precisely the role of fancy in the cultural production - and misrecognition - of the female consumer. Both the looking-glass and the mirror tradition dramatize the female subject's imaginary encounter with an ego-ideal, with the former being absorbed into and moralized by the latter. 12 loan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 87-142. 13 "The Pedlar," in Fairholt, ed., Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume, 101-2. 14 As Couliano, Eros and Magic, points out, in the discourse of eros this detachment is gendered as masculine, the voice being linked with semen (101). 15 Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses in England in Shakespeare's Youth (1583), ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Trubner, 1877-79), 72. Furnivall's notes to pp. 62-64 of the Anatomie cites several literary instances in which women "turn a number of their beholders to stone" or "draw many eyes to gaze on hir" (254-57). 16 Citations are from the Pelican edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Press, 1977). The rest of Autolycus' speech has overtones of trifles as the relics of Catholic idolatry (4.4.589-96). In Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 4.3.109-10, a similar reference to gelding is made by a pickpocket about Numps, who likewise loses himself in a ballad. 17 Barnabe Riche, Riche his Farewell to Militarie profession (1581); reprinted as Eight Novels Employed by Dramatic Poets of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), 4. 18 Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), 1-30, 128. 19 George Pettie, A Petite Pallace ofPettie His Pleasure (1576), 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), I: 9. 20 Riche's diagnosis of effeminacy in the male consumer exemplifies what Laura Levine sees as an underlying anxiety in this period regarding the instability of the male self. See "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642," Criticism 28 (1986), 121-43. However, the alignment of effeminacy with consumption also reasserts gender divisions by reciprocally defining the agents of commercial manipulation as truly masculine. 21 Riche is, of course, ironic towards the social circumstances that required him to sell love stories to eke out a living. But his irony presupposes the gendered logic of commercial manipulation.

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22 All references to Greville's Of commerce are from The Works in Verse and Prose Complete, 4 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grossart (1870; reprint, New York: AMS, 1966), vol. I. 23 Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18-47; Peter Hulme, "Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Modern Colonial Discourse," in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker et al. 2 vols. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), II: 17-32. 24 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797(London: Methuen, 1986), 167. 25 The greed of promoters was also to blame. It resulted in the scarcity of farmers among the first settlers, most of whom were sent there to extract commodities for use and sale in England. 26 See, for example, Greenblatt's treatment of Spenser's "Bower of Bliss" in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 172-85. 27 David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (New York: Knopf, 1974), 391. 28 James Rosier's account is reprinted as A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, in Early English and French Voyages 1534-1608, ed. Henry Burrage (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 388. 29 Francis Bacon, Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, 1955), 491. 30 Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), discusses the cognitive "chaos" that confronts European explorers in the New World, and the narrative strategies they use to create order in their experience (21-24). Greenblatt, in "Invisible Bullets," comments on the "scientific" assumptions informing Hariot's "catalogue" or "inventory" of commodities that Virginia produces (24). Patricia Parker in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), discusses the associations of the inventory with the rhetoric of invention, and the gender and commercial motives it inscribes (126-54). 31 The term "vex" is Bacon's. In Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), Evelyn Fox Keller points to the constructedness of natural law, with which nature must be "vexed" into conformity (36). 32 William Leiss, The Dominion of Nature (New York: Braziller, 1972), deals with overtones of magic in Bacon's attitude toward science (60). Leiss' chapter on Bacon is generally helpful to my analysis. It is only after Bacon that science began to differentiate itself from magic (74). 33 Keller, Reflections, 33-43. 34 Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, reprinted as Thomas Hariot's Virginia, 1588 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966) 27, 25, 29. The claim that Indians perceived the English as gods is an indirect one. In Hariot's words, the Indians "thought they were rather the workes of gods then of men, or at leastwise they had bin giuen and taught vs


35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44

45

46 47

48

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of the gods" (27). The phrase "at leastwise" implies that at most the Indians believed the inventions were the work of gods. See note 45 to chapter 3. Hulme discusses the same episode in "Polytropic Man," 17-32, especially 21. Although he does not examine the compass demonstration in detail, he locates it within the larger context of the scientific advances that made possible the age of exploration, and that infused explorers with a sense of their superiority to other peoples. All citations are from The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), 3 vols., ed. Philip Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Barbour, ibid., discusses the authorship of various chapters of The Proceedings, and suggests that chapter 3 could have been the work of Anas Todkill, although the name of Thomas Studley also appears (I: 195). Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14-17. See chapter 1. As Ann Rosalind Jones cogently demonstrates in The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), professional women writers occupy "negotiated positions" often ironic and even oppositional - with respect to the hegemonic institution of "male-authored love poetry" (2-3). In her study of eighteenth-century female hawkers and singers of ballads, Paula McDowell has shown that, however disadvantaged, these women often played an active role in the politics of opinion; see "The Women of Grub Street: Gender, Press, and Politics in the London Literary Marketplace, 1688-1730" (doctoral diss.: Stanford University, 1991), 51-56. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 12. In fact, the colonists were very much masterless men, faced with a situation in which authority was in flux both among the English and in their relation to the Indians. This discussion will be taken up in chapter 6, which focuses on self-valuation and colonial "ranking." Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling With the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), finds that English settlers themselves were superstitious and fearful that the Indians might use magic against them (viii). Hulme, "Polytropic Man," points to similar episodes in Cortes, Hariot, and Columbus (20-21). Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown 1544-1699 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10-33, reconstructs the chronology from the time Opechankenough was taken away by the Spaniards until his return to America, and concludes that "at least from 1571 onward, [Powhatan and Opechankenough] were acutely aware of the menace from without, as well as the great strength of the white man, long before the English first appeared at Jamestown in 1607" (17). According to David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), Smith probably found out in late December that the Lost Colony had been killed on

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Powhatan's order (374-75). Whether or not he had suppressed the information in writing the True Relation is open to question: had he done so it would cast a different light on his self-presentation. What is clear is that he "maintained a complete silence" in his subsequent publications on Virginia (Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 468). 49 This detail is missing from Smith's True Relation and The Proceedings. 50 In 1609, Smith returned to England to recover from a severe burn induced by a gunpowder accident. At the time, his harsh treatment of Indians had drawn complaints from other members of the council in Virginia, and he left "without yet knowing that the Virginia Company had shown considerable appreciation of his work in Jamestown." In England, he suffered further neglect because his return coincided with the arrival of news of the shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda {Complete Works, I: 122). 51 The episode is reported in chapters 8 and 9, ascribed to Richard Wiffin, William Phettiplace, and Anas Todkill {Complete Works, I: 195). 52 As Kupperman points out, Settling With the Indians, the Dutch were one of the groups from which the English expected treachery (129-30). 53 The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 1: 255. 54 Simon Shepherd, ed., discusses this point in his headnote to Anger's pamphlet, The Women's Sharp Revenge: Five Women's Pamphlets from the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), 30. Read in context with the entire story of Euphues' erotic misadventure, the surfeitor's diatribe could be seen as ironic towards the self-righteous excess of the reformed Euphues. However, the irony would be lost when the diatribe was reprinted separately in 1587 as Euphues his Censure to Philautus, the likely text to which Anger responds. 55 Shepherd, Women's Sharp Revenge, 109. All subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. 56 For the printing history of the Euphues romances, see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 35. 57 Cf. Ann Rosalind Jones' assessment of Sowernam's strategy, which exposes women-baiters in their "transparent attempt to shift guilt onto innocent parties," in "Counterattacks on 'the Bayter of Women': Three Pamphlets of the Early Seventeenth Century," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 55. 58 The pronoun "she" refers strictly to Ester Sowernam, obviously a pseudonym. As Shepherd points out, Women's Sharp Revenge, the issue is one of gender not biological sex; even if the writer was a man, this does not invalidate the feminist argument he advances (86). 59 Constantia Munda might also be a pseudonym for a male writer: see Shepherd, Women's Sharp Revenge (126). 60 Cf. Jones, "Counterattacks," 46. 61 There were male cross-dressers also, of course, who were considered effeminate consumers. 62 Simon Shepherd analyzes the social dynamics of female cross-dressing in


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Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 67-92. 63 Anon., Hie Mulier: or, the Man-Woman (1621) (facsimile reprint Ilkley, Yorkshire: Scholar Press, 1973), B2.v. Men are likewise taken to task for their "effeminate" fashions by the female cross-dresser in Haec Vir, probably written by the same author. The "dialogue relationship" between the two pamphlets suggests their main concern is to maintain gender boundaries (Shepherd, The Women's Sharp Revenge, 84-86). 64 William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 70-71. 5 GENDER, SAVAGERY, TOBACCO: MARKETPLACES FOR CONSUMPTION 1 Sebastian Minister, A treatise of the newe India, trans. Richard Eden (1553), in The first Three English books on America, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: Constable, 1895), 28. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2 For a discussion of the textual history of Columbus' journal, see Cecil Jane, ed. and trans., The Journal of Christopher Columbus (London: Blond, 1968), xv-xxiii. 3 S. Lyman Tyler, Two Worlds: the Indian Encounter with the European 1492-1509 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 103-05. 4 J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (Cleveland: World, 1963), 150-52. The question of value is a relative one. As Lyman Tyler points out, Two Worlds, broken pieces of pottery, worthless from the Spanish perspective, were valuable to islanders who used them on the tips of spears (47). 5 J. M. Cohen, ed., The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 55, 57. 6 See Cohen's annotations in ibid.; also Peter Hulme's fine essay, "Columbus and the Cannibals," in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797(London: Methuen, 1986), 13-43. 7 Cohen, Voyages of Columbus, 120. 8 For the publication history of Columbus' journal, see Jane, Journal of Columbus, xxii; Arber discusses the editions of Eden's translations in his Introduction to The first Three English books on America, xii. 9 As Peckham reasons, True reporte of the late discoveries: "for such be the things, though to us of small value, yet accounted by them of high price and estimation: and soonest will induce theyr Barbarous natures to a likeing and mutuall society with us." Furthermore, trifles are a "faire means" to trade, the foul means being war and conquest. Reprinted in David Beers Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, II vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 2: 451. 10 David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), I: 117. 11 This is one of many subtexts to the Serena episode. For the Irish connection, see Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser's Courteous Pastoral: Book Six of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Julia Lupton, "Home-Making in

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12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23


Ireland: Virgil's Eclogue I and Book VI of The Faerie Queene," Spenser Studies 8 (1990): 119-46. As Andrew Segura points out in Primitivism in The Faerie Queene (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1961), Spenser's cannibals "are a composite of New World, Celtic, and Asiatic savages" (87). For literary sources, see Walter F. Staton, "Italian Pastorals and the Conclusion of the Serena Story," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 6 (1966): 35-42. See, for example, Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 81. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of Guiana, in Richard Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 12 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904), X: 391. As early as 1584-85, English soldiers on an expedition to Virginia financed by Ralegh were forbidden to have sexual relations with native women. The instruction also forbids soldiers to "take any mans goodes forcibly from hym." See David Beers Quinn, ed. The Roanoke Voyages, I: 138. Louis Montrose, in "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (Winter 1991), sees the portrayal of Englishmen's selfpossession as a marker of national and social differences (20-23). George Chapman, De Guiana, carmen epicum (1596) in The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 353-57. For the Irish model of husbandry, see Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, eds., Strangers to That Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Cornwall: TJ Press, 1994), 67, 79. David T. Read, "Hunger of Gold, Mammon's Cave, and the New World Treasure," ELR 20 (1990), 209-32. All quotations are from Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978). Nancy Vickers, " 'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95-115. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 3-19. James Norhnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 713-15. The episode has also been read as a satire on sectarian Puritans for dividing the body of the English Church. See Kenneth Borris, " 'Deuilish Ceremonies': Allegorical Satire of Protestant Extremism in The Faerie Queene VI. viii. 31-51," Spenser Studies VIII (1987), 175-209. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 79-85, analyzes the dualism of the Protestant rhetoric with respect to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Stephen Gosson, Pleasant Quippes for Vpstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (London, 1595), 6. In archery, a butt is "a mark for archery practice; properly a mound or other erection on which the target is set up." According to the OED, "there were usually two butts, one at each extremity of range, hence the frequent mention of a pair of butts" (sb4 2). A prick refers to "the mark aimed at in shooting; the spot in the center of the target, the bull's eye; hence, a target, especially


24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

35

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one at a fixed distance, having such a mark in the center." Rover refers to both "an inconstant lover, a male flirt" and, in archery, "a mark selected at will or at random, and not of any fixed distance from the archer." A pin could be either "a peg, nail, or stud fixed in the centre of a target" (sbl lc) or an ornament fixed in the surface of the apron (sbl le). Paul A. Wellsby, ed. Sermons and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 110,75. J. Meadows Cowper and Frederick J. Furnivall, eds. Four Supplications 1529-1553 (London: Trubner, 1871), Early English Text Society, Extra Series, No. 13,52. Philip Stubbes, Philip Stubbes Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare's Youth, 1583, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, (London: Trubner, 1877-79), 52-53. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), 162. Frederic A. Youngs, Jr., The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 256. See editorial comment to Gosson, Pleasant Quippes, xii. Indeed, the limits to the queen's control over her own image are vividly demonstrated by a private manuscript, The Acts of Queene Elizabeth Allegorized, produced by William Woodwall around 1595. In a section which "treats of pride, as exhibited in new fashions of apparel," a drawing entitled "Queen Elizabeth Allegorized" with its companion verses caricature her as one of seven "monstrous foules which were / in Castle Coeur [England] last seen," arrayed in "flaunting ruffes," an item of high fashion at the end of her reign. Francis M. Kelly mentions the Woodwall illustration in her essay, "Queen Elizabeth and Her Dresses," The Connoisseur 113 (1944), 71-79. See especially pp. 78-79. Jeffrey Knapp, "Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene 1," ELH 54 (1987), 801-34. Reprinted in An Empire Nowhere: England, America and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Barnabe Riche, Riche his Farewell to Militarie profession (1581), reprint as Eight Novels Employed by English Dramatic Poets of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: Shakespeare Society, 1846), 11. Juliet Fleming, "The Ladies' Man and the Age of Elizabeth," in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158-83. The term "leaky vessel" is borrowed from Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 23-63. Patricia Parker analyzes Calidore's exchanges with Pastorella and her companions in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 107. Cf. also the story of Priscilla and Aladine, in which the lady refuses to be seen bearing the wounded body of her knight because he is her social inferior (Spenser, The Faerie Queene 6.3.1-19). Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 106.

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36 Eden, trans., The First Three English Books on America, 30, 66-67. Martyr mentions at one point that captive women and children were "reserved to be eaten" (68). But this is very different from Spenser's gendered presentation of male.eaters and female victim. An account of Columbus' second voyage, written by Diego Alvarez Chanca, physician to the fleet, corroborates Minister's description of cannibal habits. Diego's account, published in the mid-sixteenth century, appears in Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, ed. Cecil Jane, 2 vols., (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930), I: 32. Both colonial accounts and Theodore de Bry's engravings present cannibals as male and female. 37 Joseph Hall, Satires and Other Poems (London: G. Willis, 1838), Book IV, satire 2, 100. 38 The important documents on both sides of the controversy have been discussed in some detail by Sarah Augusta Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth Century Literature (New York: New York Public Library, 1954), 155-206. See also F. W. Fairholt, Tobacco: Its History and Associations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 43-109. There is also a section devoted to the tobacco controversy in Books, Manuscripts and Drawings Relating to Tobacco from the Collection of George Arents Jr., a guide to a Library of Congress exhibit in Washington DC, April 1938, pp. 52-61. 39 Jeffrey Knapp, "Elizabethan Tobacco," Representations 21 (Winter 1988), 51. Reprinted in An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 40 The novelty of smoke is highlighted in one of Tarleton's jests about a servant who, seeing his master smoking for the first time and thinking he was on fire, doused him with water. Foreign visitors like Paul Hentzner and Felix Platter also made detailed descriptions of the practice; see Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane, 192, 196. 41 All quotations are from Beaumont, The Metamorphosis of Tobacco (1602), in Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature, ed. J. Payne Collier, 3 vols. (New York: Blom, 1863), vol. I. 42 For an interesting discussion of this verse, see Knapp, "Elizabethan Tobacco," 45. 43 Knapp points to Spain's virtual monopoly on the mining of gold in America. Beaumont's claim that tobacco "our praised plant" is superior to gold, "the baser drosse of earthly ore," suggests English envy of Spain's fortune in America, an ideological compensation for England's belatedness whereby "the symbolic returns from the New World seems almost preferable to something more substantial" ("Elizabethan Tobacco," 50). 44 The problem can be further explained by comparison to drink, which was seldom condemned on economic grounds because it was readily available domestically and thus free from foreign monopoly. 45 C. M. Maclnnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), 35. 46 All citations are to James I, Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh, 1585) and A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London 1604), ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham: English Reprints, 1869). A Counterblaste was


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published anonymously in 1604, but its authorship was certified when it appeared in a 1616 publication of James' writings. 47 See Commissio pro Tobacco, appended to Arber's edition of James Fs Counterblaste, 113. Spain responded in kind with two additional impositions, "one on the Spanish consumer and the other on the English trade," with both being eventually passed on to the English consumer. As Maclnnes points out, for some economic writers of the time, this was primarily the reason England had less silver in 1622 than it did in 1604: Early English Tobacco Trade, 155-56. He cites a treatise "touchinge the inconveniences that the importation of tobacco out of Spayne hath brought into this land" by Edward Bennett (Harleian MSS. no. 280, no. 30, 173-77). 48 All citations are from Joshua Sylvester, Tobacco Battered in The Complete Works of Joshua Sylvester, ed. Alexander B. Grossart (Blackburn, Lancashire: Edinburgh University Press, 1880), vol. II. 49 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), aligns Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss with the sensual enthrallment of the New World, while Patricia Parker in Literary Fat Ladies points to a courtly context for the episode's lyricism as a domestic dimension that complicates the colonial identification (54-66). 50 John Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, appended to James Fs Counterblaste, 65. The class issue comes up again when Barnabe Riche attacks "upstart tobacco" in The Honestie of this Age (1614), ed. Peter Cunningham (London: Percy Society, 1844). Riche estimates that there were "upwards of 7,000 houses, that live by that trade." If each sold but 2s.6d. worth of tobacco a day, the total annual cost to the nation would amount to £319,350, "all spent in smoake" (38-40). 51 This quotation is taken from the excerpt of Dyets Dry Dinner appended to James' Counterblaste, 94. Another female figure enlisted by both sides of the tobacco controversy is Helen of Troy. Philaretes, in A Work for Chimney Sweepers, calls tobacco "a 'duke venenum,' a gracious Helen, an insatiate Messaline" (Maclnnes, Early English Tobacco Trade, 42). In Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tobacco (Edinburgh, 1614), William Barclay claims, "esteeming it [tobacco] worthie of a more loftie name, I haue chosen for gossip the faire and famous Helena, and giuen to her the honour to name this most profitable plant, Nepenthes." Barclay is referring to the episode from the Odyssey in which Telemachus listens to the reminiscences of his father's war companions, and Helen offers her guests the herb nepenthes to help them forget their sorrow. It is significant that the giver of such "mindful oblivion" should be a woman won in the greatest epic war, over whom the husband has reasserted possession (A5v). 52 Cf. Charles Fitzgeffrey's glorification of Sir Francis Drake the pirate as the English Ulysses in Sir Francis Drake his honorable Life's commendation, and his tragical death's lamentation, which I discuss in chapter 2. 53 The implications of class in his gendering of tobacco becomes visible if we notice that, in dedicating his poem to his friend Michael Drayton, Beaumont professes to seek no courtly patronage, and received none. 54 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 52.

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55 All citations are from E. A. J. Honigmann's edition of The Masque of Flowers in A Book of Masques, eds. T. J. B. Spencer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 159-74. 56 Honigmann summarizes the intricate political relationships behind Bacon's sponsorship of the masque, ibid., 151-54. 57 Philip L. Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 117; John Melville Jennings, "Biographical Sketch of John Rolfe" in the facsimile edition of Rolfe's True Relation of the State of Virginia (1616) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951) 12-14; Robert Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana (1613), ed. Sir C. Alexander Harris (London: Hakluyt Society, 1928), 105, 122. 58 Honigmann glosses "soot" as an archaism for "sweet," no doubt a pun on the ash from burning tobacco. 59 Honigmann in A Book of Masques, 156. 60 James I seemed to favor Jonson's description in Gypsies Metamorphosed of tobacco smoke as the stink from "the devil's glyster pipe." Performed in 1621, Gypsies was twice repeated at the king's request. 61 Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), I: 217. 62 Wesley F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 39. 63 Maclnnes, Early English Tobacco Trade, 130; Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, II: 211. According to Alden T. Vaughan in American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), the tobacco trade "rose to 40,000 lbs, in 1620, to 60,000 in 1622, to 500,000 in 1626, and to 1,500,000 in 1629, when it leveled off until the end of the century" (99). 64 The possibility of intermarriage had been raised in popular drama. In Eastward Hoe (1605), a satiric comedy by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman, the English from the Lost Colony are said to have "married with the Indians, and make 'hem bring forth as beautifull faces as any we have in England" (3.3.17-18). See Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-63), IV (1932), 498-99, 569. 65 John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith 1580-1631, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), II: 285. 66 See Selected Writings of Francis Bacon (New York: Random House, 1955), ed. Hugh G. Dick. Bacon's advice is as follows: "When the plantation grows in strength, then it is time to plant with women as well as with men; that the plantation may spread into generations, and not be ever pieced from without" (92). 67 Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1904), I: 76. 68 Susan Myra Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1935), III: 115. 69 The price was set during a General Assembly convened at James City, July 30-31 and August 2-4, 1619, reported by John Pory in ibid., Ill: 162; 173-74.


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70 Ibid., 503-04; also 493. The Company estimates the charge for transportation and upkeep of each woman at £12, which suggests that the profit per woman is between £3 and £10 10s. For an investigation into the women sent to Virginia in 1621, see David R. Ransome, "Wives for Virginia, 1621," William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 48 (1991): 3-18. 71 Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. 72 Peter Hulme discusses the marriage of Rolfe to Pocahontas in relation to the English anxiety regarding the "cultural half-breed" in Colonial Encounters, 142-47. Margo Hendricks, "Civility, Barbarism, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter," in Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 225-42, insightfully discusses the contradictory roles of the Amerindian woman in colonial discourse as both a "civilizing" medium for her people and as a threat to the English race. 73 To compare with the price on wives, boys as apprentices cost £10 each, enough to purchase only 66 pounds of "the worst and basest" tobacco (Kingsbury, Records III: 493). 74 Ibid., 493, 505. This solicitude for the women's good reputation pales somewhat when we realize that, in haste to send them, the company had neglected to store their victuals on board, and had to promise to make up for "the defect" by the next shipment of provisions. 75 Ibid., 505. The English law regarding marriage and property clearly extended to colonial women. The 1619 General Assembly in Jamestown ruled that maids could not contract marriages without the consent of their parents or masters and mistresses (173-74). On the other hand, the Company also specified that women may not be forced to marry against their will (494). 76 The reason for the shortage is that the number of new planters sent to the colony continued to outstrip the number of women. Of the 800 who arrived in Jamestown on June 22, 1620, for example, 500 were tenants, with 100 each of servants, boys, and women (ibid., 313). In Vexed and Troubled Englishmen 1590-1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), Carl Bridenbaugh points out that between 1618 and 1621, "about 3750 persons, including some 200 women" were transported to Virginia (396). A census taken in 1634 of 5,119 men, women, and children reveals that women constituted no more than one-tenth of the population at the end of that period (424). 77 Kingsbury, Records IV: 231-32. Nicolls is by no means sympathetic to women; contradicting his own claim, he goes on to charge that Virginia wives "deuoure the food of the land without dooing any dayes deed whereby any benefitt may arise either to ye Company or Countrey" (IV: 232). 78 Hulme discusses Pocahontas' exceptional role in Colonial Encounters, 143; Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), discusses Pocahontas' expanded symbolic role after her death, especially in Smith's Generall Historie (132).

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Notes to pages 131-33 INCONSTANCY: COMING TO INDIANS THROUGH TROILUS

AND

CRESSIDA

1 Smith, The Complete Works of John Smith 1580-1631, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), I: 160. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 Troilus and Cressida, ed. Virgil Whitaker (1970; reprint. New York: Penguin, 1986), 3.2.189-96. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3 Jane Tompkins, "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 59-77. 4 H. C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian, 1500-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1979), 310-24. For related discussions, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "English Perceptions of Treachery, 1583-1640: The Case of the American Savages," Historical Journal 20 (1977), 261-SI; Settling With the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 127-31. 5 I discuss the Jason figure in chapter 1, the Aeneas figure in chapter 4, the Ulysses figure in chapters 2 and 5, and the Theseus figure in chapter 7. 6 For a discussion of the Heroides tradition in Elizabethan literature, see Deborah Greenhut, Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid's Heroides (New York: Lang, 1988). The four are also frequently cited as exemplary models of falseness in the prose romances. 7 Peter Hulme, "Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Modern Colonial Discourse" in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker et al. 2 vols. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), II: 19-21; expanded in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 152-56. 8 Smith, Complete Works, I: lxiv-lxvi; Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 103-04. 9 Linda Woodbridge discusses the naturalizing tendency in the period's controversy on women in Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 10 As Janet Adelman states in " 'This Is and Is Not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), upon Cressida's entrance into the Greek camp the audience's knowledge of her is mediated by the commentary of male characters, a mediation which ensures Cressida will fulfill her textual destiny as the embodiment of female inconstancy (127). 11 R. A. Yoder, " 'Sons and Daughters of the Game': An Essay on Shakespeare's 'Troilus and Cressida,'" Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972), 21; M. M. Burns, "Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds," Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980), 116; C. C. Barfoot, "Troilus and Cressida: 'Praise us as we are tasted,'" Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 46.


229

12 T. MacAlindon, "Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida" PMLA 84 (1969), 39. See also Barfoot, " 'Praise us as we are tasted,'" 51. 13 Smith, Complete Works, I: 122. 14 As Barbour points out in his edition of Wingfield's The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter 1606-1609 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1969), "the explanation of the superficial uniformity in the book probably lies in the fact that those who collaborated in producing the Map of Virginia were intensely loyal to Smith, and saw things through his eyes" (322). 15 In Arthur Barlowe's The first voyage made to the coasts of America (1584), the Indians offered pearls in exchange for "our amour, a sworde, and diuers other things," but the English held off for information on the location of the pearlbeds. See The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590, ed. David Beers Quinn, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), I: 105. Ralph Lane, in his "Discourse" on the first colony (1586), reports seeing "great quantitie of Pearle" but that the Indian chief would not allow the English "to meddle with the fishing for any Pearle there" (Quinn I: 260-61). The Jamestown narratives likewise report abundance of pearls in Virginia. See, for example, Thomas Hariot in his Briefe and true report of Virginia (I: 333). 16 On his third voyage to Paria, Columbus supposedly determined the location of the earthly paradise on a mountain shaped like a woman's breast. See The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, ed. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 218-21. 17 Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 10-25. 18 Patricia Parker notes these and other instances in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 126-54, especially 140. 19 Hakluyt advocates colonization as the means to trade in Discourse of Western Planting (1584), in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), II: 211-326. This is the underlying argument in Frank Wesley Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964). According to Quinn, by 1609 English authorities knew that the settlers had been killed by the Indians. Survivors from the colony were living close to Jamestown, but their testimony was not recorded. The myth of the Lost Colony which emerged from this omission was to fuel the argument for conquest of, rather than friendship with, the Indians. David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 356-66, 371-77. 20 Gary M. Walton and James F. Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 40. 21 James Rosier, A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth (1605) in Early English and French Voyages 1534-1608, ed. Henry S. Burrage (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 383. 22 A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), 13, printed in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963), vol. III.

230


23 Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 26. 24 Kupperman discusses the rivalry within the council {Settling With the Indians, 131). 25 The authors claim that the "insufficiency" of commissioned councilors was an "errour" which "could not be prevented by their electors" in Jamestown. Still, the authors compare the English favorably to the Spanish: "if any deeme it a shame to our nation, to have any mention made of these enormities, let them peruse the histories of the Spanish discoveries and plantations, where they may see how many mutinies, discords, and dissetions, have accompanied them and crossed their attempts" (Smith, Complete Works, I: 213-14). 26 Cf. Rene Girard, "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (New York: Methuen, 1985), 188-209, who argues that Ulysses deconstructs Agamemnon's illusion of essence. Also Eric Mallin, "Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida," Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 148. 27 Elizabeth Freund, " 'Ariachne's broken woof: the Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (New York: Methuen, 1985), 29-30. 28 Ulysses uses the term "superior" in reference to social position. Of course, the alternate sense of superior as a reference to ability is also possible, but it is rendered moot by the "envious fever / Of pale and bloodless emulation." As Girard, "Politics of Desire," points out, such "mimetic rivalry" drains heroic competition of any intrinsic meaning. 29 Thomas Cartelli, in "Ideology and Subversion in the Shakespearean Set Speech," ELH 53 (1986), 10-14, claims that Ulysses' speech on degree is a production of ideology, and criticized as such by Shakespeare in its formal presentation as a set speech. 30 Kupperman, Settling With the Indians, 8-9, discusses the differences in social status and attitudes among colonists. 31 Wingfield was a squire and one of the patentees. Bartholomew Gosnold, onetime privateer, was second cousin to Wingfield. John Martin was the son of Sir Richard, the Master of the Mint and Mayor of London. George Kendall, a former servant of Sir Robert Cecil, was related to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Edwin Sandys. Christopher Newport, Admiral of the Fleet, was formerly a mariner and privateer. John Smith was the son of a yeoman. John Ratcliffe, an alias for Sicklemore, was of obscure origins which historians have been unable to trace. As Barbour points out, while other council members all have some official post, Smith alone was a nobody in the enterprise. "At least three original colonists who were not named to the council were of some standing: George Percy was brother of the earl of Northumberland; Anthony Gosnold was brother of Bartholomew Gosnold, the vice-admiral; and Gabriel Archer had sailed with Bartholomew Gosnold to Cape Cod in 1602" (John Smith, Complete Works, lxvii). 32 For books on John Smith, see Philip Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); Alden T. Vaughan, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975); and J. A. Leo Lemay, The American Dream of Captain John


33 34

35

36

37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44

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Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), who calls himself an "an apologist for John Smith" (14). Edward Maria Wingfield, "Discourse," The Jamestown Voyages, 217-18, 221,219. In the Generall Historie Smith adds: "now ever once in every foure or five dayes, Pocahontas with her attendants, brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els for all this had starved with hunger." The addition follows closely Smith's enlarged description of the Indian ceremony in which Pocahontas "saved" him, and is consistent with her more prominent role in this work than in the True Relation. According to Barbour, the information is plausible, albeit unconfirmed elsewhere (Smith, Complete Works, II: 152). For Fuller, however, "the Generall Historie narrative involves a mystification of transactions which seemed plain in the True Relation" (Voyages in Print, 119). The writers go on to describe a disastrous attempt at trade with the Indians led by Thomas West, the Lord de la Warr and Ratcliffe (since returned to Jamestown). While Ratcliff and his men were slain, "the rest near starved in the Pinnis" (Smith, Complete Works, I: 275). Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond VA: Whittet & Shepherdson, 1907), 39-45, studying the Jamestown population of 1607-24, finds that settlers consisted of skilled artisans and laborers, a high percentage (relative to England) of gentlemen, and a few noblemen, as well as servants for the latter two groups. On one occasion, as Smith tells us in Proceedings, he was able to appeal to gentlemen's social distinctions, persuading them to help in clearing forest by "conceit[ing] it only as a pleasure and a recreation" {Complete Works, I: 239). As Lemay, American Dream, suggests, Smith's attitudes towards social rank and authority would be considered "radical" by aristocrats like George Percy (170-89). I do not endorse Lemay's view of Smith as proto-American however. Both Girard, "Politics of Desire" and Mallin, "Emulous Factions," have shown that the Trojan camp is like its Greek counterpart. Hector's belief in the self's intrinsic worth recapitulates Agamemnon's "persistive constancy," while Troilus' commercial language parallels Ulysses' market logic. Troilus' logic of investment explains what Girard's invocation of "mimetic rivalry" cannnot; namely, why the rival camps continue fighting for a devalued Helen. Linda Charnes, "'So Unsecret to Ourselves': Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida" Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989), 413-40, discusses the instability of identity and the desire to "fix" it. Barfoot claims that Cressida's "bi-fold authority" relates to the recognition of treachery in trading (" 'Praise us as we are tasted,'" 45-49, especially 47). For discussions of Cressida's vulnerability see Adelman, "This Is and Is Not Cressid," 122; Burns, "The Worst of Both Worlds," 110, 120. David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America 1481-1620 (New York: Knopf, 1974), 457. Kupperman, Settling With the Indians, 7-8.

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45 James I, Instructions for Government, reprint. Wingfield, Jamestown Voyages, 41. 46 Chapter 7 of The Proceedings, in which this account appears, is ascribed to Richard Wiffin, William Phetiplace, and Anas Todkill (Smith, Complete Works, I: 195). 47 The mariners traded the provisions from the ships with anyone, English or Indian, who had "either mony, spare clothes, credit to give bils of payment, gold rings, furres, or any such commodities." For this reason, Smith and his followers call them "free traders" and their business, a "removing taverne" (Ibid. 218). 48 "Instructions given by way of Advice," in Wingfield, Jamestown Voyages, I: 53. 49 Cf. Kupperman's claim: "When a soldier such as John Smith speaks of Indian treachery he is actually saying that the Indians are worthy opponents" {Settling With the Indians, 129). 50 One of Marcel Mauss' theses in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967). His analysis is adapted to the early modern context in Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 51 Barbour identifies this source in Smith, Complete Works, II: 28. 52 I discuss this episode in chapter 4. 53 According to Barbour, ed., in Smith, Complete Works, I: 239, "mussaneekes" are possibly grey squirrels. The account specifies that trade in furs took place, "though Virginia afford no furs for the store"; one can imagine that small quantities of furs were traded in the black market trade rather than through official channels. 54 Smith explicitly claims authorship in Generall Hist or ie: "John Smith writ this with his owne hand" (Complete Works, II: 129). 55 The Preface to the Proceedings makes the same division between "those that have lived residents in the land" and "salers, . . . passeengers, . . . mercinary contemplatours, that only bedeck themsleves with other plumes" (Smith, Complete Works, I: 201). 56 As Fuller points out, in the Proceedings the opposition between gold and food marks the difference between Smith and Newport, as well as Smith's "almost conscious revisionary relationship" to Ralegh (Voyages in Print, 116, 137). 57 The Proceedings complains that the "action" of the colony is "overthrowne" by the "false excuses, informations, and directions" concocted by "the Saintseeming Worthies of Virginia" (Smith, Complete Works, I: 240). In his reprint of this passage, Smith directly implicates Newport by adding that "had not Captaine Newport cryed Peccavi, the President would have discharged the ship and caused him to have stayed one yeare in Virginia, to learn to speak of his owne experience" (II: 187). This is confirmed by Smith's letter to the Virginia Company in London, inserted into his reprint (II: 188-90). 58 As R. J. Kaufman points out in "Ceremonies for Chaos: the Status of Troilus and Cressida," ELH 22 (1965), " 'New-born gawds' is a good Elizabethan pun for idolatry" (152). 59 One instance is the compass demonstration, which I discuss in chapter 4.


233

60 See note 45 to chapter 3 and note 34 to chapter 4. While accounts of Drake's landing in California employ the topos unproblematically (chapter 3), Hariot in his Brief and true report of Virginia is much more circumspect (chapter 4). 7

THE TEMPEST, HUSBANDRY

RAPE,

THE ART AND SMART OF VIRGINIAN

1 All citations are from Stephen Orgel's edition of The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2 The 1623 folio assigns the speech to Miranda, though some editors have later given it to Prospero. These attributions are not mutually exclusive with respect to the present argument, but bring to it different nuances. Spoken by Miranda, the speech emphasizes the analogy between education and rape; spoken by Prospero, the speech underscores Miranda's role as human battleground in his power struggle with Caliban. Regardless of the attribution, the paternal imaging suggests the presence of the father behind the education. 3 I share Ania Loomba's view in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) that we can appropriate "radical ambivalences" in a text to our own purpose (144). 4 See Richard Hakluyt's prefaces to Divers Voyages (1582) and Discourse of Western Planting (1584) in The Original Writings and Correspondences of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), I: 175-81; II: 211-326. Edmund Spenser in Book II of The Faerie Queene refers to fruitfullest Virginia along with Peru and the Amazon. For fuller discussions, see Annette Kolodny, "Surveying the Virgin Land," The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 10-25. 5 Arthur Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). If, as Low suggests, the georgic revolution was primarily a seventeenthcentury movement, then colonial husbandry can be said to herald this movement with Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting (1584). 6 In Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), Stephanie Jed shows that the humanist discourse on chastity depends for ideological coherence on its opposition to rape, thus authorizing in effect a logic of rape within itself. My argument draws on her analysis. 7 Orgel, Introduction to The Tempest, 29. 8 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. 9 In Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan locate the issue of Caliban's educability in early modern European accounts of the Indian (50). 10 I am here alluding to Stephen Greenblatt's notion of the "linguistic colonialism" that is prevalent in the period's narratives of travel and encounter in the New World. See "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 561-80. Reprinted in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern

234

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18

19 20

Notes to pages 157-59 Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16-39. I would relate such colonialist attitude to the motives of husbandry. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 148. Hall's discussion of The Tempest is generally helpful to my analysis (141-51). Hall, Things of Darkness, 149. Abena P. A. Busia, "Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female," Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989-90): 81-104. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), Slavoj Zizek writes about the persistence of ideology in everyday practice as the reason for resisting the easy claim that ours is a post-ideological era (28-35). Edward Waterhouse reported 347 dead, a figure repeated by John Smith. The historian Philip Barbour, on the other hand, counts 349. See Waterhouse's report in Susan Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 4 vols., (Washington: US Govt. Printing Offices 1935): III: 551; and Barbour's note in his edition of Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), II: 302n.l. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), XIX: 226. All citations are from Robert Grey, A Good Speed to Virginia (London 1609) in Wesley Frank Craven, ed., Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia 1609-1613 (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976). Nova Britannia is reprinted in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), vol. I. That colonial settlement relieved England of its poor was a long-standing argument. Advanced in the 1580s by colonial advocates such as Sir George Peckham in A True reporte of the late discoveries . . . of the new-found landes (1583) and Richard Hakluyt in Discourse of Western Planting (1584), in Original Writings and Correspondences, the argument gained cogency with the rapid rise in England's population between the 1590s and the 1610s. Theodore K. Rabb, "Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630," in The Context of Colonization, ed. Peter Charles Hoffer (New Work: Garland, 1988), 78. Of the existing thirty-one members, twenty-two were original investors in 1606, while nine more joined in 1607-08. Richard Rich, Newes From Virginia (1610) reprinted in Wesley Frank Craven, ed., Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia, A4v. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts 1607-1688 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914), describes the laws in the colony as "a series of martial laws drawn from the code in use among the armies in the Netherlands," where Dale and other governors such as De la Warre earned their military reputations (22-23). See also Warren M. Billings, "The Transfer of English Law to Virginia 1606-50," in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, ed. K. R. Andrews, et al. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 217. Also, David Thomas Konig, "'Dale's Laws' and the Non-Common Law Origins of Criminal Justice in Virginia," American Journal of Legal History 26 (1983), 354-75;


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reprinted in The Context of Colonization, ed. Peter Charles Hoffer (New York: Garland, 1988), 435-56. 21 Anthony Pagden, "Dispossessing the Barbarian: the Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians," in Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79-98. 22 Loren E. Pennington, "The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature," The Westward Enterprise, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews et ah, 190. 23 Such evidence may serve as a correction to Meredith Anne Skura's contention in "Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonization in The Tempest," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 42-69 that readings relating colonial policy in Virginia to The Tempest are anachronistic. See also John Gillies' refutation of Skura in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150. 24 Nova Britannia 14. Johnson's New Life of Virginia (1612) is reprinted in the Force Tracts, vol. I. Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, reprinted in Wesley Frank Craven, ed. Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia, 26. Grey, Good Speed to Virginia, C2. 25 Richard Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 12 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), VIII: 361-62. 26 Smith, Complete Works, I: 157, 160. 27 Whitaker in Craven, ed., Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia, 40. 28 The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia 1606-1612, in Smith, Complete Works, I: 258. 29 Kingsbury, ed., Records, III: 14. 30 For D. J. Gordon, the masque's overall theme of marriage as the union of opposites provides a framework for the elaboration of colonial motives. See "Chapman's Memorable Masque," in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 194-202. 31 As Gordon sees it, ibid., the reference to gold recalls not Virginia but Guiana, which Chapman celebrates in his 1596 De Guiana, carmen epicum (202). But there was also a current, though contested, belief that Virginia was rich in precious metals. Thus John Smith and his followers in Virginia express contempt for "refiners" who would waste time and energy on a fool's errand (see chapter 4). In 1613, despite repeated failures to find gold, the preacher Alexander Whitaker was still talking about the "probable likelihoods of rich mines" in Virginia, at a site named Christall Rock, although crude tools made it impossible "to search the entrailes of the place" (in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes,XlX: 113). 32 All citations are from Allan Holaday's edition of Chapman, The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 564-86. 33 Most of the references to Virginian priests ("Description," line 17, "Masque," line 155) and Virginian princes ("Description," line 31; "Masque," line 326) appear early on, while the titles, Knights of the Virgine land ("Masque," lines 213, 225) and Virgine knights ("Masque," lines 223, 405) occur later, indicating not a slippage of terms but a motivated shift in signification.

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34 In fact, one of the meanings of "reap" current in this period is "to take away by force," in other words, to rape (OED, VlB3c). 35 loan Couliano, Eros and Magin in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 87-142. 36 In other instances, Indian religious ceremony is compared to Catholic ritual, as John Smith writes in A True Relation: "seven of them in the house where I lay, each with a rattle began at ten a clocke in the morning to sing about the fire, which they invironed with a Circle of meale, and after, a foote or two from that, at the end of each song, layde downe two or three graines of wheate, continuing this order till they have included sixe or seven hundred in a halfe Circle, and after that two or three more Circles in like manner, a hand bredth from other: That done, at each song, they put betwixte everie three, two, or five graines, a little sticke, so counting as an old woman her Pater noster" {Complete Works, I: 59). 37 As Orgel explains in his Introduction to The Tempest, the play was first presented at Whitehall before a royal audience in 1611; "a year and a half later the play appears in a list of fourteen performances at court during a festive season preceding the marriage of James Fs daughter to the Elector Palatine" (1). For remarks on other areas of contrast between the play and the masque, see John Gillies, "Shakespeare's Virginian Masque," ELH 53 (1986): 673-75; and Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 223-24. 38 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141-65. In his analysis of Rousseau's autobiographical narrative, Emile, the supplement (Emile's education) serves as both a complement of and a "dangerous" substitute for a cherished lost object (a dead mother's love). In extending the supplementary logic of education to The Tempest, I note a crucial shift in perception of the mother - from an early modern figure of threat to a nineteenth-century figure of nostalgia. The shift aligns the domestic idealization of the mother with her death, hence her absolute exclusion from power. 39 Orgel, Introduction to The Tempest, 18-19. 40 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3-68. 41 Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 146-47. 42 Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 66, 80, 82. 43 Ibid., 88. 44 As scholars have shown, both versions of the murder story in Judges 4 and 5 are rich with sexual and maternal overtones. See Mieke Bal's discussion in Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death, trans. Matthew Gumpert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 111-34. The maternal theme in particular equates Sisera's defeat with the loss of phallic potency, reducing him to defenseless infancy. 45 Among other writers, Thomas Heywood recounts this "incident" in An Apology for Actors (London 1612), ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941), G2r-G3v. 46 The idea of "rhetorical deformation" is taken from Gayatri Chakravorty


47

48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60

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Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 260. Gillies, "Shakespeare's Virginian Masque," 702; Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 232. My formulation departs from both Gillies', for whom the "darkness" symbolizes that which resists assimilation, and Knapp's, in which the other is assimilated. Nicholas P. Cannay, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America." William and Mary Quarterly 3rd. ser. 30 (1973): 575-98. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England," in Nationalisms & Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157-74. Donna B. Hamilton discusses the Irish connection in Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 48, 53, 64, 114. See also Vaughan and Vaughan, Caliban, 54. Enmeshed in the genealogy of classical deities, however, Spenser's allegory elides the cultural difference between ruler and rebel, a difference which fundamentally informs the theme of husbandry as power struggle in Shakespeare's play. Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 236. Roche discusses the "changed sex" from "god" to "great dame" in the notes to his edition of The Faerie Queene (1,237). Cf. Jennifer Laws, "Sexual Politics and the Interpretation of Nature in Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie" Renaissance and Reformation 28.2 (1992), who locates Nature's sexual ambiguity within the overall gender politics of The Faerie Queene (29-31). Low, Georgic Revolution, 67-68. Cf. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 113. Ferdinand's exclamation on first meeting Miranda, "most sure, the goddess" (1.2.422) recalls Aeneas' "dea certe" on meeting Venus, who appears before him as a maiden of Carthage. For the "whoredome" of Harpies, see Stephen Batman's The golden Booke of Leaden Gods (London 1577), ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1976), 19. For the reading of Harpies as barren virgins, see George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures (London 1632), 131. Orgel discusses this point in his Introduction to The Tempest, pointing to the female roles of sea nymph, harpy, and Ceres performed by Ariel (27). Although the character's sex varies through its stage history, "Ariel had been a male role throughout the seventeenth century" (70). I prefer to see Ariel in the role of Iris instead of Ceres, given the role of the rainbow goddess as messenger (not unlike Ariel's), and her relation to the Harpy as the better sister. As scholars have noted, Prospero's concern to deliver his entire nature show within four hours reflects the practical constraints of stage performances (1.2.240-41; 5.1.1-6). Orgel, The Tempest, 31-36; also Vaughan and Vaughan, Caliban, 39-45. Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 233. Gillies focuses on the theme of temperance in "Shakespeare's Virginian

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61 62 63

64 65 66 67

68

Notes to pages 173-75 Masque." Also Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797(London: Methuen, 1986), 114. This pamphlet is reprinted in vol. Ill of the Force Tracts. Part of the pamphlet, including the cited passages, is reprinted in Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes XIX: 67-72. Quotations are from 67-68. Hulme suggests the providential appeal had become suspect from the many previous appeals that went unanswered {Colonial Encounters, 102). Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), discusses the romance plot of the "delayed but final victory" in the accounts of Columbus' travels (12). In Good Newes from Virginia (London 1610) in Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia 1609-1613, ed. Wesley Frank Craven (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), the preacher Alexander Whitaker claims that God defers immediate rewards in order to discourage the covetous (29). Strachey's report is reprinted in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes XIX: 5-67. The quotations taken from 55-56. A good example is Spenser's allegory of temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene, which rejects both the extremes of idleness (Phedra) and frenetic activity (Mammon). Franklin discusses the labyrinth as a commonplace in exploration narratives (Discoverers, 8). I am extending his discussion to the discourse of husbandry. Johnson, Nova Britannia 26. The term "labyrinth" appears as a horticultural term for intricate gardens in Thomas Hill, The Gardener's Labyrinth (1592). According to the OED, sblb, such usage is current from early seventeenth century onwards. For Bacon's conception of science, see The Clue to the Maze (c. 1607), trans, from Filum Labyrinthi sive formula inquistionis ad filios. Further commentary on the labyrinth appears in Bacon's The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), translated from De Sapientia Veterum; see The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. 15 vols. (Boston MA: Brown, 1960), VI: A16-28; XIII: 129-31, respectively. Evelyn Fox Keller analyzes Bacon's virile conception of science in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Low, Georgic Revolution, discusses Bacon's New Science as part of this intellectual movement (126-42). Pettie's story appears in The Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (London, 1576), 2 vols.; Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamund, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, ed. Alexander B. Grossart (New York, Russell & Russell, 1963), I: 79-113, treats a similar theme. In romance references to the "labyrinth of love," female sexuality is the implied cause, although male desire is the explicit focus. In Robert Greene's Menaphon, ed. G. B. Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), Democles is said to be "plunged . . . in a Laborinth of restless passions" (86). In William Warner's Albions England (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), Mandevil "bethinks him the Labyrinth of Cares / Incumbering married Men" in order to resist sexual desire (286). In Book I of Spenser, The Faerie Queene, the way into Error's den is likened to a "labyrint" (1.11.4). In Book IV, the temple of Venus is described as a "second paradise" enriched with bowers that are "False Labyrinthes" of


69

70

71

72

73

74 75

76

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sensuality. These snares are contrasted with the bonds between male friends, among the pairs cited, Theseus and Pirithous (10.23.2-3; 24.8; 27.3). Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 54-66, especially 63. Sheila Cavanagh discusses the maternal sexuality of Acrasia as incubus in Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 47_51. Stephen Greenblatt discusses the excess of Guy on's action in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 178-79. As Parker further points out in Literary Fat Ladies, this excess is all the more remarkable if we realize that Guyon's labor re-enacts the Circe episode from the Odyssey in which "victory over its threatening female is in a sense already won" (63). This version of the letter appears in Philip L. Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 248. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. Rolfe's letter was appended to Ralph Hamor's Trve discourse (61-68); see note 73 below. Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World, 249. In Colonial Encounters, Hulme observes that the name Rebecca refers to the scriptural progenitress of two separate tribes - one losing its birthright to the other (144-45). Another option, which Karen Robertson raises in "Pocahontas at the Masque," Signs 21 (1996), is that Rolfe sees Pocahontas as a "female Minataur" (570), which suggests that Pocahontas herself is the offspring of mixed races. Ralph Hamor, A trve discourse of the present state of Virginia (London, 1615; Richmond, VA: Virginia State Library, 1957), B3v-C2r (4-11). See also John Smith's redaction in Book 4 of The Generall Historie, in Complete Works II: 241-45. Dale's letter is appended to Hamor's Trve discourse, 53-54. As Robertson sees it, Hamor's account emphasizes "the dignity of [Pocahontas'] silent reproach" ("Pocahontas at the Masque," 567). Hamor's report lays out the order of events as follows: the English and Indian parties met in March, 1614. After Pocahontas' brothers appeared on the scene, Dale sent Rolfe and Sparks to inform Powhatan of English intentions. The upshot was that the English agreed to yet another delay - until after the harvest so as to give both sides time to plant crops and provide for the winter. Here Hamor brings in Rolfe's proposal of marriage: "Long before this time a gentleman of approued behauiour and honest cariage, Maister Iohn Rolfe had bin in loue with Pocahuntas and she with him, which thing at the instant that we were in parlee with them, my selfe made known to Sir Thomas Dale by a letter from him [Rolfe, who was meanwhile on a mission to Powhatan], whereby he intreated his advise and furtherance in his loue, if so it seemed fit to him for the good of the Plantation, and Pocahuntas her selfe, acquainted her brethren therewith: which resolution Sir Thomas Dale wel approuing, was the onely cause: he was so milde amongst them, who otherwise would not haue departed their riuer without other conditions" (10-11). The marriage was solemnized around April 5, within ten days of the petition. I agree with Richard B. Harwell's assessment in his preface to Hamor's Trve discourse, viii.

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77 This was made known in the defense of John Smith by his supporters against the rumor that he had intended to marry the Indian "princess" and rule as king. See Proceedings of the English Colonie in Smith, The Complete Works, I: 274, 78 Hamor, Trve discourse, Glv-G2v; 40-42. Smith, Complete Works, II: 249. 79 The phrase occurs in a compilation of materials Purchas obtained from John Smith and reprinted in Purchas His Pilgrimes, XIX: 117; the pious sentiment and euphuistic alliteration is closer to Purchas' style than Smith's. 80 Smith, Complete Works, II: 261. 81 Robertson, "Pocahontas at the Masque," 579. 82 Hulme discusses the tribal adoption and the Brentford exchange in Colonial Encounters, 140-41, 146-51. Barbour discusses Pocahontas' stay in England and her meeting with Smith in Pocahontas and Her World, 165-78. 83 Smith's account appears in two places in the Complete Works (II: 150-51; 259). 84 According to Gary M. Walton and James F. Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), "the first step toward private property was in 1614, with limits of three-acre holdings; a more significant change came in 1618 with the introduction of the head right system, which gave 50 acres to anyone paying their own way to Virginia plus another 50 acres for anyone else they brought. Finally, in 1623, all holdings were converted to private ownership" (39-40). 85 Kingsbury, Records, III: 71. Rolfe, it would seem, tries to emphasize the positive about Jamestown, which he found in rather a run-down condition. In the same letter, he reports that settlers repaired buildings, fortifications, and boats, raised livestock and cultivated, in addition to tobacco, wheat, barley, corn, hemp, and flax. The account of John Smith, ousted from the colony since 1609, is much more critical: "In James towne he [Rolfe] found but five or six houses, the Church downe, the Palizado's broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the Store-house they used for the Church, the market-place, and streets, and all other spare places planted with Tobaacco . . ." (Complete Works II: 262). 86 Louis B. Wright, in The Cultural Life of the American Colonies 1607-1763 (New York: Harper, 1957), states that "the law of primogeniture rarely operated in the colonies to exclude the younger sons and daughters from inheriting some portion of their father's estates." The land hunger was further exacerbated by the cultivation of tobacco: "since it was discovered that tobacco exhausted the soil in about seven years, planters had to be sure of a succession of fresh soil" (2). 87 Kingsbury, Records, III: 63, 217, 241, 264, 671. Subsequent page references are given in the text. For further discussion, see Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585-1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), I: 276-77, 331-32. As Davis points out, these efforts came to nothing due to mismanagement of donations and the 1622masssacre. 88 According to Thorpe, the main source of friction was that Indians "are a litle crauinge and that in a niggardly fassion for they will comonly p[ar]te w[i]th nothing they haue whatsoeuer . . . is giuen them." Thorpe hoped the problem


89 90

91

92 93 94

95

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will be resolved in time, "as [Indians] begin more and more to affect English ffassions and wilbe much allured to affectvs by giftes" (in Kingsbury, Records, III: 446-47). According to Davis, Intellectual Life, proof of Thorpe surviving the attack appears "in his signature on a document recently found in the 'Wyatt Papers' dated May 3, 1622, forty-two days after the catastrophe" (I: 332-33). Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, XIX: 231. Christopher Brooke, "A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia" (London 1622), reprinted with introduction by Robert C. Johnson, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 72 (1964): 259-92: 285. A good friend of Thorpe and other Virginia colonists, Brooke was a well-known lawyer and poet and, by 1613, a Member of Parliament and "one of the chief spokesman for the [Virginia] Company in the House of Commons" (260-61). Johnson believes that the poem "had a wide circulation when it was published," since "only one copy is known to have survived" (268). While Waterhouse goes on to other pressing matters confronting the colony, the cited passage marks the end of the report on the "massacre." This is also the extent of the Declaration reprinted in Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes, XIX: 164. As Francis Jennings remarks in "Virgin Land and Savage People," in Indians and Europeans, ed. Peter Charles Hoffer (New York: Garland, 1988), the Indian farmer had been all along the obstacle to colonial expansion (101). Brooke, "A Poem," in Johnson, Virginia, Magazine of History and Biography, 275, 280. Other rights are cited as follows: the "natural right of cohabitation and commerce . . . with others," the rights of "just invasion and conquest . . . of first discovery, first actuall possession, prescription, gift, cession, and livery of seisin, sale for price," and "the naturall Inheritance of the English their naturally borne" (Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, XIX: 224-25) John Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (New York: Norton, 1989), writes: "The combined demands on the forests by Elizabethan society - 'the consuming of woods for navigation . . . building of homes . . . furniture, casks . . . carts, wagons and coaches, in making iron, [lead, and glass], burning of brick and tile' - resulted in more destruction and waste of woodlands than in any other preceding period. All late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century writers agree on this assessment" (177).

8 CODA: THE MASKS OF POCAHONTAS 1 Robert Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 Janet Maslin, "History as Buckskin-Clad Fairy Tale," New York Times (June 11, 1995): 1.46. 3 Mai Vincent, "A Largest-Ever Premiere for 'Pocahontas,'" The VirginianPilot (June 13,1995): E7. 4 Kristin Tillotson, Star Tribune (June 13, 1995): IE.

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5 Bob Tourtlelotte, "With 'Pocahontas' Disney tries to top The Lion King,'" Reuters World Service (June 13, 1995): BC cycle. 6 Chris Oliver, New York Daily News (June 12, 1995): A7. 7 Greg Evans, " Tocahontas': Indian Summer in Gotham," The Daily Variety (June 12, 1995): 4. 8 Comments by Jessica Ecock, " 'Pocahontas' Premier Dazzles Kids," Associated Press, reprinted in National (June 12, 1995): 2AN; and Kitty ElmerDeWitt, "What Did You Think of the Movie?" New York Daily News (June 12, 1995): 7. 9 "Award-winning producer Keith Thomas forms new music company," Business Wire (Sept. 27, 1996), distribution: entertainment editors. 10 Patricia Winters and Rosemary Metzler Lavan, " Tocahontas' Market Stampede," New York Daily News (June 12, 1995): Business 23. 11 Marilyn Uricchio, "'Pocahontas' moment of truth near," Pittsburgh PostGazette (June 13, 1995): C2. Dalya Alberge, "Enid Blyton's Family Sells Noddy and Big Ears," Times (Jan. 24, 1996). 12 Reuters Business Report (June 13, 1995): BC cycle. 13 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xvii-xx. 14 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s," in Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, ed. Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (New York: Routledge, 1994), 148, 152. 15 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 154. 16 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 83. 17 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 172, 181, 190.

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Index

Agnew, Jean-Christophe 21, 197 n.23 Althusser, Louis 4, 168 Andrews, Kenneth R. 43, 202 n.3, n.8, 203 n.25, 204, n.29, 207, n.58 Appleby, Joyce Oldham 72, 84 Bacon, Sir Francis 125 The Clue to the Maze 238 n.67 The Masque of Flowers 125-26 Novum Organon 93 "Of Plantation" 76, 127 ballads 38, 46, 47, 204n.35, 210n.l0 Autolycus 88 "The Faire Flower of Northumberland" 66 Jack's house, ballad of 67-69 "The Pedlar" 87 "Pride's Fall" 86-87 "The Weaver's Song" 69-70 singers and sellers of 96 Barbour, Philip 132, 134, 143, 154, 230 n.31 Barkan, Leonard 68, 211 n.15 Beaumont, Francis The Metamorphosis of Tobacco 120, 123-24 Bhabha,Homi 10, 156, 168 Black Legend, the 44-45,48, 108 see also Las Casas, Bartolome de Blazon 8,110 commercial motives in 111-13 Boose, Lynda 22 Brooke, Christopher Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia (1622) 181-83 Cain, Thomas 41 California 7,62 Nova Albion 77-82 cannibalism 9, 104, 105, 109-12, 136 and voyeurism 112, 117 cannibals 10, 106-07, 120 as rapists 108

civilized by tobacco 120 Carleill, Christopher Discourse upon the entended voyage. . . to America 48, 76 Cavendish, Thomas 34, 37, 49-50 Chapman, George De Guiana Carmen Epicum 56-58, 108-109 Memorable Masque 7,156,162-64 Christian humanism 4, 8, 14, 63, 72 and the Christian Commonwealth 65-66, 69, 75 Churchyard, Thomas A Prayre, and Reporte ofMaister Martyne Forboisher Voyage to Meta Incognita (1578) 203, n. 19 circumnavigation 32-33, 37, 77 Drake, Sir Francis the younger: The World Encompassed 77-81 The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 77-81 civility and clothing 63-64, 77, 82 and domestication of natives 160, 162 and domesticity 102, 117 and savagery 107, 109, 130 Clark, Alice 64, 21 In. 17 class and gender 4, 30-31, 71-72,112-13, 115-16 bourgeois masculinity 3, 29-30, 63-64, 96-97 social tensions 31-32, 38, 64-65 classical tradition 16, 68, 70, 91, 132, 170-71 Golden Age 57,160 labyrinth (or maze) 174-76 Ovid's Heroides 132 Ovid's Metamorphoses; Fotherby's translation of 149; Golding's translation of 68; Sandys' translation of 182 Ovidian rewritings 120,174 261

262

Index

classical tradition (cont.) Pliny 60-61 Virgil', Aeneid 30, 174 Virgil', Georgics 156, 170 classical mythology,figuresin 47, 68, 91, 124, 163, 171-72 Aeneas 10,91, 132,172, 174 Circe 121-23, 126 Dido 30, 174 Jason 10, 30-31, 51-52, 132 Medea 57-58 Penelope 47, 70, 123 Theseus 10, 132, 176 Ulysses 10,47,123,132,174 Clifford, George, third Earl of Cumberland 34,45-46 Clifford, James 78 cloth trade America as prospective market 7, 9, 66, 75,83, 106 cloth and clothing as civilizing agent 78-80 clothiers 64, 70-71; John Winchcombe 62, 64, 75 Clothworkers of London 62, 63, 74-75 English cloth on the European market 74 gendered economics of 64, 65, 68-71 promotion for, 77-82 colonization as means to trade 75-76 legal justification for 156, 159-60, 183 religious pretext for 7, 8, 75, 161-62, 164 see also plantation; settlement; Virginia colonial narratives breakdown of familial analogy in 179-81 first encounter with Algonkians in 93-95 first encounter with Arawaks in 39^0, 107-08 first encounter with Miwoks in 78-79, 80-81 image of Indians as barbarous in 103, 120, 156, 176, 180; as effeminate in 103, 164; as hellish in 182-83; as inconstant in 9-10, 131-32; as rapists in 10, 183; as treacherous in 99-100, 150 indigenous farming methods in 161 Indian uprising in 179-83 colonial promoters 48,153 see also under Carleill, Christopher; Grey, Robert; Hakluyt, Richard; Johnson, Robert; Peckham, Sir

George; Rich, Richard; Whitaker, Alexander colonial promotions 6, 38, 45, 59, 82, 90, 135 civilizing of natives in 160-62 colonists as unfaithful lovers in 10, 132 colonization as marriage in 7, 156, 162-65, 183-84 crisis emplotted as tragicomedy in 173-74 dispossession of Indians in 82, 116, 128, 159,161 Europeans worshipped as gods by Indians in 78-79, 82, 93, 154, 168 family romance as subtext in 156-57,178 femininefigurationof the New World in 92,136-37, 156, 164, 183-84 image of Indians as culturally inferior in 91-95, 97-98; as consumers of trifles in 8, 91-95, 97-98, 99-100, 129; as savages in 7, 9-10, 81, 156, 160, 180, 181; as sensually bound to nature 91-92, 170; as tractable in 160-61; as without property 160-61 monogenetic theory of Indians 76 topos of providence in 37, 124, 136, 158 topos of wonder in 59 colonists Dale, Sir Thomas 117, 173, 175-77 Gates, Sir Thomas 162 Hamor, Ralph 176-77, 239 n.75 Hariot, Thomas 59,90, 92, 161 Hunt, Robert 140 Kendall, George 137 Martin, John 137,152 Nicholls, Thomas 129 Pory, John 180 Rolfe, John 7, 117, 125-28, 130, 175-77, 179-80, 185-86 Sandys, George 179: Ovids Metamorphoses Englished 182 Scrivener, Matthew 151 Somers, Sir George 174 Strachey, William 103, 174 Thorpe, George 179-80 Waterhouse, Edward: A Declaration of the State of the Colony 180-82 Wingfield, Edward Maria 9, 134, 137, 140^2 Yeardley, Sir George 179 see also planters; settlers Columbus, Christopher 43, 77, 93, 104^06, 108, 134, 154 commerce and commodities 9, 84, 92

Index and development of market economy 3, 9,20-21, 113, 138-40 and emergence of domestic consumption 88, 101, 110, 114, 115, 139 as pretext for gold-mining 108 gendering of 14 see also consumption, commercial promotions for the Clothworkers of London 62,137 for the Merchants Adventurers 20, 74 consumption and cannibalism 104-05, 107-09 and voyeurism 110-13 anxieties about 113-15, 120-24 Cooper, Thomas 68 Correll, Barbara 63 Couliano, loan 87-88, 163 Crashaw, William 159-60 Crewe, Jonathan 32, 73 Daniel, Samuel 42-43 Deloney, Thomas 4, 7, 62-64, 66 ballads by 204 n.35, 210 n.10 Jack ofNewbery 4, 7, 62, 64-67, 71-75 Derrida, Jacques 12, 165, 188-89 Disney's Pocahontas 186-88 domesticity and bourgeois mastery 65, 70-72, 110, 123 and colonial husbandry 76, 108, 112, 128,169, 179 and the "marriage-minded" romance 16-20 see Christian humanism. Drake, Sir Francis and Protestant rhetoric of empire 44, 46 as husband 185 bourgeois heroism 31,32, 63 circumnavigation 37,49 knighthood 38,45 landing in California 62, 77, 78-79 piracy 7, 30, 49 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 33, 34, 53,56 Eden, Richard 43, 78, 106 Elias, Norbert 63 Elizabeth I and Protestant rhetoric of empire 1,7, 41^2, 47 and Catholic subjects 42, 48 and colonial enterprise 43,135,158 and knighted pirates 44,185

263 and Ralegh 57,135 as female consumer 113-15 as tobacco-giver 123-24 involvement in piracy and overseas trade 13,37-38,45 representations of 29-30, 46, 56, 57-58, 74 Engle, Lars 22 Eros, discourse of and discourse of science 8, 85, 95 and error of female fantasy 86-87, commercial motives of 22, 90 exchange and change 20-21,118-20 capitalist 5, 22, 149 colonial 77-82, 90, 94-95, 97-98, 108, 146, 148 commercial 89 heterosexual 26-28 tobacco as medium of 117,119,128 woman as figure of 8, 104, 105 exploration 13, 44, 53, 56. and Tudor voyagers 34, 37-38 see Columbus, Christopher; Gilbert, Sir Humphrey; Ralegh, Sir Walter; Rosier, James; Weymouth, George Falke, Anne 53 Fitzgeffrey, Charles 43 Fleming, Juliet 17,114 Foucault, Michel 11,189-91 Foxe, John 43^4 The Book of Martyrs 44 Franklin, Wayne 58, 238 n.66 Frobisher, Martin 31,38, 4^45, 59 Frye, Susan 196 n. 19 Fuller, Mary 6, 132, 232 n.56 Gascoigne, George 13-14, 68 Adventures of Master F. J. 13 "The Green Knight's Farewell to Fansie" 34-36 The Spoil of Antwerp 36 gender 15, 18-19 and class 4,30, 112-16 and cloth trade 64-74 and consumption 88, 103, 109-12, 113 and domestic hierarchy 4-11, 16 and indigenous resistance 156-57, 161-62, 166-67, 169, 170 and savagery 104, 107 and settlement 155-56 and tobacco 122-25, 126-30 gender inversion 58, 114-15, 122 gendering of error and errantry in 7, 15, 18-19,35-38,41, 164

264

Index

gender roles, feminine American tobacco and Circe 121-23, 126 England as over-burdened, indulgent mother 158-59 Englishwomen as consumers of trifles 16-17, 85, 86-89, 95, 100-02, 112-15 feminization of Indians 103, 156 indigenous culture as maternal 166,169, 174-76 the New World as nubile virgin 7, 56-57, 135-36, 156, 162-65, 183-84 untamed nature as mother 91-91, 170 gender roles, masculine as romance constructions 2, 6, 8, 19-20 husband 108; and georgic ideal 174-76; and self-mastery 123; as supplement 185; colonists as 99, 156-57, 158, 165, 183; domestic mastery of 66-67, 110, 128, 165; property rights of 20 knights knighted pirates 38, 45 Sir John Mandeville 13-14, 35-36 merchants and bourgeois masculinity 34, 66, 82-83, 96 and commercial mastery over Englishwomen 87,88-89 and commercial mastery over Indians 97-98, 146-47 and England's commercial expansion 2, 30, 32-33, 34, 37-38 romance writers as 111 Tudor voyagers as 34-35, 37,53, 74 genre 2,4, 13,20,35. and gender 4 interplay of genres 1-2, 5-6, 10, 132, 185-86 transformation of 2, 14, 41 see ballads; colonial narrative; colonial promotion; commercial promotions; masque; romance; sermon Giamatti, A. Bartlett 57 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 31, 48 A discourse of a discover ie for a new passage to Cataia (1575) 36 Gillies, John 168, 173 gold fever and Catholic critique of empire 52-53 and English plunder 30-31, 41, 43 and European scramble in America 6 in Guiana 40,108 in Virginia 59, 90, 137, 152-53, 162

Goldberg, Jonathan 4 Gosson, Stephen Pleasant Quippesfor Vpstart Newfangled Gen tlewomen 112-13 Grange, John The Golden Aphrodite (1577) 14 Greenblatt, Stephen 4, 90 Greene, Robert Mamilia 17,27 Greepe, Thomas The true and perfecte Newes of. . . Syr Francis Drake (1587) 46 Grenville, Richard 38, 44 Greville, Fulke Of Commerce 89-90 Grey, Robert A Good Speed to Virginia (1609) 158-59, 160-61 Gross, Kenneth 171 Guiana 1, 39^0, 44, 51-52, 54, 98-99, 123, 156 Hakluyt, Richard Discourse of Western Planting 45, 75, 76 Divers voyages touching the Discovery of America 62 Principall Navigations 38, 47, 62, 215 n. 50 The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 77-81 Hall, Kim 157 Hamlin, William 8 Hariot, Thomas A briefe and true report of the newfound land of Virginia (1588) 59, 90, 92, 161 Hatton, Sir Christopher 34 Hawkins, Sir John 34, 38, 118 The vnfortunate voyage made. . . in the yeeres 1567 and 1568 43^4 Herhily, David 211 n. 16 Howard, Jean 3, 193n.l8 Hull, Suzanne 16-17, 88 Hulme, Peter 4, 90, 93, 97, 132, 173, 175, 178, 227 nn.72, 77; 238 n.62, 239 n.72 husbandry and colonial manhood 160 and the education of natives 7, 11, 156, 164-66, 180 and the trope of marriage 7, 11, 156 and temperance 174-75 as fantasy 177, 183, 185 georgic art of 156,163-64 limits of 169 "mental husbandry" 16 Hutson, Lorna 4, 16

Index ideology 4, 11, 158, 172 intersections, ideological domestic and colonial 76, 84, 91, 97, 117,132,169 domestic and national 66 patriarchal and commercial 14, 21-22, 27, 70, 73 religious and mercenary 41-42, 47, 82 Ireland 34 as model for colonial enterprise 6, 159, 170

265 Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit 15, 28-29 Euphues and his England 15, 28-29

Magellan 50 Strait of 50,59 magic and fetishism 85-89 and intersubjective mastery 8 and mastery over natives 9,163-64 and New World gold 57-59; see also under classical mythology, figures in: Medea James I 125, 146, 158, 162, 163, 165 and the language of eros 87-88 Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604) 120-21 and the language of science 92-94 and tobacco 121-23, 126; see also under Jameson, Fredric 14 Jamestown classical mythology, figures in: Circe see also Romance, magic in as commercial enterprise 133,136 "magical consumerism" 8 colonial relations in 179-80 and commercial self-mastery 89-90 commercial rivalry in 144, 146-48, and domestication of natives 150-51 and mastery over female fancy 87-89 first encounters in 93-95, 97, 99-100 and mastery over Indian fancy 94-95, founding of 7 97-98 gender relations in 128-30 struggle for survival in 140^3 marriage tobacco trade in 126-27 and colonial husbandry 162-64,165, 171, 183-84 Virgilian construction of 174 Johnson, Richard 29 and female chastity 16, 20, 54-56 Tom a Lincolne 29-30 and masculine domestic authority 65 Johnson, Robert and Tudor law on property 19, 65 as contract 22, 25-26, 156 Nova Britannia (1609) 81-82, 158-59, as market 14,21,27-28,33 160-61, 174 in the romance plot 2, 6, 7, 14, 15-16 The New Life of Virginia (1612) 160 in Tudor society 14,19 Jones, Ann Rosalind 219 n.41, 220 n.57 in Virginia 127-29 Joplin, Patricia Klindienst 68 of Pocahontas and John Rolfe 175—77, Keller, Evelyn Fox 93 179 Kelly, Joan 196 n. 10 Marx, Karl 5, 85 Kerridge, Eric 211 n. 13 masque Kilgour, Maggie 111 Masque of Flowers 125-26 Knapp, Jeffrey 6, 51, 84,114,119,173 n.47 The Memorable Masque 7,156,162-64 Kolodny, Annette 4 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 189 Kristeva, Julia 167 Montrose, Louis 5, 222 n.14 Morey, Adrian 48 Lacan,Jacques 95 Minister, Sebastian 104^06, 109, 106, 118 Las Casas, Bartolome de Cosmographia 104-05, 107, 130 Brevissima Relacion de las Indias: The nationalism Spanish Colonie (English translation) 45 and bourgeois masculinity 29, 66, 82-83 Lodge, Thomas 7, 11, 42, 48^9 and colonial interests 124,185 A Margarite of America 7, 17, 42, 48, and commercial expansion 37 and commonwealth 72 50, 51-56, 58-61 Euphues Shadow 15, 49 and domesticity 4, 66, 123 Prosopopoeia 49, 55 anti-foreign 113 Rosalynde 15,49-50 anti-Spanish 37, 46, 47^8 Low, Anthony 156,171 national pride 33 Lyly,John 15,28, 100 Protestant Englishness 41, 44-45

266

Index

New World and Edenic allegory 79, 79-82 Anglo-Spanish rivalry in 6,7, 43^-6, 48, 107-08 as garden 92 beauty and richness of 58-60, 90 colonial motives in 158, 159, 173 commercial interests in 79, 104—06 constructions of 5, 58-60, 92, 174 European scramble for gold in 42 feminine figurations of 5, 8, 56, 135-136 reports of cannibalism in 117 Newport, Christopher 94, 95, 98-100, 137, 143, 145-51 Opechankanough 93-94, 97, 99, 132, 180 Orgel, Stephen 1, 125, 166, 236n.37, 237 n.56 Pagden, Anthony 128 Parker, John 48 Parker, Patricia 5, 19, 42, 58, 175 patriarchy 2, 14, 15, 22, 25-26, 73, 130, 158-59 Peckham, George 48 The true reporte of the late discoveries of the new-found landes 32, 44, 77, 106, 211 n.9 Peter Martyr Decades of the New World 104 Pettie, George 15, 28, 62, 96 Petite Pallace of Pleasure 15, 17-18, 20, 27,28,88-89,101,175 piracy 2, 13, 33-34, 4 3 ^ 5 , 57 pirates: see Clifford, George, third Earl of Cumberland; Drake, Sir Francis; Frobisher, Martin; Grenville, Richard; Hatton, Sir Christopher; Hawkins, Sir John; Ralegh, Sir Walter plantation 7, 128, 156, 175 planters 7, 128, 153, 156, 158, 174, 179, 180 plunder 6-7, 30-31, 45-46, 48, 49-50, 61 see piracy; privateering Pocahontas 7, 128, 130, 156, 175-79, 185-88 Pollack, Claudette 54, 60 Powhatan 9, 94-95, 98-100, 146-51, 177-78 Pratt, Mary Louise 4-5 Princess Elizabeth 162-63,165 privateering 34, 43, 44, 48, 51, 53 property agrarian conception of 108 Algonkian system of 177 and inheritance 19, 23-24, 65, 159

and self-government 90 Indians as without property 10, 160 women as 108, 127, 130, 145 Purchas, Samuel 158 A Discourse of Virginia (1625) 82, 183-84 Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) 164 Quinn, David Beers n.48

44, 77, 135, 219-20

Rackin, Phyllis 3 Ralegh, Sir Walter 1, 11, 34, 30-41, 48, 56-57, 106,123, 118, 135,185 Discovery of Guiana 1, 39-41, 47, 98, 107-08, 130 Ramsay, G. D. 74, 213 n.34 rape and cultural rape 15 5 and husbandry 163,177 and the uprising in Virginia 158 and voyeurism 116-17, 184 as colonial promotion 183-84 as emasculation 182 from classical mythology 68-69, 124, 172 of native women 8, 105, 108 resistant native as rapist 10 Read, David T. 109 religion and cloth as civilizing agents 7,31, 76-82, Catholic subjects in England: colonial hopes of 11, 46, 48, 49; colonial promotions of 76, 111; disillusion with empire 55-56, 61; legal status of 48-^9 Catholic "tyranny" of Spain 44, 50 conversion of natives as pretext for colonization 7, 8, 81, 159-62, 164, 180 Protestant rhetoric of empire 7, 52 Rich, Richard News from Virginia (1610) 159 Riche, Barnabe 16-17, 88-89, 96 Farewell to Militarie Profession 17,

18-19,26,88,89,114 Robarts, Henry

A most friendly farewell to the right worship Sir Francis Drake knight (1585) 32 Haighfor Devonshire 33 Roberts, Josephine 42 Robertson, Karen 178 Romance, the 168-69

Index adventure in 29-30 and the rhetoric of empire 46-48, 50-54, 56-61 anti-courtliness in 28-30, 33-37 as "female literature'' 17-20 as self-critical 11, 173 bourgeois appropriation of courtly love in 3 commercial motives in 2, 14, 21, 27 generic expectations of 32, 38, 165 generic transformation in 2-3, 14, 41 gendering of error and errancy in 15, 18-19,35-38,41,117 language of 11, 57 magic as ideological enchantment in 58-59, 157,167, 172-73 magic in 29, 52, 57 marriage and family in 2, 13-15, 22-26, 27-28, 156-57, 165 patriarchal values in 2, 14, 16, 22, 26 Petrarchan conventions in 8, 27, 37, 110-13; see also blazon redefinition of love's labor in 2, 14-15, 19-20, 28, 35-38 writers of 17, 31, 50, 88-89, 95, 96, 100, 111 Rosier, James True relation of the Discovery of the Land of Virginia (1605) 91-92, 135 Rubin, Gayle 127 savagery 7, 76, 102-103, 107, 109, 116, 119, 183. science, discourse of and commercial motives 92 and discourse of eros 8,85 95 and Indian fantasy 93-95 and the labyrinth topos 174 sermon 46, 47, 204 n.35. Donne, John 47; A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginia Plantation (1622) 82 Madoxe, John A learned and Godly Sermon (1581) 50 settlement 2, 6, 136-37, 140-42,179-82 settlers 142, 144-45, 149, 157-58, 179-80 as idle 136-37,143, 153,159 Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice 22-27, 30-31 The Tempest 155-58, 165-70, 171-73, 183 The Winter's Tale 88 Troilus and Cressida 10, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138-40, 144^5, 149 Sheehan, Bernard 214 n. 37 Shepherd, Simon 100-01, 220 n.58

267 Sidney, Sir Philip 34 Smith, John 9, 93-95, 137, 140, 142-43, 177-79, 186 A Map of Virginia (1612) 131, 134, 145, 151,152 and Christopher Newport 145-51 and commercial press 152-54 The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) 98,134,147,154 The Proceedings and Accidents of the Colony in Virginia (1612) 94, 98, 137-38, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154 The True Relation of. . . Virginia (1608) 93, 132, 136,146-47, 150 True Travels (1630) 132 Smith, Sir Thomas A Discourse of the Commoneweal of this realm of England (1549) 86 Smith, Sir Thomas, Treasurer of the Virginia Company 81 Spain Armada, the Spanish 37, 45, 46-47 as anti-model for England 160, 182 colonization of America 6, 43, 44-45, 50. conquistadores 6, 43 exploration of the New World 104-105 inquisition, the Spanish 6, 31, 43 rivalry with England 6-7. 43-44, 107-08 Spenser, Edmund Colin Clouts Come Home Again 34, 47 Faerie Queene 7, 15-16, 19-20, 30, 3 9 ^ 2 , 52, 54-56, 85, 91, 95, 106, 108-11,115-17,123,175 Mutability Cantos 170 Spivak, Gayatri. 197 n.26, 236 n.46 Stevenson, Laura 63, 193 n. 13 Stone, Lawrence 21 Strachey, William A True reportory of the wracke, and redemp tion (1610) 174 The Historie ofTravell (1619) 103 Strong, Roy 42 Stubbes, Philip Anatomy of Abuses in England 79-80 Tenney, Edward 48, 205 nn. 41, 43 Thirsk, Joan 85 tobacco and economic viability of Virginia 107, 179 as Circean drug 121-23, 128 as Indian Tyrant 121 attacks on: Buttes, Henry Dyets Dry

268

Index

tobacco (cont.) Dinner 118-19, 123; Deacon, John Tobacco Tortured 122; Hall, Joseph Satires 91, 102, 108-109; James I, Counterblaste to Tobacco 120-21, 123; Jonson, Ben Every Man Out of His Humour 118; Sylvester, Joshua Tobacco Battered 121 domestication of 117 promotions for: Beaumont, Francis Metamorphosis of tobacco 124; Masque of Flowers 125 trade in Virginia 9, 126-28; Dickenson vs. Potts 129-30 Todorov, Zvetan 2 Tompkins, Jane 131-32 trade domestic markets 20-21, in slaves 34, 43 in spice 34 in tobacco 117-118,121, 126-28, 137, 142 overseas 31, 33-34, 37, 53, 82 see also Virginia trade companies, licensed Merchants Adventurers 20, 74 Muscovy Company 33, 37, 53 Virginia Company: see under Virginia trifles and "magical consumerism" 8 Englishwomen and Indians as consumers of 102-03, 113-14,149, in colonial exchange 105-07 logic of the 84,153 marketing of romances as 17 tobacco as 118,120 Vickers, Nancy 111 Virginia colony under the first charter 135, 158 colony under the second charter 127, 159 Council in, 128-29, 136-37, 140-42, 146-51,180, 181 Englishwomen in 126-27, 129-30 factional politics in 134, 137-38 Indian uprising in, 7, 180-83 investment in, 18, 20, 25, 31, 34, 41-42,

51,81,123-124,131-132,135,156, 159,183 investors in 10-11, 29, 44, 72, 75, 83-84, 123-24, 138-39, 144, 158, 161, 167 need for farmers in 143, 159 promotions of 135-36 tobacco for wives in 9, 126-28 trade with Indians in 93-95, 137, 145^6, 148-51 Virginia Company of London 11,81, 125-29, 134-36, 140, 141^3, 147, 158-59, 162, 178-81 see Jamestown Walsingham, Sir Francis 33, 53, 74 Warner, William 1, 13-15, 34, 37 Albions England 1, 27-28, 35, 36-38, 53, 86 Syrinx 31-32 Watt, Tessa 96 Weymouth, George 92 Wheeler, John 20 A Treatise of Commerce (1601) 20-21 Whitaker, Alexander 161, 164, 177 White, John 126 Wilson, E. C. 46, 203 n.27 Wilson, Richard 73 woman as commodity 107, 112, 115, 117 as figure of exchange 8, 104-07, 108-09, 111-12. as property 20, 126-30, 156 compared with savages 102-03 women, controversy about Anon, Hie Mulier, Haec Vir 103 Constantia Munda, The Worming of a madde Dog 102 Esther Sowernam, Esther hath hang'd Haman 101-102 Jane Anger, Jane Anger Her Protection of Women 100 Joseph Swetnam, Arraignment of Lewd, froward, idle, and unconstant women 101 Wright, Louis B. 3,44, 77 Young, Robert 190 Zizek,Slavoj 3,4, 193 n. 15

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture General editor STEPHEN ORGEL Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University 1. Drama and the market in the age of Shakespeare DOUGLAS BRUSTER, University of Chicago 2. The Renaissance dialogue: literary dialogue in its social and political contexts, Castiglione to Galileo VIRGINIA COX, University of Cambridge 3. Spencer's secret career RICHARD RAMBUSS, Emory University 4. Shakespeare and the geography of difference JOHN GILLIES, La Trobe University 5. Men in women's clothing: anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579-1642 LAURA LEVINE 6. The reformation of the subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant epic LINDA GREGERSON, University of Michigan 7. Voyages in print: English travel in America, 1576-1624 MARY C. FULLER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 8. Subject and object in Renaissance culture Edited by MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, MAUREEN QUILLIGAN, PETER STALLYBRASS, University of Pennsylvania 9. Shakespeare and the theatre of wonder T. G. BISHOP, Case Western Reserve University 10. Anxious masculinity in early modern England MARK BREITENBERG 11. Seizures of the will in early modern English drama FRANK WHIGHAM, University of Texas at Austin 12. The emergence of the English author: scripting the life of the poet in early modern England KEVIN PASK, Concordia University 13. The poetics of English nationhood, 1590-1612 CLAIRE McEACHERN, University of California, Los Angeles 14. Textual intercourse: collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama JEFFREY MASTEN, Harvard University

15. Knowledge, discovery and imagination in early modern Europe: the rise of aesthetic rationalism TIMOTHY J. REISS, New York University 16 The project of prose in early modern Europe and the New World Edited by ELIZABETH FOWLER, Yale University, and ROLAND GREENE, University of Oregon. 17. The marketplace of print: pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern England ALEXANDRA HALASZ, Dartmouth College 18. Courtly letters in the age of Henry VIII: literary culture and the arts of deceit SETH LERER, Stanford University 19. The culture of slander in early modern England M. LINDSAY KAPLAN, Georgetown University 20. Narrative and meaning in early modern England: Browne's skull and other histories HOWARD MARCHITELLO, Texas A & M University 21. The homoerotics of early modern drama MARIO DIGANGI, Indiana University 22. Shakespeare's Troy: drama, politics, and the translation of empire HEATHER JAMES, University of Southern California 23. Shakespeare, Spenser, and the crisis in Ireland CHRISTOPHER HIGHLEY, Ohio State University 24. Discovering the subject in Renaissance England ELIZABETH HANSON, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario 25. Foreign bodies and the body politic: discourses of social pathology in early modern England JONATHAN GIL HARRIS, Ithaca College 26. Writing, gender and state in early modern England: identity formation and the female subject MEGAN MATCHINSKE, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 27. The romance of the New World: gender and the literary formations of English colonialism JOAN PONG LINTON, Indiana University

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